Under the spell of a sentence
Here, a protagonist, who is a writer, evolves ideas about the condition of humanity through the parsing of one single thought
To a small contingent of readers — full disclaimer, this reviewer included — the 88-year-old American postmodernist William H. Gass is one of the great under-appreciated experimenters of the 20th century. Middle C, only his third novel, comes 18 years after 1995’s The Tunnel, which appeared 29 years after his 1966 debut. In between, Gass has published odd, self-referential novellas and occasional short story collections. His deeply felt non-fiction on writing may be his most approachable entry point, notably1997’s Finding a Formand 2002’s Test of Time, both winners of National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism.
The story here, if one can call it that, involves Joseph Skizzen, an intensely solitary protagonist who lives with his mother in the attic rooms of a Gothic house in Midwest America. At his desk, he reworks the same sentence over and over again: “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” In a novel where language is as important as character, we watch the meaning of this idea evolve as its properties change with each draft.
Beyond this regenerating sentence, Skizzen’s office is devoted to the clippings and books that make up his Inhumanity Museum. Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia, Benin, he circles the globe and combs through history in search of hidden pockets where human cruelty passes, largely unchecked. Atrocity, one could say, is marked upon Skizzen’s genesis. A Second World War survivor, though not by any of the conventional narratives, he escaped his native Austria as a boy, in the years leading up to war because his father converted the family to Judaism.
Gass’s characters are continuously scheming their way through history, as if the events of our times are a puzzle that can be assembled many different ways. Being Jewish, the father reasons, is a gamble that could provide his family an opportunity to sneak out of harm’s way, to London, before the war sets his part of Europe on the wrong side of the historical record.
Skizzen is both connected to and distanced from one of the great atrocities of the 20th century. “Everybody claimed to have received, in his or her inherited past, a horrible hurt,” Gass writes musically and profoundly. “Exile was birth by another name,” he finishes the thought a few lines later, with a thought that is as beautiful to mouth as it is to think.
Middle C derives its title from a musical note, the fourth C key on an 88-key piano keyboard. The key to making sense of our inherited pasts, the author seems to say, is in the musical design of our eternal recurrence, to borrow a term from Nietzsche. Much like Skizzen’s sentence, we can only tease meaning out after the fact, from the differences that emerge in multiple generations of a note, a sentence, an idea, a family lineage, atrocity.
Apart from a passing resemblance to William Faulkner in his first novel, Gass has maintained his status as an utter original for the last half-century. He’s never cowed to popular ideas or felt compelled to share his version of the times. He belongs to a short list of postwar writers, among them John Hawkes, Peter Mathiessen and William Gaddis, whose advanced poetics and obscure interests have rendered themselves impossible to parse, let alone replicate.
As a result, Gass has never picked up a mass following of protégés the way contemporaries such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme or John Barth did with more formulaic — and teachable — approaches to postmodernism. But while, today, the more popular conceptions of postmodernism feel dated, even quaintly predictable, his novels still loom large in the imagination, expanding our sense of what literature is capable of achieving. Dimitri Nasrallah is the author of two novels.