F in Gass

[Terrance]

If Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife serves as the foundational text for
contemporary American metafiction, Gass's novel The Tunnel (1995),
portions of which appeared in literary journals over the course of some
thirty
years, may well be its culminating achievement. Certainly the book
provides another
set of formal eccentricities and subversions to contend with, and Gass's
signature stylistic effusiveness is regularly on display. But what has
made The
Tunnel so immediately controversial a work is Gass's exercising of his
rhythmic
brilliance in the context, or at the expense, of the greatest trauma of
modern
history. William Frederick Kohler, the dominant consciousness of the
novel, is an
historian teaching at a midwestern university during the 1960s. He is
nearly
finished with his academic masterpiece, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's
Germany, and is in the process of devising the introduction. However, he
keeps getting derailed
into relating all manner of incendiary personal confession about his
colleagues, his unavailing family relationships, his starved childhood,
his squalid
affairs, and his aesthetic and philosophical reflections, until the
added pages, which he keeps secreting within the pages of the project
proper, overwhelm his original
intention. This postponement grows into an epidemic of subjectivity and
studied
reproachfulness, as the historian displaces his purported historical
subject. (Call him a swimmer of the broken glass, whose participation in
Kristallnacht
reverberates through the years and pages of the book as his defining
instance of guilt.) If Kohler is erudite and full of figurative
wizardry--he states
that he gave up poetry for history, but the two pursuits continuously
interpenetrate
here--he is also vicious, bigoted, and, by his own account, morally
bankrupt. His
interest in "the fascism of the heart" not only fuels his theory that
sociopolitical
atrocities are rooted in the ordinary brutalities of private life, it
also derives from
the litany of abuses large and small constituting his autobiography--the
ever-interfering concern of his "tunnel vision." The title also refers
to an actual
tunnel Kohler is evidently digging in his basement as well as through
heaps of horrifying data, an effort bereft of the purpose or dignity of
those desperate survival
tactics of the World War II prisoners it imitates. In a sense, then,
Kohler stands out
as the most outrageous in Gass's line of solitary, driven, misanthropic
word-churners, whose tunnel is the most elaborately conceived withdrawal
of all.