This novel deals with self-revelations of an American academic who is trying to write an introduction for a book that he has just completed, "Guilt and Innocence in Hutler's Germany." The book can be opened to almost any page and read as fragments of self-contained poetry. It has many Joycean elements in its presentation.Reviews in Dalkey Archive at their Web site:by H. L. HixWilliam H. Gass's The Tunnel, whatever its virtues, is not an inviting book. Even a reader willing to endure its length and its narrator's unrelenting bitterness must overcome its subordination of plot to other concerns: the book does not proceed from a to b along a "straight line" of narrative or exposition, revealing all relevant information before or as it is needed, but moves in a less ordered (or differently ordered) way that its author conceives as a more accurate replication of human consciousness. Its releasing and withholding information with little regard for plot means that The Tunnel offers more to its reader on successive readings, after the reader's overview allows each part to resonate with all others -- including later parts with earlier parts -- during the reading, and not only after the fact. Each of the essays to follow will present a unique reading of The Tunnel built around a set of original insights, but this introductory essay pursues the modest goal of giving, as a foundation for the reader's own insights, a synopsis of information important to an understanding of the book, so that a first reading of The Tunnel becomes more like a second reading. In deference to the novel's division into twelve major sections, this overview will briefly address twelve different topics: the book's author, its structure, its narrator, the character called Mad Meg, the narrator's departmental colleagues, his parents, his wife and children, his lovers, the imaginary political party he describes, his participation in Kristallnacht, the book's main metaphors, and responses to the book by other reviewers and critics.Sentenced to Sentences . . . Poetry and The Tunnel*by Jonathan N. BarronLiving is doing, and dying is what it does; but writing . . . writing is hiding from history,refusing to do any dying . . . writing is lying . . . in wait . . .- The TunnelWilliam Gass, consummate formalist, writes a novel dependent on the historical event of the systematic murder of European Jewry. To what purpose? In an interview about The Tunnel, Gass, a trained philosopher, a student of metaphor (which determined the very subject of his dissertation), returns to the most fundamental metaphor of them all: words themselves. Asked why he included so much play with typography and other attention-calling visual devices in his novel, Gass responded: "The tension in the word between sound and shape, and then again, between these material elements and the concepts of the mind and their referents in the world, has been a constant concern in my work" (Zeigler 13). What does this mean? Said simply, it means that Gass makes a distinction between the world we inhabit and the various technical means at our disposal for representing that world, techniques that include language itself. For Gass, language, and more specifically written language, is just a machine for meaning, a set of devices, an instrument. He elaborates on this point noting "the very great ontological distance between the conceptual and the actual." In other words, when we render our thoughts -- "the conceptual" -into words -- "the actual" -- we traverse a huge distance that, despite what many wish to believe, separates what we intend, mean, and think from what we actually write and say. The actual in the form of words never fully embraces the mystery of Being, soul, essence, what Gass calls the conceptual. This assumes, therefore, that words are fundamentally empty constructs: hollow structures that claim to be full of meaning but, in fact, never quite capture what they mean to portray. Said another way, language, grammar, and the instinct to communicate may very well be biologically natural but, when we resort to particular words, embedded as they are in particular cultures, we are as far from nature and biology as are our own computers, the machines most likely today to produce the words we write.Since this distance between word and world is the fundamental premise behind Gass's sense of fiction, what might happen when a novel, an artificial world of constructs, engages the historical facts of the systematic murder of European Jews? For me, as a reader, that is the central issue of The Tunnel (1995) because it raises the stakes on this formalist game to a new ethical plane. In other words, when the book asks fiction to engage history, it pushes the distance between word and world closer together. It all but dares readers to question the very premise of fiction itself, a premise that says fiction has nothing to do with history: a premise that says fiction is mere construct, mere form. To invoke the Holocaust is to ask if fiction can ever really make a truth claim? It is to ask if fiction, from the formalist definition of that genre, can ever apply to the world? For if the very nature of fiction is that it is only artifice, forever self-enclosed, removed, and, finally, irrelevant to the world, then when the world appears in a fiction will it not, in effect, be cancelled out, rendered mute, even irrelevant?The book raises the question of genre and ethics by manipulating and crossing together the specific rules and techniques not just of fiction but also of three truth-telling genres: autobiography, history, and poetry. In the book's very plot Gass creates genre confusion between fiction and these three discourse systems that claim to have a corner on the truth market. To summarize the plot with genre in mind is merely to articulate the dilemma I am describing in terms of the book itself. In short, the book is supposed to be a secret introduction, an autobiography or memoir, of Frederick Kohler. This memoir, however, is, itself, a secret text interwoven, and hidden between the pages of Kohler's history, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, which he has, apparently, just finished. If his first person narrative, his autobiography or memoir, is the first truth-telling genre, then the history it introduces, which we occasionally get to read, is the second truth-telling genre of the book. A third truth-telling genre, lyric poetry, is also incorporated into this book.To say that lyric poetry is, like autobiography and history, a truth-telling genre is itself an arguable point. Suffice to say that I must simply ask readers' indulgence and call on them to accept this premise as an accurate summary of contemporary genre theory. That theory does read lyric poetry as the name we assign to the genre that speaks to the truth of the emotional, ontological, experiential self. To offer at least a glimmer of evidence though I turn to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Writing to a young poet, Rilke says: "This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity . . . And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not . . .A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it" (7-9). From Rilke, then, one might best understand lyric poetry as the inward turn one makes in order to express one's deepest self, one's "heart." Poetry, in effect, is the tunnel one makes into the cave of the self.Poetry, autobiography, and history as truth-telling genres, however, are each embedded in a work of fiction. Because the final genre, as it were, is fiction, no other genre can speak the truth, for the genre demands of fiction ought to cancel them out. This, I believe, is the test Gass sets for fiction. He troubles its waters with the invocation of other genres and, particularly with history and poetry, with other facts that those genres must, by definition, introduce. The ethical question this test asks is an urgent one: does it mute, even neutralize every fact, even the last century's murder of the Jews during the Second World War? Are facts, when found in a novel, mere artifice? It is as if Gass had asked himself the following question: If one writes a novel about a man who frankly admires Hitler, and if one lovingly details that man's own bigotry, happily citing a variety of Anti-Semitic limericks, is one, in writing that novel, as far from engaging the historical facts of Hitler and Anti-Semitism as one would be having not written anything at all? To say this another way, has Gass proven that no matter what subject a novel takes on it will always and forever be just a novel? Is one, by merely writing sentences, "sentenced to sentences"? Is one because of the law of fiction kept in a prison house of language forever distanced and removed from the world? No matter what the facts of the world one engages? Does The Tunnel, once again, prove that fiction is merely fiction, or does it, at last, find a way for fiction to engage its double, its mirror: the world?The answer would seem to be no because from a formalist perspective, fiction, no matter what its subject, can have no claim, no philosophical ground, to make a case about anything beyond itself. What follows logically from this is that no fiction can have any impact on the entirely different generic demands of ethical and moral judgements. Gass tests this definition by engaging a historical moment, through the stylistic devices of three truth-telling genres (poetry, autobiography, history) and, at the same time, clearly endorsing a Nazi ideology. In so doing, Gass's character demands that each reader break the frame. It would be a cold-hearted reader indeed who would not want to pass judgement on this character and his beliefs. I, for one, am all but goaded into reading him as the deeply unethical, hateful, petty little monster that he is. Kohler's words, and his deeds as represented in these words, demand my ethical, moral reaction. Yet the instant I, or any reader, does judge Kohler, she or he fails the novel's test. For to apply the moral standards of the ethical world outside the book is, on its face, absurd, just as it would be absurd to do so for any fiction. After all, it's only a novel.But the novel itself makes an almost constant case against its own fictive status. Again and again, the main character, Kohler, insists on the facts of his existence. He is a historian, and he writes about himself in the first person. Yet no matter how many technical devices Gass deploys none can hide the fact that there is no Kohler: he is just a character. As if to increase rather than decrease the tension between fiction and the world, the book's title itself raises the same set of issues. As it turns out, The Tunnel was an actual film that made such an impression on Hitler, according to the very unreliable former friend of the Nazi dictator, that it inspired in him the idea for the Nazi party itself (Zeigler 16). Like Hitler seeing his Tunnel, Kohler, in his own Tunnel, is also inspired to form a political party, the Party of the Disappointed People, complete with symbols, uniforms and the like. To make this mirroring even more complex, the film named The Tunnel was itself not an original work but was rather a re-telling, in a new genre (film), of an even earlier fiction, a novel. In other words, Gass's book's title mirrors the title of a movie based on a novel that is said by someone, in a memoir, to have been the inspiration for the Nazi party, itself a weird fiction, a bizarre story purporting to be the one true story of Germany. Yet the claim for this inspiration has itself since been discredited.Furthermore, not only does the title of Gass's book press the problem of representing the world to another breaking point but so too do the details of many of the events and circumstances of the main character's life. As it turns out, Kohler's story contains numerous and striking similarities to the biography of William Gass. He himself has said, "the resemblances between myself and my narrator are wholly trivial, I think, but I did emphasize them in order to test the reader's sophistication (a test many reviewers failed)" (Zeigler 19).In other words, both the facts behind the title, and the details of Kohler's life lead readers to the same conclusion: no matter how much one may wish to bridge the gap between the world and fiction, ultimately, fiction will triumph, and the world as we know it will vanish. No matter how close the connection may be between the world of truth and the world of fiction, nothing will alter fiction's basic premise: a novel will always be no more and no less than a novel. It is a tautology designed to erase all other external meaning; like a black hole it sucks meaning into its vortex and crushes it.Despite all of this, I believe that The Tunnel is not just another death jolt to the novel: it is not just another formalist game insisting on the gulf between word and world. Instead, I believe that, of all the truth-telling genres opposed to the laws of fiction set into this book, only lyric poetry has the ability to move outside of the fiction, and, thanks to lyric poetry, the book, despite its fiction, can engage the ethical problems that define our world. In what follows, then, I turn to the poetry of this book in order to offer a far more affirmative reading of it than is generally thought possible.Confronting The Tunnel: History, Authority, Referenceby Melanie Eckford-ProssorIn some ways, The Tunnel perfectly completes Gass's triptych: his earlier works dealt with philosophy and fiction; with this novel he moves to fiction and history, thus completing his passage across the three traditional fields of the humanities: philosophy, literature, history. Gass explicitly discusses his interest in history. He has "described The Tunnel as an exploration of "the inside of history' -- the ambiguity and confusion hidden beneath any intellectual attempt at understanding the past" (Kelly 5). Gass proceeds to explain his point by attacking -- and over-simplifying -- historians' use of narrative: "Historians tend to want to create a narrative, to make the world along the lines of the so-called realistic novels of the nineteenth century that pretended the world has meaning, that there are heroes and heroines and climaxes . . . . I happen to believe in none of that, so I feel my book is real realism: there's contradiction and confusion and deliberate darkness" (Kelly 5). That "darkness" can be found interleaved within the pages of the fictional work of history, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany. These interleaved pages range across a number of genres and issues: testimony, autobiography, narrative, philosophical meditations, questions about the nature of history, thoughts about the death of a mentor. Together they comprise the autobiography of the fictional character William Frederick Kohler. Phrased this way, my sentence's logic aims to clarify the different genres cohabiting in The Tunnel. The sentence appears to render The Tunnel connected and coherent -- a feeling perhaps not shared by all of its readers, for whom encountering The Tunnel is very much like walking into an unknown opening. Where we are or how to navigate through this tunnel is not easily answered. Indeed, the biggest question challenging the reader of The Tunnel might well be "What is it?" The question is both ontological -- a question about the Being of the novel -- and epistemological -- a question about how discipline and genre change knowledge. These are important questions because linking the novel to a field or genre determines expectations, which in turn can change interpretations of the text. Further, determinations about genre present potential danger since they manipulate the thin membrane between fiction and nonfiction: a reader could determine that The Tunnel is an autonomous work of fiction that, as a work of fiction, exists as a self-created world. Indeed, this is the position toward fiction that Gass advocates in The World Within the Word, especially "The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words." Within the pantheon of Gass's fiction, The Tunnel's unusualness derives from its explicit extra-textual referents: World War II, Hitler, Nazism. Such extra-textual referents import with them an ironic edge, making The Tunnel not a grand work of modernist metaphor, but an ironic work which ultimately fossilizes into historical artifact. But William Gass has spent much time, space, and energy asserting a separation between fiction and the world, and a lot of people, including reviewers of The Tunnel, have at least half-heartedly recognized this demand (see Kelly and Manning), despite persistent questions about the role and power of the author for at least the past thirty years. Nevertheless, when Gass invokes the Holocaust and fascism, he goes too far, ultimately exposing the limits of his aesthetic theory. By using these events in fiction, and by having Kohler narrate them, he shifts the focus of his fiction from the world of words -- the Gassian obsession with sentences made so beautifully that they are models of worlds -- to the broad and difficult terrain of the separation of fiction from history and the use and consequence of narrative. Further, the difficulty posed by the novel is its ironizing of fascism, a position which demands the reader confront both the concepts and kinds of history as well as the consequence of genre. Irony cannot be avoided. It arises from the choice to recognize the extra-textual as textual, to refuse the injunction to be caught in a web of words.How, then, are we to understand the aesthetic within The Tunnel? In fascism, the aesthetic is often figured as an aesthetic of the monstrous -- monstrous on a literal level in which the actions taken against Nazi enemies defy categories of horror -- but monstrous, too, in terms of Nazism's attacks on art itself. Those attacks took the form of exhibitions of what the Nazis called "degenerate" art, which they "hung" on the walls in random patterns, scrunching work against work, ridiculing art by violating how art is (literally) seen in museums: the aesthetics of art movements such as German Expressionism were ridiculed as "degenerate," as too were the artists, whose degeneracy derived from their political positions to their religion to their sexuality. Given the history of fascism's reception of experimental art which challenged the norms, how should readers who object to The Tunnel because it challenges the "norms" of understanding the Holocaust or the depiction of women proceed in objecting to The Tunnel? By questioning the aesthetics of The Tunnel, do we, ironically, place ourselves in the role of the German public who came to the exhibition to ridicule the artists? Do we place ourselves in the position of the Nazi curators of the exhibit who rejected this art because it violated their ideology? To respond to these questions we must confront what I call Gass's aesthetics of separation, composed of his theory of metaphor and his idea of fictional worlds as self-contained models of worlds. This aesthetics of separation can be seen clearly in an interview with Gass in which he discusses the work of John (Jack) Hawkes: responding to a question about the subject matter of The Tunnel, Gass explains that he is "not trying to take on the Holocaust. It's just the background. . . . I am interested in the same kind of problem Jack Hawkes came up against in Virginie: to see whether or not one could write beautifully about the grotesque, the sexually grotesque" (Saltzman 24-25). Gass elaborates: he wants the passages to "be great regardless of what they're about. Celebrations, even" (Saltzman 25). Separation is not simply the separation of fictional world from the world outside fiction, but is separation complicated by the level of the sentence. The kind of aesthetics of separation that Gass seeks to practice places the beautiful form of the sentence above all, especially above content.Much of the content, then, is explicitly callous, and forces the reader to sort out the narrative by attributing genre. When Kohler comments calmly that "in the midst of the Holocaust, the murder of a few more Jews is not an enormity" (Tunnel 201-02), the reader must decide how to understand the point, and such understanding cannot be separated from genre, as Rabinowitz has argued. Attributing genre(s) to The Tunnel is difficult because the text explicitly refers to actual historical events, such as World War II, and because Gass's own statements about reference muddy any easy approach to understanding reference. This ambiguous relation between The Tunnel and extra-textual historical reference links it to other genres such as "survivor narratives, stories of rape or childhood abuse" whose claims of "referential truth" (Caruth 2) are made problematic by their use of techniques such as metaphor, seen by many as a form of distortion, acceptable for literature, perhaps, but not for extra-textual events, events that occur outside the text and which invoke the exterior textual world for the reader. Such debates about the effects of literary language on reference "have long been at the heart of literary studies, where the status of the literary text -- which is always by definition possibly a fiction -- is in question" (Caruth 2). Caruth continues: "Attempts to assess the truth value of such texts frequently oscillate between theories that claim that literary texts refer directly to a world outside the text, and theories that emphasize that because all texts can always be fiction, they therefore do not reliably refer to any reality, which consequently remain inaccessible or even in question" (Caruth 2). From this view, any determination of genre becomes a determination of reference, which in turn elicits certain expectations from the reader. In what way is the novel a history? What is the purpose of history, or the historian? How does history (or does it at all), differ from testimony? Literature? Storytelling? Autobiography? Any combination of these? What historical techniques does the novel use? A listing of facts? Philosophical positions about the meaning of history? Is it a chronicle? Memory? These generic questions directly influence how literate contemporary readers will receive the rampant antisemitism, the misogyny, and the borderline personality of Kohler. Generic questions force the reader to decide how politics connects to history, and how the inclusion of extra-textual historical events change history's -- and the novel's -- claim to truth.When linked with the wanton invocation of known historical events such as Kristallnacht, the intellectual puzzles posed by genre, the crossword puzzles that literally edge several pages, and the map puzzles whose blue ink suggests the Finger Lakes of upstate New York confront the careful reader not only with the problem of generic attribution, but with the connected problem of how to negotiate reading with both intellect and emotion. These are often phrased as opposed terms, in which one term, emotion, is suppressed since its presence often marks the reader's naïveté. Intellect, not emotion, can solve puzzles. But the puzzles Kohler provides vary quite a lot, and some, such as the childhood puzzle of how to collect and pay for books, immerse reader and character alike in puzzling out the reference and emotion in reading. Kohler confesses:My appetite was innocent and indiscriminate. I went from The Story of Mankind to The Corpse with the Floating Foot with scarcely a blink or hiccup. Imaginary murder amused me as much as actual ones. The past was as fictional as the future. For writers like Van Loon or readers my age, mankind had a history because its history told a story; there was an incipient "working out" in all things human which encouraged the hope of a happy resolution, even if it was only discovering the guilty, which G&I is devoted to doing, just like Charlie Chan or the other sleuths in those paper-covered books. Certainly I could not understand, then, how completely the world survived as the word, or that it was the historian's duty to outshout Time and talk down Oblivion. (64-65)Like Kohler, the reader must contemplate the history of her acts of reading, as Kohler himself, in his stories of his childhood, contemplates the world he entered when he read and collected books as a boy. Kohler links his sense of self to his acts of reading, and, as in the quotation above, links his generic blindness (" Imaginary murder amused me as much as actual ones. The past was as fictional as the future.") to his current historical project. This gambit of looking closely at one's own act of reading, of indulging in a kind of metareading, may seem familiar to followers of Gass, but, as I've been arguing, The Tunnel presents something different, especially as the novel itself mutates and fluctuates from genre to genre. These fluctuations elicit multiple ethical reactions to the novel. Reading The Tunnel demands an ethics of ambivalence that moves between the poles of intellect and emotion and that refuses the usual advice about reading (such as Coleridge's formula of the willing suspension of disbelief: disbelief is very useful when reading this novel). Given the subject matter of The Tunnel, given its intellectual puzzles, its indulgence in unspeakable references (Kohler discusses his American, alcoholic mother's "Belsenated body" (619)), a conscious practicing of a kind of ethical ambivalence is useful; indeed, alternating among various ethical positions allows reading in sympathy with the novel's rejection of easy categorization, be it generic or in terms of literary movements such as modernism or postmodernism (see Unsworth and Blythe). These movements import with them implied aesthetics which cannot account for the novel's strange, ironic mutations of "reality" exemplified by the novel's shifting theories of history. Such shifts, such ironic mutations, attack any kind of historical legitimacy, regardless of the ethical claims made by certain interpretations of history.What history is, what object it takes, what purpose it serves are questions that can be potentially ironic, especially given the novel's mutating genres and the problems they pose for interpretation. The concept of irony I invoke here is Linda Hutcheon's. Instead of seeing irony as a static form of literary language, she defines irony as made by discursive community, as defined by its unpredictability -- its edge, its inclusive nature (versus the exclusive nature of metaphor), as discourse "in use," as "a social and political scene" (Hutcheon 4). Hutcheon's understanding of irony refuses lists of formal qualifications, preferring to argue that "irony isn't irony until it is interpreted as such," whether that be by the ironist or the receiver of the irony (Hutcheon 6). This last point confronts the place of intention in the understanding or attribution of irony, an important point given that The Tunnel confronts us with the question "What is history?" and leaves the many answers in any number of partially or completely insane characters, from Kohler to the aptly named "Mad" Meg. Moreover, answering the question "what is history" means considering genre, politics, facts, and ethics. At stake in all four of these divisions is a genre's claim to truth, as well as the question of the truthfulness of history. In the traditional Greek triumvirate of the Humanities, it is History (with a capital H) which discusses events as they are or as they have been. Already we can see irony's edge in The Tunnel. It cuts into these key questions about the very nature of history and historicity, but does so within a literary work, a work of fiction, whose techniques, such as narrative, when imported to history, have elicited great ire from certain historians. Perhaps nowhere has this been more discussed than in the history of the Holocaust. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.