In 1968 Gass published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, a book of stories. Therein we find this address to a feline: "You are a cat—you cannot understand—you are a cat so easily."
We have a Paris Review article from 2014, referencing this book, whose author intends to situate William Gass as a modernist writer.
'...Art is the business of serious writers, Gass insists. A brilliant essayist as well as one of this nation’s most important novelists, he argues in his essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” that the task for a serious writer is twofold: “He must show or exhibit his world, and to do this he must actually make something, not merely describe something that might be made.” In his emphasis on making, Gass.... is proposing that the meaning generated by a work of fiction goes beyond its mimetic familiarity. The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn’t to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers “a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language.” A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author’s agile mind.
'... For Gass and his generation at that moment, [1968] modernism was such a gargantuan precursor that it threatened to obscure the work that followed. Whether they considered literary modernism a failed experiment, characterized by H. G. Wells as a “monstrous egotism of artistry,” or a grand success that expresses, in Virginia Woolf’s estimate, “the quick of the mind,” novelists beginning their careers in the fifties and sixties necessarily had to position themselves in response to the dramatic shape shifting that had just occurred in their genre.
'Looking back over this heady period in American literary culture, John Gardner would claim that no one writing at that moment “was willing to live by the old, righteous rules.” Fiction, like all art, was supposed to be free from the shackles of rules. Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” (a slogan that Pound tellingly recycled from Chinese historical sources) continued to reverberate as the defining challenge.
....
'Devoted as he is to artistic excellence, Gass has never been cowed by the bold ambitions of the modernists. Just the opposite. In his essays, he pays tribute to writers he associates with what he calls “a permanent avant-garde”—Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce. Gass’s own essential fiction, written over the past half century, offers us a strikingly varied array of forms, all enriched with wit, intense emotion, and provocation, all full of the promise of discovery. ...He reminds us that art is a proven human glory, and that literature shares with all great art the potential to expand our awareness.
'.... And sauntering through the neighborhood [in this book] goes that dignified cat with his perfect name, Mr. Tick.''
Mr. Tick in fact is the cat referenced in our quote above, who moves, “his long tail rhyming with his paws...”
The essay we quote can be referenced from the link above; the author of this piece of literary criticism, Joanna Scott, has also written the novels De Potter’s Grand Tour, Arrogance, The Manikin, and Follow Me, and the story collections Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody. Not that I recommend them.
No comments:
Post a Comment