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Jeffrey Pence
Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 2000, pp. 96-126
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After Monumentality:
Narrative as a Technology of Memory
in William Gass's The Tunnel
Jeffrey Pence
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 30.1 (Winter 2000): 96-126. Copyright © 2000 by JNT:
Journal of Narrative Theory.
After Monumentality 97
With this turn to narrative writ small, a particular version of the past is
thus foregrounded.
This second feature of contemporary monuments is a valorization of
memory over abstracted public history. Without an official story capable
of appealing across a spectrum of perspectives, memory as an affective,
even aesthetic, experience seems to offer otherwise scattered individuals a
point of collective identification. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial
is the paradigmatic case. Here, coming to terms with the war means com-
ing to terms with the persistence and pain of individual memory. This is
not strictly achieved in the monument's construction, but is completed by
the cathartic participation of visitors in public rituals of mourning. More
distantly, the multiple perspectives of participants, and the signature points
of view of experts, that we find in the documentary work of Ken Burns
has refashioned much of American history along similar lines of affective
identification for public television audiences. This emphasis on the hu-
mane and communal aspects of experience raises the value of narrative
memory in contrast to the systems of meaning seen to produce historical
trauma.
98 JNT
With The Tunnel, Gass offers an opportunity to learn to read the internal
logic of such a paradox, one which is located within a fictive individual,
but more properly could be described as the split identity of narrative it-
self, connoting here both a poetic and a technological form.
and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine
arts"(13). Technology thus connotes a cognitive mode for instrumentally
revealing and ordering being, defined by its double-edged process of "En-
framing" the world. On one hand, being itself is challenged forth and or-
dered into a "standing reserve" of resources to be understood and ex-
ploited. On the other, consciousness itself is formed by enframing along
instrumental lines; as the entire world is perceived as rational and useful,
so do humans themselves risk becoming resources to be mastered under
the imperialistic logic of technology. Understood in this fashion, techno-
logical modes of thinking are not confined to natural or human sciences;
also included is history itself, because it shares with the essence of tech-
nology the drive to enframe its material as information, posit causality be-
tween units of data, and order the past under the aegis of a deterministic
destining to reveal "the real everywhere [as] standing reserve":
The normative deferral to story here amounts to the erasure of the essence
of prose fiction, which is its surface, its medium, in order to reprocess the
verities which circulate ready-made in our culture at large: "You can buy
stories at the store, where they are a dime a dozen"(46).
Like Heidegger, Gass has also faced criticism on political grounds. The
question of the social responsibility of Gass's work, as balanced with its
formal qualities, has dominated almost all of the critical discussions. With
the publication of The Tunnel, the debate has reemerged, which seems to
be exactly what Gass intended all along. * On one hand, the text is wildly
inventive stylistically; on the other, its narrator is as "loathsome" as can
be. Readers are lured into basing their judgments on one or the other of
these poles; yet these positions clearly imply one another. Rather than a
suitcase of moral content, the book offers an experience of ethical self-re-
After Monumentality 103
flection predicated upon taking seriously the medium in which this reflec-
tion occurs. The fetish of language does not merely evade the duties of
plot and morality. Rather, it is a purposeful examination of the structuring
materials of consciousness, out of which any understanding of the
world—narrative or not, moral or not—must be fashioned. Language is in-
trinsic to consciousness, and at the same time susceptible to manipulation.
In this sense, the metafictive allows for the refashioning of consciousness
itself under the ethical imperative of self-management.
Sprawling and challenging, The Tunnel combines enormous length
with extravagant experimentalism in language, material appearance, and
fictive form. At its heart, or rather hollow core, is William Frederick
Köhler. A professor of German history in his native Midwest, his name
says it all: the Kaiser; the King; the miner, in German, and the plumbing
supply manufacturer, in English. Köhler is a moral revisionist of National
Socialism, bigot, hateful husband, poisonous colleague, absolutely indif-
ferent son and father, small-penised sexual harasser, potty-mouthed poet,
and visionary of a mass movement of the vengeance-minded under the
banner of the Party of the Disappointed People. A stone chucker on
Kristallnacht, investigator at, and later critic of, the Nuremberg trials,
Köhler has completed the masterwork of his career, Guilt and Innocence
in Hitler s Germany, a rewriting of the moral judgments of the Holocaust
which functions in the ethical realm in analogy to his scatological obses-
sions with the human body. The work lacks an introduction, a statement of
motivation and purpose, and that is precisely what Köhler, consumed by
ressentiment and rage, cannot give it. Instead, he begins digging a tunnel
beneath the loveless house he shares with his sexually indifferent wife,
grown as fat as Köhler himself, and her collection of enormous Victorian
chests and sons (they mean nothing to him). Simultaneously, he begins
composing the autobiographical and essayistic fragments which, interpo-
lated into the pages of the manuscript, will constitute the novel itself.
Essentially plotless, in the sense of a causal sequencing of past events
or the meaningful unfolding of actions and thoughts in the present, The
Tunnel relentlessly resists laying a template—a technology—of narrative,
historical or memorial, across the wreckage of Kohler's consciousness. In-
stead, the text recycles and revises more conventional narrative units with-
out ever letting them develop in an attenuated fashion. Their juxtaposi-
tions likewise resist a continuous reading or a recuperation of plot. The
104 JNT
C................................]
Through this we are not yet saved. But we are thereupon
summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving
power. How can this happen? Here and now and in little
things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase.
This includes holding before our eyes the extreme danger.
(Heidegger 33)
106 JNT
Heidegger does not so much put poesis into simple contrast with techne as
place them in a dynamic relation whereby a coherent revelation of being
becomes imaginable. Kohler's own dichotomy between history and poetry
is similarly nuanced. If we understand narrative as an aspect of techne, the
purpose of the text's resistance to plot becomes clear.
Attentive to the horrors of history, and attentive to his own disposition
of thinking, Kohler's text strives toward a poetic revelation of language as
that which endures:
This statement echoes the history of formalism. For Kant, poetry "main-
tains the first rank" of all the arts, because it broadens and develops the
mind's capacities for presentation beyond the goal-driven functionality of
rhetorical uses of language (393). In its acknowledgment that "It plays
with illusion . . . but without deceiving it," everything in poetry "proceeds
with honesty and candor"(393). Kant elaborates poetry's contrast with
rhetorical uses of language by linking the first to pleasure and the latter to
technology:
Köhler turns away from narrative history, that "treacherous art." Instead,
he comes to terms with the unruly nature of language, the irreducibility of
words to instruments, and their enduring otherness as the core of history.
For him, language escapes the territorializations of meaning: "the dictio-
nary is never right"(522). At the same time, because of this resistance to
fixity and order, "language never lies"(448).
After Monumentality 107
point "the mind discovers that it can conceive of something like the infi-
nite"^). In Kantian epistemology, fidelity to the Idea of reason is devel-
oped in speculative or ethical cognition, with their progressive registers of
achievement. A similar experience may occur, according to Lyotard, in the
sublime where
his suggestion that such fragments of a family romance are only set-pieces
that he constructs in response to filmic or photographic mnemonic tem-
plates.
Köhler does not abide sincerity as a rhetorical mode of expression. For
him, it is a numbing style that sanitizes the real: "sincerity makes every
dull day Sunday, does lump sums, keeps tabs, lies through its honesty like
a Bible-beater's pious threats and Great Good News"(21). Paradoxically,
the disposition toward honesty, given Kohler's cynicism that it could actu-
ally be delivered, reveals only ulterior motives: "honesty is a sign of dis-
dain"(361). If honesty is seen as a rhetorical fiction—"in my illusion no il-
lusions are allowed"(503)—it is telling that the only sincere figure in the
text is Hitler. Inspired by the political orator of the film The Tunnel,
Hitler's sincerity consists in treating objects and people as if they were the
same. Honesty is less a property of objects than the act of objectification
itself: "Those mute white mounds of Jews: they were sincere"(23). Lan-
guage resists this silent neatness:
does not lie, only its users. I think barrel suckers say
that about guns. (560)
Far from being determined by his past, Kohler's problem is that of free-
dom, an ethical burden that, resentfully and angrily, he spends the duration
of the book struggling with: "reality permits us to believe anything or its
opposite, as we wish, even both at the same time"(258).
Kohler's schoolboy "Baconian essay," which he proposed to literally
write on a window, argued that,
His teacher's charge that he plagiarized this essay is, in one sense, true.
The argument comes from Gass's own essays, in particular "The Book as
a Container of Consciousness." More importantly, this passage tutors us
on how to read the obvious and less apparent frames of The Tunnel, re-
vealed now as just such a two-way anamorphic looking glass. A deck of
windows is a figure for a book which suppresses linear order in favor of
the voyeur's lingering gaze. If they are as a deck of cards, we have the
freedom to shuffle them; lay them out as with Calvino's Tarot cards in The
Castle of Crossed Destinies; play them in games with, following Borges,
their arbitrary rules and tedious goals. We can also imagine the edifice of
a building, with its multiple portals for observation, in whatever pattern
association and desire leads the viewer, as a counter model to the chrono-
type of narrative. Here, the two templates—the window of attenuated ob-
servation, the purposeful resequencing of narrative—establish the grounds
of Kohler's assault on history as a frame for understanding the past.
Through the historian's window, one sees the following vista, in
Eliotesque meter: "This is how the world looks. The world looks . . .
trashed"(360 emphasis original). History fails Köhler because it provides
no governing categories of proportion (historical "Enormities," such as the
Holocaust, "are notoriously relative"(201)), or responsibility: "neither
guilt nor innocence are ontological categories; they are merely ideological
factors to which a skillful propaganda can seem to lend a causal
force"(13). Rather than providing a temporal frame of causality, conse-
quence and scale for comprehending the past in a palliative manner, his-
tory for Köhler is best understood as that most leveling and degrading of
passages, mirroring Kohler's own role as the mouth of his tunnel:
kylos
cyclone
tornar
tornado
whirlwind
Wind und Wasserhosen
god's soda straw
hog-swal
1
o
i
η
η
k
e
(112)
The more Köhler recalls his past and narrates his present, the more con-
vinced he is that all organizing frames are false. Worse still, recollection
itself seems to swirl around the traumas of the past and present and revisit
116 JNT
them in a cycle of self and other destruction. The personal past has an
emptiness—"a truth . . . that cannot be abided: human worthlessness . . .
yours and mine"(197)—directly parallel to that of history itself, here de-
fined as the pure emptiness of the abyss (184). In his purposeless pit,
Köhler searches fruitlessly for a reason for his digging, for Guilt and In-
nocence; finally, purposelessness itself is revealed as his goal: "I aspire to
the abyss"(185). Paradoxically, this unification of the private and public,
of individual memory and history, provides the possibility to read against
Kohler's deflationary text. In short, it gives us the opportunity to reimag-
ine the work, emphasizing its imaginative language and form, as demon-
strating the potential for a critical memory for our age.
Köhler initially conceived of Guilt and Innocence as a monument:
"Here, in my introduction, raised above me like an arch of triumph, I
meant to place a wreath upon myself; "I said it was time for the "Big
Book," the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to
have: a pyramid, a column tall enough to satisfy the sky"(4, 5). However,
he finds nothing great, in himself or the world, to honor with a monument,
to "Leninize"(53). His inability to produce an introduction derails the nar-
rative dimension of the text and thus thwarts its monumental function. In-
stead, we receive the "foolish remembrance" of the newspapers—"FIFTY
YEARS AGO TODAY—this or that happened"(604)—and "Public mon-
uments . . . constructed of similar confusions"(605). Köhler imagines
monuments that minimize rather than enlarge, such as a "plaque or song or
some suitable ceremonial" in honor of "the day I began to dig"(214), or a
commemoration of academic bickering and misbehavior:
which spirit comes to know itself, the self-awareness that the recent past
has brought has been horrific. The twentieth century, in Kohler's timeline,
"was born a few weeks before Appomattox in 1865—in front of the bogs
of Bloody Angle where Grant invented victory by means of matériel supe-
riority and attrition [and] lasted until 1945 and died its dumb brute's death
at Hiroshima"(192). While superficially, and precisely through its insis-
tence on superficiality as essence, the text seems to relentlessly explode
the Hegelian myth ("Hegelian wholes horrify me"(424)); the abiding de-
sire for such a consoling myth is the best possible explanation for the ex-
tent to which Köhler is obsessed with attacking it. In the register of his-
tory, the dream of the Ideal might be seen to operate in synchrony with
Freud's family romance. While critical habit would lead us to focus on
Kohler's neurotic account of familial trauma and disappointment, to do so
risks undervaluing the ways that the novel is equally concerned with the
dissolution of the public romance of the nation. His insistent focus on "the
fascism of the heart" is a two-way trope; not only the fascism of the sub-
ject, but the heart of fascism itself is at stake. To press this point one step
further, Oedipus is as crucial a figure for Hegel as he is for Freud. For
Hegel, Oedipus' answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, an answer that Hegel
implies the Sphinx itself is unaware of, signals the advent of the Hellenis-
tic stage of world history by introducing, for the first time, the category of
the human as history's true subject. This figure of heroic man is exactly
Kohler's target. So, resistance to a palliative abstraction or absolute would
seem to be a version of Hegelian anti-Hegelianism.
Like Tabor, Köhler recognizes that history is fabricated, that "There is
nothing to study"(260). Unlike Tabor, Köhler cannot accept the arbitrary
destiny of the nation as an enabling fiction. Where Tabor prophecies that
"The future shall speak only German!"(272), Kohler's more modest
malevolence leads him to revise his teacher's terms: "German = now it is
our turn"(78). Kohler in fact finds himself, against his desire for a stable
and "satisfyingly gloomy point of view"(418), caught between Tabor and
another father figure. With his colleague Herschel, Köhler is "like a
child"(423), seeking approval because "in him I see myself as seen in
him"(421). The two stand for his contrary desires: "All I want: I want to
lay the world waste"(12); "I want to feel a little less uneasy"(106). Her-
schel's tragic humanism produces a historical perspective attuned to the
limits of understanding human agency, causing Köhler "to tenderize my
120 JNT
This Temple has two draws for the subject. First, it is a product of our
labor. While we don't create the shapes of history out of whole cloth, we
do have a forming relationship to them: we "fashion [] a whole out of ma-
terial from the past" (in Dienstag 703). Our actions, in this sense, are not
unlimited but more in line with the sort of meditative unveiling of being
exhibited by Kohler in his apperceptive moments, when "the Idea be-
comes real" (709). The second draw of the Temple of Memory is its aes-
thetic beauty, its sheer attractiveness. Unveiling itself, making the Idea
manifest, is already an aesthetic act. For Hegel, "art is the middle term"
situated "between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous and
transient" (in Dienstag 710). Further, the shapes of history, and more so,
the form of the Temple itself, are the greatest instantiation of "Beauty . . .
the highest value in this world" (710).
Hegel's Temple, and Kohler's poetic "frieze of stone," foreground spa-
tiality as an anodyne for a self-reflexive and paralytic consciousness of the
inexorability of temporality in all its dimensions. If history is an unavoid-
able burden of thought, with all its "slaughter-bench" (701) features, then
rendering it as a beautiful space answers a "necessity of lingering" (704),
a need to retreat from the process of time and our awareness of it. This vi-
sion of the aesthetic resisting temporality resembles Kohler's reflection on
his own practice: "Living 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" (641; ellipses original). The risk for Dienstag is that
Hegel's Temple works all too well. Temporality disappears in the Temple,
and the subject finds itself in a seductive and narcissistic space attesting
only to its own capacities:
With all of history organized into one form, time appears frozen. Rather
than a beauty that "will replace the comfort we found in earlier myths"
(725), the Temple becomes a vacuum without a future (726). It offers an
"ever-repeating picture show" (726) of remembrance that artificially bol-
sters an illusion of freedom. In our counter-temporal lingering we are
aware,
This nothing much is something crucial. Just when Köhler begins to luxu-
riate in the nostalgic memories of his few joys, or a revisionist history
which seems to ameliorate the horrific by herocizing the guilty, his atten-
tion to the material out of which such a comforting vision of the past is
created impedes the stabilizing of these recollections. More important than
the sheer distastefulness of Kohler's normal memories and bloody history,
then, is the language with which these are assiduously constructed and de-
constructed in an agon of aesthetic and ethical vigilence, both vectors of
which are affiliated with a responsibility to an Idea of reason which is not
guided by the narcissism of the will or the teleology of techne.
Through The Tunnel, Köhler emerges not as a historian exercising the
techne of narrative, nor simply as a writer arrested in the contemplation of
forms. Instead, he comes to us as an exemplary figure of the memorist,
showing how contemporary monumentality must be understood as a mul-
tiple and agonistic engagement with the basic materials of thought, with
language, while constantly resisting the pressure to succumb to temporal-
ity or its mere negation. The Tunnel, then, is the monument as ruins, or
even ruination. It is a space for consciousness, but a space always in mo-
After Monumentality 125
tion. Unlike narrative, this is a motion that intends, and manages, to go
nowhere. In a Heideggerian vein, we might say that Gass proves that free-
dom of thought is good for nothing. And what could be better than that?
Especially when, "Beyond my book the machines are still mowing"(85).
Notes
1. Given Gass's prominence in American letters, and the public fact of his decades-long
composition of The Tunnel, the novel was reviewed in an astonishingly wide array of
journals. What is most interesting in these various first takes is how easy it is to dislike
the book and how very difficult to articulate appreciation. Negative reviewers tend to
use the work as an opportunity to attack larger cultural forces: one announces that "It's
modernism's last gasp, and way too late"(James Wolcott, "Gass Attack," The New Cri-
terion February 1995, 67); while another claims the book to be "a complete com-
pendium of the vices of postmodern writing" (Robert Alter, "The Leveling Wind," The
New Republic 27 March 1995, 29). Only a few critics seemed willing to embrace the
novel without reservation (see, for example, Michael Dirda, "In the Dark Chambers of
the Soul," Washington Post Book World 12 March 1995, 1+). For the most part, re-
viewers seem caught in the middle, simultaneously repulsed and attracted in a way that
is almost agonizing: "a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel" (John Leonard, "Splen-
dor in the Gass?" The Nation 20 March 20 1995, 390); "I discover that I am paralyzed.
I find much in The Tunnel that I deplore, and much that I celebrate, and I cannot see
that either cancels the other" (Sven Birkerts, "One for the Angry White Male," The At-
lantic Monthly June 1995, 120). Along the same lines, see also Louis Menand's "Jour-
ney into the Dark," New York Review of Books 13 July 1995, 8-10.
Wofis Cited
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Dienstage, Joshua Foa. "Building the Temple of Memory: Hegel's Aesthetic Narrative of
History." The Review of Politics 56.4 (1994): 697-728.
Dirda, Michael. "In the Dark Chambers of the Soul." Washington Post Book World 12
March 1995: 1+.
126 JNT
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