Long out of print, The Tunnel returns with a timely exploration of the fascism of the heart.
Having required decades to write and rewrite, William Gass’s The Tunnel has always been a difficult novel to read. An enormously long, often gratingly obnoxious and violent book rendered in overblown prose, it is also shot through with squiggly doodles and diagrams and bawdy limericks and all kinds of lexicographical shenanigans. But that’s only part of what makes it difficult to read. Exasperatingly demanding, defiantly highfalutin, and richly rewarding, The Tunnel is also just hard to find: It was long out of print, and old copies regularly fetch hundreds of dollars in used-book marketplaces.
For this reason, Dalkey Archive has taken on the task of reprinting the book yet again. This time it has done so in full color, as the author intended, and with a companion volume called The Tunnel Reader, a special issue of the now-defunct Review of Contemporary Fiction that contains a complete publication history, critical commentary, correspondence, and the author’s own handy guide, “How to Read The Tunnel,” which helps to contextualize (and soften the blow) of Gass’s heavy masterpiece. The timing is auspicious, for not only is Gass’s book intimidating and frustrating and brilliant, but it is also a study of the ugly, often inchoate nature of the American authoritarian character, and how a crude politics of exclusion and resentment rises from the bile of a more basic resentment—what Gass terms “the fascism of the heart.”
The Tunnel has not one author but two. There’s the book’s literal author, the novelist and essayist William H. Gass, who died in 2017. And then there’s its fictional author, The Tunnel’s protagonist, narrator, villain, and governing consciousness, a bitter, bloated creep named William F. Kohler. A professor of German history at an unnamed college in Indiana, Kohler is a product of two ostensibly distinct milieus. The first is the uninspiring flatlands of the American Midwest, where he was reared and now resides; the second is the political and emotional hothouse of Nazi Germany, where he studied history and found himself “caught up in the partisan frenzy of those stirred and stirring times.”
At the book’s beginning, we are introduced to Kohler just as he is completing his work on a massive historical tome titled Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Its thesis is provocative: Rather than invoking the more standard explanations of culpability regarding the horrors of the Holocaust, Kohler blames not only every German but, in fact, all of humanity for what happened in World War II. He does so because he believes that all human beings harbor nasty, fascist, essentially Nazi-like instincts toward violence and the exaltation of one group at the expense of another. The Nazi Party, he argues, should not bear the stain of guilt alone, since Hitler was little more than “a wimp in wolf’s clothing” and “probably history’s most sincere man.” Indeed, the Nazis, Kohler insists, should be commended for embracing the violence that lurks inside us all: “Suppose but a whisper of our wishes leaked out and half a continent was ready to rise and do your bidding? Orders are easy. Liquidate the trailer parks. Murder motorbikers. Silence the soaps. Clean up the town. Bust up the trusts. It is the killing—hands-on and nearby—that takes fortitude and commitment.” Yet despite his own fortitude and commitment in making this argument, Kohler finds himself distracted as he attempts to pen the book’s introduction. Instead, he starts composing a bittersweet memoir of his childhood, jeremiads against his mediocre colleagues and portly wife, horn-dog reveries about his flagrant affairs, and extended exegeses on the deep, envenoming rancor that poisons the hearts of men. His burrowing deep into his own internal (and infernal) world finds its metaphorical expression in the titular tunnel, which is also not a metaphor: In the midst of all this psychic digging, Kohler begins to excavate a tunnel in the floor of his basement office, hiding the mud and dirt in his wife’s antique wardrobes. It’s not exactly clear what this tunnel business amounts to: an attempt to break loose from his stifling, sexless home life? An effort to escape himself, or to dig his own shallow, silty grave? Or merely “a gesture which will symbolize my desperation”?
Whatever the purpose, the image of a man boring into increasingly tight, dirty spaces befits the feeling of The Tunnel itself, as it slithers into the hollows of Kohler’s repugnant psychology. It is a pitiless, pitch-black map of the human soul—or, rather, of the gaping hole marking its absence.
“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness,” William Gass declared when he accepted the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. “For that is what fine writing does: It creates a unique verbal consciousness.”
Gass has sought to create this unique verbal consciousness ever since he started writing. His dissertation, submitted to Cornell in 1954, was a philosophical investigation of the metaphor. His 1966 debut novel, Omensetter’s Luck, deposits the reader into a slipstream of Midwestern consciousness, as characters in a small Ohio town at the turn of the 20th century rail and sputter against the breezy, earthy charm of a new arrival to their parochial berg. In his 1971 novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—which, in its use of illustrations and all kinds of typesetting trickery, anticipates some of the lexicographical theatrics of The Tunnel—Gass traces the internal monologues of a sex worker who may be a stand-in for literature or poetry itself. The job of the writer, as Gass outlined in one of his many essays, is not merely to describe the world but to bring one into being. For him, a book is a “container” of how humans think and express themselves, how they struggle to draw connections between experience and words. But a book is also more than that—because, for Gass, literature is something like consciousness perfected. Proust, he writes in one appreciation, typifies this high ideal, allowing the reader “to live for a while as we ought, in a fully realized world.”
The Tunnel is a grand expression of this idea, applied to an imperfect consciousness; it’s as if Proust wrote The Turner Diaries. It is not a typical stream-of-consciousness novel in the modernist tradition but a creation of that consciousness. Kohler is the text—to even classify him as an “unreliable narrator” would be senseless, as there is no external truth to judge him against. Everything that happens in The Tunnel happens inside Kohler’s mind. “It’s time,” he announces to the reader, “to hide inside my work, which is, of course, a fortress also made of language: the castle of what comes between commas.”
As much as Gass is committed to this experiment in verbal consciousness, so is Kohler, whose intellectual North Star is Magus “Mad Meg” Tabor, an excitable German historian with a diehard’s belief in “the force of fiction.” To write history, for Tabor, requires bringing it into being by turning it into literature. This idea animates Kohler’s own historical exercise as he attempts to write his way through (or out of) his own mediocrity, malignity, and meagerness of spirit. It turns out that, as we go deeper and deeper into the tunnel of Gass’s novel, it becomes harder to see the light at its beginning. Having coined the term “metafiction” to describe stories that self-consciously call attention to their status as such, Gass has composed a book that is an endless maze: a book about the writing of a book that is attempting to stop being a book and become a form of consciousness itself.
It must be said that Gass’s exercise in verbal-consciousness world-making is brilliant in long stretches. You could drain a ballpoint pen dirtying up the page by underlining great sentences (“After God created snot he made small boys with pugly noses to stuff it in”) or placing asterisks in the margins by memorable paragraphs. The book is full of hates: Kohler hates his parents, his wife and kids, his hippie students denouncing the Vietnam War, even his furniture and his own birthday. But Kohler hates himself most of all, with the usual narcissism inherent in so much self-loathing. “Hate,” as he says, “has given force and purpose to my life.”
The Tunnel’s reflections on how resentment and humiliation mutate into hatred and fascism are particularly sharp, and they are also scarily relevant in a time when such sentiments seem to have swelled in supply. A section headed “Being a Bigot” provides considerable diagnostic relevance for a present-day United States where Nazi sympathies are not just secretly harbored but openly barked. “The bigot,” Gass writes, “is a person who has suffered an unmerited injustice, one which hasn’t been put right, and woe to others if he ever has a chance to get his own back, and take what has long been his—property, power, and honor—from those who have traduced his principles and scorned his manner of existence.” And then, a few pages later, comes a full-blown rebuke of liberal notions of equality among the different races, colors, and creeds:
Because if we were each as identical as twins, I would scratch your face to hate the scratch which spoiled your looks and improved mine, while you would say the scratch set you apart and made you more interesting, and gave you a purpose in life: to scratch me back a thousand times.
These passages penetrate the mind of the deeply detestable or even just the basically jilted, offering an account of how the modest slights and gripes that most people endure in the course of daily life calcify and metastasize and become a “pandemic.” More bothersome, though, are The Tunnel’s no-less-exhaustive sections showcasing this ugly spirit with a libidinal glee. I’m no prude, but after a certain point, reading a guy whine about being under-endowed (“My weenie was, in fact, a little wormlike model of my soul”) or wax poetic about his bowel movements begins to grate—not because it’s unseemly, but because it’s tedious. In how many ways can a man call his wife fat? A rhetorical question, perhaps, but Gass is up to the task of answering it. It’s easy to imagine him and his authorial surrogate smirking, brows furrowed, like one of those bootleg peeing-Calvin bumper stickers as they gleefully micturate on some presumed standard of good taste: Oh, no! What a bad little boy! The truth is that the act, at times, can end up becoming a bit exhausting.
The preening and sniggering qualities of The Tunnel often make it feel like it’s trying too hard, but they are nonetheless crucial to the book’s larger project, which is probably a worthy one. The Tunnel goes to great lengths to be believed: Gass, with a kind of irksome impishness, works to collapse the gap between his fictional author and himself. For example, they’re both named William, and their last names have shared excretory resonances, with “Kohler” evoking the popular line of toilet fixtures. Indeed, when Kohler is described as overweight, beardless, and babylike, readers may reflexively flip to the back of the book to consult an author photo. (They won’t find one.) To make matters only more confusing, Gass had apparently lobbied for The Tunnel to be published with no author’s name provided on the cover or title page, hoping that the reading public might encounter it as some kind of genuine found manuscript.
Some of the book’s more vehement critics have tripped into the trap of conflating its exploration of Kohler’s execrable politics with the views of its author. “It is an act of ventriloquism,” Robert Alter wrote in a 1995 review in The New Republic. “What emerges is a kind of inadvertent complicity between author and protagonist.” Yet that the book allows for this ambiguity is part of the point: Gass does not merely think up the thoughts of a bigoted misanthrope; he wants everyone to be aware of the possibility that they might think them too. His sentences rise and fall rhythmically in an effort to make the ugly beautiful, and he gives Kohler considerable skills rhetorically. A description of a Pennsylvania autumn, where “the land becomes violet and mauve and pink and gold as if sunsets were its new cash crop and sprang freely from the earth,” is arresting. Kohler’s childhood memory about his routine trips to the candy store yields revealing thoughts on the corrupting power of candy: “Sugar slides things past the palate so agreeably a person might willingly swallow a roach or a smart remark from a spiteful spouse if its frosting were creamy and rich and thick enough.” There is wisdom in the midst of the bile. Kohler’s goal is not just indictment but recruitment: He imagines himself as the de facto leader of a new fascist cause, the “Party of the disappointed People” (PdP), “meant for people of broken promise, for whom there was once hope.” If beauty beguiles, as art has shown time and again, then the lesson of history is that evil can be no less beguiling, especially when expressed beautifully.
The Tunnel’s ugliest, grandest metaphor—the Holocaust—is bound to unsettle. In his “How to Read The Tunnel” guide, Gass himself cryptically calls the Holocaust his book’s “shadow subject.” Paved with the hatreds festering in the hearts of men, the road to Auschwitz was, at least in Kohler’s grim conception, an inevitability. The Nazi horrors seem fated, born of an original sin going back to Cain and Abel: “The Holocaust,” Kohler writes, “is perhaps an extreme example, the consummate pogrom, but only made major by improvements in technology.” In one section, he even describes the American fetish for automobile culture and its resulting environmental devastation and atomization of social life as worse than the Holocaust. Deploying such a world-historical catastrophe so flippantly feels deliberately offensive—and even risks diminishment: One might wince (or roll their eyes) at the basic suggestion that every perceived injustice, hostile glance, denied promotion, “ancestral resentment,” or lovers’ quarrel leads irrevocably to the gas chamber. Surely, not I! the polite reader will insist. To which The Tunnel responds with something like: Of course, you! Who else? In any event, this is not a historical account of fascism but rather a psychological and often metaphorical one. And it follows in a proud anti-Enlightenment tradition. If it was, as Adorno said, barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, then perhaps crude cartoons, dirty limericks, perverted daydreams, dark fantasies driving ever deathward, fart jokes, and other “obnoxious effluvium” (in Kohler’s words, but also Gass’s) constitute an appropriate—and appropriately barbarous—new form.
John SemleyJohn Semley is a writer based in Philadelphia. His writing has also appeared in The Baffler, The New Republic, and The Guardian. He is the co-host of Slow Learners, a podcast about books.