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The World Within the Word
In this sequel to Fiction & the Figures of Life, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Included are discussions of Valéry, Henry Miller, Sartre, Freud, Faulkner, suicide, "art and order," and the transformation of language into poetry and fiction. The vividness and clarity of Gass's writing, the unabashed love and inimitable use of language-his startling metaphors, the sinuousness of his philosophy, the originality of his vision-make each essay a searching revelation of its subject, as well as an example of Gass's own singular artistry.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
26 people are currently reading
1266 people want to read
About the author
William H. Gass
64 books707 followersWilliam Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor.
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.
He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.
Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.
Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.
He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.
Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.
Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
December 13, 2012
Imagine being the editor of a respectable literary publication (if it helps, quote FR Leavis and take up chronic alcoholism) and receiving a book review from William H. Gass. Not only has he written the best review of a marginal publication unworthy of his masterly talents that no mortal will ever read, he has also written a scholarly essay bursting with philosophical insight, twenty pages of sumptuous pedantic analysis, and a wonderfully rich encapsulation of the author whose work is being discussed. In short: you’ll have to cut off Gass’s nose to spite your publication’s face. Another rum? This collection from 1978 includes masterful essays on Malcolm Lowry, Colette, Gertrude Stein, and two on Proust. ‘The Doomed in Their Sinking’ is worth a special mention, containing moving (and rare) ruminations on his mother’s not-quite-suicide. Other essays here flex Gass’s academic muscles and occasionally lapse into that dense Gass-speak which can be overwhelming for inferior intellects (me): the piece on Freud and the later etymological-epistemological-ontological essays are outrageously erudite. But beautiful all the same. See:
“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.” (p337).
“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.” (p337).
Read
February 24, 2015There are only three kinds of Gass essay, and perhaps a fourth could be placed between the first two if you like for those cases where you can’t quite decide. There are, in the first place, those essays in which he covers a topic of earnest interest to you the individual reader with your own particular agendas and orientations (Stein, Lowry, Faulkner, Colette, Proust, Nabokov, Freud with a dash of Burton) and there are those occasional essays in which he deals with stuff you either don’t give a flying whos-it about or wish Gass hadn’t had to waste his time (Valéry, Sartre, Henry Miller, to say nothing of Rilke who is sprinkled everywhere like some kitchen ingredient in the kitchen) -- and if you need a third stack, place a few essays in the middle as of only middling interest to you the individual reader with your own particular agendas and orientations. The third (true) category is the category of Required Reading -- “Groping for Trouts”, “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses”, and “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words.” This final and most important stack of essays consists of those essays wherein Gass tends to argue one of two things -- that it is an insult to prose to describe it as either ‘poetic’ or ‘musical’ because prose is an art form independent of either, or that it demeans the realm of the aesthetic to demote it to a mere means to some useful end. These essays are required reading because it is important for you to, as Morpheus said, Free your mind. Which is the only really use any real art has.
As to the rest, it’s true, Gass is simply too rich.
March 20, 2021
Having recently been blown away by his novel Omensetter's Luck, I thought I'd try some of his non-fiction. This collection of essays was really impressive, with the highlights for me being 'Malcolm Lowry' (not long back read his novel 'Under the Volcano'), 'Wisconsin Death Trip', 'Sartre on Theater', and 'Groping for Trouts'. After just two books, I'm now starting to see why William H. Gass is regarded by some as one of the great American writers - but one who tends to go under the radar.
December 12, 2017
Honestly, these essays mostly about writers whom I assume Gass admired, soared unreachable (to me) above and beyond my ken. I gathered bits/pieces of what he (I think) was driving at, but alas no coalescing synergy prevailed. So, how should (I) this book find a home with other readers with whom may derive meaning/value commensurate with time/effort invested in reading? I don't know. I'm giving a four star rating because I suspect it's at least that good for those who WOULD know. Humph, exasperated, humbled, but otherwise moving on.
May 13, 2019
Oh, the indulgence. As it seems no one is/was completely immune to the pervasive and self-aggrandizing monstrosity that is postmodernism, not even masters from Gass's echelon. Just like Barnes with his Flaubert, this is a stylistic itch, an au courant hype so tempting, that everybody and their cousin wanted to prove their mettle in it, show that they can nail it, even mockingly, while adding a dash of their own. Trouble is, the results are invariantly dated and that little original dash gets absorbed by the metabombast and autoreferential baloney. When did nostalgia get so ridiculous?
January 8, 2010
"The World Within The Mind"
Phew, finally finished, to use the author's favourite and tiresome stylistic technique.
True, the essays on the works by Stein, Nabokov or Lowry are written with wit and can be read with fun.
But the ones on philosophy... Well, it seems the author builds his own world, using heavy bricks such as Ideas, Digressions, Metaphors, Enumerations, walls himself in and refuses to let too many readers inside.
I've tried to find a window in the wall to enter but failed. Have you?
Phew, finally finished, to use the author's favourite and tiresome stylistic technique.
True, the essays on the works by Stein, Nabokov or Lowry are written with wit and can be read with fun.
But the ones on philosophy... Well, it seems the author builds his own world, using heavy bricks such as Ideas, Digressions, Metaphors, Enumerations, walls himself in and refuses to let too many readers inside.
I've tried to find a window in the wall to enter but failed. Have you?
Read
December 12, 2012William H. Gass writes:
During the decline of Christian moralism few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society [as the suicide has.] It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue. To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide want? Not what he gets, surely. Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped. Others consider it quite positively, as thought to die were to get on in the world. Seventh Heaven, after all, is a most desirable address. Still others spend their life like money, purchasing this or that, but their aim is to buy, not to go broke. Are we to say to them (all and every kind) what we often say to children? no, Freddie, you don’t want a pet boa, you wouldn’t like the way it swallows mice.
It doesn’t follow at all that because it is easy enough to kill yourself, it is easy enough to get, in that case, what you want. Can you really be said to want what you cannot possibly understand? or what you are in abysmal confusion about? or what is provenly contrary to your interests? or is plainly impossible? Is ‘I’d rather be dead’ anything like ‘I want to be a chewed-up marshmallow’; or: ‘I want 6 and 3 to make 10’; or: ‘I want to be a Fiji princess’; or: ‘I want a foot-long-dong’; or: ‘I want that seventh scotch-on-the-rocks’; or ‘I would love to make it with Lena Horne’?”
During the decline of Christian moralism few groups have risen so rapidly in the overall estimation of society [as the suicide has.] It was dangerous for Donne to suggest that suicide was sometimes not a sin. It was still daring for Hume to reason that it was sometimes not a crime. Later one had to point out that it was sometimes not simply a sickness of the soul. Now it seems necessary to argue that it is sometimes not a virtue. To paraphrase Freud, what does a suicide want? Not what he gets, surely. Some simply think of death as the absence of their present state, a state which pursues them like a malignant disease and which cannot be otherwise escaped. Others consider it quite positively, as thought to die were to get on in the world. Seventh Heaven, after all, is a most desirable address. Still others spend their life like money, purchasing this or that, but their aim is to buy, not to go broke. Are we to say to them (all and every kind) what we often say to children? no, Freddie, you don’t want a pet boa, you wouldn’t like the way it swallows mice.
It doesn’t follow at all that because it is easy enough to kill yourself, it is easy enough to get, in that case, what you want. Can you really be said to want what you cannot possibly understand? or what you are in abysmal confusion about? or what is provenly contrary to your interests? or is plainly impossible? Is ‘I’d rather be dead’ anything like ‘I want to be a chewed-up marshmallow’; or: ‘I want 6 and 3 to make 10’; or: ‘I want to be a Fiji princess’; or: ‘I want a foot-long-dong’; or: ‘I want that seventh scotch-on-the-rocks’; or ‘I would love to make it with Lena Horne’?”
February 20, 2008
Gass's stylistic tics can sometimes be annoying, all too alliterative and allusive, alarming... stringing together words like he is aimlessly shuffling an abacus. Fortunately, this abacus does produce sums, and everything flows very nicely, making this collection of reviews (mostly taken from the New York Review of Books) extremely easy and pleasant to read without sacrificing sense and depth. His essay on Stein, in particular, is wonderful (and loooong, but not without cause, and never does it become tiresome). Even the alliterations grew on me, became part of the scenery, and stopped interfering with my thoughts, doing instead what they were supposed to do-- allude to other things not otherwise present. A recursive discourse, but also a curved one, and a circular one. Parts of the essay on Stein are as much about Stein as they are about Gass himself, and amount to an Ars Poetica.
December 4, 2013
Essays about authors that committed suicide, drunkenness with a particular focus on Malcolm Lowry, Freud, sex, and sentence structure. While I love Gass' short stories and enjoyed his recent novel, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed with these essays.
August 6, 2024
"Words, words, words, as Hamlet sneered. No--no difference between life and language, itch and urchin; no difference between conversation and news, a letter or an anecdote, history or advice, psychology or travel; no difference between A (writing fiction), B (composing criticism), or C (constructing a theory)."
--From "Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses"
--From "Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses"
August 30, 2020
I am pleased to have discovered this author. I enjoyed the reviews and essays presented. I also got to know a little bit more about authors I've read (Malcolm Lowery, Faulkner and Nabokov) and some I have never read. I enjoyed Gass' writing style and would like to read one of his novels.
June 29, 2022
This is relatively early Gass, and it turns out I find him less enjoyable by half than later Gass, who I adore. The will to cleverness in this one is so very postmodern, and at times quite tedious. But clever he is; it cannot be denied.
(Did I really take 4 years to read this? Good grief.)
(Did I really take 4 years to read this? Good grief.)
February 7, 2024
I suppose there were good ideas in this book, but it was hard to tell what they were. Gass seemed to be more interested in showing off his wit than in clearly communicating with the reader. After reading this book I'm disinclined to read anything else by Gass.
October 29, 2018
not as brain expanding as fiction and the figures and the life but gass still writes the good write, glad to finally resume my completion effort
September 2, 2024
Solidly down the middle- Gass has many a funny turn of phrase, but not all of the essays particularly held my interest. I think he has better essay collections out there.
Want to read
February 24, 2025Only read the chapters on Stein and Alvarez so far. I'll come back to it later. However, the Stein essay is great.
November 1, 2025
Gass pedal
Gass pedal
Gass pedal
Gass pedal
Gass pedal
July 2, 2016
Not a lot of people who are born in Fargo, North Dakota grow up to be dazzlers. I'm guessing. William H. Gass is American literature's preeminent dazzler, and he was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He starts but doesn't, contrary to how it may appear to some, end the dazzling at the level of the sentence. Sure, he is the finest sentence writer maybe ever. His sentences are the ripest fruit on the market. They are not always perfect, but they are always a meal. Sometimes they do too much. An occasional excess of frippery. Not really all that bad a problem to have ... as long as it remains 'sometimes.' But his essays show better than his fiction, I think, the two other things he dazzles w/ nearly peerlessly: analysis and rhetoric. There has been a debate of late concerning the role of the autobiographical in the literary essay and the affect that David Foster Wallace has had on the form. Well, I am a big fan of Wallace. Wallace, a conceptually cultivated version of whose self is always at the center of his own essays, is a marvelous writer and a stalwart rhetorician, but he is no Gass. Wallace (partially to be palatable, I think, and partially because it is who he is as a man and writer he needs to believe might be capable of doing service) comes off quite folksy and conciliatory, putting on humility in the way he puts on that tuxedo T-shirt on the cruise ship. Gass, on the other hand, may be cute, but never appologizes for his cut-throat, bulldozing genius. Gass may show up (rarely) in his own essays, but when he does so it is as a supremely unstable element, and often just a device of rhetoric. If we want to look at rhetoric employed as supremely as it has ever been demonstrated in all literature, we had might as well jump to the final essay here: "The Ontology of the Sentence." Read it. Seriously. As for analysis: read "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence." Set aside some subsequent time in which you can expect to expend some considerable labor recovering yr jaw from the floor.
October 19, 2021
I'd recommend his essay on Gertrude Stein, simply to understand her method and some of its motivations, both in the social milieu and in her biography. (William Carlos Williams' essay on Stein is also instructive, albeit shorter.) I'd also recommend his essay on Malcolm Lowry as a reliable window to his principal works, both Volcano and his posthumous books. Gass tends to take an eclectic approach, disinclined as he seems to be with theory.
His prose is cerebral as well as vibrant and tetchy, occasionally off-color, and something of a treat to read, although the reader may struggle to find the thesis.
His prose is cerebral as well as vibrant and tetchy, occasionally off-color, and something of a treat to read, although the reader may struggle to find the thesis.
Currently reading
June 22, 20103. "We could try to start clean. Suppose, we as composers, we had to work with hydraulic sighs and door squeaks, warning whistles, temple bells, and warhoops. WE should have, first of all to snip these unruly noises from their sources (we hear a stealthy footfall in the floor's creak), then remove them from any meanings they might have been assigned (fire, four o''clock, beep beep, watch out!) otherwise we wouldn't be composing music but sound effects."
July 3, 2013
(3.7/5.0) A few killers in here--the final essay mesmerizes. But, honestly, little Billy Gass is just too bright for his own good. Some of these, with their intense erudition, verge on unreadable status (Malcolm Lowry-- I'm looking perplexedly at you); still, as always with W.H., the language justifies the labor.
February 27, 2009
Great critic.
October 25, 2012
::: review gestating :::
December 6, 2014
need some time to fully comprehend his intention.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews