On Being Blue by William H. Gass

Author:William H. Gass
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1-59017-732-7
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

but I have been dropping hints all along like heavy shoes that the ultimate and essential displacement is to the word, and that the true sexuality in literature—sex as a positive aesthetic quality—lies not in any scene and subject, nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequences on the page of love well made—made to the medium which is the writer’s own, for he—for she—has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation (the class of cocks, for instance, or the sub-class of father-defilers), and a crowd of meanings as randomly connected by time and use as a child connects his tinkertoys. On this basis, not a single thing will distinguish ‘fuck’ from ‘fraise du bois’; ‘blue’ and ‘triangle’ are equally abstract; and what counts is not what lascivious sights your loins can tie to your thoughts like Lucky is to Pozzo, but love lavished on speech of any kind, regardless of content and intention.

It is always necessary to deprive the subject of its natural strength just as Samson was, and blinded too, before recovering that power and replacing it within the words. Popeye is about to rape Temple Drake with a corn-cob (in a corn-crib, too, if you can bear the additional symbolism):

. . . Popeye drew his hand from his coat pocket.

To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corn-cobs, the sound was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting down upon the scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely isolating it, and she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye’s tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisping thinly along his leg.

He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. ‘Something is happening to me!’ she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. ‘I told you it was!’

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