The William H. Gass Reader by William H. Gass

Author:William H. Gass
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

This swing can be corralled, as Gertrude does in the case of her overly famous tag:

Civilization begins with a rose.

These chaplets retain the plainest syntax, but beneath the simple grammar of these buttons lie meanings which have nearly lost their syntactical value, becoming astonishingly plastic. Let’s take a look at some of the etymological clusters.

The entire passage is held together by underlying meanings which are greatly akin and often simply repeat one another—a familiar characteristic of Stein’s manifest texts—and the passage is pushed forward as much by the progressive disclosure of these deep meanings as by ordinary linear onset. There is a cluster around what might be called the idea of an early state; there’s one around gestation, blood, and pain, as well as punishment and judgment; there’s still another around resistance, repetition, and property. There is finally a solution expressed in the dimmest imagery of all: the target with its black bull’s-eye.

I recall particularly that Zeus, desiring to punish Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man, fashioned a beautiful woman out of clay, clothing her like a queen and, with the help of the Four Winds, breathing life into her according to the customary recipe. This done, he sent his glittering clay creature to the brother of Prometheus as a gift, but Epimetheus, warned not to accept any favors from Zeus (as though to “beware of gods bearing gifts”), politely refused her until Zeus frightened him by chaining his disobedient brother to a pillar high in the mountains, where a vulture ate by day the liver which grew heedlessly back by night (just as waking life was to be ruinous for us ever afterward). Pandora, of course, capricious and willful and curious, opened the box in which Prometheus had bottled all the evils which might beset man, among them delusive hope whose sting keeps us from suicide and still alive to suffer the bites of the others.

Similarly, Satan (“red”), speaking through a serpent and by tradition from a tree (“box”), tempts Eve in paradise (“kindness”) to pick (“selection”) and eat the apple (“box,” “red”). A whole set of derivations indicates that we should interpret this act as a case of praiseworthy resistance. (No time is wasted on Adam.) Kindness is thus reduced to rudeness. God soon (“rapid”) seeks out (“research”) the impure pair (“rudeness”) and holds an official investigation (“question”). He finds that their eyes (“eye”) are now open; they see (“research”) that they are naked, and are consequently full of shame (“red”). His judgment (“question”) is that Eve shall belong to her husband like a chattel and bear her children (“kindred”) henceforward in pain and labor (“painful cattle”). At the point of the first full stop, there is a definite break in the text. In order to go on, we must go back.

And who are “we” at this point? Not even Gertrude would have read this far.

Without the myths of Eve and Pandora I should have no sounding board, no principle of selection, nothing to paste my conjectures to, however remarkably I imagined them.

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