After Monumentality: Narrative as a Technology of Memory in

William Gass's The Tunnel

Jeffrey Pence

Journal of Narrative Theory, Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 2000, pp. 96-126
(Article)

Published by Eastern Michigan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2011.0001

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/375829/summary

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After Monumentality:
Narrative as a Technology of Memory
in William Gass's The Tunnel

Jeffrey Pence

Recent Memory: Narrative Against Technology

There is a strong sense in contemporary culture that previous models of
public history are no longer adequate. Grand public monuments and
sweeping textual narratives fail to account for the contradictory experi-
ences of participants in historical events, or the complex legacies inherited
by later generations. In particular, the epic national narrative which under-
wrote earlier representations of public history seems exhausted and unable
to convincingly integrate subjective and collective perspectives. Hence,
where the Great War could best be commemorated through the incorpora-
tive, even generic, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Vietnam War re-
quires a monument to individual experience, a Veterans Memorial, as each
KIA becomes a unique name. The first sort of memorial explains and jus-
tifies historical traumas in light of an overarching purpose for those in-
volved. The second monument eschews total, if not all, explanation alto-
gether in favor of forging new social bonds around individual
remembrance and public mourning. This transition from large-scale his-
torical explanation to intimate remembrance has three dimensions impor-
tant for the following essay.

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 30.1 (Winter 2000): 96-126. Copyright © 2000 by JNT:
Journal of Narrative Theory.
 After Monumentality 97

First, contemporary monuments forward one form of narrative experi-

ence over another. In place of the epic of the nation, they celebrate what
Lyotard describes as the paradigmatic form of postmodernism, the petit
récit, or small narrative. This self-legitimating form depends on the prag-
matics of story transmission whereby each member of a community can
stand in for the various roles of teller, tellee and told. Perhaps the best, be-
cause least imaginary, example of this new emphasis would be the AIDS
Quilt, an amalgamation of individual biographies which can be recom-
bined and experienced in limitless ways, largely by viewers who share a
sense of community with those whose lives are commemorated in the pan-
els. Immediacy and emotional identification place this sort of narrative
memory squarely in the present:

against all expectations, a collectivity that takes narrative

as its key form of competence has no need to remember its
past. . . . The narratives' reference may seem to belong to
the past, but in reality it is always contemporaneous with
the act of recitation. (Lyotard 22)

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

A view of recent history as marred by technological dysfunction is the

third shared feature of contemporary monuments. What Adorno says of art
after Auschwitz would seem doubly relevant to the subsequent fate of
public memorials and monuments. What grand story could public history
tell other than of the progress of mechanized slaughter, neo-colonialism or
biospheric degradation? Contemporary monuments implicitly and explic-
itly contrast their own organizing features with those of a technical ratio-
nality linked to myths of progress and nationalism. Comparatively, the in-
timate narratives of memory seem a more plausible and appealing basis
for addressing the personal and collective past. Yet in this alternative we
run the risk of becoming too comfortable with a past cut to fit contempo-
rary desires. Does something of the past's otherness, and the mediations of
our means of approaching it, get overshadowed in the construction of a
"usable" past? More to the point, does not this very fashioning of the past
in ameliorative ways axiomatically return us to the problems of technical
rationality and meta-narrative determination that were the initial problem?
In the novel that is the provocation for this essay, William Gass's The
Tunnel, we find an investigation of both history and memory which sug-
gests that narrative, large or small, cannot offer to consciousness any foun-
dational certainty for its products. Rather, narrative provides a means for
constructing history and memory out of symbols and texts—all of the past
that remains to us—by disciplining their possible significance in service to
some delimited set of goals. In this formalist sense, narrative cannot be
opposed to technology; in fact, narrative is a technology of consciousness,
useful for forming and influencing subjective and collective mentalities.
Gass challenges any complacency we might feel toward historicism
and the philosophical assumptions underlying its varieties by taking as his
topic and method the most controversial subject and technique possible.
The historical representation of National Socialism and the Holocaust has
been a locus of important debates over interpretation, revisionism and am-
nesia. At the same time, the discourse on trauma, memory and testimony
of survivors and witnesses has been at the center of cultural and scholarly
interest in memory. From one point of view, the historical and memorial
meaning of the Holocaust is indeterminate; this is not because of the in-
comprehensibility of its horror (although that is one dominant perspec-
tive), but because of the rhetorical and discursive gridlock that ensues
when an event of such significance is taken to mean and imply a number
 After Monumentality 99

of often contradictory things. Is the Shoah's meaning resident in its

uniqueness, or in its universal implications? If it is possible to understand
the event, does this amount to justification? If the event teaches lessons,
where are the limits of comparison to be drawn? For reasons that will be-
come clear in the remainder of the essay, Gass disables the conventional
and moralistic positions on the Holocaust and its representations by cen-
tering his novel on a character who has written a scandalous new account
of Guilt and Innocence in Hitler s Germany, all the while affiliating this
history with his own memories of slights, resentments, disappointments.
The scandalous reduction of the Nazi era to the basest instincts of an indi-
vidual has surprising results. The effect is not simply to produce height-
ened awareness of the interestedness of constructions of the past, but to
elaborate how and of what these constructions are made, in order to imag-
ine how they might otherwise be fashioned.
Judgments of this historical period have also been applied to the tradi-
tions of German thought, which, as a trained philosopher, Gass is very fa-
miliar with. To what extent is modern German philosophy responsible for
National Socialism, complicit with it, or separable from it? The represen-
tative case in these debates has centered on the work of Heidegger in rela-
tion to his association with the Nazi party during the 1930's, and his re-
fusal to distance himself from this sympathetic affiliation afterwards.
Heidegger's quest for an autochthonous revelation of Being which might
manifest itself in a redemption of a fallen modern world led him in the two
directions typical of German Kultur Kritik: towards antiquity, with its pu-
rity of language and meaning, and towards the nation, as a coherent spiri-
tual and material agency capable of unifying the people and offering them
a destiny. Hence, Heidegger's relationship with National Socialism was no
mere accident or flirtation. The paradox here is that Heidegger's own cri-
tique of unconstrained instrumental reason, in the figure of technology,
can provide the most cogent alternative to the irrational rationality the
Nazis unleashed. Gass's novel responds to this paradox by becoming Hei-
deggerean to its very core, searching for the foundation of Being while
continuously reminding us that modes of revealing and representing
Being—in particular history and narrative—are themselves affiliated with
the technologies they seek to circumvent. Gass works through German
thought in order to separate its possibilities from its degradations. The re-
sistance to this project, as in Farais' Heidegger and Nazism, is not only
100 JNT

anti-intellectual but reduplicates Heidegger's own totalizing error in con-

flating all of his thought and actions into one self-consistent, if chimerical,
entity called "Heidegger." Gass's work is in close sympathy with the atti-
tudes towards Heidegger evidenced by certain poststructuralists, often pe-
joratively known as "Heideggereans." Although Derrida, Lacoue-
LaBarthe, Levinas, Nancy and others formulate their positions in
important and distinctive ways, Lyotard's summation of the Heidegger
problem is of primary interest for me, because his deep debt to the earlier
philosopher, combined with a concern for the fate of narrative in post-
modernity, makes him a touchstone of this essay. According to Lyotard,

1. One must admit the importance and the greatness of

Heidegger's thought.
2. One must admit the seriousness of the compromise with
what Heidegger calls "the movement" (whose "internal
truth and greatness" he affirmed even in 1953), and one
must admit that his persistent silence on the genocide is
not the product of a lapsus or a minor failure of mem-
ory.
3. One must maintain both assertions—that of the great-
ness of the thought and that of the objectionable nature
of the "politics"—without concluding that if one is true
then the other is false . . .
4. Dealing with this double assertion must not mean just
noting the conflict, but finding its internal logic.
("Heidegger and 'the jews'" 138)

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.

Indecent Memory: Narrative as Technology

In defining technology as a mode of thinking, rather than a set of material
applications and capacities, I am following Heidegger, for whom "The
essence of technology is by no means anything technological"(4). Rather,
technology is derived from "techne ... the name not only for the activities
 After Monumentally 101

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":

It is from out of this destining that the essence of all history

is determined. History is neither simply the object of writ-
ten chronicle nor simply the fulfillment of human activity.
That activity first becomes history as something destined.
And it is only the destining into objectifying representation
that makes the historical accessible as an object for histori-
ography, i.e., for a science. . . . (24)

The attempt to come to terms with technology through modes of thinking

consonant with it—ordering, causality, instrumentality: the temporal fea-
tures not only of history writ large but of narrative writ small—axiomati-
cally fails. As Heidegger writes, "Everywhere we remain unfree and
chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we
are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as
something neutral"(4). The question is whether narrative is also techno-
logical in its construction of history and memory. A philosopher by train-
ing, and a metafictionist in practice, Gass shares Heidegger's suspicion of
instrumental paradigms of consciousness. As he writes of his own work,
"My stories are malevolently anti-narrative"("Finding a Form" 46). In-
stead, he focuses on the material of prose fiction proper, its appearance,
sounds, the sentence as thought, and book as consciousness. Indeed, one
recognizes a sentence from Gass by its dissimilarity to any other sentence;
102 JNT

he refuses to understand fictive language as strictly a means for conveying

information, and thus excises or reforms the familiar in each line. He is
consistently hostile to the notion of regulating fiction's processes and ma-
terials by means of a privileged notion of narrative, which evaluates liter-
ature on the basis of its relationship to a real, or ideal, social situation:

If words find comfort in the sentence's syntactical hand-

clasp, and sentences find their proper place like pieces of
furniture in the rhetorical space of the paragraph, what
shall control each scene as it develops, form die fiction fi-
nally as a whole? Well, the old answer was always: plot.
It's a terrible word in English, unless one is thinking of
some second-rate conspiracy, a meaning it serves very
well. Otherwise, it stands for an error for which there's no
longer an excuse. There's bird drop, horse plop, and novel
plot. Story is what can be taken out and made into a movie.
Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by
asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to
clean up life and make God into a good burgher who man-
ages the world like a business. History is often written as a
story so that it can seem to have a purpose . .. because sto-
ries deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled
middle . . . Stories are sneaky justifications. ("Finding a
Form" 45-46)

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

QnIy consistent feature of the work is Köhler and, as a writer, he is defined

by his manically flexible style. Both tunneling and writing represent a bur-
rowing toward foundations which lead not toward a literal basement but
basement as such, a squalid and disillusioned consideration of the worth of
human life and history and the traumatic failure of seeking to redeem ex-
istence through memory. Kohler's introduction collapses, and Guilt and
Innocence becomes groundless. Or so it seems, to Köhler.
His unbridled skepticism makes inarguable sense in its own terms.
However, if this were all there is in his mind then he could never have the
energy to tunnel so deeply under the house or into the language which
makes up his world. Rather, like his imaginary collective of resentful and
vengeful bigots, the PdP, he would freeze in apathy: "unity, enthusiasm,
and dedication ... are nowhere in the nature of a dP"(300). Disappoint-
ment's role in his work is more ambiguous:

Sure—sure it's too simple to say that in our hearts only

Evil is real, but, in fact, the Good—well—there is no big g,
there are just dinky ones, and even they are fragile, inter-
mittent, short-lived little pleasures, pulling-on-your-prick
things, ambiguous, often costly in the long run, sometimes
painful, embarrassing even, while wickedness prospers
with a weed's ease . . . (154-55)

These sentences typify Gass's heteroglossic mixture of registers of diction

and dialect and his mutation of familiar phrases. They also indicate the
counter-force to Kohler's compulsive iconoclasm. The act of writing or,
more properly, building a book out of typeface, graphics, language, pagi-
nation, textures, reveals a potential for perceiving which is not wholly
subsumed by the narcissistic therapy of narrative, the masochistic indul-
gence of cynicism, or the instrumentality of techne. Here, Gass's project
gains a closer affinity to Heidegger.
Heidegger acknowledges that everywhere technology seems tri-
umphant, as it threatens to "drive [ ] out every other possibility for reveal-
ing"(27). However, he also believes, or at least prophetically insists, that
techne is a tertiary mode of consciousness: "the challenging Enframing
not only conceals a former way of revealing . . . but it conceals revealing
itself and with it . . . truth"(27). This more fundamental and truthful, i.e.
 After Monumentality 105
non-coercive and non-reductive, mode of revealing Heidegger names poe-
sis, which he affiliates with granting, rather than ordering, and the persis-
tence or survival of the essence of the revealed, rather than its incorpora-
tion into an artificial logic of use. We can understand poesis in light of
Heidegger's own method; whereas language in general is under the sway
of instrumentalism, his probing backward toward etymological origins is
premised on the notion that words resist complete subordination to the
logic οι techne, and bear with them something of their originary meaning.
That this sort of philological excavation is as much invention as discovery
is not a problem, but an attraction of Heidegger's method. Especially so,
given Gass's use of language as an inventive form.
Gass's poesis acknowledges both the dangerous power and irreducibil-
ity of language. Importantly, for Heidegger one can only gain access to, or
reveal, the enduring poetic essence by, first, "holding always before our
eyes the extreme danger" of unbridled technological thinking (33). This
posture precisely describes Kohler's fixation on the horrors of history and
memory. Secondly, one needs to develop a stoical stance, an openness of
mind which recalls the strategy of "acsesis" which Lyotard describes in
Peregrinations (18). This is a disposition of perceptivity that resists prede-
termined modes of thought, and thus permits a receptivity detached from
the seductions of concepts, traditions and memory. In such a state, Hei-
degger imagines a vision—transitory, unspeakably distant yet fundamen-
tally interior—of the holy through the horrible:
The irresistibility of ordering [techne] and the restraint of
the saving power ¡poesis] draw past each other like the
paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But pre-
cisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their near-
ness.

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:

poetry was the inside of history, was the interior of

the text, was the present alive in what had passed, was
what sustained itself through every change of tense.
(642)

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:

I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given

me a pure gratification, while the reading of the best
discourse . . . has always been mingled with an un-
pleasant feeling of disapprobation of a treacherous art
which means to move men in important matters like
machines to a judgment that must lose all weight for
them on quiet reflection. (393, note 16)

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

From a Temple of Memory to a (W)hole of Words

Gass has recently noted his suspicion that "form may ultimately only be
comprehensible visually"(in Saltzman 19). In this sense we can appreciate
Kohler's claim that "Three spaces matter in my life; they are my trinity;
the pane of the window, the white of the page, and the black of the
board"(311). All three frames are spaces of representation, organization,
and erasure, what Köhler describes as "the theater of consciousness"(312).
They are linked, furthermore, to a variety of other frames and spaces
which obsess Köhler; spaces that he is at pains to empty as soon as they
are conceived of as occupied by a determinative and purposeful content.
Windows, especially, offer a chance to elaborate this open-ended form of
perceptivity. In the section "Why Windows are Important to Me," he re-
calls for us the unnamed narrator of Gass's early story, "In the Heart of the
Heart of the Country" (1968), not so much surveying the Midwestern
landscape as allowing it, through the aperture of the windows, to survey
his own apprehensive condition. In addition to the many glimpses out the
window from the chairs in which Köhler passes his life, the text has other
rich passages of observation and description ("The Sunday Drive," the
memories of his brief summer of happiness with Lou, the refiguring of
sexuality as landscape in "Do Rivers") which compete with the compul-
sive rage and bitter word-play of much of the rest of the text. In their de-
liberate reconstruction of the conscious state of careful apprehension, even
acsesis or apatheia in the Stoic sense, such passages represent an ideal re-
ceptivity not unlike the perceptive disposition which Heidegger forwards
as essential for discerning being in a technological age. Or, as Köhler
writes, in the midst of narrating every physical detail of perception and ac-
tion during his morning ablutions, "The secret of life is paying absolute at-
tention to what is going on. The enemy of life is distraction. If you are not
present in the present, where the hell are you?"(448).
The implied answer, of course, would be in a plot, the alternative
framework provided by the structure of history. The driving tension in
Kohler's relationship to frames emerges in their tendency to reveal either
coercively or uncoercively, or, in Heidegger's terms, as techne ox poesis.
As apertures of poesis, "These windows are porches of appearance.
Through them move the only uncoded messages which I receive"(283).
Here, uncoded stands for perception not yet marshaled into purpose,
108 JNT

meaning, or causal relations. The frame of historical narrative, on the

other hand, immediately enacts the power of techne, the disciplining of
perception into facts and facts into tendentious argument to prop up the
vanity of the system and systemizer.
Köhler the meta-historian thus breaks his own frame, revealing its fic-
tiveness:

[0]ur accounts: when they are not absurd fancies or

outright lies or mad misconceptions or manipulative
tricks . . . they are invariably prejudiced, partial, in-
complete, confused, unbalanced, injudicious, lacking
the necessary objectivity, the necessary tender regard,
the requisite mix, the awed appreciation of complex-
ity, its supple shadings, its fine proportions, almost
unheard harmonies, its inconsistencies, mélangeries,
the endless intermingling of contraries which com-
prise it, the extenuations of which it is made like the
mud which makes bricks, yet its straightforward sim-
plicities, its dashed-off lines, or, again, its unaccount-
ably sudden eruptions, the kinds of chaos which cre-
ate its causes and their orderly operations. . . .
(422-23)

In contrast to the propulsive logic of historical accounts, the open or poetic

frame permits only fleeting glimpses of another order of being. Unsystem-
atized cognition seems the weaker in competition with consciousness'
drive to impose continuity and stability on perception across time. It is as
if memory itself, consciousness' claim to stabilize the "I" along the dura-
tion of experience and sensation, invites the disciplining of "whatever
chooses" the window or "this half-closed eye"(283). The alternative is
minimal and momentary, a death-like solitude and emptiness, as when
Köhler briefly abstracts himself from his recollection of his Uncle Bait: "I
am more than distant from those days. I am distance itself. ... I stand
alone on an empty page like a period put down in a snowfall"(125). This
diffusion of perspective and erasure of order—one dot in a blizzard—is
the extreme corrective to the capacity of frames to impose order, to code
perception as message: "For picture after picture they provide the frame,
proscenium to stage, and everything is altered in them"(283).
 After Monumentally 109
At the polar opposite to Kohler's occasional achievement of a state of
almost tranquil acsesis lies his reverie, inspired by his Nietzschean mentor
Magus "Mad Meg" Tabor, on how the Holocaust itself can be thought
through in a way which flatters and affirms rationality in the manner of
Kant's mathematical sublime:

One Jew destroyed, then, two, a dozen, thirty-five,

and it is normal, ordinary, everyday—it's simply
war—highways kill more on Labor Day—but murder
hundreds, cinder thousands, and these longer, there-
fore grander, numbers weigh upon us . . . and they in-
vite terror into our imaginations: this is human, we
wonder; this is German? while by simple repetition,
by passing mechanically beyond the thousands and
numbering their deaths like stars, the very multitude
of the corpses makes the murders magical, fabulous—
heaven help us, heroic even . . . and their acts partake
of the terrible, the awesome Sublime, like storms at
sea or an avalanche in the Alps, thundering relent-
lessly across some movie's patient screen. . . .
(246-47)

But as Heidegger finds poesis emerging as more originary in the blaze of

techne's triumph, Kohler's poetic observations and linguistic energy enact
a dialectical relationship with the power and horror of the contents of this
history and his memory. These contents are rendered—as soap from
human fat, he'd say—in such a way that the medium of thought is re-
vealed to have a capacity for perception and form capable of outstripping
that which it is compelled to represent. This passage, and the novel, is thus
sublime, but not because of the cynical mathematics of Holocaust revi-
sionism.
For Lyotard, the sublime results from an experience in which "there is
a failure in the synthesizing function of either the imagination or the
will"(Peregrinations 40). Confronted with an object whose magnitude or
force exceeds the mind's ability to organize percepts into form, a mixture
of pain and pleasure results. Pain arises as "the mind experiences its own
limitations"(40). Pleasure results from the necessary mediation of an Idea
of reason at the moment of imaginative or comprehensive failure, at which
110 JNT

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

a kind of progress in human history is possible which

would not be only the progress of technology . . . not
a progress of the beautiful... but of the responsibility
to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively "pre-
sented" in the formlessness of such and such a situa-
tion which could occur. (41)

Against the grain of Kohler's self-conception, we can read his text as

marking the shape of such a progress in his encounters with the unrepre-
sentability of history. Moreover, the hint of the ethical in the sublime be-
gins to make clear that, paradoxically, The Tunnel is a "good book" in all
senses. This pointless fashioning of dizzying argument and linguistic in-
vention does two things. First, it prevents his horrid history from being
published, as it is literally and metaphorically buried under the dirt he
digs. Secondly, it speaks to a capacity of human thought which is not sus-
ceptible to the Enframing of techne even as, on its very surface, it seems to
glide in precisely that direction.
Like the tunnel of the title, an as yet purposeless opening, Kohler's text
is structured by the pursuit for the as yet unstructured. Despite the autobi-
ographical surface of his writing, the deeper goal of the text is not the
reclamation of originary experiences but rather liberation from the modes
of thinking generated by these experiences and compelling his return to
them. Throughout the novel, we are tempted to interpret Kohler's patholo-
gies as the result of his traumatic childhood, trapped between an explosive
bigot of a father and an implosive dipsomaniac of a mother. Also in the
home is an Aunt whom we might read as an allegorical figure for
Mnemosyne, and thus Kohler's own muse, as she feeds off the lives of
others and obsessively collects the detritus and empty of boxes of domes-
tic life. However, two counter-trends work to thoroughly ironize any at-
tempt to reframe Kohler in a familiar Oedipal narrative: first, his vitupera-
tive shredding of any functional concepts of sincerity and honesty; second,
 After Monumentally 111

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:

Well, my language gives the game away. Orgasms

pass more quickly than most pleasures. Last less than
a length of licorice. Only illusions remain. The great
moment is but a string of grunts. Piggly is wiggly for
a while before the porker comes a cropper. Perhaps
that is the sadness which overcomes fornicators when
they separate: the significance of the gaze, the kiss,
the caress, the groan, the thrust, the writhe with which
lovers are—we say—sublimely occupied, is recog-
nized, revealed, and described in a phrase like "cheap
peak," "sneaky feel," "wet smooch," "last gasp"; by
describing it as bumpybump and gicky, by calling it a
fricatrix fiesta, a penis party, bum bash, gash gobble,
tongue tie, frig fry, oil change, sperm spill, spit trade,
clit lick, tit suck, cock crow, big blow; to be rancho
randy and ready to rub-a-dub-dub; and looking for a
ball bang, dong dance, ass blast, an excuse to get your
rocks off, your clock cleaned, a chance to tear off a
hunk and claim your piece of tail, to be laid to rest in
pussy paradise. Language is always honest. Language
112 JNT

does not lie, only its users. I think barrel suckers say
that about guns. (560)

If language is honest, then here it gives his deflationary game away. On

one level, sexuality is deromanticized in this low comedy of euphemism,
slang, and neologism. On another level, the potential for language to ex-
ceed the imposition of meaning—either of the idealist or cynical sort—be-
comes apparent. The play of assonance and alliteration ("Last less than a
length of licorice"), the pursuit of agrarian association ("the porker comes
a cropper"), the mixture of registers of discourse ("The great moment is
but a string of grunts"), and metaphorical comparisons (here, to the au-
thoritative logic of suicides) produces an affective response in the reader
quite at odds with their putative content. This agon of content and style
drives the text forward and provides the crucial aesthetic experience over-
all.
Köhler further undermines the personal past as the hermeneutic key to
the novel. In the most general sense, Kohler ironizes the notion of memory
itself, indicating how instrumentality guides its expressions. Whether one
remembers to coordinate present images with past ones, "to make tolera-
ble a painful present with some pleasant recollections"; to transform even
the worst experiences into entertainment; to "compile and order griev-
ances"; to impose order onto the world, to maintain a constructed but "de-
sired identity"; or,

to share and compound a self, so that the isolation of

the ego can be disguised as a joint venture, the way
married people imagine they remember a common
past... or Germans believe they share the same Fred-
erick . . . (55)

the most important guiding principle of memory is that it "must be trained

not to fetch up a disabling image, but must be lapdogged, and [this is] why
history is so important for the vanity of nations"(55-56). This radical
skepticism toward even the most quotidian or confessional-seeming remi-
niscence applies to all of Kohler's archive. For instance, the powerfully re-
alistic portrayal of his bachelor Uncle Bait—ontologically realistic, seeing
as Bait is "a metaphor for Being"(121)—is destabilized quite beyond the
 After Monumentality 113
careful emptying of him as signifier. Where, earlier, Bait was described as
"a deep hole of a man," "Dasein's quiet cancellation"(116), later Köhler
suggests that Bait may be emptier still, a projected fiction of Kohler's own
mind in response to the frames of a family album produced in Martha's
genealogical obsession: "I might as well have an Uncle Bait. His invention
affects me more in this moment than he would if he'd ever lived"(301).
The referent is less important here than the mode of reference production.
The extension of this formalist dictum is not that content as such is ab-
solutely relative, but that we cannot approach the referent—the personal
past, history, perception itself—without an awareness that our modes of
cognition themselves are variable. As Gass writes,

[W]hen a character of mine looks out through a win-

dow, or . . . peeks in through one, it is the word "win-
dow" he is really looking through; it's the word
"pane" that preoccupies; it's the idea of "glass," of
separated seeing, of the distortions of the medium, its
breakage, its discoloration, its framing, that domi-
nates and determines the eye; it is, therefore, the
fragility of knowledge that gets stressed, the impor-
tance and limitation of point of view, the ambiguity of
"in" and "out" that it provides, the range of its exam-
ples. . . . ("Finding a Form" 33)

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,

A book ... is like a deck of windows; each page per-

ceives a world and tells a fortune; each page at least
faintly reflects the face of its reader, and hands down
a judgment; each page is made of mind, and it is that
same mind that perceives the world outside, and it is
that same mind that reflects a world within, and it is
that same mind that stands translucently between per-
114 JNT

ception and reflection, uniting and dividing and dou-

ble dealing. (302)

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:

Causes collect like waste in the bowels of history.

History, in fact, is horse-drop, cow plop, nose snot,
flesh rot, ink blot, blood clot, street shout. . . And
every event, then, is somebody's—something's—
stool. History has an asshole. . . and the present is its
most immediate relief.... So the future is a fart then,
 After Monumentality 115

which heralds every bowel's movement, every new

break of day. (175)

There is no available mainframe—or frame of frames—to adequately con-

tain and explain the gun shots, dropping anvils and seeping blood of his-
tory. The hollowed out destructive opening of a tornado is the atmospheric
parallel to Kohler's cistern, a degraded version of "Trajan's Column . . .
made of air"(154), and a trope for his mother's self-destruction figured by
the twister which shattered a window behind her and filled her hair with
flakes of glass. The tornado makes the indifferent plague of history and
memory manifest, as in this hieroglyph of sound and image:

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:

If time were a well-mowed field where events were

buried . . . then, at this place in it, we should erect a
memorial column and gothically inscribe it thus: On
this Date the Department of History Died, Done In by
the Display of its Dirty Linen. (434, emphasis origi-
nally in Gothic script)

Or we get the tombstone of his son, whose Martha-given name he will

never pronounce as it begins with a suspicious "A," receiving a memorial
to his own anonymity: the child, the stone attests, dies "from a prolonged
lack of reference"(371). While Kohler's text is perhaps best understood as
 After Monumentality 117
an anti-monument, it is nonetheless a spatialized one, a form at war with
its contents. It has an arch, although by no means a triumphal one:

My big book, like this big house, hangs over me as

though it were the limits of the universe—the Π—a
world of guilt and Germans, innocence and Jews ....
This house must have a cellar, wrathkeller. . . . (153)

From arch to basement, Kohler is fully aware of the inverse monumental-

ity of his work: "I wished to raise my book above me like an arch, but
what's triumphal in a cock-a-hoop? The curve will creep beneath me,
never soar above me"(218). A triumphal arch, of course, demands to be
passed under and through, a temporal movement which literalizes the
chronological progression of both narrative history and the idealization of
the future. It is precisely the inadequacy of this temporal movement, this
arc of narrative, that subverts Kohler's intended construction of a monu-
ment, and that undermines his massive Guilt and Innocence with The Tun-
nel.
At one remarkable moment, Köhler meditates on the inadequacy of
history:

When I write about the Third Reich, or now, when I

write about myself, is it truly the truth I want? What
do I want? To find out who I am? What is the good of
that? I want to feel a little less uneasy ... I realize
(I've come to it as I write) that my subject's far too
serious for scholarship, for history, and I must find
another form before I let what's captive in me out.
Imagine: history not serious enough, causality too
comical, chronology insufficiently precise. (106-7)

The search for a form sufficient to ameliorate Kohler's self-awareness can

help us understand the crucially important formal and material features of
the text—its sheer bulk, typographic experimentalism, inclusion of con-
crete poems, obscene limericks, cabaret songs, bureaucratic records, carte
de visite, crossword puzzles, window-framed page number and concentra-
tion camp tattoo page numbers, comic strip hieroglyphics, and all the re-
galia of the PdP: belt buckles, the gaseous blob of history, and the "Pen-
118 JNT

nants of Passive Attitudes and Emotions." The text works continually to

build meditative spaces, carved out of assonance, alliteration, and deadly
word-play, without allowing them to reorganize into a deceptively hierar-
chized structure. The most important Kristallnacht in the text is not the lit-
eral one Köhler misremembers—did he watch or act? throw one stone or
two?—but the figurative smashing of his own apertures of understanding,
the historian's self-deconstruction.
In Tabor's lecture hall, we see the idealist history which seduced
Köhler. Around the room, "The heads of the great grew like blossoms
from the pillars lining the walls . . . Lessing, Herder, Hegel, Fichte,
Schelling . . . Moser, Dilthey, Ranke, Troeltsch, Treitscke"; under the bust
of the last, the anti-Semitic Prussian historian, Köhler reports reading a
version of Hegel's desire that history and individual consciousness could
converge in the nation:

ONLY A STOUT HEART WHICH FEELS THE JOYS AND

SORROWS OF THE FATHERLAND AS ITS OWN CAN
GIVE VERACITY TO AN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE.
(6)

Despite Kohler's insistent Germanicism, it is precisely the lack of continu-

ity, the frustration of his desire to locate his consciousness in a stable rela-
tionship with a national history that we notice here. Köhler does project an
identity between personal memory and history, but his heart is not stout,
there are more sorrows than joys, and veracity—in his continued derision
of sincerity—is less the source of narrative energy than the sick joke that
dissipates narrative into unrecuperable objects and produces the resent-
ments of the PdP.
Kohler's influences as a historian are contradictory. On the one hand,
Köhler is a disciple of Tabor—standing here for a Heidegger familiar to
readers of Farais—for whom will and nation provide the only meaningful
register for comprehending history. For Tabor, and National Socialism,
history is something to be made for the sake of the making, to construct a
theatricalized image of the subject and the collective in romantic struggle.
Tabor becomes enfeebled in Kohler's account, a sort of hollowing out of
the center of gesture and discourse which stands for the debasement of the
Hegelian ideal. If Hegel's historical narrative elaborates the process by
 After Monumentality 119

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

tough first terms"(421). In a symmetrical collapse, Köhler witnesses the

physical degradation of both Tabor and Herschel, the cynical Nazi and the
humanizing Jew. Without the convenience of an absolute or a faith in con-
sciousness as a player in history (his quibble with Herschel), Köhler is left
to fashion a negotiation with the past that partakes of the grand view of the
former and the localism of the latter.
Köhler disengages history from instrumentality by concentrating on its
materials. History's true object of study is not the event or the actor of the
past; rather, it is:
the study of symbols and markers, of verbal re-
mains—symbol middens . . . and tombs. ... the study
of history, is really a study of language. Only words
speak past the present, only words have any kind of
honest constant visual life. These voices shine their
distance like the constellations. (263; emphasis origi-
nal)

Kohler's desire is explicitly spatial and "visual," to construct a space

where an active engagement with language itself can permit us to linger
before an image of the past, of memory, that offers the possibility of hope.
His language echoes Heidegger's own, with the metaphor of stellar obser-
vation suggesting an actual spatialization of temporality: "When we look
into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the
stellar course of the mystery" (Heidegger 33). Köhler conceives of the
legacy poetry permits as the articulation of a space, not a temporal organi-
zation but a refraining of temporality as such:

[Pjoetry created a permanent and universal present

like a frieze of stone, and was therefore what any one
of us might see and feel who followed its lines and
felt is forms .... Poetry was not merely what stood in
front of your eye like a palace guard (for poetry be-
lieves in nothing but the reenactment of its rituals), it
was those eyes, their pupil'd core, the scene itself.
True poems constitute Kingdoms, Kingdoms of Last,
Lost, and Little Things. The true poem is a commu-
nity of words formed from the clutter of life.... (642)
 After Monumentality 121

This focus on language recalls Heidegger's turn to poesis as a more fun-

damental revelation of being. Crucially, it also brings us to Hegel, just as
Herschel felt he perceived a "Hegelian whole" in Kohler's conception of
reality as "a work of art . . . which cannot be but partially grasped"(424).
In his superb essay, "Building the Temple of Memory: Hegel's Aes-
thetic Narrative of History," Joshua Foa Dienstag argues that understand-
ing Hegel's historicism requires reading the Philosophy of History in
terms of the categories later developed in the Aesthetics. From this per-
spective, Hegel's historicism becomes less obviously a rational narrative
of progress, leading toward an end of history, but a self-conscious "at-
tempt ... to seduce us to life" (Dienstag 700). Given that history in gen-
eral (and personal history, for Gass's Köhler), appears "disordered and re-
pulsive" (700), Dienstag argues that Hegel felt it imperative to conceive of
a means by which individuals could "give meaning to the world and thus
to block an interpretation of life that is world denying" (700). This process
has two crucial steps. First, to conceive of history as having forms that we
might apprehend as beautiful. It is in the service of this goal that Hegel
rewrites the history of the world in terms of aesthetic form, progressing
from the symbolic form of the Egyptian Sphinx, to the classical humanism
of Greek sculpture, to the aesthetically self-conscious community of Ger-
man Romanticism (717-23). Dienstag notes further how, in the Phenome-
nology of Spirit, Hegel's "collection of shapes" begins to take on a purpo-
sive, architectural form, such that "history comes to resemble a museum
of enormous proportions, a 'gallerie of images'... or, as we shall later call
it, a Temple of Memory" (702-3). The forms of historical epochs, in turn,
Hegel repositions in such a manner that we relate to them not as History
alone or the evolution of the nation. Rather, we must identify with them
personally. As Dienstag writes:

At the higher level of history itself. . . Hegel does not

rely on preexisting shapes but constructs his own: the
Temple of Mnemosyne. ... He uses Mnemosyne (as
opposed to her daughter Clio, the muse of History) to
emphasize the way in which we possess the past, as
the product of Spirit's labor. Memories (as opposed to
"the past") must always be someone's memories, re-
122 JNT

siding in a particular mind, contributing to a personal-

ity. (711 ; emphasis original)

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:

[W]ith Mnemosyne we are always reminded that in

her temple we explore nothing so much as our own
past and what we find there is nothing but ourselves.
This recognition is vital if the beauty ofthat temple is
to seduce us to dwell within it. For Hegel,
Mnemosyne is not just a Muse, but also a Siren. (712)
 After Monumentality 123

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,

that any movement through the gallery of images is

something of our own making and not driven by the
images themselves. The seamless dialectical progres-
sion of the Phenomenology has been replaced by a pa-
rade of sphinxes and statuary where each image does
not seem to touch any other of its own accord. It is the
historian's hand which sets them in motion. (717)

Here, I think, Kohler's own spatialized text can be seen to work as a

sort of counter-monumental memory without the dangers implicit in
Hegel. The act of writing through his sentiments and experiences, or more
properly, over them, in an obsessive palimpsest, the three-dimensional
blackboard of his interior monologue, enables him to experience some-
thing of the amelioration, the seduction to life, which Hegel's Temple of
Memory was intended to offer. While the sheer capacity to do so may
bring Köhler, and the reader, into the affective state of the memorist—
owning history as if it were one's own—the caustic contents of this Mem-
ory Palace carry none of the risk of narcissistic self-satisfaction that Dien-
stag finds in Hegel. This is a past we are compelled to own, to own up to,
but it is not one that we can love uncritically or in a fashion which flatters
our own sensibilities and capacities.
Yet there is something redemptive about the effort. Martha eventually
discovers the soil Köhler has stored in her massive Victorian chests (al-
though not yet the strangled cat) and dumps the contents of one onto his
manuscript, the history wedded page by page to the deconstructive frag-
ments of his non-introduction. He imagines explaining himself to her, in a
tone of melancholy and formal self-awareness:

I made—Marty—I made a try. I abandoned Poetry for

History in my Youth.
124 JNT

What a journey, though, to crawl in earth first,

then in filth swim; to pass through your own plumb-
ing, meet the worms within. And realize it. That you
were. Under all the world. When I was a kid I lied
like a sewer system. I told my sometime chums I went
there. To the realm of shades. And said I saw vast
halls, the many chambers of endless caves, magic
pools guarded by Merlins dressed in mole fur and
cobweb, chest overflowing with doubtless dime-store
jewelry, rooms of doubloons, and, suddenly, through
an opening jagged as a rip in rotten cloth, a new sun
shining, meadows filled with healthy flowers, crayon-
colored streams, oh, the acres of Edens inside our-
selves, I said I saw, as if I hoped for it, wanted to be-
lieve. Am I not at least that far redeemed? to have
caught up to the first half-truth in my fantasy eventu-
ally? Come back from the below ground, if not from
the underworld, to say . . .
Argh. Nothing much. It is another day. (651)

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
Alter, Robert. "The Levelling Wind." The New Republic 27 March 1995: 29-32.

Birkerts, Sven. "One for the Angry White Male." The Atlantic Monthly June 1995:
112-120.

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

Farais, Victor. Heidegger and Nazism. Ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore. Trans.
Paul Burrel with Dominic Di Bernardi. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.

Gass, William. Finding a Form. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Gass, William. Habitations of the Word. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Gass, William. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

Gass, William. The Tunnel. New York: Harper Perrenial, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans.
William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Kant, Immanuel. "Critique of Judgment." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams.
Trans. J.H. Bernard. Revised ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992 (1790).
375-393.

Leonard, John. "Splendor in the Gass." The Nation 20 March 1995: 388-390.

Lyotard, Jean-François. "Heidegger and 'the jews.'" Political Writings. Trans. Bill Read-
ings and Kevin Paul. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 (1989).
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Lyotard, Jean-François. Peregrinations. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 7"Ae Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1979.

Salzman, Arthur M. "Language and Conscience: An Interview with William Gass." The
Review of Contemporary Fiction 11.3 (Fall 1991): 15-28.

Wolcott, James. "Gass Attack." 7"Ae New Criterion February 1995: 63-67.