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William Gass’s Brilliant and Maddening Magnum Opus

Long out of print, The Tunnel returns with a timely exploration of the fascism of the heart.

Having required decades to write and rewrite, William Gass’s The Tunnel has always been a difficult novel to read. An enormously long, often gratingly obnoxious and violent book rendered in overblown prose, it is also shot through with squiggly doodles and diagrams and bawdy limericks and all kinds of lexicographical shenanigans. But that’s only part of what makes it difficult to read. Exasperatingly demanding, defiantly highfalutin, and richly rewarding, The Tunnel is also just hard to find: It was long out of print, and old copies regularly fetch hundreds of dollars in used-book marketplaces.

For this reason, Dalkey Archive has taken on the task of reprinting the book yet again. This time it has done so in full color, as the author intended, and with a companion volume called The Tunnel Reader, a special issue of the now-defunct Review of Contemporary Fiction that contains a complete publication history, critical commentary, correspondence, and the author’s own handy guide, “How to Read The Tunnel,” which helps to contextualize (and soften the blow) of Gass’s heavy masterpiece. The timing is auspicious, for not only is Gass’s book intimidating and frustrating and brilliant, but it is also a study of the ugly, often inchoate nature of the American authoritarian character, and how a crude politics of exclusion and resentment rises from the bile of a more basic resentment—what Gass terms “the fascism of the heart.”

The Tunnel has not one author but two. There’s the book’s literal author, the novelist and essayist William H. Gass, who died in 2017. And then there’s its fictional author, The Tunnel’s protagonist, narrator, villain, and governing consciousness, a bitter, bloated creep named William F. Kohler. A professor of German history at an unnamed college in Indiana, Kohler is a product of two ostensibly distinct milieus. The first is the uninspiring flatlands of the American Midwest, where he was reared and now resides; the second is the political and emotional hothouse of Nazi Germany, where he studied history and found himself “caught up in the partisan frenzy of those stirred and stirring times.”

At the book’s beginning, we are introduced to Kohler just as he is completing his work on a massive historical tome titled Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Its thesis is provocative: Rather than invoking the more standard explanations of culpability regarding the horrors of the Holocaust, Kohler blames not only every German but, in fact, all of humanity for what happened in World War II. He does so because he believes that all human beings harbor nasty, fascist, essentially Nazi-like instincts toward violence and the exaltation of one group at the expense of another. The Nazi Party, he argues, should not bear the stain of guilt alone, since Hitler was little more than “a wimp in wolf’s clothing” and “probably history’s most sincere man.” Indeed, the Nazis, Kohler insists, should be commended for embracing the violence that lurks inside us all: “Suppose but a whisper of our wishes leaked out and half a continent was ready to rise and do your bidding? Orders are easy. Liquidate the trailer parks. Murder motorbikers. Silence the soaps. Clean up the town. Bust up the trusts. It is the killing—hands-on and nearby—that takes fortitude and commitment.” Yet despite his own fortitude and commitment in making this argument, Kohler finds himself distracted as he attempts to pen the book’s introduction. Instead, he starts composing a bittersweet memoir of his childhood, jeremiads against his mediocre colleagues and portly wife, horn-dog reveries about his flagrant affairs, and extended exegeses on the deep, envenoming rancor that poisons the hearts of men. His burrowing deep into his own internal (and infernal) world finds its metaphorical expression in the titular tunnel, which is also not a metaphor: In the midst of all this psychic digging, Kohler begins to excavate a tunnel in the floor of his basement office, hiding the mud and dirt in his wife’s antique wardrobes. It’s not exactly clear what this tunnel business amounts to: an attempt to break loose from his stifling, sexless home life? An effort to escape himself, or to dig his own shallow, silty grave? Or merely “a gesture which will symbolize my desperation”?

Whatever........

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