Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  The most important events are these: after God created the heavens and the earth (the latter a desert from whose depths water occasionally rose like a flooding Nile to moisten and soften its surface), he made man from the sand and the dust which was everywhere, and blew into him a little left-over yet divine breath as though he were a lung, so that man began to stir himself and endeavor to live. Then God designed the aforementioned garden and sequestered man inside it, denying him only the fruit of the tree which bore knowledge of good and evil, and warning him that the fruit was deadly, either because some part of it—skin, pulp, juice, seed—was poisonous, or because an awareness of sin would do Adam in.

  God fashioned birds and beasts next, rather incompetently, though they were formed from the same dust, because he wanted them to resemble man as man did his creator; yet, although they were alive like man, and ate and slept like man, they were otherwise far from family; so finally, with man etherized like a patient on a table, God cut one rib from Adam’s side, and replicated it, and ran the replications through as many variations as a theme until he heard a full tune and had a title: she, Eve.

  Eve does not become the mother of us until later, when, after listening to the serpent and having her pride piqued, she eats of the forbidden tree so as to become like one of the gods, and offers the fruit to Adam as well, which he devours, as docile as a dog. Neither dies on the spot or even falls ill.

  The serpent was right about this. Rather, the fatal blow comes from God, who, in his anger at being disobeyed, promises to return them, after a painful passage through life, to the dust they came from, although Eve ought properly to fold up like a pocketknife into a rib again and disappear into the body of her spouse, though he be a corpse coming apart in the earth then like a dry biscuit. Lest either eat of the tree of life and live forever, Adam and Eve are forced out of paradise, its precincts closed, and I suppose, left in a state of permanent neglect, with neither he, Adam, nor she, Eve, nor it, Eden, in harmony or in happiness.

  Our initial myth, that of a bubble-blown universe, was designed to exhibit the form which creation took, once it had begun and continues to occur. Its single-minded concentration upon structure leads us to call it “scientific.” The stress, in the Greek story, is rather upon “what.” It is vague about the mechanics and, of course, feels no need to rationalize. From time to time, Zeus simply calls for a new deal. However, the Hebrew tale does not simply describe the sorry state of human affairs; it seeks to justify that sorrow, so that our satisfaction with the story will be complete, since we shall now know not only how the world was formed and man was made (the way a potter makes a vessel out of clay), or what kind of paradise he was placed in, but why we must maintain our life by the sweat of our bodies, why women owe fealty to their men, why there is guilt and shame concerning many of our most powerful urges, why we reproduce in pain and with groaning when mother lions drop their cubs like overlooked gloves and fruit seems the easy outcome of every flower.

  Narratives not only explain the events they describe; they anoint the explanation—they justify. In Plato’s Symposium, when Aristophanes overcomes his hiccups sufficiently to make his speech, he does something none of the others, in their praise of the god of love, have done: he tells a story. This story not only speaks of us as once round, but suggests that we thought we were accordingly perfect, equal to the best, and describes how we wheeled ourselves up the slopes of Mount Olympus with the intention of displacing the gods. It is for this presumption (improper pride was Eve’s error also) that we were sliced in two like a breakfast bun and left to hop about looking for our better half, bereft of our accustomed capacities like a clap which has been accorded but one hand for its accomplishment. So was the serpent doomed to slither along the ground, stinging human heels, suffering his skull to be crushed in retaliation; since all it has become, as a consequence of its sly advice, is a fatal fang, hidden in its head like a thorn in a bush.

  Alleging that this original round race possessed three genders—symmetrically male, symmetrically female, and asymmetrically hermaphrodite—makes our search for the half we once had seem both right and reasonable, since most sexual preferences, on this view, are equally legitimate; although Aristophanes cleverly makes it difficult to see how the restored whole which heterosexuals pursue is something better than the sideshow endowment of a freak.

  Stories of our innocent origins are not innocent. Genesis stamps its okay on the subservient state of women; victims of natural disasters like floods and volcanic eruptions seem to deserve their fate; and the so-called curse of Canaan, recounted in the same book, can be read as supporting slavery. The normal shape of a narrative (like an hourglass, it is so corseted by Time) and its customary content (its agents, actions, and their accomplishments) are both designed to disclose a comforting pattern in events, discover a true direction to existence, and give an honest meaning to life. It is essential that each pattern, purpose, and significance be inherent in the natural course of things, and not simply be the functional properties of some descriptive history like the concealed seams of a glitzy dress.

  4. NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON’T

  Shepherds work alone on lonely slopes, and if they tell a fanciful tale, their sheep won’t correct them. Gyges was such a shepherd, but it is Plato who offers us his history. Philosophers, as we know, work in even remoter regions with nothing but their own rectitude to rein them in. It seems there was a storm of such violence it opened the earth where the sheep of Gyges were grazing. Curiosity drew him into the gorge. Descending, he saw many strange things indeed, most particularly a bronze horse with doors in its side. As innocent as Alice, he opened one to find the corpse of a very large man wearing nothing but a gold ring on one of his fingers. Gyges removed the ring and returned to his sheep.

  Some unspecified time later, at a meeting with other shepherds who were preparing their usual monthly report to the king on the condition of his flocks, Gyges discovered that by positioning the bezel of his stolen ring a certain way while he was wearing it, he became invisible. A simple turn restored him to the visible world; another twist and he was gone again like a coin in a magician’s fist. With an ease and swiftness only anecdotes of this kind can accommodate, Gyges gets himself transferred from the mountains to the court, where he swiftly seduces the king’s queen (not while invisible, one assumes, or was the invisibility the attraction?), and with her help murders her husband in order to become the ruler himself. We are not told what happens to him after that, although we know (otherwise than through Plato) that he will be the grandfather of Croesus, and that the ring makes him and his offspring very rich.

  In The Republic, following Thrasymachus’s intemperate outburst, Plato has Glaucon relate this story. If he had allowed Socrates to present it, doubtless other details would have been chosen, another point sharpened. Certainly my own summary (as with all of these specimen accounts) is just that: a description of a story rather than the tale itself, fully retold or performed. Mine is only a reminiscence, a little reminder of something we have all read. Oddly, none of these differences (among the tale, its various tellings, our memories, or its summary description) really matters. What matters here is its rhetorical employment by a very energetically held idea which is searching for a way to create for itself a sympathetic state of mind, as the story of Aladdin’s wonderful lamp does in order to dramatize human greed. What would you, or anyone, do if you had robbed the grave instead of Gyges and found yourself with the ability to vanish from sight at will? Into whose bedroom would you be tempted to steal unobserved? what blows might be struck if every back were turned? what a lot of gossip could be collected for sale to the tabloids, what gross jokes played, friends amazed?

  Narrative is indifferent to details and dislikes its swift flow impeded. It hastens from stolen ring to usurped kingdom with nary a care for complications. When Gyges first notices his own disappearance, it’s because other shepherds begin to speak of him as if he were no longer at their meeting. Do his clothes
vanish too? whatever he touches? if not, aren’t his companions surprised by his sheepskin’s sudden loss of occupant? Will the floor still squeak when he walks over it, and will the coins he has filched seem to float through the air though borne by his hidden palm? How did the adulterous queen feel, feeling Gyges and his lipless kisses? Is Gyges invisible to Gyges, and what is it like becoming disembodied as a ghost? Spooky, I’ll bet, and disorienting to be never in the picture but always where the camera would be. Put basta! to scruples and complications. The narrative is already ten miles past the station. You cannot even hear the distant whisper of its whistle. In any case, its cars were always empty of such answers.

  Narratives like the story of Gyges and his ring imperceptibly seduce their listeners, because they always solicit our participation: not for a naive or complacent identification with the protagonists necessarily (where each of us is Gyges, Eve or Adam, maybe God), or even with the rich raciness of their roles (where each of us takes the queen’s place in bed, or the serpent’s in the tree), but by an implication that extends to the idea of man in general; so even if I say to myself: “I wouldn’t go down in that gorge—no way—or sneak that ring from that dead man’s finger—not me—and I’m too good a guy, basically, to be bought by a little loose change, free flesh, or a position of power,” nevertheless (and this is Glaucon’s expectation), I can believe everybody else would; so when Glaucon suggests we place one such ring on the finger of a plainly unjust man, who has already flouted society’s conventions without its aid, and then another on the finger of a man who has always behaved like a good worker bee, a diligent drone, my mind moves easily along the track which has been greased for it to the right rhetorical conclusion: beneath clothes, cosmetics, and conventions, where we confront the naked soul, there is no difference to be discerned between the sinner and the saint, both souls are so stained and opaque, except that the saint, in addition to his other vices, is a successful hypocrite.

  The story of that state of nature, like narratives in general, prefers to take us from our present place and time to another, earlier, indeed original, condition, and it plays continually upon the differences. In a way, we always stand at the story’s end. It moves toward us as Adam’s does, explaining our life as it recounts his, justifying our miseries with his mistakes. Gyges is the dishonest heart in Everyman. Beneath his simple shepherd’s garb and sunburned grizzle is a monster, pitiless and greedy, which only the shine of the public’s gaze, the weight of their opinions, the force of their arms, keeps immobile, cold as the corpse that got hid in the horse that was buried in a chasm which had stayed a secret even to the earth.

  5. THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL

  The most eloquent description of the state of nature, as well as the most plausible, I think, is that of Thomas Hobbes. His, however, is not given to us in narrative, but in a description. Locke and Rousseau have their own versions, both palpably implausible, but the first thing to note, before admiring Hobbes’s version, is that all of these arguments, as arguments, are the same. They are the same because they have the same form. For a structuralist, at least, that is sufficient to establish an identity.

  To understand what it means to “have the same form,” let us examine a pair of children’s board games, Winnie-the-Pooh and Treasure Island. Both are played on pasteboard fields designed to resemble their respective regions of the world: Pooh’s has a stream and a bridge, woods, a house, a few fields, while the pirate realm is represented by seas and lagoons, an island, palm trees, ravines, lookout points, some jungle, a stretch of castaway beach, and so on. Through these landscapes, like a road which resembles a relaxed, even tangled, dressmaker’s tape, runs a bright, clearly segmented path. Upon this path, counters of various colors and kinds are placed (a button will do if a counter is lost). These pieces stand for the characters that have been taken from their respective stories: Eeyore, Tigger, and Pooh in one set; Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, and Ben Gunn in the other. There will be some point, probably a circle, marked START, and another, containing a honey pot or a chest of treasure, marked END. The players select their pieces (perhaps identifying with the characters and their roles in the original story). We are ready. Who shall go first? who shall roll the dice or spin the first spin?

  The word “counter” is correctly chosen, because that’s what we do when we play these games: we roll dice and add the number that turns up to the sum we have already amassed. This sum is dramatically displayed by the distance a piece has gone on the trail to the treasure; perhaps it has reached Coffin Cave just ahead of Long John Silver, who, after all, has a wooden leg and ought to be lagging behind. A little subtraction (dare I say?) adds a bit of spice to the contest, or a player may be made to lose a turn when his piece falls into the Huffalump pit or is captured by cannibals. Embellishments or descriptive alterations do not make the slightest difference to the form: imagine, instead, a racetrack with six noble steeds ready to run as fast as the spinner will point them, neck and neck along competing columns of numbers—how exciting—six plus three plus two plus four plus five, galloping as fast as your favorite cliché, their manes streaming, their jockeys digging in their heels and using the whip, a fortune bet on the outcome, maybe the mortgages on several properties from the Monopoly board. I can keep a record of losses and victories—wins, places, shows—fast track or slow—rider names, weights, and numbers—farms and owners—dams and sires—positions in the starting gate. I can call the race in an excited voice. I can toast the victor and drop around his neck a horseshoe cut from colored paper. Still, a sum of only seven will lose to eleven every time, no matter what the horse is called, or the color of the jockey’s silks. As far as the form goes, we might as well sit at a bar and roll dice for drinks. Even an ancient and much more complex game like pachisi, played with cowrie shells, states its nature in its name, which represents the game’s highest throw: the number twenty-five.

  Aristotle was the first to perceive clearly how statements became logically woven together in an argument. Nothing is more linear than the syllogism, or more like narrative in its nature. Aristotle saw how assertions (in his Greek) could be reduced to four subject/predicate forms (all, none, some, and not), and how, with the help of a shrewdly placed and chosen middle term, such shapes could be validly linked to a conclusion. The discovery (one of the more momentous in the history of mankind’s mind) required us to discard content and concentrate on structure, to remember, in short, that Winnie-the-Pooh and Treasure Island are the same game. Nevertheless, even students of logic are regularly seduced by arguments in striking costumes and propositions wearing beguiling perfume. The syllogism that runs “Movie stars lead glamorous lives, but glamorous lives don’t last, so stars tend to twinkle once and die twice, the glamour going dead before they do,” is more fascinating to most people than a simple old wheeze like “All men are mortal, some movie stars are men, so some movie stars are mortal”—an argument whose only interest is its caution.

  Aristotle called the middle term the “cause” of the conclusion, and it was natural enough to identify the relation of premises to conclusion in an argument with the relation of cause to effect in physics. Thus the syllogism borrowed the idea of causality from the material world while the material world drew upon logic for the concept of necessary connection. The regress of events that threatened to be infinite, and therefore had to be terminated in a Prime Mover, Big Bang, or lightninglike logos called God, was the same sort of regress that endangered the syllogism with indeterminacy if every premise had in turn to have been the conclusion of some prior argument, and if there were no first principles or axioms or ultimate ideas.

  The story of the state of nature, like any argument, pays off in the coins which have been fed into it. Its central process is one of pretended purification. Like a ship’s hull, history must be scraped clean of encrustation—culturation—before its real shape can be appreciated. Since one cannot do this in fact, one must do it in one’s head, in exemplary tales like that of Adam and Eve, or
Gyges and his ring.

  For John Locke the state of nature was essentially a state of peace; it was a fragile but genuine paradise. However, conflicts would inevitably arise, even between people of good will when their points of view sincerely contradicted and their interests genuinely clashed. If there were no just way of mediating these conflicts, a condition of peace would soon enough become a condition of war. Political structures are like blocks beneath the wheels of a truck parked on a steep slope. On the other hand, the snake in Rousseau’s garden was society itself. The devil destroys the truth by organizing it. These organizations then multiply desires, create social classes, and foment disappointment, resentment, and strife.

  Hobbes placed a different value on the natural condition, and belongs, with Freud, securely in Gyges’s camp. The phrase “every man against every man” tolls through his text like a dirge.

  Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man. For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many day together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.