A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Film had nibbled at the edges of this ecclesiastical cookie, held back by squeamishness and fear of offense, but a bloody sadomasochistic movie featuring the crucifixion was a payday certainty. “Look what He did for us” has been replaced by “Look what they did to Him.”

  The Brazilian Passion play has carried one necessary characteristic of a proper spectacle to an extreme: movement. Empty extravagance must be filled with more extravagance. Picasso’s Guernica or Michelangelo’s ceiling cannot not be spectacles because they remain moment by moment the same, thereby inviting serious scrutiny, or the risk of feelings of boredom and surfeit from the unworthy. An actor reciting allegorical verse may now and then raise a fist to smite the sky, but such gestures do not match those of The Tempest, where demonstrations of Prospero’s art are given to us in the form of a masque, or those of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Bottom is metapunned into an ass. Miracles dare not dillydally. Lazarus must get himself off the set before the medicos arrive. Ballet, theater, sporting events, and, above all, movies show the greatest promise in this regard. And the contemporary camera is jittery, never remaining still to watch people sleep, as in Warhol’s movie, or lingering like the images of Marienbad, or following the walk of a fly cross a cheek in the manner of Sergio Leone. The feats of a magician must snap, crackle, and pop. Spectacles, in short, have a brief life, or, even when long, are made of brief lives. In Brazil, the audience also moves, rather freely, up the streets from one staging area to another, stopping at the stations of the cross as the devout are supposed to.

  Spectacles are made of illusions. The U.S. war on Iraq was, therefore, not a perfect spectacle, although it was legitimized by lies. Buildings may crumble under our bombs, but every death except the dictator’s is an unhappy accident. Large audiences are helpful, because groups are more easily swayed than individuals. Our poets may attract fifty souls at loose ends to their readings, but Soviet poets chanted in sports palaces to twenty thousand faithful, who infected one another with their enthusiasms. In movie theaters, before TV screens, individuals sit in relative isolation and responsive silence, but they speak of what they’ve seen at work, with friends, children, husbands, wives. This is contagion of the second degree, for the next game, the next showing of a sitcom, the next day of the war, these will be observed by eyes that are at the same time altered eyes: the eyes I was using yesterday, the eyes my wife seems to have been watching with, the eyes of the New York Times reviewer, the eyes of a dozen yelling yazoos at the sports bar as they cheer a direct hit on a hut.

  Vulgarity, lust, and cruelty are constants in world history, but the dominion of spectacle has waxed and waned, perhaps according to a law that has something Hegelian about it. Elements of the theater that have been regarded as secondary or subordinate to the dramatic text, such as costumes, blocking, set design, lighting, props, the building itself, the director even, and, in the case of opera, the libretto, too (when voice is what is worshiped): These elements have at times crept toward the center of things, as we witnessed with the English masque. In illuminated manuscripts did not the empty margins frequently fill with dainty colored images and trilling lines even when the text was holy and untouchable? As the importance of the book has apparently been replaced by the computer and its opening onto the Internet, book arts have perversely drawn increasing interest. Experimental books of all kinds have been produced, with pop-ups, foldouts, loose leaves, sheets the size of rooms, volumes so small that they can dangle from ears. Illustrations, papers, typefaces, bindings, forms: Every feature has been an object of focus, every one, that is, but the nature of the text itself, which is often of poor quality and the sickly result of a slack imagination.

  Lost in this shuffle of cards has been Hiram—was that his name?—Barnum … No, Humphrey. How can we get him front and center, turn his bowl breaking into a spectacle, or at least a sliver of one? The only promising part of his accident was the smashed glass. Of course. We shall insert his mischance into cinema. We shall need the kind of glass that shatters safely, the way those poker-table chairs break when they are busted over cowboy heads in saloon scenes. Movie bar stools are built of woods so light and joints so flimsy they fly to pieces on command, and mirrors break into harmless shards, although with a satisfyingly scary clatter. In our script, the bowl will be bigger and priceless, perhaps not a bowl of anything—okay to eat the grapefruit—but a statuette standing for supreme excellence in custom catering. Get rid of the circusy Barnum name. He’s now Utah Smyth and he throws the priceless piece to the floor in disgust and distain, since he knows the evil plot that put him in his present fix: how enemies of the state connived to obtain the menu for a barbecue to be held at some Texas ranch by blackmailing one of the sous-chefs in his kitchen to use the facilities without washing his hands so as to contaminate the grapefruit slices in the salad—cough up the grapefruit; it’s back in the script—while the boss was away being rewarded for his absence with this trophy. But why go on? You’ve been to the movies, after all.

  As the masque concluded, the queen and her court, costumed and concealed in their roles as divinities, came down from the stage into the audience, and there danced and mingled, creating, Jonson hoped, a sense of unity among the participants. Present-day spectacles seek unity, too, as well as shock and awe, but now for an enormously larger public. But such sensations, when they are passively observed, and are otherwise without significant consequence, produce only titillation. Moreover, Jonson’s aim, unfortunately some may feel, to enhance the power of the monarchy in all eyes, has been made less ambition now by expanding its target. It is we the audience who are to feel empowered, and even ennobled, when, as Superman, we save the nation, or, as Woods, sink the putt, or, as Stallone, put regiments to rout. For Jonson and Jones both, the proper emblems came from Greek and Roman mythology—religious ones were eyesores, and a civil war was in the offing—but for Americans, at least, there are two legs upon which our democracy stands: the gun and the motorcar. Both are equalizers. Both are used to intimidate competition, escape from harm, maim or kill people if necessary. Movies make the most of both. Entire films have been fashioned out of plate glass and gasoline. We love to watch cars that, while chasing other cars, carom off cars inconveniently parked or otherwise in the way, en route to their own rollover and explosion.

  I am in my auto, lord of my speeding space; I am packing my attitude—my suspicions content and excuse me; and sometimes I stash my resentment in the glove compartment. We also like miracles, although some societies prefer them above all others. Ours are astonishments of the secular kind, for we have heroes who live through hails of bullets, crawl out of wrecked cars only slightly mussed, fly through the air, dispose of enemies by electrocution, immolation, defenestration, or by sucking them in airplane engines, beheading them with helicopter blades, feeding them to sharks, forcing them to swallow a poisonous snake, shooting them, but only in the balls, snapping their twiggy necks, impaling them on the picket of an iron fence, cutting off tongues and gouging out eyes, dropping them into vats of acid or pits of congealing concrete, or, with wild horses, pulling them apart like wishbones, and in other ways so luxuriously inventive that merely shooting them full of holes, stabbing them repeatedly, or hanging them from a nearby tree seems gauche.

  Horse operas are very much out of fashion, and occult reasons are sought for this. I would suggest that western weapons don’t do enough damage. Fanning the trigger, you might kill two or three, but machine guns can mow down scores. (The Gatling gun has been revived.) For sport, a single stalker with a serrated knife is okay but a chain saw is better. Where will it all end? We have traveled through time, gone to galaxies so far away, we reached boredom first. We have blown up whole cities, death stars, moons. Special effects are the leading actors, but spectacles that are everyday, taped and replayed as often as the impacted towers, spectacles commercialized with the zeal of athletic shoes, are beginning to lose their shock, their awe-inspiring powers.

  There was a brief revival o
f the social spectacle when reality arrived in the form of a sideshow so we could watch greedy wannabes come to grief, families humiliate themselves, and lucky ducks win millions. We can be shocked afresh by the weirdos on talk shows, and, best of all, now we have fresh wars to watch, although they tend to potshot and stumble into hastily photographed car bombings and ambushes that the Palestinians and the Israelis have already made boring, so you can be sure that the new war coming soon to our living room will show improvements for better viewing. Since the purpose of most of what we call culture is to so stuff our heads with fantasy and illusion, there’ll be no room for anything serious—almost any new idea is upsetting to the system—we can expect pop culture, with a technology drunk on simulation, to surpass itself. In order to avoid becoming a servant of the king, Vatel killed himself. Not just in the movie. That act was persuasive. Nowadays, blood is our argument.

  EVIL

  Is the motorcar evil? Of course not, because it can have no intentions, no interior life, nurse no resentments and harbor no malice. In daily life, it has become commoner than the cold. In the moral realm, the auto lacks pizzazz. It is merely an instrument of evil, crippling or killing thousands every year, consuming many of the resources of the earth, eviscerating cities as routinely as butchers their beef, poisoning the atmosphere, fostering illusions of equality and dominion, encouraging envy and macho competitions, facilitating adolescent fornication, and ravaging the countryside. Its horrid offspring are garages, interchanges, hamburger stands, and gas stations. Popular delusions, much destruction, its increasing casualties do not make the motorcar evil, because these consequences were never aimed at. The word in vogue for the damage it does is collateral. But the most considerable obstacle to calling the car “evil” is that its effects are easily explicable. Carbon monoxide is odorless, but that is the extent of its mystery. The price we pay for our automobiles seems more onerous to us than the cost of their use. Just add air bags and buckle up. Our callous indifference to ruinous truth may be less readily formulated.

  Perhaps the cigarette is Evil. Because it has within it, like Old Nick in nicotine, habituating elements that mimic the resolutions of intention. Because it encourages cancer to attack the lips that lip it, the lungs that suck its smoke, the eyes its blown smoke stings. Suppose the hands that held a wheel too many hours too many miles so many gallons began to lose their fingers. Then how would we feel? That justice had been done? For there is something that’s suitable about dying from your vices: playing the slots, wasting water, eating burgers. If sins only sickened the sinner, if cramp crippled the fingers of the forger, if every quarter fed to the toothy machine clogged the player’s small intestine, there would be some satisfaction in this world. A few zealots—foolish optimists about a moral universe—believe that AIDS is God’s punishment for buggery, and that just deserts are at last being generously served. What of such thoughts? Is it in their vicinity that evil really lies? What sort of heart beats at that rate?

  How about vices that have their virtues (most do), or go simply unrecognized and are therefore without stigmata? Movies of the thirties, forties, and fifties were filmed through clouds of Chesterfield, Old Gold, Lucky, and Camel smoke. Cigarettes were the expressive heart of human gesture. Like lighting a lady’s Lucky. Like settling the tobacco in its tube by tapping it on a fingernail. It provided important moments of delay—while thoughts were collected, composure was attained. The methods for mooching a fag were numerous and expressive, as was spelling a long, slow, lazy sigh in smoke. Such rituals were social essentials.

  We have learned to mistrust appearances. Beauty was the showing forth of virtue during pagan days, when virtue meant “manly” (that is, strong and brave); that was back when ample breasts and generous hips signified plow-girl fitness and maternity skills. But the devil, we’ve been warned, puts on a saintly face. Or at least a salesman’s pleasant smile—seductive yet friendly. Where is his profit in being scary? Gluttony and lust, both beguiling sirens, kill millions every year. Fricatrix and fornicators waste away, go mad, and die, while wives and mistresses, who must be fornicators, too, are shamed, abandoned, and enslaved by repeated pregnancies—if they survive the new life they carry; if their new life lives and they don’t pull through just to bury another baby. So the cigarette’s calming qualities were a wicked deception: “All is well,” our inner crier cried to the soul’s sleeping city; “Keeping your kool is what counts,” our innkeeper counseled. Once aware … no; once convinced … no; finally scared by its consequences and their cost, we gave up smoking to become self-righteous. Alleging that we’d been fooled, we sued.

  I have for some time insisted that every virtue has seven vices, and one day I intend to prove it. I have used neatness as a showcase because it cancels, hides, and opposes history. Miss Tidy believes that everything has its place and that everything should be there. To deny the parade happened, ticker tape and flagwave must be swept and furled; to pretend the party was never thrown, its empties need to be recycled, its tin horns packed away; to be able to say some war was ever foolishly waged, its wounds needlessly suffered, accounts must be scrubbed, documents shredded, evidence dug up, and history rewritten. This starchy daughter of the regiment loves roll call, frequent inspections, and the constancy of the pyramids. Moreover, one might argue, without being simply contrary, that chastity is a vice and adultery a virtue. Which one does the sonnet favor?

  Nor is any virtue, in Kant’s terms, unqualifiedly virtuous, for if we were to give our allegiance exclusively to one of them (by dreaming of a society without hunger, for instance), we should have to sacrifice too much else. So that no one might starve, we might give everyone a job. To do that (and the Soviet Union and China did do that), we find ourselves asking six men to dig a hole that two might easily shovel, and demand that women we’ve trained as nurses sweep the street instead. People will not look for or find congenial jobs, but labor when and where they are posted. Making work for others is one such assignment. Roads are repaired with forks and spoons when the aim is full employment, and slowdowns are de rigueur. Shop stewards take frequent breaks and the featherbedding is of swan’s down. Hurry up and wait is the military solution. When standing in ranks or queues, life is as level as a desert and time is too heavy to handle.

  As Milton inadvertently demonstrated, goodness is confining and limits God’s sphere of action, turning him into a droning bore. Eve ate to break the monotony. Eve ate to enjoy the appetite it would give her. Without misbehavior and misfortune, there would be no news. Some philosophers like to argue that good and evil are co-relative terms, and, like long and short, are necessary to each other. To know the meaning of evil, you must understand the meaning of good, as Satan certainly does, since he is a fallen angel. I’m sure he wondered how perfection could survive change. Perfection is more immobile than a mountain. Or, if in motion, as continuous as a heavenly body or a looped tape. Nietzsche thought a grazing cow could be happy because it had no memory of the past or vision of the future, hence no regrets, no anxieties, no invidious comparisons—an eternal now was enough.

  Without history, how would we remember the injuries done to us by the grandfathers of our enemies? There is no other way to hand down hate from one generation to another; prejudice is fed on the excrement from former days; the chronicle of previous misdeeds is read aloud every day in the marketplace; catechisms are recited in the presence of sacred books. Our unfortunate lapses, on the other hand … Maybe Miss Tidy was right. There was no last night.

  In his brilliant novel The Living End, Stanley Elkin gave God the best possible reason for the mess and misery of His Creation: It makes a better story.

  My father had a driving habit. Many do, I suspect. Such men simply like “to take a drive” the way some step outside now “to have a smoke.” “What if everybody did?” is the question Immanuel Kant suggested we put to ourselves (though less crudely than I have done). One can understand why philosophers are morally inconvenient. Which is worse: sickening people the w
ay power plants and factories do, or polluting streams by hosing hogs? In any case, repeating the offense seems essential to the elevation of the cause. And the cause, to achieve evil, must be elevated. LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, NOW PERFORMING IN THE CENTER RING! RACIAL CLEANSING AND THE CONFISCATORS! Evil cannot be a simple sideshow—the momentary ogle of a bearded lady or a lewd peek at some hermaphrodite’s minuscule appliances. Evil is a limelight hog and wouldn’t mind a little wash from the hose.

  Aristotle thought moral virtue was a habit. Certainly vice is. Think of rape and murder as a serial rather than a snapshot—six unrelated killings in a week versus four in a month with the same MO. The American soldier who mistakenly shot Anton Webern can say oops, but not if he’s done away with the entire Vienna Philharmonic. What onetime act can be called “evil,” reach that kind of high-pitched crime? The crucifixion? There have been many. Christ’s? Yes, but He had to be crucified, He had to suffer: Our sins required their goat; nor would we be in a position to be saved as He was without a death for Him to rise from on a ladder of hallelujahs. The Resurrection was a proof, a promise, and a preview. All rise; here comes the judge. Had Pontius Pilate known the plot, perhaps we might admire him now for handing down a sentence so hard on the shepherd, yet so humanly necessary for his flock.

  If repetition is at least sometimes a significant factor, numbers—higher and higher totals—would seem to matter. A RECORD NUMBER