William Gass: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)

William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is a collection of painfully beautiful and innovative short stories by a conspicuously talented writer. Gass may be responsible for coining the term “metafiction,” but these pieces demonstrate few of the reflexive excesses of his contemporaries like John Barth or Robert Coover. Having indulged in wild, often nonsensical, and quasi-pornographical textual play in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and saving his philosophically-informed comments on literature for his essays (found in Fiction and the Figures of Life), Gass in this collection instead undermines traditional literary realism by emphasizing the sensuous qualities of the words he uses. By offering his readers an intense aesthetic experience of language itself, Gass makes his readers comprehend, as he writes in his essay “The Medium of Fiction”: “[that fiction] should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really.” Words, as the “flesh” of his “concepts,” are the only physical traits available to his readers, so Gass exploits every opportunity to direct attention to the arbitrary qualities and independent being of those words, but without ever totally severing them from their function and meaning in the story. For Gass, narrative doesn’t occur at the level of plot but at the level of words, “the coming on and passing off of words,” so that a microdrama occurs as each word gives way to the next (Gass speaks of “the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come.”). The novella “The Pedersen Kid” is the most conventional piece here, but it bears obvious traces of an aesthetic overhaul. Gass admits in his preface that he undermined a thrilling tale involving murder in the isolated countryside by “covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt” and “erasing the plot to make a fiction of it.” The final product whites out its origins in genre fiction by obsessively repeating the word “snow,” creating a cold, barren, and ambiguous atmosphere in which murder appears liberatory for the young son of an alcoholic and abusive father. “Order of Insects” discretely functions as an allegory of the uncanny power of literature. In the story, a suburban housewife, despite being constrained by her gender role and domestic duties, develops an obsession with the bodies of the black bugs that she discovers every morning on her downstairs carpet. The insects, which are never seen alive, only lying on their backs dead with their legs up in the air, offer the woman a mystical vision of order that seems incompatible with her mundane existence. She reflects on the insects’ bodies: “The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earlier horror. It isn’t possible to feel disgust toward such a order.” After the insects have taken over her imagination, the woman adds, “When I examine my collection now it isn’t any longer roaches I observe but gracious order, wholeness, and divinity.” At a couple points in the story, Gass underscores how the shriveled corpses of the insects resemble the apparently lifeless words printed in black on the page. He writes, “if the drapes were pulled, [the insects appeared] so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me,” and later on, “Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I’ve a collection now I keep in typewriter ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold.” [emphasis added to both] The order of insects at such moments dissolves into the order of Gass’s words, and the reader converges with the woman, confronted by material traces on the page that always exceed any demands for meaning. The collection’s titular piece, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” abandons any interest in plot; Gass divides his imaginary construction of a Midwest town into sections with quasi-objective labels such as “PLACE,” “WEATHER,” “PEOPLE,” “BUSINESS,” and “VITAL DATA.” The narrator, perhaps recoiling from a failed love affair (“For I am now in B, Indiana: out of job and out of patience, out of love and time and money, out of bread and out of body.”), presents some fundamentally ambivalent, but gorgeously written, reflections on the town. At times, he exhibits a nostalgic and idealistic fondness for the setting: “The shade is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.” But such statements are usually quickly contradicted by more critical comments (“It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husbandman uses chemical from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not matter. It does not exist.”) or by troubling details, such as the fact that most of the town’s industry has been lost to bigger cities or to the monopolies of corporations (“Everywhere . . . the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. The empty stores, the old signs and dusty fixtures, the debris in alleys, the flaking paint and rusty gutters, the heavy locks and sagging boards: they say the same disagreeable things.”). Discussing the difficulties of defining the Midwest, Gass writes, “This Midwest. A dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of Towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time.” The Midwest - a non-place, a nondescript setting - is a fitting subject (or even a character) for Gass’s particularly writing project. In his preface, Gass discusses his own undistinguished Midwest origins, which left him no recourse but to use language to construct an identity from nothing but potential noise: “I was forced to form myself from sounds and syllables.” Returning to the geographically and culturally empty terrain of the Midwest, which offers little for simple representation, he has to construct an order through language, producing himself at the same time as he produces his subject: “I was born in a place as empty of distinction as my writing desk. When I wrote most of these stories, it was a dining table, featureless as Fargo.” But in the story itself, the success of this project is ultimately far more ambiguous, the constructed order more tenuous: “I must pull myself together, get a grip, just as they say, but I feel spilled, bewildered, quite mislaid. I did not restore my house to its youth, but to its age.”