The Tunnel by William H. Gass

First published: 1995

Type of plot: Modernism

Time of work: 1967

Locale: A college town in Indiana

Principal Characters:

• William Frederick Kohler, a history professor at a midwestern university
• Martha Kohler, Kohler’s disappointed wife
• Margaret Kohler, Kohler’s alcoholic mother
• Frederick Kohler, Kohler’s ineffectual father
• Lou, Kohler’s former student and lover
• Magus Tabor, a former history professor of Kohler in Germany
• Planmatee,
• Culp,
• Governali, and
• Herschel, colleagues in Kohler’s history department

The Novel

The Tunnel is told in the first person by a middle-aged history professor who has just completed his major work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. He now wishes to conclude the project by writing the introduction, but he is seized by some paralysis of the soul and writes, instead, the contorted story of his own embittered life and a meditation on history and the writing of history. The story loops backward and forward to the recent end of his affair with Lou, his family tree, his childhood, his student days in prewar Germany, his loveless marriage, and his present woes.

As Kohler ruminates about his life, he is obsessed with his experiences in Germany during the 1930’s and with the book he has just written. He rereads the manuscript, noting that he has neatly analyzed, explained, tabulated, and encapsulated the history of the Holocaust. He has even “justified” Adolf Hitler. Yet doubts assail him. Perhaps he has completed only half his task; he meditates on his German name and finds nothing German about himself, because he is a fourth-generation American; he taunts Herschel, a Jewish colleague, about Nazi motives. He jokes with Martha about Jewish suffering and enjoys a colleague’s limericks on the subject. He searches within for what he wants from his life, his book, and his current writings, and he muses about his own relationship to history. He decides he wants to feel “a little less uneasy.”

He finally realizes that he is engulfed with rage, and he is determined to mine his past in an attempt to expiate it. Kohler is the only child of a disappointed mother whose dreams center on her sulky, obstinate son and an angry, bigoted father. Vivid scenes from his childhood and student days come back to Kohler, leading to the novel’s autobiographical set pieces. In the midst of this psychological tunnel, Kohler, whose name means “miner” in German, begins to dig a tunnel in his basement, clearing dirt, rust, and coal, and finally assaulting the mortar with a pick. He is strangely exhilarated by this activity, particularly since it provokes his unloved wife, whom he has no desire to placate. A long interior monologue called “The Quarrel” ensues, detailing his failed relationship with Martha and leading to a meditation on the quarrels that erupted into World War II, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts.

As further childhood injustices occur to Kohler, more grievances against his wife surface. A visit to an abandoned country farm with Martha and their two sons segues into memories of country drives of his childhood, particularly one that ended in the family’s witnessing a horrible car crash that narrowly avoided missing them. Memories of his disapproving father bring back his student days in Germany and his relationship with Magus Tabor, called “Mad Meg,” the charismatic professor who is Kohler’s idol. Tabor is interested in the glorious sweep and force of history, but individual deaths mean nothing to him. He demeans his students, encourages them to falsify historical facts, adores the German fatherland, despises truth and Jews, and loves conquest. Kohler remembers tossing bricks during the infamous Kristallnacht of November, 1938, when he joined some of his fellow students in wandering the streets and smashing the windows of shops inscribed with the names of their Jewish owners. Kohler’s thoughts now drift to the failure of his marriage, his father’s death, and his own young-adult children, who disappoint when they do not disgust him. He finds his colleagues contemptible. Because of a student’s harassment charges, his colleagues convene a faculty meeting to discuss Kohler’s lechery. They bicker peevishly while Kohler alternately lies and confesses. At home, he adds a long defense of Hitler to his biographical writing and goes back to excavating his tunnel, the dirt of which he now deposits into Martha’s collection of sideboards and bureaus that she hopes to turn into an antique business.

Kohler continues to dig and pick at his life, unearthing more grotesque scenes of his childhood, including the placing his own mother in an asylum when he was fifteen. A climax of sorts occurs at the end of the novel, when Martha, having just discovered where he was putting the dirt, barges into his study with a drawer full and dumps it over the desk on which his manuscript lies. The novel, Kohler’s inquiry, and the tunnel find no resolution.

The Characters

Although they are always seen through the narrator’s eyes, William H. Gass’s characters are fully developed, and the author uses different techniques to bring them to life. For the first hundred pages of the novel, Kohler mentions only snippets and fleeting impressions of other characters, which start to build in the reader’s mind. Initially, he circles around his former student and lover, Lou, the great love of his life, who leaves him when he tells her of his loathing for humankind. Tabor also appears early, and Kohler’s wife, Martha, is introduced with several pages of invective.

The circle widens to include Kohler’s family with a ten-page story about his Uncle Balt’s farm. Uncle Balt is carefully described, from the shape of his knuckles to his eating habits, and speaks in his own words. This sets the pattern for the novel; long sections of stream-of-consciousness narration interspersed with stories of the characters told by the narrator from a more detached viewpoint. The novel is not broken up into chapters, but the stories often have titles, such as “Learning to Drive,” about his father, “Aunts,” and the beautifully lyrical “Do Mountains,” about his love affair with Lou. Each of his colleagues has a section of his own. These individual sections are highly realistic and richly detailed, with physical descriptions of the characters and their distinctive patterns of speech. Although the reader learns not to trust the narrator’s view of others, the dialogue is so brilliant throughout the novel that each time a character speaks, he or she reveals much.

The most problematic character in the book is Kohler himself. Although he tells the story, it is obvious how others feel about him from their reactions. His mother, drifting further and further into fantasy and alcoholism, dotes on her only child, but it is clear she has no one else. His father considers young Kohler stupid, unmanly, incompetent, and dishonest. While this may not be the whole truth, it is apparent that the child makes no attempt to please. Kohler’s wife, Martha, turns against him during the first year of their union. He goes to great lengths to describe the unfortunate housing conditions that caused her disaffection, but now, after years of marriage in a lovely home, they thoroughly detest each other and stay together only for malice. He always disliked his two sons, one of whose name he cannot bear to utter. Kohler’s colleagues find him a problem, both for his sexual proclivities and for his earlier book, Nuremberg Notes. In his own words, Kohler is a misanthrope, a bigot, and a Hitler sympathizer. William Gass writes such dazzling, energetic prose that the reader sometimes falls under the spell of this bitter antihero, but Kohler’s hatred bubbles up so often that the spell is soon broken.

Critical Context

The American experimental writing that began in the 1960’s and 1970’s was driven by the violence and upheaval of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. For Gass and others such as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, and Gilbert Sorrentino, realistic fiction seemed no longer adequate. Just as protests and demonstrations sought to overturn the conventions of society, these writers aggressively attacked literary conventions such as linear plot line, “lifelike” characters, and language used merely to convey the story. Instead, they wrote stories and novels about writing stories and novels, parodied standard forms, and used language in truly innovative ways. Some of the devices of the modernist writers are allusion, puzzle, fragmented chronology, circular plots, and style as subject. In addition to this arsenal, Gass, who did graduate study at Cornell University in philosophy and became interested in aesthetic theory, also uses drawings, slogans, banners, different font styles, and cartoons to embellish The Tunnel.

Gass taught for fifteen years at Purdue University, where he completed his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck. Published in 1966, it was acclaimed as the most important work of fiction by an American of that generation and placed Gass as the undisputed leader of his literary contemporaries. His second novel, Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife (1968), exhibited even stronger influences of modernist tendencies in its narration. The Tunnel, a compelling example of modernist literature, is a direct descendent of these books and proceeds still further in its use of modernist devices. The language of the novel takes on a meaning of its own. It is full of puns, alliteration, concrete arrangements, and wordplay and leads the narrator toward digressions and dead ends. Gass’s novel, while brilliant, makes heavy demands upon the reader.

Bibliography

Gass, William. “Language and Conscience: An Interview with William Gass.” Interview by Arthur M. Salzman. Review of Contemporary Fiction 7, no. 3 (Fall, 1991): 15-31. Gass reveals the difficulties of using words, which filter and adulterate perception, as a useful tool for objectively comprehending the world.

Holloway, Watson L. William Gass. Boston: Twayne, 1990. An introductory study of Gass’s work that offers a close reading necessary to appreciate the novelist. Includes a chapter entitled “The Tunnel,” although it was written five years before The Tunnel was published.

Kelly, Robert. “A Repulsively Lonely Man.” Review of The Tunnel, by William Gass. The New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1995. A five-page review that gives a fairly complete overview of The Tunnel and includes some comments by Gass.

Klein, Marcus. “Postmodernising the Holocaust: William Gass in The Tunnel.” New England Review 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 79-88. Klein analyzes the success and failures of treating one of the major events of the twentieth century in a modernist style.

Salzman, Arthur M. The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. A brilliant analysis of Gass’s fiction, with a provocative chapter entitled “The Tunnel: Recent Excavations,” written when Gass had been working on The Tunnel for fifteen years.