William Gass will be speaking about “baroque prose” in the Davis Auditorium of the Schapiro Center later tonight. A few days ago, he was kind enough to respond to a few questions via e-mail. The text of this exchange is as follows:

SPEC: Could you give our readers a taste of what material your lecture will cover? What do you mean by the term “baroque prose”?

WG: My lecture is the opening chapter of a small book on baroque prose.  It commences around 1630 at a time in England when the conflict between Puritans, Anglicans, and Catholics was at its height and affecting the nature of the church and what went on during services, principally the sermons and how they were presented.  The fourth factor was the new scientific prose which resembled the stripped-down Puritan style, in being stripped down but in very little else.  The book will try to locate the properties and qualities of baroque prose and argue for its special role in the history of literature in English.  It is a performance prose, associated, though not exclusively, with the sermon, and its representatives are John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, and others, and it makes its way to the U.S. through Emerson and triumphs in our time with Henry James.  It is an oral prose, not a “written” but a “spoken” one, hence it is dominated by rhetorical rather than poetic structures.

SPEC: Musical analogies are often helpful in describing different styles of writing, and your own writing has been called “musical.” Where exactly does this musicality reside? In the phonic qualities of words themselves? In the rhythms created by words in sequence? In certain poetic effects available to prose writers?

WG: In all of these ways.  Like the techniques of the poet (rhyme, rhythm, etc.) which were designed to aid the listener’s memory when there was no text in front of him (like music), baroque prose seeks a similar musicality, a physicality of language which will require the reader to mimic the writer’s verbal movements, and even chew the words.  The ear’s mouth must move.

SPEC: Your writing, especially your fiction, exhibits a strong interest in how words play together, and in trying out novel combinations and patterns of words. Given that, as well as your educational training in the philosophy of language, you could be said to have an interest—even a stake—in how language develops. That gets me thinking: a writer like Richard Price is often praised for incorporating idiomatic speech into his characters’ dialogue. And it’s not just that their speech, as he writes it, is idiomatic, but that it reflects an almost up-to-the-minute awareness of the state of the idiom (a certain kind of idiom, anyway). It’s not surprising that this goes hand in hand with his emphasis on reportage; he is, in some sense, a linguistic reporter. As someone who’s been writing for a longer period of time, do you think this emphasis (almost an interest in reporting on language as it evolves) is helpful? How much is it possible to keep a good handle on the changes that occur in a living language, especially in the long term? And how much should it be the writer’s duty to try?

WG: Some people have a good ear for the musicality of a language and pick up conversational French, say, just by hearing it spoken on the street; others hear the new words, the syntactical differences, of various argots and slangs, etc.  If you are glib you end up merely following the latest fashion among teenagers who always have to have a lingo of their own, but should not carry it past seventeen without seeming silly.  The good writer has to grasp the lasting quality, rather than the passing changes, of the language.  He also has to be able to get the emotional results he wants by using it.  Of the changes that occur, the creation or adoption of new words is the most obvious.  English has been most generous in this regard.  Changes in syntax and inflection, social status and acceptability, come about most slowly.  They are however the important ones.  Some writers use this information, others don’t.  No one is required to have this interest, but it is certainly an important one.  Again, James is great in playing with the social status every word possesses; but he never wastes his energy on the flybynight.

SPEC: Is there ever a danger in baroque prose’s becoming too much so? What would rococo prose be like?

WG: Any prose style risks being overdone, so that it makes a mockery of itself, and defeats the clarity and depth and efficiency of its aim.  Undercooked, a prose comes to the table cold and raw; overcooked, it is flavorless, dry, and merely tough.

SPEC: A related, kind of random question: There’s a website called savethewords.org that’s gained a bit of publicity lately. Essentially, its founders have tried to attract sponsors to recuperate neglected words in English; they do so by committing to use them in writing and conversation. It almost seems as though the project is motivated by a genuine anxiety that the hygiene of language will decline if too many words disappear from it (even if they’re replaced by new ones). For the founders of this site, the maintenance of variety in language is a matter of grave social (even political) consequence. What are your thoughts about all this? And, when you think about how large a role writers play in shaping the language (Shakespeare being the most obvious example; Tennyson being another—I’m sorry; I can only think of poets at the moment), is this something that they ought to be thinking about, or dealing with, when they write?

WG: The meaning of words is the history of their use.  Baroque prose requires you to recognize where a word has come from, how high it stands in the world of meaning, how potent or neutral it is, and so forth.  But words grow archaic when they are not used, and they should be allowed to die in peace.  New ones will replace them.  The French have long endeavored to keep their language pure.  It has not worked.  And in our changing milling world it shouldn’t.  I find the idea of saving the words by using them pretty silly.  If a society ends up with a small vocabulary it won’t last because it won’t have a full grasp of the world it lives in.  Save the society and you will see words multiply without artificiality.  Such choices (to use this or that to save it) will only produce little verbal social circles to go with the salt cellar collectors.

SPEC: Last fall Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the jury for the Nobel Prize in literature, told the Associated Press that “[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” These remarks caused quite a stir at the time (and were almost certainly dispiriting to the likes of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo). Do you think there’s any merit to Engdahl’s assessment? An do you think there’s something of imaginative value that stands to be gained when a writer grapples with the translation of thoughts and feelings from one language into another?

WG: We don’t translate enough.  That part is true.  But we are getting better.  And we don’t buy translations.  That indicates our provinciality.  But what people read in the U.S. and in Europe is mostly trash, and much of it is from the U.S.  American junk of all kinds is everywhere.  Significant American writers rushed to support, extol, and copy the Latin American boom.  But Latin Americans weren’t Europeans, who are the provincial ones here. We read Calvino, Kis, Sebald… etc.  French and other language departments went goofy over deconstruction, and made its import unwisely popular.  I founded and directed the International Writers Center at Washington University for a decade.  Incidentally, Robbe Grillet was on our faculty.  Philip Roth did wonderful things to support Polish etc. writers, and tackled Israeli issues in one of his greatest books.  Perhaps it is Europe who is insular.  Writers like Hawkes, and Coover lived or live part time in Europe.  You have to be aware of all of literature because local writing (that with only local interest; Faulkner is not local) is doomed to languish.

SPEC: We’ve spoken about musicality in writing. But you also have a well known talent for photography. So I wonder (even though it’s perhaps a facile distinction): do you think about aspects of visual art as you write? And, without getting too bogged down in semiotics, how does this relate to your understanding of musical prose? (I don’t mean to suggest that the two are in any sense opposed, as music can be very evocative of the visual, and vice versa. But I wonder how you understand their interaction, if it’s something that you’ve spent time thinking about.)

WG: I try to think only about what I am writing when I am writing.  When I am not writing I think a lot about the physicality of language, and that includes both its musical and visual character.  I collaborate a good deal with my neighbor, Michael Eastman, a great photographer (who will have a big NY show in May… a little plug), and we discuss such questions all the time.  My photography was mostly note-taking: rescuing what I’d seen instead of writing in a notebook about it.  That meant I could return to it and remind myself what I had, in the meantime, forgot.  Music creates its own space, notes locate themselves in the listener’s consciousness and relate to one another there.  Photograph has its space too, and its way of organizing.  The page is a space. Does it matter where the words go on it?  Yes.  Imagine a page of Mallarme.  Imagine a page of Mallarme photographed.  What happens to the poem?  Plenty.

SPEC: In addition to your fiction, you’re acclaimed for your critical writings. Again, I’m sure you’ve been asked this a hundred times before, but I’m curious: how much overlap is there in the way that you approach these different modes, especially when you’ve thought of an idea or problem to take up in your writing? Have you ever started working out an idea in one mode, and then found that it might be better developed in the other? Or have you used both to work on a single (or related) idea(s)? If so, how did that process play itself out? And did it do anything to revise your understanding of either mode, or of which subjects are best taken up in each?

WG: I am a writer first and a novelist and essayist by accident.  I am clueless about the course of my writing in my novel and in my piece on baroque prose.  I expend the same attention on every detail.  I curse my subjects with equal anger.  Of course, I am also doing different things.  In one case I am making up everything, in the other I am making up nothing (scholarly rigor is aimed at, etc).  But explication is the essay’s form of narration.  My hero in my baroque book is baroque prose itself.  In the essay I will talk about it; in the novel I will write that way sometimes.  But in my essay I will write that way all the time.  I am a sucker for imitative form, though I remember what Coleridge said about it.  Musil (possibly Proust) wrote the greatest essay/novel.  But I would never stop in a novel to analyze a passage of my own prose (hey, maybe I should), or anybody else’s.

SPEC: For a great deal of your career as a writer, you were also employed as an academic. I could imagine that this has its benefits (e.g., a work schedule that is in many ways hospitable to the process of writing, especially in contrast to the drudgery of certain 9-5 professions—although I understand that academic life has its own peculiar difficulties.) I know you’ve been keeping busy since your retirement from regular teaching (your output attests to it), but do you find that your productivity, or the practice of your writing, has changed at all? And, to the extent that it relates to the tempo of your life as an academic, has this change been for good or bad (if it’s had any significant effects to speak of)?

WG: When you retire (I waited until I was 76) you have time for illness, all the equipment in your house breaks, you can’t carry in cases of wine, relatives start coming to visit while you are still alive…  I taught for fifty years.  It was a wonderful occupation.  One cannot stress too much the advantage of Plato’s company, or Aristotle’s either, or Kant’s and Hume and Hobbes.  Our students at Wash U were good, and teaching is demanding in its own good way.  The rigamarole around it is pretty intolerable, however.  Committees kill not only their members but all of their ideas.  I don’t miss that.  I don’t miss teaching either.  It has been time to spill the beans, not pick them up. So I get to do what I love/hate most.  And listen with my inner ear to my pacemaker.  Writing, for me, remains as hard as ever.

SPEC: Who are your all-time favorite prose stylists? Why? Does the influence of any of these bear on your understanding of the kind of writing that you’ll be lecturing on, come Wednesday?

WG: My favorite prose writers are the writers I will be talking (and writing) about.  But they are not my only favorites.  I listed some of them in A Temple of Texts.  There is Joyce, Proust, Mann, Musil, Barth, Woolf, Porter, Stein, and so on into the many many hundreds.  These aren’t influences on my subject.  They are my subject.

SPEC: In your opinion, are there any current writers who proffer good examples of baroque prose? Who? Why?

WG: Paul West writes it when he chooses to.  He can write well in a dozen styles.  Alexander Theroux.  It is not popular.  You ask why? Because they do.

SPEC: What sort of writing are you working on these days?

WG: A novel called Middle C, a little book called On Some Passages in Jeremy Taylor, getting a couple of essay collections together, still working on The Architecture of the Sentence.  Essays now and then for Harper’s.

SPEC: We’ve talked about the shape of a work of art, and that makes me wonder: do you ever consider the shape of your career, especially when you attend to your current projects. I don’t mean to demean your age, of course (for one thing, you respond to e-mail faster than most people I know), but I’m curious as to how much your current writing is informed by a sense that you’re in one of the later stages of your career. I suppose I’m reminded of a theme from Edward Said’s On Late Style. He wrote that while “late works crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor,” there is a lot of historical evidence for “artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.”

WG: I don’t think of its shape… the so-called arc de dump.  I will die but I don’t have time to plan on it.  As for youthfulness: I value experimentation.  In that area I am one of the youngest writers now writing.  I smile when I see all these old young people still treating a sentence as if it had been a child of Dick and Jane.  A sermon of Donne’s often has more ideas, more energy, certainly more art, than these writer’s entire books.  And the meters of Sir Thomas Browne are confounding and should astonish everyone.  Age is not a function of time but of mind, the old old old saying goes.  Try a novel by the great Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo.  He’ll measure how young you are, not the New Yorker.  I recently had to do a retrospective piece.  It was a horrible experience.  Don’t look back; complete immobility may be gaining on you.

SPEC: James Wood spoke to students in Columbia’s Writing Program a few weeks ago, on the centrality of character to the fiction writer’s work. Toward the end of his lecture, as he was discussing different attitudes re: character-creation, he referred to you as a “formalist fatalist.” (To be fair, he also criticized Harold Bloom for being too invested in certain characters, to the point of over-identification.) Do you think that this is a common perception of your approach to fiction? Is there anything that you would say to revise or correct it? And, for the sake of fairness, do you have any thoughts on James Wood?

WG: I’m surprise that he had time for me.  I do identify myself as a formalist (in my sense of the word), and I am proud to be an elitist (in my sense of the word).  My formalism has nothing to do with pre-established structures.  It holds that the key to esthetic experience does not lie in terms but in relations – ideally internal relations: i.e., not as an apple lies on a plate, but as H and O make water.  For me, character is defined linguistically: it is any recurring subject that is repeatedly modified by elements of the text which stand as predicates to it.  So David Copperfield is indeed a character in Dickens, but so is a movie poster or a mountain in Malcolm Lowry.   A perfectly organized book would end up as Hegel said the Absolute should: every word would ultimately modify or affect one and only one subject.  This is nonsense as far as the world goes but fiction is not the world. It’s important relations are internal the way they are in a Cezanne still life.  I don’t know what he means by fatalist.
Perhaps it is someone who has given up trying to be understood.  By the way, I don’t pick fights, except with the church.  I am sure his opinion is well considered and well informed.

SPEC: In general, how do you feel about the state of literary criticism today (especially in this country)? There was a lot of hand-wringing re: the recent folding of the Washington Post’s Book World section. On that note, do you think that criticism, especially that which is provided by serious book reviews (either in print or online), is in any kind of trouble?

WG: There is no state of literary criticism in America.  I think this is a very wholesome condition.  Deconstruction and all its dreadful bloodsucking “isms” are now reduced to squalling helplessness.  There are fine critics who have various individual takes on things who regularly write for NYRB, Bookforum, NYTimes, Washington Post, Atlantic, Harper’s, and so on, whom one may read agree or disagree and enjoy.  As civilized persons are supposed to.  Serious novels are scarce, rarely tracts, seldom shocking except for their formal properties, and a small number of critics should be able to handle them.  Criticism is, by the way, one of the most difficult of activities.  Think, in past centuries, how many great poets, dramatists, or novelists there have been.  Then count the number of equally significant critics.  The critics can scarcely be found.  Once found, one finds that they are also novelists, poets, and dramatists.