American Graffiti: Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Country’

AMERICAN GRAFFITI: GASS'S 'IN THE HEART OFTHEHEARTOFTHE COUNTRY' Stan Fogel The narrators in William Gass' s fiction attempt relentlessly to yoke signs and being, to replace an inchoate world with their noetic, their verbal structures. The same impulse prods Donald Barthelme's Snow White to utter her lament, "O I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always here. " 1 Perceiving a mundane, banal milieu around her, she betrays a yearning for the kind of language play that has not turned being into a cliche, into the jejune phrasing that has cosseted the world. In this sense, as it is for E.L. Doctorow in "False Documents," creative use of language produces liberation from reified perceptions of the world and concomitantly from sterile visions of America. The attempt on the part of the metafictionists and their protagonists is to undermine the status of those false documents which have become ensconced as reality. The purpose is not to supplant those documents with truer ones (though occasional thrasonical narrators try); rather, it is to expose the palpable fictiveness of those and any documents that purport to explain world, that masquerade as truth rather than as construct. Such an engagement with false documents is vital not only in epistemological tem1s, but also in social terms. Monolithic America and its ideology, and concomitantly its reality, are reduced to the status of Vonnegut's bad fiction. Thus, although Gass's characters such as Jethro Furber (Omensetter's luck), Willie Master's lonesome wife and the melancholy and bitter narrator of •'In the Heart of the Heart of the Country'' do not confront overtly and didactically the American identity, their dilemmas pertain to the status of anyidentity which has 66 Stan Fogel been accorded ontological security. For them the battle is between bland world shaped for them to inhabit and enriched fictive world they create. The former milieu is one which is saturated by, to quote Doctorow, the language of the regime. That language, among its other properties, dispenses facts, imbuing such terms as soul or dernocracy or identity crisis, for example, with validity; Doctorow 's language of freedom calls into question these facts. The power of this language lies in its ability to be marshalled into false documents as real as, but other than, those documents upon which the power of the regime confers truth. Doctorow writes: The novelist's opportunity to do his work today is increased by the power of the regime to which he finds himself in opposition. As clowns in the circus imitate the aerialists and tight-rope walkers, first for laughs and then so that it can be seen that they do it better, we have it in us to compose false documents more valid, more real, more truthful than the "true" documents of the politicians or the journalists or the psychologists . Novelists know explicitly that the world in which we live is still to be formed and that reality is amenable to any construction that is placed upon it. It is a world made for liars and we are born liars.:! Gass's most well-known short story, the often anthologized' 'In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,'' sharply and vividly expresses the clash of the two warring camps with their attendant ideologies and languages. The directory of middle America is clustered in separate sections of the story labelled ''Data,'' ''More Vital Data'' and ''Final Vital Data'': the clubs (''The IOOF, FFF, VFW, WCTU, WSCS, 4-H, 40 and 8, Psi Iota Chi, and PTA"), the businesses ("There are two restaurants here and a tearoom. two bars. onebank .... '' [177]), etc. There is the midwestern character succinctly and sardonically defined: "Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated. They are the Midwest's open sores." (197) This harsh and skeletal portrait is drawn of "B ... a small town fastened to a field in Indiana." (172) Ironically recalling Yeats's Byzantium, the refuge of the artist who experiences an ecstasy free of the fury and the mire of human veins, the locale at the heart of the heart of this narrator's country is a heartless place...