Gass, William. Tests of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 319 pp.

The story goes that young Oscar Peterson was pretty well convinced he was going to be hot stuff on the piano until he was told to listen to a recording of the great Art Tatum. Hearing the ambidextrously polyphonic Tatum find keyboard notes where one would not imagine them to be, Oscar fell into a deep funk and bawled.

Think, then, about what a fledgling writer—even one who has earned a master’s degree in writing—may feel when reading the essays of William Gass for the first time. It is enough to wonder if one should turn off the computer and seek another degree before typing another word.

In Tests of Time, Gass’s breadth of knowledge, evinced with a polylingual range of allusions and his ability to write in several contexts at one time, and his world-wiseness present the author as a postmodern Emerson. But whereas the more pastoral and less acerbic Waldo used nature as a rhetorical riff to advance his new American religion, Gass is fond of tongue-in-cheek pedantry laced with Freudian overtones (mixed with modern colloquialisms) that subtly push the reader toward his own secular wisdom.

This collection, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, has three sections: “Literary Matters,” “Social and Political Contretemps,” and “The Stuttgart Seminar Lectures,” which includes a remarkable essay, “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert,” where Gass pools all of his resources and methods to propose that, historically, language (and its rhetoric) can manufacture a persona behind which anyone can hide:

I know you can’t hurt language. It can absorb every stink-footed invader and turn them, in time into model citizens…each of us has a somewhat different tongue…. Henry James does not have the word ‘snot’ in his vocabulary…. He knows not what ‘snot’ means…. He is a gentleman…. He does not write sentences like ‘Geez, Louise, it’s okay, play with yourself if you wanna.’ (223)

Gass is such an expert at managing a cornucopia of terms because he understands not only their interconnectivity but also their power to construct forms of reality: “…all of us are simply clots of words.” And the literary fraud that tries to redefine history (“Fred Miller” he calls the German who penned a classic post-WWII lie) understands that truth the most.

Gass is capable, though, of transcending sarcasm with alarming clarity:

For the real writer, life does more than accept or resemble language; it coughs up words like gobs of bloody spit…and every one is more historical than history, deep beyond diving, wide beyond reach…. Lovemaking used to be thoughtless…but as our senses dulled to one another, the familiar was forgotten, and words rose in the mind where reality had been… . (233-34)

In these essays, Gass extends the biblical principle suggested in Genesis, that man’s unique capability is in naming, the use of language to create reality and present it in the terms of the creator. The god of language—us—procreates at will.

In the title essay, Gass states, “History is humanity on its rampage…it should be an occasion for surprise when anything excellent survives.” With Tests of Time, be ready to be surprised.

Jeff Cebulski