"Middle C" is a Tonic of Imagination

It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge of the Imagination. “It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” He penned this celebrated definition in a chapter of “Biographia Literaria” titled “On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power.”  In that chapter, the poet, critic, and philosopher also coined a new word, “esemplastic,” to articulate the Imagination’s unique uniting force, its power to mold disparate objects into one.

William H. Gass’s latest novel “Middle C” might achieve Coleridge’s poetic ideal with its masterful prose. In his literary theory, Gass is chiefly concerned with the ontological transformation of language into literature, and he incorporates many of Coleridge’s ideas. With his intellectual project underpinning the novel, Gass certainly demands a lot of his readers: plot takes a backseat to explosive sentences, elaborate metaphors, and abounding references. But the fundamental unit of Gass’s language is the sentence—each ekes out a life of its own—and though the driving force of “Middle C” might not be immediately evident, the resounding truth of the novel lives in the book’s close. Gass’s diction is, in an uprooted word, esemplastic.

The storyline of the novel is less plot than premise, a stage for Gass’s performance. The novel follows one Joseph Skizzen who immigrates to Woodbine, Ohio and under a sinister pretense becomes a self-taught professor of musicology at a small college. His parents, Rudi and Miriam, leave Austria in the ‘30s fearing the nation’s approaching fate even before the Anschluss. They aren’t Jewish but claim to be so and flee to England, where Rudi disappears. Miriam crosses the Atlantic with Joseph and sister Deborah, and after they land the trio attempts an ordinary middle-American life, despite their dubious background. From then on, Joseph Skizzen’s life is built with falsehood as infrastructure. He fabricates his past—replete with forged academic credentials, fake driver’s licenses, and fictional violinist fathers in the Vienna Philharmonic. Ultimately, the adrenaline of the novel is created sentence by sentence: Gass’s construction of the truth mirrors Skizzen’s alternating impulses to curate and to compose.

Gass assigns Joseph Skizzen, and his father alike, three identities in the novel. While Joseph’s father adopts new identities to match the circumstances, Joseph’s shifts in selfhood seem to happen to him rather than by him.  His father passed from Rudi Skizzen the Austrian, through Yankel Fixel the Jew, to Raymond Scofield the Englishman. Though Joseph simply sets out as Joey, crosses to Joseph, and arrives at Professor Skizzen, he retains his father’s deceitful inclinations. He zigzags to middle-age with no companions except his aging mother, and with few diversions aside from music.

Skizzen does, however, have one peculiar hobby, which becomes a metaphor that wants to transcend metaphor, unifying the object with its meaning. He obsessively curates an Inhumanity Museum in the attic of his Victorian house. In newspaper clippings, photographs, and paintings, Skizzen exhibits atrocity.  Gass’s introduction of Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum displays Gass’s lyrical genius and the way that his language aims to construct rather than describe. Among the museum’s contents are “clips from films that showed what struck the eyes of those who first entered the extermination camps—careless heaps of skins and bones, entirely tangled, exhibiting more knees and elbows than two-pair-to-a-death ought allow.”

Skizzen’s curation of the Inhumanity Museum—a self-conscious construction of metaphor by Gass—parallels his other fixation: throughout the novel, Skizzen attempts to compose a single sentence that will condemn humanity. Its initial iteration reads, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Skizzen’s struggle to perfect this single sentence displays Gass’s own conviction and corresponding goal. Language, when used correctly, can become the thought itself. The impulse is not a creative one, and in fact Skizzen struggles to create. Gass writes of a short verse that Skizzen had just drafted: “Professor Skizzen thought it should be sung. He planned to compose some music. If only he knew how.”

Gass’s sentences are notes with their own frequencies, counterpoints, tonics and modulations in what may be the philosopher-writer’s last aria. And while the sentences themselves propel the novel forward, they are copper and tin, not bronze. They are the Imagination that transforms Gass’s language into literature, novel into truth. As Skizzen’s first piano instructor bluntly poses, “What are you going to remember—the notes? No. The tune.”

—Staff writer Zoë K. Hitzig can be reached at zhitzig@college.harvard.edu.