Volume 23, Number 13 · August 5, 1976
The Wild Blue Yonder
By Michael Wood
On Being Blue
by William Gass
Godine, 96 pp., $10.00
The Franchiser
by Stanley Elkin
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 342 pp., $8.95
Proust believed that 'only metaphor' could give 'a sort of eternity to style.' But he also said that his 'whole philosophy' came down to 'justifying, reconstructing what is.' Taken together, the two thoughts point us not only toward Proust's own achievement, the rescue of a fading world by means of vivid analogy, but also toward the work of William Gass and Stanley Elkin, whose styles are thick with metaphor and yet who practice close observation of things as they are. Metaphors arise, Elkin said in a recent interview,[*] from the careful study of appearances. 'I try literally to look at what I'm writing about.' What he teaches his writing students at Washington University in St. Louis is that 'things look like other things.' As the patterns on American sports jackets, to pick up a simile from The Franchiser, look like 'optical illusions,…like aerial photographs of Kansas wheat fields, Pennsylvania pastureland, or the russets of erosion in western national parks.' 'Every loving act of definition,' Gass writes in his new book, meaning definition in language, 'reverses the retreat of attention to the word and returns it to the world.'
Review, 2380 words
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