Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife is an early experiment in William Gass’s continued attention to language, specifically literary language and how it functions. A key question for readers of the novella is whether literary language and “ordinary” language are separate things or whether they share certain features and/or functions. Given the display of typographical fonts and the inclusion of musical notation, photographs, and the colors and textures of pages, the notion of language should be expanded to include all symbolic systems. I’ll focus here on literary and ordinary language rather than the larger category of symbolic systems.
The novella is a challenge to the ways in which ordinary language can be said to mean. Having challenged the meaning-making functions of ordinary language and demonstrated how difficult it is for us to mean something with it, Gass appears to go one step further: literary language doesn’t participate in that function at all (or, at least, should not be engaged with that function in mind). If the function of literary language is not to mean, what is it? To make or create something. What might that something be? Sentences, paragraphs, books—in short, strings of words. The result of this function can be summed up by Archibald MacLeish’s dictum: “a poem should not mean, but be.”
What follows is a very brief overview of a few meaning-making functions of ordinary language challenged in the novella. The introduction also features a description of the book itself, excerpts from interviews with Gass, and a bibliography of sources related to Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. I leave to Michael Kaufmann, Karen Shiff, E. L. McCallum, and Rolf Samuels the descriptions and implications of the particular strings of words and the use of other symbolic systems in the novella.
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Traditionally, discussions about meaning have involved how people use language, language’s affects on readers, relationships among words, and how language corresponds or refers to “the world.” Correspondence theories of meaning usually involve word and sentence meaning, and find the language meaningful by appealing to things like reference, truth, and verification. One simple way to undermine correspondence theories with respect to literary language (specifically fictional discourse) is to say that there are no such persons or things as Jane Eyre or tribbles. If meaning is determined by a correspondence to the world, in these cases, we can argue that such references are meaningless.
To overcome that problem, philosophers have expanded the notion of “world” to include the actual world (including things and actions, as well as concepts like truth or justice); “possible worlds” (C. S. Lewis’s Narnia or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but also Henry James’s London); or “ideational worlds” (in the world of the mind and the various associations of ideas people might have).
Gass has made pointed comments against the assumption that fiction and the language therein has any referential function as far as representing the real world (see Gass on Willie). Fiction is not history. To read it as such is to no longer read it as fiction—in short, to ignore the very thing it is. History and ordinary language place considerable faith in an assumption that nouns are, as we learned in elementary school, names for persons, places, or things. This naming function is at the core of most correspondence theories.
In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, the attack on proper names, which seem to be secure in their function of identifying specific things in the world, is played with in the Blue section where the dominant consciousness of the novella challenges the simplified version of this assumption:
* that proper names function to identify individual people, places, or things, etc. in the world, and
* that this is possible because each individual has a single and unique name.
This is challenged in at least three ways.
First, and more easily resolved, is the case where a proper noun might denote more than one individual. The man who “I” (also refered to as “she”) is presumably with throughout the novel is identified as “Phil.” But, “I/”She” quickly extends this proper name to all men: “They were always Phil.” Again, this is a fatal flaw to our definition, in that it violates the first assumption. We can resolve this issue by jettisoning the entire premise of proper names and argue that all nouns are “common nouns.”
Second, there is the problem of synonymy. The “I”/”She” of the novel has no name and many names. Nearly all critics refer to her as Babs, but “I”/”She”/”Babs?” also acknowledges that “I”/”She”/”Babs?” has taken the names “Olga” “Ella Bend,” and “Baby Babs,” as well as an odd non-proper proper name “Willie Masters’ wife.” A single entity, it seems, can have many names. This critique reveals a fatal flaw in the definition of a proper name, at least as far as the second assumption goes.
Third, the problem of reference is compounded by the possibility of pseudonyms, or “false names.” This problem is explicitly advanced on the opening page of novella where “I”/”She”/”Babs?” informs us that “Gentlemen gave themselves all sorts of pseudonyms, as though she cared or would ever tattle.” For correspondence theories, this isn’t really a problem. Strictly put, a word or a sentence that is wrongly applied is meaningless. When a gentleman whose real name is “Phil” calls himself “Frank,” the word “Frank” doesn’t have anything that it corresponds to.[1]
In all three cases, the proper noun can be said to be meaningless.
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The more general references made by common nouns resolves the first problem, but not the second and third. If all nouns are common, “Phil” or “giggle” or “twiggy little wonder” mean not a particular Phil or giggle or twiggy little wonder, but a class of entities that share Phil-like or giggle-like or twiggy-little-wonder-like qualities. There might be cases that look like proper names, but only because there is one entity in the class.
A revised definition of a noun, then, would be something like: a common noun functions to identify people, places, or things, etc. in the world, where people, places, or things, etc. share a set of unique qualities, and that each class has a single and unique noun that corresponds to it.
The second problem, that of synonymy, still holds. If the class sharing penis like qualities is called “penis,” then other words, when applied to those qualities, will be meaningless. Mentions of “dick,” “peter,” “bun,” “sausage,” or “twiggy little wonder” in the novella are simply meaningless.
These are some of the semantic problems that lead “I”/”She”/”Babs?” to suffer the “terror of terminology.” But the terror here is not limited to “literal” meaning. “I”/”She”/”Babs?” is terrorized by language itself, both literal and metaphoric. At the end of the novella, it appears that metaphor can overcome the semantic problems as “I”/”She”/”Babs?” declares “Metaphor must be its god now gods are metaphors.” Is literary language literary because it is metaphoric?
Ordinary language is rife with metaphor, so it is difficult to mark a distinction between the two based upon that distinction alone. Moreover, metaphoric meaning suffers the same problems of semantic meaning that literal meaning suffers. But metaphor (as long as it isn’t dead) has the advantage of calling attention to the problems of truth, reference, and verifiability. We might call a loved one “Honey,” or a penis a “sausage.” We know that the loved one is really not honey and that the penis is not a sausage. A loved one might share a quality of honey, or the penis might share a quality of a sausage, but for “honey” and “sausage” to mean something in these cases, we still must appeal to truth, reference, and verifiability. The god metaphor is still a tyrant, but the god, at least, is open and honest about the tyranny.
We might imagine Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife to be a narrative of the overthrow of the tyrant of terminology; the book acknowledges the problems outlined above, simply adds layers upon layers of words as if they are meaningful, and asks us to take joy or find beauty in the impasse that arises by such complexity, a complexity that is further compounded by a wide range of discursive styles. The adding of more and more words and styles in which those words might play works as the god metaphor works, it highlights the tyranny and diffuses it. We see this announced at the end of the White section where “I”/”She”/”Babs?” says “Then let us have a language worthy of our world, a democratic style where the rich and well-born nouns can roister with some sluttish verb…a diction which contains the quaint, the rare, the technical, the obsolete, the old, the lent, the nonce, the local slang and argot of the street…”etc. This plurality runs rampant through the book and establishes a corresponding explosion of plurinated meanings.
This is demonstrated in the Olive section, where the featured text, the play, needs an endless series of footnotes and footnotes to footnotes to come to a definite “meaning.” Such a meaning is impossible—one can never produce enough glosses on a text to firmly determine what it means. Moreover, each of the glosses suffers the same kinds of referential problems already outlined.
Indeed, much of the book can be read as a series of “glosses” on “She.” We begin with “She” as it tumbles out of a woman’s mouth. Everything after that attempts to give us more information about this “She.” “She” goes by various names. “I”/”She” suffers the “tyranny of terminology.” “I”/”She”/”Babs?” acted in the play represented in the Olive section. “I”/”She”/”Babs?”/”Olga” has worried about spit and shit and kisses and their saintly manifestations. One can only enjoy the play/impasse, the ultimate inability to nail down just who “I”/”She”/”Babs?”/”Olga”/”Willie Masters’ wife” is.
The tyranny of terminology still exists, but it is diffused into a kind of anarchy.
One way out of the semantic problem of reference, truth, and/or verifiability is to reject the assumption that words correspond to a world outside of language itself, whether that world be actual, possible, ideational, or some combination of the three. The difference between ordinary language and literary language is that, while they share certain vocal qualities or graphic representations, literary language has no reference to the world—and, on the above definitions, has no meaning whatsoever. So these worlds might have a Timothy or a Corrine or a giggle or wovveling. But in literature there are only words, only “Timothy” and “Corrine” and “giggle” and “wovveling.” The primary function of language is, therefore, to create particular instances of itself. As Gass says, he is a maker of sentences (placing himself in a long tradition that invokes the “poet as maker”). Rather than looking for meaning in the text, we should be looking at the book itself.
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1. Strictly speaking, mistaken application or use is not a semantic problem, but resides in the realm of pragmatics and how people use language: a false name can be intentionally used, whether openly as in a game of “pretend” or make-believe, or without such open-ness as in lying or other forms of deception. The belief that works of fiction are based upon such pretenses or make-believes is widespread. Such a belief is not, however, held by Gass, since what counts as a misapplication or a pretending is determined by appealing to the world, whether it be actual, possible, or ideational. One might, for example, have a make-believe bun, but it is only meaningful because somewhere in the world(s) there are non-make-believe buns.
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