“It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about; by singing to themselves the large, round lines they find, at the same time as they applaud their placement on the page, their rich surroundings, and everywhere the show of taste and care and good custom – what a cultivated life is supposed to provide; for if my meal is mistakenly scraped into the garbage, it becomes garbage, and if garbage is served to me on a platter of gold by hands in gloves, it merely results in a sardonic reminder of how little gold can do to rescue ruck when ruck can ruin whatever it rubs against; but if candlelight and glass go well together, and the linens please the eye as though it were a palate, and one’s wit does not water the wine, if one’s dinner companions are pleasing, if the centerpiece does not block the view and its flowers are discreet about their scent, then whatever fine food is placed before us, on an equally completed plate, will be enhanced, will be, in such a context, only another successful element in the making of a satisfactory whole; inasmuch as there is nothing in life better able to justify its follies, its inequities, and its pains (though there may be many its equal) than in getting, at once, a number of fine things right; and when we read, too, with our temper entirely tuned to the text, we become – our heads – we become the best book of all, where the words are now played, and we are the page where they rest, and we are the hall where they are heard, and we are, by god, Blake, and our mind is moving in that moment as Sir Thomas Browne’s about an urn, or Yeats’s spaded grave; and death can’t be so wrong, to be feared or sent away, the loss of love wept over, or our tragic acts continuously regretted, not when they prompt such lines, not when our rendering of them brings us together in a rare community of joy.”

(William H. Gass, “The Book as a Container of Consciousness,” pp. 351–2 in Finding a Form.)

“Let us look back a moment at Hobbes and his language, which seems to unwind across the page in a continuous and dutiful line and seems to be presenting us with lively incidents from an old story. Yet the rules of English grammar, which determine word order and the direction of modification, require the reader to return, again and again, to what has gone before; to move the eye, that is to say, not at all like a stylus in a groove, but like a tailor’s needle, loop after loop. When phrases are well turned, we linger over them, which interrupts the narrative; and when predicates lead us back to their subject, we find ourselves looking over our shoulder as we go, instead of straight ahead. ‘Hereby it is manifest,’ Hobbes declares, and we must carry that boast forward over an entire paragraph. What is manifest? That men are, when without a common power, in a condition of war. Hobbes halts his thought to tell us what war is in terms of what weather is. In short, any complex idea is like a territory to be traversed, not the way a number of ticks reach their tocks, but the way we crisscross a neighborhood or inhabit a building, holding the whole in our head as we walk along one walk, watching a florist wrap a bouquet or, through a window, a barber shave.”

(William Gass, “The Story of the State of Nature,” p. 257 in Finding a Form.)

“By the time Joseph Pulitzer’s charge to the fiction jury reached it, Nicholas Murray Butler had inserted the word ‘some’ in a discreet though critical spot (he called the addition ‘insubstantial’), so that the jury’s charge read, ‘novel . . . which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life . . .’ instead of ‘whole atmosphere,’ the words that were there originally. The jury could not find a winner the first year, wholesomeness being in short supply even among the mediocre, and they would fail again two years later. Butler also fussed about the word ‘manhood’ because he wanted it clearly understood that women writers would be eligible for the prize, so long, of course, as their work presented ‘the highest standard of American manners and manhood.’ ‘Wholesome’ was dropped in 1929 (a poor year for it anyway) and ‘whole’ restored, but ‘wholesome’ answered the bell again the next round, only to be knocked out for good in 1931. Meanwhile, ‘manhood’ and ‘manners’ were also eliminated. In 1936, ‘best,’ which had been allowed to wander back in front of ‘American novel,’ was softened to ‘distinguished.’ Throughout all this, and from the beginning, the short story was given . . . well . . . short shrift. There can be no question that part of the problem with the Pulitzer was the early wording of the award’s conditions.”

(William Gass, “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize,” p. 8 in Finding a Form.)