Hue and Cry

ON BEING BLUE: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY by WILLIAM GASS 91 pages. David R. Godine. $8.95.

Why are blue movies condemned by the bluenoses? How is it possible that blue skies signify happiness while the blues represent a descent into lowdown misery? Once in a blue moon seems more than often enough to raise such questions, and the philosopher who does so is obviously in the mood for a blue streak of idle speculation.

Or is it so idle after all? William Gass is not only a philosopher in the business of posing paradoxes but a writer (Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) to whom words matter. Blue, for instance. Gass notes that "a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects." Gass would like to know why, and he is writer enough to make his inquiry far more entertaining than just another academic trip through the wild blue yonder.

Not since Herman Melville pondered the whiteness of Moby Dick has a region of the spectrum been subjected to such eclectic scrutiny. Gass hoards azure words and holds them up to the light: "Blue poplar. Blue palm ... the blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue John is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are yankee boys." He squints at past authorities on physics (Democritus, Aristotle, Galen), the bet- ter to glimpse the essence of this protean color in the corner of an eye. The mystery remains, more mysterious because Gass so thoroughly exposes its complexities. Yet the humanist does not visit nature for facts but for creative suggestions, and these Gass offers in abun- dance: "Blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed."

The erotic overtones of this surmise tinge Gass's entire argument. For he is not finally interested in pinning "blueness" to the wall, but in suggesting what is truly "blue" in the realm of art. Not, he insists, the vivid depiction of sexual activity. Literature can convey only a mechanical imitation of the real thing--and offer a skewed reality to boot: "I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it, a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing." Instead of their lovers, Gass wants writers to caress their language: "It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word." In Gass's view, the truly "blue" writers are not those who flaunt explicitness but those whose works demonstrate "love lavished on speech of any kind, regardless of content and intention."

This is a polemic, although the author does not alert the reader to the argument on the other side. His approach leads to a hermetic absorption with words as objects rather than signs pointing outward--precisely the premise that makes so much "experimental" writing so ghastly and unreadable. Gass also passes off a tautology as profundity: "I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say." This is both true and too cute by half; it nar- rows human awareness to the single focus of language, denies the very variety of living that words can celebrate.

Yet by his own definition Gass has produced a very blue book, both in the sinuous beauty of its language and in the passion for argument his words radiate. He gives philosophy back its old good name as a feast that can never sate the mind. He also has the common sense not to run on until he is blue in the face. Paul Gray

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