Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System

Paper Empire

Paper Empire William Gaddis and the World System

EDITED BY JOSEPH TABBI AND RONE SHAVERS INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH TABBI

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2007 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeface: ACaslon ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paper empire : William Gaddis and the world system / edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers ; introduction by Joseph Tabbi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1548-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8173-1548-9 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5406-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8173-5406-9 (alk. paper) 1. Gaddis, William, 1922-1998—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and technology—United States. 3. Globalization in literature. 4. Mass media in literature. 5. Capitalism in literature. I. Tabbi, Joseph, 1960– II. Shavers, Rone, 1970– PS3557.A28Z85 2007 813′.54—dc22 2006020793 An early version of Joseph Tabbi’s “William Gaddis and the Autopoiesis of American Literature” ¤rst appeared in The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris. Normal: Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series, 2004. Used by permission.

Contents

Illustrations Introduction Joseph Tabbi 1. 2.

3.

4.

vii 1

PART I: AESTHETICS An Interview with William Gaddis, circa 1980 Tom LeClair 17 In the Diaspora of Words: Gaddis, Kierkegaard, and the Art of Recognition(s) Klaus Benesch 28 The Collapse of Everything: William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel Stephen J. Burn 46 Gaddis Dialogue Questioned Joseph McElroy 63

PART II: SYSTEMS 5. The Aesthetics of First- and Second-Order Cybernetics in William Gaddis’s J R Stephen Schryer 75 6. William Gaddis and the Autopoiesis of American Literature Joseph Tabbi 90 7. Cognitive Gothic: Relevance Theory, Iteration, and Style Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong 118

vi / Contents

PART III: CAPITAL 8. Critical Mimesis: J R’s Transition to Postmodernity Nicholas Spencer 137 9. Cognitive Map, Aesthetic Object, or National Allegory? Carpenter’s Gothic Nicholas Brown 151 10. The End of Agape: On the Debates around Gaddis Rone Shavers 161 PART IV: MEDIA 11. Writing from between the Gaps: Agape Agape and Twentieth-Century Media Culture Michael Wutz 185 12. Mark the Music: J R and Agape Agape Anja Zeidler 211 PART V: BIOGRAPHY 13. Valuable Dregs: William Gaddis, the Life of an Artist Crystal Alberts 231 14. The Secret History of Agape Agape Steven Moore 256 Works Cited 267 Contributors 277 Index 281

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

A rarely seen side of Gaddis 17 Mithraism appears in Gaddis’s The Recognitions 28 Gaddis’s of¤ce 46 “Unspeakable Practices” 63 An installation view of the Überorgan, created by artist Tim Hawkinson 75 In a modest closed room, Gaddis approximates hypertext 90 A Carpenter’s Gothic house 118 The typewriter on which J R was written 137 A player piano and piano roll with its attendant technology 151 William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and Walter Abish in West Berlin, 1987 161 A page of Gaddis’s work notes for Agape Agape 185 A player piano roll illustrates that music can be viewed as a semiotic system 211 Gaddis in front of a painting of himself by Julian Schnabel 231 Gaddis had a lifelong obsession with the player piano 256

Paper Empire

Introduction Joseph Tabbi

Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, June 2000: in the 300-footlong gallery of a converted textile mill hangs the Überorgan, a combination bagpipe, pipe organ, and player piano “elegantly jury-rigged mostly out of materials you might ¤nd at your local Home Depot and RadioShack.” Cardboard ducts wrapped in aluminum foil convey bellows, bleats, and moans from air-¤lled bags of woven polyethylene; a nylon net holds the bags in place; and the ensemble is connected by wires and alligator clips to electronic sensors that detect the movements of gallery visitors. At the “Composer Console,” twelve ink pens record notes on butcher paper. These dabs and dashes are then transferred with black paint to a 200-foot-long role of Mylar, which winds over twelve photoelectric sensors arrayed like piano keys. The score, derived from church hymns, sailors’ ditties, and the American standard, “Heart and Soul,” is suitably hybrid; its sound, both familiar and hard to place, is not unlike the discordant musicality of William Gaddis’s last work, Agape Agape. Under a ceiling whose structure resembles a ribcage, the Überorgan’s massive biomorphic bags appear delicately traced with blood vessels and nerve endings. The enormous room now houses a human form—but one whose body, heart, and soul are no less mechanized than the turbines and massive looms formerly housed there. The scale of the installation is at once monumental and cartoonish; the sound we hear with “a familiarity that fades in and out” is also the sound of our own breathing and our own blood coursing through our veins. The idea of making a vast pipe organ from notional organs of the body surely would have appealed to Gaddis, as would the epic construction out of secondhand materials using low-tech sophistication. The Überorgan is, after all, an instrument of organization, a means of overcoming chaos in ourselves and disorder in a world without certainty or absolute values. A combined Übermensch (overman) and overhead pipe organ, the huge

2 / Tabbi installation gives us technology writ large as the human body, belonging to “us” but also detachable, responding to “us” but with a dangerous life and energy of its own. The factory that once embodied nineteenth-century industry in all its vast, alienating power has been turned into an echo chamber—still vast, but now oddly, bodily intimate. Key to the installation is the “vent” that forces air into the massive bags. These ¤ll out the organ(s), ®oating them, and making them audible. Gaddis in his last ¤ction, following Homer, instead of characters invented a number of “belly talkers,” hallucinated interlocutors who function as a surrogate audience. Gaddis in this last work addresses his lifework to the dead—not to individuals he has known in his life, but to past poets, dead writers, philosophers, inventors, and visual artists. The Überorgan “vent” is also relevant to the ¤ction: a sort of ventriloquy, a “belly-speak” or dream of the dead. This mode of address—irritable, unresigned, a ¤nal unrestrained venting—is all the more plangent in that Gaddis knew, during the composition, that the manuscript would be read after he himself was gone; the book would be recognized and received, like all of his work, long after his personal interest in the subject matter had passed. An umlauted “u,” printed discretely on the wall at the gallery entranceway, could almost be a smiley face, letting the visitor know that it’s all just corporate fun after all and the bellows and moans are only the sound of the Überorgan having the last laugh.

Composer’s Consolation William Gaddis’s status as a “neglected” writer has been repeated so often, with so many sighs and urgent claims for rediscovery, that one is hard put to present his work, posthumously, in any other context: He is the writer who is “famous for not being famous enough,” as Cynthia Ozick wrote on the 1985 publication of Carpenter’s Gothic; “Mr. Dif¤cult,” in the words of novelist Jonathan Franzen. Even admirers of his work have come to depend on the trope of neglect. That and his so-called dif¤culty somehow put him in advance of the literary fashions, a postmodernist avant la letter, with the unfortunate consequence that, when postmodernism would itself become a dead letter commercially, the publishing industry would ¤nd yet another reason to dismiss Gaddis. What is unnoticed, by detractors and even many admirers, is that for a long time Gaddis has been neither neglected nor especially dif¤cult. He has

Introduction / 3 never been popular, this is true, but he enjoyed more than respectable sales from the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic, his third novel, to the end of his life. He received National Book Awards for J R (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994). Late in life, he experienced a celebrity’s welcome in Germany; and he traveled to Russia and the Far East as a kind of literary ambassador under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. The muted response to the publication of the posthumous work, similar in too many ways to the reception of his two early, major novels, was answered a year later by an outpouring of appreciations in Conjunctions from more than twenty fellow novelists and writers. There were detailed essay-narratives by near contemporaries such as Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gass, and Joseph McElroy, but many more, tonally surprising, entries from novelists one, two, and three literary generations younger, Gaddis’s lifelong audience and posthumous hope. All this indicates that “the work continues its own existence,” a selfsustaining, indeed autopoietic re-creation that Gaddis found most gratifying especially among young people (as he told Tom LeClair in an early, comparatively unguarded interview, published in the present volume for the ¤rst time). Rather than repeat the trope of neglect or attempt once again to introduce Gaddis to a book-buying audience that remains, and probably must remain, recalcitrant, the critical writers featured in this volume place the work in context. Rather than seek to widen the audience (to what purpose?), we follow Gaddis’s own lead in Agape Agape, a book that addresses itself exclusively to the dead (including the dead within and among us). With that remarkable ultimate scaling down, at once generous in its stance toward reality but concentrated in its aesthetic purpose, Gaddis made no attempt at widening the “very small audience” he had already foreseen for himself in his ¤rst novel, The Recognitions (1955). Gaddis criticism likewise can do without attempts at overt promotion. What is needed is to continue building the network of allusions, literary and historical references, and recognized sources for the similarly networked, similarly integrated world system that Gaddis inhabited, more fully than any American literary contemporary or follower so far.

Networked Narrative The literary network, as its construction continues, needn’t be limited to readers of ¤ction. No one who has encountered the installations of Tim Hawkinson (the Überorgan depicted on the cover of this book for example);

4 / Tabbi no one who has experienced the hand-drawn ¤lms of William Kentridge (the crisscrossing telephone lines interlinking one man, his of¤ce phone, his family, his lover, the Johannesburg city infrastructure, and, ultimately, Schrödinger’s cat in a box); no one who has seen the collage-work of Julian Schnabel (who composed a portrait of Gaddis reproduced alongside the essay in this volume by Crystal Alberts)—none of these diverse audiences would ¤nd anything abstruse about a lifelong investigation of networks, systems of organization, or modernity as a continuing standoff between mechanization and the arts. No reader of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri should balk at Gaddis’s expansiveness. After A. R. Ammons, no reader should ¤nd it strange that poetry and a narrative of surprising intimacy can be generated by the sheer garbage, both verbal and material, that American corporate culture produces in unprecedented quantities. There is no mass audience for these massive works of contemporary art, poetry, and political philosophy, but the audience is nonetheless sizeable, sustainable on its own terms long after the work’s appearance. The individuals who make up, not a public, not even an audience of nearby listeners but rather a network of fellow creators, are in touch with one another through the same systems and communicative structures that the artists, poets, and philosophers take as their point of reference. The publishing industry in America, for reasons discerned by Gaddis and amply documented in his novels, has largely abandoned any serious interest, let alone the sustaining critical discussion, necessary to reproduce literary works (in stable editions available in libraries and through forums of scholars and co-creators capable of referencing past work as a measure for current production). On every front, commercial, academic, and political, serious writing recedes to near invisibility. Yet none of this means that a readership for serious ¤ction doesn’t exist. The challenge to Gaddis scholarship and criticism, now that the body of work is complete, the archive is available, and edited editions are in circulation through the Viking Contemporary Classics series, is to bring this work and its readers in touch with af¤liated threads in the newly emerging, only partially public, networks linking narrative, philosophy, literary theory, and the visual and sound arts. Gaddis’s work, uniquely among American post- (cold) war ¤ctions, details the supports and structures hidden from view—hidden by the proliferating languages of commerce, law, economics, technoculture and other professions concerned, necessarily, with their self-regulation, their own survival and reproduction, and their distinction from the codes and languages of competing professions. Most of all, the professional activities so well documented by

Introduction / 5 Gaddis are in constant need of insulation from the mass of disorganized, noisesome, unprofessionalized, procreative life. All professions, as the lawyer Harry Lutz says in A Frolic of His Own, are conspiracies “against the public, every profession protects itself with a language of its own, look at that psychiatrist they’re sending me to, ever try to read a balance sheet?” (251). Ever try to read a sincere narrative of personal “witness” by an author who has been taught to “write what you know”? What can such advice mean, except that apprentice writers should protect themselves from the proliferating knowledges and purposely impersonal expression of professions and disciplines? That the academic representatives of both literary and extra-literary disciplines are housed in close proximity, in the same colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences where most published authors in America now receive their training, hasn’t kept scienti¤c and professional content from being reduced, in ¤ction, to its exclusively human effects, those that contain all the affects needed for emotional stimulation but only a fraction of the truth about contemporary systems and structures. Technologies, economics, legal mechanisms—in most ¤ction today these are knowable only to the extent that they can be domesticated, known only as symptoms of something else— namely, in individual pathologies, neuroses, home, and private circumstances that everyone can understand, however vaguely these domestic conditions are linked to deeper, material conditions that produce them. (It may be no accident that Gaddis succeeds least when he purposely reduces the space of literary representation, in Carpenter’s Gothic, to the domestic space of a single home, and registers global conditions exclusively as they affect the lives of a restricted set of characters: on this valuation most contributors now agree, including both Nicholas Brown, writing from a postcolonial perspective, and Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong, taking a cognitive approach.) With a shift toward a world system come shifts in power that are still not resolved—not least the power to determine literary value, to determine what counts as Contemporary, what counts as American, or even what counts as Fiction. (The question, “How Does the State Imagine?” and the “grand ¤ctions” of religious belief are topics of sustained re®ection in Gaddis’s essays and occasional writings, collected posthumously in The Rush for Second Place [2002].) Nowhere are the fault lines in the contemporary literary landscape more clearly de¤ned than in the multiple receptions accorded to Gaddis’s posthumous work. Published a few weeks in advance of Agape Agape, Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay set the tone for subsequent treatment (or, more often, encouraged neglect) in most national review media. Sven

6 / Tabbi Birkerts’s response in the New York Times Book Review, with its gratuitous attack on deconstruction and academic literary criticism, worked to contain any positive reception within the terms of a defensive American literary avant-garde. Among prominent reviews only Hal Foster’s, in the London Review of Books, pointed to the larger context of Gaddis’s art, his participation in a combined literary and technological exploration that opens out (notably in the imaginative critical writing of Walter Benjamin) to an international— one might now say global—conception of literature in relation to technology and the arts.

VR and the Virtual: Gaddis Compared with Franzen Signi¤cantly, Foster points to Gaddis’s hybridity, his ability to “write in the gap between the two dispensations,” between science and literature, theory and narrative, “different orders of linguistic imagination.” Taking up this manifold approach, Paper Empire offers a set of fourteen essays by both practical and conceptual critics, writers of essays as well as ¤ctions who in every case move beyond the controversy to a more sustained view of a remarkable American literary presence. More is at stake here than an argument for one author’s importance. By seeking to understand Gaddis, the contributors probe what it means to write realistically in the current global culture and media-dominated age. Systems nowadays rarely conform to our intuitive understanding—shaped as such understanding has been by causal, classical mechanics, by managed economies and of¤cial national languages. Least of all can systems be said to be systematic, in the mechanical sense that outcomes can be predicated on the basis of known inputs and initial conditions. Likewise the novel, which emerged out of these same national programs and mechanistic paradigms, has evolved various nonintuitive, antirepresentational stances—although these, too, are resisted by a narrowly literary aesthetic that remains, for the most part, within the terms of nineteenth-century social realism. To circumscribe the effects of contemporary systems into what can be known, by a single protagonist, a speci¤c community, or an author’s own narrative self-projection (however ironical or limited in omniscience), is drastically to reduce the literary work and its critical understanding. One can ¤nd no better measure of this reduction than in the work of Franzen himself. Topically, The Corrections (2001) deals with the same global issues that preoccupy Gaddis. The historical roots of the changing global culture are ably,

Introduction / 7 and often humorously, explored in an international context, though always, inevitably, the effects are registered through a series of individual witnesses, with the coming into spiritual, ¤nancial, and sexual awareness of three siblings and their midwestern parents. When news of the world reaches these characters, it is mostly, inevitably, through talk: table talk, bedroom talk, bar talk, boardroom talk, or that most talkative of modern media, the Internet. Rarely however does the author of The Corrections re®ect on the material supports for his own medium, in the way, for example, that Gaddis channels “talk” in J R and Frolic through telephone lines, televisions, and all the other nonliterary media that emerged after the novel itself had already come into its own. The novel of manners, the novel of ideas, and the nineteenthcentury realistic novel certainly remain viable as ways of talking about modern developments—but the altered circulation of talk itself can only be hinted at when talk is unaccompanied by the novelist’s self-conscious engagement, in his own medium, with other media and other (less easily registered) modes of communication. As Joseph McElroy notices in his contribution to this volume, the “voices” in J R are important not only for what they say but also for all that they “screen”: “a wild urban suburban miscellany” brought to our attention “but not so it sticks together like features of a portrait.” The programmatic refusal of dif¤culty in ¤ction, while it holds that living complexity in the background, also limits the way a novelist can engage with an emerging global culture. Like Gaddis in The Recognitions, Franzen often transports his characters overseas, to gain perspective on their American circumstance. In The Corrections, for example, a Lithuanian diplomat and businessman can point out, rightly, that after the fall of the Soviet Union and the achievement of a nominal independence, there is “no positive de¤nition of my country.” The dissidence and unof¤cial culture of critique that helped move the Baltic nations to a precarious political independence (eventuating in a greater dependence on the world system of economic and informational exchange) has no purchase against the capitalist order: “ ‘How Lithuanian we all felt,’ Gitanas said, ‘when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we’re not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized— this doesn’t make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age’ ” (447). The situation is not speci¤c to one post-Soviet state (a rather fortunate one, in comparison for example with the many peripheral states that emerged after the dismantling of the Soviet empire). Franzen’s character Chip Lam-

8 / Tabbi bert, an accidental American expatriate whose failure is given as a background and measure of the author’s conception of literary success, does little better than his Lithuanian counterpart in explaining recent changes in his own country. Despite his capacity as a one-time assistant professor of “Textual Artifacts” and the extensive training he’s undergone in all modes of ideological critique, Chip changes nobody’s mind about anything, certainly not the minds of private university students situated to bene¤t most from the world system. His critical disposition, in fact, ¤ts him only to a career composing fraudulent press releases for Lithuania.com, originally a joke Web site but one that attracts credulous investment, cash in the mail, to this newly fashioned country-as-corporation. Chip does not lack imagination, or pathos—but his serious play, effectual in the realm of Public and Virtual Relations, hardly compares with the focused, boundless, and not yet civilized or even fully sexualized imagination of the adolescent antihero of Gaddis’s great novel of American capitalism.1 Before Chip gets real, ¤nds a girl, and settles down to write seriously, he engages himself (like so many of Franzen’s contemporaries, and mine) in the creation of a virtual reality (VR), part image, part verbiage, fully constructed and built knowingly, whole cloth, from illusions easily seen through and readily made into objects of satire and cultural critique. The boy J R’s activities are of a different order altogether, comical, to be sure, but not reducible to the terms of parody. The pay phone outside J R’s shabby Long Island grade school is all the boy needs, by way of a communications infrastructure— that and a handkerchief stuffed into the receiver to make him sound “big,” to create a (patently false) impression of power and authority. No further illusion is needed, because the system is geared, in its operations if not its imagery, toward ®ows of money and information that need very little human intervention—or rather, since human input is never entirely avoidable, agency tends to be reduced to “coded anonymity.” In deals that are more dervish than devious, J R engages not in the virtual reality of digital technology but in something more fundamental—what contemporary philosophy terms the virtual. The virtual, as opposed to VR, has little to do with illusion, it is open-ended in its constructions, mostly analogue in its effects despite its frequently digital source code. The virtual moreover remains largely untouched by critique in its many cultural or ideological forms. It is approached, rather, through paradox and “parable,” the preferred mode for cognitive and philosophical ¤ctions adopted most successfully by Donald Barthelme in ¤ction and Brian Massumi in his book, Parables for the Virtual.

Introduction / 9 Unlike VR, which preempts rather than promotes creativity, the virtual describes a condition of continued poiesis, emergenc(y), distribution of agency, and transformation. The virtual, as opposed to VR, is more cognitive than re®ective, a product of self-referential play rather than a structure built on foundations (even the weightless foundation of computer code). For all these reasons, the virtual is a condition better suited to the limited, socially inexperienced, incompletely formed consciousness of the adolescent mind. Huckleberry Finn stands as the mostly unknowing agent of American postemancipation racism (and its ongoing expansion into the current world system, notably in “offshore,” instrumentalized service industries whose phones are operated often by men and women of color). The boy J R, similarly, is the agent of postindustrial capitalism and its as yet incomplete transformation to the network form. The network model is by now well known, it is no longer a concept belonging exclusively to the avant-garde. In Multitude, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out that the state, particularly the corporate American state that has the most extensive outreach militarily if no longer culturally or economically, has become fully aware of the resisting power of cells and networks, a kind of informal global militia using the same monetary and technological tools that support the world system, to irritate it. (That such irritations can be catastrophic for numberless human beings does not mean that the system itself is threatened with destruction, no more than a natural disaster taking hundreds of thousands of lives much affects the overall South Paci¤c economy.) But awareness by itself is not enough: to engage with the new reality and operationally to thrive, argue Hardt and Negri, the state itself needs to become a network. The prospect emerges that American ¤ction too, to be adequate to the changing nature of state power (and the changing power of nature), might also become a network. This argument is implicit in my own essay in this volume, and in the essays on economics, cybernetics, and cognition by Nicholas Spencer, Steven Schryer and Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong. Adequacy, in this case, doesn’t mean a simple repetition or representational accuracy, but a means of understanding, or reproducing in narrative the founding ¤ctions of state and ¤nancial power, of pointing a direction for the changes taking place in these spheres. What’s called for is not a change in attitude or a modernization of content, but a far-reaching network aesthetic that has, uniquely in American world literature, models going back to Melville, Emerson, Crane, and Dos Passos. It is to this tradition that Gaddis rightly belongs, not literary modernism, not the

10 / Tabbi literary avant-garde although elements of both can also be identi¤ed in Gaddis’s work. Franzen (and a wave of af¤liated novelists of the public sphere discussed by Rone Shavers in his essay) may be aware of networks at a topical level. They are certainly adept at the art of literary networking. Franzen for example can have his character Chip post e-mails from a ¤ctional domain named “gaddis®y.com.” This is another nod—like the very title, The Corrections, to the author of The Recognitions. It signals a kind of awareness, at the user end, of network power; but Franzen, unlike Gaddis, never goes so far as to recast narrative itself as a network.

American World Literature The authors collected in this volume are not the ¤rst to speak of Gaddis’s accomplishment as uniquely “American.” Our use of the term, however, especially in the context of an emerging world system, needs some quali¤cation, and a clear differentiation from earlier uses. Gaddis the “American original,” in Cynthia Ozick’s phrase; the author of “the long-awaited great American novel,” as the San Francisco Review of Books claimed on the publication of J R—such formulations sound dated not because Gaddis’s claim to preeminence has diminished. The invocation of “America” as a bounded nation-state has itself come to seem more limiting than otherwise. When we call Gaddis a quintessential “American” novelist, the term needs to be de¤ned broadly, on the order of an “American World Literature.” Just as “America” itself has become a political and cultural force globally, so has our literature taken on global concerns merely by engaging with the materials, messages, concrete speech, and abstract operations of power at home and in its worldwide circulation. One might argue that it has always been so. From its modern foundations in Emerson, Melville, Poe, and Stein, American writing has been remarkably speci¤c about the making of its own Americanness, its self-fashioning both politically and aesthetically even as the nation (in another formulation advanced by Hardt and Negri) has from its foundation de¤ned sovereignty on a different model from that of the Roman Empire or the European nationstate, not to speak of the short century of Soviet Eastern European and panAsian domination. “Liberty” in the United States, write Hardt and Negri, “is made sovereign and sovereignty is de¤ned as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of expansion” (169). This formulation, while it responds to the receding power of authoritarian states, is not always attentive

Introduction / 11 to the way that an expanding popular sovereignty can also repress egalitarian aspirations. Gaddis does attend to repression and he goes even further, to show in detail how the system is capable of producing deep inequalities regardless of who is operating the controls. The authoritarian Governor John Cates, a formidable intelligence, ultimately has no more power over events than the boy J R, whose unruly energy gives expression to the emerging sovereignty of the multitude. Both Cates and J R are constrained by the same democratic rules and market forces, and both, in the end, make parallel decisions that result in huge losses, creating on balance further inequality but neither one ever stops: Cates is still barking out commands (which will go unheeded) as he enters the hospital operating room, possibly for the last time; J R, the adolescent who’s always asking for help “just this once,” at the novel’s end has one more idea that he tells to the telephone, left hanging at the other end by a recipient who has stopped listening. Gaddis is consistent both with his country and his American literary precursors in ¤nding an altogether unique form for such continuity and expansiveness, the “space-time compression” described in detail by one contributor, Nicholas Spencer, and the overall economic need for continuous growth and market expansion just to maintain the current living standard. We can observe a formal parallel, for example, in the mostly continuous narrative present (from J R on) built largely from recorded speech, and (no less remarkably) we see both the constraints and expansiveness of such power in Gaddis’s decision to restrict his language and his own literary voice to what can be said through actual, existing networks of communication and what can be conveyed (from one scene to the next) through actual systems of transportation. America is the ¤rst technological mass society, yet it uniquely and structurally de¤nes the mass, its multitudes and its mobility, in the singular. Gaddis responds with characters no less distinct and individual than those in Dickens, although (unlike Dickens) he refuses to “psychologize” them: their qualities, like the poetic qualities of Gaddis’s language, are made to emerge through the same networks and systems that impart global dimensions to their individual pursuits and desires, a canvas much larger than that experienced by the bourgeois self in conventional novels. The perennial neglect of Gaddis is probably a result, not of any inherent dif¤culty in his work, but of the categories that criticism uses to distinguish types of American writing (not to mention powerful review media whose authors, working on strict deadlines, are operationally incapable of processing long, complex texts). As Klaus Benesch argues in his contribu-

12 / Tabbi tion, to be properly understood, Gaddis should be placed not along the modernist/postmodern divide, nor dropped into the naturalist/aestheticist gulch. High/low distinctions only get overturned at every turn in the writing, sometimes rendering the work generically indistinct. Carpenter’s Gothic, in the end, is neither a modernist narrative of immanence and authorial absence nor the old-fashioned didactic novel it sometimes strives to be, rendering this work neither ¤sh nor fowl, neither “Cognitive Map,” “Aesthetic Object,” nor “National Allegory,” in the terms posited, only to be serially rejected, by Nicholas Brown in his contribution. Rather—or because of this generic undecideability—Gaddis is best understood fully in the American mainstream, a mainstream that has always included a small number of writers (compared to the total national production of ¤ctions), working for a “very small audience” (The Recognitions), but an audience that (like the country itself ) has staying power. Like the Carpenter Gothic houses built in New England, “it’s stood here, hasn’t it, foolish inventions and all it’s stood here for ninety years” (Carpenter’s Gothic 228). An American Gothic, then: such work has also, traditionally, found its best advocates among those who can bring the literary to bear on the arts, and on the most exciting (if also contradictory) currents of contemporary thought. The Melville revival in the ¤rst half of the twentieth century, though grounded on a continuing, underground popularity, depended to no small degree on the activism of an art critic, Lincoln Kirstein, a man who was also a close friend of Walker Evans. The intervention of an art critic, Michael Fried, was needed to fully establish Steven Crane’s position in American literature, not as a naturalist whose work had these odd, uncontainable elements of impressionism, but as a comprehensive literary artist who, like the great American painter Thomas Eakins, allowed the materiality of writing to surface through the naturalistic content of the work. (See for example the many descriptions, taken it seems from any page of The Red Badge of Courage and the stories, of black lines as they appear on various white surfaces, most of which have the dimensions of the human face and its horizontal counterpart, the page; and see also Michael Wutz’s discussion in this volume, detailing the extensive literary effects of such media-speci¤c notions of embodiment.) Evans, incidentally, was known to Gaddis and may have been one model for the character Wyatt Gwyon in The Recognitions—a model not for the ¤ctional painter himself, whose works were counterfeits, but for the aura that this young man has among the circle of writers, artists, critics, hangers-on,

Introduction / 13 and “just alcoholics” (in the lyrics of John Cale) who make up the postwar Greenwich Village art scene. When the literary biography of Gaddis is written, it will be as much about that scene as about Gaddis himself—about the postwar shift of the art world’s center from Paris to New York City (a prelude to the internationalization and expanded franchise evident in the various Guggenheims and MoMAs worldwide), and the generalization of visual, sound, and media art into popular culture and advertising. When the autonomy of the arts is lost, their autopoiesis is possible: the arts, and literature, construct themselves, on terms set neither wholly by the artist nor the culture, but rather, as Gaddis says in his interview with LeClair, by “what a speci¤c scene requires, what the work as a whole demands.” The length of such work is neither an indulgence nor the result of a preset formal challenge; neither is it a simple re®ection of the endless new materials and processes thrown up by modern history and the media environment in which the artist works. In engaging these materials, processes, and new histories, the work ¤nds its own distinct but communicating form, long enough “to accomplish what it comes to need to be.” There is no contradiction in a Flaubertian aesthetic (not a word wasted in works that assert their independence of subject matter) and encyclopedic range, as Stephen J. Burn demonstrates in his essay in this volume. Nor should there be any contradiction in Gaddis’s status as a preeminent American novelist and a model for a postnational imagination. Among post–World War II novelists in the United States, Gaddis is at once worldly in his demeanor and speci¤c in his American references. His novels all are set primarily in Long Island and Manhattan, the locales where Gaddis lived most of his life, while (as Crystal Alberts shows in her extensive biographical essay appended to the volume) Gaddis drew extensively on his family history for the generational histories presented in the novels. Yet his uniqueness cannot be reduced to local color or autobiography. Rather, he shows how the local, in the United States as much as anywhere, is increasingly dependent on ®ows of capital and crisscrossing lines of communication spanning the globe. Although Gaddis has been known as a systems novelist since the mid-1980s, our understanding of both literary and bureaucratic “systems” has developed suf¤ciently in the past decades—as the world system itself has developed— that a reconsideration is in order. Gaddis’s major novels of American capitalism and corporate culture can be placed at the emergence of a particular “global” context, the world system whose development could not have been foreseen at the time when the works were written. His books are prophetic,

14 / Tabbi not because they merely predict details of the current system (the instrumentality of remote-control education, the structure of stock market crashes, the social production of in®ated expectations, and so on), but because he understands, in the refrain from J R, “what America’s all about.” The world economy that in Gaddis’s time and ours has been dominated by the United States, is nonetheless caught up in exchanges that exceed the control of any single nation-state, and its leading ¤ction, appropriately, exceeds all generic boundaries and admits interpretive approaches from various academic disciplines. A world ¤ction, like a world economy or world empire, is not a representation of the world; rather, these entities are worlds, containing in themselves political, cultural, and technological elements that work together as an integral whole. Like the world system itself, and like the patchwork of system and improvisation that went into the construction of a Carpenter Gothic house, Gaddis’s world ¤ctions are durable, and they develop over time from one book to the next. Systems do not, however, last forever. But we might hope that the literary system, if brought into communication with similar networks and correspondingly broad ways of knowing, will outlast the moment of American expansion and domination that the novels capture so well.

Notes 1. The nation-state as tax haven offers, according to a prospectus that Chip drafts and posts to the Web site, prospects of below market human labor and a wealth of “natural resources”—in sand and gravel, soon to be in demand when the expanded European Union starts demanding concrete for all the new roads and buildings!

1 Aesthetics

1 An Interview with William Gaddis, circa 1980 Tom LeClair

It is somewhat obvious that William Gaddis became very self-conscious in front of a camera, as many photos of the author ¤nd him “posing” (in a fashion), and staring directly at the camera lens. But as this shot helps to illustrate, LeClair’s hitherto unpublished interview, conducted in 1981, captures a rarely seen side of Gaddis, one in which Gaddis is candid and open, without the guarded, defensive tone that marks many of his later interviews. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

18 / LeClair

 After some resistance, William Gaddis agreed to do an interview with me in 1980, perhaps because of my review of J R in Commonweal, maybe because his publisher at the time was going to publish a collection of interviews with American novelists that Larry McCaffery and I were doing. The interview was taped at Gaddis’s apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. When I arrived, dressed casually, I was greeted by a small man dressed—it’s been more than twenty-¤ve years—quite elegantly, certainly in a jacket, possibly with an ascot. I wasn’t in his apartment more than a minute when Gaddis showed me by the door a large cardboard box of letters and, perhaps, essays—what he said were requests for or demands on his time. This did not put me at ease, but when we started talking Gaddis seemed to be quite pleased to be speaking about his work, particularly the in®uence of T. S. Eliot, which he felt was unrecognized. That’s when I realized that interviewing this patrician-dressed novelist was probably like interviewing the old banker-poet. As the interview went on, Gaddis unexpectedly became garrulous, switching from thought to thought as his novels do. Therefore the interview had to be rather severely edited to get the best of our talk. Because the edited transcript came out a bit shorter than what I needed for publication, I sent some follow-up questions to Gaddis. They went into that box by the door. In later correspondence, Gaddis said he might some day have time to get around to improving the transcript I sent him. I used several quotes in a Horizon essay called “Missing Writers,” his short interview with Moore and Kuehl came out in Review of Contemporary Fiction, the Paris Review talked with him, and Gaddis never did edit the transcript. He knew I was not pleased, but when I saw him at a gathering of writers at Brown University ten or more years later, we had a good talk, not recorded this time. Those are the only two times I ever saw William Gaddis, but the image I have of him—distant, recalcitrant—has been a good reminder over the years that the novelist should have better things to do than talk to young academics, no matter how much they admire his work. And that young academics might have better things to do than travel around the country recording the talk of novelists. Although my collaborator, Larry McCaffery, went on to do more books of interviews, useful all, my experience with Gaddis helped turn me toward my own writing, including ¤ction about waste, what I think is Gaddis’s central theme.

Interview with William Gaddis / 19 The transcript has not been touched since I sent it to Gaddis in 1980. Perhaps it is the ¤rst interview of this man who hated to be interviewed. Tom LeClair: Does some of the energy of your work come from outrage? William Gaddis: One is dismayed and disturbed as one grows up by the difference between the anticipated actuality and the actuality. Indignation can take a writer a long way, but it can be indignation at anything: Sinclair Lewis’s outrage at American hypocrisy in Babbitt; the inequity between blacks and whites in the South; or outrage at the gods, the human condition. A central theme in The Recognitions is the absence of love, the withholding of love, the withdrawal of love. When it came out, reviewers said my outrage at what seemed to me to be the prevailing false values painted a black picture of the world. Now some of them could probably read it and be comforted. TL: Was The Recognitions written out of indignation that there were no “origins of design,” to quote a repeated phrase from the novel? WG: No, because in that book there is still hope that there are “origins of design.” There is nostalgia for order in both The Recognitions and J R, but more in the ¤rst novel. TL: How far back does this nostalgia for order and absolutes take one? Wyatt’s father returns to Mithraism. . . . WG: Well, I don’t know. That’s the problem. Solzhenitsyn would be happy in Spain with Phillip the Second. That’s his idea of order. One sees in his work a man hysterically clinging to a world in which absolutes prevail, a man who cannot tolerate a world of relativism. But the human nightmare of relativism is nearer to the point than Solzhenitsyn’s ideas. TL: Are there writers who were particularly important for you in your early years? WG: I remember being amazed, when The Recognitions ¤rst came out, by the number of reviewers who found it drawn from or an imitation of Joyce’s Ulysses, which I had not read and have still not. I just haven’t. Very few mentioned The Waste Land. I read that in college and it has never left me. Keats talks about poetry as being the ¤nest wording of one’s highest feelings. But to ¤nd in a poem perfectly articulated your vision of the world is remarkable. I was just beginning to draw

20 / LeClair together my own view of the world and here it was. It was a juxtaposition of exchequer bonds and the South Seas and Doris on the stairs. Now, for me, it is Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” with its impending apocalypse. It’s hard to believe, but where we live now is all there in Yeats’s poem. TL: The writer “Willie” in The Recognitions says he’s doing for writing what Bruckner did for music. Did you have nonliterary models for your works? WG: I saw a parallel with Bruckner in the use of repetition, variation, and the whole volume getting bigger and bigger, so I tossed that in. While I do think music is the highest of the arts, totally abstract and ungraspable, why must we assume that writing is or needs to be derivative of other forms? A writer could set out to write a novel in the form of a fugue, but there is likely to be trouble with the technique overpowering the life in the book. TL: Critics often read The Recognitions as an attack on modernism in art. WG: That was not my purpose. I don’t have much sympathy with some modern art, abstract expressionism for example, because it seems part of the disorder. But perhaps my concepts of order are becoming passé. TL: There are many failed artists in your work. Are they victims of commercialism? WG: In both books there is the old idea of the artist as a con¤dence man: both artist and con man ask for a willing suspension of disbelief. But the artists in my books also con themselves. The young composer Bast in J R is taken in by J R’s con¤dence scheme and then goes along with it. He’s writing commercial music—zebra music—instead of creating what he is supposed to be creating. Wyatt in The Recognitions knows what he is doing when he paints his forgeries. Anyone who reads both books carefully sees the artists digging their own graves all the time, often calling in the commercial world to help them. The suggestion that I write about business destroying the innocent artist is simplistic. The novels suggest the artist’s job is a hard one, but. . . . TL: Are any of the artists at least partial successes? What about Stanley, the composer in The Recognitions? WG: I suppose I’m most sympathetic to him. But he has a framework —the Church—that allows him to bring his work to completion.

Interview with William Gaddis / 21 TL: Is Stanley’s framework of faith one that you share? WG: Good heavens, no. Twenty-¤ve years ago I both envied him and despised him for this framework. But there are alternative frameworks. The tangible framework of forgery presents Wyatt a context for accomplishment, a tradition of delimited and delineated perfection in painting. Forgery makes him feel safe, and con¤dent, and able to accomplish his work. The difference is that Stanley is not taking a risk. With the writer Gibbs in J R, there’s no framework whatsoever. He takes the risks, but is destroyed because he has not pursued his work to the end. He is not able to sustain his belief that what he wants to do— his book—is worth doing. Once he saw solutions, the accomplishment didn’t interest him. He was just too bored. That, if you like, is tragedy. Mrs. Joubert’s love for him is not quite enough to get him through, as Esme’s love was not enough in The Recognitions. TL: Is it important for you to take risks? WG: This question calls for the kind of theorizing I don’t like. It assumes that a writer has something to say, that you learn more about his writing by hearing him talk about it than from the writing itself. The cult of personality insists on putting the man in place of the work, on turning the creative artist into a performing artist. Writers talking about their own work is dangerous second-guessing, not trusting the work enough to let it carry its own weight. Another danger is for the writer to believe his own myth created by talk; that myth is just not there when one sits down to write. J. R. slips into the myth he has created and it takes over him at the end of the novel when he reads a press release describing him as a shrewd executive. The writer should avoid the possibility of being taken over by his own ¤ction. When I sit down to work, none of these theoretical intentions—am I taking a risk, am I creating beauty—exists. One doesn’t say, “I’m going to take a risk and write a 700-page book in a technique that I may not be able to bring off.” What I am trying to do is achieve what a speci¤c scene requires, what the work as a whole demands. TL: How do the novels get to be so long, if they don’t start out with mass in mind? WG: If one is involved with a complicated idea, and spends every day with it, takes notes, and reads selectively with it in mind, rami¤cations proliferate. If one has what could be called an obsessional wish to

22 / LeClair exhaust an idea, understand it on six, seven, or eight levels, the book gets longer and longer. In The Recognitions I became interested in giving order to layers of ideas I saw relationships among. For example, perfection in painting, perfection in the godhead, ¤nite attempts to create beauty and Christianity on earth, alchemy as an expression of turning base metals into gold. When the novel was already in page proofs, I found something else that had to go in: an item about a person ¤nding a fake Tintoretto, under which was an English landscape, under which was a real Tintoretto. TL: Is bulk necessary to make a ripple? WG: I don’t think an 800-page book is twice as good as a 400-page book. The question is: how long does the book have to be to accomplish what it comes to need to be? I was pleased when one reviewer of J R said that in this 726-page novel there was not one wasted word. TL: Do reviewers prefer 250-page masterpieces? WG: This is not a joke. It is a very serious problem. I found reviewers for several New York periodicals who had clearly not read J R, who did not have the facts straight. I also was delighted to ¤nd that a number of reviewers in provincial newspapers, reviewers who did not have any pretensions, took their jobs seriously and read the book. TL: A common criticism of very long books, such as yours, is selfindulgence, as though the writers had written at such length only to amuse themselves. WG: In J R, Gibbs complains about Schepperman’s having to sell blood to buy paints and about Van Gogh’s cutting off his ear. Hyde says, “Who asked him to paint?” That’s a central question. If you’re going to write a book, who asked you to? It is, in fact, quite an act of ego to sit down in a room, while others are getting on trains and subways, and put one’s vision on paper, and then ask others to pay to read it. Not only to pay but to say, “Isn’t he brilliant.” It’s an act of audacity. I have no sympathy with the complaint that writing is a lonely profession. I suppose one could charge my work with self-indulgence in its style and technique. Perhaps it is, but I did what I had tried to do and I’m not complaining if it doesn’t sell like Judith Krantz’s latest. TL: You’re not embittered then? ). Aside from WG: I showed you my last royalty check ($ that, it is immensely gratifying to remember the books that were best

Interview with William Gaddis / 23 sellers when The Recognitions came out. Where are they now? The work continues its own existence. Young people still ¤nd it pertinent; that is awfully gratifying. TL: You have someone say to “Willie” in The Recognitions, “You’re writing for a very small audience.” Did you realize . . . ? WG: I may have feared it. When writers such as Harold Robbins or Sidney Sheldon say they write for a certain audience, they mean it and they do. When I explore an idea in ¤ction, I am concerned with characters and their actions, making action spring from character yet giving it spontaneity. Forster said, “Character must be consistent but plot should cause surprise.” That’s what I’m trying to manage when I’m working. That evening I might look back over what I’ve written that morning and say to myself, “Won’t they howl over this,” or, “How they’ll weep” [laughter], or, “What crap.” TL: Did you ever have any doubts about using the economic and political materials of J R? WG: No, except as any writer may have days or weeks or months of doubt about whether or not what he is doing is worth doing. That is a central concern of mine in both books: the question of what is worth doing. Gibbs says in J R, “There’s never been a time in the world when there were so many opportunities to do so many things that were not worth doing.” A corollary is: there’s nothing more miserable than failing at something that wasn’t worth doing in the ¤rst place. In our time, that’s a real problem, for so many people fail in just this way. Because of the Protestant ethic, free enterprise, democracy, and all of the high-sounding—and profoundly marvelous—concepts we started out with, everyone is supposed to have the chance to succeed. If you fail, it is your fault that you fail, with no notice of advantages or disadvantages. One sees here the in®uence of social Darwinism. When John D. Rockefeller talked about plucking buds off a rose to get one perfect rose, he considered himself the perfect rose. God had him in mind in this process of natural selection; he was the ¤ttest. In J R I was pursuing the many meanings of communication breakdown in a system that is not under control. There is entropy, but there is also the turning upside down of what I see as the great system of private capitalism because of abuses. I would still like to think that the problems are not inherent to the capitalist system and that they could be corrected.

24 / LeClair TL: How did you decide upon the technique of J R? WG: One way to combat the threat of becoming bored with a piece one is working on is to set oneself problems to solve. In J R I wanted to remove the author, thereby having the characters bring themselves and each other to life by what they say and do. This was a temperamental revolt against what Forster described as “characters climbing up and down the ladders of their own insides.” Instead of a phony elicitation of information—a character saying to another character, “Tell me more about yourself ”—I tried the opposite. I have Bast resist J R’s speeches. Bast is the reader’s surrogate: “I don’t want to hear any more about it.” And J R is this insistent little voice saying, “Just one more thing.” What one is always trying to do in writing is get information across. In order to make the intricate corporate manipulation and the events of the plot possible, if not altogether plausible or real, a lot of information was required. I let this information come through dialogue, through fast-talkers like the PR man Davidoff. Not providing the information myself took a great deal of work—paring down, concentrating, arranging each bit where it would ¤t. I wanted the whole thing in dialogue, in real time. TL: Are the noise and waste of the voices redeemed by the structure? WG: I would like to think so. The architecture of The Recognitions puzzled readers for ten years or so. If one reads J R with care, one can see it as a complicatedly structured ¤ction. The characters’ language may not be elegant, but it expresses who they are. TL: How did you keep straight the intricacies produced by this method of composition? WG: I’ve used a large wall to plot relations. Also, voluminous notes and rewrites, putting pieces together, cutting and pasting, throwing half away, rewriting. TL: You have used terms such as entropy, information, and real time. Does J R come out of in any direct way a study of communication theory? WG: I have written speeches for IBM executives, but they were hardly the origin of this idea. The concept of entropy—as removed from physics and the second law of thermodynamics to communications—is present back in The Recognitions, a work of fragmented pieces and of a

Interview with William Gaddis / 25 breakdown at a number of levels. I think it is a basic concern of mine and a problem. Words empty of information: that too is where we live. The school at the beginning of J R is a microcosm of this atmosphere: confusion, waste, words going in all directions. The principal’s speech shows no mind operating. Education is never discussed. This absence was a conscious effort to show that the educators were wholly concerned with administrative problems, rooms, schedules, machines. The novel begins slowly as I attempted to create an atmosphere with enough verisimilitude to have the reader suspend his disbelief and be prepared to accept the possibility that a not very bright kid could send away for penny stocks and defaulted bond issues and out of them build a business empire. TL: I’ve been reading about runaway systems and positive feedback. Is your Governor John Cates supposed to be a governor in the same sense that a thermostat is a governor? WG: This is the kind of question that always fascinates me, and it’s why academics’ efforts do sometimes cheer me up. Things that had never occurred to me are read into my books, and I think, “My, how lucky I was.” It cheers me up because for the critic the ¤ction is real enough, the events and characters consistent enough, to lead him to construct this kind of analogy. That’s all I ask. Cates is, in effect, the control on the whole system of energy and communications, which is cybernetics. I read Wiener, and all this was probably in my mind, but I decided to make him Governor Cates because it gives him that good old Republican background of big-money power. But even the people, like Cates, who abuse the system in J R have their reasons. Hyde justi¤es his position when he says near the end of the novel that man has the capacity for loyalty. If you look around for something to be loyal to and there is a corporation that is feeding you, you are loyal to that corporation. In this time, that is a logical position. In Cates’s last speech, he says, “I don’t take vacations, I don’t have a pool in my backyard. All the people working for me think they have achieved by their own efforts, but if I had not kept the whole system together they’d have nothing.” That was John D. Rockefeller’s position, and it was a good argument. He saw himself bringing order to the chaotic and cutthroat oil business. This idea of imposing order on chaos continues to be of central interest to me.

26 / LeClair TL: Is there resignation to the disorder in J R? WG: One might say that the disintegration of order in the twenty years between the books is re®ected in J R. But there is hope at the end of the novel. While the corporate system disintegrates, Bast says he is going to write his music. From the detritus and trash, he vows to make a whole guided by creativity and art. One still clings to art as order, at the same time that one hopes that art is a destructive force. The threat J R runs is: how can I keep the worthwhile activities somewhere in view and not have them devoured by the entropy—and yet create a world in which they are, in fact, being devoured. How to do it without becoming part of the chaos? TL: In order to create J R, did you have to sacri¤ce what you could have written in your own voice? WG: Yes, of course, in order that J R be a consistent entity of its own. I’d done The Recognitions once; I had no interest in rehearsing it. It was heavily allusive, but one of the points of J R is the transiency of the atmosphere, its instantaneousness, its happening right when you read it. Allusions would have been antithetical to the style and intention of J R. The Recognitions was an attempt to set the then current life in a large perspective. In J R, characters can occasionally say wistfully, “I do like Mozart,” but I have included as few allusions as possible. That world of order is no longer around. TL: Do you think conditions in publishing have worsened since your unhappy experience with The Recognitions? WG: There have been many great changes, perhaps for the worse. Publishing has become a big-money enterprise. I do feel the tendency toward packaging is alarming. When a corporation is involved with publishing, paperback publishing, periodical publishing, television, and ¤lm, this can only bring standards down. There are still a few people around who are interested in putting a good book out. Right now, the cost of money puts pressure on for a fast return. If a book doesn’t do well damn fast, it may go out of sight immediately. TL: John Gardner has made the morality of contemporary ¤ction an issue. Do you have a response to that? WG: It’s sort of pitiful, his showily intruding himself on a question that has been the concern of writers for centuries as though he had just discovered it. His being taken seriously is even more pitiful. Moral di-

Interview with William Gaddis / 27 lemmas are at the heart of the matter all the time for most serious writers. TL: You have stayed out of the public eye. Yet there is this writer “Willie” in your books. In J R you quote from the reviews of The Recognitions, and one of your characters is a neglected novelist named Eigen. What can we make of all this? And why are you talking now? WG: “Willie” is just for fun, strictly, unabashedly for the hell of it. The quotes from the reviewers and the anagrams of The Recognitions were to amuse readers of J R who knew The Recognitions. What one makes of Eigen and his name I don’t care one way or the other. People say, “Is Gibbs really you?” But then where does J R come from? There’s got to be a little J R growing here too. And the bleak innocence of Bast? One draws on whatever one can, but I like to keep the biography and the work as separate as possible.

2 In the Diaspora of Words Gaddis, Kierkegaard, and the Art of Recognition(s) Klaus Benesch

What does this sign—which reads “Mithras Street” in German—mean to you? Does it remind you of anything, or stir up any sort of recollection? Here is an example of a very clever textual doubling, for Mithraism evokes a host of historical connotations and references, and also appears in Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Noted theorist Klaus Benesch argues that The Recognitions, much like this street sign Gaddis photographed, contains an intriguing and intricate textual doubling, one that rede¤nes the act of recognition itself. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

In the Diaspora of Words / 29

 The form of representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given language gains currency. —E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion Make something new of repetition itself. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

In 1759 the English writer Edward Young published an essay in which he argued that novelty and originality should be the most important categories for evaluating a work of art.1 By valorizing original contributions, rather than the popular, slightly disguised copy of an earlier text, his “Conjectures on Original Composition” paved the way for much of modern discourses on authorship and copyright. “Originals,” Young declares, “are, and ought to be, great favorites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion. Imitators only give us a sort of duplicate of what we had, possibly much better, before; increasing the mere drug of books, while all that makes them valuable, knowledge and genius, are at a stand” (319). Young criticized the large-scale dissemination of printed matter that the advancement of printing technology (most notably the advent of the hand press) and the concomitant surge of publishing activities during the latter half of the eighteenth century have initiated. He particularly deplored that the lettered world no longer consists of “singulars”: “it is a medley, a mass; and a hundred books at bottom are but one” (333). Annoyed by the onslaught of books that are basically “duplicates of what we had,” he separates the mechanically manufactured text from the truly inspired, original work of art. Imitative artists are thus dismissed as mechanics, manual laborers who manipulate and piece together material that is already there. “Imitations,” Young concludes, “are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics [ . . . ] out of pre-existent materials not their own” (333). If much of modern literature thrived on the aesthetic ideals articulated by Young and his romantic followers, postmodern writers seemed to be at odds with the belief that great art is solely constituted by original acts. In “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), a programmatic essay reviewing the appearance of postmodern writing in America, John Barth denied that the so-called newness of an artistic work has anything to do with originality as such; rather

30 / Benesch it is the critical use of tradition, the creative rewriting of existing artistic concepts and inherited forms and techniques (which are now perceived as having “used up” the possibility of renewing themselves from within the tradition) that confer uniqueness upon the individual artist. Innovative postmodern art forms such as “pop art, dramatic and musical ‘happenings,’ the whole range of ‘intermedia’ or ‘mixed-means’ art, bear recentest witness to the tradition of rebelling against Tradition” (1). As he explained later in a companion essay, titled “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979), Barth was primarily concerned with the potential of literary production to constantly reinvent itself without having recourse to an essentialist, highly ideological conception of originality.2 From yet a different perspective, semiotician and cultural critic Umberto Eco identi¤ed various modes of iteration and repetition as the dominant narrative techniques of postmodernism at large. Whereas modernism “¤gures out a new law, imposes a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the world,” postmodernism, he argues, privileges repetition and redundancy. The postmodern break with the aesthetic of newness and originality is closely related, according to Eco, to the sociocultural changes concomitant with the introduction of electronic mass media and the shift from industrial to postindustrial society: “Social change, the continuous rise of new behavioral standards, the dissolution of tradition require a narrative based upon redundancy. Redundant narrative structures would appear in this panorama as an indulgent invitation to repose, a chance of relaxing” (165). Having examined various forms of repetition and iteration in TV, ¤lm, and popular culture (the retake, the remake, the series, the saga, intertextual dialogue, etc.), Eco de¤nes the new postmodern aesthetic as basically a mediated pleasure in “recognition” or the barely camou®aged return of previous cultural forms and styles: “the era of electronics—instead of emphasizing the phenomena of shock, interruptions, novelty, and frustration of expectations—would produce a return to the continuum, the Cyclical, the Periodical, the Regular” (179). A strikingly original work of art in its own right, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) is perhaps the ¤rst American novel to deal at length with the quandaries of assessing originality in a cultural environment predicated on an abundance of copies, representations, and simulacra. As a ¤ne example of what Tom LeClair has called the postmodern “art of excess,” The Recognitions, a ¤rst novel of truly encyclopedic scope, clearly adds to the proliferation of doubles (the world as text) in contemporary society, yet, in so doing, it also foregrounds our confusion about the fake and the real.3 Recognizing the elu-

In the Diaspora of Words / 31 siveness and, ultimately, obsolescence of the very act of recognition itself— severing the twin realities of fact and ¤ction—the novel lavishly indulges in the postmodern pleasure of repetition and endless doubling. Rather than invoking a clear-cut division between originals and their reproductions, the novel’s title thus points to the futility of our continuous attempts at recognition. Although erudite readers may still experience moments of recognition when tracing some of the novel’s obscure references to their possible historic origins, interpretative efforts are constantly subverted by the changing meaning of uniqueness itself. Unable to pin down the staggering amount of data and information to a single, original design, readers are left with a sobering realization: that the more adroit they have become at deciphering the intricate web of textual doubling, the more confused they are about the epistemological value of origins and originality. Because of its inherent structural ambiguities, Gaddis’s unwieldy text has often been read as a harbinger of postmodern aesthetics and the end of originality and, simultaneously, as a desperate attempt to withstand the emphasis on appearances and mechanical reproductions in contemporary society. As Dominick LaCapra argued in an early assessment of the novel’s formal and structural ambiguities, “any given element—event, character, development— is never simply univocal or one-sided but generally has two or more valences: it is serious and ironic, pathos-charged and parodic, apocalyptic and farcical, critical and self-critical” (35). In terms of literary history, The Recognitions appears to fall between the stools of modernism and postmodernism. By rewriting the history of Western art as a history of doubling and counterfeiting, the novel transforms itself into a literary echo chamber that bustles with the cacophonic reverberations of Europe’s masterpieces (we may call this the Joycean mode) while, at the same time, it constantly obfuscates their historical context and questions their referential authenticity (thereby pre¤guring the deconstructive mode of writers such as John Barth or Thomas Pynchon). Stylistically, it is neither fully determined by the postmodern juxtaposition of the real and the ¤ctional (or the original and its mimetic double), nor by the modernist pathos of meaning and cultural critique, both of which we ¤nd closely knit into its loose and often rambling narration. If Gaddis’s “carnival of repetition,” as John Johnston labels its redundant, cross-referential style, adumbrates much of postmodern narrative technique, it certainly also provokes a deeply humanist critique of its own hypertrophied use of ®eeting repetitions/recognitions.4 Attributing to Gaddis’s ¤rst novel the status of a hybrid text, a mixture of

32 / Benesch proto-postmodernist form with a thematic thrust reminiscent of Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or the Cantos, has by now become common coin among the expanding community of Gaddis scholars. In a similar vein, its variegated uses and disguises of notions of repetition, recognition, difference, originality, and so forth have been made the focus of several substantial studies.5 In what follows I will therefore avoid these beaten critical tracks without, however, entirely suppressing the often-stated fact that The Recognitions re®ects, in its own peculiar ways, the shift from modern (uniqueness, originality, authenticity) to postmodern modes of representation (seriality, iteration, repetition). While I recognize the adequacy of that contention with respect to the novel’s structural hybridity, I also believe that a strictly historicist approach leaves the critical reader with a bad aftertaste. Because we expect a literary text to be more than just a mirror image of any kind of paradigm shift, a novel that seems merely to combine the major features of both the preceding as well as the inaugurated paradigm does not quite score. Put another way, if The Recognitions were just a “carnival of repetition” in the sense that it re®ects the psychology and epistemological ambience of the 1950s as a transitional moment between modernism to postmodernism, why bother with its structural and topical intricacies at all? In my own reading of Gaddis’s debut novel I will therefore try to leave behind the various fault lines of the modernist/ postmodernist paradigm. This I hope to achieve by concentrating on a concept of repetition that, to my mind, represents Gaddis’s own “original” solution to the crisis of originality in modern and postmodern society. In response to the changing conditions of art production during the latter half of the twentieth century, The Recognitions, I argue, sets out to rede¤ne the very act of “repetition” itself. By introducing a form of repetition that signals not so much an act of iteration but the laying bare of a spiritual core that is extant yet not fully actuated in the original, the novel re®ects and, at the same time, defuses the tensions between the modern notion of authenticity (and/as originality) and a postmodern environment steeped in modes of simulation and means of producing simulacra. The notion of repetition I have in mind here is primarily philosophical and spiritual. At its most general level, it involves a wide range of poignantly unsystematic repetitions/recognitions that are meant, as their sum total, to convert the multiplying acts of repetition in the novel into a single regenerative practice of “re-petitioning.”6 My model for this kind of repetition as the recapturing or unfolding of an existential truth is Kierkegaard’s short philosophical narrative “Repetition” (1853), a text that is strikingly absent from

In the Diaspora of Words / 33 critical discussions of Gaddis’s novel. Even though there are no direct references to Kierkegaard anywhere in The Recognitions (and Gaddis himself, for all we know, may not have known about this precursor text), it constitutes an ideal foil for a discussion of some of the novel’s philosophical implications as well as one of its major themes, namely, the rede¤ning of “repetition” itself within a burgeoning postmodern culture of the copy and the double.7 Yet before I go further into the similarities of the notion of repetition in Kierkegaard and Gaddis, a brief analysis of how originality and authenticity became key concepts in the construction of the modern subject and its artistic production is in order.

The Real Thing In his Introduction to the Penguin edition, fellow writer William Gass notes that “following the hubble bubble of its initial reception, The Recognitions was left in a lurch of silence, except for those happy yet furious few who had found this ¤ction . . . about the nature, meaning, and value of ‘the real thing’ . . . found it to be the real thing” (viii). Its marvelously convoluted irony notwithstanding, this sly remark, originally directed toward the small but dedicated group of Gaddis’s followers, rings with an important truth about the nature of writing in general: any literary text, regardless of cautionary stylistic devices such as irony or self-referentiality, is likely to be taken by readers as more authentic than the reality it re®ects upon. Even if the frame of reference, as in postmodern writing, is the ®imsy status of “authenticity” itself, we are reticent to deconstruct the act of criticism in the same way that we deconstruct the concepts represented in the text. The reason for this reticence, I believe, is not so much that we give the author the bene¤t of the doubt or suspend, as Coleridge argued, our commonsensical disbelief when entering the realm of art. Instead, we might partake in an as yet unrealized culture of authenticity in which writing is taken to be a major means to authenticate the modern subject. As various critics pointed out, the technological changes in eighteenth-century print culture contributed to the development of the modern understanding of authorship, and not only because print technically alleviated the production and dissemination of essays, pamphlets, books, and other forms of printed matter. Such techniques have also shifted authority away from the written text to the writer, thus laying the groundwork for a new evaluation of what it means to be an author. The way in which Western societies confer authority on their writers

34 / Benesch has been subject to numerous sociohistorical changes, many of which were closely related to issues of originality and reproduction. In medieval (scribal) cultures, where the dissemination of handwritten copies had always been tied up with the process of transmitting sacred truths, authority was derived ¤rst from content (the translation of the holy text) and second from the uniformity and therefore readability of the reproduction. This “art of making writing legible,” as Marlon Ross observes, “is also a political act; the act of claiming or declaiming a culture’s authorities” (232). In the premodern context of writing as copying, any eccentricity regarding the form and style of the reproduction would by necessity detract from the sacredness of its content and thus call into question the authority that legitimizes and inspires the writer’s hand. With the debut of the printing press, however, the relation between authority and uniformity is reversed: to be printed now becomes the primary marker of cultural authority. Power and esteem, therefore, are no longer given by way of a text’s sacrosanct mytho-poetical origins. Rather one’s status is the achievement of making public one’s private mind and thoughts, thereby authenticating the self “by virtue that [one] has written; that [one’s] scribblings have been scripted, that [one’s] script is made overly and overtly legible through the technology of print” (Ross 237). By the end of the eighteenth century, copyright issues also implicated the reconceptualization of authorship on various levels (poetic, legal, and economic); ranking high in professional and public debate, copyright altered the status of the artist at large. As a number of historians have noted, the modern notion of authorship developed alongside the enlightenment ideal of the individual as a distinctive (and thereby distinguishable) rational human being incorporated into the social body by free will and consent.8 Similar to the autonomous subject, the modern artist discards aesthetic standards that had been established mainly by way of tradition, repudiates any authority outside his own universe of production, and thereby transforms himself from an imitator or homo faber into a performer of authentic, original acts. By seeking his professional authenticity in his entire autonomy, the writer, as Martha Woodmansee poignantly remarked, who until then had been “a vehicle of preordained truth—truth as ordained either by universal human agreement or by some higher agency—becomes an author” (429). Signi¤cantly, if also somewhat paradoxically, true art (as opposed ¤rst to mere craftsmanship and later mass production, popular taste, and kitsch) often functioned as an antidote for the differentiation and self-alienation of modern life. “From the mid-eighteenth century to the very recent past,” as

In the Diaspora of Words / 35 the German critic Jochen Schulte-Sasse noted, “art has [ . . . ] been posited as a utopian space within modernity” (93). For both artists and the cultural elites, who cherished and ¤nanced their aesthetic endeavors, art represented a redemptive symbolic site where the negative aspects of mass society and rationalization were allegedly suspended. Sasse aptly describes the ambiguous role that art played as a sanctuary for the endangered autonomy of the modern self: “As a functionally differentiated space, art under modern conditions is at once structurally equivalent to other differentiated activities and burdened with the primary function of sublating differentiation in a reconciliatory manner” (87). Put another way, while modern art constituted a full®edged commercial enterprise in its own right, it also attempted to provide imaginary experiences of wholeness and self-determined subjectivity (that is, a self outside the economic con¤nes of modern capitalist society) that were based on a ¤lial, generative relation between the artist and his work. Its reunifying symbolic potential notwithstanding, the modern valorization of artistic authenticity could not prevent an increasing confusion about the real and its sham, mechanically reproduced double. As Hillel Schwartz argued in a perceptive study of the history of doubling, copying, and counterfeiting in Western culture, concomitant with the emphasis on originality as the repository of true art was an equally widespread tendency to reproduce the unique work of art in order to make it available to a mass audience.9 What is more, it seems as if the modern knack for originality, rather than working against the practitioners of doubling and copying, actually signaled the end of uniqueness on a scale that could barely have been imagined by even the most vigorous of copyists of earlier times (of which, as Edward Young complained, there were plenty). With the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, a century famed for the invention of core technologies in reproduction such as photography, lithography, stereotyping, the typewriter, telegraphy, the telephone, and the phonograph, uniqueness and originality were reduced, slowly but surely, to a sort of aesthetic gold standard: appreciated by many as a wise rule yet utterly removed from actual cultural practices and the material demands of the marketplace. With the (retrospective) appearance of such a gold standard, actual originals would now become “the vanishing twin to a pristine, glowing, longlasting ‘second original’ ” (Schwartz 227). Given the overwhelming presence of means of reproduction (¤rst mechanical and later electronic or digital), that made it often impossible to distinguish the “one” from the “many,” copyright laws were dif¤cult to reconcile with a cultural environment predicated

36 / Benesch to an ever greater degree on simulations and simulacra. “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard,” writes Walter Benjamin in his now classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes” (219– 20). If photography, radio, and ¤lm were crucial in demoting, as Benjamin claimed, the aura associated with the “original,” unique work of art, then the introduction of computers and the encompassing digital revolution following in their wake (scanners, laser printers, digital photography, morphing, etc.) have irreversibly replaced the spiritual adoration for the singular with the equally mythopoeic appeal of endless repetition and reproduction.

Repetition/Recognition Not that there was ever a shared understanding as to what “originality” is exactly and how it might be distinguished from its negative twin, repetition. From Edward Young’s rather practical-minded conjectures on original composition to Emerson’s patriotic call for an original (spell: American) literature, from Coleridge’s highly gendered organicist view of art (that fatally ricochets in much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse on authorship) to Eliot’s inquiry into individual talent and its place within the hierarchies of tradition, there had always been a striking vagueness as to the trappings of originality in the arts and, more speci¤cally, an uncertainty as to the extent artists should be allowed to “borrow” from their predecessors. Most commentators have attempted to solve this problem by de¤ning or rather rede¤ning “originality,” while only few have used the concept of “repetition,” not as a foil or antithesis to the phenomenon they wanted to describe, but to make it actually the basis of a theory of artistic (or philosophic) creation.10 Because its negative aspects (stagnation, imitation, mechanization, primitivism, etc.) are perceived as irreconcilable with the very idea of creativity, critics often take it for granted that “repetition” per se cannot generate new insight or meaning.11 Enter: The Recognitions. If much of what has been said so far turned on the juxtaposition of originality and repetition as mutually exclusive concepts engendering a host of cultural stereotypes about artistic and intellectual creativity, Gaddis’s novel deliberately blurs the boundaries between these concepts. By using a number of innovative narrative techniques and by structur-

In the Diaspora of Words / 37 ing the plot around complex patterns of repetitions/recognitions, Gaddis conjoins both form and content so that “repetition” can be reconceptualized as “re-cognition” (a second cognition, from recognoscere: to examine, investigate a lost or hidden truth) and vice versa. The structural and epistemological dynamic Gaddis sees at work between the two activities is reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s analysis of repetition as a spiritual/poetical mode of “knowing.” To these resemblances or, if you wish, repetitions, I will now turn in more detail. On a very broad level, The Recognitions can be read as a modern adaptation of the themes (and title) of a ¤rst-century, anonymously published theological romance, also known as the Clementine Recognitions. As one of Gaddis’s prominent characters, Basil Valentine, remarks, this “¤rst Christian novel” (373) is already linked to yet another core narrative of Judeo-Christian culture, namely, the Faust legend or the fatal quest for truth outside the sanctioned avenues of, at ¤rst, Christian theology and, in later renderings, Enlightenment thought. Yet even though the search for redemption (in the Clementine Recognitions) and the search for truth (in the Faust legend) constitute important undercurrents in Gaddis’s text, the novel as a whole seems to be driven more speci¤cally by a self-re®exive inquiry into the wide-ranging rami¤cations of repetition/recognition as pivotal techniques in the cultural accretion of knowledge (which includes the composition of the text at hand). We may note, however, that the meaning and function of both categories, repetition and recognition, vary considerably; what is more, they are embedded in a series of contradictory if not mutually exclusive narrative contexts that need to be distinguished thoroughly. In a brief article, titled “Stop Player. Joke No. 4,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1951, Gaddis scathingly ridicules the monotonous movement of the player piano and, in particular, its popularity among middle-class Americans, who smugly inferred that possession of the automated instrument comes close to “mastering” a piece of classical music.12 Because of its dehumanizing, crippling effects on the individual, repetition as merely the imitative, mechanical process of doubling (or aping) is equally scorned in The Recognitions. Examples involve technical means of reproduction such as radio, telephone, or the record player, the print reproductions of Wyatt’s paintings, the burning of ef¤gies (in the overtly racist depiction of Recktall Brown’s black servant, who practices a form of hollow neo-Hoodooism), but also, in one of the novel’s funniest scenes, Mr. Pivner’s naïve attempt directly to transfer set phrases from Dale Carnegie’s best-selling How to Win Friends

38 / Benesch and In®uence People to real-life situations. The list could easily be extended; on one level, then, The Recognitions clearly resonates with traces of Arnoldian cultural critique or, if you wish, Gaddis adumbrates, in a subtler, poetic register, the harsh analysis of contemporary postindustrial society in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964). Just consider the following incident: “People who passed, passed quickly and silently, leaving behind a ¤gure barely taller than the barrel organ mounted on a stick, whose handle he turned, his only motion, the hand, clockwise, barely more enduring than the sounds he released on the night air, sounds without the vanity of music, sounds unattached, squeaks and drawn wheezes, pathos in the minor key and then the shrill of loneliness related to nothing but itself, like the wind round the ¤re place left standing after the house burned to the ground” (The Recognitions 264). The scene occurs at the end of a crucial encounter between the protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, and Basil Valentine, the priest-turned-critic and barely veiled mouthpiece of the author. The two had initially met at the of¤ces of Recktall Brown, who commissions counterfeit paintings from Wyatt, and Valentine offered to take Wyatt to his apartment where he wants to show him blown-up photographs of paintings by Flemish masters. The scene is further contextualized by a reference to Thoreau’s Walden, a book that Wyatt stealthily places on Valentine’s lap while both are riding uptown in a cab. Obviously, the above quoted incident again testi¤es to Gaddis’s interest in the history of mechanical instruments, yet it does so by condensing the farreaching symbolic rami¤cations of “mechanized” music into a single, compelling image: juxtaposed with the cranking motions of the hand that “plays” the instrument are sounds (pathetic “squeaks and wheezes”) that appear to be entirely detached from human agency or a physical center; the groaning murmur of the barrel organ, which is produced not by natural forces (as in the Aeolian harp) but by the repetitive movement of a metallic cylinder scarred with dents and protrusions, has ceased relating to anything but itself: a free-®oating, diasporic signi¤ed in search of its signi¤er. As a ¤ne example of repetition-as-mechanical-reproduction, the image powerfully cuts across a wide range of concerns about the course of contemporary society. Prominent among these concerns is the loss of a center or referent, of being caught in an endless loop of self-re®exive, autistic repetitions of a plot in which, as Wyatt puts it, the “hero fails to appear, fails to be working out some plan of comedy or, disaster” (The Recognitions 263). As an artist, Wyatt has an acute sense of the tragedy of this failure and his own fate of being inextricably

In the Diaspora of Words / 39 linked (“Yes, I don’t live, I’m . . . I am lived, he whispered,” 262) to a society that has lost its ability to deal with “original” art in any other way than by endlessly reproducing it. It is not easy to fathom the difference between Wyatt’s own occupation as a copyist of Flemish masterpieces and the kind of repetition-as-mechanicalreproduction that he denounces in the reproductions of his paintings as illustrations for the Collectors Quarterly (“they have no right to spread one painting out like this,” 250). The ambiguous if not paradoxical attribution of “repetition” as, on the one hand, a viable technique and, on the other, a token of cultural deprivation can be traced throughout The Recognitions; rather than denounce or embrace either mode of repetition, both are absorbed into the novel’s self-re®exive discourses on art and art production. In a crucial conversation with Esther, his ¤rst wife, Wyatt adamantly defends his obsession with copying against the modern, self-righteous emphasis on originality. In another “turn of the screw,” that is, another play on repetition/recognition, the words are those of his Munich art teacher Herr Koppel:13 “That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original. . . . Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates . . . you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart” (89). Wyatt’s/ Koppel’s argument strikingly synthesizes the diverging aspects of repetition in Gaddis’s text, and it provides a key to an alternative (philosophical) understanding of the term. This other meaning centers in the German expression “auswendig wissen,” which translates literally as “knowing by heart,” but, contrary to its English equivalent, derives from the verb “aus-wenden” or to “turn something inside out.” “Auswendig wissen” thus is a form of knowing arrived at by turning something inside out or looking at it from both sides. It is an activity that implies both the immersion in and the distancing from the phenomenon you intend to learn or know about. According to Wyatt’s/ Koppel’s reasoning, it make no sense either to de¤ne originality by way of difference (that is, as different from what has been there already) nor to reduce repetition to similarity (that is, to an identity with what has been there already). While mass reproduction or copying for the sake of copying will lead to degeneration and decline, the copying of a great piece of art to the

40 / Benesch point where you begin to know it by heart (because you have become immersed in it, you have looked at it from the inside out) marks a mode of repetition of a different order. “How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible: to come up one day saying, —You see? I was right all the time. Or, —Then I was wrong all the time” (92). Wyatt’s mind-boggling question is framed by a strikingly doubled discourse on authorship, involving, on one level, Esther’s critique of his painterly career as copyist and, on another, a broadcast discussion about the invention of the printing press and its impact on the writer’s authority over his text (the two levels being, formally, hard to disentangle). How, then, does Wyatt’s remark tie in with a discussion of authorship? Put in philosophical perspective, his question addresses the issue of time and being or, more speci¤cally, the relation between the singular moment that we experience as the “here and now” of our existence and the series of these moments that form our sense of the past. By these terms, the act of repetition can be understood as a re-collection of what happened before, and art emerges as one powerful means of re-presentation or re-petitioning of past events. Enter: Kierkegaard and Repetition. In a brief philosophical narrative, titled The Repetition and published in 1843 (the same year as the more widely known Fear and Trembling), Kierkegaard proposed what proved to be a radical revaluation of “repetition” as “the new [philosophical] category that will be discovered” (148). His complex repetitions and recognitions (both true and false) on all levels of textual composition, strikingly similar to Gaddis’s technique in The Recognitions, have triggered a host of critical interpretations. Chief among them, Deleuze’s poststructuralist rereading in Difference and Repetition (1968) marks a renewed (postexistentialist) interest in Kierkegaard as one of the most important thinkers of modernity. In a very broad sense, one could say that Repetition is primarily concerned with reconceptualizing our relationship with time. Rather than explaining time as following a linear axis from past into present into future as in Hegel’s philosophy, Kierkegaard posits that we cannot experience time (including future time) except through a recollection of past events and that therefore our whole life is a repetition: “When the Greeks said that all knowledge is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence. If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise” (149). Put brie®y, Kierkegaard’s argument runs as follows: repetition is life because without repetition

In the Diaspora of Words / 41 the present would be irrecoverably past or perpetually passing. Yet if reality is made of repetition, then the form by which repetition becomes manifest is recollection or the act of remembering. Repetition, therefore, does not just happen; it is neither mechanical and automatic (as Kierkegaard famously realizes when trying to “repeat” his journey to Berlin) nor does it freeze human agency in a series of passing, identical moments. “The dialectic of repetition,” Kierkegaard argues, “is easy; for that which is repeated has been— otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new” (149). Whereas recollection is repetition backward, repetition, according to this logic, can be described as recollection forward. This is also why he calls repetition the modern category (vs. the ancient or “ethnical” category of recollection, 149). Rather than marking the end of human life before it has even begun, repetition represents a powerful instrument to overcome death: “it may be true that a person’s life is over and done with in the ¤rst moment, but there must also be the vital force to slay this death and transform it to life” (137). Kierkegaard’s de¤nition of repetition as an ongoing process of remembering and representation is essentially poetic. To repeat (wieder-holen) is an act of willful recovery by way of reimagining the past as presence. Moreover, the dynamics of repetition are volatile, not contrived or determined: “repetition is and remains a transcendence” (186). By thus redeeming repetition of its negative material connotation, Kierkegaard is able to posit a special place for the artist in society. If repetition is the driving force of human existence, the artist, whose professional interests are centered in the representation of being as (past) time, becomes what he calls an “exception” and a bridge to that other “aristocratic exception,” namely, religion. Insofar as he engages in a “re-petitioning” of life as art (as Kierkegaard’s philosophical alter ego Constantine Constantius engages with the young poet of his case study), the artist constantly navigates the shifting boundaries between the paradox of repetition and the dreadful possibility of irrecoverable loss. This, then, is what connects him to the sphere of religion and spirituality and, by way of “forward” recollection, to that mid-twentieth-century priest-turned-artist ¤gure, Wyatt Gwyon. To him I now return in conclusion.

In That Diaspora of Words . . . Toward the end of The Recognitions, Wyatt, who by now has reappeared under the name of Stephen, is seen, in a Spanish monastery, feverishly scraping off layers of paint from a sixteenth-century genre painting. In keeping with

42 / Benesch the austere, spiritual environment, Wyatt seems to be obsessed with “simplicity” (872), a reductive, self-annihilating approach to painting that he learned from studying Renaissance masters, who in turn, so the argument goes, had copied it from Titian (Thoreau, who has numerous cameo appearances in the novel, is yet another important source here). Wyatt has pushed the idea to the very end of the scale, where simpli¤cation becomes erasure or the removal of every layer of paint. His model, obvious to those who have read the novel, is Praxiteles, the Greek artist, who de¤ned the process of sculpturing as the removal of excess marble to the point where one “reaches the real form which was there all the time” (875). Although readers are hard pressed to explain Wyatt’s search for perfection, purity, and formal concretization as anything but a representation of modernist aesthetic core values, his project could also be read as a re-petitioning of Constantine’s (alias Kierkegaard’s) de¤nition of art to “expose what is hidden” (Repetition 135). Whereas Constantine every morning “shaves off the beard of all [his] ludicrousness” only to recognize that “the next morning [his] beard is just as long again” (214), Wyatt scrapes off heaps of paint only to arrive at the recognition that repetition cannot be avoided: “we all studied . . . with Titian” (The Recognitions 873). All Wyatt’s life has been marked by a form of artistic theft (“I am lived as a thief. Don’t you know? All my life is lived as a thief,” 868).14 By positing repetition as a powerful, creative force, both Kierkegaard and Gaddis try to discard its negative cultural and philosophical image. In this scheme, reality becomes the repetition of an abstract idea and ideas or, more speci¤cally, their re-presentation as art, are always only actualizations of the real. Even though it necessitates a series of repetitions, art is not, as in the Platonic understanding, merely an “imitation” of life. Its ceaseless effort to actualize the real by way of re-presentation notwithstanding does not mean an eternal reproduction of what has been there before. Rather the artist’s work resembles Kierkegaard’s experience of rereading of the Book of Job: “Every time I come to it, it is born anew as something original or becomes new and original in my soul” (205). In Eco’s analysis of postmodern media culture, the shift from innovation to repetition, from the modern aesthetics of “novelty” to the postmodern aesthetics of “recognition” implements a new form of mythmaking. Yet myth, Eco argues, “has nothing to do with art. It is a story, always the same. It may not be the story of Atreus and it may be that of J R. Why not? Every epoch has its mythmakers, its own sense of the sacred” (182). Gaddis would not agree. To this staunch critic of mechanical reproductions and (post)modern

In the Diaspora of Words / 43 doubling (a critique most scathingly executed in the Pivner sections, 282– 92), contemporary media society was veiled in an “undimensional darkness,” a self-perpetuating, endless repetition of “static patternless con¤gurations [that] recalled nothing” (286). Faced with “that Diaspora of words” (85), which has become the nature of communication and discourse, The Recognitions articulates a longing for simplicity: “the unmeasurable residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin.” This, to be sure, entails both the process of making and that of unmaking, of ‘scraping off.’ An impossible task, most readily associated in the novel with Esme, the enigmatic, ephemeral muse of Greenwich Village’s artistic community (and ¤ctional alias of Sheri Martinelli, Gaddis’s coeval and correspondent, later Pound’s long-term friend and partner), who knows how to create without creating.15 Working through a thousand words that by now have become “a million inanities,” she moves on to where “work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem” (299–300). On a much larger scale, The Recognitions may be seen as the next best solution to this challenging task of the (post)modern writer to embrace repetition as a new category while, simultaneously, resisting the dangers of self-effacement.

Notes 1. Considering the premium that our culture puts on originality, progress, and innovation, the Austrian historian of science Paul Feyerabend sees this myth of “creativity” already at work in Plato’s Phaedrus, where in his seventh letter, Plato explains how “understanding or building a work of art contains an element that goes beyond skill, technical knowledge, and talent. A new force takes hold of the soul and directs its [ . . . ] artistic achievement” (701). Feyerabend criticizes “the view that culture needs individual creativity [as] not only absurd but also dangerous” (701). It is absurd because of its underlying assumption that “human beings are self-contained entities, separated from the rest of nature” (708) and it is dangerous because, on a larger historical scale, it “led to tremendous social, ecological, and personal problems” (“Creativity: A Dangerous Myth” 711). 2. In particular, Barth’s argument was directed against what he saw as an ideological superimposition of one rather limited literary tradition upon all of literature: “What my essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective ‘exhaustion’ not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that admirable, not-to-be-repudiated, but essentially completed

44 / Benesch ‘program’ of what Hugh Kenner has dubbed ‘the Pound era’ ” (“The Literature of Replenishment” 39). 3. In his “William Gaddis, J R, and the Art of Excess,” Tom LeClair examines the excessive nature of Gaddis’s style of writing and the waste motif in his second novel J R. 4. In this volume, Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong offer an explanation of the necessity of “hypertrophied” repetition in The Recognitions, and the technique’s failure when used within the constraining canvas of Carpenter’s Gothic. —Eds. 5. As of now, the most substantial study of this issue is John Johnston, Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory (1990). 6. The term “regenerative re-petitioning” is LaCapra’s (35). I borrow it here because it equals nicely the various meanings and wordplay of the German term wieder-holen that constitutes the philosophical center of Kierkegaard’s The Repetition (which I discuss below). 7. To this intertextual panorama one may well add Gilles Deleuze’s creative appropriation of Kierkegaard in Difference and Repetition (1968), a text that raises similar questions about the nature of “repetition” as those raised in The Recognitions. By the same token, it would also be possible to speak of Gaddis’s novel as a precursor text to Deleuze’s, even though the latter does not seem to have been conscious of his American ancestor (which is actually quite surprising, given Deleuze’s explicit interest in and frequent references to American literature). 8. As Roland Barthes argued in his often-quoted essay “The Death of the Author,” “the author is a modern ¤gure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the human person” (168). On the genealogy of modern authorship, see also, among others, Trilling, Foucault, and Said. 9. While Schwartz’s assessment of copying and twinning practices in Western society is admirable for its wide range and almost encyclopedic approach to the topic, there are numerous studies that deal more speci¤cally with the history of forgery and counterfeiting in the visual arts (a topic especially pertinent to The Recognitions). For a historical overview, see Matthew Rutenberg’s review essay “The Charms of Deception.” 10. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, names only Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the French catholic writer Charles Péguy as having recognized ‘repetition’ as a pivotal philosophic and creative concept: “Each of the three, in his own way, makes repetition not only a power peculiar to language and thought, a superior pathos and pathology, but also the fundamental category of a philosophy of the future” (5). Obviously, the list should also include Deleuze’s own attempt to reconceptualize repetition vis-à-vis a cultural environment predicated on ‘difference’ and change. 11. With the exception, perhaps, of its classic variant ‘emulation’ (repetition as ‘improvement’) that was revived in America during the early national period to vindicate the lingering ‘import’ of ideas and technology from Europe.

In the Diaspora of Words / 45 12. This brief piece is actually the ¤rst instance of Gaddis’s lifelong obsession with the history of the player piano as a glaring manifestation of cultural and intellectual decline. It foreshadows the use of the same theme in J R (1975) and the posthumously published novella Agape Agape (2002). See also the head notes to this and related material in The Rush for Second Place and the Afterword to Agape Agape by Joseph Tabbi. 13. “The First Turn of the Screw” and “The Last Turn of the Screw” are Gaddis’s headers for the very ¤rst and last chapters, respectively. 14. One is also struck here by a parallelism between Kierkegaard’s quip on “shaving” as “castrating” (“I sit and clip myself,” 214) and Gaddis’s mention of “that most extraordinary Father of the Church, Origen, whose third-century enthusiasm led him to castrate himself so that he might repeat the hoc est corpus meum, Dominus, without the distracting interference of the rearing shadow of the ®esh” (103). 15. For a detailed discussion of Martinelli’s appearance in the novel, see Taylor.

3 The Collapse of Everything William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel Stephen J. Burn

Gaddis often liked to keep the works he “referenced” close at hand when writing a novel, but how many references does one really need? How much is too much? While this photo of Gaddis’s of¤ce may indeed show how and why it is proper to describe Gaddis as an encyclopedic author, Stephen Burn describes how popular culture, especially in light of the glut of mass-media outlets, threatens to overwhelm and destabilize all encyclopedic works, including those that Gaddis created. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

The Collapse of Everything / 47

 On the night of 26 January 1852, Gustave Flaubert noted that his ambition was to write “a book about nothing,” a book with “almost no subject” that would survive through the internal strength of its own style (Letters 213). For critics who see the development of twentieth-century ¤ction as a gradual emptying-out of content from the novel, Flaubert’s imagined work may seem to contain the germ of the next century’s literature. His emphasis on style over subject matter suggests a tempting explanation for all the reduction in plot, character, and referentiality that is sometimes considered the hallmark of modern ¤ction. Even Andreas Huyssen relies on this argument when he claims that Flaubert’s dream of a book about nothing lies at the core of modernist aesthetics.1 The problem with this formulation, however, isn’t just that it offers an insuf¤ciently nuanced account of the complexities of modernism, but that the idea of a content-free literature doesn’t even adequately describe the diversity of Flaubert’s own work. Despite his devotion to a self-suf¤cient literary style, Flaubert believed that the roots of all great literature lay in encyclopedic knowledge. In 1854 he attributed the power of Homer and Rabelais to the information embedded in their works. They were, he claimed, “encyclopedias of their time,”2 and he sought to match their achievement in his ¤nal work, the exhaustively researched Bouvard and Pécuchet. Layered with an encyclopedic range of information (running from horticulture to politics), Bouvard and Pécuchet presents the drama and futility of acquiring knowledge, and the extent of the research behind the novel is hinted at in Flaubert’s claim that he read more than 1,500 books in preparation for the work. Flaubert may be famous for his desire to write a book about nothing, but the six years he spent working on Bouvard and Pécuchet demonstrate that he was also one of the ¤rst modern novelists to try to write a book about everything. Flaubert’s efforts to complete his encyclopedic survey were eventually undone by his death in 1880, when only one volume of Bouvard and Pécuchet was near completion. The fragments that remain, however, indicate that this last book would have eventually collapsed under the weight of its own erudition. Flaubert’s outline for the rest of the book suggests that he intended the animating narrative of the ¤rst volume to drop away as the book’s two main characters withdrew from the external world to concentrate on copying out entries from Flaubert’s encyclopedia of bourgeois stupidity, the Dictionary of Received Ideas. The book at this point would have degenerated into almost

48 / Burn pure list, and although such a format would surely have been unworkable, the legacy of Flaubert’s encyclopedic ambition can be traced far into the twentieth century. As Italo Calvino has argued, the desire to write an encyclopedic book about everything is one of the characteristic impulses of the twentiethcentury writer, and is often to be found in modernist works alongside acknowledgements of Flaubert’s in®uence.3 James Joyce, for example, marks the legacy of Flaubert’s last work in Finnegans Wake by describing a development “From here Buvard to dear Picuchet” (302.9–10), and he makes the scale of his ambition explicit by de¤ning Ulysses as a “kind of encyclopedia” (Selected Letters 271). In works by Robert Musil, Ezra Pound, and John Dos Passos, an equivalent ambition can be detected and, in fact, the desire to produce a book about everything is so prevalent among modernist writers that the encyclopedic narrative is often de¤ned as the quintessentially modernist form.4 Michael André Bernstein, for example, sees the emergence of “a new kind of encyclopedic masterpiece” as a distinctive characteristic of modernism (5), and he argues that the development of postmodernism coincides with the twilight of this encyclopedic form. Bernstein claims that postmodernism is founded upon the subversion of all the imperatives that underlie the encyclopedic modernist masterpiece. Postmodern works, he contends, insist upon their own partiality and historicity, and with such a narrowed format are unable to approach the universality of the modernist encyclopedia. This retrenchment, he concludes, “throws into doubt the category of genius” (12). Bernstein produces no examples to support this conclusion, which perhaps betrays his belief that his conclusions are so self-evident as to be beyond reproach, and in an age that is often de¤ned in terms of Lyotard’s in®uential announcement of the collapse of grand narratives many critics might agree that it is no longer possible to write an encyclopedic novel. The belief that the postwar aesthetic cannot be expressed in encyclopedic forms has particularly affected the reputation of William Gaddis. When The Recognitions was ¤rst published in 1955 its intricate architecture, and vast and layered erudition, seemed to have little in common with an episteme that privileged local knowledge, or with the narrower scope of what Frederick Karl called “the slice-of-life ¤ctions that characterized the 1950s” (American Fictions 1940/1980 180). In the 1960s large-scale narratives faired better than in the 1950s, but ironically, when The Recognitions was reissued in 1962, its publication coincided with Frank O’Connor’s in®uential announcement that the short story was America’s “national art form” (62). But while the initial

The Collapse of Everything / 49 poor reception of Gaddis’s work can partly be explained by a combination of the midcentury fashion for short ¤ctions, and early formulations of the postmodern episteme, the reasons for its relative neglect in later decades are more deeply entwined with critical constructions of the encyclopedic form. Apart from a handful of pages in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, and a few scattered essays, critics have rarely engaged directly with the genre of the encyclopedic narrative. Perhaps the most in®uential attempt, to date, is Edward Mendelson’s 1976 essay “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.”5 Mendelson’s essay sets out to establish that Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is an encyclopedic narrative, but his account is complicated by an attempt to blend generic analysis into a larger cultural argument. The encyclopedic narrative is, for Mendelson, “the most important single genre in Western literature” (161), and membership of this elite group is limited by the precise criteria that he insists encyclopedic works must ful¤ll. Mendelson contends that such works must present a synecdochic account of the entire range of a culture’s knowledge, offer an account of one technology or science, offer a compendium of literary styles, include an account of art other than ¤ction, and provide a history of language. They must also acknowledge their own massive scale by including giants and, critically, they must occupy a position at the center of a national culture. This last injunction places particular restrictions on the genre, limiting each country to just one encyclopedic narrative, and explains why Mendelson was only able to ¤nd six examples to set alongside Pynchon’s work: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses.6 Although the formal criteria have provided a useful foundation for later critics, the scheme contains several problems. Mendelson is never really clear, for example, about why the inclusion of giants should make a novel more encyclopedic than one that does not. It is also curious that Mendelson does not consider theology an important component of the encyclopedic narrative, given the historical reach of his scheme and the books he selects. More materially, however, his insistence on the unique cultural centrality of the encyclopedic narrative necessitates the neglect of a number of works that most readers would consider encyclopedic. Finnegans Wake, The Cantos, and The Recognitions, from the twentieth century alone, each seem encyclopedic in their intellectual range, and worthy of inclusion in a less restrictive scheme. In terms of contemporary ¤ction, at least, Mendelson can point to the

50 / Burn number of encyclopedic narratives that have been published after 1976 to partly mitigate the low population count given in his essay, but some later approaches to the genre have supported his estimate of the form’s scarcity. Franco Moretti, for example, in his 1996 study Modern Epic, recounts how Mendelson’s essay helped shape his understanding of what he calls a supergenre. Although Moretti considers the works that Mendelson views as encyclopedic to actually be the modern descendants of the epic, he links their scarcity to their status as “sacred works.” The rarity of such works, he contends, “is a constitutive aspect of this symbolic form. A work can be the ‘sacred text’ of a culture if it is unique: thirty Bibles do not enlarge the sphere of the sacred, but pulverize it” (4). Moretti offers a nuanced account of his chosen texts, but this equation of wide-ranging ¤ctions with sacred works is, I think, unnecessarily limiting, allowing (as Mendelson does) the reception of a work dominance over its generic features. By contrast, focusing on the encyclopedic elements of a text does not require such narrow generic boundaries: thirty Bibles may destroy the sphere of the sacred, but thirty encyclopedias do not destroy the category of the encyclopedic. Critics of contemporary American ¤ction, however, have offered a counternarrative to the narrowness of Mendelson’s survey. In particular, Frederick Karl and Tom LeClair have demonstrated the range and quality of contemporary encyclopedic ¤ctions in America. But while both Karl and LeClair offer crucial insights, their preference for new descriptive terms (Karl calls encyclopedic narratives “Mega-Novels,” while LeClair favors “Novels of Excess”), has tended to obscure the form’s engagement with the encyclopedia as controlling idea. In response, I argue for a quite direct relationship between encyclopedias and the encyclopedic novel that, in the late twentieth century in particular, crystallizes into a coherent genre. To map the topography of this genre, and to demonstrate the vitality of the postmodern encyclopedic novel against the claims of critics such as Bernstein and Mendelson, I take the novels of William Gaddis as representative examples partly because I argue that they have signi¤cantly in®uenced the development of the encyclopedic form in the few decades, and partly because they take encyclopedias as both artistic source and theme.7 Steven Moore’s Reader’s Guide to “The Recognitions” has shown how Gaddis drew upon the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for details about painting, alchemy, mummi¤cation, religion, and Hungarian literature, and his use of that edition is dramatized in a subplot in one chapter of the novel. Wyatt’s father owns the fourteenth edition and consults “volume eigh-

The Collapse of Everything / 51 teen . . . PLANTS to RAYM” (420) midway through part two, chapter three. Later in that chapter Gaddis reveals that Wyatt’s grandfather has borrowed the book, as the Reverend Gwyon sends a note instructing him to “Return vol. 18” (442). But while the dif¤culty Wyatt’s father has in getting hold of his encyclopedia when there is “a great deal of work to be done” (442) offers an ironic commentary on Gaddis’s own struggle to keep track of the disparate resources needed to write his novel, the Town Carpenter’s use of the volume offers a salutary warning. The Town Carpenter reads up on Prester John in this volume and his enthusiasm for the subject leads him to subsequently mistake his own grandson for the legendary King. Encyclopedic knowledge for him leads to a misrecognition and should remind us that, as Emerson notes, “all the wisdom is not in the encyclopædia” (111). Even armed with reference books, we never know enough, and it is sensible to heed Gaddis’s warning when trying to catalogue a subject as inherently unmanageable as the encyclopedic novel. Naming all the features of the modern encyclopedic novel (even if discussion is limited to Gaddis’s work) would require a full-length generic study, so the focus of this essay is limited to an analysis of Mendelson’s insistence on the cultural centrality of the encyclopedic narrative, an analysis that, I believe, also demonstrates how the encyclopedic form develops from modernist roots to become a vital postmodern form. One of Mendelson’s opening axioms is that the encyclopedic narrative arises from a major Western culture as that nation becomes aware of itself as a unity. The history of encyclopedias, however, suggests that the encyclopedic urge emerges from a culture’s awareness of its own fragility rather than from a sense of national coherence. In his study, Encyclopaedic Visions, Richard Yeo has demonstrated how the motivation behind many encyclopedic projects was a widespread fear about the vulnerability of a society’s information level that is manifested in a pervasive anxiety about the security of ordinary books as safe containers of knowledge. The seeds of such anxiety were partly sown by the loss of larger storehouses, such as the library of Alexandria, and the same fear looms large in foundational Enlightenment documents such as Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. In the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie, D’Alembert explicitly frames their information storage project against the example of earlier lost civilizations. In contrast to the cultures of Egypt, Chaldea, Greece, and Rome, which (he contends) disappeared along with much of their knowledge, D’Alembert promises that the Encyclopédie will act “as a sanctuary,

52 / Burn where the knowledge of man is protected from time and from revolutions” (121). This idea was evidently at the heart of their conception of the encyclopedia, as a paraphrase reemerges in the entry Diderot wrote in 1755 for “Encyclopédie.” He argues: “The most glorious moment for a work [like this encyclopedia] would be immediately subsequent to some great revolution which had halted the advance of science, interrupted artistic activity and plunged some part of our hemisphere once again into darkness. What a profound sense of gratitude would be felt . . . towards those who, alarmed about the future and anticipating the havoc, had safeguarded the knowledge of past ages!” (24). That a similar threat of imminent destruction is often incorporated into the encyclopedic narrative can be demonstrated with brief reference to some of the works Mendelson selects. The encyclopedic narrative typically contrasts the exuberance of its earlier data gathering with an ending that either delivers or promises death: Moby-Dick closes with nearly all its characters destroyed by the object of its study; Gravity’s Rainbow’s fascination with the rocket comes to an end on the brink of apocalypse; and in Faust, Goethe summarizes this tendency when he has Mephistopheles link a fantasy of total knowledge with an apprehension of ensuing terror by announcing that, “From dreams of god-like knowledge you will wake / To fear, in which your very soul shall quake” (99). This intimate connection between the encyclopedic urge and approaching apocalypse is central to Gaddis’s novels, and partly through his in®uence becomes an essential element of the late twentieth-century encyclopedic narrative. But because the encyclopedic narrative is so commonly considered a modernist phenomenon (and because Gaddis’s work is so frequently compared to Ulysses) a brief account of Ulysses’ encyclopedic characteristics is valuable as a prologue to Gaddis’s novels. The encyclopedic reach of Ulysses has often been noted. In 1922, for example, Ezra Pound presciently argued that the work “carried on a process begun in Bouvard et Pécuchet ” (403), while an unsympathetic Wyndham Lewis later described the work as “an encyclopaedia of English literary technique” (74). But, as in the works of Cervantes, Melville, and Pynchon, the encyclopedic elements of Ulysses are predicated on the fragility of the society the novel depicts, as Joyce acknowledged when he famously commented that his aim was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” ( Joyce qtd. in Budgen 69). Stan Smith has noted that this “anecdote deserves more consideration than it usually receives” (15), and the idea that

The Collapse of Everything / 53 the reader is witnessing a “cityful passing away” (Ulysses 208) has been signi¤cantly incorporated into the text. The theme of the destruction of cities, “shattered glass and toppling masonry” (28, 54, 683), runs through the text alongside what Bloom calls the “last day idea” (133). While the novel is famously set on Thursday, 16 June 1904, the knowledge that “tomorrow is killing day” (122) lurks behind the action, going beyond a literal reference to the city’s abattoirs, to suggest a wider “slaughter of innocents” (218). News is brought of “funerals all over the world everywhere every minute” (127), and rumors spread as far as the city’s brothels that “the last day is coming this summer” (623). In the face of this uncertain future, the novel plays with various methods of information storage—Bloom’s “mnemotechnic” (834), messages scratched into sand, and even the “plasmic memory” of the soul (538)—but the most frequently invoked archive is the library. Ulysses is preoccupied with “the great libraries of the world” (50). Several appear in the text, from invocations of the scribe “Thoth, god of libraries” (248), through the library that provided the intellectual centre of Hellenistic culture, “Alexandria” (50), to parodic collections of the “World’s Twelve Worst Books” (607). Most signi¤cant, however, is Bloom’s library of “several inverted volumes improperly arranged and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles” (832). Although only including twenty-two books, the range of Bloom’s library is encyclopedic, as those books encompass literature, philosophy, astronomy, theology, geography, math, history, and biography, but in a real sense the collection might be considered to form the center of the book. The list of books appears in the “Ithaca” chapter and, according to the list of correspondences Joyce prepared, the penultimate chapter was to represent the “skeleton” of his epic. Appropriately, then, Bloom’s library can be seen to function as a kind of backbone to the text, not only laying out the materials for the book’s construction (a crude formula for which might run Thom’s Dublin Post Of¤ce Directory + Shakespeare’s Works), but also providing a spine from which a number of Ulysses’ obsessions radiate outward. For example, on three occasions Bloom remembers his copy of “Physical Strength and How to Obtain It by Eugene Sandow” (833) in connection with his anxieties about his masculinity (73, 567, 797), while his tendency to evaluate human life against “the apathy of the stars” (867) is highlighted by the reverence he holds for his A Handbook of Astronomy (299, 654, 833) and the “fascinating little book . . . of sir Robert Ball’s” (194), The Story of the Heavens (591, 832). Against the threat of apocalypse Joyce’s modernist novel uses encyclopedic

54 / Burn information storage as a base from which the world (as ¤ltered through the author’s sensibility) could be reconstructed. The movement is from book to world, with the world being reshaped by the image contained in the library. Although “the studious silence of the library” (30) may be seductive to scholars, the direction of this movement is revised by Gaddis’s novels. Deeply aware of the need to understand the “order of things” (The Recognitions 560), and to avoid the corresponding dangers of “mummifactory presentations called ‘digests’ ” (497), Gaddis’s novels are even more involved with the idea of the encyclopedia than Joyce’s are. In fact, the central themes of The Recognitions (and of all Gaddis’s ¤ction) bear a close correlation to the themes of the encyclopedia: the novel’s quest for “recognition” of reality dramatizes the Enlightenment encyclopedia’s efforts to locate and select “essential” truth; Gaddis’s detailed critique of originality has af¤nities with the encyclopedia that, as an assemblage of current knowledge, cannot be too original, but equally cannot plagiarize; while the vastness of The Recognitions and modern encyclopedias are responses to the proliferation of data, and both are concerned with how that body of information can be encompassed. But within these broad encyclopedic themes, The Recognitions is con®icted between two different historical ideas of the encyclopedia, and this con®ict is epitomized by the two main narrative templates for the book, the Clementine Recognitions and Goethe’s Faust. Although the two are related (Basil Valentine notes that Clement’s work is “really the beginning of the whole Faust legend” [373]), they provide the historical poles that the novel’s encyclopedic perspective shifts between: a third-century outlook that, like the slightly later medieval encyclopedia, found salvation and meaning in God, and an Enlightenment perspective that was fashioned at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Middle Ages the encyclopedic dream of a work that could coherently encompass all knowledge was deemed feasible. This belief, Richard Yeo has noted, was part of “the theological framework that regarded true knowledge . . . as a divine and unchanging gift” (5). As William N. West observes in Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, the medieval encyclopedist sought to re®ect this order. The “encyclopedia as it was imagined in early modern Europe,” West contends, “was not a space where knowledge was produced, but where it was preserved . . . they do not create, but instead seek to re®ect . . . reality” (22, italics mine). The choice of the word “re®ect” is important here, as it betrays the assumption (contained, as Yeo also notes, in the titles of medieval encyclopedias such as the Speculum

The Collapse of Everything / 55 Maius [“The Great Mirror”] of Vincent of Beauvais) that the work could be a perfect re®ection of the divine order of knowledge. By contrast, the eighteenth century marked the historical crisis when, according to Yeo, “observers acknowledged that there was . . . an unbridgeable chasm between the knowledge contained in individual memory and the collective body of knowledge stored in an encyclopaedia” (xi). The proliferation of knowledge in post-Renaissance Europe meant that information could no longer be reliably gained from one polymath intelligence and, as a consequence, single-authored encyclopedias began to be replaced by multiauthored volumes, with an inevitable loss of overall coherence. So while the encyclopedias of the Middle Ages unfolded according to some coherent overarching pattern, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of discrete entries, a development that made locating speci¤c information easier, at the expense of locating that specialist knowledge within some larger scheme. The pervasive sense of “something lost” that af®icts many of the characters in The Recognitions is partly a result of the tension between these two models of encyclopedic knowledge, and the subsequent loss of the coherence lent by the compendiums of the Middle Ages.8 Behind the contemporary frustrations of most serious characters in the novel is the yearning for the “meddy-evil indulgence” of coherence (399). Stanley treats his work as if it were a “commission from a prince in the Middle Ages” that “must be ¤nished to a thorough perfection” (323). Similarly, Esme strains to make her work re®ect the “residence of perfection, where nothing was created . . . because it was origin” (299). But the character who most completely absorbs the “pious cult of the Middle Ages” (690) is, of course, Wyatt, who comes to believe that he belongs to a medieval guild. As the encyclopedist of the Dark Ages adopted the mirror to suggest his work’s simple re®ection of divine unity, so Wyatt is a “mirror-gazer” (673), whose work is completed with mirrors. These mirrors, according to Esme, contain “terrible memories” (221), memories that seem to suggest what Wyatt has lost. The image of the mirror in medieval encyclopedias was intended to suggest the straightforward correspondence their work bore to reality, an aim that West summarizes as the goal of “literal reference . . . the sense of bearing their users back to the substratum of a reality” (14). This goal is, of course, the same aim that Wyatt believes true art seeks: a “recognition of reality” (91). The problem with such an ideal, however, is that it depends upon an unchanging referent (either body of knowledge, or artistic subject), and this stability is another reason why the model of the medieval encyclopedia ap-

56 / Burn peals. While eighteenth-century encyclopedias were motivated, as Yeo notes, by “the need to record new knowledge” and characterized by “open-ended inquiry” (12), the medieval encyclopedia conceived of knowledge as ¤xed because divine. West characterizes them as attempts to “record the unchanging and timeless” (22). This contrasting approach to time and knowledge dovetails neatly with the larger argument about time articulated in The Recognitions. It is the forward motion of time’s arrow that oppresses most characters in the novel, from the Reverend Gwyon at the start, who appears to be “waiting for something which had happened long before” (7), through all the other characters who hope (like Eliot’s Prufrock) that there will be more time. When Stanley, however, envisions his work as a medieval project it seems to protect against this motion, by carrying with it what Gaddis calls “proof against time” (323). Similarly, it has been the continual prospect of “another blue day” (238, italics mine) that shadows Wyatt (who takes the phrase from Thomas Carlyle). Wyatt fears people “chopping time up into fragments with their race to get through it” (382), and in his ¤nal, apparently deranged, moments in the book he, like Stanley, seems to be seeking a form of protection against time’s passage in his work. Wyatt praises the “daring to reshape the past” (898), and this is perhaps one of the reasons why at the end he is “restoring” pictures (870), by apparently scraping the paint off them. He is trying to arrest the proliferation of works, the new information that renders the simpli¤ed, timeless worldview outdated. He is insanely trying to restore the world to an earlier level of knowledge. While characters seek this coherence, however, Gaddis’s novel typically undermines the medieval vision with the informational excess of the Enlightenment encyclopedia, fragmenting the timeless model. So while Stanley dreams of the cohesion of the Middle Ages, in reality he complains that “everything is in pieces” (927). Similarly, when Wyatt’s worldview is challenged by the belief that the pattern he has sought to re®ect does not exist, he is driven to a desperate “effort to assemble a pattern from breakage” (381). This opposition between the medieval and Enlightenment encyclopedia is neatly encapsulated by the contrast between the very start of the novel and its end. The novel’s epigraph, “Nihil cavum neque sine signo apud Deum” (“In God nothing is empty of sense”), promises a divine unity, a pattern that will locate events within a larger framework of meaning. The loop of the uroborus on the title page, a snake with its tail in its mouth, seems to support the medieval belief in wholeness, with the connection of start and end sug-

The Collapse of Everything / 57 gesting the satisfying closed circle of a traditional narrative. By contrast, the absurd death of the pious Stanley at the end of the novel seems to derive more from the Enlightenment understanding of knowledge. The collapse of the church at Fenestrula symbolizes the crushing weight of information (expanding since the eighteenth century) because it is caused by an increase in the number of cultural artifacts (the new composition by Stanley cannot be borne, signi¤cantly, by the architecture), but also because the collapse arises from the inability to process enough data (Stanley is an expert on composition and musical history, but is unable to translate the priest’s warning). The close of The Recognitions, then, offers an instructive contrast to Joyce’s encyclopedic model. While Joyce’s library is a cultural storehouse against apocalypse, Gaddis’s encyclopedic narratives typically confront engulfment by culture at their climax. Supporting structures (churches, business empires, sanity) collapse at the end, and culture overwhelms. As the end of J R approaches, Bast’s delirious collapse and subsequent spell in the hospital (spent composing cello solos) is partly the result of his failure to make an impact on Vansant by playing him Bach’s Cantata No. 21;9 while as A Frolic of His Own draws to a close and Oscar descends into childish insanity, the narrative voice gradually blurs into Longfellow’s Hiawatha. These parallel endings, however, should not suggest that Gaddis’s approach to the encyclopedic novel is static. One of the reasons that Gaddis has in®uenced later writers is that the idea of the encyclopedia evolves through his work, from the medieval vision of divine order at the start of The Recognitions through to the collapse of the encyclopedic ideal in Agape Agape. In J R, for example, the image of informational excess that eighteenthcentury encyclopedic projects provided for The Recognitions is inverted, so that Enlightenment encyclopedias now seem emblematic of a less informationdense age. This reversal is largely articulated through Jack Gibbs, who is writing a work that tries to encompass “the beast with two backs called arts and sciences” (289), but in increasing despair he complains: “must have thought I could, like Diderot good God how I ever thought I could do it” (588). Ironically, however, earlier encyclopedias begin to encumber, rather than enable, Gibbs’s attempt to complete his own encyclopedic work. As the novel progresses, volumes of a corrupt ten-part children’s encyclopedia gradually ¤ll up his apartment, and in another subtle comment on the compartmentalization of knowledge, it is only “samples of volume four” that are “blanketing the city” and Gibbs’s apartment (518). Continuity with the encyclopedic argument of The Recognitions is, however, ensured as Gibbs’s

58 / Burn book (“a social history of mechanization and the arts” [244]) must face the same contest against time that Stanley and Wyatt fear, to avoid being outdated. Gibbs’s book begins with an appeal posted in a Leadville saloon, “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best” (289), but his book is already “ten years late” the “God damned pianist already shot . . . everybody knows” (605). This movement away from the coherence of the thematically arranged medieval encyclopedia seems to be mirrored by a shift in narratorial style. While The Recognitions is uni¤ed by an omniscient narrative voice, adumbrating themes and connecting discrete scenes, this overarching support gives way in the later novels to a range of competing voices that appear without the comfort of any explicit connection. In his ¤nal work, Agape Agape, Gaddis presents the ¤nal step in this progression: the apparent collapse of the encyclopedic ideal under the weight of its own data. As J R recycled and reversed the model of the encyclopedia found in The Recognitions, so the materials for Agape Agape are found in Jack Gibbs’s encyclopedic project at the end of J R. Gibbs’s book about “order and disorder” (244) shares the name of Gaddis’s ¤nal ¤ction, and Gibbs describes his work as being “like living with a God damned invalid . . . come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence” (603). As Peter Dempsey has noted, Gaddis literalizes this simile in Agape Agape by taking as his subject the efforts of a terminally ill writer, trying to order his encyclopedic notes as he lies con¤ned in bed. Ulysses, of course, ends its encyclopedic excavation of early-century Dublin in a bed, accompanied by Molly Bloom’s all-encompassing “yes.”10 But the bed of Agape Agape (where the ¤rst word spoken is “no”) is less like Molly’s than it is like the sad marital bed described in The Recognitions, “which had become a refuge, no longer a beginning but a desperate end” (151). This description neatly encapsulates Gaddis’s vision of the encyclopedia in Agape Agape, because in his last work the beginning of the encyclopedic project (data gathering and ordering) has become an end. The melancholy writer of Agape Agape is surrounded by a “whole pile of books notes pages clippings” that he is futilely trying to get “sorted and organized” (1), but this is a task that he never completes. While Wyatt relied on the medieval trope of the mirror as symbol of unity, Agape Agape’s writer blames his diminished vision on the fact that there is “no mirror on the wall” (57), and, in fact, unlike the artists from earlier books, who manage (however momentarily) to tran-

The Collapse of Everything / 59 scend their circumstances, this last writer never manages to extricate himself from his research. Instead he announces: “that’s what it’s about, that’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight” (2). The collapse of everything is the collapse of the Flaubertian dream of a book about everything,11 and the narrator’s vision is, of course, also Gaddis’s. His work traces the movement from the collapse of the divine pattern of knowledge in the Middle Ages, through the proliferation of information that transformed the eighteenth-century encyclopedia, to the melancholy collapse of the encyclopedic dream in his last work. Gaddis notoriously spent around ¤fty years collecting thousands of pages of notes for Agape Agape, and the book’s curtailed ¤nal form (though itself a remarkable achievement) seems to mark the point where the mass of data exceeded the synthesizing powers of even his encyclopedic grasp. Yet even this partial defeat at the end has some parallels in the history of the encyclopedia. Yeo records, for example, that the ¤rst edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica devoted its ¤rst three volumes to a near exhaustive catalogue of A–B, while the last volume crammed in a hasty run through M–Z (5). But despite the late revision of Agape Agape, Gaddis’s work has not been short of recognition from other writers. Slightly younger contemporaries, such as Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Coover, have each acknowledged the in®uence of Gaddis’s continual engagement with the encyclopedic form, and Gaddis’s in®uence can perhaps be detected in several of their works. DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, for example, shares Gaddis’s mixture of erudition and imminent apocalypse, while Coover’s Lucky Pierre, which is itself a kind of encyclopedia of postmodernism, seems to include an allusion to Agape Agape.12 Gaddis’s work has also been important to the next generation of writers, although the supposed dif¤culty of his ¤ction was criticized in 2002 by Jonathan Franzen, who also attacked those critics who seemed (in Franzen’s eyes) to imply that the purpose of a novel was “to capture and ef¤ciently store data” (“Mr. Dif¤cult” 109). (The possibility that data might be not stored but synthesized, or that sublime failures of synthesis can themselves be a theme of contemporary ¤ction, is not considered by Franzen.) Franzen’s attack on Gaddis was apparently motivated by a frustrated attempt to read J R that Franzen abandoned on page 469 of the novel because he felt that Gaddis had stopped making sense. In a perhaps intentional irony, however, Franzen claims to have given up on the exact page that Gaddis’s

60 / Burn young capitalist blurts into the phone “I can send you some biographical stuff ” (469). The irony is in the move away from the informational, broadly conceived, to the personal and the biographical. For the decision to move away from an engagement with the legacy of postmodernism in favor of sending the reader “some biographical stuff ” is precisely what seems to sum up the confessional strand of Franzen’s recent writing while, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, the characteristic movement of the encyclopedic narrative is away from the personal voice toward larger scales of knowledge and the extinction of ego. Franzen’s criticism, however, does not seem to be shared by many of his contemporaries since writers such as Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Evan Dara, and Richard Powers have all continued to mine the encyclopedic vein. But if Gaddis’s transformation of the modernist encyclopedic form was signi¤cant for a heightened self-consciousness about the limitations of the encyclopedic impulse, then in subsequent generations this awareness seems even more central, as the work of younger writers (while retaining the crucial elements of the form outlined above) tends to use the encyclopedic form to dramatize more explicitly the limitations of the encyclopedic urge. The novels of Richard Powers provide a good example here, because Powers has drawn “a direct line” between Gaddis’s work and his own, and there are several af¤nities between the works of the two novelists.13 In Powers’s ¤rst novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, for example, the narrator describes “unsponsored recognition,” a phrase that teasingly recalls Gaddis’s terminology, while (characteristically) introducing a literal, cognitive dimension not often found in Gaddis. Powers writes: “Each day as I sift through my many new experiences, I ¤nd a few that I recognize without having any memory or experience of them. I do not mean mystical déjà vu; I mean the practical moment artists call epiphany and scientists call the instant of aha. At this moment of recognition I temporarily stop taking part in the thing at hand and jump a level in the hierarchy of awareness” (207–8). The outline Powers gives here seems to overlap signi¤cantly with Wyatt’s account of Recognitions in Gaddis’s ¤rst novel, though Powers’s description (which develops into a discussion of recursive consciousness) is rather more expansive than Gaddis’s aesthetic account. More pertinent, however, is the fascination with the limitations of the encyclopedia that Powers shares with Gaddis. One of the quests in Three Farmers hinges on a ®awed search through “a thousand encyclopedias and references” (46). An unnamed narrator has become fascinated with a photograph by August Sander, but because an exhibition incorrectly lists his name as Zander, the narrator’s desire to

The Collapse of Everything / 61 learn more about the photographer is doomed from the moment he begins his investigation in “the Xerxes to Zygote volume of a multivolume encyclopedia” (38). Although Powers notes that the twentieth century is “the century for records” (228), this failed quest adds to the novel’s demonstration that the dream of a perfect catalogue belongs to Flaubert’s century, and that now “the incomplete reference book is the most accurate” (44). Powers’s fascination with the archive, however, is present in its purest form in his third novel, The Gold Bug Variations (1991), which links data and apocalypse when Powers observes that “the world would end in ®ood . . . of information” (55). This novel is signi¤cant to the progression of the encyclopedic novel, because one of the images Powers adopts for his novel’s encyclopedic storage is, like Joyce, the library. Featuring a librarian as one of the novel’s authors, the book envisions life as “a lending library—huge conglomerate, multinational, underfunded, overinvested” (326). But while the movement in Ulysses is from the book to the world, the movement is complicated in The Gold Bug Variations. Rather than just shaping the world with its information, the library in Powers’s novel is constantly being invaded by the world: by people bringing music into the library (Todd enters, humming Bach), and by suggestions from its question board.14 Rather than a private store, it is an open, evolving archive. As Gaddis’s novels showed the idea of the encyclopedia developing from the Middle Ages, in con®ict, and always in danger of collapse from the Enlightenment onward, Powers and his contemporaries have critiqued the dream of total knowledge further, as they have continued the encyclopedic tradition by creating what Powers calls “encyclopedias of the Information Age” (Galatea 2.2 215).

Notes 1. In After the Great Divide, Huyssen claims that Flaubert’s ambition “grounds modernism in literature” (54). 2. “Homère, Rabelais, sont des encyclopédies de leur époque” (Correspondance 480, translation mine). 3. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino explores the fascination that the encyclopedic form has held for the modern writer, and calls Bouvard and Pécuchet “the most encyclopedic novel ever written” (113). 4. Although in modernism the encyclopedic tradition seems curiously male, the form is not wholly gendered. Despite the fact that Gertrude Stein, for example, draws less on external information, a recognizable strain of the encyclopedic instinct can be detected in her ambition to present an exhaustive “history of everyone who ever can or is or was or will be living” in The Making of Americans (143).

62 / Burn 5. Although published in the 1970s, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” is still regularly cited in discussions of the encyclopedic novel. In an essay from 2000, for example, Richard House called Mendelson’s essay the “most comprehensive [early] theory of such texts” (41), while in 1998 Trey Strecker used an overview of “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” to frame his short discussion of Richard Powers’s encyclopedic ¤ctions. In one of the few longer works to address the form, Hilary Clark begins her study The Fictional Encyclopedia with a discussion of Mendelson. 6. Mendelson fractures his own scheme to allow Gravity’s Rainbow, as a second American example, admission to this select group on the basis that Pynchon had recognized “a new international culture, created by the technologies of instant communication and the economy of world markets” (165). 7. Although Carpenter’s Gothic’s McCandless tries to make “a fresh start [by] writing . . . for encyclopedias” (166), I do not discuss Gaddis’s third novel here as its compactness seems to mark a deliberate break for Gaddis from the encyclopedic form. Taken together, Gaddis’s three long novels compose a uni¤ed survey of the three major arts, but I concentrate on The Recognitions, J R, and the shorter Agape Agape here to give a clearer picture of the development of Gaddis’s treatment of the encyclopedia. 8. In terms of the contrast between the thematically coherent medieval encyclopedia and the separate entries of later alphabetically arranged works, consider that Gaddis’s note for The Recognitions stating that the novel “should be ‘apparently’ broken up, because that is the nature of the problem it attempts to investigate, that is, the separating of things today” (qtd. in Koenig 102). 9. This scene is analyzed by Steven Schryer and mentioned by Anja Zeidler in this volume. —Eds. 10. Given Gaddis’s claims not to have read all of Ulysses, it should be noted that I am not arguing that Gaddis deliberately imitated or adapted Ulysses’ model. I have attempted to show, instead, that the two writers worked in the same genre, though with a different attitude to encyclopedias. In this instance, however, be it noted that Gaddis did confess to reading the “Penelope” section of Ulysses, and Joyce is mentioned in Agape Agape (18). 11. In Agape Agape Gaddis quotes Flaubert’s letters on four occasions. 12. Coover’s novel is ¤lled with ¤lm titles parodying postmodern ¤ction. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is recast as “Invisible Titties” (390); Barth’s Giles Goat Boy and Lost in the Funhouse are alluded to in the “goatish knockabout comedy called Lust in the Funhouse” (297), and Gass’s On Being Blue and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife are fused in “Feeling Blue: The Travelling Salesman and the Lonesome Wife” starring “who else but the master himself, Willie” (366–67). Coover seems to nod to Gaddis’s last book in the reference to “our little love feast. Our agape” (386). 13. Unpublished interview with the author, 11 February 2004. 14. One of the questions directed to the library even seems to come from the novel’s author: “R. P.” asks his librarian, “How many humans will there be by the beginning of next century? How many other living things?” (493).

4 Gaddis Dialogue Questioned Joseph McElroy

In “Gaddis Dialogue Questioned,” author Joseph McElroy argues that the reason we perceive William Gaddis as “dif¤cult” is because we use the wrong terms to describe Gaddis’s literary practice(s). For example, according to McElroy, we might use “dialogue” to describe the writing style of J R, when it is in fact a networked discourse. A Gaddis text thus contains many misrecognized literary elements, which causes most to believe that Gaddis indulges in the literary equivalent of “unspeakable practices.” Photograph courtesy of the Brown University Literary Arts Program.

64 / McElroy

 Imagine the ¤lm, with all that Gaddis left out of J R put in. Like faces, places, physical presence, gesture as language, collision, body’s collusion with or clothing of the soul, so much else, occluded from the novel not entirely, mind you, but embedded and receding within the impression that hits, surrounds, follows, ¤lls your attention with a present and foreground screen, in fact a wild urban suburban miscellany but not so it sticks together like features of a portrait: for it’s the voices that are in our way and Gaddis will leave the voices (which also screen) “alone”; go with them; try and build with them (but build what?), and unbuild or take apart with vast economy a ¤nancial and commercial and heart-burned wasteland in a novel itself made to last. Voices not just to preserve the authorially veiled and, likewise modernist, unrelenting stand-alone embodiment in talk, though J R is full of trickles of stage directions, brief ushering descriptions dense-sentenced sometimes touched with narrative longing, that we will attend to, thirst for (as for Gaddis in this other mode): for example school teacher entropy-genius Jack Gibbs (341) excusing himself on an errand to the post of¤ce but seen disappearing into a bar; or schoolkids’ responses to that great unedited ¤lm documentary Nanook of the North or “the cadenced ®ap” of Edward Bast’s ruined shoe (291). While from among them important to the practical realities of the 726page treasure text Gaddis leaves to us in 1975, this expanding story set off by (yet not generated single-handedly by) an eleven-year-old kid J R who, studying up on markets and their manipulations, and essentially over the phone where he reverses the (now, long-dead and never Gospel) rule children should be seen and not heard (for he is, with an exception or two or three, heard rather than seen); and, largely “behind” (yet acoustically inseparable from) the scenes, and with contagious, canny, national, and often disembodied presence, leverages by phone a corporate empire to some extent paper—“lifeless” as currency is said to be at the outset in an old maid’s voice answering a young estate lawyer’s voice that “rustled” like it. Or is that voice the omniscient? A J R movie? How would you do it without showing, betraying, giving away, extruding, inventing what Gaddis has largely excluded or elided from a tale commonly described as being composed of dialogue? Sure, but—wait: what does that mean, J R written in dialogue? These heard energies, these explainings, instructings, interruptings, hopes, half-lies, intricate transactings

Gaddis Dialogue Questioned / 65 and in®ations, confessions, answering confusions, fugitive pay-phonings, frustrated creatings and lovings, despairs, approaches, retreats, words at times seemingly never heard exactly in this world but in (and making up) a prose space and system—what kind of dialogue is this, I ask; is it really dialogue, if we stop to think (or sit down with one another)? The great raw weary impasse between Edward Bast and Stella Angel (68– 71) suggests where dialogue in J R can sometimes trace, destroy, and remember dearly how to be “with” someone; though this is not the most of it in J R. For this devoted reader quite overwhelming but at a different distance these faceless, momentum-forming, demanding, sometime yakkings mostly unattributed but always identi¤able, that are the book and its mind reaching day and night toward enacted failure in its story and nation and era but as well on every page to ingenuity and thought’s capacity, the often blindfolded reader’s challenged presence, which is, paradoxically for such a pessimistic book, no less than imagination. Is it a blindfold? The answer may tell me whether it is generally dialogue we are listening to. It depends. Conversely alike, neither ¤lm nor The Novel ¤nds its prime range in dialogue. For ¤lms are motion pictures ¤rst—seducing us with what can be shown on screen, while extended ¤ction is most naturally and potentially distinguished by if not comparable to its rendering of the motion of consciousness. Glance at a script—not Woody Allen, of course, not My Dinner with Andre, nor even one of the current (however well furnished and landscaped) screen translations of that great ironist Jane Austen—and you ¤nd scenes of half a page or a page or two or three with very little dialogue: instead, described in prose, what the camera is to show. Think what we remember from a ¤lm?—the map of a face, a stairway to an upper room, a helicopter slowly, wildly descending to collect a sick person, someone doing something, even how they look talking. Open Proust, James, Faulkner, even Hemingway, and surveying a narrative sentence there you ¤nd a freedom of movement in time and space, memory and consequently thought, that dialogue does not typically approach. (This is why dialogue, especially at the outset of a story, can be a trap for apprentice writers who assume that it is inherently more rapid than narrative or description.) Harold Pinter pares his dark exchanges down even to the most sharpened pauses, understanding that theater is about dialogue. But he shows how well he knows that ¤lm is not, when in The Proust Screenplay he limits In Search of Time Lost to an almost musical succession of descriptive intuitions montaged with the most subtle cuts. A visual suggestion, if not the full cast of

66 / McElroy Proust’s great characters, the texture of time like perception itself scored by the sentences that are somehow acknowledged but elsewhere. One consequence of J R’s endemic dialogue, restless, rooting-about, is that, present scene by present scene, from the school in Massapequa to the kids’ pivotal visit to the money museum—I almost think “museyroom”—to a long dictated business letter, to a Manhattan bathtub like an endless ending stacked with consumable impediments, we clock often real time. Apt thus for the strandedness of his principles, dialogue serves Gaddis in other ways. And the tumbling out of broken hopes and tentative, even underground will, and bursts of incipient action and frenetic speeches may bring from Edward, Amy, Jack in their voicings of frustration a lost and distracted tragic-comicness like that of some Dostoevsky people in their own messy but awful and true crisis-dramas. J R, never messy in the writing, is from one angle all business, and rolls on wildly well in dialogue, getting and spending. As busy as G. B. Shaw, voluble socialist head and in-your-face playwright who once appeared as a sewing machine in W. B. Yeats’s dream and whose John Tanner at the curtain of Man and Superman has the last exasperated line (“Talking! ”) of the play but not really the last word to the serenely amused dismissal of him by his lady love as a forever talking male. Mark Twain’s possibly short-circuited (and canonized) appearances in an absurd educational ¤lm “shown” in J R brings to mind his ridicule of heavy fraudulent talkers and even those idlers hanging day in day out in a riverfront village. Trash we talk more than we know—Gaddis, Twain, Bierce agree; and the Gaddis tape (though his ear isn’t always pitch perfect) runs on, picking up commercial noise like Davidoff on (I happen to know) now long outmoded noise elimination devicery—good dialogue material all around, and needs to be heard (sort of like a real thing (an “audible,” to adapt a quarterback’s term)—and, between us, from privileged unwritten con¤dences with your lawyer clear down to summits for privatizing Iraq, you-me dialogue, nothing like it for getting things done), though I forget is Davidoff addressing anyone in particular? Penetrating my reading, as if I overheard the book, is the phone: matchless medium for being cut off, for anger, pressure ticking, pleas, pressure, news, getting into someone’s head, dialing intimacy or information, shifting money, getting in touch, contacting the Other. The voice sort of at the end of the line with dramatic persona nonetheless abstracts itself, hidden. Yet there (hidden as J R himself can seem even when he meets Edward at the Met not for history’s sake but “in connection with” the Eagle Mills deal

Gaddis Dialogue Questioned / 67 [291]). In a sense, though, it’s all for the reader (in the dark, or just outside the door)—and reading J R I can feel like a (riveted) central operator of an ultimate conference call, the voices crossing this out-of-control system part of it. Like fascinating references to music, history, science, the culture (is the last name Vansant of J R, who’s always trying to get someone’s ear, connected long distance to the “Vincent” also referred to who in that signature act sliced off, well I think actually only part of . . . )—such shards of art all but chaotically embedded in Gaddis’s novel built amidst and of our ruin yet unlike much of his material built to last: failure of gift, quest, concentration, love; that awful joke, that bitter, ludicrous waste though with never a spilled word in the prose for all those incessant ellipsized or comma’d (half-suffering) tentatives. So talk dominates for good reason in J R. Less technically well-written but sometimes more poignantly near, The Recognitions (1955) had similar fractured communications, people not completing a reply, Agnes Deigh breaking off (like Edward, Jack, Amy, in J R), these chronic ellipses . . . a self hung up in its parts, falling short, doubt’s pause, second thoughts, these small moments re®ecting that other intimacy the exponential scale of The Recognitions taking on the whole culture in some crushing sublime anti-sublime embracing the cheap or not cheap imitation as a very material of our would-be life. It was a work adequate to our underground history and pretension, carried through no matter how long it takes: this was the Gaddis example, an idea of a book itself, what it could hold. (Forget “experimental”; forget “encyclopedic.”) Worth writing, worth reading, it will be a book to be in, not just to pass through as so much nowadays passes through us and is gone. This ¤rst of his somehow I waited to read, and it for me, its rumored art forging my image of it for seven years before I bought a copy in London in 1962 and even compulsively tracked some of Gaddis’s Clementine texts at the British Museum: though consumed with the smuggling trope of my own ¤rst book by then, so that I was mysteriously con¤rmed to ¤nd in Gaddis that bottle of schnapps Gwyon hides like contraband “in the cavity cut ruthlessly out of The Dark Night of the Soul.” The hole so over®ows with voices twenty years later when Gaddis in J R comes to unprecedentedly deconstruct and dismantle our capitalist-totaled, both abstract and stacked-with-junk, shuddering-out-of-control, defective player-piano system—the wasteland exchange up for grabs so who better than a kid to jump in, the water’s ¤ne—that the reader could be in the dark groping for the furniture, the bath, The Novel’s so-called world; but somehow the talk when it doesn’t imply, will often (if not always) displace

68 / McElroy my need for, something outside its designed perimeter and cost, yet as inside as a realness of the people the method and madness of the society screen from me. Fantastic, the glut of bulk deliveries in this gathering chaos—the hundred thousand plastic ®owers, toilet paper rolls, the mail, the bargains and freebies accumulating by the gross, and logically bizarre their coupling with dialogue’s abstraction (!)—like the leaving-out Sartre called the key to writing—literally here the drawing of attributes away from “characters” in order to leave often an acoustic presence, narrowed pro¤le or drive, or half-imprisoned “voice,” paralleling a transactional or market abstraction that reduces value to either a medium of exchange or paper (which I will add for me amounts sometimes, even in the prevailing satiric comedy of Gaddis’s scope, to a horror imaged like the at least temporary fate of the three villains early in the Superman saga con¤ned and ®attened in a two-dimensional plane or facet tumbling through space). The J R voices exert a fascination never comfortable, always uneasy slightly, upon the reader who, engrossed keeping track, “¤nds” Gaddis always clear who’s speaking (even when you have to trust him for a page to show you—like delaying any kind of info in narrative—and there will sometimes as once upon a time in Eliot’s Waste Land Parts I and II, be a reason to momentarily not know who’s being heard and about what. So much, given the premises of this staggering book J R, for the utility and payoff of dialogue. Let me tax Gaddis with it now. Notice J R reading aloud to Edward, who is asleep. Or Edward in another city scene (like so much of the progress of the narrative mysteriously half-submerged or a challenge to chart like the Wandering Rocks episode in Ulysses) complaining that J R always blames someone else for his fuck-ups (640). Jack haranguing Eigen about marriage (403), though he could use a mid-wife for that book he’s working on. Missed connections, protests to deaf ears. What makes me uneasy here—or wonder—is hardly a cost Gaddis didn’t foresee. He is writing about it—writing it —expressly, these spilled energies, failed aims, words not getting through. I would guess Gaddis thinks to blur the liability of all this for the reader with curiously the point, edge, massive speci¤city of his unfailing invention ( Jack’s divorce monopoly board game [411].) And Gaddis you’ll count on to cover himself with the reach of reference looping and connecting (1876 events, for example, or Wagner/ Mozart/Beethoven) the amusing bibliomantic aspect of what in stacked commodities elsewhere is paranoia; and cover his covert habits with trademark sudden (but temporary) punctuated, gag-wise explosions of folly.

Gaddis Dialogue Questioned / 69 Maybe I’m more than that central system operator hearing all these people on the network: suppose I’m the one who isn’t in the dark: what if they are? Or are, like future ghosts (say, sleepwalkers, with or without reference to another big book, Herman Broch’s, that Jack is reading in the ¤nal scene while the totally self-preoccupied voice of J R, never much of a child, issues listened to maybe only by the reader from a dangling phone on the subject of his budding career). They in the dark? The question no more perverse than What are they saying to each other? Edward with Crawley (290); Amy with Vogel (309), feeling her up or not (who on the bus home talks to himself ); Jack ranting on—key raissoneur for Gaddis, author in progress, but reading the Constitution to the school PA system for godsake, and in an apartment drunk talking—the real thing, but crippled, like Edward (who in his music, his composing, waylaid by an uncaring culture that mechanizes music among everything else is even more likely the real thing but for who, typically halfscreened from our knowledge, drifts toward failure (or in it as in a colloidal suspension) which Gaddis would have us believe is inevitable for gifted people—Gaddis’s habitual view of our society in my experience of him, reiterated not ungently between excellent jokes. It is the extreme and tough and rationally contemptuous comic (Romanfarce, I’m told) mode in J R that may account for the limits placed upon what the characters do for themselves; with still, in occasional narrative transitions no less syntactically tight for suggesting, an American longing and melancholy and a resignation darkly romantic. But the designed failures in J R even with the variety of cultural history embedded in the text and the hugely entertaining rot and idiocy apparently everywhere, in school, home, of¤ce, in the consumption curve in the precarious lives of creative people, and the many (not always so richly differentiated) voices, come to seem a plurality funneled or constrained. Not the freedom discovered in individual necessity by, for instance, the three people of Dublin’s Ulysses—or in the plurality of dialoguing voices loose in unpredictable, derangeable, visionary intimacy in the brimming disorder of Dostoevsky’s quite open encounters. Bakhtin pointed to that plurality as a kind of freedom Dostoevsky gave his characters. Freedom or by turns hysteria one might say of the situation early in Crime and Punishment thrusting the Marmeladov family onto Raskolnikov’s stage, Katerina Ivanovna and Sonia and the rest, beyond Dostoevsky’s control the reader may well feel, yet from the writer’s angle a freedom in existential difference, however events turn out. Which is in part what J. M. Coetzee means when he calls Dostoevsky a “great Christian phi-

70 / McElroy losopher” who “push[ed] . . . to its limits [the] . . . analysis of . . . self [and] soul . . . ” (“Autobiography and Confession”). Plato in Laws IV (719) sees only contradiction in a poet’s portraying characters “of opposing dispositions”; inspired and “not in his right mind,” he must imitate reality, “[nor] can he tell whether there is more truth in one thing that he has said than in another” (Benjamin Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, vol. ii, p. 490). Laws, of course, are where we will ¤nd the truth. Curious, coming from J R to Crito, Theaetetus, or Symposium to feel that, whatever of the individual and the physical Plato discounts or would exclude from what is truly valuable, his fully lighted inquiries and completed conversations, his formed dialogues, may seem more “here” than Gaddis’s, or to be spared the curtailments Gaddis, with his hedgehog vision or instinct or nature as a man, will see are worked out in labyrinthine tour de force. These limitations seem quite absent from the anti-art, anti-body ¤fth-century BC Greek writer, whose dialogues, quite apart from such obvious anecdotal touches as Alcibiades’s relation to Socrates or Socrates’ legendary stamina or cagy humility, can seem sometimes more close to the reader than the density of Gaddis’s lives in J R. Well, this is something of an illusion in Plato, but no less felt—a realness almost ®esh-and-blood in the speakers incidentally a consequence of his illuminating and un-disjunct coherence. As if the intercourse of minds begot an aura of persons and thus their corporeal presence and physical scene. To identify Gaddis’s dialogue I overstate these contrasts. Nietzsche, resolute enemy of Plato’s dialectic and its devaluing of tragedy, saw Plato’s dialogues as a hodgepodge of styles (prose, poetry, narrative, drama, lyric), “the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself . . . [indeed] the model of a new art form, . . . the novel”—by which Nietzsche meant “an in¤nitely enhanced Aesopian fable” [The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 14]: thus, the novel as a demonstration or illustration (of something elsewhere, i.e., not “here,” which is where tragic drama “happens”), hardly ¤ction as we may ¤nd it in a range from Henry Green’s novels (Loving or Living, for example) made as they are almost entirely of dialogue with a subtle coherence of wit promising at least temporary completeness that seems to bring the voices physically close in an action-less “conspiracy of insinuations,” as he described Party Going; to the bold and austere philosophical dialogues (“Love,” for example) to be found in William S. Wilson’s stories Why I Don’t Write like Franz Kafka; to Gaddis’s massive structure. And if writing is ¤ghting, as Nietzsche said, so certainly is talk. Jack Gibbs like others will argue all night,

Gaddis Dialogue Questioned / 71 which brings talk nearer and the talkers nearer one another. Although sometimes an energy of separation characterizing what I might call Anti-dialogue. That energy nothing if not impure, but hear the smarmy book salesman with his children’s encyclopedia deal and his foot in the door (as he will rue) against Rhoda’s resisting interruption of his spiel (601–2) which will only make him begin again yet improvise too: distant inkling of the reader not so secretly built into J R, in it, following along, recomposing the themes, back and forth up and down with the very vectors of this G force that ®y out and concentrate in: a response for all the book’s pessimism brought to its light and darkness, its messed-up, acoustically variable spaces in another dialogue like an active, improvising vein cutting against Gaddis’s own which perimeters his community. The colossal eruption of indignant laughter in this great native writer cannot quite yield freedom to his characters to speak as equals to the destructive element. Or so it seems to me in the entropic dissipations of event at J R’s end, which is the same old story whether you take Lucretius as guide or Pascal. But the alternative is in the balance, visible (to mix my senses) in this curious text ruled by talk that we may call dialogue as an act not taken for granted but an object of further critique. As was the society in whose contradictions and disjunctions Gaddis, whatever he said, found such unfailing inspiration.

II Systems

5 The Aesthetics of First- and Second-Order Cybernetics in William Gaddis’s J R Stephen Schryer

This is an installation view of Überorgan, a self-playing pipe organ (note the player roll at its center) created by artist Tim Hawkinson. But without any contextual information, that is, without any knowledge of the function and/or purpose of the object, a viewer is left without a means to interpret the visual information presented, and thus cannot determine that Überorgan is both an instrument and an autonomous objet d’art. But just as this photograph invites a viewer to ponder how he or she interprets an image, Schryer describes how J R’s written style ultimately invites readers to (re)consider their methods of interpreting and critiquing a text. Tim Hawkinson, Überorgan, 2002. Woven polyethylene, nylon net, cardboard tubing, various mechanical components. Dimensions variable. Installation ACE Gallery New York. Photograph courtesy of ACE Gallery. Collection of Andrea Nasher.

76 / Schryer

 Throughout William Gaddis’s 1975 novel, J R, musicians, artists, and writers espouse an aesthetics different from the one embodied in the text. Edward Bast, for example, the young composer whose decline the novel traces, conceives of the work of art as an alternative and sheltered world. His model for the ideal composition is Wagner’s Rhinegold, whose opening chord “goes on and on it goes on for a hundred and thirty-six bars until the idea that everything’s happening under water is more real than sitting in a hot plush seat with tight shoes on” (111). Although Bast here refers to a late romantic work, his understanding of art has much in common with that of the twentieth-century high-modernists, whose autotelic works tried to overcome the alienation and fragmentation of modernization by creating utopias that exist solely within the work itself. As such, these works needed to be selfsuf¤cient, independent of the audience’s role as listener, observer, or reader. However, as Gaddis’s novel unfolds, Bast cannot live up to the challenge posed by his own aesthetics; the noise and fragmentation of contemporary U.S. culture destroy the utopic space of his compositions. He attempts to compose his masterpiece, an opera based on Tennyson’s Locksley Hall, in Jack Gibbs and Thomas Eigen’s chaotic spare apartment. Although Gibbs and Eigen intended the apartment as an artist’s retreat, the world refuses to stay out. Threatened with ®ood from running faucets in the bathroom and kitchen, bombarded with snatches of music and commercials from a broken radio, and beset with continual phone calls from J R’s corporate executives, the apartment becomes a ¤gure for the forces that thwart the modern artist. Working in this environment, Bast ultimately produces only a small piece for unaccompanied cello, scribbled in crayon in a Manhattan hospital as he recovers from exhaustion, malnutrition, and pneumonia. Gaddis’s model for the inability of the work of art to resist the noise of modern culture is the science of cybernetics, whose terms Gaddis invokes throughout the novel. Observing Bast’s efforts, Jack Gibbs comments, “Problem Bast there’s too God damned much leakage around here, can’t compose anything with all this energy spilling you’ve got entropy going everywhere. Radio leaking under there hot water pouring out so God damned much entropy going on think you can hold all these notes together know what it sounds like?” (287). However, many of Gaddis’s critics have confused the nature of his aesthetics by attributing to the author (not the character) the ¤rst-order cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, a communication theorist

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 77 to whom Gaddis alludes periodically. Wiener’s early model of cybernetics, prominent in the immediate post–World War II era, was motivated by the assumption that the patterns that cyberneticists discover in phenomena are objective features of the world. First-order systems, in other words, exist independently of any observer’s perspective on them. Hence, an aesthetics that rigorously adopted a ¤rst-order perspective would produce precisely the kind of art espoused by Bast and other artist-characters—autonomous objects, worlds unto themselves. In this essay, I will argue that Gaddis’s understanding of aesthetic form should not be confused with that of his characters. Gaddis instead develops an alternative aesthetics of textual openness, one that self-consciously incorporates the reader’s perspective and constructive presence. This alternative, participatory aesthetics brings Gaddis’s novel closer to the work of a group of second-order cyberneticists writing in the early 1970s, contemporaneously with the composition of J R. These ¤gures, such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela, transformed cybernetics from a model of language and cognition that posits information as objectively present in the world into a constructivist paradigm that highlights the role of the observer in creating his or her own reality. Gaddis’s novel should be read according to this paradigm, as an open, perspectival text that makes readers aware of the partiality of their own constructions of reality. As such, the ¤ction participates in a widespread reevaluation in the late 1960s and early 1970s of the role of the observer in the reception and creation of works of art. In the terms of art critic Michael Fried, J R’s second-order perspectivalism turns the novel into a theatrical work, one that solicits the reader’s participation in the creation of its meaning. For Gaddis, this exploitation of the reader’s perspective allows him to discover a new way of representing and resisting the same processes of modernization that cause anxiety for his artist-characters.

Bast’s Aesthetics The problem of distinguishing between Gaddis’s aesthetics and that of his characters is one that has bedeviled many readers of J R, including the novelist himself. In an interview published in the Paris Review, Gaddis was asked about the signi¤cance of the crayon composition that Bast ¤nally ¤nishes in hospital, after surviving his tenure with J R’s company. He replied by relating Bast’s composition to Walter Pater’s aesthetics of “art for art’s sake,”

78 / Schryer claiming that the piece represents “a small voice trying to rescue it all and say ‘Yes, there is hope’ . . . having lived through all the nonsense he will rescue this one small hard gem-like ®ame, if you like” (cit. in O’Donnell 17; see also Gaddis’s remarks on Bast in the interview with Tom LeClair published in this volume. —Eds.). Gaddis’s characterization of Bast as a Paterian aesthete corresponds to Bast’s own artistic ambitions. He spends much of the novel trying to compose a work that will repeat the accomplishment of his absent father, the composer James Bast, whose austere modernist opera, Philoctetes, has been, like Stanley’s organ masterpiece in The Recognitions, highly regarded but seldom performed. For Edward as well as his father, both the act of composition and the ¤nished product should be detached from considerations of audience and commercial marketability. Bast thus compares the despoiled barn where he and his father would compose to Wagner’s Bayreuth retreat, a site of artistic creation separate from the world. Amy Joubert, attempting to engage in a conversation about Wagner with Bast despite interruptions from an inebriated and lustful Jack Gibbs, misquotes his logic as follows: —Yes we, we were talking about Wagner earlier weren’t we Mister Bast . . . she pressed one hand into the other as though to restrain her voice’s tremor in her ¤ngers —about his, the conditions he needed in order to work scents and, and silks to touch and . . . —Women, and women . . . —Oh and the garden path yes I forgot, that he couldn’t concentrate if he looked out and let his eyes follow the garden paths because they led to an outside world, to the real . . . —Led in. —Pardon? —They led the God damned outside world in. (116) Bast suffers an irreparable loss when he loses his father’s barn to local vandals and is forced to compose and live in Gibbs’s messy apartment. At this point, in Gibbs’s terms, he can no longer exclude the “God damned outside world.” The small piece that he manages to compose thus constitutes a minimal protest against everything that he has experienced, a testament to the artist’s radically diminished but lingering ability to escape from his immediate milieu. Nonetheless, throughout the novel Gaddis undercuts most of Bast’s claims

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 79 for aesthetic autonomy, demonstrating that few works of art can avoid falling prey to the narrowly instrumental concerns of the novel’s capitalists. Late in the novel, Bast attempts to make J R, Gaddis’s eleven-year-old entrepreneurial anti-hero, into an unlikely convert to the cause of art. He presses a running-down tape recorder to the child’s ear, playing a Bach cantata: —What was I suppose to hear! —You weren’t! you weren’t supposed to hear anything that’s what I’m . . . —Then how come you made me lis . . . —To make you hear! to make you, to make you feel to try to . . . (657–58) Bast insists that Bach means nothing, that J R isn’t supposed to “hear” anything in it; in contrast to J R’s stocks, the cantata is an “intangible asset” (655). In Kantian terms, Bast attempts to shake J R out of his instrumental worldview by presenting the cantata as an example of the aesthetically beautiful— an object that is purposive without a purpose, giving disinterested pleasure but irreducible to immediate grati¤cation. J R, however, quickly demonstrates that Bach does indeed lend himself to vulgar, commercial recontextualization when he turns Cantata No. 21 into a pornographic opera: —Okay okay! I mean what I heard ¤rst there’s all this high music right? So then this here lady starts singing up yours up yours so then this man starts singing up mine up mine, then there’s some words so she starts singing up mine up mine so he starts singing up yours so then they go back and forth like that up mine up yours up mine up yours that’s what I heard! (658) As Steven Moore has noticed, Bast in this scene unknowingly appeals to the preface to Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, in which Conrad gives the following advice to the prose writer: And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who, in the fullness of a wisdom which looks for immediate pro¤t, demand speci¤cally to be edi¤ed, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: —My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written

80 / Schryer word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is before all, to make you see. That —and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall ¤nd there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. (cit. in Moore, online) Gaddis’s allusion (via Bast) to Conrad thus reinforces the character’s claim for art’s noninstrumentality; Conrad’s novel should promote a special form of hearing and seeing distinct from everyday sound and vision. Once readers no longer seek to gratify their immediate, interested desires, they may achieve a disinterested pleasure that will give them “that glimpse of truth for which [they] have forgotten to ask.” However, for the reader, the allusion also undercuts Bast’s claim by exemplifying the tendency of Gaddis’s characters unknowingly to repeat each other’s words [this tendency is itself a variation on modes of modernist repetition, whose second-order originality—making something new of repetition itself—is analyzed in this volume by Klaus Benesch. —Eds.]. Earlier in J R, Mr. Crawley, a stock broker who commissions Bast to compose and record the music for a ¤lm aimed at convincing the government to turn America’s natural parks into hunting preserves, urges Bast to write music that will “make this subcommittee hear, to make them see, above all to make them feel” (449). Both Gaddis and Crawley thus pervert Conrad’s intentions, turning an argument for aesthetic disinterestedness into a project for art’s subservience to particular interests. Most of the works of art in Gaddis’s novel fall prey to a recontextualization similar to Crawley and J R’s perverse misreadings of Conrad and Bach. The novel posits two possible effects of a market economy upon the work of art. First, the artwork can become a commodity like all others. Most of the novel’s businessmen and lawyers insist upon this instrumental view: “Get it? Art? You get it where you get anything you buy it. . . . Records of any symphony you want reproductions you can get them that are almost perfect, the greatest books ever written you can get them at the bookstore” (48). A commercial recirculation of the work of art however disrupts its formal unity. For example, when the J R Corporation takes over a classical radio station, it edits all of the performances down to readily digestible, ¤ve-minute intervals, thereby more easily managing the blocks and making room for more commercial advertisements. Throughout the novel, aesthetic fragmentation seems to take place even when no commercial exchange has occurred, as if the aesthetic effects of commodi¤cation had infected the artists themselves.

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 81 Jack Gibbs, the failed writer, thus weaves misquoted fragments from Eliot and other champions of organic art into his frequently drunken speech. The second possible fate of the artists in J R is for their work to fall prey to an equally destructive form of primitive hoarding. Another of the novel’s desperate artists, the painter and sculptor Schepperman, sells his life’s work to the avaricious collector, Zona Selk. Zona stores Schepperman’s paintings in her damp basement, out of the public eye, waiting for them to appreciate in value. Zona thus helps Schepperman break free of any immediate link between the work of art and public consumption. However, this separation takes place at the expense of Schepperman’s public presence as an artist, and he spends the rest of the novel trying to ¤nd a way to make at least one of his works popularly visible. The work of art that remains closed to both the world and the market, Gaddis implies, is condemned to disintegration in a private collection. As Gaddis’s references to Walter Pater and Joseph Conrad indicate, Bast’s and other artists’ aesthetics throughout J R conform to a tradition of art theory traceable to Kant, a tradition that conceives of the work of art as irreducible to its audience’s immediate interests. In his landmark 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” art critic and historian Michael Fried uses the terms “absorption” and “presentness” to characterize the works described by this tradition. For Fried, modern painting was successful insofar as it engaged in a project to suspend its own objecthood, its status as a worldly object. Modern painting aspired toward presentness, the ability to transcend temporal perspective in order to exist in a continuous present. For Fried, the work of art achieved this temporal transcendence through a process of absorption; a painting seals itself off from its community of spectators, often by staging the act of aesthetic consumption within the work itself. Fried’s lifelong interest in absorptive works of art derives from his conviction that this tradition has been undermined by contemporary styles of art, which instead emphasize the work’s dependence upon audience engagement. In contrast to highmodernist painting, such work is theatrical; the minimalist sculptures of Robert Morris and Donald Judd, for example, call attention to the fact that they are objects in the world and thus encourage a performative identity between spectator and work. In later essays, such as “How Modernism Works” (1982), Fried maps this distinction between presentness and theatricality onto more recent distinctions between modernism and postmodernism. “In the years since ‘Art and Objecthood’ was written,” he argues, “the theatrical has assumed a host of new guises and has acquired a new name: postmodernism”

82 / Schryer (299 n. 17). Fried’s distinction, although motivated by his distrust of theatricality, has thus become a touchstone for many discussions of the postmodern. As one commentator notes, Fried’s comments on theatricality offered many art critics “a way to map the distinction between a modernist, politically apathetic formalism on the one hand, and a proto-postmodern, proactive commitment to ‘the performative’ on the other” (Szalay 261). Throughout Gaddis’s novel, Bast espouses an aesthetics of presentness, an aesthetics that highlights the work of art’s transcendence, its existence beyond worldly concerns. However, as any cursory glance at J R reveals, Gaddis’s own compositional strategy is the opposite of Bast’s; his work does not attempt to preserve a gemlike ®ame amidst the chaos but rather reproduces the very chaos that his novel deplores. Hence, his epic-length novel is almost entirely composed of overlapping, cacophonic conversations, with minimal narrative interventions to indicate who is speaking and in what context. Similarly, while Bast’s small composition represents a ®ight from the economic system that has so far thwarted his career (even as his day jobs writing “nothing music” compromise his time), the plot of Gaddis’s novel hinges upon a complex network of business deals and corporate mergers. In contrast to Bast, Gaddis’s novel lets “the God damned outside world in” (116). In Fried’s terms, Gaddis’s alternative aesthetics is one of textual theatricality.

Gaddis’s Cybernetics Gaddis’s novel thus adopts a compositional strategy that attempts to circumvent the alternative he sets up between an omnipresent vulgar commodi¤cation of the work of art and an impossible ideal of aesthetic autonomy. Gaddis achieves this alternative aesthetics by reworking several key ideas from the science of cybernetics in such a way as to highlight the role played by the reader or observer in producing the literary text. Throughout J R, many of Gaddis’s characters refer in particular to early information theory and the cybernetic concept of entropy. The name of the novel’s most persistent theorist of entropy, Jack Gibbs, refers to Josiah Willard Gibbs, the turn-of-thecentury physicist who introduced contingency into physics at an elementary level through his statistical approach to thermodynamics, thereby in®uencing a generation of early cybernetic thinkers. Gaddis’s chief source for most of his knowledge of cybernetics is Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings; in that text, Wiener lauds Willard Gibbs as the ¤gure “to whom we must attribute the ¤rst great revolution in twentieth century physics” (10).

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 83 Jack Gibbs refers to Wiener’s book throughout J R, at one point recommending it to a friend whose wife has left him as a guide for understanding dysfunctional marriages: “whole God damned problem read Wiener on communication, more complicated the message more God damned chance for errors, take a few years of marriage such a God damned complex of messages going both ways can’t get a God damned thing across” (403). As many of Gaddis’s critics have noted, these and other references to cybernetics imply that the science functions as a central metaphor for Gaddis and the key to understanding his narrative technique (LeClair 1989; Tabbi 1995). Because the novel often lacks direct narration and thus does not attribute speech to particular voices, J R prompts us to read it cybernetically, as an information system whose redundancies we learn to identify by noticing each character’s linguistic idiosyncrasies. Thus, many of the potentially anonymous inhabitants of Gaddis’s corporate boardrooms can be identi¤ed by their stock phrases and personal obsessions. Mr. Whiteback, for example, the principal of J R’s school, repeats hypercorrect phrases such as “utilize,” and emphasizes the need to “implement unplanlessness” in the classroom. Major Hyde, one of the school’s trustees, tries to work his obsession with bomb shelters into most administrative discussions. The reader, like Maxwell’s demon, eventually becomes familiar with these redundant features of the text and learns to sort characters’ voices out of the chaotic ®ow of conversation. However, several variants of cybernetics have emerged throughout its complex history, and a failure to understand how Gaddis interprets cybernetic concepts could lead to serious misunderstandings of his basic aesthetic approach. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman, provides a useful schema for the history of the science, dividing it into several overlapping phases. She identi¤es a ¤rst wave of cybernetics, stretching from 1945 to the 1960s, in which scientists such as Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon developed an interdisciplinary theory of communication and control that could be applied to societies, organisms, and machines. The purpose of cybernetics, for Norbert Wiener and most other ¤rst-order cyberneticists, was to reduce phenomena to information patterns, which could then be discussed in terms of the order (information) or disorder (entropy) found within them. Most ¤rst-order cyberneticists assumed that the systems being described could be observed from an outsider’s objective point of view; cybernetics allowed scientists to describe real features of the world. Beginning in the mid-1960s, a small group of cognitive scientists associated with Wiener’s group, including Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela, began to

84 / Schryer criticize this paradigm from within. In contrast to the early communication theorists, Foerster, Maturana, and Varela made questions of observer re®exivity central to their work. They thus referred to their work as second-order cybernetics, or “the cybernetics of observing systems” (Foerster, “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” 7). They claimed to set aside the objectivist premises of ¤rstorder cybernetics in their work, instead focusing on the act of observation itself. According to Foerster, every observation of the world creates a necessary blind spot that cannot be seen by the ¤rst-order observer; “we do not perceive our blind spot by, for instance, seeing a black spot close to the center of our visual ¤eld: we do not see that we have a blind spot. In other words, we do not see that we do not see” (6). Foerster was quick to point out that second-order observations, the observation of others’ blind spots, cannot themselves stand outside of the systems that they observe and thus do not promote objectivity; rather, they only produce more blind spots in an endlessly recursive manner. Foerster and others argued that this recursive model of observation describes the manner in which organisms cognitively construct their environments. In Fried’s terms, second-order cybernetics sets up a “theatrical” model of scienti¤c investigation, one that insists that the scienti¤c object only takes on meaning in relation to a possible viewer. Gaddis’s novel draws upon the work of ¤rst-order cyberneticists such as Norbert Wiener, but does so in a manner that brings the form of his novel closer to the work of second-order cyberneticists such as Heinz von Foerster. In particular, as noted above, Gaddis frequently refers to the concept of entropy, as derived from Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings. Wiener’s particular version of ¤rst-order cybernetics starts out from the premise that entropy measures the disorder and probability of a given message, while information measures its order and improbability. In The Human Use of Human Beings, a bizarre compendium of popular science, cultural critique, and speculative ¤ction, Wiener extends this concept of entropy beyond its original de¤nition so that it becomes an all-pervasive threat to society as a whole and the scientist in particular. Here, however, Wiener introduces a tension that shapes all of his subsequent discussions of the cultural implications of cybernetics. On the one hand, Wiener is a cultural pessimist who presents an entropic view of societal decline; the decay of American culture parallels the heat death of a thermodynamic system. Americans’ emphasis upon material progress only hastens this process; “it almost seems as if progress itself and our ¤ght against the increase in entropy intrinsically must end in the

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 85 downhill path from which we are trying to escape” (46–47). On the other hand, Wiener is an epistemological optimist who believes that scientists can use cybernetics to stave off or manage entropy. Hence, when Wiener describes entropy as “evil,” he refers to “the negative evil which St. Augustine characterizes as incompleteness, rather than the positive malicious evil of the Manichaeans” (11). In Augustinianism, Wiener explains, evil only characterizes the absence of good, while in Manichaeanism, evil actively challenges good and takes steps to thwart its initiatives. From Wiener’s Augustinian perspective, the scientist confronting chaos struggles against a passive adversary and will ultimately triumph. “Nature,” he writes, “offers resistance to decoding, but it does not show ingenuity in ¤nding new and undecipherable methods for jamming our communication with the outside world” (51). Wiener offers his epistemological optimism as a source of hope in the face of the cultural entropy that he diagnoses; his cultural pessimism “is only conditional upon our blindness and inactivity, for I am convinced that once we become aware of the new needs that a new environment has imposed upon us, as well as the new means of meeting these needs that are at our disposal, it may be a long time yet before our civilization and our human race perish” (47). His solution to the problems posed by cultural entropy is thus a kind of consciousness-raising—by “becoming aware” of our entropic environment, we can contain and manage it effectively. Wiener’s scienti¤c project thus oddly resembles the aesthetics of Edward Bast. Throughout Gaddis’s novel, Bast confronts a situation of social entropy in which the American economy continually draws and dissipates energy from its human and natural environment, turning it into noisy waste. In the face of this growing chaos, Bast believes that human-made, autonomous systems of order still have a chance of preserving a haven for disinterested human freedom. Both Bast and Wiener thus attempt to create utopian spaces that exclude the outside world. In Wiener’s case, this utopian space is the scienti¤c project, which works against and successfully manages cultural entropy. Bast, similarly, believes that autonomous works of art, through their very existence, can awaken characters such as J R to the consequences of their actions. In both cases, the inviolability of the scienti¤c and aesthetic project depends upon circumventing the question of observer re®exivity. Once one takes into account the observer’s role in creating the aesthetic or scienti¤c project, cultural entropy begins to in¤ltrate the object from within. This is a problem that Wiener himself acknowledges in some of his early work but set

86 / Schryer aside when writing The Human Use of Human Beings. In Cybernetics (1948), his earlier, more technical introduction to the ¤eld, he thus argues against the incorporation of cybernetics into the social sciences. “In the social sciences,” he argues, “we have to deal with short statistical runs, nor can we be sure that a considerable part of what we observe is not an artifact of our own creation. An investigation of the stock market is likely to upset the stock market. We are too much in tune with the objects of our investigation to be good probes” (164). In contrast to The Human Use of Human Beings, J R rejects the consolation of Wiener’s epistemological optimism. In particular, Gaddis reformulates Wiener’s notion of entropy in order to transform it into a much more pessimistic concept. Jack Gibbs offers the novel’s ¤rst explanation of the concept while teaching physics to a class at an experimental school run by commercial interests, where live teaching is being replaced by television broadcasts. Gibbs interrupts his class’s television lesson on thermodynamics to ponti¤cate: “has it ever occurred to you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so that you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so that it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so that it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forms that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin perilous condition that we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos” (20). Gibbs here avoids Wiener’s description of chaos as a passive, Augustinian adversary. From the Augustinian perspective, information effectively confronts and conquers its passive adversary, “the basic reality of chaos,” from an objective outside. This attitude toward knowledge, according to Gibbs, is a product of institutions that reduce teaching to mere transmission and repetition. Gibbs’s alternative theory of order instead turns away from Wiener’s text to allude to one of the later chapters of Henry Adams’s Education. Referring to the implications of the discoveries of Josiah Willard Gibbs and his mentor, Karl Pearson, Adams notes, “the Kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man” (451). Both Adams’s and Gibbs’s vision of order as a “dream” or “thin, perilous condition,” are far more suspicious than Wiener’s conception of the organizing capacity of knowledge. Gibbs’s lecture on chaos makes clear what Gaddis ¤nds most disconcerting about conceiving of order as an inherent property of knowledge that can be

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 87 imposed upon the world. The danger is not disorder as such but rather our willingness to delude ourselves that our ordering activities actually work. J R’s critique of Wiener’s epistemological optimism parallels the contemporaneous critique of ¤rst-order cybernetics found in the work of secondorder cyberneticists such as Heinz von Foerster and others, who similarly questioned the possibility of bracketing the observer’s contribution to a system’s disorder. In contrast to Bast’s compositions, Gaddis’s novel thus takes into account the reader’s participation in constructing the text. J R is a rigorously “realist” text, in the sense that it purports to be an accurate transcription of the characters’ voices, including grammatical errors and interruptions. Many of Gaddis’s critics have thus likened Gaddis’s narrative method to that of a moving tape recorder (Malmgren 1982; LeClair 1981/82). Yet the very accuracy of J R’s realism means that readers often do not have a ¤rm grasp on the narrative “reality” of the text outside of the characters’ observations and communications. As a result of the novel’s virtual elimination of the narrative voice, the reader becomes a second-order observer, able to look at the characters’ blind spots but unable to achieve a total understanding of their world. At times in his novel, Gaddis thus juxtaposes different characters’ points of view, forcing the reader to decide between them. An example of this tendency is the scene in which Amy Joubert, like Bast, tries to dissuade J R from his obsession with ¤nance. She points to the moon as an example of an object with no monetary value: —Yes look up at the sky look at it! Is there a millionaire for that? But her own eyes dropped to her hand on his shoulder as though to con¤rm a shock at the slightness of what she held there. —Does there have to be a millionaire for everything? —Sure well, well no I mean like . . . —And over there look, look. The moon is coming up, don’t you see it? Doesn’t it make . . . —What over there? He ducked away as though for a better view, —No but that’s Mrs. Joubert? that’s just, wait . . . (474) The scene, like the confrontation between Bast and J R, seems to represent a moment of communication between divergent worldviews, an attempt to bring J R to an understanding of an aesthetic object that lies outside of the purview of his instrumental worldview. However, two hundred pages later, in a conversation with Bast, J R reveals his actual observation:

88 / Schryer —But she’s can’t you see what she, why did you duck away! can’t you see what she was trying to tell you she . . . —What tell her it’s this top of this here Carvel icecream cone stand? tell her does she want to bet her ass if there’s a millionaire for that? (661) As Stephen Matanle argues with respect to this passage, J R and Amy each perceive a different object, and “there is no way to know which of them is right. Since the narrator con¤rms neither perception, we are faced with an unresolved con®ict between Amy’s romanticism and J R’s instrumentalism” (17). Either J R transforms even the most purposeless of images (the moon) into an object of immediate grati¤cation (ice cream), or else Amy naively romanticizes a mundane advertisement. Even when a narrative voice brie®y emerges to interrupt the novel’s ®ow of speech, it rarely offers the reader an objective view of the text’s reality. Some of the novel’s narrative passages are very brief and function conventionally to indicate who is speaking and when, thus preventing the reader from becoming totally lost in the ®ux of dialogue. Others take the form of grammatically disjointed narrative fragments that describe changes in motion and colliding body parts. Often, these fragments do not clearly attribute body parts to speci¤c subjects, especially in the novel’s descriptions of sex: “From his her own hand came, measuring down ¤rmness of bone brushed past its prey to stroke at distances, to climb back still more slowly, ¤ngertips gone in hollows, ¤ngers paused weighing shapes that slipped from their inquiry before they rose con¤rming where already they could not envelop but simply cling there ®eshing end to end” (490). Patrick J. O’Donnell relates these passages to a previous reference to Empedocles, uttered by Gibbs during a chaotic staff meeting: “limbs and parts of bodies were wandering about everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unmatched eyes looking for foreheads . . . these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless heads, faces looking in different directions” (45). Passages such as these remind us of “the basic reality of chaos,” the excess disorder that ¤rst-order observers neglect when they construct their worlds. Gaddis’s characters try to cover over this residual chaos of disintegrating things and decaying bodies but only perpetuate it with their words. Rather than presenting the reader with an objective reality that will ground the rest of the text, the novel’s seeming efforts to step

Aesthetics of Cybernetics in J R / 89 “outside” of its characters’ observations show that, for Gaddis, no de¤nite account of that objective reality should be trusted. Gaddis’s elimination of the narrative voice thus distinguishes his aesthetic project from Bast’s. Whereas Bast conceives of works of art such as Wagner’s Rhinegold and his father’s opera as self-suf¤cient experiences that overwhelm the viewer but require no participation, Gaddis demands that readers actively construct the novel’s meaning. His purpose is to draw the reader into taking responsibility for the contingent order that can be constructed out of the novel’s noisy exchanges. As Gibbs complains elsewhere with respect to modern audiences, “problem most God damned readers rather be at the movies. Pay attention here bring something to it take something away problem most God damned writing’s written for readers perfectly happy who they are rather be at the movies, come in empty-handed go out the same God damned way” (289–90). As J R’s response to the Bach cantata indicates, one of the problems with works that aim at what Fried calls presentness is that they risk inviting the kind of passive spectatorship that Gibbs associates with movies. The observer, excluded from the work itself, brings nothing to it and takes nothing away. Gaddis’s novel instead insists that readers “pay attention,” that they actively confront the omnipresent cultural entropy depicted in the novel rather than attempting to build sheltered spaces within it. The turn away from aesthetic autonomy is thus a turn toward a readerly ethic.

6 William Gaddis and the Autopoiesis of American Literature Joseph Tabbi

In our current environment of databases, instant messaging, and one-to-one links, few readers may recall that hypertext was intended to be a writing space within which multiple documents might be gathered—many to many—and readily referenced at a glance. In a modest closed room where manuscript pages could expand inde¤nitely through marginal glosses, coded references, and typed inserts attached with Scotch tape, Gaddis approximates hypertext more closely than most authors do in electronic writing spaces. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 91



Epic and System Gaddis’s last ¤ction, which is also in some ways a ¤nal accounting, brings the author’s own work deliberately into conversation with the work of the dead. The book presents itself in one solid block of text without paragraphs or section breaks, in sentences whose infrequent commas seem only to indicate pauses, or gasps, for breath. A deathbed monologue, the work is nonetheless dialogical. Gaddis knew that the book would appear posthumously, and this knowledge, that for once his absence would be given, not guarded, seems to have allowed him an intimacy and a personal mode of address rarely found in his previous work—although it is not the reader who is addressed so much as authors no longer living. Pursuing his own theme of mechanization in the arts, Gaddis has Walter Benjamin trade observations with Johan Huizinga, for example, while the narrator himself enters into discourse with other characters in ¤ction: John Kennedy Toole’s narrator Jones in The Confederacy of Dunces, Svengali in George Du Maurier’s Trilby, Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev and Levochka in The Kreutzer Sonata, and Gogol’s Golyadkin in The Double. Creations of other imaginations, these ¤gures become, in Agape Agape, both a block and a stimulus to a living author’s own creation: the Other, as Gaddis writes, “thinking your thoughts so you could have them” (79). Gaddis has his narrator cite Homer’s “dangerous demons,” automata who appear in The Iliad like repressed elements of a human psyche “with lives and energies of their own that aren’t really part of you since you can’t control them” (89). The purpose of such citations from the classics is ambivalent. At times Gaddis seems attracted to the Flaubertian model of intertextual conversation as the re¤ned province of “a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch” (Flaubert in a letter to George Sand cited in Agape Agape 50). More often, however, and more productively, Gaddis treats the “demonic” energies of epic literature, larger than consciousness and outside any one author’s control, as the automata that they are; ¤xed in the primordial past of prehistory, identi¤able with no single self, uncontrollable, but nonetheless available to anyone at any time, for unexpected purposes (beyond the primarily religious and communal purposes for which epic images were intended). A piano keyboard once programmed (by punch card or computer technology) makes music available for selection and remixing rather than interpretation by a master; and a thought, once had, becomes citable and so

92 / Tabbi ¤t for recirculation and mass distribution. As Gaddis’s frequent Platonic references indicate, writing was always, in the ¤rst instance, a technology; and like all technologies writing marks an absence. Not only does writing permit the withdrawal of the author, it also makes possible the articulation of differences that belong solely to the work—the distinction between author and narrator, for example, or (more fundamentally) the distinction between perception and communication, human thought and its circulation among characters and between readers and authors. “We are not accustomed to the idea that communication is unable to perceive,” writes Niklas Luhmann (Art as a Social System 15). But this distinction between separate cognitive operations helps make sense of Gaddis’s insistence that, in literary realms, others might think our thoughts so we can have them, or his claim elsewhere that another author can have “plagiarized” his ideas “in advance.” Once distinguished from thought or perception, “communication” is given a life of its own, independent of whatever goes on in speci¤c human minds engaged in reading, conversation, or composition. The technological, in such an account, consists in the preservation, archiving, and dissemination of past works through a medium independent of readability or interpretation; whereas the aesthetic, for Gaddis, consists not in the interpretation of past works but in their recognition—literally, the re-cognizing of one author’s creation in the mind of another.1 Through citations, implied or explicit, that link a thought to past works and thoughts, one’s own thought is able to constitute itself as literary. Any invocation of Luhmann and systems theory takes us immediately away from the mainstream of theory, even that branch represented by Mikhail Bakhtin that insists on placing art in a social context. For Bakhtin, the “dialogic imagination” was famously humanizing, capable of bringing to life not only the many languages of populations held together by the modern nation state, but also the more recent proliferation of “socio-ideological” languages, those “belonging to professions, to genres, languages peculiar to particular generations, etc.” (“Discourse in the Novel” cit. in intro. to The Dialogic Imagination xix). No American author has been more attentive than Gaddis to the polyphony and immense plurality of language as it is actually spoken, transmitted, written down, and marked up, every day in ordinary contexts. But the strati¤cation of languages and the creation of hybrid identities in corporate America do not produce, in Gaddis, the “living mix of varied and opposing voices” that Bakhtin found in Pushkin, for example (Introduction to The Dialogic Imagination xxviii). Although Gaddis’s major novel of American capitalism, J R, is written predominantly in dialogue, the speech

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 93 Gaddis records in print is not reducible to utterance; the novel’s languages do not of themselves rise above their circumstances, or combine together into a “higher unity” (“Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 263). No con®icts get resolved; no one language sheds light on any other, differing language; and the only metalanguage in the novel is the literary tradition itself, a tradition that persists in citations known to the author, but rarely known to the ¤ctional speakers themselves (and most likely only sensed even by a reader of wide experience, unless this reader has consulted the exhaustive online annotations compiled by Steven Moore). In Gaddis, dialogue with the Other is often more demonic than human; recorded speech produces narrative energies that I ¤nd more epical than novelistic, though not in the way that Bakhtin distinguishes epic and novel. Where the “epic” according to Bakhtin was ¤xed and settled in the past, in the primordial time of prehistory, the novel was to be of the present. Written most often as “a discourse of a contemporary about a contemporary addressed to contemporaries,” the novel for Bakhtin was more profoundly contemporary still in its ability to comprehend change. The novel might do this because it was itself a young genre, and “Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process” (“Epic and the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 7). J R, to be sure, is a narrative written in an unremitting, continual present; its form remains as fresh, as innovative, and as greedily accretive as its eleven-year-old protagonist, whose wheeling and dealing and self-positioning at the levers of capitalist systems affects numerous lives and localities. Much is destroyed, much talent and much time is used up in the material world depicted in J R. Yet change, deep, systemic change, is precisely what escapes the novel’s otherwise considerable inventiveness. The corporate systems it depicts are devoted to sustaining themselves through feedback not forward motion, re®exivity not re®ection, and an expansiveness in the realm of communications distinct from, and unhindered by, thought. There is no question of staging ideological con®icts or religious crises in the conversations among characters—no Grand Inquisitors, no direct authorial voicing of political themes that mix with the network of lives, the catalogue of objects, the encyclopedia of voices. Although Gaddis’s narrative operates continuously on an open terrain and in constant renewal, and while it may, like earlier epics, sacri¤ce formal and ¤nished architecture so as to include a multiplicity of nonliterary languages, the narrative remains organizationally closed: languages from the social environment, from the “outside,” can get in, but they will be recognized as meaningful only in terms that the novel itself cre-

94 / Tabbi ates, in what Luhmann would call “a systems-speci¤c play with forms” (Art as a Social System 17). The epic at the end of history has folded into itself, as an autopoietic system.

“A gaping hole in humanity” By way of introduction, and to give a precedent for Gaddis’s perennial neglect at the hands of reviewers and most critics, I want to develop one parallel in particular, with a Russian author who, like Gaddis, has remained highly regarded but slightly to the side of the mainstream, a generation ahead of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (as Gaddis was ahead of Pynchon, DeLillo, McElroy, and the brief ®ourishing of the postmodern epic in the United States), but not assimilable to the aesthetic he engendered. Bakhtin regarded Gogol’s Dead Souls as a “failure.” Modeled on the Divine Comedy, its “tragedy” was to have become not a modern epic but a Menippean satire because (writes Bakhtin), “Once having entered the zone of familiar contact [Gogol] was unable to leave it, and he was unable to transfer into this sphere distanced and positive images” (“Epic and the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 28). It was among Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, not Gogol, that George Steiner meted out the epic tendencies that he felt still lived in the modern novel, but Steiner never mentions that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky achieve epic magnitude only by largely neglecting the day-to-day operations of business and capital, and the slow, steady, and never-ending work of making contacts, cutting a ¤gure, and managing the gossip generated when doing business—activities Gogol excelled at representing. In contrast to Tolstoy’s epic of the upper classes and Dostoevsky’s excavations of the lower, Gogol in Dead Souls had attempted the impossible: an epic of the middle. His main character Chichikov, a bachelor of uncertain standing who must invest his assets, who will rise or fall in society as his capital grows or depreciates, is too familiar, too bound up in contemporaneity, to be carried into the “distanced images of the epic” (“Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 27). “Gogol lost Russia,” Bakhtin concludes, “he lost his blueprint for perceiving and representing her” (27). The book’s presentness, and the new positioning of the author on a level with his characters, may represent a new start for the novel as a genre; but the loss of distance, the immersion of novelistic discourse in the “now,” is precisely what keeps Dead Souls from attaining the poetic force of epic. I am not in a position to judge whether or not Dead Souls fails or succeeds on its own terms, although I can say that the “distancing” features that

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 95 Bakhtin ¤nds in the premodern epic might describe a difference not in literary quality alone, but in the kind of society and power structures that epic takes from society into itself, into its own genre-speci¤c forms of communication. Russian literature, it is said, emerged out of Gogol’s Cloak; the Americans have been “less fortunate” in that Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Gaddis remain obscure and idiosyncratic, bequeathing not a recognized national literature but a model for what “talent is capable of producing in relative isolation” (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky 33). So writes George Steiner, forgetting that the retention of singularity, the constitutive resistance of the individual to absorption by a collective, may be precisely what distinguishes American society and pushes American power toward its own, particular development. Steiner was able to ¤nd epic qualities in the Russia of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky because the country was almost a world to itself, the source of greatest resistance to the Napoleonic reconstruction of Europe, and a nation-empire unfolding unpredictably and uniquely. America, too, is a geo-political reality distinct from the European nation-state. So when it comes to de¤ning an American epic, singularity and “relative isolation” may well prove representative, not iconoclastic. And this singularity may also be representative not only of one national character: in the current condition of global expansiveness, the operative concepts of inclusiveness, hybridity, and borderlessness are no longer limited to circumstances in the United States per se. The faithful preservation of singularity could well be precisely what out¤ts American ¤ction, in its more expansive modes, as the epic for an emergent empire “on the model of networked power” rather than national, monarchical, or otherwise transcendental sovereignty (Hardt and Negri 167). Steiner, however, is correct in regarding both the American and the Russian novel as distinct from the European because, excepting prerevolutionary Russia’s relatively small and Eurocentric aristocracy, neither Russia nor America could reference clear “intellectual standards” or touchstones of manner. (Steiner is here citing Henry James on Hawthorne, although the comment is applied to American Literature generally.) When a standard is drawn not from ¤xed society, but from antiquity, the work (in Gogol, in Joyce, in T. S. Eliot) may be monumental, but it is epical only if the term is recast, as in the “Modern Epic” described by Franco Moretti, or the “Novel Epics” considered by S. J. Rabinowitz. The epic is made “new” precisely by incorporating elements of the novel, by existing in its present or, in the case of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, in a colonial past that is however presented in the subjunctive, containing a future that might have been pos-

96 / Tabbi sible then, but is only realized in some future, which is to say, our now, when we and Pynchon are living. Epic does not realize itself in the modern world until the work gives up its modernist reliance on mythic parallels or other aspirations toward transcending the present. The novel, to achieve epic magnitude (rather than ironical distance and an inevitable sense of belatedness) needs to take seriously its own potential on the plane of immanence, as a ¤eld where a singular, irreducible subjectivity can play itself out. Yet the novel-epic is one hybrid that Bakhtin himself never recognized; on the contrary, he regarded Dead Souls as a failure precisely because it compromised novelistic and epical modes. A multiplicity of language systems gives the novelist a way of refracting identity, of dispersing aspects of the author’s self and language among the characters and their languages. Dialogism brings the author into the ¤ction, but as someone or something other. The relativity of literary and nonliterary language, Bakhtin argues, and the mixing of forms in the novel, “open up the possibility of never having to de¤ne oneself in language, the possibility of translating one’s own intentions from one linguistic system to another, of fusing ‘the language of truth’ with ‘the language of everyday,’ of saying ‘I am me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other’ ” (“Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 315). Unlike novelistic languages, which can coexist on a single ¤eld of representation, the “distanced images” of epic (what Bakhtin found lacking in Gogol), remain on a separate plane, outside and distinct from familiar language. The novelist, too, distances him or herself from the work, but this is more of an internal distancing, one that establishes itself on the same plane as the characters and events in the novel. The former, image-based, epical distance preserves the idea of an outside; a sphere of the gods, or a nature that is unchanging, cyclical, capable of renewing itself with each rosy-¤ngered dawn despite the shifting fortunes of love and war. By contrast the latter, language-based, internalized distance of the novel opens out from a plane of immanence. One can appreciate why a secular humanist criticism would want to retain the immanent, open-ended sphere as an exclusive site, and the novel as a privileged genre-without-genre where all that is uniquely human is capable of ¤nding expression in language. One can appreciate a desire, when dealing with a form so well suited to domestic representations, that epical forces and autonomous systems should themselves be domesticated. But there is no reason why systems, too, cannot occupy the same ¤eld of immanence—so that nature, animals, and machines have as much to do with

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 97 what is “human” as does language itself. And it is in this “®uid terrain of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies” that the epic today is most likely to take its form and de¤nition (Hardt and Negri 218). In networks, not in bounded nations; in circulation and redistribution, not in conquest: this is how Empire’s distanced images ¤nd contemporary form. Money, for example, has enormous distancing powers not recognized by Bakhtin, or perhaps by Gogol himself as he engaged a society only partially removed from feudal arrangements. And money, like poetry and religion, demands a certain faith that, once recognized, offers a kind of demonic equivalent to “spirit” in the epic. To participate imaginatively in Gogol’s “poem of Russia” and to enter into Chichikov’s world, a reader must maintain faith in the newness, in the “novelty,” of the literary project, even as business can be conducted only so long as the businessman maintains credit in the eyes of others, and society as a whole maintains faith in a system set up to create value. In Russia of the nineteenth century, and in America then as now, the lack of strong bourgeois values (and the absence of a middle class “in the European sense of the word,” as Marx noted in his later years), made faith in systems potentially that much stronger (Marx cited in Steiner 37). The value of an estate, in tsarist times, depended partly on the number of peasants, or souls, working the land, the number established by a national census. Chichikov’s scheme is to buy up the listed peasants who have died in the interval between censuses, and so establish himself as a man of means and property ¤t to marry and move in society. Of course his only movement, in his signature “smallish spring brezka” (Dead Souls 3), is from one inn to another around one of those towns so familiar in Russian literature, “the provincial town of N,” until the time when he is run out. But this movement is enough to create from within an image of society in all its classes, professions, and languages. One landowner, living with his wife in rural isolation, is only too happy to avoid paying the quitrent on the dead souls and so he makes each one over to Chichikov at a fraction of the cost of a healthy laborer. At the house of another, a gambler and dissolute, Chichikov barely escapes with his life. A third, suspecting treachery, wants from him more than the price of a living laborer. But it is the fourth landowner, Plyushkin, who best completes Gogol’s “blueprint” for Russia (Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 28). This old man has lived for years in miserliness and isolation, hoarding grain, collecting tithes, storing rags until they turn to dust, and refusing to throw away even a used toothpick. Without his realiz-

98 / Tabbi ing it, the estate itself has fallen to ruin and the items themselves have all “turned to rot and gape.” Indeed, the landowner has himself “¤nally turned into a sort of gape in mankind” (Gogol, Dead Souls 120). A hitherto unnoticed source for Gaddis’s title, this line in Gogol (which Gaddis would have read in translation), is worth noting because it presents the old man not so much as a Dickensian caricature, but as a representative “soul”; and this not because the old man represents any actual person or allegorizes the dehumanizing effects of capital. Rather, in the dusty ¤gure of the hoarder and the miser we ¤nd expressed the overall strategy of internal distancing; the presence, at the boundary of the capitalist system, of a subjectivity that is neither good nor evil, is known only as a “gape in mankind.” Within the world but not a part of it; existing more as its boundary or limit, the old man has become the system’s subjectivity, a once vital power whose spirit over time (and unnoticed by himself ) has been stripped away. In place of “virtue” and “rare qualities of soul” (courtesies that even Chichikov, a practiced ®atterer, cannot bring himself to utter), Chichikov gives as a reason for visiting his desire to meet a man reputed for his “economy” and “order” (121). The social bonds of Agape, the early Christian ideal of fellowship, in this novel are torn apart (rendered “Agape”) because exchange has separated out from value; economics and organization, in turn, have supplanted the material world they are supposed to organize, while nature, so long neglected, overtakes the social order and the human body itself through processes of decomposition. And it is not only the old miser who is made unrecognizable by his blind devotion to the forms of capital, rather than the substance of production: Chichikov too, when he comes to the attention of the town, is revealed as oddly substanceless: “The whole search carried out by the of¤cials revealed to them only that they did not know for certain what Chichikov was, and that all the same Chichikov must certainly be something” (199). Failures of recognition abound in Gogol’s novel. On ¤rst sight, Chichikov takes the decrepit landowner for a housekeeper; only on a second appearance does he take this housekeeper for a man, not a woman, and he realizes his mistake only after asking the old man, in some perplexity. “About the master? Is he in, or what?” “The master’s here,” said the housekeeper. “But where?” Chichikov reiterated. “What, my dear, are you blind or something?” said the housekeeper. “Egad! But I am the master!”

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 99 The same misrecognition is rendered in Gogol’s short novel, The Double, and recounted twice by Gaddis in Agape Agape. Early in the narrative, Gaddis’s narrator cites Huizinga on the identi¤cation of tribal humans with animals, when the savage “in his magic dance . . . is the other” (25). The narrator in his extremity, uninclined to symbolic distancing or literary doubling, identi¤es himself fully and ¤nally with the dying animal other: “Got to stop it’s got to end right here can’t breathe the other can’t speak can’t cross the room can’t breathe can’t, can’t go on and I’m, I am the other. I am the other. Not the two of us living side by side like the, like some Golyadkin he invented in a bad moment no, no not those Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! In meiner Brust one wants to leave its brother, one clings to the earth and the other in derber Leibeslust no, no no no, can’t breath can’t walk can’t stand I am the other” (20). A few pages later, thinking of the work he is trying to ¤nish (a social history of the player piano), Gaddis’s narrator recounts the scene of misrecognition in The Double (chap. 8), so close to the one in Dead Souls: this work of mine trying to explain this other it’s not Golyadkin no, it’s not this doppelgänger who’s gone with his bed in the morning when Petrushka brings in tea and complains that his master is not home, shouting You idiot! I’m your master, Petrushka! And the “other one,” Petrushka ¤nally blurts out, the “other one” left hours ago it’s not like that, this doppelgänger of Golyadkin’s I’ve never even seen my, seen this plagiarist because I am the other one it’s exactly the opposite, I am the other I just said that didn’t I? . . . we’re not these Golyadkins we’re not doppelgängers, it’s either/or, it’s all-or-none, it’s this whole binary digitized pattern of holes punched in those millions of dusty piano rolls . . . (22–23) The dying man will return once more to Gogol before the narrative comes to an end: “Ought to go out and get some fresh air, get out of this dim suffocating airless lightless little no no wait not yet no, these demons of Homer’s and Golyadkin’s doppelgänger who’s gone with his bed in the morning when Petrushka brings in tea and explains that his master’s not at home shouting You idiot Petrushka! I’m your master!” (79) The refusal here of a doubling strategy can be understood more generally as a refusal of the novelist’s own separate existence as a speaking presence within novelistic discourse. “I am the other,” a major refrain in a narrative

100 / Tabbi that is nothing but last words, is a lament, obviously, that expression must cease. But the phrase also indicates a condition that has in®uenced all of Gaddis’s writing, not just this ¤nal ¤ction. Identi¤cation with the other, particularly the “either/or, . . . all-or-none” alterity of digital technology and network communications, is the condition of novelistic epic today, where distances are eliminated, consciousness becomes the distinctions it creates, and the human subject, rather than trying to transcend either nature or the world system, occupies their boundaries. One of the key innovations of systems theory is to allow us to conceive of a boundary actively, as a subjectivity that joins even as it separates: “there are no systems independent of environments, only systems/environment couples” (Clarke, elucidating Luhmann). And subjectivity itself is conceivable as a way of bringing forth that coupling—whether through human or nonhuman agencies. Hence, in systems theory, a society can be conscious even as an individual is capable of embodying social forces of generation and corruption. What happens when “Agape” becomes “Agape” is that an isolated, human-made system decomposes, ceases to differentiate itself from the nonhuman environment. Entropic disintegration, turning productive difference into sameness, rot—Gogol’s “gape”—might appear as an inevitability, the collapse of consciousness with the organic dissolution of the dying body. Death cannot of course be recognized by consciousness: it is aware only of its own operations and selections, able to process only those aspects of the environment that it is set up to process (“either/or, . . . all-or-none,” replications and duplications rather than recognitions). But if the system boundary is conceived as something two-sided, a systems/environment coupling that may work at various levels (including both the psyche that perceives and the society that communicates), then it is possible to imagine a way out of the mirrorlike doubling that (literally) bedevils Gaddis’s narrator. By shifting the focalization, from the dying man to the admixture of living systems and communicative networks that give form to the work, Gaddis in Agape Agape stages a crossing-over. The autonomous, dying consciousness, an entity incapable of experiencing its own end, can however combine with the nonhuman, with Homer’s demons and all their equivalents in the current world system. This is not a crossing-over into the spirit worlds familiar in traditional epic, but rather a way for one, authorial consciousness, to pass his observations on to another, readerly consciousness. The author thus completes a transition from a single, dying system to many systems, to a combination of psyches that perceive and societies that communicate. And that transition

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 101 out of the author’s private observing system is what allows others—readers— to think an author’s thoughts so he can “have” them (in circulation and communication, not in consciousness). In Dead Souls, incidentally, Chichikov’s fall has very little to do with the transactions themselves, their lack of substance and their vaguely disreputable— though entirely legal—character. Rather, his worldly fall results from an uncharacteristically spontaneous attempt, near the completion of his project, to court the governor’s daughter. The businessman’s awkwardness is noted in society, but the trouble really begins the next day, with a conversation among two woman of the town, one “simply agreeable,” the other “agreeable in all respects” (chap. 9). The ladies are no more distinguishable than are Anne and Julia Bast, the aunts who are the ¤rst to speak in J R. More than anywhere else, the dialogue between the old ladies is where Gaddis introduces details of his own biography and family history in Long Island. The aunts, whose memories (in all fairness) are actually quite precise with regard to essentials and whose talk is not nearly so addled as readers might think, are also capable of becoming more than just vehicles, more than disembodied voices who set the plot in motion. They may start out that way, but it is evidence of Gaddis’s breadth and compassion that the most incidental character, over time and in unexpected circumstances, will be revealed as an individual, as one in possession of a singular, irreproducible life. Anne (or is it Julia?), while trying to help with a pressing legal matter, suggests making a phone call to the “family lawyer,” who (if he is still alive) is probably long retired from practice and living thousands of miles away in the Indiana town where the family was established generations in the past. The aunt remembers passing by “the old Lemp home” in Indiana (14), and (much later in the book) she recalls how as a girl she imagined getting married and living there one day. The brief memory is all the more moving for being scarcely noticeable, within the mundane and instrumental talk that surrounds it. Another character, the lawyer Beaton, is ¤guratively “beat on” by the governor whose orders he is expected to carry out. This he does up to the very end of the book—when he quietly and unexpectedly ignores the governor’s barked instruction (“—Hear me . . . !”) and refuses to declare a dividend, something he’s been reminded of at least three times before (712). The entire plot, affecting both Amy Joubert’s guardianship of her only son and the fate of an entire corporation, may depend on this single, deliberate inaction, which is given magnitude only through Gaddis’s attention to the inhuman, the slowly accreting and detailed processes of corporate power and legal lan-

102 / Tabbi guages. Small as it is, Beaton’s inaction shows how much the system depends on obedience, and how vulnerable it is to even a singular refusal of work and authority. Refusal, as Melville’s “Bartleby” shows, is the beginning of a liberatory politics; but as Hardt and Negri point out, “refusal in itself is empty” (204). One must also know one’s place, literally, in the corporate system, where even to identify a class enemy is something of a challenge. Character in Gaddis, though far from conventional and certainly not rounded or psychological, takes epic dimensions that would be impossible to achieve without this detailed immersion in systems. The “recognitions” that began, in Gaddis, as largely aesthetic judgments, have become more literal acts of recurrent cognition in J R and his later narratives. As the purpose of art is to create a bridge between perception and communication, character in Gaddis becomes less an end in itself than a means of locating the self and its desires within networks of power.

“If you could have seen what I saw there”: Second-Order Observation Before going ahead with my reading of J R, a novel that I think is especially yielding to the terms and methods of systems theory, I want to distinguish some aspects of Luhmann’s theory that are available for literary criticism, and some that are not. My main point of reference will be the most recently translated volume from Luhmann’s series for a theory of society, Art as a Social System. In that volume, Luhmann sees criticism in our time as no longer “the perfection of art, as the production of its history, even as its ‘medium of re®ection’ ”—the approach favored by Walter Benjamin (Art as a Social System 53). Certainly in the modern era criticism’s function is not “to assist in judging or creating works of art” (3)—although Luhmann would not have objected to critics assuming a more active role in deciding what is acceptable as art. Selection, not interpretation, is the critic’s ¤rst obligation. At a time when the demand for novelty by a mass audience has displaced the cultivated judgment of a few, there remains the need to determine “criteria for rejecting some innovations as failures” (201). Indeed, Luhmann implies, we should look to systems theory not for a method of reading literary texts, viewing works of art, or creating music out of sound and noise, but rather for principles that are of use in the drawing of boundaries. The shift is from

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 103 interpretation to observation, from a concern with an individual author’s subjectivity to what is public and intersubjective. Only then, when a space is reopened for “the mere perception” of a literary work in its material reality, might critics think of constructing literature as an object of institutional recognition within the otherwise unbounded environment of mass entertainment (10). By de¤nition, neither social reality nor a literary tradition can be unique to an individual; what is unique, however, is the position from which an artist observes and, especially in an artist who assigns vantages to characters in ¤ction, the particular mix of differently located and differently embodied individuals, each with a particular history of structural coupling within a complex environment: “Look! If you could have seen what I saw there,” the exclamation of the visual artist, Schramm, spoken near the end of his life and cited near the end of J R (he is paraphrasing Broch’s The Sleepwalkers), is every artist’s implicit plea to every viewer, and every author’s plea to a reader (724). Of course it is impossible to see through another person’s eyes or to think another person’s thoughts. But to observe what an author has been able to hold in thought is to begin to know one’s own mind and to locate oneself within the ¤eld of operations, quotations, blind spots, and occasional correlated perceptions that can be said to produce a living tradition or evolving art system. There should be no question of studying either the work or its tradition for direct insights into the working of society: both the work and society are self-constituting, or autopoietic, systems. But the work can function as a stage for “second-order observations,” inviting readers to look again at the world—to re-cognize—to observe their own observations and “to discover previously unacknowledged idiosyncrasies, prejudices, and limitations” (Luhmann, Art as a Social System 87). Criticism according to Luhmann participates in this process of observing the work and then reintegrating what one has learned into the work’s form— advancing to a second-order observation where it is possible to think with the work, to converse through it and to explore social forms and possibilities at the level of the work’s autopoiesis, its self-creation out of multiple perspectives (out of the multiple systems within the work’s environment). But what might autopoiesis look like in a work of art—particularly in a literary work made not of plastic materials or sound and not of formal relations alone but of language? Autopoiesis means that the decisions made by the artist do not follow an external set of rules or strive toward a speci¤c end; rather they

104 / Tabbi emerge from relationships within the work whose endpoint is unforeseen in the making and recognized only in retrospect. Different readers will view these relations differently and construct out of them different meanings, for good or for ill. But it is not clear to me—and I’m not sure whether Luhmann himself really believed—that this readerly construction of a literary text is itself a system. Indeed, in places Luhmann does distinguish art as a developing social system from “other, more rigidly programmed functional systems” because in art “one cannot assume the existence of selection criteria in the way one can assume a pro¤t motive in the economy, a criterion of methodological correctness in science, or the distinction equality/inequality in current legal practice. If artworks constitute their own programs, then they can convince only after the fact” (230). But such noted differences between the work of art and social systems are not incidental but essential, and they suggest to me that what is really describable as a system is not the artwork or literary text itself but its context. A system—a literary tradition, for example, or a society—does not exist in the same way that a work of art exists. A printed novel, for example, is available for me to experience, and to do so in communication with you, another reader, because the novel as a potential for experience has an objective existence. You and I can agree on the text, in a consensus, and we can return to that novel, later, for more. It won’t have changed. By contrast, a tradition or genre cannot be gone back to because it will have changed in its contents and their relationships. Instead of evolving systems, what we have instead, as objects of study, are particular texts, and unless we as critics account for individuality in language, ¤xed in a speci¤c, unchanging textual object, there will be little to distinguish aesthetic observations from more strictly—and necessarily more transient and abstract—sociological observations. This abstraction is a shortcoming that at least one critic, Florian Cramer, has noticed in applications of Luhmann’s theory: “While Luhmann was a sociologist indeed,” observes Cramer, “It appears to me that also the nonLuhmannian attempts to employ systems theory as a literary theory always boiled down to sociology. Systems theory helps to analyze how ‘art’ and ‘literature’ work as social systems, but in my view hasn’t proven yet to be usable for analyzing texts and artworks themselves. There might be, however, an exception: namely those artworks which are autopoietic systems themselves” (). I am, to an extent, reading J R and perhaps the postmodern epic in gen-

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 105 eral as just such an exception, but with one caveat: even a literary work that (like J R) is autopoietic in its form or systemicity exists, as art, only insofar as it is experienced in a consciousness. The work is intelligible only as an elaboration of another consciousness in language, always invincibly personal. Thomas Pynchon is as confessional as Anne Sexton; Gaddis as much a narrative presence as Fielding. That presence is refracted and distributed among characters in the ¤ction and expressed through language other than the author’s own—in citations, in instances of extraliterary language, in allusions direct and implied, and so forth. In none of these writers is language a system, however. To account for the fact of literary art, one needs to account for its individuality—but individuals, as Luhmann of course recognizes, “are not and cannot be ‘parts’ of society”; language is never a system; and “communication cannot receive or produce perceptions” in or from another mind (Art as a Social System 10). Our “autopoietic closure as minds and as living bodies” keeps us outside the social system, much as our language and our consciousness emerge out of, but evidently remain separate from, cognition. So for Luhmann to treat the arts (including literature) as a social system, he needs to distinguish language in art from its usual function in communication. This is why, in the opening chapter of Art as a Social System, Luhmann insists on the primacy of perception in consciousness when experiencing works of art. Only by “participating in communication via perception” can an individual psyche “generate intensities of experience that remain incommunicable as such” (48). And only by keeping perception distinct from communication can art have an effect on society that is indirect and nondestructive. Art’s purpose, Luhmann recognizes, is not to represent the social but to “irritate” and provoke it; to de¤ne the work’s own difference and to mark off a space in which readers can observe the emergence of order and disorder. I’ll come back to the question of how literature can be rooted in perception—it is the aspect of Luhmann’s theory that speaks most pointedly to what is unique about Gaddis’s aesthetic. For the moment I would simply note that, unless we keep this fundamentally uncommunicable aspect of literary art clearly in view, we are likely to fall into the trap Florian Cramer observes in Luhmann’s followers, of treating works of literature as documents of sociology. One obvious ¤eld of application for Luhmann’s theories has been the modernist poem—the autotelic poem of Warren and Brooks cited approvingly by Luhmann, which becomes “a unity only at the level of connota-

106 / Tabbi tion, by exploring the liberties that come with using words exclusively as a medium.” The words and repeated motifs give meaning to one another not through their outward or informational content so much as their selfreferential combination of “sound, rhythm, and meaning” (Art as a Social System 26). Cramer, however, has more recent models in mind, along the lines of John Barth’s “Frame Tale,” which uses words themselves as the codes for a self-enclosing unity: “Once Upon a Time there was a Story that Began”— and that’s it, the story in its entirety, arranged vertically along two sides of a page, so as to produce (with the reader’s help and a pair of scissors) a Möbius strip in which the words themselves are the self-encircling code, enclosing instructions for the story’s own assembly. When Cramer delivered his comments in the year 2001 at the Tate Modern, he was speaking on a panel with Robert Coover in whose work “autopoiesis, recursion, self-reference and selfre®exivity have frequently been observed.” These qualities can also be observed in the work of William Gaddis, credited by Tony Tanner (in City of Words) for having bridged American modernism and postmodernism in the art of ¤ction and identi¤ed, by Tom LeClair, speci¤cally as a “systems novelist” (The Art of Excess). More consistently even than literary heirs such as Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Didion, Caponegro, and DeLillo, Gaddis would let the language of systems—of¤ce talk, depositions, press releases, legal judgments, and such—act as a medium through which his own work, as ¤ction, achieves its form. But before Gaddis reached this level of self-consciousness expressed through the nonliterary language of the “other,” he had to get past the more direct self-consciousness in his ¤rst novel, The Recognitions, which for example, presented several characters at parties and on the streets of Greenwich Village discussing a long talkative book that very much resembles The Recognitions: “You’re not reading that are you?” asks one character. “No, I’m just reviewing it.” At two points in The Recognitions Gaddis appears in cameo, as a character named “Willie.” He also gives his initials to the book’s main character, Wyatt Gwyon, a forger of sixteenth-century Flemish masterworks. In J R, one of Gaddis’s many distinct personae is named “Eigen,” from the German word indicating “of one’s own,” what belongs to the self. An eigenvalue is also a term cited by Luhmann to describe the self-referential basis of the brain’s perceptual processes: “Today we know that the external world is the brain’s own construction, treated by consciousness as if it were a reality ‘out there.’ The extent to which perception is prestructured by lan-

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 107 guage is equally well known. The perceived world is nothing but the sum total of the ‘eigenvalues’ of neurophysiological operations” (Art as a Social System 6). That we see the world as separate and independent of observation is a result of the mind’s ¤ltering out, or repressing, its own operations. And Gaddis, the author of cognitive ¤ctions, creates a similar effect in J R by repressing his own organizing presence, and presenting the narrative as a “recording” of multiple voices (LeClair). Instead of putting himself “in” the ¤ctional world—as authorial will and the world-engendering Willy of The Recognitions—in his later novels Gaddis avoids any objective presentation of his individuality and distributes his agency as a sum of eigenvalues, with each persona indicating aspects of his own engagement in society, and his various locations within its networks of technoscienti¤c relations.

Epic at the End of Nature What Gaddis accomplishes in J R might be described as formally similar to Barth’s “Frame Tale,” but carried out over the length of a 726-page novel, not just a ten-word phrase. For Gaddis had undertaken in J R a thoroughgoing critique of corporate America that hardly ever strays from the programs and languages generated by an increasingly mediated environment. By exploring at encyclopedic length the entire social order and composing largely with found language, the language of headlines, talk, box carton labels, advertisements, and innumerable social others, J R realizes an order and form of its own; and by imagining the rise of a corporation run by an “unkempt 11 year old whose penny stock and defaulted bond operations [blossom] into a vast and perilous ¤nancial empire,” Gaddis is able to focus his critique, demonstrating how much of society and the economy is pre-ideological and available to the mind of a preadolescent (“J R Up to Date,” Rush 62). The boy, J R Van Sant, speaks only what is spoken by the society, knowing nothing of the sociality within which adults are expected to conduct themselves, and using grown-up language but with a literal-mindedness that reveals tacit expectations not covered by the corporate program: “through his simple creed of ‘get all you can’ by obeying the letter of the law and evading its spirit at every turn” (Rush 62), young J R tests the limits of the economic system and participates in its systematicity, its continued growth for the sake of growth without regard for consequences or costs on human lives and the environment—indeed, without ever recognizing the existence of an environ-

108 / Tabbi ment: “wait a second,” J R tells his lawyer (whom he hired by dialing a number on a matchbook). The boy is speaking from the school pay phone in Long Island where he conducts most of his business: look did they do that mineral essay of that water they’re using in this here beer . . . ? No I did see if . . . No but see if it’s got any of these minerals in it we should get to take this here percentage depletion allowance off the whole . . . What do you mean we’re depleting them aren’t we? I mean if we get some tax bene¤t off depleting something why shouldn’t we de . . . okay so go ahead and get a ruling on it look, the next thing . . . where? That says mineral assets twenty million why shouldn’t we claim . . . Okay but with all these here mineral claims we’ve got how does anybody know there’s not these mineral and gas deposits worth twen . . . Look okay look that’s the whole thing then look, if there’s any crap about that we just go ahead and drill or whatever you . . . What does it matter for what! for whatever they give out these deductions for these here intangible drilling costs for I mean what do they expect us to . . . ( J R 469– 70) J R might not understand the difference between a mineral “assay” and a school essay (in class, maybe he missed that day). Often as not he will misplace the decimal point when practicing sixth-grade math on the billions of dollars that ®ow through his business (though neither he nor his employees ever pause to enjoy the pro¤ts). He might mistake “amphibious” for “anphibious” (“J R Up to Date,” Rush 67); and maybe he does not exactly distinguish an Indian reservation from a preservation; but he knows environmental and tax law. If the system allows a deduction for “depletion,” the J R corp will go ahead, drill, and deplete. All the boy can see, and all the system expects him to see, is the deduction on a balance sheet that a paid accountant can sort out for him. The corresponding environmental depletion is invisible to him, and so unreal (even as the “stuffed Alaskans” he assumes are placed on display in the Museum of Natural History might as well be human bodies to a boy of eleven with no experience of mortality). “Postmodernism,” writes Fredric Jameson, “is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good” (Postmodernism ix, cit. in Hardt and Negri 187). By “Nature,” neither Jameson nor Gaddis is primarily addressing such things as the depletion of natural resources or the loss of habitats and wildlife, real as these losses are. Nor would

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 109 either the novelist or the theorist deny the continued existence of drives and passions, however vacant and affectless the presentation of character in such ¤ction and its theorization might be. What is being dramatized rather, in both the literature and the theory, is a new, because truly global, incorporation of the drives and senses. “We have no nature,” Hardt and Negri comment, “in the sense that these forces and phenomena are no longer understood as outside, that is, they are not seen as original and independent of the arti¤ce of the civil order” (187). No longer available as an eternal, unchanging environment or setting against which human wars and arti¤ce can be measured, nature is itself now a participant in human wars, a force that remains invisible to a system until the system breaks down or nature breaks in, in the form of disease, climate change, ®oods, hurricanes, and other disasters no longer regarded as accidental or insurable as “acts of God.” Nature has become, “as some might say, a part of history” (187). There can be no epic effect, of course, in the cited dialogue of a boy, however recognizable the consequences of his sorcerer’s apprentice-like decisions and instructions. Yet J R’s blindness to nature does not change the fact of its presence, as a part of history and on the same plane of immanence through which the dialogue unfolds. A presence more perceived by the reader than communicated among characters, the natural world is given in small phrases interspersed through the dialogue, and in longer, transitional passages. Indeed, what is most remarkable about the self-consciousness of J R is Gaddis’s decision (despite a number of authorial winks, such as a publisher’s list of books under review whose titles are all anagrams of THE RECOGNITIONS) to impart an authorial perspective not to any one character or group of characters but to these wholly impersonal, at times technological, at times natural, passages of transition—instances of prose poetry without comparison in the body of American literature: . . . and they entered the [train] car out of sight behind its ¤lthy windows as its lights too receded and became mere punctuations in this aimless spread of evening past the ¤rehouse and the crumbling Marine Memorial, the blooded barberry and woodbine’s silent siege and the desirable property For Sale, up weeded ruts and Queen Anne’s laces to ¤nally mount the sky itself where another blue day brought even more the shock of fall in its brilliance, spread loss like shipwreck on high winds tossing those oaks back in waves blown over with whitecaps where their leaves showed light undersides and dead branches cast

110 / Tabbi brown sprays to the surface, straining at the height of the pepperidge tree and blowing down the open highway to ¤nd voice in the screams of the electric saws prospering through Burgoyne Street . . . ( J R 74–75) Although the book has no chapter breaks, the predominant dialogue in J R is continuously marked off by such passages. Time’s passing is quietly registered (here with an allusion to Thomas Carlisle, “another blue day”), while scenes are demarcated by passage through a sensible environment. Each time the narrative returns to Burgoyne Street, one of maybe a dozen stable settings in the novel, we have variations on the same foliage and the same set of markers—the Marine Memorial, the For Sale sign, a church memorial to “Our Dear Departed Member”—all of which may or may not be perceived by the characters, who may or may not be present at each transition. Violence is done not only by the ever-present electric saws, but by nature itself, where woodbine is said to renew “its attack on the locusts in the next lot, penetrating to the mangled saplings and torn trunks at the forward edge of the battleline” (235). Trees are said to “[ride] high losing sight of each other as though readying to hurl their fruit in all directions and make a real night of it, one to emerge from with old wounds reopened and new ones inviting attention” (143). No human presence is needed for subjectivity to exist; no armies need to battle for war to carry on. Something unprecedented is taking place in such prose—not an animism so much as a re-situation of subjectivity and human violence. The human in Gaddis, as in systems theory, is never a part of nature; rather it is a material operation sensed at nature’s boundaries that connects us, body and psyche, to the environment whether or not we know it. Ecology, though easy to overlook in Gaddis’s city-centered work, is nonetheless a presence from the opening pages of The Recognitions (set in rural Connecticut), through the shade trees on Burgoyne Street in J R, to the slayed pigeon used as a football by children at the start of Carpenter’s Gothic, to that novel’s concern with the despoliation of resources in Africa. Most extensively, nature appears as a deadly environment in the late work, in the human body becoming its kangaroo “other” in the last ¤ction, and in verbally recorded scenes from a TV nature show in A Frolic of His Own—exclusively sexual and violent scenes that become intermixed with sustained citations from Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Still, natural ecologies, their rhythms and patterns, are subordinate thematically and they do not themselves drive the narrative any better than dialogue alone is able to move things forward. Those

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 111 pervasive, poetic bridge passages do not comment on events so much as suggest an environing presence of the non-human, distant from living languages and implying different models of time. Rather than Bakhtinian dialogisim, a combination of voices and con®icts among social positions, we have in Gaddis a continuing contrast between perceptual and communicative operations. What distinguishes Gaddis’s aesthetic, and what suggests a new treatment of epic time (not restricted, in Bahktin’s term, to a continual concern with “novelty” and immersion in “innovation”), is the way that the natural and the perceptual is held noticeably at the edge of the communicative (disturbing it). This is where the discourse of systems and the discourse of epic converge most powerfully, in a narrative bridge, never complete, between consciousness and perception, between the different world-organizations that come through human communication and perceptual power. Call it a cognitive ecology. A consciousness at once authorial and impersonal carries the narrative from voice to voice, and from scene to scene, through television monitors, phone lines, cars and trains, or through a static landscape where time passes in the absence of any observer. The “sunlight, pocketed in a cloud” on the ¤rst page of J R, is a small-scale use of the device, at once establishing the “setting” and setting off the dialogue of the two elder sisters: —Money . . . ? in a voice that rustled. —Paper, yes. —And we’d never seen it. Paper money. —We never saw paper money till we came east. —It looked so strange the ¤rst time we saw it. Lifeless. —You couldn’t believe it was worth a thing. —Not after Father jingling his change. —Those were silver dollars. —And silver halves, yes and quarters, Julia. The ones from his pupils. I can hear them now . . . Sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the ®oor through the leaves of the trees outside. ( J R 3) We have now reached a point where we can observe how J R ful¤lls the particular aesthetic demand identi¤ed by Luhmann—that a work of art should create a bridge between perception and communication. The very ¤rst voice that we hear rustles, like money itself, and like the rustling pages of the

112 / Tabbi book we are reading. At the same time the word, “rustled,” works as a reference to the voice of an elderly woman. The sunlight, “pocketed in a cloud,” is as much a medium as the money jingling in the pocket of the elder Bast; nature is thus appropriated as a commodity, although it’s a careless, wasteful, and destructive appropriation because the pocketed bounty spills “suddenly broken across the ®oor.” The ¤rst of many spills in the novel (scarcely a page will go by without an accident), this line signals the constant but scarcely noticeable intrusion of the environment into a society concerned with its own, more loquacious, activities. (Not until the trees are cut down one day, by those very buzz saws “prospering” on Burgoyne Street, do either Anne or Julia notice their former presence.) But we, the readers, are meant to notice, and we’re also meant to pick up on meanings unavailable to the characters or miscommunicated among them. We can know, if we are listening and paying attention, that the lawyer Coen’s name is spelled “without the h,” as Coen tries to explain. But the aunts, Anne and Julia don’t know it, and Coen himself does not know that the ladies don’t know. He’s a restless communicator, unable to “come and sit down” (3), and unable to listen for meanings outside the coded meanings he busily cites as legal precedents. When Gaddis at the end of the novel indirectly (through the boy J R, himself heard through a dangling telephone receiver) asks the reader, “hey you listening?” the author himself is asking whether we have learned to keep still and listen to what’s being said, not because we’re expected to respond or act (as to a direct judicial order) but rather to participate in a second-order communication with the author, a kind of co-writing or collaboration that produces the narrative out of voices and materials provided by the culture and selected by the author. This opening passage reveals how it is that Gaddis gives “primacy to perception in consciousness” rather than re®ection or representation: pocketed sunlight is a shadow, a vacancy; it is followed, in the very next transitional passage, by “the graveled vacancy of a parking lot” (18); and then, when the sunlight gets in a character’s eyes, “It caught him ®at across the lenses, erasing any life behind them in a ®ash of inner vacancy” (18). A word, “vacancy,” is not a concept already “out there”; it is a humming with “sound, rhythm, and meaning” (Luhmann, Art as a Social System 26). By building poetic connections out of repeated words and everyday (mis)communications, and by utilizing “media such as space and time,” Gaddis makes his narrative appear more worldlike, consistent in its own internal relations but remaining dependent on “triggering perceptions (not least, the reading of texts)” (Luhmann, Art as a Social System 7). Gaddis’s radical empiricism, with his un-

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 113 matched attention to the environmental blindnesses and evacuated subjectivities generated by self-regulating professions such as business and law, does not make J R an imitation of the society it depicts; nor is the novel itself a social system in microcosm. On the contrary—Gaddis critiques the system, but to understand how requires that we enter the “spirit” within or behind the “letter” of the law (and Gaddis’s text), that we as readers complete the cognitive circuit between perception and communication. The difference between a literary and a social experience, already anticipated in the title of Gaddis’s ¤rst novel (The Recognitions), depends on the author’s cognitive activity in putting the work together, and the reader’s re-cognition of this activity. Gaddis has said that his intention in J R, and in his third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic, was for “the characters to create themselves,” something that is true of the stage and movies but requires verbal mediation in a novel and requires, again, the imaginative participation of a reader: “It is the notion that the reader is brought in almost as a collaborator in creating the picture that emerges of the characters, the situation, what they look like, everything. So this authorial absence which everyone from Flaubert to Barthes talks about, is the sense that the book is a collaboration between the reader and what is on the page” (“Interview,” Rush 79–80). Gaddis, as a composer of narrative elements, remains always at the level of the speech he cites in this book; even the transitional passages that comment on actions and set the stage for spoken discourse remain ¤xed in the here and now. There is also a certain distance between the narrative voice and the numerous voices of characters, but—again—rather than rising above the characters, Gaddis creates a narrative presence to the side of them, observing their actions and indirectly commenting on what the characters say or do. “Educationwise it isn’t hurting us PRwise, I’ll say that, Miss Flesch said it, . . . ” “Me? Paid to me? No, it was paid to the law ¤rm, my partner. Just say twenty-¤ve thousand paid for consultation, representation, and what? No, say legal services, rendered by Ganganelli during this legislative session in conjunction with . . . no conjunction, conjunk, junk” (27–28). Next to the ¤rst-order (mis)communication among characters, the narrator in J R achieves a kind of second-order communication unavailable to the characters—but available to the attentive reader who is willing to enter into this second-order conversation, and able to put together signi¤cant connections within the environment of junk language and junk bonds. The in®ection Gaddis gives to so many utterances, however empty they may be in themselves, also bespeaks a generosity of attention reminiscent of,

114 / Tabbi but rather different from, the practice that Steiner notes in Tolstoy of “giving even minor characters proper names and of saying something about the lives they lead outside their brief appearance in the novel,” a technique that is simple but “far-reaching” in its effects (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky 101). The practice in Tolstoy reveals a mind incapable of thinking of a character as lifeless; in Gaddis, having a character (Miss Flesch, for example), constantly speak “through bread,” might reveal a colder humor in an author’s observations, and even a disbelief in the character’s reality: “Mister Urquhart creeping around picking up napkin wads like something out of Dickens . . . ,” is an observation made by one of the novel’s main characters, Jack Gibbs ( J R 118). But nowhere does Gaddis allow himself the direct presentation of a character’s subjectivity in language recognizably his own. Authorial commentary in Gaddis, though equally present and pervasive is always of a second order; for this is how an author today, while differing from a Tolstoy or Dickens, can still open up a space within the narrative, on the same plane of immanence inhabited by the characters, for the broad-based social commentary and naturalistic dimensions of a possible epic.

Autopoiesis In some ways, Luhmann and Gaddis make for an odd pairing. They do share a certain independence of thought and a craggy separation from the discursive communities their work helped to establish (the German social constructivists, the meta¤ctionists in post–World War II America). There is also an intriguing biographical and professional similarity: after the commercial failure of The Recognitions and before settling down to work on J R, Gaddis worked as a corporate speechwriter. Luhmann also had substantial extraacademic experience: he “was a public administration consultant before he became a sociology professor, and his experience with complex bureaucracies seems to have profoundly shaped his individual offshoot of General Systems Theory [as originally elaborated by the Austrian biologist, Ludwig von Bertallannfy]” (Cramer). Any order achieved through bureaucratic organization is recognized, by Luhmann and Gaddis, as exceptional rather than normal, a “temporary and contingent crystallization” (Luhmann, “Globalization”) or “a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos” ( J R 21). Both the American novelist and the German social theorist experienced chaos, incompetence, corruption, and the apparent bureaucratization of everything at ¤rst hand. But whether one responds with Luhmann’s equa-

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 115 nimity or Gaddis’s Protestant resistance is beside the point: what these two unique ¤gures more deeply share is an understanding of the self-exemplifying nature of any imposed order, its autopoietic circularity, which is so fundamental to each writer’s thought that—for all their obvious stylistic differences—it shows up in the way they shape their actual sentences and prose structures. This circularity in phrasing is designed, in Luhmann, to short-circuit paradox and take philosophical discourse past one blind spot to another point of observation (in turn generating new blind spots). Circularity is most noticeable, in Gaddis, as the ordinary mark of a bureaucratic mind: “As a former president of our great nation once observed,” says a congressman out of J R, “when many people are out of work, unemployment results” (“J R Up To Date,” Rush 63). Oscar, the main character in A Frolic of His Own, is both plaintiff and defendant in a lawsuit: he had been run over while trying to start his car, but since liability falls on the owner, not the manufacturer, he is obliged to sue himself. (The car he drives is a Sosumi; his insurance advisor happens to drive an Isuyu.) The examples proliferate, in satirical indictment not of the legal profession alone, but of the more general autopoietic functioning of society’s “self-regulating” and functionally differentiated systems: “Legal language,” Christina complains to her lawyer husband in Frolic, —I mean who can understand legal language but another lawyer, it’s like a, I mean it’s all a conspiracy, think about it Harry. It’s a conspiracy. —Of course it is, I don’t have to think about it. Every profession is a conspiracy against the public, every profession protects itself with a language of its own, look at that psychiatrist they’re sending me to, ever try to read a balance sheet? Those plumes of the giant bird like the dog cornering his prey till it all evaporates into language confronted by language turning language itself into theory till it’s not about what it’s about it’s only about itself turned into a mere plaything . . . (251) Neither conspiracy theory nor postmodern simulation is needed to explain the function of social systems. An awareness of their functional differentiation and their self-regulation is enough to distinguish Gaddis and Luhmann from their novelistic and sociological peers. The economic roots of this circularity, Luhmann has suggested, are (like legal language) produced by a shift from ¤rst-order credit to a second-order system of derivatives that make “speculation” itself the primary object: “The economic system,” Luhmann writes in a late essay on “globalization or world

116 / Tabbi society,” has shifted its bases of security from property and reliable debtors (such as states or large corporations) to speculation itself: “He who tries to maintain his property will lose his fortune, and he who tries to maintain and increase his wealth will have to change his investments one day to the next.” The boy J R, who owns no property and sends in daily change orders from the school pay phone and, later, through agents working out of rented rooms at the Waldorf Astoria, is thus a much better economic and legal player than Oscar, who remains immobilized in bed and in a wheelchair after his accident, and then at his family property through most of A Frolic of His Own. J R, fatherless and never seen at home (where his mother, a nurse, is said to keep irregular hours) is a great example of Zygmunt Bauman’s “vagabond” class, striving through economic speculation to become not (like Oscar) a landed and settled owner but a “tourist,” imagining himself and his hapless business partner—it is the only fantasy the boy harbors—“you and, and me riding in this here big limousine down, down this, this here big street” ( J R 637). Unlike most intellectuals who have developed “their own derivative instruments . . . , describing what others are describing under the common denominator of ‘postmodernity,’ ” Gaddis and Luhmann understand re®exivity as something active, a way of crossing from one side of the system/ environment boundary to another, and back. This understanding is unabashedly textualist: their work facilitates second-order observations of a textual object created out of ¤rst-order observations of society and direct or indirect citations from other literary texts. Instead of using leftover progressivist vocabularies whose ambition was to de¤ne an ideal social order or literary tradition, their work clears discursive and narrative “space in which we can observe the emergence of order and disorder” under conditions that actually exist, through selections and possibilities observed in speech and perceptions (as these have been recorded in the media of our time) (Luhmann, “Globalization”). Regarding media not as engines of simulation but as a ¤rst-order archive, a living material record of what is being said here, and now, Gaddis and Luhmann underwrite a social aesthetic that is pragmatic, though not necessarily static or conservative. It would be wrong to regard this work’s radical realism as an apology for what exists (for example, the current system of global capitalism). “Emergence” is a key term in Luhmann’s thought that implies a collaboration or con®ict, not always conscious, among various nodes in the networked society. Emergence also comes out of differences

The Autopoiesis of American Literature / 117 between what an author chooses to narrate at the level of text, what the characters do at the level of story, and what the reader makes of these differences [the move away from aesthetic autonomy, Stephen Schryer concludes, is a move toward a “readerly ethic.” —Eds.]. To read a self-re®exive novelist such as Gaddis is not only to follow a text, but at the same time, and in parallel, to follow a story told by the text. This is how language can be, in art, not a means of communication; it is rather a “bridge between perception and communication” (Luhmann, Art as a Social System 18). What emerges out of that interpenetration is an understanding that belongs to neither the work nor society, neither to the author nor the reader alone, but to a circulating literary consciousness newly aware of its primary perceptions. For this perceptual consciousness to be communicated, the work itself does not have to be a closed system, operating within a perpetual present from which history, time, and change have been excluded. Insofar as the work is a printed textual object that does not change over time it may be a closed structure. But such a structure only provides materials for a more open readerly system, out of which we create a narrative (in the context of other narratives within a tradition that itself changes: tradition, indeed, could well be the environment that a structurally closed narrative opens onto, where the reader may ¤nd resonances, allusions, and repetitions [see the essay by Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong. —Eds.] that both join and separate the new work from works in the past). Only at this level of second-order observation, when the reader observes a structure of prior decisions put in place by an author, does the work achieve autopoiesis—that is, structural closure (at the level of perception) and environmental openness (in communication, in textual citation and circulation). And, like the experience of listening to music (“for as long as the music lasts,” in a line from T. S. Eliot Gaddis liked to cite), the work is suf¤cient to itself only so long as we hold the book in hand and its structures in mind.

Notes 1. The 2003 decision of the Library of Congress—a fortunate decision, in my view—to preserve digital texts not in the platform of their ¤rst appearance but in “unreadable” zeros and ones so as to be accessible at any time in any format, testi¤es to the need to separate inscription, what enables the perception of material text, from communication.

7 Cognitive Gothic Relevance Theory, Iteration, and Style Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong

Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong’s essay “Cognitive Gothic” argues that Gaddis’s third novel is too focused upon one sole locale for Gaddis’s repetitive style to achieve its intended or desired effect. Drawing on cognitive studies and relevance theory in particular, Bursey and Furlong claim that with its claustrophobic setting, Aristotelian unities, and smaller, self-referential cast of characters, Carpenter’s Gothic lacks the aesthetic, stylistic, and systematic edge that de¤nes Gaddis’s other, longer works of ¤ction. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

Cognitive Gothic / 119

 In 1995, William Gaddis discussed Carpenter’s Gothic in an interview with Paul Ingendaay, seeming to draw back from it: “I thought to myself, just take these clichés, and keep yourself to the strict unities, don’t break out into the world, but let everything take place on this little stage. I simply wanted to know if I could bring it off. It was really nothing more than a ¤nger exercise” (82). But Carpenter’s Gothic is more than a “¤nger exercise”; like all Gaddis’s ¤ction, it is a thoughtful, brilliant commentary on the contemporary world. If we turn our attention to a device that is central to Gaddis’s style throughout his career—namely, repetition—and examine how its use changes in Carpenter’s Gothic, we can account for the relative weakness of this novel, and claim a genuine continuity in Gaddis’s literary output over four decades. Christopher Knight remarked that “both the details and the critique must be understood in the light of an enlarged perspective or realm, in which ostensibly disparate things are found to hold together and assume meaning” (Knight, Hints 20), an approach which Gaddis himself adopted. In Agape Agape, Gaddis writes through his narrator: “I don’t really believe you can take ninety-six people, that’s almost two hundred hands, take out some of them like the sleigh bells there’s still more than a hundred-odd hands doing entirely different things, guiding bows across strings pressing the neck so fast it’s dizzying, ¤ngers pushing, plunging valves, keys opening holes and closing them, the clarinet changing whole registers translating every jot and tittle on the score into a stab, a wail, a delicate lonely suspense, a blast to wake the dead, sforzando, piano God knows what all of it going on at once but not exactly all at once” (90). Repetition, iteration, the piling up of vast arrays of exempla, are the literary devices that underpin the condition Gaddis describes here. “All of it going on at once but not exactly at once,” not exactly the same: this is the effect Gaddis achieves in all his longer works with his great choruses. In Carpenter’s Gothic, however, he con¤nes himself to fewer than a dozen voices. It is no wonder the “blast” is less effective. Throughout his works, Gaddis describes what may be termed a counterteleology. The worlds of art or ¤nance are too large, amorphous, and pervasive to be comprehended by an individual. We might say that Gaddis has written a natural history of forces that direct human cultures worldwide, though his material is restricted to life in the United States. The long novels present a vast array of characters, plans, and events,

120 / Bursey and Furlong variations on a small set of recurring types and situations. The repetition of these instantiations permits the underlying patterns to emerge. Patterns are important, because the structures that concern Gaddis—the art works and money forged by Wyatt and Sinisterra; the tentacles of ¤nance extending into education; the legal maneuvers that defeat justice—are forming (or deforming) Western culture, and can only be apprehended if seen from multiple perspectives. The ways in which the business world enters and transforms the mind of a sixth-grader takes the form of a hunt for ¤rst causes that eventually ®ushes a suf¤ciently large set of cases so that Gaddis and his reader are able to arrive at provisional conclusions about the forces blindly, irrationally at work. What Gaddis is searching for is so large that it cannot be seen directly, so he approaches the subject in many different ways, and through a variety of examples. Few really extensive theoretical treatments of repetition exist. Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Authoritarian Fictions (1983) addresses one kind of repetition, arguing that “redundancy” is an essential feature of the roman à thèse. Developing a schema based on Greimas’s and Genette’s typologies, she produces a taxonomy and a categorization protocol to demonstrate that the same information may be given about a character by the narrator(s), other characters, and the character himself. This categorization has some evident attractions for those interested in the uses and effects of the more general device of repetition. However, there are reasons to discount her work’s relevance to Carpenter’s Gothic, not least because Gaddis’s novel is not a roman à thèse; on the contrary, far from being “closed, structured, constrained, authoritarian,” it is “playful, ®uid, open, impervious to the repressive rule of structure, grammar, or logic” (149). And while redundancy (or duplication) is clearly a kind of repetition, Suleiman discriminates between the two, remarking that “repetition does not necessarily imply . . . redundancy” (154) and carefully noting that the same information can be given many times without actual repetition occurring (175–76). Additionally, the redundancy she identi¤es in other novels forces events, characters, and interpretations to converge in order to force a particular reading onto the audience; this convergence is not the case in Carpenter’s Gothic. There are other reasons not to adopt Suleiman’s protocols. First, redundancy in language is not “surplus of information”; rather, and very simply, redundancy in language consists of having the same information conveyed by more than one system of the grammar. Second, even if Sulieman’s account of

Cognitive Gothic / 121 redundancy in language were correct, her classi¤cation system multiplies descriptions of even the most negligible parts of the text. Indeed, a thorough categorization of the “redundancies” would exceed the text by several orders of magnitude: like describing a house by counting the number of nails in it. Finally, critical, stylistic, and linguistic theoretical developments have long superseded this kind of approach. Almost a quarter century has passed since the appearance of Authoritarian Fictions, and the sources on which Suleiman drew are nearly forty years old. While poetics proper has not produced signi¤cant new treatments of repetition, the ¤elds of stylistics, pragmatics, and linguistics are generating important and fruitful research in this area.1 As a fundamental rhetorical and device, repetition is implicated in a range of literary techniques from irony to versi¤cation. Strict repetition is productive if it leads the reader to expand the context in ways suggested by the text as a whole, and in which new effects are experienced. Tom LeClair writes that “[n]ovels of excess often signify their comprehensive impulse by exhaustively developing a word or phrase” (1989, 92). The iterations in Carpenter’s Gothic are restricted to too few cases, and do not lead to insights as to the existence, nature, and moral character of the forces that mindlessly and relentlessly drive the characters’ lives. Consequently, the reader is put to the effort of noticing the recurring elements without gaining any clearer view of their root cause. As we will show, the parallels in Carpenter’s Gothic are con¤ned to local action; although Gaddis seems to indicate a connection to the greater worlds of religion, international con®ict, and ¤nance, the reader has too narrow a range to generalize from.

Critical Response to Carpenter’s Gothic Christopher Knight, Steven Moore, and Peter Wolfe have all written extensively and sensitively, with varying focus, on Carpenter’s Gothic. They are aware that the strategies and techniques that Gaddis employs in this novel are somewhat different from those used in The Recognitions and J R. Speaking of Gaddis’s working within a literary tradition, Knight remarks that “in novels such as The Recognitions and J R, there is the clear desire [on Gaddis’s part] to extend the novel’s boundaries. . . . But, in Carpenter’s Gothic, the ambition is more reined in” (Hints 167). In a similar vein, Frederick Karl, who has written on The Recognitions and J R, considers Carpenter’s Gothic as comprising “[a] nation of brief segments” (2001, 296) which re®ects a fractured world; more importantly, “[t]he multiplicity of events is so enormous

122 / Bursey and Furlong that language can no longer capture them” (2001, 297). The “multiplicity of events” is a recurring motif found in every Gaddis novel, and as we will argue, when events are echoed and repeated with slight variations on different strata, his vision of the world comes through most effectively. Karl allows generous space in his book for discussion of A Frolic of His Own (213–22) in contrast with the few pages dedicated to Carpenter’s Gothic (295–98). By contrast, Moore contends that Carpenter’s Gothic is “not merely a footnote, a postscript to [Gaddis’s] mega¤ctions, but a virtuosic exercise in meta¤ction” (1989, 128). Stephen J. Burn, like Karl, appears to downgrade the achievement of Carpenter’s Gothic, writing that “despite its many local triumphs of wit and intelligence, the novel is an exercise in compression that doesn’t allow Gaddis’s imagination its usual scope” (22). Although Wolfe, Moore, Knight, and (to a lesser extent) Karl admire Carpenter’s Gothic, they seem quietly to defend it from questions about its status in Gaddis’s oeuvre. As Knight comments: “Gaddis criticism has, to this point [1997], been often characterized by a tone of advocacy, with the critics thinking it their ¤rst responsibility to enlarge his circle of readers . . . but I also write mindful of another, somewhat newer, obligation, and that is as a critic responding to a writer assumed to be canonical” (1997, 22). Like Knight, we assume Gaddis’s canonicity. Unlike Knight, we also ¤nd a failure in the aesthetics of repetition, and hence in the ef¤cacy of the novel. We contend that Gaddis’s trademark stylistic device does not succeed here: repetition of this sort, in order to produce the desired effect, requires a very large set of cases that differ in degree but not in kind. In the absence of such a set, it is impossible for Gaddis to achieve his aims. The explanation, we believe, is to be found in the cognitive processes that repetition exploits.

Repetition and Cognition Iteration, or repetition, has been extensively studied in stylistics and in the related ¤eld of pragmatics (see Johnstone; Neal; Suleiman; Persson; Kawin). The topic is theoretically interesting because, while evidently wasteful of cognitive resources, repetition produces an extraordinarily wide variety of effects. It is the means by which patterns in texts emerge. In verse, repetition provides the evidence for verse structure, rhythm, rhyme, and assonance; in prose, sections of text may be repeated, or we may see recurrences of events,

Cognitive Gothic / 123 behaviors, or outcomes. Secondary or subplots, doppelgängers, thematic variations, and other forms of parallelism are all produced by some form of repetition. This single mechanism thus gives rise to a range of effects, and raises questions, not just about how the brain distinguishes between trivial and productive repetition, but about how the communicator uses a single device to achieve so many different results. Persson (1974) attempted to categorize the effects of literal repetition in poetry and prose; his taxonomical approach only underscored the interpretive richness of repetition and the impossibility of linking the use of this device with a determinate set of possible effects. In general, stylistic and pragmatic studies of repetition have focused on speci¤c uses of the device, such as those producing irony, implied in parallelism, and responsible for verse form (Wilson and Sperber; Fabb). Relevance theory, developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, has produced a comprehensive body of literature concerning aspects of repetition. In what follows, we will provide a sketch of relevance theory adapted to the questions raised by the use of repetition. Relevance theory makes two fundamental claims about cognition and communication. It claims that “human cognition tends to be organized so as to maximize relevance,” and that “every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, 260). “Relevance” is a property (261), and is quanti¤able: “something is relevant to the extent that the cognitive effects it produces are large, and to the extent that the cognitive effort needed to achieve these effects is small. The greater the cognitive effects an utterance produces, the more relevant it is; and the more effort it takes to achieve these effects, the less relevant it is” (122–32). Relevance thus involves a dynamic balance between effort and effect; when there are no longer adequate effects for the effort expended, we stop processing the utterance—we stop paying attention. Because the interpretation of utterances is automatic, every utterance is a demand on the hearer’s cognitive resources, a demand that cannot be refused. When we hear an utterance in a language we know, we automatically expend at least minimal cognitive resources on recovering the explicit propositional content, the implicatures, and any illocutionary or paralocutionary effects. Repetition thus presents a paradox. Whether the interpretation of an instance of repetition takes more processing effort, or less, than the interpretation of the original utterance, a repeated utterance is still literally irrelevant—yielding

124 / Bursey and Furlong inadequate effects for minimal effort. Indeed, so wasteful of cognitive resources is repetition that Sperber and Wilson claim that “an echoic interpretation is acceptable only if it contributes to the relevance of the utterance for the hearer [or reader] (or may seem to the speaker [or writer] to do so)” (1998, 284). Echoic utterances are also highly salient, or “manifest.” The more manifest an assumption is, the stronger the evidence that the writer wanted the reader to notice it. But a repeated or echoed assumption (an iteration) has already been through the process of interpretation. The reader must cast about for more contextual premises to create a wider or at least a different context in which the repeated utterance will allow him to recover adequate contextual effects. People who repeat themselves may just be poor communicators. Still, they may be actively if implicitly encouraging their audiences to expand the context in which the repeated utterance is processed. In such instances, we will ¤nd that the effects produced by this expanded context—one that includes not only the repeated utterance but also the original context, the original interpretation, and the fact of its repetition—are very rich indeed. Furthermore, these repeated utterances contribute actively to the construction of the core set of assumptions by which the entire text is interpreted, and so add to our apprehension of the writer’s more complex intentions. We would argue that repetition in Gaddis’s work is of this second type, central to achieving not only this core set of global assumptions, but to grasping the worldview he is indirectly but powerfully offering. The question then becomes why, since this device runs throughout all his novels, it fails in Carpenter’s Gothic. One reason, we would suggest, is that Gaddis decided in this novel to restrict the cast of characters and the action to the “Aristotelian unities”; this stylistic decision had perhaps an unforeseen consequence, since much of the action in these kinds of works occurs off stage, reported rather than witnessed. Events are related by no more than half a dozen witnesses, in various media (newspapers, letters, broadcasts). The result is a recitation that becomes increasingly monotonous as the work progresses. The reader does not experience the richness of variety through which underlying forms can be discerned. Instead, he must rely on correspondences operating over a local ¤eld, and somehow related, so he is assured, to vast conspiracies, movements, corporations, and religious and political structures. A cognitive account of repetition can shed light on the peculiar reversal of effect that the use of this technique produces here.

Cognitive Gothic / 125

Repetition in Carpenter’s Gothic Burn has noted that “Gaddis worked best on a large canvas, amassing endless details, and this is one of the reasons why his third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), is perhaps his least impressive” (22). This accumulation of details emerges in the characteristics shared by the three main male characters and in the way all the characters appropriate one another’s dialogue. We will examine these from a relevance theoretic perspective on iteration. Elizabeth (Vorakers) Booth is tormented, abused, and used by her husband Paul, her brother Billy, and her absentee landlord and eventual lover McCandless. One or two of them (though never Paul and McCandless) are almost always present; failing that, their arrival is imminent, or unexpected. The similarity of Paul and Billy is established in the opening pages, and McCandless will act like them in some ways. All three men harangue Liz. Paul and McCandless are especially fond of outlining how the world works, usually in language evoking blood, meanness, and violence. Paul’s verbal abuse centers in the domestic world. McCandless’s obsession with fundamentalism and conspiracies leads him to concentrate on what has “really” gone on in Africa (the international world). The less worldly Billy wounds Liz by talking about her marriage and the Voraker family, intruding into the private world. At the same time, each man wants something from this woman, and to get it each one is prepared to use force, guile, or abuse. Billy’s and Paul’s demands concern money; Billy is content with cadging a few dollars, while Paul is eager to gain access to the Vorakers’ millions. McCandless also wants money that is owed him (120), but his interest is primarily sexual, connected to his desire to renew his youth. He pays attention to her needs more than Paul—once interceding on her behalf on a legal matter (171)—but haphazardly and insensitively. After sex, he calls her “Mrs. Booth” (165). Although he does not abuse her physically like Paul (9), McCandless does make fun of her, in their one intimate conversation (155–56), and he overcomes her and her brother through force of intellect. Paul also forces his way with language, and the intention is the same: to cow Liz and get her to support him. Liz recognizes that these men are three facets of one character. Early in the novel, she protests: “Paul what’s the point! You shout at me, Billy shouts at me as though I could do anything” (20). Just before Billy drives McCandless to New York, she remarks, “Because I, because sometimes I almost can’t tell you apart you and Paul, you sound the same you sound exactly the same the only difference is he says your God damn brother and you say

126 / Bursey and Furlong fucking Paul but it’s the same, if I closed my eyes it could be either one of you” (194). Finally, near the end of the novel, Liz says that Billy, in their last conversation, had sounded less like himself and more like McCandless (223–24). The identi¤cation of these similarities sets up the correspondences that, in other Gaddis novels, sensitize the reader to the correlations among widely disparate and separated persons, places, and events. In Carpenter’s Gothic, however, the recognition of resemblances weakens the effect, and makes it less likely that the reader will see this domestic drama as intimately implicated in the greater forces convulsing the world. The con®uence of three versions of one type of man in one place means that the novel cannot break away from these strictly local conditions and comment persuasively on the global realities that truly concern Gaddis. Characters also reiterate what others have said, copying styles of speech as in A Frolic of His Own, recycling whole phrases or rhetorical ®ourishes, or repeating conversations with “improvements” that create a fantasy, parallel existence. Liz often repeats what others have said, or refashions conversations in order to make her own life appear more appealing. Her speech becomes “a patchwork of conceits,” as McCandless (signi¤cantly) describes the house (227). Billy, seeing a bruise on her arm, recognizes Paul’s handiwork, and sarcastically asks if she got it bumping into a bookcase. When Paul is angered by her wearing a sleeveless top that reveals her “combat badge,” which he knows Billy has seen, Liz says she told her brother that she had “bumped into a bookcase” (22). After learning from Madame Socrate that McCandless visited in her absence, attempted to get into his study only to ¤nd the lock changed, and consequently was “fâché” (27), Liz says, “I mean I’m a little fâché myself ” (28). After meeting McCandless, but before they become lovers, Liz’s speech turns assertive, almost aggressive (70–76), and Paul is unpleasantly surprised and responds with “what the hell are you talking like that for you don’t” (72). She has been inspired by McCandless, but with him she will feign that she reads about the Masai (66–67), and freely invert a metaphor he uses when talking to Billy about hammers and nails (182, 223). She is a keen listener—though not by choice—to the speech patterns of Paul, Billy, and McCandless. Billy and McCandless also repeat words. Liz points out that, among other in®uences, Billy has caught one of McCandless’s verbal tics in the course of a long conversation: “it wasn’t even Billy he’d picked up your no no no” (223). When the ¤rst Mrs. McCandless visits Liz, she too speaks in this fashion

Cognitive Gothic / 127 (250), leaving open the question of whether or not McCandless has in®uenced her. In the long conversation between Lester and McCandless (123– 48), both repeat each other’s words (124, 125, 126, 131, 132). The presence of a signi¤cant number of literal repetitions at several levels of the text draws the reader’s attention to the substance and the context of the repeated elements. We note that this iteration, rather than multiplying cases and allowing for the emergence of an underlying design, tends to reduce the signi¤cance both of the characters and of the ideas that govern them. Because the sources of repetition are restricted to the handful of characters, the single primary setting, the restricted plot, the reader is constrained in the construction of context. Instead of seeing how these isolated individuals are interconnected through the devastating effects of the great governing systems, the reader is compelled to bring these systems into the lives of characters already related several times over, by birth, marriage, desire, and destiny. In the absence of a suf¤ciently large and heterogeneous range of iterations, the reader must focus on the petty world of the characters. Ultimately, the repetitions in Carpenter’s Gothic therefore draw our attention not to the paucity of thought so much as the scarcity of origins.

From the Mountain to the Plain: A Change in Aesthetics We can discuss the use of repetition in A Frolic of His Own to demonstrate our point about the effectiveness of iteration and see how much more widely the reader is invited to cast about for correspondences or parallels. We will consider three types of strict repetition: echoic speech, the reiteration of words and phrases, and precedent. The ¤rst two occur in Carpenter’s Gothic where they have limited effectiveness. Precedent is of course speci¤c to the discourse of the law and occurs more often and is exploited more intensively in Frolic than in any of the other novels. Unlike the repetitions in Carpenter’s Gothic, which are relentlessly housebound, the repetitions of Frolic set up correspondences between whole systems of action, culture, and thought. The effect is to suggest, over the course of the work, and in slight but pervasive ways, that while all the characters are responsible for their utterances, few are capable of original thought. Indeed, there may be no originating thoughts or ideas at all, only an in¤nite set of individuals endlessly parroting other people’s words. Throughout A Frolic of His Own, characters borrow phrases from one another, or repeat catchphrases. On the ¤rst page of Frolic, Harry Lutz says, “I’m talking about fas-

128 / Bursey and Furlong cism, that’s where this compulsion for order ends up. The rest of it’s opera” (11); less than ¤ve paragraphs later, he argues that “It’s the money, Christina, it’s always the money. The rest of it’s nothing but opera, now look” (11). Later, he’ll refer to commentary in la Repubblica on the Spot case: “They’re an operatic people, Christina” (235). Here he is echoing himself, indicating that his store of ideas, no matter how apparently diverse, can all be traced back to a tiny set of basic convictions about the world (the only thing that matters is “money”), and a single metaphor to account for all other behaviors, apparent desires, and appearances (“opera”). The fact that his comments occur across the span of the novel, and with such little variation, indicates how in®exible, reductive, and restricted his notions are. Echoes of this phrase, such as Basie’s remark that “It’s all just money” (88), appear throughout the novel in altered forms. All these variations contribute to a context in which the reader is encouraged to draw several related inferences. These inferences, if we think cognitively, produce three primary effects. First, the reader will include Lutz’s comments in the context in which he processes many of the characters’ speeches; the reader may wonder if even those who have not explicitly argued that “money is everything” secretly or unconsciously believe this. Next, the reader may conclude that even the most innocent remark expresses agreement with this conviction, so that all the characters seem to be cynically playacting, advancing their own interests in the ¤nancial and legal games that punctuate their lives. Finally, the reader may construct a context in which the primacy of money is a fact, not just of the characters’ views of the world, but of the world itself, and look for ways in which even apparently unrelated events are governed either by the ¤nancial world or by the pursuit of gain. In the end the reader arrives at a view of the world in which forces that seem unrelated to one another are actually in collusion. Three of the most frequently repeated phrases, in a novel ¤lled with repetitions, are variations on “the clock’s running” (¤rst said by Basie, repeated by Christina: 124, 125, 126, 127, 183, 258, 264, 309, 419, 564), Lily’s “when tragedy struck,” which Oscar and Christina mimic and then co-opt (246, 247, 254, 277, 303, 422, 439, 510, 550), and Oscar’s “a lot on his plate,” which Christina also uses (333, 395, 437). Unlike the previous repetitions, these phrases are old and tired when they ¤rst appear. Consequently, we are more likely to regard them as indicators of the characters’ mental impoverishment, or a refusal to think clearly about the events they speak of. Furthermore, the frequency of

Cognitive Gothic / 129 the repetition suggests how deeply the corruption of the world has affected everyone: the mindless imitation suggests that the characters are incapable of suf¤cient critical distance to make sense of their lives. Simultaneously, the repetition of phrases of urgency (looming deadlines, sudden tragedies) ¤ts in with the sense of exhaustion and surfeit. The poverty of thought and analysis in conjunction with excess of event and obligation exactly conveys a world ¤lled with urgent vacuities. Liz’s unconscious imitation of the discourses of Paul, Billy, and McCandless indicates the degeneration of her character as she becomes absorbed by the men who dominate her life. It comes as no surprise to see Gaddis using the same technique in his last long novel. The phrase, “the unswerving punctuality of chance,” appears here (54, 292) as it did in The Recognitions (223), J R (486), and Carpenter’s Gothic (223). (Travis Dunn, in a note to the Gaddis Listserv [14 September 2004] notes that this phrase can be found in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel [1929].) But the role of language and the question of originality are not themes found in Carpenter’s Gothic. The reader of that novel ¤nds himself irresistibly hunting for the connections among far-®ung people, corporations, and events that will allow him to make sense of the central plot. No such temptation overwhelms the readers of the other “big” novels. In A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis’s echoing of advertisements and songs (e.g., “A little dab’ll do ya,” 29; “it was Al all the time,” 537), suggest that there may be nothing original in our speech or thought. The fact that people use the inanities of advertising and entertainment to convey their genuine emotions and reactions demonstrates that originality of thought and speech has been rendered impossible. The most striking repetition occurs in the use of the substitutes in “Once at Antietam.” This brilliant conceit works on the level of Oscar’s play, as a view of one aspect of Civil War history, as a variation on discussions of copyright and falsity, while potentially subverting the notion of individuality, and, on the novelistic level, as a way for Gaddis to revisit his grand obsession with “recognitions”: if originality exists, where is it? Here one may consider Judge Crease’s quotation from a law case, that “[o]riginality does not exist in a vacuum” (408). Consider Oscar himself. The scar, self-in®icted during the hot-wiring of his own car, disappears for a time under a rough beard. When the beard is shaved off, there is nothing left but a faint mark. The scar is both a physical mark and an oblique comment on the long-lasting psychological effect

130 / Bursey and Furlong caused, as Oscar believes, by the way his father, Judge Thomas L. Crease, regarded him. The scar from the accident is preceded by the scar he has given the character Thomas in his play. By the end, the scar is more of a crease, a pun on Oscar’s name. His name re®ects his ®aws, and implies that as his condition does not originate solely with him, it cannot be entirely his own creation. These repeated phrases pose profound questions on the nature of reality, on the possibility of originality, and on the debasement of human character. Because of the number of lawsuits Oscar instigates, every one of which gives rise to others, he is nothing more than a body of law (natural, social, and judicial). At one point he says that the Demerol he’s taking is affecting him: “it’s as if there are holes in my memory and things that are happening to me are happening to somebody else, because all you really are is your memory and” (19–20). Oscar’s thoughts on memory recall how the law is formed: it emanates from and is based on precedent, a notion that goes beyond legal provenance to the heart of one of the most productive uses of repetition in Gaddis. A precedent is an original that must not be unique. For it to be of any use, a precedent must be productive of an in¤nite range of similar, though slightly differing, decisions. Likewise, in the world of money, currency is legal or valid only if each individual note exactly resembles the (nonexistent) original; the difference comes down to the serial number on the particular bill. Again, the art world relies both on originality and on reproduction. Each newly discovered artwork is adjudged an original—that is, legitimated—on the basis of its resemblance to the rest of the artist’s output. Finally, the law depends on precedent: a single case is legitimate if and only if it generates a large body of law, that is, cases in which a case is determined not on the basis of its unique characteristics but on the degree to which it resembles others. As we have seen in A Frolic of His Own, exempla and iterations occur there in ways that differ signi¤cantly from those found in Carpenter’s Gothic. The effects do not succeed in Carpenter’s Gothic because they work to connect one set of events, places, and people with another. Consequently, they resemble the elaborations of a conspiracy—a set of items brought together by a single dominating intelligence for some (usually hidden) purpose. None of Gaddis’s other novels sketch out a conspiracy; instead, they present a vast range of individual cases that differ from one another in minute, often unimportant ways. The slight differences reveal that the cases are iterations—

Cognitive Gothic / 131 products of a single organization so enormous and complex that it can only be traced (as in the empirical sciences) by looking at large sets of similar instances. Carpenter’s Gothic does not produce this effect precisely because too few individuals are involved. We might say that there are two ways in which repetitions can work: vertically or horizontally. Iterations that encourage the reader to look for a single explanatory narrative thread are “horizontal.” However, a reader may be encouraged to construct a context that focuses on the underlying patterns rather than on the lives of the characters and the events of the novel. We could think of this contextual construction as “vertical,” operating in a dimension orthogonal to the action. Certainly, this kind of repetition is more likely to encourage the reader to look for ways of seeing patterns among complex entities. This approach is less focused on drawing out exact correspondences among events, phrases, or people than it is in constructing contexts that expose the originating systems themselves. This use of “vertical” repetition, which occurs in all Gaddis’s works (but in the most limited way in Carpenter’s Gothic), is part of a consistent movement toward transcendence. It may seem odd to speak of transcendence with Gaddis; but the ability to go beyond the merely personal, without losing sight of the individual, is central to his purpose. Convinced that the world we have made is ungovernable, Gaddis compiles encyclopedic sets of dialogue, actions, and characters, all echoing one another.2 Only when we have seen enough individuals can we start to recognize the patterns and perceive what is being repeated, how, and why. In Frolic, The Recognitions, and J R, Gaddis writes from the mountaintop, and this vision informs his aesthetic. In Carpenter’s Gothic, Gaddis has descended to the plain, and his aesthetic changes. Most critics have regarded this shift as accidental or unimportant. We do not see the change this way, nor do we consider Frolic “a return to form.” We suggest rather that the familiar form of A Frolic of His Own allows Gaddis the room he requires to make his points most effectively. What is missing in Carpenter’s Gothic is precisely what LeClair observed about an earlier Gaddis novel: “Like several of his personae in J R, as well as other systems novelists, Gaddis masters the world by collecting masses and varieties of its information” (1989, 88). By working with stock characters and situations—the mysterious stranger, the lonely wife, the small cast, the Gothic home—Gaddis operates on a ®at plain that we think is unsuited to his thematic concerns and preferences. As a “¤nger exercise,” Carpenter’s Gothic shows what Gaddis is capable of in the way of aesthetic compression and intellectual concentration;

132 / Bursey and Furlong but within the entire body of his work, it demonstrates the relative failure of his signature device—iteration—when the ¤eld of play is so profoundly restricted.

Conclusion Repetition is a simple device that can produce a very wide array of effects. When repetition appears throughout a text, the reader cannot help but pay attention to it. Because the reader’s attention has been claimed, the automatic processes of interpretation will point him toward constructing a context and a reading of the text that accounts for this highly salient fact. If the reader discovers recurring character types, she may conclude that the writer is providing evidence that these men and women have something in common. If he ¤nds phrases or fragments of speech, or styles of speech, again and again, the reader will pursue lines of interpretation that look for commonalities. However, the repetitions may be subtle and pervasive; then the reader may ¤nd that repetition extends beyond the individual, or even the group, to the culture itself. Here, repetition acts as a form of ampli¤cation; each separate instance of similarity supports the development of a comprehensive theory about the root causes of duplication. The variety of cases is an illusion: they are in fact all versions of a single type. But the reader will reach this conclusion only if the number and variety of examples is great enough. In The Recognitions, the staggering assortment of characters, some glimpsed for as little as a few words, contributes to the impression of a great chorus of voices. Rather than producing harmony, however, the multitude speaks in a single voice whose resonance is the result of minute differences between one set of vocal chords and another. It is that diversity of instances that Carpenter’s Gothic lacks, focused as it is on the house of the title and its small number of major characters. A ¤eld of wheat is needed to see the wind; instead, we have a stalk in a ®owerpot. Gaddis’s long novels provide a swarming cast, and consequently a density of iteration. Carpenter’s Gothic cannot achieve what Gaddis’s other works do, because without the mass of humanity that seethes through the other works, and without the multifarious connections to a world beyond themselves (except as they themselves report it), the novel becomes not expansive but reductive. The iterations home in on the same cast of characters, the same narrow and irrelevant concerns. The repetitions do not necessarily lead to outright boredom; but they ultimately frustrate the purpose they are intended to serve.

Cognitive Gothic / 133 Relevance theory explains why. In the absence of enough suf¤ciently diverse cases to draw on, the iterations in Carpenter’s Gothic cannot produce the very wide range of very weak implicatures that could help the reader see what he is being told: that the world has been “vexed to nightmare,” and that the disintegrations seen in the novel trace the “shape” that is “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.” The allusions to Shakespeare, Eliot, and others that Gaddis exploits indicate that repetition in this work—expanding beyond one writer to a literary tradition—is meant to connect Carpenter’s Gothic to global concerns. However, these literary references give the novel a sterile quality; they mirror literature rather than life. In the same way, the airlessness of Carpenter’s Gothic is the consequence of the fact that the iterations are all, ultimately, copies of themselves, and not exempla thrown up by the systems that dominate and direct their lives.

Notes 1. Nine years before Authoritarian Fictions appeared, Gunnar Persson produced Repetition in English: Part 1. Sequential Repetition. He concludes that, while repetition can be readily recognized, its effects cannot be predicted, but depend on local conditions. Persson’s work remains relevant because of its empirical method and the range of his examples; his theoretical openness ensures that his results can be drawn on by researchers in a wide range of disciplines and theoretical schools. 2. As detailed by Stephen J. Burn in his essay on Gaddis and the encyclopedic novel. —Eds.

III Capital

8 Critical Mimesis J R’s Transition to Postmodernity Nicholas Spencer

Nicholas Spencer’s “Critical Mimesis” illustrates how the contemporary factors that determine a work (and the worth) of art are tenuous at best, primarily due to our shift from a productionbased to a speculative and credit-based economy, from signi¤cance ¤xed in print to moving characters coded on a screen. In other words, postmodernism needs to manufacture arbitrary value, and we only need to consider the value of the typewriter pictured here to feel the cogency of Spencer’s argument. By way of example, note that this particular typewriter, identical in make and model to other typewriters produced by the same company throughout the course of the same year, takes on additional value and signi¤cance in the minds of most individuals, simply because it is the machine on which J R was written. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

138 / Spencer

 While many discussions of postmodernism focus solely on cultural issues, some of the most in®uential analyses of the postmodern emphasize the economy and its relation to culture. As one of the most detailed studies of postmodern capitalism, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity epitomizes this latter critical trend. By identifying connections among several key economic indicators, Harvey convincingly depicts economic postmodernity as a signi¤cant development within modern capitalism. From the perspective of this economic emphasis, Harvey regards postmodern culture as simply “mimetic” of postmodern capitalism (113). He claims that the culture of postmodernism “swims, even wallows” in the attributes of economic postmodernity, “reduc[es] knowledge and meaning to a rubble of signi¤ers,” and is characterized by “exhausted silence” (44, 350). In replicating the ®eeting and ephemeral qualities of postmodern capital, argues Harvey, postmodern culture ruins the possibility of materialist critique and oppositional subjectivity. Yet Harvey’s evaluation is not universally applicable to postmodern culture, and William Gaddis’s J R presents a strong and unique challenge to central aspects of his thesis. The fragmentary and indeterminate narrative of J R accords with Harvey’s diagnosis of postmodern culture, and Gaddis has described himself—albeit grudgingly—as a postmodern author.1 But Gaddis also emphasizes both the historical transition to postmodernity and the cultural extensions of economic factors, and these aspects of J R express a stable, interconnected, and powerful critique of the attributes of economic postmodernity described by Harvey. Moreover, those aspects of J R that are mimetic of postmodern characteristics are also integral to the critique that Gaddis articulates. For Harvey, the transition to economic postmodernity involves a departure from the era of Keynesian economic policy and the Fordist principles of mass production. Instead of the “Fordist compromise” (145), postmodernity is de¤ned by “®exible accumulation” (147). The chief characteristic of this new economic situation is what Harvey terms “time-space compression” (147), which refers to the reduced time frames of economic decisions and production and the global integration caused by information and transportation technologies. One of the distinguishing features of Harvey’s discussion is its precise historicization of the emergence of such principles. From 1965 to 1973, he writes, monetary policy was the only way that Western governments could offset economic rigidity and the power of organized labor. But

Critical Mimesis / 139 printing more money led to high rates of both in®ation and labor activism. The recession of 1973 exposed much excess production capacity and caused governments to prioritize the reduction of in®ation. As a result, unemployment, part-time contracts, self-employment, new arrangements for subcontracting, and the relocation of production in areas with cheap labor markets all increased. Such ®exibility in employment was achieved at the expense of the power of organized labor. In the area of production, economies of scale were turned into small-batch economies of scope. As a result, the complexity and integration of the capitalist system were both enhanced, and Harvey emphasizes the conjunction of seemingly opposed values that emerged from these dual tendencies. On the one hand, ®exible accumulation promotes rapidly changing fashions and consumer patterns, disposable products, and ephemeral yuppie status symbols; on the other hand, it also requires corporate images of “permanence and power” (288). “The greater the ephemerality,” writes Harvey” “the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal truth that might lie therein” (292). The seemingly paradoxical coexistence of contradictory tendencies is at the heart of Harvey’s de¤nition of postmodernity. In another such formulation, Harvey claims that “capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and ®exible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets” (159). With these centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, Harvey associates two societal developments. Firstly, new information technologies essential to the intricate workings of capitalist postmodernity allow for manipulation and a concentration of the power of dissemination into fewer and fewer corporations. This centripetal development parallels the experience of the many industries in which deregulation led to monopolization rather than competition. The new culture of information promotes homogeneity and thus deepens the fundamentalism and essentialism of postmodernity. Secondly, and most importantly for Harvey, ®exible accumulation has bene¤ted from a restructured global ¤nancial culture. In the wake of the U.S. Hunt Commission Report of 1971, American ¤nancial markets were deregulated for the ¤rst time since the Depression. For Harvey, the massive “merger mania” of the 1970s and 1980s was due to the new emphasis on securing pro¤ts through investment rather than production (158). Cut free from both production concerns and state control, this culture of “paper entrepreneurialism” has become increasingly autonomous (163). Remarkably, debts, defaults, and devaluations have been essential elements of the ¤nancial activity of postmodernity. Harvey emphasizes

140 / Spencer that developments such as increased debt and the splintering of American industrial production led in 1971 to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944, which ¤xed value in relation to “the price of gold and the convertibility to the dollar” (164). For Harvey, the implementation of a ®exible exchange rate in 1973 was an important factor in the promotion of the autonomy of ¤nance capital at the expense of the power of national governments. Also, Harvey argues that the realization of “®oating exchange rates” has raised questions such as “how value should now get represented, what form money should take, and the meaning that can be put upon the various forms of money available to us” (297). The highly in®ationary art market is, for Harvey, the most telling example of the many alternative forms of value that were sought in the early 1970s. Such unmooring of value typi¤es the autonomy and self-referentiality of postmodern ¤nance. It is also a primary manifestation of the dimension of postmodernity that is based on transient and decentralized meaning. Consistent with Harvey’s analysis, J R represents economic postmodernity as an interconnected whole that is characterized by opposing tendencies.2 According to John Beer, J R contains “incompatibilities” because it is committed to both “the accurate representation of reality” and “the creation of an autonomous artifact” (76)—an apparent incongruity that is resolved by regarding the two approaches as twin features of Gaddis’s critique of economic postmodernity. Gaddis inverts the oppositions noted by Harvey to expose postmodernity’s contradictions: seemingly autonomous and unrelated spheres of postmodernity are shown to be consistent elements of a monolithic social formation, and claims to wholeness are represented as selfreferential and arbitrary constructs. These two inversions work together to articulate the critical sensibility of J R. The representation of art in the novel exempli¤es Gaddis’s coarticulation of these twin themes. Representatives of corporate culture insist that art should remain in its own distinct and isolated sphere of cultural activity. In one instance, Crawley tells Bast that he should “[s]tay in music” (201), and other characters offer similar advice to the young composer. Such views seek to deny attempts to establish a critical grasp on postmodernity that would unite and encompass many different cultural spheres. In contrast with the views of Crawley and others, Gaddis suggests that the sphere of art is subject to the same economic forces that are evident in other areas of society. The nature of these economic forces is revealed by Gaddis’s other critical inversion of the place of art in postmodernity. While representatives of corporate culture in J R belittle the aesthetic meaning of

Critical Mimesis / 141 art, they nevertheless insist that art’s value is rooted in hierarchical notions of greatness. For example, Dan DiCephalis’s continual references to “a real top®ight name painter” and Stella Angel’s “collect[ion]” of artists and musicians re®ect the belief that artistic value is determined by the status of the artist (105, 145). But Gaddis suggests that the worth of art in the postmodern era is driven by the need to manufacture arbitrary value in a post-Fordist and postKeynesian economy. Just as Harvey cites the art market as an alternative site of value in the wake of the transition to ®exible accumulation, so too in J R Zona Selk stockpiles the paintings of Schepperman for their future economic potential: Selk’s pursuits illustrate the self-referential nature of artistic and other forms of value in J R. The overall effect of corporate America’s de¤nition of art as an isolated sphere of individual greatness is to marginalize creative endeavor and reduce aesthetic meaning to market value. By overturning the validity of these two ideas about art, Gaddis seeks to make a case for the importance of the kind of critical artistic activity that his own novel exempli¤es. Despite being interwoven, the two critical tendencies of J R take different forms and have varying degrees of prominence; hence it is useful to discuss them separately. Gaddis’s representation of the holistic integration of postmodernity underpins the overall structure of J R. For Harvey, postmodernity is a totality in which time and space are recon¤gured. While the isolated effects of postmodernity are suggestive of indeterminacy, the concept of time-space compression enables them to be viewed as components of a highly uniform and integrated social formation. Similarly, the numerous instances of postmodern indeterminacy and self-referentiality in J R do not compromise Gaddis’s coherent representation of the early 1970s as an era of time-space compression. The ¤ctional world of J R is wholly self-contained, and Gaddis never introduces meta¤ctional elements that might suggest the possibility of multiple worlds of experience. Spatially, Gaddis portrays complex and tightly woven economic arrangements that incorporate areas of Africa and West Germany. As well as highlighting the role of technological innovation in societal transition, the Teletravel system in which Dan DiCephalis is stuck is a microcosm of the compressed spatiality of the novel. As Susan Strehle notes, the highly compressed time frame of the novel enhances the experience of the present at the expense of both representations of the past and imaginings of the future (119). Chaotic and elusive, the past cannot be recaptured or connected to the present. The situation is one in which “all allusion to permanence had disappeared or was being slain,” as the

142 / Spencer trees around the Bast home in Long Island make way for suburbanization (18). The haphazard discourse of Bast’s aunts shows the incoherence of memory (despite its power in the private realm). Having been lost, the past can also be manufactured as postmodern simulacrum. For example, “new lengths of post and rail are treated to appear old” outside the DiCephalis home even as “frilled ironwork [is] made of aluminum to appear new” (57), and Eigen thinks that his wife “takes the whole God damn past and reconstructs it” (404). Narrative simulacra re®ect how the representation of temporality in J R mimics postmodern transience, but the wider context of timespace compression historicizes and gives critical coherence to this dimension of the novel. Yet the presence of the past is not completely extinguished in J R. By exerting a strong in®uence on the events of the novel, the military past enhances the integratedness of economic postmodernity. Numerous details suggest that the lingering presence of military power reinforces the reach and control that corporate interests exhibit throughout the narrative. The link between the military past and the economic present is intimated in the novel’s opening scene. The lawyer Coen speaks to Bast’s aunts as counsel of the General Roll Company, but Anne Bast thinks that General Roll is a “military friend” from their brother’s past (5). A moment of comic confusion, the scene also commences the identi¤cation of military and corporate interests that runs through the text. One of the most pervasive manifestations of the military past is associated with the novel’s corporate representatives. Characters such as Major Hyde, General Box, and General Blau¤nger evidence how corporate power relies upon the symbolic authority of the military achievements of a previous time. That Schramm fails to complete his book because he is haunted by the events of World War II highlights the notion that the military past subverts artistic expression and thus advances the pervasiveness of corporate logic. In addition to characters’ links to the military past, there is another sense in which the military presence of a previous era engenders the cohesion of economic postmodernity. According to Harvey, the Fordist-Keynesian model of state interventionism in industry promoted “standardization” and “coherence” in post-1945 culture and society (135, 136). For Harvey, postmodernity relies on some of these Fordist-Keynesian principles in the era of ®exible accumulation. In particular, national defense spending, or military Fordism, is an important area in which ®exible accumulation requires centralized and uni¤ed policy. Harvey writes that “[t]he massive government de¤cits in the

Critical Mimesis / 143 United States, mainly attributable to defence, have been fundamental to whatever economic growth there has been in world capitalism in the 1980s, suggesting that Keynesian practices are by no means dead” (170). In J R, Gaddis alludes to military Fordism through the boy J R’s procurement of plastic navy forks. The importance of this deal is underscored by its illustration of the disposability characteristic of ®exible accumulation and its privileged role in the origin of J R’s ¤nancial empire. The link between J R and national economic defense policy is made explicit by Jack Gibbs, who says that when you observe J R and the Hyde boy together “you suddenly know what the industrial military complex is all about” (497). Also, Coach Vogel frequently refers to state military interest in the technologies of Frigicom and Teletravel. His belief that Frigicom will “sever both military and artistic barriers at one fell swoop” emphasizes the role of military Fordism in business’s colonization of art and other areas of society (527). Along with the in®uence of the military past, these examples of military Fordism in the era of postmodernity make the economic activity that Gaddis represents seem both uni¤ed and threatening. While J R is concerned to portray the integrated and holistic aspects of postmodernity, much of the novel articulates a critical inversion in which fundamentalist claims are revealed to be self-referential constructs. The transitional quality of J R facilitates Gaddis’s critique of postmodern information technology in these terms. The goal of cybernetic technologies is to create seamless networks and ef¤cient feedback mechanisms. The Quotron, which Crawley and Governor Cates use to receive updates on stock prices and transactions, is the most advanced form of information technology in the novel and attains the cybernetic ideal. However, most ¤nancial information and decision making is communicated by telephone. As a crude form of cybernetic technology, the predigital telephone engenders the conversational entropic noise that technological endeavors in J R seek to eliminate. As Joseph Tabbi noted in 1989, the “cybernetic in®uence” on J R is substantial (148), and the context of technological transition enables Gaddis to imagine various cultural extensions of the cybernetic principle and therefore suggest its extensive societal implications. Information technologies may aim to achieve clarity and integration, but the cybernetic experience of several characters in J R is one of violence and incoherence. In one instance, Norman Angel looks at pornographic pictures of Terry, his secretary, as he talks to her; in another case, the sixth graders describe the western movie that they have seen in Manhattan by saying that “when this one guy shot at this other guy

144 / Spencer this ¤rst guy thought he was shooting at him so he shot him” (123). Just as the interplay of the real and its representation is predicated on Norman’s objecti¤cation of Terry, so too the cybernetic interaction of the movie characters leads to intersubjective con®ict. When J R says that “I can’t hardly tell what I’m sending from what I’m getting” (167), he states that he too experiences the communicational noise that occurs when input and output matrices are confused. For J R, the goal is to purify rather than critique feedback processes, and he eagerly describes “the wonders of the computer” as the technological realization of this ideal (168). That J R’s experience anticipates a widespread cultural transition is suggested by Gaddis’s reference, more than two decades later in Agape Agape, to “every four-year-old with a computer” (2). Yet Gaddis suggests that the cybernetic experience is one in which communicational failure is more real than wholeness and clarity. Rather than being simply a form of postmodern playfulness, Gaddis’s representation of discordant cybernetic messages expresses a social critique of the pretensions of postmodernity. As in much postmodern culture, re®exivity such as that associated with cybernetics is an important feature of J R, but for Gaddis re®exivity attains this status because it is central to the information technologies and economic practices that he critically represents. In addition to such speci¤c examples, Gaddis shows the macroscopic in®uence of cybernetic trends. In the school, two technological forms converge to promote reductive and uniform values. Many of the early sequences of J R depict the school’s attempts to introduce a system of “instructional television” (331). Major Hyde in particular insists that the system should be “a simple interference-free closed-circuit school setup” (26). The closed circuitry of the project re®ects an attempt to eliminate noise and complexity from communication channels and to establish the exclusive and seamless transmission and reception of information. The self-referentiality of the educational knowledge that is communicated via instructional television is highlighted by its interface with systems of “testing” (22). School testing measures the extent to which human subjects behave according to the logic of the reception and restatement of information. DiCephalis is the “[p]sychometrician” in charge of school testing (22). With the aid of his “new testing equipment,” DiCephalis seeks to “tailor testing to the norm” (22), but Whiteback, who gives him these instructions, realizes that the norm is itself determined by the tests and thus the tests are a self-referential code rather than a representation of students’ preexisting abilities. Just as the Foundation pulls out of

Critical Mimesis / 145 the closed-circuit television project, so too Dan’s classi¤cation tests and equipment continually fail. Yet cybernetic principles and technologies thrive elsewhere in the novel. In the scene where the sixth graders visit Typhon International to buy stock in Diamond Cable, Gaddis reiterates his critique of technological simulation by referring to “the modest playland of corporation exhibits off the gallery where questions posed fabricated to answers that ®ashed at the touch of a button” (81). Also, Cates’s reference to “this medium and the message damn foolishness” indicates that he opposes re®ection, such as that provided by Gaddis, on the ways in which media structure and delimit message content (423). As suggested by Jack Gibbs’s un¤nished book on technology and the arts, the insistence on the testable norm is an extension of the dominance of facts, pragmatism, and capitalist utility in American cultural history. In the tradition that Gibbs outlines, trends such as economic Taylorism and the development of school testing from experiments upon animals converge to marginalize the arts and promote ideas such as economic ef¤ciency and the identi¤cation of the real with the measurable. As in his portrayal of military Fordism, Gaddis here suggests that the fundamentalist beliefs of postmodernity are extensions of earlier forms of American culture. The normative principles of testing are related to Harvey’s ideas regarding the prevalence of unchanging identity in postmodernity. As well as searching for norms, the corporate interests in the novel continually identify their activities with essentialist ideals. The notion that ¤nancial investment is “what America is all about” recurs throughout the text (19), the refrain of “[c]orporate democracy” underscores the identi¤cation of business with political and national ideals (49), and Hyde’s repeated appeal to the “basics” equates economic opportunism with the eternal verities of common sense (23). The shift in Whiteback’s vocabulary from “using” to “utilizing” denotes the transition to a business language that seeks authority in apparently unchallengeable pseudo-scienti¤c terminology (26). Similarly, J R’s “Just Rite” slogan betokens postmodernity’s association of simple advertising language with honest endeavor (537). The appeal to stable notions of individual subjectivity bolsters these assumptions regarding corporate identity.3 The reference to Miss Flesch as “a real video personality” suggests how the new school technologies de¤ne the terms of authentic identity (24). More signi¤cantly, J R’s ¤nancial activities stabilize and center his subjectivity. As he accrues investments, J R becomes “the Boss” (511). Economic power brings with it a dominating egotism that is in®icted most often on the unfortunate Bast. Referring to his various business innovations, J R’s boyish claim that “I did it ¤rst” also indi-

146 / Spencer cates that his egotism is accompanied by the colonialist desire for priority through the conquest of new territory (659). In this respect he is very similar to Cates, who is associated with the bedrock values of the ideal American pioneer. Yet Gaddis shows how in both cases the pretension to stable subjectivity is an illusion. J R of course is a youth who requires Bast as his representative, and Davidoff ’s admission that he has “never met the Boss” reinforces the impression of pretense (542). In the ¤nal section of the novel, Zona Selk describes Cates as “nonexistent null void” (708). As in the scene where Gall tells Eigen that he has tried and failed to contact “the man in charge” of the Foundation (418), Gaddis provides a critique of corporate subjectivity by suggesting the hollowness of the claim to foundational identity upon which power relies. Just as elsewhere Gaddis describes the exhortations of corporate egotists such as Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt and John D. Rockefeller as a “rush for second place” (Rush 42), a re®ection of the failure of capitalist identity, so too all these examples from J R illustrate the problematic nature of the individualistic essentialism of postmodernity. While motivated by the same purpose—that of undermining the notion of stable meaning—Gaddis’s treatment of transformations in the nature of economic value is more fully reliant on the ®eeting, mutable, and self-referential principles associated with postmodern culture. The opening sequence involving the lawyer Coen and Bast’s aunts establishes the sense of value in transition. As Gaddis’s critics have noted, this celebrated passage emphasizes the shift from an idea of economic value linked to the material substance of silver to one based on the representational value of paper money.4 Yet, as John Johnston argues, the more substantial economic distinction in J R is between value based on money and value based on stocks (167). The value of cash is very small in the novel, and characters who are preoccupied with cash and checks are usually devoid of wealth. In contrast, powerful and wealthy characters are concerned with the value of stocks. J R’s “Paper Empire” entails the supersession of value based on silver and paper money by the value based on paper stocks (651). Also, the cybernetic technologies of the novel eliminate the paper foundation of stock value and reinscribe it as, in J R’s terms, “different electric numbers” (173). The scene in which J R, as the character of Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, steals the gold is an important trope for this transformation of value. J R’s theft of the gold, which in reality is the money that his class will use to buy stock in Diamond Cable, represents the historical shift in value noted by Harvey. Free of the Bretton Woods Agreements and the material basis in gold and the dollar, value be-

Critical Mimesis / 147 comes abstract and subjective. Pro¤ts are made from the purchase of companies that depreciate in value, and the “merger mania” that Harvey describes becomes a key feature of the autonomous paper entrepreneurialism that J R pursues. The unemployed and homeless victims of this substitution of investment for production appear throughout J R. Memories of Black Jack Cates’s violent suppression of a miners’ strike in Montana are voiced in the text, but the narrative insubstantiality of the threatened teachers’ strike illustrates the enervation of labor power in the post-Fordist era. According to Harvey, postmodern culture is mimetic of the new form of value associated with economic postmodernity. Like postmodern theories of the signi¤er, the autonomous process of ¤nancial speculation in J R is based on endless deferral. As J R realizes, “if you’re playing anyway so you might as well play to win but I mean even when you win you have to keep playing” (647). Such moments in the novel suggest that J R is mimetic of the processes of economic postmodernity, but Gaddis uses several strategies to provide a critical perspective on J R’s pursuits. As Joel Dana Black argues, Gaddis exposes the “¤ctive” nature of corporate ¤nance by suggesting that there is no real difference between the corporate world and the “unfounded” and “insubstantial” dealings of J R (167). As a result, argues Black, “J R’s enterprise . . . succeeds in mimicking and challenging the corporate Empire” (167). Also, Gaddis offers a critique of capitalist postmodernity by suggesting its extensive effects. The visual metaphor of train “lights signifying nothing but motion” suggests how the ¤nancial process in which J R is involved repeats itself throughout the culture (74). Rather than representing ¤xed value or substance, the train lights in this image evoke the self-referentiality and movement through deferral that characterize the frenzied and endless practice of ¤nancial speculation. The dominance of this manic process of acquiring more and more nonreferential values means that other cultural meanings are reshaped according to the logic of the ¤nancial signi¤er. J R encourages Bast to change the spelling of his name to match a misprint on his business card, Dan DiCephalis becomes known by the number he is assigned by an employment agency, DiCephalis also takes candy cigarettes to be real ones, Davidoff writes news releases prior to the occurrence of events—these are just some of the examples Gaddis uses to critique the general effects of the transition to postmodern value. Gaddis also shows how the sphere of artistic activity comes under the in®uence of the ¤nancial signi¤er. Artists fail to complete their projects because they are caught in processes of deferral that result from the commodi¤cation of texts. The corporate writer Gall, for ex-

148 / Spencer ample, defers the completion of his western until he meets the writing requirements of the Foundation and Typhon International. As Gibbs states, Eigen can no longer write because the logic of postmodernity is “too real” to him (492), and Gibbs himself concedes that his book will never be ¤nished. For Bast, deferral is also decline, and the morass of business signi¤ers in the 96th Street apartment is both the context and cause of the diminishment of his musical plans.5 In all these cases, Gaddis highlights how the selfreferential values of economic postmodernity contaminate artistic production and thus erode the possibility of critical art. Despite the failure of artists in J R, Bast voices opposition to the twin tendencies of postmodernity. In opposition to the standardized meanings and norms of identity, Gaddis insists on the indeterminacy of art. J R in particular wants to believe that artistic creation and reception can be reduced to the predetermined meanings of, for example, the “nothing music” that Bast is commissioned to write (112). However, Bast claims that J R is wrong on both counts.6 J R wants to know if musical composition is a matter of seeing the notes or hearing the sounds, but Bast refuses to codify the process according to J R’s paradigms. Similarly, J R asks Bast what he is “suppose to hear” in a Bach cantata, and Bast tells him that there is no preestablished meaning of the music (657). When Bast bemoans the fact that classical radio stations are tainted by commercials for the J R Family of Companies, it becomes clear that J R’s attitude toward music is continuous with the simpli¤ed meanings and naturalized desires that are promoted by advertising and corporate culture. By refusing to acquiesce to J R’s de¤nitions, Bast resists the logic of postmodern identity. At other times, Bast counters J R’s activities in a very different manner. Responding to J R’s reference to the endlessness of ¤nancial activity, Bast begs him to “just stop and let somebody help you pull things together instead of this more! more!” (647). Here, Bast asks J R to curtail the process of deferral and arrive at a stable, coherent, and integrated understanding of his business dealings. The two key aspects of postmodernity that Gaddis evokes through the textual properties of his novel are therefore also represented on the diegetic level of character interaction: ¤xed identity is here opposed by indeterminate artistic meaning, and ¤nancial deferral is countered by coherent understanding. That Gaddis’s critique functions on two narrative levels reaf¤rms the dualisms and inversions of the novel. Localized character and textual whole both appeal to stable and indeterminate meaning. The complexity of these narrative arrangements re®ects the relentlessness and ®exibility of Gaddis’s critique of postmodernity.

Critical Mimesis / 149 J R epitomizes postmodern critique because it works wholly within the terms it seeks to oppose. Since economic postmodernity, as de¤ned by Harvey, is predicated on principles of both identity (e.g., national values, competitive egotism) and indeterminacy, neither of these concepts is available to Gaddis as an untainted resource with which to conduct his critique. J R therefore must mimic key aspects of postmodernity in order to generate critique. The precariousness of such a critical project is suggested by the actions of the novel’s titular character. J R’s ¤nancial empire sometimes appears as a critical force because it threatens the workings of postmodern capital and almost leads to its demise. Toward the end of the novel, Cates is eager to learn the extent of the ¤nancial transactions of J R’s company. However, when Cates realizes that a lawsuit being brought against J R might result in the imposition of severe penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and widespread lawsuits against corporate America, he closes ranks with J R against those who wish to undermine him. Cates’s logic indicates that his business dealings are fundamentally in accord with those of J R. However, the systematic nature of Gaddis’s critique prevents his novel from collapsing into the complicity that informs J R’s behavior. Instead of being simply mimetic, J R literally mirrors the attributes of postmodernity to produce a critical mimesis. If the novel is dominated by principles of indeterminacy, this means that ideas of identity are the aspects of postmodernity that Gaddis is most keen to negate. But J R does not succumb to the fascination of the arbitrary signi¤er. Gaddis’s emphasis on historical transition and interconnected economic and cultural tendencies creates a narrative whole that is clear and stable. This preservation of the notion of meaningful totality in the face of the reductive fundamentalism of postmodernity is arguably J R’s most signi¤cant feature.

Notes 1. Gaddis writes that “maybe I am a postmodernist, if it does involve all the ideas of indeterminacy, as opposed to . . . a relative universe as opposed to an absolute, I mean, I am an anti-absolutist” (Knight 2001, 691–92). 2. Several of Gaddis’s critics have noted that J R represents distinctive features of contemporary capitalism (see Knight 1997, 89; Comnes 87; P. Wolfe 151). My analysis differs from these arguments because it emphasizes the speci¤cally postmodern aspects of capitalism, its dualistic nature, and its relation to postmodern culture. 3. Comnes argues that Gaddis attacks the notion of the stable ego through the

150 / Spencer character of Schramm (113). Also, P. Wolfe suggests that Gaddis represents “the breakdown of self ” as a means of countering egotism such as Schramm’s (172). 4. See Black 165–66; Comnes 91; and P. Wolfe 157. 5. The ineffectuality of the apartment as an artist’s retreat is detailed in this volume by Steven Schryer. —Eds. 6. As Knight (1977) argues, Bast appears to advocate a form of art that “hints at a more perfect completion, though ever deferred” (142). These two aspects of Bast’s de¤nition of music correspond with the dual textual strategies at work throughout J R. Comnes is right to note that J R “dramatizes” the aesthetic indeterminacy described by Bast (88), but the novel also encourages the reader’s active participation to reconstruct postmodernity as an objective whole.

9 Cognitive Map, Aesthetic Object, or National Allegory? Carpenter’s Gothic Nicholas Brown

Notice the position of the man in the photograph to what is highlighted in the foreground. The piano roll—along with its attendant technology—receives the attention here, but who plays the tune, and for whom? Questions regarding race and aesthetics underscore Brown’s essay as much as, Brown insists, the racialization of aesthetic positions forms a tacit line of inquiry in Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

152 / Brown

 Part of the genius of the character J R is that he embodies the innocence of Capital. Unlike the vulgar critique of capitalism, which always ultimately requires a pathological ¤gure at the root of any particular problem—a conspiracy or a corporate monster fully aware of the consequences of his or her actions—J R’s next move is always entirely innocent: any inquiry into his motives or rationale meets with an incredulous “because that’s what you do!” On one hand, J R takes advantage of certain possibilities inherent in U.S. capitalism circa 1972; on the other, the possibilities are part of the system’s normal functioning, objectively there for someone else to exploit if J R doesn’t. Like any other sixth grader, J R is innocent of any ethical responsibility for his actions: while an adult’s “because that’s what you do” might be disingenuous, J R’s refrain arouses no such suspicion. Capitalism follows its own impersonal logic through mobilizing J R’s capabilities and obscure desires, while at the same time remaining radically independent of these particular capabilities and desires. The next step of the syllogism is inescapable. If J R’s actions are innocent in this sense, then why not everyone else’s too? Capitalism “pays the ransom of existence . . . not out of its own pocket, but with the passions of individuals.”1 In that case, one can legally regulate and limit the scope of Capital, but it makes no more sense to speak of corporate ethics—or to expect ethically acceptable outcomes from the normal functioning of capitalism itself—than it does to expect an ethical attitude from children. In Carpenter’s Gothic capitalism appears under a contradictory aspect— though one generally present alongside the ¤rst—that of perpetual crisis and incipient anarchy. Through a New York Times headline that appears early in the novel, Gaddis alerts us that the action is set squarely in the middle of a crisis in the pro¤tability of capital: LOSS OF $412 MILLION, A RECORD, REPORTED BY GENERAL MOTORS (28) This headline, from late July 1980, “yesterday’s headline or the day’s before,” is “of no more relevance then than now in its blunt demand to be read” (28). But this is only the protagonist’s perspective, and Liz’s perceptions are gen-

Map, Object, or Allegory? / 153 erally con¤ned to the immediate. In fact her entire situation is framed by this crisis in the rate of pro¤t (which in fact reached historic lows around 1980). The bribery scandal that forms a backdrop to the novel and ties up Liz’s father’s estate is a symptom of the fact that his company—which, we cannot forget, is the material basis for the lives of Liz, her husband Paul, and her brother Billy—could not maintain its pro¤tability by legal means; and in fact it is apparently only rescued from insolvency by an insurance policy on which it collects upon Liz’s father’s suicide (17). Bribery, fraud, and corruption suddenly become more attractive options in the relative absence of pro¤tably legal investments. From Paul’s absurd insurance fraud to the Vorakers Consolidated Reserve court case to Reverend Ude’s attempt to bribe his way onto the airwaves to unholy alliances between big business and powerful politicians, Carpenter’s Gothic is driven by conspiracy and deception. The largest of these, sprawling like a great cancerous mass across the entire novel and ultimately incorporating most of the smaller conspiracies, involves the CIA, conservative politicians, evangelical churches, cold-war brinksmanship off the coast of East Africa, and disputed mineral deposits in the Rift Valley. At this point we should take a step back and recall that one of the variously expressed traditional Left critiques of modernism was that it was unable to produce anything like a cognitive map of social life. That is, it was unable to ful¤ll classical realism’s task of vitally connecting the narrative arc of an individual life to historical events in which, in however mediated a fashion, it participates. Even a book like Joyce’s Ulysses, which is devoted in part to a certain mapping of the space of Dublin, is nonetheless incapable of connecting the lives of its characters to the great events in Irish history that are developing in 1904—and coming to a head even as the book is being written. Like Liz, modernism was unable to connect its own immediate perceptions to a larger history, which therefore looks like so much dead context, “of no more relevance then than now.” The more sophisticated versions of this critique understood that this limitation was not a matter of bad aesthetic decisions on the part of modernist artists, but was instead a symptom of the real abstraction of modern social life. Such critiques have tended to offer as an alternative to modernism (e.g., the historical novel, critical realism, proletarian ¤ction, postcolonial literature) narrative forms written from positions at some sort of remove (historical, geopolitical, social, or geographic) from the abstract and hyperspecialized life of the wealthier segments of the advanced capitalist countries. A relatively recent exemplar of this tradition was Fredric Jameson’s much-criticized

154 / Brown article on the nature of third-world literature, published a year after the appearance of Carpenter’s Gothic. In that article, “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,” the Hegelian master-slave dialectic was invoked to explain the difference between modernism and third-world literature: while the master does not labor and is therefore “condemned to idealism” (85), the slave—who produces both his own life-world and that of the master—“can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation.” While modernism can only be a symptom of the social order through its own epistemological mutilation, third-world literature can achieve some workable consciousness of the social order and represent it in the mode of allegory: as Jameson infamously put it, “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . to be read as . . . national allegories” (69). Another way of approaching this issue would be to remind ourselves that one of the tasks by which high modernism de¤ned itself was the vocation to represent the unrepresentable—ultimately to represent everything, the absolute totality of causes that cannot ever be directly compassed by the understanding—by means of sensuous fragments of everyday life: William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow on which “so much depends,” Stephen Hero’s God in Ulysses who can only be approached through “a shout in the street.” The problem this ambition runs up against is the same problem that prompted it: modern social life is so fragmented, consciousness so specialized, that particular experience is insulated from most of the causes that determine it: think of the tremendous production of wealth that takes place on the colonial periphery, but which is only registered at the center as a subsidy silently paid to metropolitan capital. Modernism promises to heal this rift between universal and particular, but its methods only repeat the problem in the form of a demand to solve it; in a sense, modernism actually creates the problem by extravagantly demanding Totality of itself. Reconciliation remains nothing more than a promise. Meanwhile, of course, classical realism is no longer adequate to the segmented social conditions the modernists ¤nd themselves in; but this dif¤culty does not necessarily hold for everyone else. Indeed, the Jamesonian argument is designed in part to account for the powerful realist tendencies of literature on the periphery of capitalism, where consciousness of the ¤rst world impinges in a rather more brutal and inescapable way than the reverse, and where—for reasons that are in themselves only to be deplored—the specialization of consciousness and fragmentation of social life have not proceeded to the degree that they have in the metropolitan center.

Map, Object, or Allegory? / 155 Now, whatever one thinks of Jameson’s thesis—to which there are substantial legitimate objections—one must be struck by the fact that in Carpenter’s Gothic we have a book whose genealogy is solidly modernist (the formal relationship to Joyce, or even to the “Telemachus” episode in Ulysses, would provide material for a substantial essay) but which at the same time tries to produce the kind of explicit representation of the social totality that seems incompatible with any modernist wager on the fragment. Jameson, as we saw, reserves this explicit mode for third-world literature, and it is no coincidence that a great deal of what would need to be represented in a cognitive map of late-cold-war America is in the third world, speci¤cally southern Africa; but the narrative itself is constrained to what takes place within four walls: a high modernist conceit par excellence, fully on a level with Joyce’s decision to constrain Odysseus’s travels within a single day. How are these two apparently contradictory imperatives to be made to operate simultaneously? All this returns us to the great tentacled plot that Gaddis uses to map the United States and the world not only of his own historical moment but also of our own in nascent form. At ¤rst blush the conspiracy plot—traditionally understood as a vulgar or stunted attempt to represent the social totality— seems more suited to a cold-war pulp thriller than to the art novel. Nonetheless, a powerful current of realism emerges from this fantastic narrative when it is considered as a map of the relations among elements in late twentiethcentury American society rather than as a conspiracy theory of contemporary history—even if the Iran-Contra affair, which came to light only in 1986, a year after Carpenter’s Gothic was published, should remind us that conspiracy itself is not an entirely implausible element of such a map. The end of the colonial period did not in general greatly affect the centerperiphery relationship: afterward the third world remains an exporter of raw materials and cheap labor. Instead, what changes is the political battle that takes place on the periphery, which, at the time the novel is set, is the primary battleground in the cold war. More speci¤cally, the novel takes place during the transition from a strategy of containment to the Reaganite policy of “rollback,” which entailed the overthrow or strategic weakening of legitimate postcolonial governments perceived as hostile to the United States or friendly to the Soviet Union—a policy which, in the wake of the reassertion of congressional oversight of covert operations represented by the 1975 Clark Amendment, virtually required an illegal and conspiratorial approach to foreign policy. The situation in Mozambique—where McCandless is said by Paul to

156 / Brown have been “peddling these infrared nightscopes on the wrong side of the fence” (74)—was one such battleground. The Mozambique Liberation Front (known as Frelimo) had conducted a successful guerrilla war against Portugal, the quasi-fascist colonial power, and in 1975 formed a forward-looking socialist government that, despite the usual postcolonial dif¤culties, made signi¤cant progress in education, medicine, and social welfare. White Rhodesia, threatened by its newly independent neighbor, created the Mozambican National Resistance (known as Renamo), a terrorist organization whose mission to destabilize the new government involved the massacre of thousands of civilians and destroyed the Mozambican infrastructure and economy. In 1980, when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe under majority rule (and much of the white Rhodesian military ®ed to South Africa) Renamo became a client of apartheid South Africa. While covert CIA involvement with Renamo’s South Africa–sponsored equivalents on the other side of the continent in Angola was an open secret, the Clark amendment precluded such direct backing for Renamo. Instead, the U.S. policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa provided the apartheid regime resources and political cover to harden its policies at home and to continue its destabilization campaigns against its majority-ruled and left-leaning neighbors. The representational problem Gaddis faces is the old one of politics in the literary work, which Stendhal famously compared to “a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.” How does one connect this historical content of the late cold war, of American terrorism by African proxy, to the lives of ordinary people—rich and well connected to be sure, but not so rich or well connected as to prevent them representing a generic Anglo-American middle class— and be left with a novel rather than an op-ed piece about events on the other side of the world, sitting lifeless on the page like so much newsprint, “of no more relevance then than now in its blunt demand to be read”? It is easy enough to say that all Americans were deeply affected by the cold war and by the domestic economic and social policies it made possible—this is not only true but banally true: of great moment, and yet strangely unimpressive. The relationship between the horrors of Mozambique and life in the American suburbs is so highly mediated that it does not lend itself to sensual (that is, aesthetic rather than conceptual) apprehension. This deadening mediation is, of course, the same problem faced by classical modernism in a different form. But the modernist solution—just show us the wheelbarrow and let “so much” fend for itself—plainly does not satisfy the more urgent representational demands placed upon this novel.

Map, Object, or Allegory? / 157 How, then, to bring Mozambique within striking distance of Croton-onHudson? The solution to this representational dilemma is named McCandless, who tells us all we need to know about our relationship with South Africa, “our great bulwark against the, what was it? aggressive instincts of an evil empire?” “no, take a look at every country bordering South Africa you’ll see who’s doing the destabilizing . . . Who set up the Mozambique National Resistance Movement in the Transvaal when Rhodesia went down, want to write to them they’re at Clive Street, Robindale, Randburg, want to see a reign of terror see them raiding into Mozambique beating, raping, dis¤guring the locals, teachers, health workers, all the forces of darkness and the whole rickety thing collapses, Mozambique’s brought to its knees like Lesotho” (189–90). It is also up to McCandless to provide us with all the mediations between cold-war Africa and upstate New York in the compressed form of a conspiracy theory that, once again, one is not required to take seriously in itself to recognize its value as a kind of force-diagram of American society circa 1980. Reverend Ude is a kind of a joke as the direct link between conservative domestic politics (Teakell) and intervention in southern Africa; but we do recall that Jerry Falwell both mobilized the Moral Majority to elect Reagan and asked white Christians to support South Africa by buying Krugerrands. The shadowy ¤nancier Grimes is utterly improbable as the puppet-master behind the whole charade; and yet it does remind us that, of all the options available, the policies that ended the recession that elected Reagan disproportionately bene¤ted ¤nance capital at the expense of other sectors of the economy. That the Food for Africa program could be designed to counter Cuban medical assistance and make money for Teakell’s own seed company (237) is a bit too direct; but foreign relief efforts in Africa were more about cold-war propaganda than humanitarian concern, and economic aid often entailed pro¤table contracts for domestic companies. That a nonexistent gold strike could start a war is almost beyond imagination; but if, as McCandless is careful to tell us, nicely paraphrasing Lenin’s theory of imperialism (190), wars during the colonial period were in the last instance over resources, this area of con®ict can only be a red herring during a cold war over geopolitical position: “Who’s been guarding Gulf Oil’s installation in Angola where they’re pumping out millions of barrels a day, the US Marines? Cubans, Cubans” (189). By the time we reach McCandless’s ¤nal diatribes (the one excerpted above occupies most of twelve pages) he has become a kind of Ancient

158 / Brown Mariner, buttonholing whomever will listen, including the reader: during McCandless’s quasi-monologues Carpenter’s Gothic approaches the quality of a didactic novel. One is not required to make this observation as a criticism— in fact this attempt to revisit the neglected half of the ancient imperative to “delight and teach” is the novel’s great strength—in order to note that McCandless marks a tremendous violation of the modernist canon of immanence, which insists that while the work of art can reveal the truth, characters can only reveal themselves. Rather than paring his Joycean ¤ngernails, Gaddis is down here on earth explaining how the cold war works, and the selfreferential turn of making McCandless himself an author whose protagonist resembles him a little too much does little to repair the damage. Once again, this damage is not necessarily a bad thing, and Gaddis accentuates the rupture by stuf¤ng McCandless full of mutually contradictory stereotypes: artist, tough guy, scientist, conspiracy freak. What is interesting, rather, is the way this rupture is ultimately recontained; not so much by the doubts thrown on McCandless’s history in the ¤nal pages (doubts that cannot stand up against the material evidence of his activities: missed phone calls, insurance records, passports, the missing thumb, Lester himself ) as by his ¤nal climactic exchange with Liz. Passive, neurotic, but in retrospect quietly and consciously superior to most of what goes on around her, Liz interrupts McCandless in the middle of his denunciation of millenarian Christianity: —Because you’re the one who wants it, she said abruptly in a voice so level he stopped, simply looking at her . . . —And it’s why you’ve done nothing . . . She put down the glass, —to see them all go up like that smoke in the furnace all the stupid, ignorant, blown up in the clouds and there’s nobody there, there’s no rapture no anything just to see them wiped away for good it’s really you, isn’t it. That you’re the one who wants Apocalypse, Armageddon all the sun going out and the sea turned to blood you can’t wait no, you’re the one who can’t wait! The brimstone and the ¤re and your Rift like the day it really happened because they, because you despise their, not their stupidity no, their hopes because you haven’t any, because you haven’t any left. (243–44) The reversal here is complete. A perspective that had seemed to violate the canon of immanence—making statements rather than pseudo-statements, to use Brooksian language—is suddenly ironized in the most abrupt and ab-

Map, Object, or Allegory? / 159 solute way, as the real content of McCandless’s jeremiad is shown to be identical with what it denounces—worse, because the desire that feeds religious fundamentalism is not despair but hope. McCandless’s diatribes are only pseudo-statements after all, no more true in themselves than Paul’s pathetic self-deceptions. Far from revealing the Truth, McCandless only reveals himself. Gaddis thus returns safely to the Joycean realm above his handiwork, re¤ned out of existence, and Carpenter’s Gothic becomes, once again, a late modernist novel. But the link between Gaddis’s didactic impulses and those of the author McCandless cannot be so easily severed. If McCandless secretly desires a raptureless Apocalypse, Gaddis in his turn unleashes an Armageddon on the central characters. Billy’s and Liz’s deaths in particular are unnecessary in purely narrative terms. But it is precisely the extravagance of the ¤nal pages that suggests that we are looking at something more than the simple recontainment of pedagogical energy: these exorbitant fates call attention to themselves as allegorical ground rather than as illusionistic narrative fabric. Few commentators have missed carpenter gothic itself as an allegorical motif. McCandless (of course) explains: Oh the house yes, the house. It was built that way yes, it was built to be seen from the outside . . . —a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions, the inside’s a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale, because it’s stood there, hasn’t it, foolish inventions and it’s all stood here for ninety years . . . (227–28) There are a number of ways to understand this description, but among the most obvious is as a representation of America itself, “built to be seen from the outside,” beginning with a constitution built on borrowed enlightenment principles that had little purchase in the life of a slaveholding territory whose realities forced good intentions into gothic contortions. In this vein Liz, genuinely endangered but beset by imbecile fears, can be seen as the embodiment of American liberalism: she is the one fundamentally decent character in the novel, who just wants to do a few small things, like paying the help a decent wage, without thinking too hard about what lies behind the privilege that enables her to do it. Paul’s petty-bourgeois ambition, the bedrock of a certain American self-representation, is doomed to failure or manipulation: both tolerated and loved by Liz, he is unlikely to get much mileage out of his

160 / Brown dalliance with the ¤nancial class. Billy’s callow radicalism is aborted before it could develop into a more substantial political will. McCandless, the intellectual, is nominally in possession but relegated to a tiny airless corner and ¤nally exiled altogether. The destructive fury of the novel’s ¤nal pages, however, brings us to an entirely different kind of allegorical content, one much more profound than these relatively static and lifeless correspondences. To return to the register we began with: McCandless’s intellectual exile is in fact the one properly ethical fate in the book—because, as Liz understands, it rests on a choice. Rather than acting, like Liz, in an imperfect, compromised, and even hypocritical way, he retreats to a “quiet shore where [he] can be secure in enjoying the distant sight of confusion and wreckage.”2 For McCandless is reserved the searing fate of Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, who would rather maintain his purity and innocence than commit himself to something that might involve compromise and hypocrisy—and who, by his inaction, therefore commits himself to the deepest complicity and hypocrisy. The singular pathos and genius of Carpenter’s Gothic is that Gaddis separates himself from McCandless by aligning himself with him. For the unforgivable choice made by McCandless is one for which, by exposing it, Gaddis does not forgive himself.

Notes 1. Hegel 35. Hegel is, of course, referring to the Idea, not capitalism. 2. Hegel 24.

10 The End of Agape On the Debates around Gaddis Rone Shavers

Pictured left to right: William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and Walter Abish. Taken in West Berlin in 1987, this photograph illustrates the strength to which postmodern ¤ction can be said to represent a white, male worldview—or does it? In “The End of Agape: On the Debates around Gaddis,” Rone Shavers argues that the con®ation of identity politics and aesthetic positions has led to a deliberate misunderstanding of ¤ction’s social value, and using Gaddis’ Agape Agape as a demonstrative example, Shavers posits a new way to recognize literature in the public sphere. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

162 / Shavers

 Published posthumously in 2002, William Gaddis’s Agape Agape displays an aesthetic temperament only hinted at in earlier Gaddis work. In its pages, an unnamed narrator, ravaged by cancer and debt and alone in a room throughout the course of the novel, attempts to get his papers in order and write down his history of the player piano. The narrator slips in and out of hallucinations, has imaginary conversations with a number of canonical authors and philosophers, and cites numerous works in order to support his thesis that the marriage of technology and entertainment has transformed the democratic polis into a mindless, “common herd” (47) waiting only to be entertained. Given that Agape Agape repeatedly refers to the rise of democratic values in art as “the tyranny of the majority” (59), it, like much of Gaddis’s previous work, has been dismissed as nothing short of an intentionally cryptic, confusing text meant to appeal to only a small group of extremely literate “elitists.” In this essay, I will refute this speci¤c instance not solely to defend one author, but because I hope to show how charges of elitism only serve to foreclose discussion and redirect attention away from the issue that is actually at hand: the role of art and the artist in a public sphere that has increasingly used aesthetic debate as a means to confound a thorough examination of other structures of social power. For example, the very notion of what constitutes literature and the “literary” has become enmeshed in the political and quite public debates on “race and culture” as a valid aesthetic source, and as a consequence, the genre of literary postmodern ¤ction is now considered to be exclusively white and male, mainly because of its most visible and/or popular members. No matter that the number of authors who explore or attempt to create works that are speci¤cally representative of a literary postmodern aesthetic has increased in number, the notion that novels are to be viewed as “representative of one’s culture” has superseded the idea that text may be written with the intention of expanding and exploring the boundaries of any particular aesthetic. Therefore literary postmodernism is now perceived in popular culture to be solely one among many various “multicultural” identities present in the world. Literary postmodernism and the speci¤c strain of literary postmodernism that has its antecedent in Gaddis’s work is now believed to constitute a social identity—a subject position as well as an aesthetic position. Thus, because Gaddis was a white male author who wrote “encyclopedic” postmodern texts, his in®uence on contemporary writing is only examined in (and contrasted

The End of Agape / 163 to) the works of other white, male authors, generally over the age of forty. Such an assumption, that Gaddis’s in®uence extends solely to one generation or gender of authors is false, of course, but it is also a natural consequence of the epistemology of race, class, and culture’s supplanting and con®ating aesthetic positions and beliefs. That is to say that because the literary text is now judged according to a rubric of social and cultural classi¤cations rather than aesthetic classi¤cations, the critiques and aesthetic recognition of a text is read according to racialized, gendered, and sociocultural lines of inquiry. I will return to the above point shortly, but what I would ¤rst like to address are the general categorical positions taken by all aesthetic movements, and in order to do so, I must immediately turn to Gaddis’s friend and near-namesake, author William Gass. In his essay, “The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,” Gass presents three distinct categories taken by avant-garde art forms: liberal, conservative, and what I term problematic (202). I posit that Gass’s categorical groupings can be applied to all art forms, not merely those that are considered avant-garde, and note that while I address the category of the problematic avant-garde in greater detail further on in this essay, Gass’s ¤rst two groupings can be given directly. According to Gass, the liberal avant-garde, “[A]ims to improve man and his life” and: “tends to be impatient with the past, maintaining that little can be learned from history but its errors, and fearing nostalgia above all other passive emotions. Although members of this avant-garde are largely arty-intellectuals, there is a sense of common cause with the impoverished and the downtrodden—a shared powerlessness. Its in®uence is strongest among arts that have a public posture (architecture, theater, cinema). When the liberal avant-garde wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Left” (202). Gass then by contrast de¤nes a conservative avant-garde, and its artists who are “ready to take from tradition and often oppose the present by looking to the past. They have a natural af¤nity with the aristocracy, and in general their movements are marked by extreme dislike of the masses. Their image of the artist is the individual in his isolation. When [the conservative avant-garde] wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Right, and often shows, alas, a racist face” (203). Gass also states that for the liberal artist, “society of some sort was still worth saving; and art could, as in the old days, do the job” (203). While for the conservative artist, “society was not worth rescuing, only art was” (203). In other words, we can de¤ne a liberal aesthetic position as one that gives primacy to the idea of art as a social tool, and a conservative aesthetic posi-

164 / Shavers tion as one that claims art’s independence from general cultural movements and phenomena. In our present moment, we generally tend to read most texts with an interpretation that skews toward the liberal position, but it is also important to note that both liberal and conservative aesthetics can take weak or strong forms, solely according to a writer’s personal temperament. I should further state that it is the temperament and position of the writer— the creative artist—that I am most interested in examining in the pages of this essay, as authorial intention (and not critical interpretation) has a direct impact on how an author chooses to write and craft his or her text. That is, writers in®uence other writers, and therefore the determination of which aesthetic category, conservative or liberal, should be considered primal to writing and evaluating literature is a very serious matter. The stakes involved in aesthetic struggles, and for those who claim to represent them, are very high. To cite but one instance that illustrates exactly how seriously aesthetic categories matter, take the author who best typi¤es the strong liberal aesthetic position, Dale Peck, well known for writing scathing reviews condemning most of the masterworks of high-modern and postmodern literature. Peck’s aesthetic is decidedly liberal, because in the Afterword to Hatchet Jobs, his collection of essay-length reviews, the author states that he prefers to, “think of [him]self as a kind of mother hen, not so much of writers, but of the novel itself ” (219). Further supporting Gass’s claim that the liberal aesthetic possesses a “sense of common cause with the impoverished and downtrodden,” Peck later claims in his essay that “[A]rt, like political activism, seeks to make itself unnecessary. Embedded in every story, every poem, every play is a utopian vision that, if achieved, would make the words irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary” (225). Peck believes that art can save the world because it has a public, political function and presence, as it is through art that a better world can be achieved: art as social catalyst, and the novel as agent of change. In perhaps his most infamous review, Peck describes high-modernist and postmodern writing as “the most esoteric strain of twentieth-century literature, what people think of as the highest of high canonical postmodernism, and what I prefer to think of as the white man’s ivory tower” (184). He then lists several very well known authors, all icons of high- and postmodern literature, and if only to give the reader a complete picture of the scope of Peck’s ire, I cite him at length: All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with

The End of Agape / 165 the diarrheic ®ow of words that is Ulysses, continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of late Nabokov and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of John Barth and John Hawkes and William Gaddis, the reductive cardboard constructions of Donald Barthelme, the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Thomas Pynchon’s, and ¤nally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid— just plain stupid—tomes of Don DeLillo. This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment upon anything other than its own ability to comment upon anything, a malaise that only David Foster Wallace has the good sense to lament. A tradition which has turned the construction of a novel into a formal exercise, judged either by the inexpressive or inscrutable ®oribundity of its prose (Eggers, Wallace, and Moody) or the lifeless carpentry of its parts (Antrim, Eugenides, Franzen, Lethem, Powers, and Whitehead), rather than by the quasi-mystical animating aspect of literature that even a rational Englishman like E. M. Forster called “prophecy.” (185) To recast Peck’s argument, we can then say that literature (and by extension, all art-making) that illustrates an explicit attention to what writing can and cannot do, writing that experiments with novel forms, does not deserve to be called “literature” because it has no immediate or future social use. Peck labels the tradition of modernist, postmodernist, and/or all conservative aesthetic positions as bankrupt, morally wrong because conservative aesthetics offend, alienate, and/or simply ignore the overarching concerns of the bourgeois reading public. He states, “As one reads contemporary novelists, one can’t shake the feeling that they write for one another rather than some more or less common reader. Their prose shares a showiness that speaks of solidarity and competition” (221). He then mentions: “My generation has inherited a tradition that has grown so increasingly esoteric and exclusionary, falsely intellectual and alienating to the mass of readers, and just as falsely comforting to those in the club. In place of centuries of straightforward class discrimination, the twentieth-century invented an elitist rhetoric intelligible to only the most diligent and educated of readers—a club that doesn’t exclude per se, but makes you work very, very hard to join” (222). It is important to note that Peck’s claim of literary postmodern “solidarity” rei¤es Gass’s description of conservative aesthetic views’ “dislike of the masses” (Gass 203), almost as much as it also implicates the political position taken by Gaddis in Agape Agape. The scenes in Gaddis’s ¤nal work in which

166 / Shavers the narrator addresses other authors and philosophers are indeed meant to connote solidarity with a select few, but as I will argue, Agape Agape is particularly expressive of a conservative aesthetic. Yet the racialist element of postmodern conservative aesthetics is nonexistent, at least not in the way Peck suggests. The charge of borderline racist exclusivity in literary postmodernism is an easy charge to make, but it falls apart when placed under scrutiny. Peck decries Gaddis and all literary postmodernism as the “white man’s ivory tower,” as classed, elitist, and white, because Peck chooses to recognize only writers of one sole race and class as postmodern. In other essays in his collection, Peck reads the postmodern novels of authors of color along the lines of their racial and gendered subject positions, thereby reinforcing the “ghettoization” of writers of color, and reinscribing the very color line Peck seeks to condemn. When one cites only these postmodern authors who are members of the same class and culture (e.g., white, middle-class men from predominantly Eastern Seaboard colleges) as representative of an aesthetic that also includes such ¤gures as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Carter, Maryse Condé, Lydia Davis, Samuel L. Delany, Percival Everett, Lynne Tillman, Ishmael Reed, and Jeanette Winterson, to name but a few individuals Peck leaves out, one not only misrepresents a literary movement whole cloth, one also racializes it. This is what I mean when I mention how cultural classi¤cations have superseded aesthetic ones, as Gaddis, Powers, Wallace, Whitehead, and the others Peck indicts can be considered to constitute an elite only when one regards the most super¤cial aspects of their novels: that their novels depict characterizations of white male subjectivity. What we see when Peck indicts postmodern writing as almost exclusively white, intellectual navel-gazing, then, is the desire to reduce literary postmodernism to solely racial/ized and cultural components. Further still, by insisting that postmodern writing indulges in an elitist rhetoric, Peck underscores his commitment to a strong form of the liberal aesthetic. The liberal aesthetic position is clear: art can change and save the world, but in order to do so, art must be accessible to the common man. All liberal aesthetic positions can then be summarized as the thought that somewhere out in the world, there is an imaginary bourgeois reader, an everyman who must be addressed in order for the “art” of the novel to be not only recognized, but also realized.1 All liberal aesthetic positions, then, are underscored by the thought that art must appeal to a series of “universals” meant to connote, identify, and reify what is ultimately bourgeois subjectivity, misinterpreted as universalism. If a novel is too “esoteric” or too “dif¤cult,”

The End of Agape / 167 then that bourgeois subjectivity is challenged and the work is judged to be no longer “universal”—which is to say, not appropriate.2 And if anything, whether weak or strong in its position, radical or conciliatory in its politics, in order to reach a critical mass of readers and effect change, the liberal aesthetic strives to be as appropriate to an imaginary class of readers as possible. Another key component of the liberal aesthetic is entertainment, and the view that a story must entertain rather than challenge (directly or indirectly) a reader is usually the position taken by those who express a weak liberal aesthetic. That is, proponents of the weak liberal aesthetic tend to cite the needs of the reader more than they do notions of exclusivity or elitism, and will go as far as to argue that a reader’s perception of a work is more important than a writer’s aesthetic intention. This is the position taken by author Jonathan Franzen, once a Gaddis fan but now his most vocal detractor. Immediately following the publication of Agape Agape, Franzen published an essay entitled “Mr. Dif¤cult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-toRead Books.” “Mr. Dif¤cult” not only attacks Gaddis’s entire body of work— which Franzen admits to not having read—but also attacks Gaddis as an author, for having written in a style Franzen ¤nds too challenging to be entertaining. And while it is easy to simply write off Franzen’s essay as an exercise in duplicity,3 Franzen’s position nevertheless attests to the continuing persuasive power that the liberal aesthetic holds. In book reviews, creative writing workshops, and the numerous publications in which writers discuss the art and craft of writing, preference is given to the public conception and reception of a writer’s work—to the interpretation of literary writing and the appropriateness of literary writing in the bourgeois public sphere. And as Peck and Franzen both pronounce, any work that has the capacity to confound a bourgeois reader, either through its use of literary form and language (in Peck’s case) or the density of its ideas (in Franzen’s) deserves no literary attention. For Franzen, it is the needs of the reader that a writer must always initially address, and he de¤nes his liberal position as a “Contract.” According to Franzen, in “Contract” writing: “[A] novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Every writer is ¤rst a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing ¤ction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so the novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust. This is the Contract model” (100).

168 / Shavers Thus the “impoverished or downtrodden,” group that Gass suggests the liberal aesthetic seeks to protect is in Franzen’s estimation the entire reading public. Franzen’s Contract is precisely a liberal aesthetic position, mainly because Franzen emphasizes the social importance and impact of art, and that the content of art therefore can change (or at least shape) society. More than the small community of select individuals who conservative aestheticians seem to write for, Franzen believes that every reader deserves the attention and respect of an author, simply because every reader can read. Franzen posits that all writing is therefore social writing, but in order to fully understand Franzen’s devotion to liberal, “Contract” writing, it is necessary to see what Franzen places Contract writing against, to grasp the community-based aesthetic intervention he tries to make. Franzen claims that there is another school of literary thought that exists as a countermodel to Contract writing, and he terms this oppositional school “Status.” According to Franzen, “Status” is an aesthetic belief that: “the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it. We can call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance” (100). Franzen then elaborates on the “Status perspective” as a means to achieve literary worth. “Status” is obtained by writing novels that are “dif¤cult” for readers to understand, and Franzen mentions how Status writers—those who can properly be said to hold a conservative aesthetic—believe that “dif¤culty tends to signal excellence: it suggests that the novel’s author has disdained cheap compromise and stayed true to an artistic vision. Easy ¤ction has little value, the argument goes. Pleasure that demands hard work, the slow penetration of mystery, the outlasting of lesser readers, is the pleasure most worth having” (100). Conservative artists value artistic dif¤culty more than social insights, an artist’s abilities in his or her medium more than the potential response of an audience. Franzen states: In the most grievous cases, [literary dif¤culty] may convict an author of placing his sel¤sh artistic imperatives or his personal vanity ahead of his audience’s legitimate desire to be entertained—of being, in other words, an asshole. Taken to its free-market extreme, Contract stipulates that if a product is disagreeable to you the fault must be the product’s. . . . You’re the consumer; you rule. The Status position is undeniably ®attering to the writer’s sense of importance. In my bones though, I’m a Contract kind of person. I

The End of Agape / 169 grew up in a friendly, egalitarian suburb reading books for pleasure and ignoring any writer who didn’t take my entertainment seriously enough.” (100) In brief, because Status writers produce dif¤cult works—novels that do not often function as an easy form of entertainment—the authors of Status novels merit the antipathy they sometimes receive because they refuse to follow the Contract model of writing. Or, as Franzen puts it, “sure enough, literary dif¤culty can operate as a smoke screen for an author who has nothing interesting, wise, or entertaining to say ([my emphasis] 111). Because Franzen ¤nds Gaddis dif¤cult to read, Gaddis should be ignored; because most postmodern literature is dif¤cult, most postmodernist literature should be ignored. To someone with a weak liberal aesthetic, literary postmodernism is simply not entertaining enough to merit a reader’s interest.4 But the community of readers Franzen invokes is ill de¤ned, as is his assumption of entertainment as a mutually agreed upon criteria. Entertainment and exactly what constitutes entertainment is subjective, and an appeal to a generally recognized de¤nition of what makes for entertaining art is not possible in the postmodern public sphere. Unfortunately, the conceit of all liberal aesthetic positions, weak or strong, is the belief that the public sphere is unitary, static, and that one’s relation to society is determined by one’s race, class, and/or culture. The liberal aesthetic has yet to take into account that the bourgeois culture it seeks to change and/or effect through art has degenerated into various subcultures.5 Thus a strong liberal aesthetic such as Peck’s must view literary works, who they are written for, and who reads them as a system of inclusion and exclusion (according to either a reader or writer’s subject position) of variegated groups, while a weak liberal aesthetic position like Franzen’s must ignore the fact that society consists of variegated groups with completely different tastes altogether. Although Franzen depicts a Status school of aesthetic thought, they are posited as reckless and arrogant individuals running counter to an organized and innocent “community” of readers, a small group set against the normative mores of rational society. Peck, who embodies a stronger liberal view, takes the opposite approach and recognizes only the various subsets of society, but cannot reconcile society’s subsets into a larger whole capable of inciting social change. Instead, Peck’s subgroups make art according to classed, raced, and gendered positions, forever excluded from joining the dominant culture Peck hopes to indict. Bour-

170 / Shavers geois subjectivity in the strong liberal view, then, is something that is concurrently historical and ahistorical, in that much like 250 years ago, it is a subject position available only to white male gentry. Yet the liberal aesthetic position is not alone in failing to properly rationalize the question of bourgeois subjectivity—the notion of a general readership and what to do with it. The social function of art is the axis on which all aesthetic positions turn, and for conservative artists, art exists in a dominant hierarchical relation to society, with little importance given to bourgeois subjects or social concerns. Early on in this essay I mentioned how Gaddis’s Agape Agape is the author’s only novel to blatantly express a strong aesthetic temperament. Now I intend to illustrate how. I am inclined to read Agape Agape as re®ective of a strong form of the conservative aesthetic, diametrically opposed to any socially oriented liberal aesthetic project, as Gaddis’s ¤nal novel conforms to Gass’s portrayal of aesthetic conservatism in the following ways: the narrator is a struggling writer with an “extreme dislike of the masses” (“Vicissitudes” 203), so uniquely “individual in his isolation” (203), that the only people with whom he is able to establish a subsequent af¤nity are those artistic, “aristocratic” personages of the past. And furthermore, while Gaddis (unlike his predecessor aesthetic conservatives Pound and Eliot), stops short of fascist or racist politics,6 Agape Agape does indeed “oppose the present by looking to the past” (203), mainly by way of its extreme antitechnological stance, especially when technology is coupled with and packaged as entertainment. The antisocial position of Agape Agape is almost self-evident, as early in the text the narrator states: “entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where the technology came from in the ¤rst place, you see?” (Agape Agape 2). I describe sentiments such as Gaddis’s rejection of computers as “antisocial” because Agape Agape is littered with the intellectual assertion that entertainment is not a redeeming social value, and that the only value society ascribes to technology is when technology can be used as a form of entertainment. For Gaddis, technology, then, when coupled with entertainment, leads only to mediocrity in art, since it causes one to appreciate what one already knows and what already has been recognized. Such a belief runs counter to the liberal positions taken by Peck, Franzen, and countless other liberal aestheticians, for the liberal aesthetic believes that recognition (and subsequently, recognition of a predominant and socially ordered subject position in a work) is a necessary step in art-making, that art must be similar to

The End of Agape / 171 other previous forms of art in order to be socially recognized as art. Conversely, conservative aestheticians tend to devote much more attention to form and the formal elements of a novel (as a case in point, Agape Agape is not meliorated by such common novelistic elements as a plot, character development, the elaboration of settings, or even paragraph breaks, yet is rightly de¤ned as a novel) because they hope that through the use of form, subjects will be forced to question—at the very least—their individual assessment and recognition/understanding of what constitutes and/or de¤nes “art.” Thus, Gass, Peck, and Franzen are correct when they note the existence of two competing and vastly different aesthetic “camps,” but what the latter two authors fail to see is that neither aesthetic position is universally, absolutely right. On the contrary, as Gass explains, the position one takes toward aesthetics will be determined by what an individual author feels is most worth saving: society, or art (203). Of course, this is not to say that a conservative aesthetic ignores social phenomena altogether, but merely to illustrate that to a writer possessing a conservative aesthetic, ideas concerning the use(s) of art in the public sphere are much more pressing topics. Gaddis’s last novel is an attempt to write a Foucaultian genealogy of technological infantilization—tracing the computer to its historical points of origin, and then attempting to show how technology has always been paired with entertainment as a way to deploy consolidated institutional power and disperse individual power—and is in fact tinged with bitter sadness toward the contemporary subject who can no longer distinguish between art (an act of creation) and entertainment (a passive mode of participation). For example, take the following passage from Agape Agape where the narrator cites player piano advertising copy and laments: “What happened! Go back to that biggest thrill in music is your own participation where did it tip [ . . . ] what took it from entertaining to being entertained? From this phantom entertainer to this bleary stupe¤ed pleasure seeking, what breaks your heart. [ . . . ] ‘Discover your unsuspected talent’ that’s what breaks your heart, [ . . . ] ‘every member of the household may be a performer’ this ad says, discovering his unsuspected talent with his feet, this romantic illusion of participating, playing” (16–17). What the narrative argues here is that our current conception of entertainment merely reduces entertainment to its most passive form: we are being entertained, not attempting to develop the talents needed to create entertainment. There is no “hidden talent” to be discovered by an individual working a player piano; the machine does all the work for you. What happens when

172 / Shavers sitting at a player piano, then, as the ad copy attests, is the social recognition of talent that is not truly present, a mass orgy of misrecognition con¤rming a false statement as a truth that is already known, since the piano’s player only maintains the illusion of an already-completed project. It is precisely this specialized form of groupthink, combined with the belief that it is proper, correct, and necessary in a democratic society to support the notion that anyone with access to the right technology is an artist—or better still, an artist cum entertainer—that so rankles the narrator of Agape Agape. He accordingly rails against the “stupe¤ed mob” (2) waiting to be entertained and decries the agent of their passive participation—media conglomeration and replication achieved through technology—as the manner by which they are so willfully enthralled. The player piano is thus indicative of the use of tekne as the weapon with which to destroy not just art, but agape, Gaddis’s own conception of the “social” value of participation in the act of creativity. Admittedly, Agape Agape is not without its ®aws, but its ®aws are inherent to the strong conservative aesthetic represented by the novel, and in order to present readers with a fuller understanding of the conservative tendency, I must ¤rst trace the outlines of the weak form of aesthetic conservatism. We can ¤nd such a weak conservative position in author Curtis White’s The Middle Mind. Subtitled, Why Americans Can’t Think for Themselves, White also notes our current dependence on passive modes of entertainment, and like Gaddis, White indicts structures belonging to commodity culture and resists attempts to democratize the arts. White feels that our current Western culture has engendered, under the auspices of late capitalism, what he labels the “middle mind”: the condition of being “stupid smart” (162). That is, smart enough to recognize that art matters, but simultaneously dumb and often too lazy to grasp the complex relation(s) between aesthetics, economics, and other ¤elds of social in®uence, dominance, and power. The stupid smart condition is one wherein art (and all manner of ill-de¤ned “creativity”) is recognized, but the means by which creativity is de¤ned (and by whom, and for what reason) is never thoroughly examined. White interrogates the liberal aesthetic belief that art must have social appeal as a misguided contemporary belief that art must have consumer appeal, especially given the desire for constant technological innovation of and in mass media formats (like the creative economics of advertising, the Internet, and television). The very notion that creativity can be welded to economic policies and made to serve purely ¤nancial interests causes White trouble. He cites the rise of the “creative economy” in which everyone is considered to be a creative thinker and “art-

The End of Agape / 173 ist” in some way, and notes the following: “The Creative Economy does not require us to be artists. It requires us to be stupid-smart. It used to be that we only required our soldiers to be stupid/smart—dumb enough to go to Saigon, say, but smart enough to win once they got there. Now workers need to be smart enough to be capable of creativity, but they also have to be stupid enough to think that the present economic disposition really allows for this creativity. In the ¤nal analysis, our creativity will be accounted ” ([emphasis original] 162). Taken one way, White states here that liberal works written to appeal to a social category or subcategory have already been accounted for, carefully structured by the tenets of a totalizing capitalist system. Taken another way, White shows how both Peck and Franzen’s disparaging remarks concerning literary postmodern writing, and their subsequent call for a return to bourgeois realist ¤ction ¤t into a general economic rubric in which the race and class of the author matter more than the author’s work. White explains— from a conservative aesthetic standpoint—the shortcomings of liberal aesthetic positions in a capitalist era. In its weak form, its reliance on the market (good works entertain, and therefore are rewarded with accolades and sales, economic markers that serve as proof of their aesthetic worth and quality) in no way challenges the dominance of capitalism and capitalist thought. In its strong form (a supposedly utopian vision is embedded in every work of art), liberal writing must appeal to the greatest number of readers, an imaginary bourgeois subject who by nature and without question is deeply committed to the conservation and proliferation of neoliberal economic policies. White’s correction of the liberal aesthetic, then, is that liberal art is either only as good as its conformity to an economic system that has already accounted for select types of creativity (Peck), or only as good as it conforms to an economic system that ignores creativity altogether (Franzen). For White, Gaddis, and many other writers who hold a conservative aesthetic, there’s a slippery slope between liberal aesthetic practices and neoliberal economic policies: “In the world of the Middle Mind, all one asks of art is that it be ‘entertaining,’ ‘fun,’ and ‘interesting,’ and that’s as it should be. Things are ‘interesting’ in the Middle Mind in much the same way that a character would be said to be ‘clever’ in a novel by Henry James. For James, a clever person has all of the appearance of perceptiveness without really being perceptive at all” ([my emphasis] 39–40). The parallels between White’s thesis of the middle mind and Gaddis’s opinions in Agape Agape are stunning. Gaddis arrives at a similar conclusion

174 / Shavers to White regarding a lack of social and aesthetic understanding when Gaddis writes, “this enormous market of the non-literate and half-literate devouring the poets who compose to please the bad taste of their reviewers end up instructing one another, what this glorious democracy in the arts is all about isn’t it?” (50–51). The democratization of the arts, the process that creates the stupid smart middle mind is in place to reify what one already knows, to foster mutual misrecognition and obscure the workings of free market economics, so that the market (or speci¤cally in this case, the increasing corporatization of the publishing industry) can continue to go about its business of artistic and aesthetic commodi¤cation. The conundrum presented to conservative aestheticians, then—and to literary postmodernism as an aesthetic movement—is how to resist the further commoditization of aesthetics and art. The conservative aesthetic attempts to preserve art with insular zeal from what it perceives as any corrupting force, and its claim that art somehow exists independent of capitalist procedures should ring false to everyone but its most fervent supporters. Hence both Franzen and Peck are correct when they identify something deeply ®awed in conservative aesthetic views, but what both authors miss is that the source of the ®ow is not the disdain conservatives have for anything other than “art,” but rather a tendency of both aesthetic positions to accumulate two very disparate types of symbolic capital. Where the liberal aesthetic is devoted to the retention and dissemination of cultural capital, the conservative aesthetic is concerned with the acquisition of aesthetic capital—what endows art to be recognized as art. Conservative and liberal positions both rest on a unique recognition of the symbolic value embedded in every artwork, rightfully described by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as symbolic capital. For Bourdieu, symbolic capital is: “any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural, or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value” (Practical Reason 47), and the acquisition of symbolic capital is the underlying impetus behind all aesthetic positions. No stretch of the imagination is needed to then comprehend that the symbolic capital desired by conservative positions, with their emphasis on art, is primarily aesthetic, and therefore should be included in Bourdieu’s de¤nition. The public sphere of bourgeois readers recognize the symbolic capital of the novel precisely because every novel published connotes an act of dif¤culty—the dif¤culty incurred in writing and publishing a text. Thus the symbolic capital of a novel is preserved

The End of Agape / 175 precisely because bourgeois readers recognize dif¤culty in the novel, and thus invest the novel with speci¤c value that actually has no relation to what is written: to a novel’s text.7 This is not to say that conservative works are not “dif¤cult” or do not have dif¤cult passages, but rather to illuminate that the dif¤culty one encounters when reading a conservative text is literary dif¤culty used as a means to obtain differentiation and symbolic—in this instance, aesthetic—capital. And given that symbolic capital rests solely on cognition and recognition (Practical Reason 85), the symbolic capital of the novel is intertwined with its perceived dif¤culty, a concept that Gaddis and his postmodern inheritors understood, if only tacitly. However, to describe the acquisition of symbolic capital as nothing short of an exercise in “elitist rhetoric,” as Peck does, is to obfuscate the fact that any author or text is already subject to a predetermined method of reception and distribution set in place by a totalizing economic system. Adopting Bourdieu’s terminology, one might then say that both Peck and Franzen engage in “allodoxia”: a deliberate misapprehension or misrecognition, meant to obscure the larger context of commodity capitalism at work (Distinction 323). According to this deliberate misunderstanding, the novel gained and continues to receive its Status position simply because it re®ects the “dif¤cult” accumulation and transmission of aesthetic capital, as much as the liberal aesthetic is able to ponti¤cate on the aesthetic direction the novel should take because liberal positions re®ect the “dif¤cult” accumulation of cultural capital. Despite the fact that Peck idealizes a literature that will “write itself out of existence,” and despite Franzen’s promotion of literature that connects with readers in “friendly, egalitarian suburbs,” both authors— and most authors holding a liberal aesthetic—fail to address their own position as respected authors of “literary” works or, it might be better to say, works of “Status.” In their arguments, one form of symbolic capital is presented at the expense of another. By expressing populist cultural sentiments without actually being populist authors themselves, both authors rely on an appeal to an imaginary, allodoxic bourgeois subject in order to make their case and the essential case of liberal aesthetics in general. The conservative aesthetic indulges in an altogether different kind of allodoxia. While it is correct to read Gaddis’s novel and White’s non¤ction as cautionary tales, illustrative of how life is lived in an allodoxic society, it is wrong to imply, as both authors do, that salvation from allodoxia (false recognitions) can be achieved through attention or exposure to art.8 Just as social subject-positions have been accounted for, so too, has art been “ac-

176 / Shavers counted,” in that art exists in relation to other ¤elds of social structure, in®uence, and power. The reason conservative aesthetic movements seem like movements of an aesthetic elite is because conservative artists have to draw upon the aesthetic positions of their predecessors in order to form a suitable critique of the present, as if to say, “Here was a moment when aesthetics were .” Only in hindsight, and through free from the corrosive in®uence of deliberate misrecognition of an earlier age can such theorizing occur, because conservative artists can then focus on the literary and formal elements of the work (as literary forms are quite often transhistorical) while ignoring the cultural and social elements of a work’s content (as whatever social position or view is described in the work can be said to belong to an “unenlightened” or fundamentally “different” era of the past). What I mean is that conservative aesthetic positions over-emphasize form over content, aesthetic inquiries over social dilemmas, because they can neither rationalize nor fully separate aesthetics from other social ¤elds that allow art-making to occur (such as economics, religious and cultural ethics, the state—note well the intrusion and in®uence of state power on such issues as pornographic, seditious, or other materials which evoke questions of censorship, etc.). The conservative aesthetic, with its careful attention to form, can indeed offer quite brilliant critiques of contemporary life, but what a conservative aesthetic cannot do is offer solutions: no aesthetic position can be altogether free from art’s interdependence within other social ¤elds outside of any sole author or literary movement’s control. Instead of presenting one form of symbolic capital at the expense of another, the conservative aesthetic misguidedly tries to assert that symbolic capital exists independent of anything else, including economic power. Yet, if both liberal and conservative aesthetics result in opinions that invariably encounter an impasse, there is still a way around the systemic constrictions set up by the interrelation of one social ¤eld to another. This third way I call the “problematic” aesthetic, following Gass’s use of the adjective: The existence of a third avant-garde is more problematic. I believe there are works to which habit won’t have a chance to get us comfortably accustomed; works that will continue to resist the soothing praises of the critics, and that will rise from their tombs of received opinion to surprise us again and again. These works may pay a dreadful price for the role they have chosen to play, but if they are going to be a perma-

The End of Agape / 177 nent part of “the” avant-garde (the avant-garde common to all kinds), they must remain wild and never neglect an opportunity to attack their trainers; above all, it is the hand that feeds them which must be repeatedly bitten. They have to continue to do what the avant-garde is supposed to do: shatter stereotypes, shake things up, and keep things moving; offer fresh possibilities to a jaded understanding; encourage a new consciousness; revitalize the creative spirit of the medium; and, above all, challenge the skills and ambitions of every practitioner. (“Vicissitudes” 205) Gass essentially outlines a dual aesthetics concerned with the form of the novel and the forms the novel may take, but also concerned that the novel should not codify its formal approach(es) so that form is privileged to the detriment of everything else. Gass describes novels that explore and push aesthetic possibilities to the limit,9 but also simultaneously engage the tenuous relation of the novel to other, larger social ¤elds. Samuel L. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Percival Everett’s Erasure, and even Gaddis’s J R are all novels representative of literary postmodernism, but “problematic” in the sense that they cannot be easily classi¤ed, categorized as belonging to either a conservative or liberal aesthetic camp. These novels rebuke the easily digested messages of received opinion put forth by the liberal aesthetic (e.g., racial discrimination is bad, and multiculturalism good), equally as much as they reject aesthetic conservatism’s retreat to formal exercises and past literary ¤gures as a means to a forever-deferred end. The problematic aesthetic seeks to renew art by forging links with its historical past as well as the in®uences brought to bear upon art in the contemporary present. Yet in order to do so, “It cannot be satis¤ed merely to complain of the frivolities of a king’s court or to count the crimes of capitalism or to castigate the middle class for its persistent vulgarity” (“Vicissitudes” 205). Rather than present itself as a mere voice for entertainment (the weak liberal position) or as a medium for the common cause of its readers (the strong liberal view), or alternatively function as a sophisticated social critique without acknowledgement of its complicity in preserving the status quo (the strong conservative view), or call for a return to formal aesthetic study as a common cause with common sense (the weak conservative view), the problematic aesthetic must—and does—do all it can to show how ultimately what matters is neither the content of art (the liberal supposition) nor the form that art takes (the conservative supposition); on the contrary, what matters is the survival

178 / Shavers of the wedding of artistic forms to social imagination—essentially, a reductive de¤nition of the aesthetic ¤eld and its relation to other ¤elds of power. All this to say that Agape Agape vocalizes a strong conservative aesthetic, yes; but Gaddis’s oeuvre, when regarded in its entirety, is much more “problematic” in terms of aesthetic valuation than it might initially seem. Given his almost obsessive attention to the ¤elds that identify, de¤ne, and compose a society (art, the economy, international and interpersonal relations, the law, and forms of entertainment, listed in chronological order according to each ¤ctional work, respectively) Gaddis does indeed manage to identify each ¤eld’s inherent shortcomings, as well as portray the in®uence of one ¤eld upon another. To take the economic ¤eld, for example, we can see how no matter whether it’s the forging of art masterpieces in The Recognitions, or the manipulation of the stock market in J R, or the legal entanglements that arise from the Cyclone 7 sculpture in A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis indicates how both art and aesthetic beliefs, in a capitalist system that seeks the largest amount of entertainment for the greatest number of people for the greatest pro¤t, quickly become reduced to yet further items of commerce. Not only does Gaddis’s depiction correctly illustrate the interrelation of supposedly separate ¤elds in power and in®uence, his observation on the con®ation of economics and art also pervades all of his works. Consider for instance, the imaginary conversation between Walter Benjamin and Johan Huizinga in Agape Agape: “[T]his massive technical reproduction of works of art could be manipulated, changed the way masses looked at art and manipulated them. Inadvertently, Mr. Benjamin, you might say that art now became public property [ . . . ] Positively Mr. Benjamin, with mechanization, advertising artworks made directly for a market what America’s all about. Always has been, Mr. Huizinga. Always has been, Mr. Benjamin. Everything becomes an item of commerce and the market names the price” (34). If everything, including one’s aesthetic position, has become an item of commerce, then allodoxia—deliberate misrecognition of the economic and social uses of art—pays quite well. In other words, the adversarial points of view between liberal and conservative aesthetics has launched careers, ensured reputations, and most importantly, increased the symbolic—aesthetic and cultural—capital of numerous authors and critics; nevertheless, the greatest gain is not to be had by either the readers or writers of literature, but by those institutions that control literature’s commoditization and dissemination; the greatest gain to be had is ¤nancial, and the money goes to those who distribute art in the public sphere.

The End of Agape / 179 If so, then Agape Agape, despite its aesthetic conservatism, can be read as part of Gaddis’s larger literary pattern, an elegy for a social order that perpetuates itself by eliminating the autonomous individual and propagating the mythmaking automaton in its place. And the myth of the artist in isolation, oblivious to the ways in which the symbolic capital of his work is manipulated, is equally as destructive as the myth of the artist as true agent of social change. In either respect, the apparatus that obfuscates the interrelations of social forces and social power are still in place. What Gaddis’s oeuvre helps to show is how allodoxia, an intentional, deliberate misreading of the workings of commodity capital, is practiced by many, all in the name of art and aesthetic communities. Thus the problem any author faces when de¤ning and supporting an aesthetic position is the lack of agape, charitable love from his peers without which a work of provocative, problematic art can only be seen, like an unwelcome guest, as either too pandering, or too “dif¤cult.” Further still, because charitable love toward an aesthetic position, like everything else in a capitalist society, is a commodity that can be manipulated, bartered and exchanged for social, symbolic, and ¤nancial gain, the sad state of contemporary affairs is that for far too many aesthetic positions have become, for far too long, just another misunderstanding of art and art’s relation to social power: allodoxia by any other name. Gaddis’s work, like the provocative, problematic aesthetic Gass describes and literary postmodernism attempts to embody, does point a way out of this aesthetic conundrum, but in order to achieve such a thing, the readers and writers who constitute a literary public must ¤rst learn not only how to recognize and accept problematic, problematizing artistic difference, but also learn how to love it.

Notes 1. For perhaps the most sophisticated and well-thought-out explanation of the liberal aesthetic position on the “common man’s” relation to art, readers should turn to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Gaddis was introduced to Benjamin’s work rather late in his career but he immediately recognized common ground with the great theorist of “aura.” 2. The interventions of Critical Race Theory have been most effective in illustrating the racialized politics embedded in Universalist claims and their application to literary texts, but by privileging the subject position of the author over the aesthetic and/or formal composition of the work, Critical Race Theory tends to reinscribe racial categories in literature even as it seeks to de-racialize the aesthetic question of who determines and what exactly constitutes “literary” ¤ction.

180 / Shavers 3. The theory of Status and Contract in the age of capitalism, it should be said, did not originate with Franzen. It goes back to Max Weber, and allusions to Weber’s theory appear on page 393 of J R (Tabbi, Conjunctions 406), page 52 of Agape Agape, and on page 47 in The Rush for Second Place. Given that Franzen has professed to reading up to page 469 of J R, he might well have discovered the terminology while reading Gaddis, against Gaddis—another reason why “Mr. Dif¤cult” can be read as an exercise in duplicity. 4. Several writers and critics who take Franzen to task for his opinions are Rodrigo Fresán (394–95); Joseph McElroy (402); Christopher Sorrentino (405); Joseph Tabbi (406); and most prominently, Ben Marcus (380), in the pages of Conjunctions 41. With varying degrees of severity, they attack both the idea of a “dif¤cult” novel, and Franzen’s estimation of Gaddis in particular. 5. For perhaps the best explanation of the account of the bourgeois public sphere of readers and its twentieth-century degeneration into spheres of publicity, I refer readers to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I am indebted to the Habermasian description of the breakdown of once-unitary social categories into competing subcategories, but space and a desire to focus on aesthetic evaluations of novels and novelists prevent me from going into too much detail here. 6. Scenes of racialization and racist caricature are indeed present in Gaddis’s works, most notably in depictions of Fuller’s minstrelsy (The Recognitions), a Conradian Africa in Carpenter’s Gothic, and Basie’s jive in A Frolic of His Own. The essay on Gaddis and race has yet to written, and apart from a few acute observations by Anne Furlong and Jeff Bursey in this volume, a full-scale feminist analysis of Gaddis’s ¤ction is well past due. 7. In the October 2005 issue of Harper’s magazine, writer Ben Marcus takes on Franzen again in an essay titled, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Marcus uses scienti¤cally accredited reading tests such as the Fog Index point spread and the SMOG-Grading System, among others, to prove how Franzen’s The Corrections is actually a more dif¤cult read than Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own. I mention this because Marcus helps to point out that dif¤culty as a form of symbolic capital is inherent to text, but dif¤culty as a form of symbolic capital is not necessarily inherent to all other forms of media: television, for instance. That said, Marcus then goes on to show how Franzen’s rather abusive claims to want to protect the novel (as a form of media) are actually detrimental to the novel as locus of symbolic capital. 8. In White’s defense, however, it should be noted that his solution to contemporary allodoxia is a call for a “pragmatic sublime” in American art (189–91). Yet what White fails to do is illustrate exactly how we should attempt to arrive at this sublime pragmatism when the allodoxia engendered by commodity capitalism is so enthralling and pervasive. I do not take issue with his solution so much as I wonder how it is to be embodied, enacted, brought about. The solution I ¤nd White posits then is a call for others to think of solutions, and in that manner, he ¤ts in with other weak

The End of Agape / 181 conservative aestheticians who posit artistic forms to follow, but no means by which to follow these forms, or examples these forms take. 9. One can draw a corollary between the Russian formalism of the 1920s and 1930s and the pragmatic aesthetic, but where the movements differ is in the emphasis they place on de-familiarization. Where the Russian formalists sought to emphasize de-familiarization, the pragmatic aesthetic seeks to emphasize how unfamiliar contemporary readers are with the in®uence of other social ¤elds on art. A pragmatic aesthetic doesn’t attempt to de-familiarize what readers already know as much as it seeks to make readers aware of their own short-sightedness and collusion with the structures of social dominance and power.

IV Media

11 Writing from between the Gaps Agape Agape and Twentieth-Century Media Culture Michael Wutz

As this page of work notes for Agape Agape attests, William Gaddis’s interest in the intersections of art, entertainment, and technology certainly did not diminish over time. If anything, his posthumously published novel serves as proof that his interest increased with age. In “Writing from between the Gaps,” Michael Wutz explains how Agape Agape should be read as a Foucaultian “genealogy,” except that unlike many of Foucault’s genealogies, the topic of Gaddis’s work concerns both American media and American media culture. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

186 / Wutz

 [Corthell] came back to the organ and detached the self-playing “arrangement” without comment. . . . The moment was propitious. The artist’s pro¤le silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard. And on this keyboard, full in the re®ection, lay his long, slim hands. They were the only things that moved in the room, and the chords and bars of Mendelssohn’s “Consolation” seemed, as he played, to ®ow not from the instrument, but, like some invisible ether, from his ¤nger-tips themselves. —Frank Norris, The Pit And by that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano. —E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

William Gaddis is widely known for not being known better. Despite winning the National Book Award for ¤ction twice, in 1976 and 1994, he is and has always been, in a contemporary formulation, an absent presence in current curricula and reading lists. Recognized as the brilliant author of gargantuan novels that have rede¤ned the limits of ambitious ¤ction, he has never had the luxury of falling into oblivion, always having been consigned to the gaps of Who’s Who in the of¤cial world of letters. Lesser known still—if such a formulation is appropriate to Gaddis in the ¤rst place—is that Gaddis had a lifelong preoccupation with the history of the player piano and its effect on the position of art in twentieth-century American culture. Gaddis diehards, of course, may remember that in J R, the young hero’s crumbling ¤nancial empire sports a “General Roll” corporation that, originally, was a manufacturer of piano rolls. Furthermore, one of the characters in the novel, Jack Gibbs, shares bits and pieces of a player piano project, “a social history of mechanization and the arts” (237), with the motley crew surrounding him. That history was, however, to remain as un¤nished as was Gaddis’s own. Only the posthumous publication of The Rush for Second Place and Agape Agape have brought into full view Gaddis’s sustained interest in the history of mechanized music, and furthermore suggest that Gibbs’s scattered pronouncements are part of a piece.1 As a sampling of Gaddis’s archive—ostensibly as vast (and only now being mined) as Gaddis’s ¤ction itself—and a ¤rst collection of essays (many hitherto unpublished), including

Writing from between the Gaps / 187 several on the player piano, Second Place enables the reader to glimpse the outlines of a cultural project that preoccupied Gaddis for half a century, and further suggests that, certainly at the beginning of his career, the road toward ¤ction writing was a road not yet unequivocally taken. Agape Agape, in turn, reads like a series of slender re®ective miniatures by a frail and geriatric voice fearful of death and painfully cognizant that the history of the player piano will forever remain incomplete. Hence, one presumes, Gaddis’s decision to transmute social history into savvy ¤ction, into the interior monologue of a singular consciousness, alternately keen and hallucinatory, blending personal anguish with cultural commentary.2 The suture between protagonist and author, always razor thin in Gaddis’s work, has here been rendered virtually transparent, and is further accentuated by the obvious: the heft and substance of Gaddis’s early work has been compressed into a textual substrate in which every line counts.3 For these reasons, differences in length and volume notwithstanding, Agape Agape can be seen as “a ¤nal impassioned outburst summing up [Gaddis’s] half-century inquisition of American civilization” (Moore, Conjunctions 387), a reprise of the themes orchestrating his entire oeuvre: entropy, plagiarism, the pressures of capitalism, the threat of mass culture to artistic authenticity, and the continued viability of literature—Gaddis weaves them into the evolution of the player piano, which emerges as a symbolic register for the modern-day rush toward mechanization and rationalization and as a key link in the development of data processing technologies. We can observe in Gaddis a series of relays carrying authentic art, mechanized music, and the fear of technological disembodiment into the media ecology of the twentieth-century. These relays, and their cultural importance for literary narrative, have helped to de¤ne a distinctively American “bodymachine complex,” in Mark Seltzer’s phrase, under development since the late nineteenth century (3). Where does the body end and the machine begin? How does the notion of agency have to be resituated in an industrial culture, and what does that mean for the so-called autonomy—artistic and otherwise—of the subject, that utopian bubble of the Enlightenment presuming individual self-reliance? Further, what does it mean to be a writer in such a high-tech world, when the idea of book-keeping, so literary in its phraseology, conjures up visions of bureaucratic control and data management at odds with the craft of writing? These are some of the questions central to Gaddis’s aesthetic, and they indicate his location within the mainstream of American literature.

188 / Wutz The work of Rebecca Harding Davis, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, among others, indeed, has pushed these questions to the forefront. Following Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Michael Fried, for example, has shown how Stephen Crane, writing in an industrialized world championing manuscript output and word counts, was preoccupied with a general thematics of writing. Crane, Fried notes, “unwittingly, obsessionally, and . . . automatically metamorphized writing and the production of writing . . . in images, passages, and . . . entire narratives that hitherto have wholly escaped being read in those terms” (Realism 120, Fried’s emphasis). Crane’s work lays bare his ¤xation on the scene of writing, understood as a material practice, side by side with a profound fear of it. That which typically remains invisible, namely, the act of writing itself, pushes through in Crane’s network of tropes to reveal a profound anxiety about textual production in an industrialized culture. The upturned and faceless faces in his work express not only the blank page needing to be blanketed with signs but also an allegorized fear of authorial facelessness in the wake of mechanized modes of production.4 Gaddis, I would submit, reveals similar anxieties and preoccupations in Agape Agape. Unlike Fried, however, whose analysis of the scene of writing is fundamentally deconstructive, I bring a more media-theoretical focus to my discussion of Agape Agape drawing, as I do, on the work of Friedrich Kittler and, to a lesser degree, on Walter Benjamin (on whom Gaddis himself draws). The virtue of media-theoretical analysis is that it emphasizes the way a discourse is embedded in the technologies that produced it (not least the literary “discourse networks” designated by the terms, “naturalism,” “realism,” or “modernism”). More importantly, such a media-based reading can show how Gaddis himself, in J R no less than in Agape Agape, works in effect as a literary media theorist. What I hope will emerge from the following discussion is not only Gaddis’s own media-oriented focus, but also that his interests in a (visible and repressed) thematics of writing, and in art and authenticity, in Agape Agape are part of a literary mainstream: of a piece with the work of Crane, Norris, and Dreiser. If Gaddis, as Tom LeClair has noted, is one of a cadre of “scienti¤cally and aesthetically sophisticated naturalists,” a “re-modern” novelist rewriting the turn-of-the-century literary traditions (Excess 17), he brings the naturalist body-machine complex up to date by engaging his late modernist sensibilities with the contemporary media landscape in which his work partakes.

Writing from between the Gaps / 189

Preliminary Considerations—“Secret” History and the Undoing of Either/Or The scholarly quality of Agape Agape as a projected media technological study, even as it presents itself as a ¤rst-person ¤ction, is fully evident in the numerous references to the narrator’s research. Sifting through his “stack of papers” on the player piano and “getting the whole chronology in order 1876 to 1929” (Agape Agape 6), he returns repeatedly to what was, most likely, his animating concern: “my whole thesis entertainment the parent of technology” (45).5 Speci¤cally, the narrator retraces numerous and frequently unacknowledged links between individual technological achievements and how, collectively, they brought about revolutionary change: thousands of years of tinkering with mechanical dolls and ¤gures eventually yielded the ingenious duck and ®ute player of Vaucanson; and the successive contributions of Pascal, Leibnitz, and others to a mechanical means of computation prepared the ground for Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the early nineteenth century. But while Babbage is frequently considered the “grandfather of the modern computer,” the narrator notes that the latter “got his idea from Jacquard’s loom” (operated and controlled by a punch card strip), and Jacquard, in turn, rode on the coat tails of Vaucanson’s ingenuity when he reopened the toy-maker’s abandoned textile factory in Lyons. Jacquard, we are told, “picks up the pieces of Vaucanson’s mechanical loom for ¤gured silks, glues the pieces together, and we’ve got Jacquard’s loom” (8–10).6 As modes of control, whether to regulate the air ®ow or ¤nger movements of mechanical dolls or the production of textiles, such punch cards usher in a cybernetic regime of data and bits, and a regime that is epitomized in “the epidemic” of the player piano, “the plague spreading across America a hundred years ago with its punched paper roll at the heart of the whole thing, of the frenzy of invention and mechanization and democracy and how to have art without the artist” (11). Camou®aged as an instrument of pleasure, the self-playing machine represented almost imperceptibly the increasing shift toward quanti¤cation and measurability that de¤nes Western modernity: “Analysis, measure, prediction and control, the elimination of failure through programmed organization, the player emerged as a distillation of the goals that had surrounded its gestation in an orgy of fragmented talents seeking after the useful” (“Agape,” Second Place 13). This orgy included ¤gures such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose time-motion studies sought to eliminate

190 / Wutz productive inef¤ciencies from the movements of American laborers; John Dewey, whose decidedly American emphasis on a philosophical pragmatism shunned, in Gaddis’s estimate, theoretical questions about the enabling conditions of a technocratic regime; and, among numerous noteworthy contemporaries, Herman Hollerith, whose algorithms presided over the mathematical intricacies of the ¤rst U.S. Census in 1890 and, eventually, led to “IBM and NCR and the whole driven world we’ve inherited from some rinky-dink piano roll” (43).7 Laying bare such often hidden political and technological synergies is no small feat and testi¤es to Gaddis’s astonishing knowledge as a cultural historian. While other Gaddisian compositions have been said to parade erudition as “an ostentatious display of intellectual elitism” or as “manifestations of pretentiousness” ( Jackson 3), the textured tapestry of player piano history in Agape Agape suggests, especially if seen in the context of the essays paralleling it, a rich understanding of a unique cultural phenomenon that compresses a half-century of research (cobbled together as much of it is from newspaper clippings and advertising brochures) into a treasure trove of insights.8 In particular, Gaddis’s subterranean methodology associates his work avant la lettre (considering that it dates back to the late 1940s) with Michel Foucault’s ingenious genealogies or, perhaps more appropriately still, with Michel Serres’s practice of locating and negotiating “Northwest passages” through various disciplines (qtd. in Hermes xi). Similar to his own mantra that the universe is awash in “the tide of entropy” (Agape 5), that “chaos, . . . disorder, . . . discontinuity, disparity, difference, discord” are the only constants in the world (2), and ever-shifting constants at that, Serres believes in the “universal principle of disorder” perforated, momentarily and locally, by pockets of structure and order (Hermes xxvii). And similar to Serres’s theorem that knowledge is always “local, distributed haphazardly in a plurality of spaces” (Hermes xiii), Gaddis’s aggregate of knowledge reaches across disciplinary boundaries to produce punctual and nonauthoritarian (though author-controlled) insights, cogent and persuasive as such insights may well be. “The sheer tension the energy” (78), as Gaddis’s narrator describes the vibrant oscillations between Dionysus and Apollo in The Birth of Tragedy, is in¤nitely more interesting and quickening than the reductive concentration on any one pole or knowledge domain. Above all, such dynamic interplay locates meaning in the gap between the ones and zeroes, between the binaries of Norbert Wiener’s “all-or-none machine” (4), precisely because mean-

Writing from between the Gaps / 191 ing is all about (and through) these interstices. Agape Agape offers, hence, a “secret,” which is to say, heterogeneous and multidisciplinary, as opposed to a one-dimensional or of¤cial, history of the player piano. The history may well be “potted,” as Hal Foster has noted (14), but this pottedness seems precisely the point because a concentration on the development of a single, apparently “dead” technology resists any fall into the presumption of a historical master narrative. As Foster himself notes, “history always sticks together its pieces in partial and passionate fashion” (“Aporia!” 14). Its very title so stuck together, Agape Agape presents a story without beginning and end: “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Roland Barthes cit. in “Old Foes,” Second Place 97).9 Let’s take a closer look at some of those gaps, at the discords and harmonies arising out of the player piano’s perforated history.

Homo Faber, Homo Ludens, Homo Mechanicus— From Performance to Perforation Virtually all of Gaddis’s concerns involving the player piano are encapsulated in his ¤rst national publication in the Atlantic Monthly in 1951. In “the brave new world” of turn-of-the-century America, he noted, the player held the promise of indiscriminate consumer satisfaction: “the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none” (“Stop Player,” Second Place 2). In a second early essay on the technology, he turned a jaundiced eye on the promise of universal ease, which he quoted from an advertisement: “there is no one in all the world, having the use of hands and feet, who could not learn to use it with but little effort. . . . The striking of the notes of the selection, in proper time and place, is no concern of the player. This is correctly done by perforated rolls of paper” (“Agape,” Second Place 11–12). Hard work, effort, and the gift of artistic creation nourished over long periods of time—all the virtues that, in theory and practice, are behind the achievements of genuine art and cultural progress, have been bypassed by the player to feed into a consumer paradise driven by pleasure, ease, and entertainment. The player piano denies blood, sweat, and tears—indeed, denial itself—in favor of instant grati¤cation, and thus becomes, ironically, an instrument commensurate with the country’s presumption of political equality, now extended into the domain of the arts.

192 / Wutz Not everybody agreed with such a diagnosis of artistic erasure and cultural atrophy. Gaddis was aware that the photographer Alvin Landon Coburn had given well-received recitals on the player piano and published a volume, titled The Pianola as a Means of Personal Expression, to press for the machine’s recognition. In his “Chronology,” Gaddis records that Coburn believed the reproducing piano to be “an instrument for the artist; taking 2 hrs. practice a day for a year to master it” (Second Place 168). Rex Lawson, the roll cutter for the Pianola world premiere of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, similarly claimed that a “pianolist” should be awarded the status as artist. While “relieved of the necessity of pushing down the notes of the piano with his own ¤ngers,” he observed, the operator “must nevertheless control the dynamic force of them all with the pressures of his feet; he must acquire a subtle and ®uent use of the tempo lever; and his left hand must carry out the functions of sustaining and una corda, which his feet are too preoccupied to manage.” As with Coburn, Lawson observed that the player piano “takes years of practice to master” (“Stravinsky,” Second Place 286, 296). As well, some composers saw in the mechanical piano new resources of expression far extending those of the traditional piano or orchestra. Australian pianist Percy Grainger noted that, “from the viewpoint of the composer,” the Duo-Art Pianola is an instrument “with perhaps broader possibilities even than the piano” (qtd. in Roehl 73). And Igor Stravinsky not only composed speci¤cally for the new instrument, such as the “Etude for Pianola,” to capture its speci¤cally mechanical timbre and rhythm, but also saw in the player piano an opportunity for adapting his orchestral work to an instrument that had, “on the one hand, unlimited possibilities of precision, velocity, and polyphony, but which, on the other, constantly presented serious dif¤culties in establishing dynamic relationships. These tasks developed and exercised my imagination by constantly presenting new problems of an instrumental nature closely connected with the questions of acoustics, harmony, and part writing” (Autobiography 101).10 Had Gaddis in Agape Agape been interested in the heteroglossia of voices that he orchestrated so masterfully in J R, he might have appreciated Stravinsky’s magnanimous claim that, “There is a new polyphonic truth in the player-piano” (“New Music” 329). His novella, however, is focused not on a multiplicity of discourses, but rather on culling a single and genuine voice from the cacophony of voices pressing in on the narrative persona. For that reason, though not without ambiguity, Gaddis grasps another reason for the attraction felt by pianists and composers for the player: its capacity for an

Writing from between the Gaps / 193 early version of high-¤delity sound reproduction. Claude Debussy, Edvard Grieg, and George Gershwin, among others, saw in the player—particularly in the Welte-Mignon and Duo-Art Pianola pianos—a technology “that didn’t just record the notes but [inscribed] more perforations that actually reproduced all the shadings and subtleties of the artist,” leaving a sound record of the utmost ¤delity far surpassing those of high-end gramophones (Agape Agape 39). Such recordings facilitated consumer access (if only among the af®uent) and ensured both artistic integrity and control.11 As Stravinsky put it: “In order to prevent distortion of my compositions by future interpreters, I had always been anxious to ¤nd a means of imposing some restriction on the notorious liberty . . . which prevent the public from obtaining a correct idea of the author’s intentions. This possibility was now afforded by the rolls of the mechanical piano, and, a little later, by gramophone records” (Autobiography 101). Gaddis was similarly interested in authentic reproduction and artistic control. The narrative persona of Agape Agape is throughout obsessed with putting his affairs in order and engages in a kind of literary estate planning, to “get it all sorted and organized” (1); at one point, he even recalls the famous case of Nietzsche’s sister who compromised her brother’s “immortality” by publishing “a completely corrupted pasted together jumble called The Will to Power as his ¤nal work” (78). Composers of literature, no less than those of music, want to preserve the integrity of their work and protect “the author’s intention” against future forgery and adulteration. Surely, a narrative voice about to lose his voice forever cannot but be attuned to what piano rolls do best: play back, that is, play back posthumously, and with minimal manipulations, the prerecorded work of art especially if the work is as quick and mercurial—entropic, really—as Agape Agape. The thematic preoccupation with piano rolls, in that sense, serves as a perfect equivalent to the volatile modulations of style and form. Indeed, in what amounts to a technological breakthrough of the ¤rst order, as the Agape persona himself observes, what the reproducing pianos have done “was to make the transient permanent, given the ®eeting nature of music of great performances . . . a permanence that’s the heart of authenticity” (40). For that very reason, one could suggest, Gaddis committed the sin—up to this point, considered unpardonable by Gaddis himself—of a media breach: the transgressive switch, at the very end of his career, from print to the more oral and auditory form of a radio play entitled Torschlußpanik on which much of the published Agape Agape is based. The writer who had orchestrated the

194 / Wutz spoken word in his literary symphonies produced a monologue (however polyphonic) written for a radio broadcast, and thus closed a medial feedback loop that had, from the very beginning, been written into his work: the shift from transcribing a world of overheard bits and pieces to a single (autobiographical) persona sorting out the talking heads inhabiting him, and the consequent rede¤nition of a mass medium from a source of white noise to a legitimate vehicle of genuine art and communication. Gaddis may have felt comfortable entrusting a script to the performative orality of the radio because, I suspect, it afforded him a de facto authenticity and exposure similar to that anticipated by the high-¤delity recordings of the player pianos. As well, the radio performance returned him to an earlier, previsual technological order that was dominant during his childhood and youth, and hence attuned him to all the noises and speeches of the world, arguably even shaping the very core of his narrative sensibilities.12 To prevent the doors of literary recognition from shutting all the way, to return to his formative aural medium, and to secure his authenticity beyond print—“left unmarried on the shelf,” as the Agape narrator playfully de¤nes the German Torschlußpanik (81)—he may have sought a productive synergy of print- and voice-based media that he saw ful¤lled in his radio script for the Deutschlandfunk. Radio gave him belated voice recognitions that he might otherwise not have had.13 This late embrace of radio by Gaddis might be said to enact in his work a return of the technological repressed: as if the buried radio of Gibbs in J R, whose broadcasts circulate like disembodied utterances through the novel, is symbolically raised to the surface and given a belated legitimacy. What was once a discarded narrative voice, an overheard leftover disrupting conversations, is now—in Agape Agape—the voice making conversations (with iterations of itself ) possible. Yet what Gaddis was centrally concerned about, of course—in Agape Agape and his other work—was precisely this vocal authenticity and its degradation through reproduction, and the degradation, in turn, of artistic genius to a replay entertainer. In a well-known essay that surfaces repeatedly in Agape Agape, Walter Benjamin suggested that “the earliest art works originated in the service of the ritual,” the magical or religious communion among a community through the binding vehicle of a quasi-sacred object. “The unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art”—which is to say, art possessing a spatiotemporal uniqueness or “aura”—has “its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value” (“Art” 223). With the advent of mass repro-

Writing from between the Gaps / 195 duction in all forms in the late-nineteenth century, however, as well as the parallel decline of religion, art was dissolved from its spiritual context: “for the ¤rst time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (“Art” 224). From which Agape ’s narrative persona extrapolates, in the spirit of Benjamin, that while mass (re)production may allow for the storage and transmission of art, it also allows for “Mona Lisa and the Last Supper” becoming “calendar art hanging over the kitchen sink” (38), and “socalled legendary performances” becoming cannon fodder for “these enormous markets of the non-musical” who have “no true sense of musical values” (41). Instead of once-in-a-lifetime concerts, such as the Paganini heard by the persona’s grandmother, artistic genius is reduced to a machined strip of perforations replayable ad in¤nitum. More importantly still, Gaddis was fearful of the disembodiment brought about by the increasing mechanization of art and culture and the consequent march of dis-authentication. Consider, for example, the repeated focus on hands, not as an index of humanness and self-expression, but—what is more prominent in light of the ubiquitous severance of art from the body—as a marker of mechanization, which is to say, dehumanization. In an early draft of the player project, Gaddis conjures up an ironic vision of the country in which “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them” (“Agape,” Second Place 11). Early “Educator” piano rolls, as the Agape narrator recalls, claimed to teach the public “how to play the piano with their hands nothing doing,” urging that “You can play better by roll than many by hand” (14–15). Testimonials by deceased pianists about the virtues of player recordings announced that “many of these artists will never play again, but their phantom hands will live forever” (15). A pamphlet of the Wurlitzer Harp—“six feet six about Frankenstein’s mimic’s height”—shows the instrument “in full view covered by glass offering the opportunity watching the ¤ngers (almost human) pick the strings” (32). And in his ¤lm script on the use of software, when he presents a fully embodied human being, Gaddis opens with a man ostensibly playing a piano “though we cannot see his hands on the keys.” Then, once the camera cuts to the man sitting at the piano from behind, it turns out that “the man is unable to play it,” but instead sits in front of a player piano driven by a punched paper roll, his putative manual skills having been usurped by a machine (“Treatment,” Second Place

196 / Wutz 16). In each instance, hands have been severed from human bodies or become mechanical, self-acting agents, or, as in the last instance, preempted by a strip of coded perforations. In an immediate sense, and in every case, this disjoining of limbs from the body and of extremities taking on a life of their own is intimately related to Gaddis’s writing practice. The sustained association between piano playing and writing and between hands and “felt-tipped wooden ¤ngers,” of course, urge comparison to the scene of writing, especially the work on a keyboard as analogous forms of artistic expression. But while the piano is the medium without which a pianist would not exist, a writer could easily choose to write with pen or pencil—write “by hand,” that is—and still be a writer. Indeed, as Friedrich Kittler has established, unlike more immediately embodied forms of writing such as hand-held instruments, a typewriter “creates in the proper position on a paper a complete letter, which is not only untouched by the writer’s hand but is also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work” (Beyerlen, cit. in Kittler, Discourse Networks 195). Thus, while the piano keyboard may be said to afford full reembodiment in the act of playing, because the piano is the medium sine qua non, the typewriter keyboard may drive asunder the link between body and act, between the physical self and its material investment in letters—letters that are always fully formed and imprinted without the imperfect subtleties of a guiding hand. The Agape persona, certainly, is more fully at home in the world of hand writing, penciling, and annotating, and Gaddis himself “was one of the last two-¤ngered typists” who, “in the course of numerous pauses” while writing,” became disconcerted to hear his eleven-year old daughter typing away uninterrupted” (Caponegro, Conjunctions 385). The manual dislocations built into the typewriter, to whom most writers today have become thoroughly inured, may, for Gaddis, have been redoubled by his own unskilled use of the machine. When the Agape persona, in one of the text’s enfolded doppelgänger constellations, slips in a quotation from Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete—with the narrator observing that “if I hadn’t met Glenn [Gould] I wouldn’t have given up the piano” (38)—he may express not only a change in artistic venue (in virtuosity, really) but also allude to his preoccupation as a writer whose sphere of material embodiment has shrunk from ten ¤ngers to two.14 In an even more immediate sense, particularly with regard to Agape Agape, this severance—or better, this gaping wound between body and self—was connected to Gaddis’s own impending disembodiment, his death, and the

Writing from between the Gaps / 197 resultant anxiety about lost agency and control. Time and again, the Agape persona is, literally and painfully, aware of his condition. Like Tristram Shandy, who ends up being terminally ill and writing against the pressures of a life petering out, the narrative I registers that his body is “being dismantled piece by piece.” His leg is “layered with staples like [an] old suit of Japanese armour” (1), and his skin, feeling “like tissue paper blotches” and “dry old parchment” (26, 11), have made the body itself a kind of brittle writing surface. The “back of my hand,” he notes, is laced with “little criss-crosses,” and the hands themselves have ostensibly lost their mobility and function: “goodbye to that hidden talent, those ghostly ¤ngers hard as petri¤ed wood,” or, as he reiterates on the same page, “the waste, tiny felt-tipped wooden ¤ngers turned to stone look at mine, keep my hands” (18). While the persona experiences the literal effects of radiation and prednisone in these instances, such as immunocompromise and a sloughing off of the skin, he also re®ects on the loss of personal agency and control brought on by disease: his hands just won’t let him do anymore what he was used to doing. What lurks behind this hold of hands is ultimately a kind of double recognition that alternates between the fear that technology brings about the disembodiment of art—hence its inauthenticity as mass-made artifact—and the acknowledgment, fundamentally romantic, that artistic creation always entails an element of the irrational, not subject to the controlling ethos of technological programming. Thus, while part of Gaddis and his persona want to exercise control over both the making of art and its subsequent dissemination as a completed product, the other Gaddis surrenders, albeit not altogether willingly, to the control of the uncontrollable. He associates himself with a string of possessed artists—from Keats and Beethoven to Baudelaire and Nietzsche—who at the peak of their genius created under the in®uence, enacting in effect what Gaddis said of one of his literary heroes: “Of his books [Samuel] Butler himself said, ‘I never make them; they grow; they come to me and insist on being written’ ” (“Erewhon,” Second Place 86). Gaddis’s persona ¤nds himself occupied, repeatedly, by “these phantom hands” and—reaching back to the primal scene of possessed creation and censorship—by “Homer’s dangerous demon with its own life and energy you can’t control force you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise, everything Plato wants to banish” (Agape 76). As well, he once again relates himself to the genius of Gould, who “cut his thumb on the keys in his exuberant ¤nale” of a concerto, as if to suggest, not just Gaddis’s own golden swan song, but also the danger of manual injury—the lack of full rational control—in

198 / Wutz moments of possession (38). Indeed, in a further uncanny parallel, the bedridden narrator is brought back to reality from a frenzied spurt of writing when he accidentally sticks himself, not with a syringe, but “a sharp pencil” that concludes in a howl of (and to) the high priest of authenticity, “Mr Benjamowww!” (35). These repossessed hands and demons temporarily inhabit the artist, in synch with conscious focus and purpose, and so allow for the cultural critique of a system predicated on the very notion of technological control and predictability. For one, Gaddis insists that any form of art must always, by de¤nition, be embodied art—even if the body is failing and about to lose its capacity for making signs and leaving traces. The great dream, so dear to information utopianists, that art can be free from the material constraints governing the mortal world is an exercise of wishful thinking, a ®ight of fancy blind to the realities of our ®esh-and-blood existence. With N. Katherine Hayles, Gaddis would agree that “mak[ing] information lose its body” entails a monstrous act of denial, not unlike the cultural repression of our sexual and bodily functions in a Freudian sense. Thinking housed in human bodies, in Gaddis’s and Hayles’s view, is part of a “complexity too unruly to ¤t into disembodied ones and zeroes” (Posthuman 13). Similarly, on a cognitive level, whether one wants to call it af®atus, demon, incubus of inspiration, or the unconscious, Gaddis insists on a spark of human agency that cannot be predicted or codi¤ed into and onto a strip of perforations. Plato’s border patrol is being kept busy by subversive literary agents insisting on their unquanti¤able quantum of humanly creative freedom that cannot be pressed into the service of the state, or into the ones and zeros of programming languages. Ironically opposing the very “technology the artist created,” the artist embodies the measure of entropy that very system wants reduced to zero: all are “barricades against this fear of chance, of probability and indeterminacy” (50). Otherwise, as the persona laments, the writer is in danger of being absorbed into the apparatuses of information processing, “this grand billion byte technology.” He runs the risk of becoming complicit in the structures of power surrounding him and of sacri¤cing “that hidden talent, those ghostly ¤ngers,” already “hard as petri¤ed wood,” to the “all-or-none ranks of order in those dusty piano rolls become chips in gigantic computer systems whose operators are at the mercy of the systems they’ve designed, programmed” (18). Such a concern parallels Jean-François Lyotard’s argument that a regime of bits, evolved as it is from a regime of punch cards, dramatically reduces

Writing from between the Gaps / 199 human agency, its ®ashy rhetoric of empowerment notwithstanding. “When we are dealing with bits, there’s no longer any question of free forms given here and now to sensibility and the imagination.” On the contrary, agency and art in a world of gigabytes become predictable entities “assembled into systems following a set of possibilities (a ‘menu’) under the control of a programmer” (The Inhuman 34). Such a concern also reduces not just the process of writing, but reading as well to a simple toggling between either/or and eliminates the entropic residue or signifying gaps Gaddis was so keen on keeping agape. And, of course, such a concern points to ¤lm and television as the media leading the frontal assault on whatever resistant pockets of autonomous subjects are still out there. Exit Wurlitzer, enter Warner Brothers.

From Homer to Homer Simpson— Media Ecology and the Novel Gaddis’s ongoing work on the player piano, in concert with his lifelong posthumousness, certainly made him sensitive to the shifts within the media ecology of the twentieth century. Aware that traditional and player pianos were headed for a showdown, he noted that “more than 200,000 player pianos were built in 1916. They amounted to 65 percent of the total piano production” (“Stop Player,” Second Place 5). With an entire culture giving in to the lure of decreased effort, and the diminished need to play by hand, player machines were gaining the upper hand, as it were, pushing the old-time instrument to the brink of extinction. Conversely, the days of the player pianos were numbered by the new electric upstart in the 1920s, the radio, whose broadcasts reduced the need for bulky apparatuses ¤lling already crowded front parlors and dance and movie halls.15 The industry once under siege by the player piano, but encouraged now that mechanical music was forced into retirement, launched a nationwide campaign to revitalize its old craft, forming a committee “to go about country to school supervisors asking to have piano lessons given at 25¢ apiece. In Chicago, 12,000 children, in other cities 3–5,000 average, took advantage of it.” Eventually, hand-played piano music recovered, partly nourished by a new generation of homespun pianists who “were learning to appreciate and being inspired to want to make piano music themselves by the radio”—the technology that had outdone its mechanical rival in the ¤rst place (Second Place 172). Media theorists have long noted, with Walter Benjamin, that “One of the

200 / Wutz foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand that could be fully satis¤ed only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form” (Selected Writings II). Thus, just as the hand-played piano prepared the ground for its mechanical precision and orchestral reach (and, eventually, the convenience of radio broadcasts), so the player piano was digging its grave by helping to bring about the cultural sound expectations to be ful¤lled only by radio technology shortly thereafter.16 The media-speci¤c entries and passages in Agape Agape and The Rush for Second Place, in fact, suggest that Gaddis, had he had time, might have developed his research notes into a more fully nuanced ecology of modern media. By 1919, for example, the 65% market share of player pianos just three years earlier declined signi¤cantly, which suggests the emerging dominance of the gramophone as the privileged (and certainly more affordable and portable) medium of sound reproduction, prior to the onset of radio. An entry in the “Chronology” reads: “Players outnumbered straight pianos, were 53 percent of industry output: 341,652 total. Radios: 1920, 5,000; 1924, 2.5 million” (Second Place 167). And Agape Agape itself assigns just such an intermediary role to the gramophone. The “splendid phantom hands” of pianists, already once removed through piano roll recordings, the narrator notes, have been “pushed further from reach by the gramophone and ¤nally paralyzed by the radio teaching birds to sing birdsongs” (17), repeating not just Gaddis’s claim about technological disembodiment but also suggesting his sensitivity to media history. For Gaddis, certainly, Edison represented very much the ambiguous genius who championed not just “art” (qua effort, brilliance, and invention), but also “entertainment . . . and the ascendancy of the crow, the herd,” and hence the diminishment of art (Agape 85). Historically speaking—and very much despite Edison’s claims that “the strings are perfectly distinct, the violins from the cellos, the wind instruments and the wood are perfectly heard” (Baldwin, Edison 191)—early gramophones were still a far cry from the rather hi-¤ sound reproduction of the Welte-Mignons and Duo-Art Pianolas. Similarly, Gaddis was sensitive to the evolution of media technologies in times, and out of times, of warfare. Kittler has demonstrated that “the technologies of typewriting and sound recording are by-products of the American Civil War” (Gramophone 190). Inspiration hits when bodies fail, when a soon-to-be inventor overcomes a physical impairment or gets the opportu-

Writing from between the Gaps / 201 nity to watch a weapon. The ¤rst typewriters had been “made by the blind for the blind,” before arms manufacturer Remington—feeling the pinch of declining sales “in the post–Civil War slump”—translated the principle of the repeater ri®e into a writing machine repeating letters (Gramophone 22, 14). Conversely, Edison was a telegrapher during the war and set himself the task of improving “the processing speed of the Morse telegraph beyond human limitations,” an endeavor facilitated by his (almost lifelong) hearing loss for which he had to compensate (Gramophone 190). Gaddis similarly noted that the American Ur-father of the player piano, John McTammany, “got the idea . . . during the Civil War in which he fought,” when, as Gaddis quotes from McTammany’s History of the Player, it “came into being amid the stress and struggle of the war during the rattle of musketry, clash of steel and din of battle,” suggesting itself as a “pure white lily” (“Chronology,” Second Place 150). Gaddis was also cognizant of the relays between demographic shifts in the labor force, female empowerment, and the typewriter. Again, Kittler, among others, has shown that the domain of of¤ce work and word processing, once exclusively ruled by men, became a crucial ¤eld “for the battalion of unemployed women” shortly after the Civil War (Gramophone 193); and Gregory Anderson has similarly described “the white-blouse revolution,” as women, once considered un¤t for the world of words, entered the work force to become “professionals” (1–26). Likewise, Gaddis entered in his “Chronology” that the “78,073 typewriters” manufactured in the United States in 1899 were “bringing women into world of affairs for ¤rst time” (Second Place 154). Kittler, in fact, points to the catalytic link between the piano, the typewriter, and female emancipation, noting “a practical use for what has become a veritable plague across the country, namely piano lessons for young girls: the resultant dexterity is useful for the operation of the typewriter” (Meyer and Silbermann, qtd. in Gramophone 194). Gaddis reminds himself similarly to “describe postwar emancipation of women as related to ‘accomplishments’ of previous generation, i.e., piano” (“Chronology,” Second Place 167). What is important here is that these miniatures toward an ecology of media—inconclusive and undeveloped as they are—suggest Gaddis’s grasp of the intricacies of historical description, and they further indicate again that he favors the interstices and in-betweens of a historical moment over simpli¤ed binaries. The gaps or, better, the perforations in the paper rolls of lived history, are, ¤nally, more telling and useful than the “all-or-none” of the digital universe. This nuanced model, I would suggest, ¤nally also more pre-

202 / Wutz cisely describes Gaddis’s relationship to the contemporary media landscape— a landscape he tends to build himself back into and partake of, even as it wants to exclude him. Committed to “tracking the leading issues of our times and the composite man in an age of hybrids” (“Instinct,” Second Place 79), Gaddis refuses outright opposition (which would leave little room for constructive participation) but, instead, embeds himself in the circuits of modernday media technologies as a way to maintain critical leverage. Similar to his friend and multimedia artist Julian Schnabel, for example, whose work provides a commentary on “the Age of Information” by using that age’s very media, Gaddis is cognizant of the productive relays between his own work and the media surrounding him (“Schnabel,” Second Place 138). He certainly knew, as Joseph Tabbi has noted, that while media culture was largely inimical to his complex ¤ction, “his own widely referential, densely interlinked narratives anticipate hypertext,” and hence enter his work into a textual economy preparing for alternate forms of narrative structure (Second Place xx). Gaddis’s tireless collection of materials, moreover—visible no less in the intricacies of the player piano history than in his weighty tomes— suggests a fact-¤nding urge in synch with the current culture of information, almost as if to indicate that literary narrative, after all, is still ¤nally capable of orchestrating data surplus into discursive symphonies. What is more, writing for Gaddis was a material practice distinctly ¤lmic in its method. Gaddis would typically cut out material from newspapers and journals and “combine strips on a single topic or under a single date and tape them all the way along one side, on a single long page,” thus in effect replicating ¤lmic montage on a piece of adhesive ¤lm. Similarly, while correcting galleys and typescripts, he would pencil in words and phrases by hand, but preferred to splice in “new material in typed scripts cut with scissors,” in the manner of a ¤lm editor (Tabbi, Afterword 100). Paralleling such media-inspired methods, Gaddis was also more directly involved in the production of the media conglomerate and thoroughly knowledgeable about its methods. As a family man and ¤ction writer, Gaddis (like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Don DeLillo) at one time wrote advertising copy and eventually became a speechwriter for corporate executives. He also earned his bread by writing ¤lm scripts for such companies as Eastman Kodak, P¤zer Pharmaceuticals, IBM, and the U.S. Army (before his opposition to Vietnam made such work impossible), eventually even entering into contract negotiations for a ¤lm of J R. But while certainly complicit in the strategies of desire formation and consumer manipulation that uphold a capitalist

Writing from between the Gaps / 203 economy, Gaddis always saw media in their double-edged complexity. The ¤lming of J R never came to pass, partly because Gaddis experienced ¤rsthand the legal maneuverings of the ¤lm industry (later to provide fodder for A Frolic of His Own), but equally important, because he refused to surrender to the industry’s notion of “novelization,” whereby a ¤lm script—written by a script writer and deviating already signi¤cantly from the novel—is distorted beyond recognition. The result, as Gaddis put it, is that the J R hitting the shelves is “totally different from my book. What the people do, they buy it, they don’t buy my book,” not only cutting the writer from legitimate pro¤ts but also increasing the chasm, already wide, between literary vision and ¤lmic rendition, now compounded by a form of reader’s digest or pseudo-literary derision (Interview with Chénetier and Félix 10).17 Similarly, once on assignment for the Ford Foundation to script a ¤lm on the use of closed-circuit television in education, Gaddis found himself “between two stools, huzzahs for the tonic effect [technology] is having in (public school) teaching interspersed with caveats on technology devouring its own children” (qtd. in Second Place 14). This quali¤er is echoed in the concern of the Agape narrator about the uncontrolled access to computers, often disguised as toys, by “every four year old” preschooler: “Press buttons it lights up different colours he’s supposed to be learning what, how to spell? No, it corrects his spelling doesn’t need to know how to spell, how to multiply [and] divide” (7). The uncritical use of media technologies, Gaddis and his persona observe, runs the risk of producing a generation devoid of cultural literacy and intellectual effort and accelerates the dumbing down of America that is already in full progress. Ultimately, it is that intellectual atrophy, and the consequent rift between artistic work and consumer leisure, that gives Agape Agape its title and signals Gaddis’s broad cultural concerns. Already in 1927, in one of Gaddis’s primal scenes, when Philo T. Farnsworth gave “the ¤rst public demonstration of television,” he projected “the image of a dollar sign for sixty seconds,” signaling not only the pixeled steadiness of an icon that has come to rule the globe; the projection also reached the dazed stares of the “stupe¤ed trash out there gaping” at the screen “avoiding pain and seeking pleasure” (6). Then, as Hollywood assumed global dominance over the images deposited into viewers’ brains, the movies degenerated into “the ¤nal great stupefying collective,” leaving “the herd numbed and silenced agape at blood sex and guns blowing each other to pieces.” In their “insatiable thirst” for terminators and battle droids, viewers ultimately battled themselves, terminating their capacities for

204 / Wutz critical thinking and shrinking into fully-®edged droids, into cognitive ®atliners with little more than a heartbeat, or, alternatively, in a scenario no less alarming, by morphing into Columbine wannabees “mow[ing] down their classmates” (55). While authentic art forms, in the narrator’s estimate, uphold the mystical notion of “agape, that love feast in the early church” (37), ¤lm and television re®ect a cult of simulation in which the individual and unique have been rinsed out by eyewash visible in the dulled gloss of inanimate spectatorship. The communal coherence made possible by art, ¤ssured by the advent of the mass media, has opened up to a yawning chasm and into monadic isolation. Wrapped within the high-modernist distinction of the genuine versus the fake is the narrator’s media-technological distinction between serious ¤ction—understood as a leftover of authentic art in an age of mass mediation —and television and ¤lm, “the twin Pandora’s boxes that shape and reshape our world daily” (“Old Foes,” Second Place 99).18 Invoking a well-known McLuhanesque probe, Gaddis observed that “a hot medium, like television, has high de¤nition” in the sense that the medium’s data density allows the viewer to “bring little to his participation besides passive reception.” By contrast, “a cool medium, such as a book . . . has low de¤nition in that it provides less information,” asking the reader to ¤ll in “much of the experience” (“Frolic,” Second Place 129).19 Books and print, alas, while in theory collaborative and synergistic, have been co-opted by the culture industry no less than the media largely responsible for its very creation. In the same measure as the ethical standards of the press have, during the reign of Hearst and Pulitzer, given way to a “carnival of journalism” (Agape 62)—virtually manufacturing sensational news to in®ate circulation—so novels geared to supermarket standards are “pretty warm media, requiring no effort whatsoever except some degree of literacy” (“Frolic,” Second Place 130).20 Even the New York Times is guilty of “seeing art as decoration,” when its section titled “Arts and Leisure” equates one with the other and thus puts a “¤ne spin on the oxymoron in fashionable use on all sides today” (“Schnabel,” Second Place 138). By giving the arts and literature the recreational gloss of a Martha Stewart or the diversionary cachet of a Laura Ashley, the profoundly inquisitive and constructive edge of art has become muted. Gaddis typically partakes in mass culture’s consumer economy by “recycling its massive waste products,” from mail-order catalogues and advertising to fundamentalist rhetoric and legalspeak (Tabbi, Second Place xi). That is to say, his novels rewrite the leftovers of a capitalist system in the key of con-

Writing from between the Gaps / 205 structive irony and critique. The discourses of mass culture and their reformulation make up a Gaddisian synergy bene¤ting both. In Agape Agape, however, at the very end of a life of nonrecognition, the author seems to shift the emphasis away from such a symbiotic ecology to press home the point that only serious ¤ction can provide perspective on the global avalanche of schlock and offer “the only refuge”—for both writer and reader—“from the vast hallucination that’s everything out there” (85). If literary artists want to avoid being the last of the Mohicans, so Gaddis’s argument goes, they have to do battle with the tribe, the media circus that tends to render ineffective authentic artistic expression in favor of disingenuous pseudo-art indistinguishable by untrained ears, eyes, and brains. While Tolstoy, otherwise one of Gaddis’s favorites, caves in to “the tyranny of the majority” (a de Tocquevillean term resurfacing in John Stuart Mill)—educating the masses for their self-enlightenment—the narrator of Agape Agape proffers a more demanding notion of art that does not shy away from “the new, the challenging or what’s labeled dif¤cult” (59, 61). Instead of playing to a sensibility of mediocrity, Agape Agape seeks to bring an audience up to a text’s cognitive demands, and hence of making them into an audience, in the true sense of the word, in the ¤rst place. While it may be true that, side by side with Gaddis’s lament over the gap between elite and mass art, he “appreciates other gaps . . . that open up spaces for experiment and doubt, creative risk and critical thought” (Foster 16), I see his taking the modernist high road (which his detractors, as Gaddis was no doubt aware, would label “conservative,” if not “reactionary”) as a ¤nal vote of con¤dence in language as humanity’s most effective medium of thought formation. Signi¤cantly, the very title and form of Gaddis’s literary testament draw attention to the resilience and suppleness of language, the medium within which he himself was working. Agape Agape suggests a resonant linguistic pun that lays bare the gaps between the real and the fake in need of healing. Like the moments of verbal capriciousness in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, the title circumscribes the swath of ambivalence and oscillation that give language a density unseen in the dulled ®atness of other media. Commensurate with the structure of the text, with its seamless shuttling back and forth between memory and the past and the momentary act of writing and disease, the encryption behind Agape Agape itself urges an attentive reader to collaborate in the slippery processes of signi¤cation. Meaning making in this “multidimensional space” does not accrue automatically, but is subsumed in an unending ®ow of sentences without paragraphs and few punctuation

206 / Wutz marks, as if to suggest a textured space of healing—between reader and writer, between the fake and the real, and between the schizoid narrative persona himself—in the face of intellectual (cultural) and physical (personal) death. Opening with the double negative “No but” that continues the rift contained in the very title, Agape Agape can be read as Gaddis’s ¤nal love offering ministering to the body politic even as his own body disintegrates. As such, Agape Agape also locates itself within the literary tradition of “the dead white guys” whose confraternity Gaddis seeks, not because the af¤liation is elitist per se (he would certainly distance himself from the politics of the later Baudelaire or Pound, just as he deplores Wagner’s reappropriation of Nietzsche for political ends), but rather because its primary intent is to maintain standards of excellence and intellectual effort at odds with lowbrow populism: “ ‘to pass on the torch,’ ” as the narrator approvingly quotes Flaubert (50). In particular Agape Agape may echo Absalom, Absalom!, that other suggestive title resonant with linguistic play. With a nod to a missed Nobel and his own and Faulkner’s taste for scotch, Gaddis once noted that “the majority of America’s native-born winners of the Nobel Prize in literature have been con¤rmed alcoholics,” their work “fueled by [an] . . . appetite for strong drink” (“Old Foes,” Second Place 91).21 As well, as Gaddis wrote in a late essay, Absalom, Absalom! was initially received as “the ¤nal blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor talent” by the New Yorker, as if anticipating the reception of his own late work and the parallel histories of both writers. Indeed, as Gaddis continues in the same essay, just as Faulkner’s work was shunned because of its celebration of linguistic instability and epistemological slippage, so the same magazine, in a review of J R two generations later, accused Gaddis of the “foxy purpose” of having produced “an unreadable text” (“Mothers,” Second Place 136). Not only did the work of both writers await gradual (re)cognition as they were reaching old age; the work of both also explores the boundaries of literary form and linguistic meaning (and the very notion of inheritance). As both title and text, Agape Agape comes full circle by encoding Gaddis’s own philosophizing about writing and language. The etymological overlays and tension between both terms plough the “swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy” that is at the heart of Gaddis’s work: “the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language . . . disorder and dislocation” (2). While the work of art provides a temporary stay against disorder, an archipelago of structure in a sea of chaos, the inherent instability and

Writing from between the Gaps / 207 suppleness of language—especially when used by gifted novelists—invites a sort of interpretive entropy, a meaningful degradation and rebuilding of meaning that, in contrast to the narrowly prescribed visual syntax emitted by the mass media, can become liberatory and productive. Gaddis in Agape Agape sends messages that his work has been emitting from its very inception. He inserts himself into the gaps of mass culture by exploring that culture’s medial blind spots, and he does so by exploding the signifying gaps within his own medium, language. A book of gaps and gaping wounds, it reasserts the continued vitality of ¤ction in an age when the novel has repeatedly been declared dead, a leftover from an earlier technological order lying etherized upon a table. Of course, the Gaddis young and old had no illusions about where his medium ranked in the cultural pecking order, always writing, as another William once famously put it, against the grain. Still, in a world of the Second Law and Second City Live, it was better to rush for second place than not to rush at all.

Notes 1. The genealogy of the posthumous Agape Agape and its textual integrity following Gaddis’s intentions have been discussed in Thomas Girst, “Man könnte am Sterben verzweifeln” [and by Steven Moore in this volume. —Eds.]. 2. Joseph Tabbi in his Afterword to Agape Agape (103–4) and Ed Park in “The Precognitions” (a title suggestive of Phillip K. Dick and a recent Hollywood ¤lm) have drawn attention to the many echoes of Thomas Bernhard, especially the novellas, The Loser and Concrete, in Gaddis’s late ¤ction, such as the seamless prose, their joint interest in music history (Bernhard’s protagonist in Concrete, Rudolf, is writing, but never ¤nishes, a biography of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy), and the effects of prednisone (taken as a relief from emphysema) simulated in the divergent, hallucinatory style. Park also notes that a recent critic has described Bernhard’s style as Rollenprosa (rolling prose), which is uncannily suggestive of the player piano’s continuous unfolding of prerecorded rolls of prose (3). From punch-carded strips back to the codices of yore—we have come full circle, it seems. As Gaddis noted, early “Arto-roll[s]” were visible to audiences and so named because “the space usually left blank . . . was ¤lled with art work and comment” (“Stop Player,” Second Place 4). 3. While agreeing with much of Robert Jackson’s insightful review of Agape Agape, including his view of the importance of self-re®exive irony in Gaddis’s work, I cannot see how “the text stands as a parody of the aspiration rather than any abortive consummation thereof,” particularly in view of the narrator’s anguish and torment (“Last Laugh” 2). However, I would have to agree with Tom LeClair that, if

208 / Wutz Gaddis had had time to work through his material in a more organized fashion, “Agape Agape might have had more intellectual substance,” especially compared to his other novels (“Will and Testament” 2). 4. See Fried’s “Almayer’s Face” for an extension of the ideas in Realism, Writing, Dis¤guration into the work of Joseph Conrad and Frank Norris. 5. Further references are to the 2002 Viking edition and will be cited in the text. An excerpt from the “Piano Player Chronology to 1929,” including a detailed project summary and working papers for “Agape Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano,” has been reprinted in The Rush for Second Place (142– 72); further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 6. Paralleling Gaddis’s own project, William B. Everdell develops in miniature what one could call a cultural history of the pixelization of art. Everdell shows how Michel-Eugène Chevreul, the “old head of the dyeworks at the Gobelins tapestry,” formulated the “law of simultaneous contrast” with regard to the phenomenology of color perception—a law that would shortly thereafter be con¤rmed and theorized by the (then still emergent) disciplines of experimental psychology and physics, implemented technologically by the “halftone screen” process in printing and the pointillism of Georges Seurat, but that weavers had in effect been instantiating for centuries (Moderns, esp. 70– 73). Gaddis certainly would have loved this history and may partly have been aware of its complexity, when he cites “the long and painstaking process” of “patterns woven into cloth. . . . [T]he details of tapestry weaving as pictured in Diderot’s famous eighteenth-century encyclopedia” (“Treatment,” Second Place 18). 7. Reading Harvey Roehl’s richly illustrated Player Piano Treasury, one cannot help but be impressed by Gaddis’s own research, as seen in his “Chronology” as well as in Agape Agape itself. Gaddis’s clippings and notes cover all the major developments of the mechanical piano in the United States, from the early contributions by the likes of Fourneaux and John McTammany to the big players in the business, Welte, Wurlitzer, and Ampico. The narrator’s astonishment in Agape about the precision of keyboard recording devices in mechanical pianos, “measuring the time it took the hammer on the last eighth of an inch of tape down to ¤fty-one hundredthousandths of a second” (46), may have been gleaned from a November 1927 article in the Scienti¤c American: “This delicate recording instrument measures accurately the length of time it takes the hammer to travel the last eighth of an inch before it strikes the string, and from this measurement the exact loudness of the tone produced can be easily calculated, 416 hundred-thousandths of a second being required to produce the softest note and 51 hundred-thousandths for the loudest” (cit. in Treasury 80). Moore notes that Roehl was one of Gaddis’s principal sources (“Agape Agape Annotations”). 8. In Agape Agape, Gaddis may be said to have created an autobiographical persona whose “wide ranging information fused into knowledge,” as he said of the protagonist of Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak, and is the result of internalizing various discourses (“Instinct,” Second Place 75).

Writing from between the Gaps / 209 9. When Gibbs in J R is asked whether Agape Agape is a novel, he answers, “no no it’s more of a book about order and disorder” (237). 10. Stravinsky worked largely on a Paris-based Pleyala, not on a Welte-Mignon or a Duo-Art Pianola, even though he eventually made some recordings in the United States (see Lawson 293–94). 11. For the commentaries offered by various pianists, as well as cogent descriptions of the histories of the Welte-Mignon and the Duo-Art Pianola pianos, see Roehl 62– 73. The pianist Josef Hofmann, for example, observed: “My Duo-Art rolls correctly reproduce my phrasing, accent, pedaling, and are endowed with my personality. They are my actual interpretation with all that implies” (70). 12. I hesitate to describe this turn toward radio as a technological form of the “return of the repressed” because Gaddis is too complex a writer (for all his preoccupation with absent fathers) to reject his early non-print environment. To the best of my knowledge, Gaddis has not commented on the in®uence of radio. I suspect, however, that he would have agreed with his contemporary E. L. Doctorow: “I grew up listening to the radio, and it left you room to participate . . . it is a form of storytelling. . . . Before I ever saw television, I’d heard about it and I thought this has to be great,” but “the picture was ®at, hermetic, oppressive. . . . I’d expected the same depth in the television picture as I had in my mind when I listed to radio shows. . . . The nature of visualization is profoundly different from mere vision” (Conversations 199). 13. Torschlußpanik was commissioned by several German radio stations and originally broadcast in February 1999 by the Deutschlandfunk. For useful discussions of the radio play, including Gaddis’s visit to Germany in 1997, see the two essays by Walter van Rossum, “Lange Nacht” and “Am Ende war Geschwätz der Anfang.” 14. As Martin Heidegger has noted, “The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word. The word turns itself into something ‘typed’ ” (Parmenides 81). 15. Observes Roehl: “The vast player piano industry which for three decades caused the atmosphere to be permeated with mechanical music has for all practical purposes been dead since 1925, victim mainly of radio and phonograph” (Treasury ii). The number of player pianos in the 1920s can also partly be explained through the onset of Prohibition when speakeasies mushroomed throughout the country and made orchestrions and full-scale pianolas—operated by only one person and switched off and on at will, without the expensive engagement of bands— desirable. The prosperity of the 1920s certainly also contributed to the increased sales ¤gures of the high-end Welte Mignon and Duo-Art Pianola. 16. The media-speci¤c intersections in Agape Agape, as Joseph Tabbi has noted, put Gaddis “in the tradition of those North American thinkers on media and technology—Lewis Mumford, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman—who could perceive technology’s aesthetic consequences and wellsprings” (Afterword 101). 17. Gaddis’s son Matthew is currently working on a ¤lm documenting “the last three years of his father’s life” (Rossum, “Lange Nacht” 4). If only posthumously, it

210 / Wutz seems, ¤lm (in the right hands) will try to do justice to the man who spoke so vociferously against it. 18. A distinction of the genuine versus the fake is considered in comparable detail by Klaus Benesch. —Eds. 19. In view of Gaddis’s lifelong concern with education, it is worth noting that McLuhan developed his ecology of sense ratios and the distinction between “high de¤nition” and “low de¤nition” media—later to be jazzed up as “hot” and “cold” media—while working on a syllabi project of media in eleventh-grade classrooms funded by the National Association of Education Broadcasters (see Marchand, McLuhan, esp. 136–41). 20. Gaddis is thinking here of Tom Clancy, Judith Krantz, and Stephen King, among others: “¤fty million copies of Danielle Steele’s books in print—it is Gresham’s Law, it is the bad driving out the good. But I think movies and television have so compounded this now” (Chénetier and Félix 8). 21. “Well, I almost think if I’d gotten the Nobel Prize when The Recognitions was published I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. I mean that’s the grand intoxication of youth, or what’s a heaven for” (Abádi-Nagy, “The Art of Fiction” 58).

12 Mark the Music J R and Agape Agape Anja Zeidler

As this player piano roll indicates, marks have always been made (or in this case, punched) to serve as a referent for a particular sound, and thus music can also rightfully be viewed as a kind of semiotic system. In “Mark the Music,” Zeidler draws upon music theory and musicology in order to distinguish the musical references found in Gaddis’s texts, from the musical representations available to Gaddis on the whole, with quite surprising and informative results. Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

212 / Zeidler

 “Listen . . . !” Anne in alarm calls to Julia after Coen has left their house on Long Island, his car “burst[ing] out into the world.” The two women follow its noise, deciphering the acoustics of his departure; readers are asked to do the same. That is what this reader will do: trace the music that appears in manifold forms in Gaddis’s 1975 novel and plays such a prominent role in his last work of ¤ction, Agape Agape. Aside from occasional remarks describing J R as a kind of opera, or “a score for many voices,” and a few approaches to Wagner’s Ring Cycle as subtext, the musical sources and design-governing structures in J R have so far been neglected. Let me start with the most general remark concerning the relationship between music and literature: music differs from verbal language through its lack of a clear reference. Music is a kind of language of course, but it “does not form a system of signs” (Adorno, “Fragment” 251). Music can only appear as a sign in literary texts. Starting out from that assumption, Albert Gier applies the semiotic triangle to music’s role in literature. He distinguishes among music as referent, or “any poetic texture which has a piece of music as its ‘theme,’ ” music as signi¤ant, or the attempt to mimic the acoustic qualities of music in words, and music as signi¤é, the imitation of musical techniques of composition in literary texts. In J R, music primarily appears as referent and signi¤é. Generally speaking, J R is a vocal drama and bears certain af¤nities with a group of musical genres comprising forms like ballad opera, Singspiel, opéra comique, or operetta. In all of them musical sections alternate with passages of spoken dialogue. This structuring also holds for J R if only one replaces “musical sections” with “verbal music,” a term Steven Paul Scher has coined for a description in words of any piece of music. J R can aptly be called dialogue opera, or—more speci¤cally and due to its satirical nature—opéra comique. My choice of a genre ®ourishing in eighteenth-century France as model for a novel of the second half of the twentieth century needs a few explanatory sentences. Opéra comique developed as an alternative to the privileged stages of the time and found a home on the nonprivileged stages of the marketplace. It was a parodic and satiric reaction to the grand opera’s melodramatic and pathetic style and typically comprised three elements, “timbre,” “vaudeville,” and “air nouveau.” “Timbres” were popular melodies and songs or wellknown arias from contemporary opera, quoted in the new burlesque context

Mark the Music / 213 of opéra comique. “Vaudeville,” its major musical element, was a “timbre” equipped with original texts commenting on current events and political topics. The resulting eclecticism contributed to the opera’s complex referential system, “an inter-textual complex, where music bore the decisive role of a code” (Betzwieser, “Text und Subtext” 432). After 1760 more and more pieces expressly composed for the respective opus, so-called airs nouveaux, were incorporated into the opera, and would later be its main feature. I believe that the satiric impulse behind this particular operatic genre, its eclecticism, and its essential feature, the “vaudeville” with its comments on contemporary political, artistic, and societal events, makes it a valid model for J R. J R does contain its own “timbres,” popular tunes, whole concerto movements, or amputated parts of classical music broadcasted into its noisy world by radios and loudspeakers. And the “vaudeville” as used in opéra comique is also J R’s most prominent satirical musical instrument. In one of the novel’s melodramatic scenes, for example, Bast bemoans his lost love with improvised musical accompaniment on the grand piano. He adds a genuine “vaudeville” when “[striking] into the sailors’ chorus from Dido and Aeneas” by Henry Purcell, substituting the sailor’s original line, “never, no never intending to visit them more,” by a new text retrieved from some trash brochure J R has been reading: “you’ll never, no never, have to clean your [toilet bowl again]” (142). The tragic as present in the sailors’ song turns into farce in J R. Any kind of “airs nouveaux” is characteristically absent from the novel, or at least “never performed” like James Bast’s opera Philoctetes (12). This is in keeping with a society that suppresses the original and allegedly dangerous artistic voice. Establishing J R as a kind of opera calls for a look at the variety of voices involved. A close look uncovers the novel’s tendency to depict its women in terms of their respective voices and its men in terms of their movements. The women’s voices are in tune with their character. Amy’s angelic voice is compared to American singer Louise Homer’s “lovely contralto [ . . . ] when she did Gluck’s Orfeo” (234–35). The link to Orpheus, whose song and play had an appeasing power, explains the signi¤cant changes in her voice later when “she sounded very cold [ . . . ] frozen inside in fact” (707). During a taxi ride Amy’s brother and Jack Gibbs take through New York the radio is “playing Gluck’s Orfeo drove all over hell so Freddie could listen to it, just getting into Che faro senza Euridice counted my money and we had to get out” (619). Despite her name, Stella Angel is equipped with a more devilish voice. “I ¤nd [ . . . ] the sound of her voice disturbing, that almost languid, uncurious

214 / Zeidler manner” (233). Appropriately Stella is linked to the tritone (69, 142), a link ironically established in Edward’s operatic suite celebrating her. The tritone is an interval also known by the name Diabolus in Musica, portraying especially in nineteenth-century opera the ominous and evil, emphasizing Stella as the man-eating woman, who will later gain control over General Roll, earlier the domain of men. Ann diCephalis with “an accent like the grocery boy’s” (in one of the Aunt’s condescending observations) has the desire to participate in artistic endeavour (230), “but neither the skills nor talent for such an expression” (Rush 143). A course in “voice culture” hasn’t helped (53). So her own high opinion of herself as an attractive, erotic, creative woman is ironically counterpointed by a song, “Dark Eyes,” heard on her husband’s car radio just before her entry onto the scene. The song addresses the dark, fervently passionate eyes of some obscure object of desire, contrasting with her false eyelashes in spite of what she tells Edward Bast (38). The link between the women and their voices can be read as a sign of an independence (or the wish for it) that is at least greater than the men’s: The voice being the most natural, unmediated musical instrument hints at their being less deeply entangled in mechanized society than the men who largely made it so. A signi¤cant reference in light of J R’s sustained interest in “the mechanization of the arts,” appears when Gibbs contemplates the nineteenth-century physiologist Johannes Müller, who considered the voice as “the worst God damned instrument ever invented [ . . . ] Thought opera companies could buy dead singers’ larynxes ¤x them up to sing arias save fees” (288). In general, unlike the women, the men in J R are neither linked to voice nor music. Typically they are portrayed in terms of their gestures, their movements and conduct, indicating that they are the human machines moving in, and moving, the business world. But their moves are hardly ever independent. On the contrary, they constantly imitate each other. Dan diCephalis is trying to adjust to “Mister Pecci’s stylish appearance” (26), David Davidoff, his name itself indicating one of a series, is desperately trying to come close to his role model John Cates, the main mover metonymically reduced to his “black shod foot” (108). But the “sharp punctuation of [Davidoff ’s] heels” echo hollow through the halls of Typhon International (196). Too frequently his moves are “badly choreographed” and he eventually has to leave Typhon International (95). The men in business—with the exception of Cates after

Mark the Music / 215 whose tune they all have to dance—tend toward the grand gesture, which does not have to mean anything as long as it looks good. However, there is also a different kind of man: in contrast to all the surefooted, energetic walks of the men in business, the artists are likely to be seen stumbling and limping through the world, or they can “hardly feel [their] feet touch the ground” (258). Edward Bast in particular tends to move awkwardly (19). But he is also a ¤gure of both worlds, a ¤gure of transition, moving from the “musically re¤ned” world of women to the rhythmic—the “musically primitive,” if you like—world of men. In the beginning he literally is music, except that Whiteback’s “He’s music appreciation” depreciates that link (18). With the loss of his job at school Bast enters the world of business, and from then on he will be associated with the businessman’s characteristic dance. His entry into that world bears strong traits of the operatic. Shortly before Stella and Norman Angel set off for home to leave Edward with the broken pieces of the day and his studio, he ends his musical summary of the day with the remembrance of offers J R has made to him earlier. He puts on the new sneaker J R has given to him, “his foot [coming] down on the cluster at middle C—to, yes to Tribsterill go into the shoe business there” (143). His new career is effectively accompanied by a song and dance, an offensive dance abusive of that noble instrument, the grand piano, which he kicks with the same foot with which he plans to gain his foothold in business. As his ¤rst moves start to have an impact in the business world, a rudimentary but signi¤cant dance rhythm is forced upon him. It springs from the mingling of his and Jack Gibbs’s footwear. In a taxi ride Gibbs loses his shoe and in need of one asks Bast to lend him his right one. What Edward gets in exchange for his shoe is a “speculum,” a mirror as tractates of moral and other content of the Middle Ages were called, a concept also present in a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch known by the title, “The Pedlar” (1487/93), depicting a man in poor attire wearing a sandal and a shoe. This is how Edward looks having to get along with a “straw beach slipper” and a sneaker until Gibbs returns to him his right shoe (286). However, the “slap, slap of the straw slipper” anticipates the new rhythm that will accompany Edward’s further doings in the business world (286). As “the God damned sole’s [come] loose” while Gibbs has been wearing Edward’s shoe (288), it will lend Bast’s every further step “a percussive effect” (290). The acoustic warning corresponds to the visual warning that is expressed by the ¤gure in

216 / Zeidler the Bosch painting, the poorly clothed homeless man, additionally marked as a wandering pedlar by the basket he is carrying and thus doubly binding him to Bast. Bosch uses the ¤gure to represent sinful man, and so the picture we get of Bast and his footwear is like an exhortation to the reader—and to Bast himself—to contemplate his life; but Bast doesn’t hear Gibbs’s call back to where “the better among us” have their place (290). Bast descends into the world of business, adjusts his pace to J R’s “and side by side, left foot, right foot, they got through the door marked men” (292), back to the domain of “John Black Jack Cates,” the main mover and through “a brief glimpse of hornpipe” in another men’s room linked to “the devil paying the piper for all the good tunes” (17, 180). Cates resembles yet another rather unpleasant person in his capacity as “nobody, [ . . . ] a lot of old parts stuck together” (708): a walking rattletrap, he recalls that other rattlebones, Death, as found capitalized in many pictures of the Middle Ages, depicted as a ¤gure playing either a wind or percussion instrument. Because Cates is the musical leader, what is going on around him is a veritable danse macabre, “death as a skeleton [ . . . ] leading the living to the grave” (New Grove). That is also where imitator J R’s notorious “parade’s heading [ . . . ] right over the” (530). Gibbs’s picture of the contemporary world is no less grim. Signi¤cantly he uses music to express it, telling Eigen about his idea of an operetta featuring the Empedoclean “creatures with countless hands eyes wandering around looking for a God damned forehead” (407). Prompted by the chaos in Whiteback’s of¤ce with Hyde and diCephalis crawling on the ®oor, Gibbs had introduced Empedocles’ cosmogony earlier in the novel. A link between Empedocles and corporate high ¤nance is equally indicated by the juxtaposed voices from the televised school lessons set against voices of people in Whiteback’s of¤ce as the principal changes channels: “[Gibbs:] In the second generation these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless hands, faces looking in different directions . . . [Amy:] —and that’s what owning a share in a corporation means too doesn’t it” (45). Owning a share is like belonging to a monster’s body. The one known best in J R, Typhon International, is aptly named after the fantastic mythical being with one hundred dragon’s heads all with terrible voices. The Empedoclean creatures play their part in Gibbs’s operetta, joined by similarly amputated beings, a great number of male organs believed to have been collected in a bird’s nest by witches, as in the ¤fteenth-century Hexenhammer, a kind of handbook accumulating evidence for an easier persecution of witches. All this “god damned commotion [ . . . ] hell of a thing to choreograph” is enforced by “a

Mark the Music / 217 musical score of catchy songs, ensembles and dances” generally characteristic of the loose plot of an operetta (New Grove 407). Like opéra comique and the novel at large, Gibbs’s operetta comprises a number of “timbres,” popular pieces of music he uses for his own comical context. In fact, it is a veritable play in the play, an “operetta” in the “opera”: the women sing and the “men” dance. What is—more subtly—written into the novel’s musical structure becomes visible here, also anticipating developments toward the end of the novel itself when Stella and Amy do indeed take control over businesses formerly headed by men. Jack Gibbs deals with such a prospect in his rendering of Stella by recalling the role of the witch collecting male members. At one instance in the novel her husband Norman even wonders about “these artists and people you collect [ . . . ] these artists and these musicians” (145), involuntarily establishing a link between artists and the male sex. Humperdinck’s “Hexenritt” from Hänsel und Gretel accompanies her onto the scene, and strong musical allusions to Richard Wagner’s “Walkürenritt” also draw a connection to another group of man-collecting women, the Valkyries gathering dead men fallen in ¤ght and bringing them up to Valhalla. The allusion to Wagner is further accentuated by the title Gibbs had chosen for an earlier version of his imaginary play: “Our Dear Departed Member” evokes the only home still able to give peace and quiet in J R (74), the home for “these here departed loved ones” (344), Brisboy’s Wagner Funeral Homes. The allusion is to the Ring’s last part, “Twilight of the Gods,” in particular. It is a comic link, to be sure, associating Wagner with the terrible and grotesquely distorted mythical ¤gure, Charon, who conveys the dead to Hades. However, with Brisboy’s decision for Wagner instead of Charon as a name for the funeral parlor, the appalling creature is trimmed into a friendly dog, wagging its tail: “[E]veryone simply calls it wag-ner [ . . . ] whining wag-ner wag wag like a doggy’s tail” (545). Instead of a twilight of the gods Gibbs imagines a twilight of men. Gibbs’s travestied “Ring” is not the only one in the novel. We also have Miss Flesch’s “Ring,” a school production, which seems to ful¤ll Gibbs’s vision of woman as expressed in his operetta. We see her take bite after bite of her bread through the budget conference dominated by men, while “rubbing everybody’s face” in her “Ring” (313), turning her ring into a veritable vagina dentata. Wagner, “Man and Artist” (146), is devoured by a woman whose name associates ®esh, the body, the chthonic. But there is also “Mozart’s, ah, Ring, is it?” (39), Whiteback’s grotesque mistake, but at the same time “an oblique

218 / Zeidler allusion to the concept of agape ” (Comnes, Ethics 112). “Mozart’s Ring” is the “lacs d’amour” of freemasonry, to which Mozart was deeply committed, a representation of the brother’s chain, symbol of fraternal connectedness (G. Wagner, Bruder 83). And of course we also have Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle: as direct reference it is reduced to its prelude opera, The Rhinegold, no coincidence in a novel about money. It will be consumed by the noise of the contemporary world. This is one way in which Wagner is used as an illustration of how high art is reduced to farce. On another more general level, J R with The Nibelung’s Ring as an important even if vague subtext has written into it the intent to contrast with the tragic pathos of Richard Wagner, the composer who “laid especial emphasis upon the necessary element of tragedy in the art-work of the future” (Gruber, “Wagner’s View” 61). In Gaddis the tragic stance will only appear in grotesque attire. Wagner’s music has nothing dancelike, Thomas Mann knows (“Richard Wagner” 382); while Friedrich Nietzsche observes the forms of Wagner’s music “swimming, ®oating—no longer walking, dancing . . . maybe this says something crucial about him,” (“Contra Wagner” 42). Gaddis prefers dancing and walking in J R’s exceptional mixture of danse macabre and veritable slapstick. Nietzsche presents Wagner as the “most impolite genius of the world” repeating a thing so often that in the end you despair and ¤nally believe in it (“Case” 14)—a judgment that may inform Edward Bast’s explanation of “the E-®at chord that opens the Rhinegold [and] goes on and on for a hundred and thirty-six bars until the idea that everything’s happening under water is more real than sitting in a hot plush seat” (111). Wagner, who uses the leitmotif as a principle of composition, is writing “for the forgetful listener,” his music constructed in such a way as to be remembered easily, like advertising in mass culture (Adorno, “On Wagner” 29). Not so J R. If you don’t listen closely you miss decisive details. In Gaddis’s novel the reader is not meant “to ®oat,” he is meant to participate, and thus J R metaphorically belongs to “the music one plays,” unlike Wagner who belongs to “the music one hears,” a distinction made by Roland Barthes (one that parallels the oft-cited literary distinction between the readerly and writerly text). The “music one plays” involves “the muscular, the manual, the sensual,” the body, which transcribes what it reads, producing sense. Listening to music, by contrast, is passive and receptive and extinguishes the element of play (Plaisir 231). In contrast with Wagner’s grand opus, Gaddis’s equally monumental (yet more satirical) work does not “delight in grandiose debacle,” as Adorno has

Mark the Music / 219 it (“Wagner” 669). On the contrary, J R is a novel of understatement. Its tragedies happen almost unheard. They all drown in the noise of the world: a child is shot, Buzzie is killed in a car accident, Dan diCephalis is lost in Vogel’s experiment and Rhoda is pushed out the window. “In Wagner, the down-fall of the world turns into a spectacle never experienced before” (“Wagner” 669). Wagner’s fantasy of twilight, death, and extinction of the gods is ridiculed in J R. There Gibbs’s voice will be heard telling Thomas Eigen that it is a dying voice—“I’ve got leukemia haven’t long to live that’s all” (622)—but he is speaking grand words while tripping in the chaos of the contemporary world where somebody else’s blood tests have been mistaken for his. Finally, the epic voice in Wagner, above all personi¤ed by the three Norns, is comically reduced to Anne and Julia Bast—a third sister, Charlotte, has died a long time ago. The Norns are daughters of Erda, mother nature, who had once warned Wotan of the curse of the ring. Erda is still present in the aunts’ garden, but has metamorphosed into a male artifact depicting a male voice of warning, “that horticultural Laocoön of honeysuckle, grape and roses” (68). The Norns’ rope, with which they weave their tales and which in J R is reduced to a piece of black carpet thread (8), is torn apart when their tale comes to the curse that weighs upon the ring. “Eternal knowledge [has come to] an end” and they descend into their mother earth forever (“Wagner” 270). While they go under, the Bast sisters comically go on telling shreds of family history. However, Wagner’s opera is also used as an example of the depreciation of complex art by ignorance and stupidity. The Rhinegold itself is chosen for a school performance but already during rehearsal disintegrates. Like the “vaudeville” of opéra comique, Wagner’s music is equipped with new texts and even additional music. In Gaddis’s revision of the original, the long-term consequences of Alberich’s predatory act can be heard. Edward Bast’s reproduction of Wagner’s music on the piano is complemented by “The Call to the Colors” played by Hyde’s son, and Dad’s doodle of “Buffalo Gals” on the saxophone, turning the Rhinemaidens’ natural state into an eclectic mixture of the military-industrial complex and the world of light entertainment. Playing his way through music infected by entropy, Bast reaches the chord, which accompanies Alberich’s renouncement of love (36). Whether J R does or does not utter the decisive words is left open, the words are lost amid a chaos of people in pursuit of each other on and behind the stage, repre-

220 / Zeidler senting in modern dance the predatory element of capitalism. All of it ¤nally spills out into broad daylight, where the Rhinemaidens’ wailing is taken up by “the wailing counterpoint of the saws” (37), turning the young seductive women into “Erinyes” (75), the old avenging, raging women of Greek myth. The scenes in Burgoyne Street and thus its hellish music are closely connected to the scenes in Whiteback’s of¤ce. The children’s cultural education is fully in keeping with what is celebrated there in the of¤ce, at its endless budget conferences: in a word, money. The deafening music takes on the function of a Bachian “continuo polyphony,” a piece of music composed as musical illustration of religious themes dealt with in divine service. But here it is a perverted “continuo polyphony.” Three voices are generally involved, the vocal part, the concertante instrument, and the continuo, the instrumental bass line running throughout a piece. In Burgoyne Street the “continuo” is “played” by the wailing saws that cut the trees, a bass line—though it is up in the air—continually present. But in all scenes the wailing continuo does violence to both the “concertante”—“a descending bloat of Clementine” say (37), spilling from Whiteback’s bank—and the “vocal part,” Whiteback’s voice, for example, “sheared off by [the] inhuman scream” of the saws—or other voices in other scenes (19). None of the parts of the dis¤gured “continuo polyphony” is contrapuntally woven into any kind of constant musical texture; they are sheared off or shredded to pieces before they can ever evolve. If the music of Burgoyne Street illustrates how polyphony is killed, the music in Whiteback’s of¤ce is an equally good illustration of homophony: money has turned language into what Roland Barthes calls “langage encratique,” speech that develops and spreads under the protection of power (Plaisir 110)—or in Whiteback’s words, “you have to speak it when you talk to them” (50). Such a language is paradoxically related to music insofar as it is merely meant to sound good or competent, but is semantically empty. Thus, although the “music” in Whiteback’s of¤ce is made by several human voices with their different signature tunes, there is a strong tendency toward homophony. Time and again the men’s homophone chants end in cadences like these: —Once we have their con¤dence . . . —Now whether or not a campaign . . . —I think nationally . . . —Prwise . . . The telephone rang. —Hello . . . ? (27)

Mark the Music / 221 “Cadence” is the musical term for the formula on which a conclusion to a phrase, movement or piece is based. “The cadence is the most effective way of establishing or af¤rming the [ . . . ] modality of an entire work [ . . . ]; it may be said to contain the essence of the melodic (including the rhythmic) and harmonic movement, hence of the musical language, that characterizes the style to which it belongs” (New Grove). Characteristic for J R’s style is a “music made of inane, conniving, sly, deceitful speech”; J R does sound like “a hymn to Horatio Alger” (Gass, Introduction ix), and the religious metaphor is very much to the point in “a novel in which the embodiment of money [ . . . ] has become ‘something like Divine Law’ ” (Soutter 124). But there is one voice that strongly disturbs the homophone music inside and outside Whiteback’s of¤ce—even if it goes more or less unheard. In a veritable musical sermon, the Mozart lecture, Edward Bast draws his listeners’ attention to the hardship and sufferings of various famous but unhappy composers. He includes a reading from a letter by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart containing a long allusion to the parable of the lost sheep. This allusion will reappear in Bast’s last feverish attempt at converting J R with Bach’s Cantata No. 21, “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis,” on a lost and retrieved soul, equally evoking the parable of the lost sheep. This parable is especially likened to the fate of children as Christopher Knight shows, and in J R theirs is a sad and desolate one indeed. So it is true as Knight says that “on one level Bast’s “noble effort represents [ . . . ] the good shepherd’s concern for the lost sheep” (Hints 111), but on another level, Edward Bast is just one of the lost sheep himself, one of the wounded children. He comes home to ¤nd his home is gone, meeting Mister Coen, who takes him to the hospital instead. While in the car with a delirious and exhausted Edward, Coen ironically tries to soothe him with music from Handel’s oratorio Jephtha and—to make matters even worse—tells him: “I remember this part yes when I was a child, I thought the soprano here was singing get away!” (667). On the one hand, Edward is reminded of his failed sermon and the music J R had recently ruined for him. Now he is in J R’s position, the music does not reach him. On the other hand, the horror J R’s reaction meant to Edward, is relativized for the reader who learns how Coen as a child had himself misunderstood the words in Handel’s oratorio, but is shown to appreciate music, to continue believing in its power. In a novel where the world is perceived as upsidedown, we have yet another ironic reversal: Bast’s sermon on Bach never reaches J R, but the boy himself is far more successful as we learn from a scene that echoes the dialogue between the sad soul and Jesus in Bach’s can-

222 / Zeidler tata. In the men’s room of the Museum of Natural History, J R is heard reading aloud from his success story in the newspaper, while an unlistening Bast is trying to explain that he wants to quit as a business partner. J R’s persistent attempts to persuade him back are interrupted, initially, by several “Nos” from Bast, who involuntarily takes over Bach’s soprano singing “Ach nein.” Eventually, however, Bast’s refrain alters, and by the end of the scene we hear him “all right [ . . . ] yes [ . . . ] yes” (305), echoing Bach’s “Ach ja.” J R wins in the end. The music of The Rhinegold has dissolved into entropy’s two forms, chaos and paralysis, respectively the noise and the homophone chant of the contemporary world. The Rhine’s gold itself, out of which Alberich forges the ring, metamorphoses into the money with which Mrs Joubert’s class buys a share of Diamond Cable and J R starts his family of companies: for a brief moment, the class’s money functions as an improvised stage prop in the Wagner school production. All that is left of Wagner’s music in J R is the Rhinemaidens’ wailing, representing their mourning over the lost Rhinegold, the rhythm of the Nibelungs’ hammering, representing the forging of the gold under Alberich’s whip, and the Ring motif, representing the ring cursed with lovelessness. Wagner’s music is reduced to the voice of money, and although it is still a foreboding voice, it is in “pianissimo” (37), hardly able to make itself heard. Bast’s preaching is also in vain, his voice not heard, because money’s voice is by far more penetrating, the “most awful shrill sounds” accompanying J R’s “odd [ . . . ] voice” on the telephone (229). But the music of money sounding through the novel is not an invention of the contemporary world. It has been there from the beginning, “Father jingling his change [ . . . ] how he jingled when he walked” (3). This is not the music of Thoreau’s “brave man” who “recognizes [music] for his mother tongue,” but music of the coward who “would reduce this thrilling sphere music to a universal wail, [ . . . whose] music is no better than a jingle” (10). However, the novel does hint at a dichotomy between a passing world where music was an activity and the contemporary world of passive constant exposure to music. The natural way in which Anne and Julia Bast mention the names of Rachmaninoff (9), Ravel (11), and later Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, Paderewski (63) illuminates music’s extraordinary position in a family that once had its own family orchestra. But the decline from active play to passive consumption of music begins with the very ¤rst entrance of Edward Bast. His left hand is badly injured by Amy Joubert’s foot, a mark, which later at the Rhinegold rehearsal turns his performance on the piano into a painful

Mark the Music / 223 experience. “The elimination of the complicated handicraft marks the beginning of high mechanization,” Siegfried Giedion states (5). Ironically, Bast is even beginning to lose the essential prerequisite for operating the player piano, its “universal means,” in Gibbs’s written words: “Universal because there is no one in all the world, having the use of hands and feet, who could not learn to use it” (283, 609). Anne Bast’s concern expressed in “what’s happened to Edward’s hand?” (67) is repeated by Stella’s concern about Mozart’s Dminor concerto, which suddenly dies away while she and Edward are listening to it in the barn, “counterpoint [weaving] the strings toward extinction”: “What happened” she wonders. And later Rhoda expresses the same concern (70), a concern which sounds on in Agape Agape: “Man like what’s happening in here [ . . . ] I mean [ . . . ] what happened” (608). She wonders about the racket Gibbs makes after the Scherzo from Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony on the radio has been cut into extinction by commercials. Gibbs answers both Rhoda and Stella: “Shot the pianist” (608). Technical reproduction has eliminated “the frail human element” in the arts (289), the artist, “redolent of chance and the very immanence of human failure” feared by a society ¤xated on progress (289). Complex art in general awaits the same fate. Even though a highly excited Jack Gibbs urges Rhoda ¤ve times to listen to Bruckner’s Scherzo, she hears nothing but the telephone and it is louder. When the Scherzo is broken off Gibbs “shoots the pianist,” delivering the coup de grace to artistic complexity not wanted in a world that prefers “nothing music” and “oompah oompah” (383). Having done away with the dangerous artist, Gibbs turns into a performer, an entertainer, a reproducer of a text promoting the player piano, the mechanical, the calculable, the homogenizer: everyone “having the use of hand and feet” (609) can play any of the great masters who are equally leveled, available without inconvenience, their complexity cheapened with labels like “old Handel,” “unhappy Schubert,” “Beethoven, master of masters,” “great Wagner”—and “Chopin bemoans the fate of Poland” (609). Struggle, development, and work are faded out. While Gibbs is reading, Rhoda tells the story of her struggle to develop as an individual by ¤nding out that she is “¤ne just who [she] is” (609), that she does not have to give in to some prescribed model. Two intoxicated melodies, Gibbs’s stereotyped and Rhoda’s idiosyncratic ones, are woven together in double counterpoint. Both voices drown in an imagined shipwreck, though. There is neither a place for the artist’s voice nor a place for the imaginative voice: Rhoda is pushed out a window by Congressman Pecci after “she told him she could ®y” (674).

224 / Zeidler Even if one “hears a different drummer” (50) it is hard to step to its music because the world dedicated to progress would not “know what you’re getting into” (25) and would rather avoid chance and failure. The element of chance, inherent in the “balance between [ . . . ] destruction and realization” in the making of a work of art (69), is eliminated from the player piano. The player piano “signi¤ed the element which is missing when ‘You push a button—We do the rest’ in the areas of the arts where truth and error are interdependent possibilities in the search for unpredetermined perfection” (Rush 144). Everything is predetermined when playing a player piano. What happens to Bast during the Rhinegold rehearsal shows him to be a human being rather than a machine—“[he] thumped the theme [ . . . ] on the piano, missed a note, winced, repeated it” (32). The mistake would not have happened had he used a player piano. In 1927 pianist Eugen d’Albert, husband of Teresa Carreno, another acquaintance of James Bast (66), regretted a tendency in pianists of his time to aim more and more at a performance without mistakes, a clean and smooth technique that more and more approached the way of the pianola (Hagmann, 190). Alexander Jemnitz claims that you cannot make music on precision instruments: there should always be a degree of technical imperfection in an interpretation because the imperfect is also the human and will thus touch more immediately than any machine could (cit. in Hagmann 192). Edward Bast explains that “music is [not] just writing down notes” (69). Nor is it just sound effects, “there are things only music can say, things that can’t be written down or hung on a clothesline” (655). In accord with his character Edward Bast, who tries to convince J R that “there’s such a thing as [ . . . ] intangible assets” (655), Gaddis summarizes the fundamental concern of his history of the player piano as a demonstration of “the application of systems designed to accomplish tangible and predetermined ends, to such intangible goals as those of the arts” (Rush 146). And music is perceived as the most intangible of all arts. Signi¤cantly, those in the novel who are portrayed as having the deepest understanding of music, Freddie in particular, but also Schramm (370), are themselves never heard. Furthermore, as a mentally retarded boy Freddie also stands outside society, outside some kind of commonly accepted reality, and he “was hearing things you didn’t” (498) when listening to Bach’s Minuet in G. His understanding of music is beyond language to express. Toward the end of J R, Gibbs is overheard reading Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers to Schepperman and is still reading while J R is speaking the

Mark the Music / 225 novel’s last words. Broch sounds in as polyphone music that mixes different genres, philosophy, the novella, the essay and as such might be viewed as an inspiration for “a new art of novelistic counterpoint,” broadening the parameters of contemporary literature (Kundera, Art of the Novel 65). Gaddis’s last work of ¤ction, Agape Agape, takes up Broch’s mixed music in miniature. Fragmentary voices from various genres, Platonian dialogue, aphorism, the letter, the essay, the scienti¤c treatise, the novella are mingled to become one panharmonicon-like voice telling us “what all of it’s all about” (9). Theme and form are as closely entangled as they would be in the dense form of a poem: the novel “turns into what it’s about” (6). It wants “to explain all this” (1), “the collapse of everything” (2), agape agape, the unique work of art made powerless and invisible by the crowd “waiting to be entertained” (7) and that unique power now available only through a paradoxical form already mirrored in the oxymoron of its title, “what they’re calling aporia, [ . . . ] the academics” (2), “the ‘impasse’ of an undecidable oscillation” between rhetoric and thought (Culler 102). On one level, Agape Agape is a complex imitation of the entropy of meaning, language, art, “the collapse of everything” (2), because it is levelling off the multitude of different voices in expressions like “everything else” (28) or “and all the rest of it” (68). On another level, Agape Agape is an anti-entropic text, written against ossi¤cation and paralyses of the mind by letting readers themselves create order out of materials gathered by the author, to perceive the musical forms embedded there by the author and complete the thoughts given in fragments, as motifs in an overall composition. In his attempt to understand “what happened” (16) and for that matter order the material that may hold preliminary answers, the narrator makes several starts. He imitates in the verbal form a musical “sequence,” “a ¤gure or motif stated successively at different pitch levels, so that it moves up or down a scale by equidistant intervals” (New Grove). Each sequence ends on a request for af¤rmation, “you see?” (2), “isn’t it?” (3), “aren’t we?” (7), “you see?” (9), but af¤rmative answers are impossible and every new attempt also ends in resignation: “that’s not what I’m trying to explain, no” (5) or “of course, you can’t explain anything to anybody” (51). The effort to de¤ne words and concepts will be turned the other way around a short time later: at one point “aporia” is “this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity” (2, 70), at another it implies creative acceptance of a contingent universe’s ambiguous and paradoxical character. Or, in the old man’s enterprise, order is “half the battle” (12), only to be recognized immediately as “the battle” itself; society,

226 / Zeidler however, needs it “to eliminate failure” (13) for “fear of chance, of probability and indeterminacy” (50). In Agape Agape, the connection of thoughts, ideas, and quotations is accomplished through a system of correspondences, a method of associations. The musical form is what binds together elements that would otherwise drift apart, structuring the thematic material by way of rhythm and repetition, motif and variation. More speci¤cally, there is a rough resemblance of the text’s structure to what in musicology is known as the classical sonata form, the “most important principle [ . . . ] of formal design” for instrumental music since the Classical period (New Grove). The sonata form comprises three basic parts: exposition, development, and recapitulation. Characteristically, two contrary themes are introduced in the exposition, are modulated and developed in the following part and repeated, though in slightly varied form, in the recapitulation. The novella’s “exposition” introduces two thematic strands: the ¤rst (1.1–1.17) deals with the artist’s attempt to come to terms with entropy in its various scienti¤c meanings; the second one (2.1–3.14) deals with the entropical state of intellectual affairs itself. The latter is distinctly marked as a theme by a formula attached to its beginning and end, “that’s what it’s about” (2.1), “that’s what all this is about isn’t it?” (3.14). The thematic material contains discrete motifs, short phrases, and single words, which will be modulated, developed, or repeated verbatim in different contexts in the “development” of the themes. One example should suf¤ce: “everybody his own artist” (2) is such a motif. When it reappears later (47, 59) it is transformed into an expression representing the crowd, “this democracy of every man his own artist where we are today” (47). It undergoes further variation changing into “Plato’s chance person,” “the performer, [ . . . ] the pantomimic [ . . . ] the imitative who is not a threat” (47). This last phrase takes up in the negative what is stated in the positive for the case of “the real artist” (3), the real “threat to society” (3). The exemplary motif is thus also enforced by way of contrast in its function as representation of “the common herd” (47). In that manner every motif, every phrase, every word carrying weight, is connected to other motif, phrases, words, and each one becomes part of a densely woven musical web, where everything is compared to everything else, whether by establishing a similarity or a contrast. It is left to the reader to discover the difference within this paradox of polyphone homophony, following the “unpleasant but eternal truth”: “Quod licet Jovi [ . . . ] non licet bovi” (47). Finally, a “recapitulation” as in the classical sonata form, can equally be discovered in Agape Agape. The beginning of the ¤rst theme,

Mark the Music / 227 which sets in with the beginning of the book—“you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is and I have to work on the, to ¤nish this work of mine while I”—is repeated word by word (28) up to the point in the quote, but after that phrases are left un¤nished. We hear their ¤rst part, mere reminiscences of their appearance in the exposition. Readers have to complete the movement of thought themselves. In a text that strongly demands the reader’s activity, the most conspicuous musical element aptly is a rhythmic one, the ever recurring rhythmic motif of three beats, in simple form reading “toys, toys, toys” (7) or “loss, loss all just loss” (54), in varied form, “what’s lost what’s gone what’s shouting in the streets” (22). Movement is vital for a narrator who “can’t breathe can’t walk can’t stand” (20) and so, one way to get out of the body’s “prison,” one possibility of moving against all odds is by moving ideas, motif, words. On the one hand, Agape Agape conveys a feeling of standstill, it does not move anywhere in terms of plot or character development; it is immobilized like the narrator, con¤ned to his bed by the disintegration of his body. On the other hand, the book calls for movement. The text’s use of repetition and variation forces the reader to move back and forth in the book, remembering, combining, and understanding. At one point the reader is directly asked to join the dance of voices that embrace each other in ever new ¤gures like a man and a woman dancing the tango: “Should have learned the tango, Pozdnyshev,” the old man advises the narrator of Tolstoy’s Kreutzersonata, “the most elegant, merciless, disciplined [ . . . ], learned the tango you never would have killed [your wife] and if I had I wouldn’t be here now, listen. Listen where’s my clothes, can you help me?” (78–79). The author, who has repeatedly lamented “can’t dance can’t even stand up that’s the other can’t can’t breathe” (30, also 20, 25) now asks the other, the reader, to help him, to help his work stand up and walk. And so the reader might as well start by getting beyond the player piano, the imitative, the pantomimic art and actively listening to Gaddis’s music.

V Biography

13 Valuable Dregs William Gaddis, the Life of an Artist Crystal Alberts

As this painting by Julian Schnabel illustrates, sometimes the worth of an item is determined according to how it is reused or reassembled, not according to its history or original composition. With that notion in mind, Crystal Alberts has researched the contents of the William Gaddis Papers at Washington University in St. Louis in order to piece together a partial biography of Gaddis, titled “Valuable Dregs.” Photograph courtesy of The William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

232 / Alberts

 My feeling essentially is that a book really goes out on its own, for the human remains that wrote it to run along after it is suicidal since there’s clearly no separating them until the mortal partner drops.1

In the half century since The Recognitions was published, William Gaddis has yet to take his rightful place among the American literary canon. He has been called “experimental”; critics have incorrectly “demonstrated” his debt to Joyce; and reviewers have proudly proclaimed they could not and would not ¤nish his books. Overall, his challenging novels remain generally unread and more often than not misunderstood. His life has remained nearly as enigmatic as his works, primarily because when biographical facts were solicited, his (in)famous answer remained: “ ‘What’s any artist but the dregs of his work:’ I gave that line to Wyatt thirty odd years ago and as far as I’m concerned it’s still valid.” William Gaddis usually refused to disclose private information and loathed the idea that his literature would be interpreted biographically; however, his working library contains many biographies and collections of letters from authors he admired, suggesting that he valued or at least appreciated the insight that such personal information gave him. His literary archive, housed at Washington University in St. Louis, belies the author’s ambitions for an absolute impersonality and shows that he not only had a notion of his historical importance, but also that he had a speci¤c idea of how he wanted to be remembered. The archive preserves images of Gaddis as author, screenwriter, critic, son, father, husband, and friend. Yet, even the archive does not provide a complete picture of William Gaddis. Rather, like his work, it is carefully constructed and reveals only as much as he wanted discovered. Hence, this essay is an attempt to piece together a partial biography based on the contents of the William Gaddis Papers. It is intended to debunk some of the rumors, to introduce the Gaddis literary estate to the academic world, and, most importantly, to show that William Gaddis, the man and the artist, is far more than the dregs of his work. The William Gaddis Papers—forty-two numbered boxes, oversized items, and three pallets holding his working library—arrived at Washington University in St. Louis in late March 2002. Gone were the “standard 12-bttl liquor size” boxes that Gaddis had used to store his papers, but his organization and inventory roughly remained. Gaddis does not begin his historical reconstruction with his childhood, rather, just as he had done in life, he placed his

Valuable Dregs / 233 work ¤rst, starting with his published novels in chronological order: boxes 1 (a and b) through 4, The Recognitions; boxes 5 through 10, J R; boxes 10 through 13, Carpenter’s Gothic; boxes 14 through 16, A Frolic of His Own. Corporate works from P¤zer, IBM, Kodak, and the U.S. Army, including the “Answers to Cancer” brochure and the Pile Fabric Primer follow in boxes 24 and 25. Unpublished stories appear in box 32 and Agape Agape, published posthumously, is stored in box 36. Personal information was placed in boxes originally numbered “0” and “00,” which were later renumbered. However, Gaddis stipulated in his inventory that this material could be removed from the collection prior to its release to Washington University. At this time, it is unknown how much, if any, of the manuscript materials were removed from the collection. That said, based on the lack of personal information in the William Gaddis Papers, it has been assumed that some materials were removed, thereby preserving his privacy even in death. As a result, given its contents and physical order, the organizing principle used by Gaddis in The Recognitions may also be bene¤cial to those seeking his biography. Speci¤cally, Gaddis’s son, Matthew, described The Recognitions as a carefully constructed novel, which is built around the idea of a broken mirror. Wyatt stands in the center and the shards (the other characters) re®ect back upon him. In the case of the William Gaddis Papers, at the center stands Gaddis, while each box, each folder re®ects a sliver of his history. Most comprehensively, the archive re®ects the biography of William Gaddis of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Recognitions was written over a seven-year period; it went forward in ¤ts and starts, ending in marathon rewriting sessions during the winter of 1954. The ¤ve boxes that hold materials on The Recognitions begin with letters from Sheri Martinelli and end with correspondence, reviews clipped from newspapers, as well as notes and negotiations for translations. However, in between the paratextual and business documents are “rough draft notes, sketches, outlines, early story versions, false starts later incorporated, ± 2000 items mostly 8 1/2 × 13 typescript heavily annotated often both sides pen pencil notes & scrawls in no order.” These materials document the construction of The Recognitions; however, they only re®ect one aspect of his creative process: the workmanlike, head down writer. But this pristine ¤gure did not entirely exclude details from the life he was living. Three large pieces of Gaddis’s life converged and culminated in The Recognitions: education, travel, and Greenwich Village. Yet, the archive does not equally ¤ll out all of these areas. Gaps remain, particularly as regards educa-

234 / Alberts tion. Although the collection reveals much about Gaddis’s childhood and adolescent years at the Merricourt Worthington Schools, it contains next to nothing about his high school experience. While it contains the short stories written for English A-4a at Harvard, one ¤nds none of his work from the Harvard Lampoon. The archive documents when and where Gaddis traveled from 1947 to 1951, but what he did while there is reported only in letters to his mother. It is well known that Gaddis lived in the Village and associated with the “Beat Generation”; however, the collection only alludes to the extent of that connection. As a result, only an incomplete image of William Gaddis can be reconstructed, one that gains substance and telling detail from the archive materials but still needs to be supplemented by external research—comments by others, references in books of the period, and the scholar’s own understanding of the era. Gaddis was born 29 December 1922, in New York to Edith and William Gaddis Sr. About his parents’ marriage, the collection contains only one letter written by Gaddis in 1994: “my mother age about 18 [drifted from Indiana] to a brief college career at Sweetbriar & thence to New York where she met this dashing fellow & married at 22 & he wasn’t much older in the high spirits of the 20s, little ®iers on Wall Street (where he overworked) which seemed to go on theatre tickets & ¤nally a breakdown & they separated when I was about 3 brought up by my mother’s family & I didn’t see him again until I was in my 20s when we got reacquainted or I should say acquainted [ . . . ] with him.” Shortly after their separation, Gaddis’s formal education would begin in Berlin, Connecticut, where from the age of ¤ve to thirteen, he attended the Merricourt School (September 1928 through June 1934) and then moved to the Worthington School (September 1934 through June 1935). These boarding schools, informally af¤liated with the Congregationalists, were small and “run along the lines of what was then described as the ‘modi¤ed Dalton plan’ implying a good deal of freedom but very strictly within a New England framework” (a description that might even describe aspects of Gaddis’s aesthetic, not unlike the constrained constructivism of a Carpenter Gothic house—built from the outside, so as to necessitate numerous accommodations and improvisations within the actual living space). The collection also contains materials from this period, including letters to his mother, childhood stories, drawings, photographs, and his ¤rst forays in French. It leaves the reader with a picture of a rather well adjusted boy of a loving single mother relatively untouched by the Great Depression, though tinged with

Valuable Dregs / 235 enough Calvinist notions for them to appear in his ¤rst novel in the guise of Aunt May. In addition, his Congregationalist education, in spite of Gaddis showing no particular hostility toward it, establishes a possible historical source for his ardent dislike for organized religion as it appears in Carpenter’s Gothic and “Old Foes with New Faces.” From boarding school, Gaddis moved back to Long Island to attend public high school from seventh grade through his graduation in 1941. In Gaddis’s words: “High school was the general run of prewar uncrowded New York state public education emphasizing grades insofar as all courses were subject to the state regents examinations. My grades were good and occasionally excellent. Throughout school I never questioned doing homework on a regular assigned basis, I don’t recall ever being what you call a ‘recognized achiever’ although, since I was admitted to the only college I applied to (Harvard) presumably some of that element was present.” Beyond the contents of the letter cited above and a few pictures, the speci¤cs of his high school experience are not re®ected by the archive. However, Gertrude Kranz (née Radle), one of his schoolmates, has provided me with excerpts from his senior yearbook, revealing that Gaddis was a member of the Farmingdale High School yearbook staff; that he served as Master of Ceremonies for the Senior Dinner and dance in March 1941; and that he also played Philip Hare, one of the twins, in “The Merry Hares,” the comedic three act senior play. Next to Gaddis’s senior picture, also provided by Kranz, is the epigram: “You can’t tell what his car’ll do next, / Or what Bill’s going to say, / His manner always carefree, / And his motto ‘toujours gai.’ ” However, Gaddis’s high school days were not consistently “toujours gai.” As he notes: “All out of the ordinary that coloured [sic] my high school experience was loss of about a year and a half with a severe illness.” The illness to which he refers is memorialized not only in The Recognitions “(from page 41 on),” but also in a letter from 1986: 2 years of what was at last resignedly diagnosed as a “tropical fever of unknown origin” (I’d then never been in the tropics), told I’d accumulated the most voluminous case history in New York Hospital, and ¤nally sent home without prospects when I demanded that my dog be brought in for a visit; after which things gradually mended with no more explanation than what it was all about in the ¤rst place. Lord, when I remember those hospital days waking bright as a penny sitting

236 / Alberts bolt upright learning / practicing Old English lettering doing Do Not Disturb signs for the nurses [ . . . ] and by evening a temperature of around 103º & pains not generally earned till about age 80. This illness would also affect his college career, as “some after effects of the ‘cure’ ” would force Gaddis to take a medical leave of absence from Harvard in November 1941, just two months after his arrival. Based on letters to his mother contained in the archive, we known that during this time Gaddis traveled throughout the western United States, including U.S. Army Camp Hale, Tucson, Los Angeles, Cheyenne, and St. Louis. The correspondence also reveals that he worked as a ranch hand out West and as a river dredger on the Mississippi River. From St. Louis, he gradually made his way back to New York in time for the fall semester, returning to Harvard in September 1942. However, the aftereffects of the illness had still further fallout. As Gaddis notes, “my college experience was clearly coloured by its taking place during the war where many or most of my friends were bound.” By January 1943, Gaddis reports to his mother that he will shortly “either be 4F or in His Majesty’s Army.” Approximately two weeks later, he informs her that he has been denied by the Merchant Marine; he “shant be drafted.” Medically barred from entering World War II, Gaddis proceeded with his education, taking classes in English literature, creative writing, French, and psychology. According to Gaddis: “Harvard stressed one’s taking one’s courses, assignments, attendance at lectures &c very much upon one’s self. My marks were generally good; I was occasionally on the Dean’s List. My only extracurricular activity was editing the Harvard Lampoon. I studied English literature and psychology. (At age 14 I’d had a consuming ambition to be a chemist; it quite suddenly disappeared for no reason I knew, any more than why I’d been so consumed by it in the ¤rst place.)” Here, Gaddis mentions the Harvard Lampoon, but the details of his involvement are not revealed by the archive. However, it is known that Gaddis wrote over sixty pieces for the Harvard Lampoon and served as its president from 1943 to 1945. Joseph Eldredge, who also wrote for the Lampoon, ¤lls in a bit of the hole left by the collection. He described the Gaddis he knew as “small, intense, with an el¤n face supported by substantial ears, his smile an integral part of his cosmic sense of humor, occasionally exploding from within a large armchair.” Elaborating on this image, he relates:

Valuable Dregs / 237 I remember one such dance at the (Hasty) Pudding. It was New Years eve [sic], and there were a few of us free of the essential libations. Just before the lights went off at mid-night, Billy was sitting bolt upright in one of the great black leather club chairs, wearing his impishly beati¤c smile. When the lights came on again, his position was inverted. Still clutching his half-empty-¤lled glass, his intensely ¤red eyes refused to divulge who it was that had done this, or whether he was actually sober enough to have done it himself. For those who understand the Lampoon’s charivaric [sic] tradition, it could have been a combination of both, arranged at dinner in anticipation of the day in which he would be able to extend his brand of mischief to generations of readers. Seemingly remembered fondly by those who knew him at Harvard, Gaddis (on archival evidence) formed lifelong friendships with Barney Emmart and John Snow during this time, but beyond quotidian details related to his mother, a few short stories, and some schoolwork from a psychology class, not much else is known about Gaddis from this time. Despite the fact that he had attended his reunion in 1970, he was still deliberately vague when responding in 1982 to a critic’s question about Harvard: “I have little enthusiasm right now for reviving the Lampoon period, didn’t know John Hawkes at College [although he would later], believe I had an English survey course under Guerard but nothing beyond that.” This hard-line stance softened somewhat by 1994, when he revealed just a bit more about his acquaintances: “I was still there when John Updike arrived. We were both involved in the Lampoon. He was always one of those clever guys. I was more quiet, more brooding, a romantic, less of a wit.” Beyond his general refusal to disclose any biographical information, perhaps Gaddis’s reluctance to discuss “the Harvard period” arises from the misinformation and rumor surrounding his involuntary leave from the institution. Possibly as a way of setting the record straight once and for all, the collection does preserve the dean’s expulsion letter. According to it, Gaddis was asked to leave Harvard on 17 January 1945. On 8 January, after a night out, the student with whom Gaddis was drinking “pushed his hand through a large pane of glass.” Gaddis and another student took the injured man to the in¤rmary, where the injured became belligerent. Gaddis, in an attempt to calm the individual, went to a neighboring shop and banged on the door, hoping to use a telephone to call the man’s girlfriend. The girlfriend was

238 / Alberts called, as were the Cambridge police. The arrest occurred after an exchange of words, and Gaddis later paid a small ¤ne for disorderly conduct. Harvard based its decision to expel on the fact that Gaddis was already on probation for violations of “parietal rules” and that he had failed to register for classes prior to the Christmas deadline. Harvard gave him the option to reapply in two years. It is unknown whether he did so. However, in his expulsion letter, the dean warned: “when you talked with me, you said that you would like to take up newspaper or magazine work. It has been our experience that a job of reporting or writing for a paper or a magazine does not give the kind of discipline that we regard as necessary in cases of this kind.” With these words in mind and in seeming de¤ance, Gaddis moved to Greenwich Village and started working for the New Yorker as a “fact-checker”; he also began freelance writing. The collection contains nothing re®ecting his work at the New Yorker, but the archive does contain his early writing. Box 32 contains approximately thirty-¤ve completed “magazine stories” mostly dated between 1947 and 1949, which not only demonstrate Gaddis’s development as an author, but also re®ect his past experiences. “Westerns” found in box 32 discuss ranching or riding the rails; they are set in places such as Wyoming and St. Louis where Gaddis worked while on medical leave from Harvard. “Faire Exchange No Robbery,” a mock Elizabethan drama, reveals his talent for satire, his interest in theater, and his knowledge of English Renaissance drama (a fact supported by volumes found in his working library), while “A Father Arrested” and “Notes on Cartago” relate Gaddis’s time in the Costa Rican Civil War of 1948. As letters to his mother and his “Statement of Personal History” completed prior to his employment with the U.S. Army attest, Gaddis traveled extensively from March 1947 to April 1951 and sporadically immediately thereafter, including stops in Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Gibraltar, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, England, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, ranging in duration from one day to four months. His time in Latin America— working in the Canal Zone and for “banana republics,” as well as ¤ghting with the army of Figueres in Costa Rica—would cause him to question America’s role in the world and mourn the loss of Native culture as a result of Americanization. From Spain in 1953, he would write to his mother about the McCarthy trials, further lamenting the state of American society. He jokes that the letter should be burned to prevent its falling into the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee and being used by them out of context, perhaps a prophetic statement as the collection also contains the

Valuable Dregs / 239 FBI ¤le on William Gaddis obtained by Gaddis through the Freedom of Information Act. These travels would also allow Gaddis to write his novel, by providing him not only with time but also with additional material. As a result, The Recognitions contains scenes set in Latin America and Europe, including banana republics, Central American revolutions, and Spanish monasteries. Greenwich Village of the late 1940s and early 1950s would also shape William Gaddis’s biography and his writing. Other stories found among his unpublished works allude to his experiences there. “Evelyn Ex Libris” describes a person whose personality is dictated by whatever book she happens to be reading. Anatole Broyard, an acquaintance of Gaddis from this time, would depict a similar character in Kafka Was the Rage (1993), suggesting that such a person did exist. However, perhaps the most interesting of the unpublished stories surrounding Village activities is “Who Is R?” which refers to a woman named only “M” (whether the “M” refers to Margaret Williams, Gaddis’s girlfriend in Paris and a lifelong friend or Sheri Martinelli is not made clear). Moreover, Gaddis was conscious of the connection between his biography and his novel, as he would tell his friend Charles Socarides: It is a good novel, terri¤c, the whole thread of the story, the happenings, the franticness. The man who (metaphorically) sells himself to the devil, the young man hunting so for father ¤gure, chasing the older to his (younger’s) death. And the “girl”—who ¤nally compleatly [sic] loses her identity, she who has tried to make an original myth is lost because her last witness (a fellow who takes heroin) is sent to jail—the young man (hero) the informer. There the frantic point: that it all happened. Not really, maybe, but with the facts in recent life and my running, it happened. All the time, every minute the thing grows in me, I “think of ” (or remember) new facts of the novel—the Truth About the Past (alternate title). (The title is “Ducdame, called ‘some people who were naked’ ”). The Recognitions immortalizes the San Remo, a popular Village bar, as the Viareggio and bases characters on individuals that Gaddis interacted with either there or around the Village. Speci¤cally, it makes mention of “Anatole,” most likely Anatole Broyard, who is also the real source for the

240 / Alberts character Max. While the “girl” who “loses her identity” is Esme, modeled after Sheri Martinelli. The archive also partially re®ects this connection between the facts of Gaddis’s life and his ¤ction. Inside box 1(a) is folder 1, containing correspondence and materials from Sheri Martinelli. Gaddis’s decision to begin with Martinelli is perhaps an interesting coincidence, perhaps a conscientious choice, as she fuses Greenwich Village biographical fact with his ¤ction. The letters from Martinelli—“the central character Esme,” long-time companion to Ezra Pound, and one-time girlfriend of William Gaddis—oscillate between rage (possibly real, most likely feigned), nostalgic reminiscences, praise, and “Mr. Pound says.” They are fragmented; they shirk standardized spelling; they shed little light on the relationship between Martinelli and Gaddis. And yet, when read along with other letters in the collection, they provide a glimpse into Gaddis’s life in Greenwich Village and its reaction to the author of The Recognitions. Martinelli knew that she was Esme: “esme . . . (whut a name u bastard) can go to hell . . . but it is dif¤cult NOT to recognize her . . . at least my beloved you were THERE . . . that’s more than i can say for myself.” As Gaddis’s inventory notes, “She wrote the letter on painting transcribed in [The Recognitions] pp. 471– 73.” She recognized her words in the text, remarking: “thank god no one BUT anatole [Broyard] WHO received that letter on art . . . will recognize the portrait . . . you lousy lousy lousy punk!” Despite her “outrage,” Martinelli praised the book in her own way: “oh well what can one do wit an ole fren except indulge him . . . so i do . . . my small sister . . . (thank god she DONT know YOU) is terribly thrilled . . . i suppose you couldnt resist.” She continues: “oh my god how clearly you emerged from the pages . . . and i honestly NEVER knew you knew all that bullshit but seems you did . . . dear ole willie . . . ole friend . . . old comrade . . . i told my little sister NOT to read yr goddamned book until shez about 65.” It is unknown whether Martinelli ever ¤nished The Recognitions; she was still “chewing [her] way through” it in 1957. Beyond her letters, only slivers of information remain about Gaddis’s Village experience. However, because the materials preserved by the collection were either given special weight by Gaddis, having been singled out into their own folders or placed in “rare books,” or were occasionally discussed in detail by Gaddis, they appear to be a piece of his biography that he wanted brought to light. They demonstrate not only his association with the “Beat Generation” but also the respect that these authors

Valuable Dregs / 241 had for Gaddis and his writing. Consequently, they are physically placed and pieced together here in quick succession and quoted at length. After reading only one hundred pages into The Recognitions, the aforementioned Anatole Broyard wrote a letter to “Willie:” I’ve been reading your book, and for many reasons I felt like telling you I like it. So far, it has surprised me. Not that I didn’t think you had talent, but after all it’s a ¤rst book, and it’s so “professional.” People who aren’t writing their ¤rst novels can’t know, I suppose, what it means to write a real, honest-to-God novel while saying what it is you wanted to say, cracking all your favorite jokes, grinding your axes, etc. You did it, and I admire you for it. It’s an achievement writing 956 pages—not the way Wolfe or Jones or the other windbags do, but composing it in every word, writing literature. [ . . . ] God knows why I’m raving to you, Willie. Because I knew you and you surprised me so impressively, because you’re so much better than Chandler and the others and so much more ambitious, because I wish I could write 956 pages while I count my words every day. In the collection, Broyard’s letter is found in the same folder as Martinelli’s, perhaps because Broyard and Martinelli had a romantic relationship, but perhaps more likely because Broyard praises the art and craft of Gaddis’s ¤ction, something that reviewers failed to do. He represents a kind of “ideal reader,” a fellow author who appreciates the composition of literature and the integrity of an author’s voice. Broyard compares Gaddis to Chandler Brossard, whose ¤rst novel, Who Walk in Darkness, appeared in 1952. Gaddis’s onetime roommate in Greenwich Village, Brossard also documented life there and modeled characters after his acquaintances, including a character based on Gaddis. As Gaddis recounts, “I seem to have been the model for a young Harvard drinks too much character who is ¤nally mugged.” Although not the most favorable representation, Gaddis claims, “but I’ve been fond of Chandler—it never upset me.” Yet another characterization of Gaddis is found in Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (1960), in the guise of one “Harold Sand.” In The Subterraneans, among other observations, Kerouac preserves what appears to be his only interaction with Gaddis. According to Gaddis, “I was quite unaware—

242 / Alberts at the time & until now—of Kerouac’s generous regard for me as it appears in these pages. I remember our acquaintance as very much the way he presents it right down to the old car (a wounded 1941 Chevrolet) & centered very much around Alan Ansen.” In 1953–54, Gaddis became friends with Ansen, poet and onetime assistant to W. H. Auden. Gaddis does not recall how they met, but remembers “many enough evenings of heavy talk & drink (though I knew him only for approx. that year) till 7 am in that ‘library’ Kerouac describes.” In the fall of 1953, when Gaddis “had THE RECOGNITIONS in what [he] considered a ¤nished draft but had ‘a little more work’ to do on it [ . . . ] Ansen went to Europe (Venice) & [Gaddis], for a ridiculous rent ([ . . . ] $35 a month) & tending his mail, banking, bills &c, spent that winter alone in the house practically rewriting the entire book.” The collection also preserves the relatively extensive correspondence from Ansen to Gaddis, which details the activities of Ansen and his travel companion William S. Burroughs, mentioning when their path crosses Gaddis’s earlier one. Ansen also offers his editorial assistance: “If you don’t get yourself killed in the drunken orgy which will come off on your release or bereavement (however you like to put it), so let me know when the labors of revision are de¤nitely at an end. Are you planning to do your own proof-reading? I remember having helped Auden [whom Gaddis had met in 1943] with the proofs on The Age Anxiety and, if you like, I might do something along those lines for you. I should feel like less of an idler.” Gaddis takes him up on his offer, to a certain extent, as Gaddis relates: “I’d ¤nished just as [Ansen] returned in spring & remember him sitting down barely off the boat in that ghastly diningroom & reading it straight through in a day and a half.” The collection also preserves yet another sliver of information surrounding Gaddis’s interaction with the Beat Generation. A copy of Junky (1953) given to Gaddis by William S. Burroughs is inscribed simply “to Bill Gaddis who knew me before I knew myself.” Why Burroughs would write something to a man approximately eight years his junior and without a completed novel has yet to be discovered, but interestingly Gaddis thought enough of it to store this copy of Junky among his “rare books.” Although incomplete, the archive reveals that Kerouac, Ansen, Burroughs, Broyard, and Brossard were in Gaddis’s circle in Greenwich Village during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some of these individuals would be mere acquaintances, some would be relatively close friends for a year or so, and some would send the occasional Christmas card throughout his life (as was the

Valuable Dregs / 243 case with Burroughs). Still others would be brie®y mentioned by name, such as Muriel Murphy and Constance Smith; but these would not reappear until a much later date. However, the speci¤cs of when and where he met each one or how often he came into contact with them is not re®ected by the archive. The collection contains no letters from Gaddis to those of the Beat Generation. Also, although the letters from Martinelli were carefully stored in a folder of their own (along with one letter from the aforementioned Anatole Broyard), Gaddis’s letters to her are hidden among his notes, manuscripts, and a folder perhaps appropriately labeled “un¤nished.” Usually addressed simply to “You,” the few found are most likely unsent. However, they reveal an intimate side of Gaddis. They are ¤lled with passionate emotions that like the letters themselves would become buried under many protective layers, only to be revealed to those closest to him in the years to come. These letters suggest that while Gaddis wanted his biography to include a section on his connection to the Beats and Greenwich Village, he wished the intimate details, those unrelated to his art, to remain a mystery. Nevertheless, the innermost thoughts of Gaddis about his writing do occasionally slip into focus through the collection. The aforementioned “Who Is R?” reveals more than just the in®uence of the Village on Gaddis’s works; it also suggests his struggle to write The Recognitions. Time and again, he would express his perceived inability to write—to his mother, to Sheri Martinelli, and to his friends. The letter to Charles Socarides quoted above also articulates this dif¤culty: “I have been away for 3 days, on a neighboring island, working frantically on this novel. Which looks so bad. [ . . . ] But this growing ¤ction ¤ts so insanely well with facts of life that sometimes I can not [sic] stand it (must burst as I am doing here). And then, I ruin it by bad writing. Like trying to be clever—this perhaps because I am afraid to be sincere? But I watch myself ruin it. And then—because when I was writing in college I went so over board, now it must be reserved, understated, intimated.” This passage from a letter most likely never sent and found in a folder labeled “notes” among his unpublished works reveals much about William Gaddis as a person and as an author. First, it re®ects the fact that Gaddis was his own worst critic. Throughout his life, he wrote deliberately and with a meticulousness that can only be understood through an examination of his manuscripts. He methodically selected words and punctuation and would challenge editors who attempted to make “corrections.” In his own words, he

244 / Alberts was an “inveterate researcher” and was “obsessed with getting it right”; he spent years researching subjects to ensure veracity. He painstakingly chose the order and form of his thoughts, which culminated in his own version of “cut and paste.” He would copy (either by Xerox or by retyping) his manuscripts and cut them into strips, arranging and rearranging the sentences, ¤nally taping them onto a blank page to preserve their order—a process that he used to write J R and Carpenter’s Gothic. The Socarides letter excerpt also lends credence to the fact that his biography in®uenced his work. More speci¤cally, as Martinelli noted, he was becoming a chronicler of his age. Perhaps as a result, when William Gaddis wrote The Recognitions, he believed that it would be “the last Christian novel.” He thought it was about “the massive character of the dissolution and corruption of authority, in belief, in ritual and in temporal order . . . about our histories and traditions as ‘both bonds and barriers among us,’ and our art which ‘brings us together and sets us apart.’ ” He is “on the record saying [half-jokingly] that [he] thought [he] would win the Nobel Prize,” which of course he did not. He thought the novel would “change the world,” but “It didn’t. Nothing happened. I was shocked, angry, hurt surprised. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that no, I had not become famous.” He anticipated ¤nancial security and fame, but he received none. He had hoped that his audience would understand his novel and perhaps even be redeemed by it. Instead, as noted by Jack Green, “2 of the 55 reviews were adequate the others amateurish & incompetent.” Yet, he had anticipated this very response in The Recognitions: “Good Lord Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.” However, writing it and experiencing it are two very different things. The reception of The Recognitions affected Gaddis profoundly. Put simply, in his words to David Markson: I was in low enough state for a good while after the book came out that I could not ¤nd it in me to answer letters that said anything, only those [ . . . ] that offered “I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming . . . ” Partly appalled at what I counted then the book’s apparent failure, partly wearied at the prospect of contention, advice, and criticism, and partly just drained of any more supporting arguments, as honestly embarrassed at the high praise as resentful of patronising [sic] censure.

Valuable Dregs / 245 As this letter implies, Gaddis as a person and as an author changed. His young ideological notions were replaced with weariness, suspicion, and cynicism. He grew to dislike critics and distrust academics (or those in training), later describing one university interested in purchasing his literary estate, as a place “engulfed in the serious industry of doctoral dissertations.” He became what Tom LeClair would call a “literary recluse,” guarding personal information and revealing his innermost thoughts and feelings only to those closest to him. This change is also re®ected by the archive, which consciously seems to contain less personal information about Gaddis post-Recognitions than it did pre-Recognitions. Along these lines, other major events rapidly followed the release of his ¤rst novel, further altering his life, but the archive contains very little information on them. The Recognitions was published in March 1955; in July, Barney Emmart, a close friend of Gaddis’s from his Harvard days, would congratulate Gaddis on his marriage to Patsy Black. Later that year, the Gaddises added a baby girl, Sarah, to their family. Matthew, the Gaddises’ only son and last child, would be born a little over two years later. Although family life undoubtedly impacted Gaddis’s life, the collection focuses not on intimate details, but rather on practical implications. Speci¤cally, because The Recognitions was not a commercial success, he was forced into the corporate workforce to support his family. In order to meet ¤nancial obligations, Gaddis initially attempted to ¤nd work in freelance writing. Shortly after the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis submitted a few television show treatments to CBS, including a program on forgery, but the network was not interested. Gaddis also wrote an article for Sports Illustrated on miniature golf, but after a number of rewrites, Sports Illustrated rejected it as too literary. As a result, Gaddis ended up in corporate America, working in public relations, writing speeches, scripting ¤lms, and creating pamphlets. In particular, he worked for P¤zer, where his superiors were pleased with his work, as re®ected by the contents of the archive. Copies of his letters in the archive contain comments such as, “Another ¤rst rate letter!” Where he had received little professional praise for his novel, he now was rewarded for writing insipid corporate documents. In his words: “I am hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments de¤cit but mostly staring out the window, serving the goal that Basil Valentine damned in ‘the people whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill.’ ” P¤zer would indeed pay the

246 / Alberts bills for a little over ¤ve years, from May 1957 to July 1962, after which time he would resign, returning yet again to freelance work for Eastman Kodak, IBM, and the Ford Foundation. The archive represents Gaddis’s professional face with an appropriate businesslike precision. An “inveterate researcher” when writing ¤ction, Gaddis is revealed by the collection as no less adept in exploring corporate America. Whether scripting a ¤lm for the U.S. Army or creating documents for IBM, he wanted to make sure that he got the facts right. As a result, the archive also contains notes and letters reconstructing the events at St. Vith’s, Belgium, the site of the World War II Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, including photos with the military generals involved. It also houses lecture notes and pamphlets on the inner workings of the nations’ earliest computers from IBM. The collection also contains dozens of itemized billing slips from his freelance work, documenting down to the penny the cost of his corporate creations. Although Gaddis worked in corporate America and maintained an image of professionalism, he stepped through the looking glass regularly to continue writing ¤ction. In 1956, shortly after The Recognitions, Gaddis sent a certi¤ed letter to himself containing the basic idea for J R, a project that he laid aside to “put a year or two into” a play, Once at Antietam, which he would describe to Markson in 1961 as “a presently overlong and overcomplicated and really quite straight ¤gment of the Civil War.” The “quite straight ¤gment,” as the archive reveals, was a quite true characterization. Although he obviously had no direct experience with the Civil War as he had with the Village, Gaddis found historical facts on which to base his ¤ction. Speci¤cally, as he had done with The Recognitions, where he intermittently enlisted the help of his mother, Gaddis occasionally used those around him as “research assistants.” In the case of Once at Antietam, his wife provided vital information. Hidden among the few extant letters between husband and wife, written while she visited her family in North Carolina, are two decaying legal notepad pages containing notes presumably from the Pennsylvania Historical Society. They relate the history of Colonel Frank Coxe, who enlisted with a regiment out of Greenville, South Carolina, and participated in the Battle of Bull Run. Coxe owned coal mines in Pennsylvania and, when he discovered that the Union Army intended to con¤scate them, he hired a substitute to take his place in the Confederate Army so that he could go North. Upon his arrival in the North, he hired a substitute to serve in his place in the Union Army. “Hence the story that he fought on

Valuable Dregs / 247 both sides at once, against himself in many battles, ran away from himself on more than one occasion, was twice shot to death and lived to a ripe old age, haunted always by the fear that he had killed himself.” The life of Frank Coxe became the central story of Once at Antietam, a never-produced play that would be incorporated almost wholesale into A Frolic of His Own. Putting Once at Antietam “on the shelf ” and fueled by his experiences in corporate America, he would continue to work on J R until it was published in 1975. As with The Recognitions, the archive contains “original source material, notes, scraps, strip paste-ups, early versions of scenes (rough), false starts, rewrites; pen, pencil, typescripts most heavily annotated in intricate outlines of scenes sequences dialogue; material never included or included and later cut.” Among the “source material” can be found stock certi¤cates, shareholders meeting notes, and pro¤t reports. The “intricate outline of scenes sequences dialogue” [sic] includes large grids arranged alpha-numerically, a code that appears throughout his “paste-ups.” Further reconstructing the image of J R’s creation are photographs from his Piermont workroom, which show his desk and walls covered with meticulously arranged manuscript pages.2 For the vast majority of the time spent writing J R, Gaddis lived outside of New York City, residing in Croton-on-Hudson or Piermont. The archive contains relatively little detail about Gaddis’s personal life during this time, save for an image of it found in a letter to David Markson: [Croton] is excellent, bachelor or family (I’m not suggesting the former to you), I can live there for weeks and speak to no one but the clerk at the A&P & comment on the weather with the gas station man. Which I like. [ . . . ] But inevitably with children in school you meet parents, more or less. I do have a few friends there, say 4 families, which is all I want. It is country and because of the twisty up & down nature of the land unsuburbanizable like Long Island. [ . . . ] With children, as I say, I don’t think one could do better; and even without it’s worked out well for me. I don’t know, I get awfully bored in NY, going out, sitting around, hearing myself talk, awfully impatient with it. In this letter, Gaddis implies his divorce from Patsy Black and refers to his second wife Judith Thompson. With amazing consistency, the archive contains essentially nothing about the circumstances of either the divorce or the second marriage other than that they occurred sometime between 1963 (the

248 / Alberts last reference to Patsy and William Gaddis) and 1967 (the ¤rst reference to Judith and William Gaddis). The letter also makes reference to his children, who, after the divorce, apparently lived with their mother for most of the year. Just as there is little in the collection concerning his marriages, there is very little material re®ecting his relationship with his children. However, scattered throughout the collection are images of Gaddis as the loving and dutiful father: ¤nger paintings, drawings, letters to preschools, cards and occasional notes, gift receipts, as well as photographs, including pictures from his seventy-¤fth birthday party in Key West. Perhaps exacerbated by the personal events of divorce and marriage, as well as, to a much lesser extent, the death of his father in 1965, as with The Recognitions, Gaddis struggled to write the novel that he wanted in J R. As he would con¤de to Warren Kiefer in a letter: God damned weary of everything, problem I get up in the morning and think any positive energy has simply got to go to this God damned book & by this time of day haven’t a kind word left for anybody. [ . . . ] try to start again. Really so God damned lucky splendid wife son and daughter own a house car the roof goes up and down had a boat too but it burned. [ . . . ] not fair as I said to open, mainly just the God damned day after dayness of this “second” book which has just about devoured everybody close to me (see above) attended, as its completion is if not in grasp in sight by Eliot’s That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all. . . . Burned by the reception of The Recognitions, Gaddis feared that J R would suffer the same outcome. However, as fate would have it, William H. Gass “had the good fortune to be on the jury which awarded J R the National Book Award, and got a little recognition for an author who, till then, had been the idol of a clique.” The publishing of his second novel changed Gaddis’s life, although again, not in the way that he might have imagined. J R was received warmly by critics, but not by a vast, money-paying audience. However, the critical acclaim did open doors, permitting him to end his commercial work. Speci¤cally, he would join the U.S. Information Agency’s (USIA) literary tour of Japan and the Philippines in 1976. He would be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius award” in 1982. In spite of all of this recognition, Gaddis would comment to

Valuable Dregs / 249 his agent Candida Donadio, shortly after J R was published: “America has odd ways of making one feel oneself a failure.” Failure. The word that he used to describe The Recognitions reappears to reference J R. It would lead to a class titled “The Literature of Failure” taught by Gaddis at Bard College in 1978–79. The collection contains his class syllabus and lecture notes, as well as copies of the books taught, including Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and In®uence People. The class would culminate in “The Rush for Second Place” published by Harper’s in 1981, which allowed him to “let off some steam.” The archive also physically maintains this connection by placing materials from the Bard College course in folder 147, “Failure Notes” in folder 148, and “failure notes/The Rush for Second Place” in folder 149. By the time the article came out, Gaddis’s personal life had undergone yet another change. A few years after J R was published, Gaddis and his second wife divorced. By August of 1979, Gaddis had “rediscovered” Muriel Murphy, an acquaintance of his from his Greenwich Village days, with whom he would live until late August 1995. As before, speci¤c information about Gaddis’s divorce and subsequent relationship is not contained in the archive. Yet another Village acquaintance would reemerge in 1979. Through his friendship with William H. Gass, formed shortly after Gaddis received the National Book Award, he met Stanley Elkin. Gass and Elkin, professors at Washington University in St. Louis, asked him to serve as a Hurst Professor from 4 to 23 February 1979; he accepted. Gaddis came to St. Louis, delivered two talks, and spent time with Gass and Elkin. He also met up with Constance (Connie) Smith, a woman whom he was acquainted with in the Village, who moved to St. Louis in 1961 and served as the head of acquisitions at Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University. Smith had reestablished contact with Gaddis shortly after J R was published, and she maintained intermittent correspondence from 1975 to 1981. Although the extent of their friendship is unknown, the collection preserves her one-act play written after visiting with Gaddis in St. Louis in 1979. As with so many others, why Gaddis kept these letters and the play is a matter of speculation. Perhaps it was simply nostalgia for the Village.3 After publishing J R, Gaddis would tell Candida Donadio that he was trying to ¤gure out what to do with himself, and by August of 1980 he had an answer. He was “trying by weak force of will alone to start another book, no damned thick square book this time but I hope simply a ‘romance’ but trouble still coming up with the fueling indignation, the only thing

250 / Alberts that rouses me these days all these God damned born-agains & evangelicals.” Following this source of “indignation,” as the archive re®ects, Gaddis gathered information on Jimmy Swaggart and Billy Graham. While in Mexico with Murphy and his friends John and Dorothy Sherry in the winter of 1980–81, Gaddis wrote ¤fty pages toward the “romance” Carpenter’s Gothic. While working on Carpenter’s Gothic, set in a home based on the one in which he had lived in Piermont, down to the working room (where he had written J R), he was awarded the Guggenheim (1981) and the MacArthur (1982) grants. Carpenter’s Gothic, published in 1985, received the PEN/ Faulkner award in 1986. After Carpenter’s Gothic, Gaddis traveled and socialized more than he had since his Village days. In 1985, Gaddis journeyed to the Soviet Union for a writer’s conference with Gass and Louis Auchincloss. The collection contains a seemingly complete set of audiotapes documenting the event. Gaddis also rejoined the USIA literary tour in West Berlin, New Zealand, and Australia in 1987. Also in 1987, Gaddis published his ¤rst face-to-face interview with the Paris Review, thereby breaking his silence as a “literary recluse.”4 The reasons for Gaddis’s sudden, albeit still tentative, willingness to be in the public eye are not revealed by the archive, but his emergence might have something to do with his relationship with Muriel Murphy, who “was an old hand at the New York literary scene” and whose “large apartment on East 73rd Street saw lots of dinner parties.” Gaddis ¤nally seemed to be getting some of the recognition he deserved, as by 1989, Gaddis had at last been granted membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This newfound sociability brought Gaddis into contact with attorney Donald Oresman, with whom he struck up a conversation at a party. Gaddis had a preestablished interest in legal language formed during his own contract negotiations, something that, even without legal training, he had a propensity for. Of particular amusement to him, as revealed in an interview, was an experience that he had working on the ¤lm option for J R: “Some time ago, years ago, I signed an option on J.R., it never came to anything but it said the company had the rights throughout the world and elsewhere.” After his party conversation, Oresman sent him an eighty-four-volume set of American Jurisprudence. The initial result of this acquisition was a short story published in the New Yorker in 1987 titled “Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount, et al.,” while the end product would be the last novel published during his life, A Frolic of His Own, which won an American Book Award in 1995. Frolic incorporates the aforementioned Once at Antietam as well as the

Valuable Dregs / 251 true experience of one of Gaddis’s friends, who, while attempting to hotwire his car was run over by it. Gaddis explains, “I thought it was so funny, had to use it. I asked him ¤rst though.” Ultimately, Gaddis discovered that the humor, among other things, found in the American legal system was better than any fabrication. Overall, Gaddis spent ¤ve years researching for Frolic, primarily reading American Jurisprudence, On Torts, and the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, all of which are contained in his working library. As the archive re®ects, Gaddis’s sources also included federal court decisions, such as U.S. ex rel Mayo v. Satan and His Staff, a case that questions whether one can sue Satan in forma pauperis for violating an individual’s civil rights. Further meshing fact with ¤ction, A Frolic of His Own often takes the stylistic form of a legal document. As the archive testi¤es, this precise style was accomplished with the assistance of two legal practitioners, the aforementioned Oresman and a judge who would be named to the United States Court of Appeals just as Frolic was going to print. This connection between legal reality and Gaddis’s satirical creation is further magni¤ed in the contract for Frolic signed by Gaddis, which appropriately included the claim of “rights in perpetuity, throughout the universe,” at which point Gaddis asked “if perpetuity included the afterlife.” Thoughts of life, death, and immortality were very much on his mind by 1993–94 (if not before). As he explain to two longtime friends: “Did I ever mention that a 1/2 [sic] century ago I changed my middle name on Harvard’s transcripts from ‘Thomas’ to ‘Tithonus’ there conjuring the day when through Eos’ intervention I’d secure immortality forgetting, in our lust, to stipulate eternal youth, until the day comes round (Here at the quite limit of the world) when, pitying, the Dawn to the rescue has him transformed into the grasshopper with its relentless immortal tdzzzk, tdzzzk, tdzzzk . . . [ . . . ] I tell you, it’s all a metaphor.” In this letter from 1993, Gaddis names “Muriel Oxenberg [Murphy]” Eos. His status had been secured through the receipt of the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement and through the bestowal of the title of “New York State’s of¤cial State Author”; however, the failure to stipulate eternal youth was very much a grim reality. Just a few months prior, Gaddis, who had been diagnosed with emphysema years earlier, had been hospitalized after having “the electrical and plumbing ravages attended to,” including an implanted pacemaker. These thoughts would carry him even further, leading to “Old Foes with New Faces” an essay on religion, originally delivered in 1994 at the Writing and Religion Conference organized by the Washington University International Writer’s Center.

252 / Alberts Even in his late sixties and seventies, Gaddis remained active and traveled not only to St. Louis and Britain, but elsewhere, including Paris sometime in 1991–92 and Germany in 1997. Gaddis’s daughter, Sarah, published her ¤rst, some say semiautobiographical, novel Swallow Hard in 1991. As the archive re®ects, Gaddis read it in manuscript and again in galleys. He was immensely proud of the work and went to Paris to listen to his daughter read. A few years later, Gaddis would again travel to Europe, this time to Germany, where, for the ¤rst time in his life, Gaddis was treated like a literary celebrity. There, he received “the red carpet treatment” according to his travel companion William H. Gass. He also granted interviews, which would turn out to be some of his last public appearances. The collection’s folders from this trip contain numerous clippings and photographs. They are simply labeled “Germans” and “Cologne 1997.” They are some of the last folders that he would organize for his archive, attested to by his handwriting, which had become shaky with age. At the age of seventy-four, he had ¤nally received the type of fame that he believed he would have obtained after The Recognitions. Even though it was not received from his native country, he wanted the images preserved, in the archive, in perpetuity. In addition to the last pictures of Gaddis in public, the archive also re®ects some of the last images of Gaddis in private. Gaddis celebrated his seventy¤fth birthday in Key West, where he was spending the winter with his family. Missing his induction ceremony for the Farmingdale High School Wall of Honor to which he had been nominated through the efforts of his highschool mate Gertrude Kranz, he would return to his four-room home in the Hamptons in April 1998, where, as ill as he was, he wrote Torschlußpanik, a one-act monologue commissioned by Deutschland Radio. He would ¤nish Torschlußpanik before the end of his life. The last moments of Gaddis’s life are not preserved in the archive, although his memorial service is. However, it is known that at the end of his almost seventy-six years, he lay in a four-room home by an East Hampton boatyard battling prostate cancer and suffering from emphysema. According to Sherry and Gass, in December 1998, Matthew and Sarah took their father home from the hospital for the last time. That night he missed his favorite television show, “Law and Order,” and asked for a drink and cigarettes, two things he was required to give up because of his illness. William Gaddis died December 16, 1998. Three and a half months after his death, in March 1999, Torschlußpanik, a

Valuable Dregs / 253 shorter version of what would later be named Agape Agape, was aired in translation. Appropriately bringing his literary career full-circle, Agape Agape, published posthumously, is the condensation of over ¤fty-¤ve years of research on the history of the player piano, which began around 1951 with his ¤rst published piece “Stop Player. Joke No. 4.” Contained within the archive are numerous chronologies, clippings, pamphlets, and reading notes, documenting his obsession with the rise of technology and its relation to the arts, an idea that he pursued into the 1990s with no knowledge of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Agape Agape also does something more: No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to ¤nish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armor in the dining hall feel like I’m being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I’ve got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleaned up and settled before everything collapses and it’s all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes and everything else because that’s what it’s about, that’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology. [ . . . ] I can’t even go into it, you see that’s what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon, whole stupe¤ed mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in the place of his work. As Joseph Tabbi has phrased it, in Agape Agape, Gaddis constructs his own speech as if it were posted from beyond the grave. While this passage cannot be taken as biographical truth, it does express Gaddis’s desire to “get it all sorted and organized,” so that the facts of his life and his work as presented

254 / Alberts in the “whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what” would not be “misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon.” He wanted to “go into it,” into “what [his] work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight.” As a “creative artist,” he did not want to be turned into “a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in place of his work.” Yet, as Gaddis knew, the man is an integral part of his work, as “there’s clearly no separating them until the mortal partner drops.” In his own fashion, Gaddis did eventually get the “whole pile . . . sorted and organized”: the William Gaddis Papers, his own construction of a historical self, are what remain. While not all of the shards of the metaphorical mirror have been found,5 those contained in the archive provide enough information to piece together an image of the man not only as creative artist but also loving and loved son, husband, father, and friend. The archive re®ects his work: three “damned thick square books,” a romance, and a preconceived call from the grave. Moreover, the archive reverberates with the lost voices that promised praise in the future—Sheri Martinelli, for example, who informed Gaddis a few years after publishing The Recognitions: “I know it is the kind of book that will be read a hundred years after it was written because it is too contemporary for its contemporaries.” The archive attests to the fact that despite Gaddis’s public declarations, he was more than the dregs of his work, more than the human shambles that follows it around, and more importantly, that this man who could do more was far from a failure. And, to repeat a phrase that will become the “tdzzk tdzzk tdzzk” of the grasshopper, the William Gaddis Papers prove that William Thomas (Tithonus) Gaddis Jr. is one of America’s greatest, if currently least read, twentieth-century authors.

Notes 1. William Gaddis. Letter to David Markson. 5 March 1970. William Gaddis Papers, Washington University in St. Louis Special Collections Library. Unless otherwise noted, all letters cited in this essay are from the William Gaddis Papers at Washington University in St. Louis Special Collections Library. 2. See the illustrations accompanying the chapters by Burn and Tabbi in this volume. —Eds. 3. The particulars of the friendship between Smith and Gaddis have apparently

Valuable Dregs / 255 been lost. Connie Smith died in 1990. Her “papers” were left to a friend and have since been disposed of. When contacted, her colleagues at Saint Louis University were completely unaware that she had been an associate of the Beat Generation. 4. A previous interview, never published for reasons given by Tom LeClair, appears in this volume. —Eds. 5. “[T]he incomplete reference book is the most accurate,” in the words of Richard Powers cited by Stephen J. Burn in this volume. —Eds.

14 The Secret History of Agape Agape Steven Moore

Gaddis had a lifelong obsession with the player piano, and went to great lengths to link it with the loss of individual creativity. In “The Secret History of Agape Agape,” contributor Steven Moore follows suit, revealing the evolution of Gaddis’s desire to write a popular essay on mechanization, authenticity, and art, to what eventually became his last and ¤nal novel: Agape Agape. Photograph courtesy of The Roehl Collection and American Heritage magazine.

Secret History of Agape Agape / 257

 When the obituaries appeared for William Gaddis a week before Christmas 1998, one piece of good news surfaced in those otherwise dismal announcements, namely, that Gaddis had ¤nished a new book shortly before his death. This ¤nal book, with the rather ungainly title Agape Agape, is a project he had been working on all his professional life. Perhaps “struggling with” would be a more accurate phrase, because it’s a book that he abandoned decades ago as hopeless, beyond even his abilities, and in fact he dramatized his struggle in those pages of J R that feature Jack Gibbs working on a book with the same title. The version that was ¤nally published in the fall of 2002 is considerably different from the one Gaddis began writing ¤ve decades previously, so I’d like to describe how this troublesome book evolved over the years. It was when Gaddis was working as a fact-checker at the New Yorker in 1945–46 that he ¤rst became interested in the player piano, the subject of an article he was assigned to work on. He quickly became interested in this musical contraption not for its own sake—Gaddis didn’t own or play one, and in fact admits in the published novella “I can’t read music and can’t play anything but a comb” (90)—but as a popular manifestation of what he considered a dangerous trend, namely, the growing use of mechanical reproduction in the arts and a corresponding loss of the autonomy of the individual artist.1 After he ¤nished the assignment he decided to research the history of the player piano further and to write something of his own on the topic, which he hoped to publish in the New Yorker’s “Onward and Upward with the Arts” column. Two early drafts survive, both apparently dating from 1946. The ¤rst anticipates its acceptance by Gaddis’s employer and is thus called “Onward and Upward—A Partial History of the Player Piano,” and is subtitled “You’re a Dog Gone Daisy Girl—Presto.” This is a twelve-page typescript of about 3,500 words, and after a typically raf¤sh New Yorker opening paragraph, it gives a straightforward account of the development of the player piano, with special attention to John McTammany’s account in The History of the Player (1913). It’s a workmanlike account, rich in details but otherwise undistinguished, and it’s easy to see why the New Yorker rejected it. Undeterred, Gaddis then expanded it to a thirty-page essay titled simply “You’re a Dog Gone Daisy Girl—Presto.” This song (“presto” is a tempo marking), which is mentioned in Agape Agape (14), ludicrously underscores the paradox of deploying immense technical ingenuity for frivolous ends, a theme Gaddis would ex-

258 / Moore pand upon in later versions of the work. Opening with an account of the use of the player piano in a William Saroyan play, the expanded draft is much better than the ¤rst, moving beyond a mere recital of the instrument’s history to discuss other media like ¤lm, radio, and the recording industry. The style is already recognizably “Gaddisian,” and he does a ¤ne job animating the technical details, but the essay couldn’t ¤nd a publisher at the time (nor later: it’s a shame it wasn’t included in The Rush for Second Place). By this time, Gaddis had begun work on The Recognitions, so he set the essay aside, but in 1950, while living in Paris, Gaddis decided to send it to the Atlantic Monthly, who, much to his delight (as he wrote in a letter to Helen Parker), “offered to take an excerpt from it, or possibly the whole.” The following summer, Gaddis made his ¤rst appearance in a national magazine with “Stop Player. Joke No. 4,” taken from pages 20 to 23 of the typescript. As published, it’s a slight piece, just an anecdotal overview of the history of the player piano, and yet its opening paragraph gives a clear indication of Gaddis’s concern: “Selling player pianos to Americans in 1912 was not a dif¤cult task. There was a place for everyone in this brave new world, where the player offered an answer to some of America’s most persistent wants: the opportunity to participate in something which asked little understanding; the pleasure of creating without work, practice, or the taking of time; and the manifestation of talent where there was none.” Previously, it took real talent and dedication to play the piano, but with this invention anyone could “play.” There was an ad in a 1925 Saturday Evening Post for the player piano (which Gaddis saw and cites in Agape Agape 15) that even elevated its operator above true pianists: “You can play better by roll than many who play by hand,” it promised. “And you can play all pieces while they can play but a few.” It degraded art to mere entertainment, and encouraged passivity over activity. And if you’re satis¤ed with a player piano, then what becomes of the piano player? What part, if any, does an artist play in this “brave new world”? Gaddis wasn’t merely displaying an elitist reaction to the democratization of the arts; instead, he was concerned about the growing demand for immediate grati¤cation and for the willingness to accept a mechanical reproduction over the real thing. It’s the same trend toward the elimination of the human element that was going on in assembly-line production, whose growth took place concurrently with the heyday of the player piano. Mechanization of the arts ran parallel to the mechanization of people by means of ef¤ciency studies, standardized testing, and various methods of measurement and evaluation more suited to machinery than people. Some of Gaddis’s material on player pianos found its way into The Recog-

Secret History of Agape Agape / 259 nitions. At Esther’s Christmas Eve party (in part 2, chap. 7), she ¤nds herself seated next to a rather pathetic college friend of Benny’s. This unnamed character ¤rst asks her if she knows anything about player pianos, and when she answers in the negative, he boasts that he’s spent two years writing a history of the player piano, and regales her with a list of famous people who owned one (579). Here Gaddis treats the subject in a self-deprecatory way, and indeed a book solely on the player piano would be of limited interest. But after The Recognitions appeared in 1955, Gaddis returned to the subject and began exploring more of the implications of mechanical reproduction. And that’s where he ran into trouble. As you probably know, the player piano uses paper rolls with rectangular holes punched in them. And as those over forty remember, computers originally used cards punched in the same way. Both the player piano and the computer adapted this technology from the automated loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which also used punched cards, which were taken up in 1835 by Charles Babbage for an early calculator, and further modi¤ed in 1890 by Herman Hollerith for a tabulating machine, another forerunner of the modern computer. As Gaddis realized, the player piano was only a chapter in the long history of mechanization and automation, his research broadened to the point where he was overwhelmed by the logistics of integrating all this material into a coherent narrative. He tried to organize his notes by year, starting with 1876, an important date in American history: that was the year the earliest version of the player piano was introduced to Americans at the Philadelphia Exposition; it was also the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, the year of Custer’s Last Stand, and the year (to quote from Richard Powers’s 1998 novel Gain) “that the ¤x robbed Tilden of the Presidency and reduced the democratic process to parody.” Gaddis’s friend Gore Vidal wrote an entire novel set in (and titled) 1876, likewise recognizing it as a watershed year in America’s history. It was also the year Willard Gibbs published his ¤rst paper on statistical physics, and the year Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung was ¤rst performed in its entirety—all of which is highly relevant to Gaddis’s second novel J R, where much of the player piano research wound up. In fact, a page of Gaddis’s notes for the year 1920 is reproduced on page 587 of J R, and one look at that and you can see what he was up against. (The chronological notes printed as an appendix to The Rush for Second Place are considerably cleaned up, abridged, and lack Gaddis’s cryptic, abbreviated references.)

260 / Moore To go back a little bit, it should be remembered the late 1950s were a dif¤cult time for Gaddis. He was crushed by the commercial failure of The Recognitions in 1955, which he probably thought would set him up in the same way that Ralph Ellison was set for life after the publication in 1953 of Invisible Man. Gaddis got married later in 1955 and had to get a job, and within a few years had two kids to support. When he did begin writing again, he had trouble settling on the right project. In 1957 he approached producer Keith Botsford about a television program on forgery for the shortlived series The Seven Lively Arts, submitting a three-page proposal and several more of notes, but this came to nothing. (Botsford’s reply implies Gaddis proposed this idea largely as a way to earn enough money to quit his job and write another novel.) The same year he began then abandoned a novel on business, then started a novel on the Civil War, which he changed to a play entitled Once at Antietam, then shelved it in 1960 after failing to ¤nd a producer for it. He then decided to resurrect his work of a decade earlier on the player piano because he continued to be obsessed (as he writes in a letter to John Seelye) with “expanding prospects of programmed society & automation in the arts.” He worked on this version of Agape Agape from 1960 to 1962, at which time he accepted a commission from the Ford Foundation to write a book on the use of television in the schools, which fell through the following year. Two crucial documents surviving from that period were eventually published in The Rush for Second Place: Gaddis’s proposal for the book—presumably shopped around to publishers by his agent—and its opening pages. The proposal is the clearest articulation of the ambitious project, and it’s surprising to learn that Gaddis intended the book to be only 50,000 words (i.e., about half the length of Carpenter’s Gothic). Finding no takers, Gaddis decided to abandon Agape Agape altogether and resume that novel on business he began in 1957. In an attempt to salvage as much as possible from the rejected non¤ction work, he decided to put the Bast family in a business that once manufactured player pianos, and created Jack Gibbs as an alter ego to act as a mouthpiece for the material Gaddis had planned to articulate in Agape Agape and to dramatize his own dif¤culties in bringing the book to completion. On pages 288–89 and 571–604 of J R Gibbs reads aloud from those opening pages, which are so dense and allusive that some readers may feel it’s just as well that Gaddis never completed the book. I yield to no one in my admiration for Gaddis, but even I have to admit expository writing wasn’t his forte. Gaddis was able to incorporate most of his thoughts on mechanization

Secret History of Agape Agape / 261 and the arts in J R, triumphantly if I may say so, and in later years he seems to have become reconciled to this solution. In his letters he continued to refer occasionally to Agape Agape, offering tantalizing glimpses of what it might have been. In a 1987 letter to critic Gregory Comnes, Gaddis said that he had recently come across a book similar to what he had intended to write, namely, Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters, and felt “well damn! that settles it, mine will never be done; though something still remains that drives me to tear out and save anything I come across on mechanization & the arts to add to the 30 year hoard.” Kenner’s book, originally published in 1968, covers a lot of the same ground as Agape Agape: mechanization and automation, closed systems, computers, the role of the artist, and of course counterfeiting and the related theme of authenticity. It’s a brilliant book, too complicated to summarize here, but well worth seeking out for its own sake as well as for an indication of what Gaddis was working toward. In the same 1987 letter to Comnes, Gaddis mentions a writer whom he had not read yet, despite the relevance to his own work, namely, Walter Benjamin, whose seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” would seem to be right up Gaddis’s alley. (It must be remembered, of course, that Gaddis did most of his research on this topic back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before Benjamin had been translated into English.) In a 1992 letter to Comnes, Gaddis reported that he eventually did read Benjamin’s essay and jokes that he would “certainly have been pilloried for plagiary” had he ever completed his work, which became, he goes on to write, “a casualty of overresearch; but then of course in my ignorance Benjamin had already clearly, concisely, brilliant[ly] and brie®y covered the ground.” The extent to which his own book was “overresearched” can be gleaned from a letter Gaddis wrote to critic Joseph Tabbi in 1989; asked about his sources for Agape Agape, Gaddis said they “were very far ranging & having largely to do with organization (Hull House, crime, John D Rockefeller &c); Hollerith, early punched card innovations (from Jacquard’s loom & Thos J Watson (pere) selling pianos off a truck; Plato’s warnings & exclusion of the artist; Babbage; von Neumann (which I found largely beyond my comprehension); & I cannot recall his wellknown name [F. W. Taylor] doing time/ motion studies in the very early 1900s for industrial ef¤ciency: all these ®ood back but there was far more however all this was done before (though spilling a little over into) the composition of J R for the never to be completed Agape Agape whose premises—measurement & quanti¤cation as indexing thus dic-

262 / Moore tating order & performance (cf. McNamara’s Vietnam body counts)—have long since caught up with us. Alas it will never be realized but in massive notes & marked margins in the hands of some beleaguered doctoral candidate, since I am now immersed in an equally mad enterprise.” This “equally mad enterprise” was of course A Frolic of His Own, which was eventually published at the beginning of 1994. Afterward, he toyed with the idea of expanding a legal opinion that he had left out of A Frolic, but in 1996 decided—despite everything he had said over the years—to revive Agape Agape in a ¤nal attempt to complete it. His new agent, Andrew Wylie, sold the proposal to editor Allen Peacock at Henry Holt, who offered a $150,000 advance. Publishers Weekly reported the sale in its 6 January 1997 issue, stating that Agape Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano (to give its full title) was a non¤ction work that Holt hoped to publish in the fall of 1998. There are several possible reasons why Gaddis chose to return to an un¤nished work rather than begin something new. First, he was seventy-one years old and in poor health when A Frolic of His Own was published, so the idea of starting a new novel, especially given his slow working methods, probably struck him as unrealistic. Second, he was uncomfortable with leaving un¤nished work behind. He had been able to salvage his Civil War play Once at Antietam for use in A Frolic of His Own, and a similar desire to get Agape Agape into print in one form or another may have appealed to him. I’m sure he didn’t really want to leave it in the hands of “some beleaguered doctoral candidate” in the future, despite what he had told Tabbi. And since he had continued to amass material for this project, perhaps he felt he had a fresh perspective on it and could ¤nally complete the work. At any rate, he worked hard on it from 1996 through 1997. It must have been strange for Gaddis to take up in old age the notes he had compiled as an ambitious young man a half-century earlier; one can imagine him saying, as Gibbs does when he confronts his old notes, “—Christ how did I, look at that what did I think I was doing! . . . ANI, LEM abbreviated all these God damned references can’t remember what they, go through every book in the place again Christ, how I worked on this” (J R 586). And then history repeated itself. Just as twenty-¤ve years earlier he decided to convert much of his research into a novel, he decided to reformat Agape Agape from non¤ction to ¤ction. In a valuable document that accompanied the manuscript when searching for a new publisher—after Allen Peacock left Holt no one there took much interest in the book—Matthew Gaddis gives an account of the proj-

Secret History of Agape Agape / 263 ect’s metamorphosis from non¤ction to ¤ction. After deciding that a non¤ction book interested him less than his own “raillery” on the subject, Gaddis began with a monologue of an ailing man, then thought of adding more characters for a novel based on Shakespeare’s King Lear: a wealthy historianphilosopher decides to divide his property among his three daughters, resulting in familial strife. The old man is con¤ned to a rundown nursing home in Long Island with a counterpart to Lear’s Fool as a companion. But Gaddis rejected most of this as “too literal” and returned to his original idea for a monologue. Vestiges of the Shakespearean structure remain in the published book: on page 5 the narrator admits to “dividing the properties three ways one for each daughter,” and on page 79 there is a reference to the Cordelia counterpart among his daughters, along with a direct quotation from King Lear (“my sometime daughter” —from act 1, scene 1). The “you” addressed on page 79 through the end is apparently the Fool ¤gure, silently listening to this monologue. (Tabbi in the Afterword feels it’s the reader who is being addressed at the end rather than the Fool character; given the information Tabbi supplies, I wonder if Gaddis had his old friend Martin S. Dworkin in mind.) What Gaddis also took from King Lear is its rage. Like Lear on the blasted heath, Gaddis thunders against the iniquities of our time, “because the rage is there at the heart of it, the sheer energy, the sheer tension the tinge of madness where the work gets done, the only reality, the only refuge from the vast hallucination that’s everything out there, and that you’re all part of ” (85; in this instance, “you” probably does mean the reader). The second model Gaddis decided to use was Thomas Bernhard, whose works he discovered in the early 1990s and took a great liking to. (In a 1996 letter to Gregory Comnes, Gaddis wrote, “You may see where I have found my Cicero for all future engagements” below a desolate passage from The Lime Works he had typed out.)2 Many of Bernhard’s novels—I’m thinking of The Loser, Concrete, Woodcutters, and The Lime Works—are ¤rst-person narratives by brilliant but pessimistic men at odds with society. And many of them are novellas, not much longer than Agape Agape, which brings the parallel even closer. As he was working on this streamlined version of his novel, Gaddis received a commission from Deutschland Radio to write a play for broadcasting, so he sent them the penultimate draft of Agape Agape as a one-act monologue entitled Torschlußpanik (which means the fear of doors closing, of opportunities lost). It was translated by Markus Ingendaay and broadcast under Klaus Buhlert’s direction on 3 March 1999, three and a half months

264 / Moore after Gaddis died. In his ¤nal months Gaddis was able to complete Agape Agape to his satisfaction. (The Torschlußpanik version is quite similar, though it ends around page 83 of the ¤nal version.) The ¤nished manuscript ¤nally found a publisher at Viking Penguin and was typeset in early 2002. Unfortunately, between the ¤rst state of proofs produced in March and the bound galleys that were issued the following month, the text was censored. From pages 65 to 66 three sentences (about 70 words) concerning John Kennedy Toole’s efforts to get his Confederacy of Dunces published were cut, apparently in deference to the still-living editor who encouraged but ultimately abandoned Toole, even though the story had been known for years and had been detailed in a biography of Toole published in 2001. (Gaddis didn’t name names, but I will: it was Simon & Schuster’s Robert Gottleib, who later became Gaddis’s editor at Knopf and who Gaddis later felt had likewise abandoned J R after publication.) Apparently those responsible for expurgating Gaddis’s work were unfazed by the passage a dozen pages later in Agape Agape on Nietzsche’s sister’s “editing” work, where Gaddis objects that it “wasn’t that she betrayed the man, the artist, sold him out no that’s to be expected, he’s expendable, just the vehicle or the husk of it for the work that’s what she betrayed, that’s our immortality and that’s what she corrupted” (77). Like the excavated city of Troy, the published novella reveals its various stages of development to the informed eye. From Gaddis’s earliest research for the “Onward and Upward” draft comes the basic history of the player piano, including the ill-fated John McTammany. (He spent much of the second half of his life embroiled in lawsuits defending his claim to have invented the instrument.) The reading he did in the late 1950s as he expanded his interest from the player piano to the larger area of mechanization can be tracked, from Siegfried Giedion’s monumental book Mechanization Takes Command, Arthur Loesser’s brilliant Men, Women and Pianos, and Alexander Buchner’s illustrated survey Mechanical Musical Instruments (all of which are quoted more often in Gaddis’s notes than in the ¤nal novella) up to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that he read in the late 1980s. The social implications of mechanization that preoccupied Gaddis the longer he worked on the project are drawn from writings that stretch from Norbert Wiener’s 1950 study The Human Use of Human Beings up to the press coverage of Dr. Ian Wilmut’s cloning experiments a year before Gaddis died. Gaddis’s lifelong engagement with philosophers such as Plato and Nietz-

Secret History of Agape Agape / 265 sche ¤nds its fullest expression here, and his abiding interest in the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga—whose Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) was an important book for The Recognitions—led to several quotations from his Homo Ludens (1938) as well as an imagined dialogue with Walter Benjamin. Oddly enough, almost nothing from the version of Agape Agape that Gibbs reads from in J R survives, except for the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis (83/84), misspelled Millis in J R (575). Old favorites like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are cited—the latter mostly by way of Henri Troyat’s 1965 biography—and new favorite Thomas Bernhard is represented by two novels. Gaddis evokes several kindred spirits in literature—Hawthorne, Melville, Flaubert, Eliot, Jeffers—and even gives a surprising nod of approval to John Kennedy Toole, surprising because Gaddis absolutely hated A Confederacy of Dunces when it ¤rst came out. And although Gaddis resented inquiries into his personal life, he loved reading biographies, several of which are quoted here: in addition to Troyat’s Tolstoy, Otto Friedrich’s biography of Glenn Gould and W. A. Swanberg’s of William Randolph Hearst are praised.3 In one sense, Agape Agape can be read as a highly compact intellectual autobiography. Agape Agape was ¤nally published in October 2002 in a form the twentyfour-year-old who began it in 1946 wouldn’t have recognized. That ambitious young man had hoped to write something that would appeal to the New Yorker’s wide audience, but the dying old man who completed it a half-century later wrote principally for himself and for what Flaubert called “a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch” (83). However Agape Agape comes to be regarded in the future—as a brilliant tour de force, an anguished cri de coeur, a black hole emitting no light, or as a mere footnote to Gaddis’s career—it movingly ful¤ls some lines of Robert Browning’s poetry Gaddis copied into a 1983 issue of Conjunctions that featured an interview with his friend William H. Gass: “This trade of mine—I don’t know, can’t be sure / But there was something in it, tricks and all! / Really, I want to light up my own mind.”4

Notes 1. All quotations from Gaddis’s novels are from the current Penguin editions. Quotations from his letters are from the large collection in my possession, and used by permission of the Estate of William Gaddis. Citations to King Lear are from The Norton Shakespeare (1997).

266 / Moore 2. Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought. . . . In any case, words were bringing everything down, Konrad said. Depression derives from words, nothing else. . . . It was comforting, one of those rare times when one feels that everything is possible again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Suddenly everything. (128–29) Regarding Cicero: In the past, readers took similar “comfort” in his essay on old age, De senectute. 3. For details on all these borrowings, see my notes to Agape Agape on the Gaddis Annotations Web site, . 4. The issue of Conjunctions is something I noticed on Gaddis’s shelves during a three-day visit in August 1984.

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Contributors

Crystal Alberts received her PhD in English and American Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She has worked with the William Gaddis Papers since their arrival at Washington University in 2002. She is currently working on a book on the trajectory of American historical novels of the twentieth century, featuring texts by John Dos Passos, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, and Diane Glancy. Klaus Benesch is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). He was a 2004 Mellon Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas (Austin), and has taught at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and Weber State University (Utah). Major publications include Space in America: Theory, History, Culture (editor/2005); African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds (editor/2004); The Sea and the American Imagination (editor/2004); Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (2002); Technology and American Culture (editor/1996); and The Threat of History: Narrative Discourse and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Afro-American Fiction (1990). Nicholas Brown is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Stephen J. Burn teaches English at Northern Michigan University. He is the author of David Foster Wallace’s In¤nite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2003).

278 / Contributors Jeff Bursey reviews for Books in Canada and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Recent essays on Blaise Cendrars and Henry Miller have appeared in the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, respectively. Anne Furlong, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Prince Edward Island, completed her PhD in Linguistics at University College, London, focusing on relevance theory, pragmatics, and literary interpretation. Tom LeClair is the coeditor of Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, author of In the Loop and The Art of Excess (literary criticism), and four novels—Passing Off, Well-Founded Fear, Passing On, and The Liquidators. He is Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. Joseph McElroy is the author of nine novels—A Smuggler’s Bible, Hind’s Kidnap, Ancient History, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, Actress in the House, and the forthcoming Fathers Untold. He has also published the novella, Cannonball, and a volume of essays, Exponential (published in Italy). Steven Moore is the author/editor of a half-dozen books—three of them on William Gaddis—and numerous essays on contemporary literature. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is writing a history of the novel. Stephen Schryer is a PhD candidate at the University of California–Irvine. He is currently completing a dissertation on conceptions of the professionalmanagerial class in postwar U.S. ¤ction and sociology. Rone Shavers is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studies creative writing and critical theory. He is a Contributing Editor to BOMB, where he was Associate Editor of the three-volume anthology, Speak Art; Speak Fiction; and Speak Theater: The Best of BOMB Magazine’s Interviews. Nicholas Spencer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His book, After Utopia: The Rise of

Contributors / 279 Critical Space in Twentieth-Century American Fiction, is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. He has published articles on American literature and critical theory in Angelaki, Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book on American science ¤ction and Antonio Negri. Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota 2002) and Postmodern Sublime (Cornell 1995). He edits the “Electronic Book Review,” and has edited and introduced William Gaddis’s last ¤ction and collected non¤ction (Viking/Penguin). His essay on Mark Amerika appeared at the Walker Art Center’s phon:e:me site, , a 2000 Webby Award nominee. Also online, at the Iowa Review Web, , is an essay-narrative, titled “Overwriting,” an interview, and a review of his work. He is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Michael Wutz is the coeditor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, the English cotranslator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, and was guest coeditor of a special issue of Con¤gurations. He is Professor of English at Weber State University. Anja Zeidler is a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg. She has studied American and Canadian literature, Latin American studies, as well as Russian at the Universities of Hamburg, Augsburg, and the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Index

Adams, Henry: Education, 86; on J. Willard Gibbs and Karl Pearson, 86 Adorno, Theodo: “Fragment,” 212; “On Wagner,” 218–19 Agape Agape, 1, 3, 45, 57–59, 119, 180, 185, 200, 253–54; connections to Homer, 2; its reception in the American media, 5–6; and the encyclopedic ideal, 58–59; as personal, dialogical mode of address, 91; as refusal of the novelist’s separate existence, 99; connections with systems theory, 100–101; as culmination of Gaddis’s aesthetic temperament, 162, 170; on entertainment as antithetical to comprehension, 170; as Foucaultian genealogy of technology and technological infantilization, 171; connections to Curtis White’s The Middle Mind, 173; as critique of creativity in the age of commodity capitalism, 174; as example of William Gass’s “problematic” aesthetic, 178; and the concept of allodoxia, 179; as illustrative of Gaddis’s sustained interest in the history of mechanized music, 186; as a reprise of themes that permeate Gaddis’s oeuvre, 187; as media technological study, 189–90; connections to Foucault’s genealogies, 190; as encapsulation of Gaddis’s concerns involving the player piano, 191; as avoidance of a heteroglossia of voices, 192; as evidence of a “media breach” from print technology to a more oral and auditory based form, 193–94; connections to Walter Benjamin, 194–95, 198; as the return of

the technological “repressed” 193–94; mechanization as dis-authenti¤cation and dehumanization throughout early drafts of, 195–96; on Thomas Edison as ambiguous genius, 200–201; and intellectual atrophy, 203; as attempt to bring an audience up to a text’s cognitive demands, 205; title as code for Gaddis’s philosophy about writing and language, 206– 7; connections to Thomas Bernhard’s work, 207, 263; and mediaspeci¤c intersections, 209; as imitation of entropy and anti-entropic text, 225–27; as invitation to “readerly” involvement, 227; references in JR, 257, 260, 262, 265; its origins as an article for the New Yorker, 257; as critique of mechanization and democratization in the arts, 258; its conversion from non¤ction to ¤ction, 262; its references to King Lear, 263; its appearance as the radio play Torschlußpanik, 263–64; as intellectual autobiography, 265 Alger, Horatio, 221 Allen, Woody, 65 American Jurisprudence, 250–51 Ammons, A. R., as part of a network of creators, 4 Anderson, Gregory, 201 Ansen, Alan, 242 Antrim, Donald, 165 Ashley, Laura, 204 Atlantic Monthly, “Stop Player. Joke No. 4,” 36, 191 Auchincloss, Louis, 250

282 / Index Auden, W. H., The Age of Anxiety, 242 Austen, Jane, 65 Authenticity, as more “real” than reality in literary texts, 33 Babbage, Charles, 188; as inventor of the early calculator, 259 Bach, Johann Sebastian: “Cantata No. 21,” 79, 89, 221; “Minuet in G,” 224 Bakhtin, Mikhail: On Dostoevsky, 69; The Dialogic Imagination, 92–93, 96–97; on Pushkin, 92; on the difference between the Epic and the novel, 93; on Gogol, 94; on Epic and narrative time, 111 Bambara, Toni Cade, as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166 Barth, John, 165; “The Literature of Exhaustion,” 29–30; “The Literature of Replenishment,” 30, 43–44; “Frame Tale” 106; JR as formally similar to “Frame Tale,” 107 Barthelme, Donald, 8, 165 Barthes, Roland, 113, 191; “The Death of the Author,” 44; Plaisir, 218, 220 Baudelaire, Charles, 197, 206 Bauman, Zygmunt, 116 Beer, John, 140 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 68, 197, 223 Bell, Alexander Graham, 259 Bellow, Saul, More Die of Heartbreak, 208 Benjamin, Walter, 91, 102, 188; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 36, 179, 194, 261, 264, 253; connections between Benjamin and Agape Agape, 194–95, 198; Selected Writings II, 200; on Thomas Edison as ambiguous genius, 200–201. See also Huizinga, Johan Bernhard, Thomas: Concrete, 196, 202; in®uences and connections to Agape Agape, 263, 265 Bernstein, Andre, on the encyclopedic narrative as a distinctive characteristic of modernism, 48 Bertallannfy, Ludwig von, 114 Birkets, Sven, 6 Black, Joel Dana, 147 Black, Patsy, 245 Bosch, Hieronymus, “The Pedlar,” 215

Bourdieu, Pierre: Practical Reason, 174; on symbolic capital and the bourgeois public sphere, 174–75; on allodoxia as a form of social misrecognition and its relation to aesthetics, 174–76; Distinction, 175 Broch, Hermann, The Sleepwalkers, 69, 103, 224 Brossard, Chandler, Who Walk in Darkness, 241 Browning, Robert, 265 Brown University, “Unspeakable Practices” conference, 18, 63 Broyard, Anatole: Kafka Was the Rage, 239; his appearance in The Recognitions, 239; his reaction to The Recognitions, 241 Bruckner, Anton, 223; and parallels with the use of repetition and variation in The Recognitions, 20 Buchner, Alexander, Mechanical Musical Instruments, 264 Burn, Stephen J., 122, 124 Burroughs, William, Junky, 242 Bursey, Jeff, and Anne Furlong, 117 Butler, Samuel, 197 Cale, John, 13 Calvino, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 61; on Flaubert’s in®uence and the encyclopedic impulse, 48, 61 Capitalism: as a source of impersonal, unethical logic, 152; appearing as a state of perpetual crisis and anarchy in Carpenter’s Gothic, 152–53 Caponegro, Mary, 106 Carlisle, Thomas, 110 Carnegie, Dale, How to Win Friends and In®uence People, 37–38, 249 Carpenter’s Gothic, 2, 5, 12, 235, 250; as break from Gaddis’s encyclopedic ideal, 62; Gaddis’s intentions in, 113; repetition in as a sign of weakness, 119–21; its failure and ef¤cacy in the aesthetics of repetition, 119– 22, 124, 126–27, 130–33; capitalism as a state of perpetual crisis and anarchy in, 152–53; as evidence of contemporary modernist and social realist imperatives, 155–56; its relation to third world politics, 153–55; as violation of the modernist canon of immanence, 158; Carpenter Gothic architecture as allegory

Index / 283 of America, 159; its construction, 243–44; possible historical sources for its antireligious stance, 234–35 Carter, Angela, as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166 Cervantes, Miguel de, 52 Chopin, Frederic, 223 Cicero, 266 Clancy, Tom, 210 Clark, Hilary, The Fictional Encyclopedia, 62 Clementine Recognitions, 37; as narrative template for The Recognitions, 54 Coetzee, J. M., on Dostoevsky, 69– 70 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 36; on the suspension of disbelief, 33 Commonweal, 18 Communication theory, 24–25 Comnes, Gregory, 149–50, 218, 261, 263 Condé, Maryse, as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166 Conjunctions, 3, 187, 196; “William Gaddis: A Portfolio,” 180; William Gass interview with Gaddis inscription, 265 Conrad, Joseph, The Nigger of the Narcissus, 79, 81 Coover, Robert, 3, 106; Gaddis’s in®uence on Lucky Pierre, 59 Courbin, Alvin Landon, The Pianola as a Means of Personal Expression, 192 Cramer, Florian: on Niklas Luhmann, 104, 105; on John Barth’s “Frame Tale,” 106 Crane, Steven, 9, 10, 188; American aesthetic of, 9; The Red Badge of Courage, 12 Cybernetics: Norbert Weiner and ¤rst-order cybernetics in JR, 25; the era of ¤rst-order cybernetics, 76– 77, 83; second-order cybernetic theory as a constructivist paradigm, 77; J. Willard Gibbs and the theory of entropy, 82; Gaddis’s source for cybernetic knowledge, 82; reading JR as a cybernetic system, 83; the era of second-order cybernetics, 83–84; Heinz von Foerster and the cybernetic “blind spot,” 84; second-order cybernetics and connections to Michael Fried’s “theatrical” model of art, 84; secondorder cybernetics and the elimination of the narrative voice, 88–89

Dante, The Divine Comedy, 94 Dara, Evan, 60 Davis, Lydia, as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 188 Debussy, Claude, 193 Delany, Samuel L.: as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166; Tales of Nevèrÿon, 177; as author with a “problematic” aesthetic, 177 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition on Kierkegaard, 40, 44 DeLillo, Don, 3, 94, 106, 165, 202; Gaddis’s in®uence on Rather’s Star, 59 Dempsey, Peter, 58 Derrida, Jacques, 188, 205 Dewey, John, 190 Dialogue: JR as anti-dialogic, fractured communication, 24, 65–67, 71; and “real time” in JR, 24, 66; as narrative pitfall, 65; as tragiccomedic voicing comparable to Dostoevsky, 66; as object of disorder and critique, 71 Dickens, Charles, 114; connections to Gaddis, 10 Didion, Joan, 106 Diederot, Denis, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 51 Doctorow, E. L., 186; on the in®uence of the radio, 209 Donadio, Candida, 249 Dos Passos, John: as an example of a uniquely American aesthetic, 9; his work as an example of the encyclopedic impulse and modernist forms, 48 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 94, 265; his characterization as comparable to JR, 66; Crime and Punishment, 69 Dreisser, Theodore, 188 Du Maurier, George, Trilby, 91 Dunn, Travis, 129 Dworkin, Martin S., 263 Eco, Umberto: on postmodernism, 30; on repetition in postmodern aesthetics, 42 Eggers, Dave, 165 Eliot, T. S., 81, 95, 117, 248, 265; his in®uence on Gaddis, 18–19; The Waste Land, 68 Elkin, Stanley, 249

284 / Index Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10, 36, 51; as an example of a uniquely American aesthetic, 9 Emmart, Barney, 237, 245 Empedocles: connections between Empedoclean cosmology and JR, 216–17 Encyclopedia Britannica: its appearance and in®uence on The Recognitons, 50–51; its ¤rst edition, 59 Encyclopedic narratives: as a vital postmodern form, 51; as drive towards self-effacement and apocalypse, 52; as drive towards the prevention of information collapse, 53; evolution of the encyclopedic ideal throughout Gaddis’s work, 57; Carpenter’s Gothic as a break from Gaddis’s encyclopedic ideal, 62; Agape Agape as example of Gaddis’s encyclopedic ideal collapsing under the weight of its own data, 58–59; as the embodiment of white male subjectivity, 162–63 Entropy: as a concept in The Recognitions, 24– 25; as a concept in JR, 26; Agape Agape as imitation of entropy and anti-entropic text, 225–27 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 165 Evans, Walker, 12 Everdell, William B., his cultural history of the pixelization of art, 208 Everett, Percival: as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166; Erasure, 177; as author with a “problematic” aesthetic, 177 Farnsworth, Philo T., 203 Faulkner, William, 65; Absalom, Absalom!, 206; connections to Gaddis’s work, 206 Feyerabend, Paul, “Creativity: A Dangerous Myth,” 43 Fielding, Henry, 105 Flaubert, Gustave, 113, 206; as founder of modernist aesthetics, 47; as source of an encyclopedic aesthetic, 47; Bouvard and Pécuchet, 47–48; Dictionary of Received Ideas, 47–48; connections between Joyce’s Ulysses and Bouvard and Pécuchet, 52; as a model of intertextual conversation, 91; in Agape Agape, 265

Foerster, Heinz von: and the positing of second-order cybernetics as constructivist paradigm, 77; the era of second-order cybernetics and cognitive theory, 83–84 Forster, E. M., 165; on characterization, 23; JR’s revolt against Forsterian characterization, 24 Foster, Hal, “Long Live Aporia!” 6, 191, 205 Foucault, Michel, 185; connections between Foucault’s genealogies and Agape Agape, 190 Franzen, Jonathan, 2, 165; “Mr. Dif¤cult,” 2, 5, 59–60, 167, 180; The Corrections as a drastic reduction of literary and critical understanding, 6–10; connections between his novel and The Recognitions, 7, 10; connections between his novel and JR, 6– 7; and William Gass’s “liberal” aesthetic position, 167; on “status” and “contract” writing, 167–69 Fresán, Rodrigo, 180 Fried, Michael, 12, 77, 89; “Art and Objecthood,” 81; “How Modernism Works,” 81– 82; his observations on art’s rupture of Kantian transcendence, 81–82; on theatricality and the aesthetics of postmodernism, 81– 82; second-order cybernetics and its connections to the “theatrical” model of art, 84; Realism, Writing, Dis¤guration, 188; on Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, and Frank Norris, 207 Friedrich, Otto, 265 A Frolic of His Own, 3, 5, 115–16, 122, 126, 131, 127–30, 178, 203, 262; as an effective use of the aesthetics of repetition, 127–30; its incorporation of Once at Antietam, 250, 262 Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism, 49 Gaddis, Matthew, 209–10, 233, 245, 262–63 Gaddis, Sarah, 245; Swallow Hard, 252 Gaddis, William: his status as a writer, 2–3; on his perennial neglect, 11; as both preeminent American novelist and model for postnational imagination, 13; on turning the artist into a performing artist, 21; on the artist succumbing to his or her own myth, 21, 27; evolution of the encyclopedic ideal throughout his work, 57; connections to

Index / 285 the work of Richard Powers, 60; Carpenter’s Gothic as a break from Gaddis’s encyclopedic ideal, 62; his treatment of epic literature, 91; on plagiarism “avant la lettre,” 92; his use of characterization as a means of locating the self within networks of power, 101–2; as the bridge between modern and postmodern American ¤ction, 106; his cameo in The Recognitions, 106; ecology and nature as narrative and communicative presence in his novels, 110–11; the treatment of time in his novels as counter to Bakhtinian dialogism, 111; connections to Niklas Luhmann, 114–17; as counterteleologic author, 119; repetition as central to his work, 124, 131; listserv for, 129; Dale Peck on, 165; his oeuvre as evidence of a problematic aesthetic, 178; misrecognition and allodoxia in, 179; on Samuel Butler as a literary hero, 197; connections between his aesthetic and N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, 198; his grasp of the intricacies and interstices of an historical moment, 201; his “¤lmic” method of writing, 202; and the history of the ¤lm negotiations for JR, 203; connections to William Faulker, 206; Agape Agape as a code for his philosophy about writing and language, 206– 7; his visit to Germany, 209; his debt to Joyce, 232; as anti-biographical author, 232; his parent’s marriage, 234; possible historical sources for his dislike of organized religion, 234–35; his participation in the Harvard Lampoon, 236–37; expulsion from Harvard University, 237–38; as a factchecker for the New Yorker, 238; his early, unpublished work 238–39; his travels in Latin America and Europe, 238–39; his appearance as Harold Sand in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, 241–42; his association with Kerouac, Ansen, Burroughs, Broyard, and Brossard in Greenwich Village, 241–43; his passion for Sherri Martinelli, 243; as his own worst critic, 243; his response to the commercial failure of The Recognitions, 244– 45; his response to the commercial success

of JR, 248–49; The Rush for Second Place, 249–52; interview in the Paris Review, 250; on his own mortality, 251; his death, 252; his obituraries, 257; his mentions of player pianos in The Recognitions, 259; his player piano research in JR, 259; proposal for the Seven Lively Arts television show, 260 Gardner, John, on moral ¤ction, 26–27 Gass, William, 3, 33, 248, 249, 250, 252; “The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,” 163, 165, 168, 170– 71, 177– 78; aesthetic connections with Agape Aagpe, 170; on the existence of a “problematic” aesthetic, 176– 77 Gershwin, George, 193 Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 86; his ¤rst paper on statistical physics, 259; and the theory of entropy, 82 Giedion, Siegfried, 223; Mechanization Takes Command, 264 Gier, Albert, on the semiotic triangle as it applies to music’s appearance in literature, 212 Girst, Thomas, 207 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: the Faust legend, 37; Faust as a narrative template for The Recognitions, 52–54 Gogol, Nikolai: The Double, 91; Bakhtin on Gogol, 94; Dead Souls, 94, 97–99; Cloak, 95; misrecognition in The Double and Dead Souls, 98–99 Gottleib, Robert, 264 Gould, Glenn, 196–97 Graham, Billy, 250 Grainger, Perct, 192 Green, Henry, 70 Green, Jack, 244 Grieg, Edvard, 193 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 180 Handel, George, 223; Jephtha, 221 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 97, 102; as part of a network of creators, 4; Multitude, 9; on liberty and repression in the America and American sovereignty, 10; empire as a model of networked power, 95; on nature, 108–9

286 / Index Harper’s Magazine: Ben Marcus’s “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” 180; initial appearance of Gaddis’s “The Rush for Second Place,” 249 Harvard Lampoon, 234, 236–37 Harvard University, 235–38 Harvey, David, 138–40; The Condition of Postmodernity, 138–40; postmodern culture as mimetic of postmodern capitalism, 138, 147; JR as a critique of economic postmodernity as described by Harvey, 138 Hawkes, John, 165, 237 Hawkinson, Tim: Überorgan, 1, 3; as part of a network of creators, 3–4 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 95, 265 Hayles, N. Katherine: How We Became Posthuman, 83; her overview of the history of cybernetics, 83; connections between How We Became Posthuman and Gaddis’s work, 198 Hegel, Georg W. F.: the master-slave dialectic, 154; unhappy consciousness, 160 Heidegger, Martin, 205; Parmenides, 209 Hemingway, Ernest, 65 Hofmann, Josef, 209 Hollerith, Herman, 190; inventor of tabulating machine, forerunner of modern computer, 259 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 251 Homer, 197; connections between Homer’s “belly talkers” and Agape Agape, 2; his writing as an example of early encyclopedic narrative, 47; The Iliad, 91 Horizon, “Missing Writers,” 18 House, Richard, 62 Huizinga, Johan: in conversation with Walter Benjamin, 91, 178, 265; Waning of the Middle Ages, 265; Homo Ludens, 265 Huyssen, Andreas: on Flaubert, 47; After the Great Divide, 61 Ingendaay, Marcus, translator of Torschlußpanik, 263 Ingendaay, Paul, “Interview with William Gaddis,” 119

Jackson, Robert, 190; 207 Jacquard, Joseph Marie, 188; inventor of the automated loom, 259 James, Henry, 65 Jameson, Fredric: “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,” 154; Postmodernism, 108 Jeffers, Robinson, 265 Jemnitz, Alexander, on technical imperfection, 224 Johnston, John, 146; on The Recognitions as a “carnival of repetition,” 31, 44 Jowett, Benjamin, Dialogues of Plato, 70 Joyce, James, 95; Ulysses, 32, 68, 69, 153–54, 165; connections between Flaubert and Finnegans Wake, 48; Finnegans Wake as example of an encyclopedic narrative, 49; Ulysses and the encyclopedic impulse, 48, 61; connections between Ulysses and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, 52; Ulysses’s encyclopedic characteristics, 52–54; Gaddis’s The Recognitions and encyclopedic model of, 57 JR, 3, 8, 10, 14, 45, 92, 101–2, 107–16, 121, 129, 131, 178, 180, 186; connections to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, 6– 7; nostalgia for order in, 19, 25; as example of the artist a self-conning, con¤dence man, 20; as example of communication breakdown in a system not under the control of a governor, 23; as critique of capitalist systems, 23; as revolt against Forsterian characterization, 24; its use of dialogue as “real time,” 24; Norbert Weiner and ¤rst-order cybernetics in, 25; entropy as a concept in, 26; its inversion of the encyclopedic project set forth in The Recognitions, 57–58; as deconstruction of a capitalist system, 67; and the effect of disembodied voice upon the reader, 68; as example of a novel without a governor, 69; competing aesthetics embodied within, 76; as example of a second-order cybernetic system, 77; reading as a participatory theatrical work, 77; allusions to Joseph Conrad in, 80; as demonstrative of commodity capitalism’s effects on the work of art, 80; as an aesthetics of textual theatricality, 82; its ref-

Index / 287 erences to the cybernetic concept of entropy, 82; and how to read it as a cybernetic information system, 83–85; parallels between Norbert Weiner and the character Edward Bast in, 85–86; as refutation of Norbert Weiner’s epistemological optimism and belief in the infallibility of human order, 86–87; as narrative method similar to a moving tape recorder, 87; its connections to second-order cybernetics and the elimination of the narrative voice, 88–89; its turn away from aesthetic autonomy towards a “readerly” ethic, 89; as an organizationally closed system, 93–94; JR and the postmodern epic as autopoietic system, 105; as formally similar to John Barth’s “Frame Tale” 107; as ful¤llment of Luhmann’s autopoietic aesthetic, 111; as invitation to participate in second-order cybernetic collaboration, 111; Gaddis’s intentions in, 113; as a critique of postmodern materialism, 138, 149; its allusions to military Fordism, 143; its critique of postmodern information technology, 143; as statement that the cybernetic experience is one of failure and incoherence, 144; as social critique of the pretensions of postmodernity, 144, 148–49; examples of cybernetic principles and technologies in, 145; as suggestion that fundamentalist beliefs of postmodernity are extensions of other forms of American culture, 145; as critique of corporate identity and subjectivity, 145– 46; economic distinctions in, 146; its relation to postmodern theories of the signi¤er and endless deferral, 147; as example of how the values of economic postmodernity contaminate artistic production and erode the possibility of critical art, 148; the character of J R as embodiment of American capitalism, 152; as illustrative of Gaddis’s sustained interest in the history of mechanized music, 186; ¤lm negotiations for, 203; music appearing as semiotic sign and signi¤ed in, 212; as comic opera, 212–13; and the depiction of female characters by their voices, 213–14; and the depiction of male characters by their movements, 214–16; connections to

Empedoclean cosmology, 216–17; Gibb’s “operetta” within JR’s comic opera, 217; connections between Wagner’s Ring Cycle and JR, 217–20; and “active and “passive” participatory models of music in Wagner, 218; and the Rhinegold and entropy, 222; the dichotomy between music as an active activity and the passive exposure to music, 222–23; its construction, 243–44, 247; Gaddis’s response to its critical success, 248–49 Judd, Donald, 81 Kant, Immanuel, and the concept of transcendent art in JR, 81 Karl, Frederick, 121–22; American Fictions 1940/ 1980, 48; on contemporary American encyclopedic narratives, 50 Keats, John, 19, 197 Kenner, Hugh, 44; connections between The Counterfeiters and Agape Agape, 261 Kentridge, William, as part of a network of creators, 4 Kerouac, Jack, The Subterraneans, 241–42 Kiefer, Warren, 248 Kierkegaard, Soren, 40–41; “Repetition” 32–33; repetition as a spiritual and poetical mode of “knowing” 37; Fear and Trembling, 40; The Repetition, 40; his theory of repetition a reconceptualization of time, 40–41; Deleuze on Kierkegaard, 40, 44 King, Stephen, 210 Kirstein, Lincoln, 12 Kittler, Friedrich, 188; on the distinction between hand-held writing instruments and the typewriter in Discourse Networks, 196; on the genealogy of typewriters and sound recording in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 200 Knight, Christopher, 119, 121–22, 221 Krantz, Judith, 22, 210 Kranz, Gertrude, 235, 252 Kundera, Milan, on Hermann Broch, 225 LaCapra, Dominick, 31, 44 Lawson, Rex, 192 LeClair, Tom, 30, 44, 87, 121, 131, 188, 207, 245,

288 / Index on contemporary American encyclopedic narratives, 50; The Art of Excess, 106 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 188 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, and his theory of imperialism, 157 Lethem, Jonathan, 165 Lewis, Sinclair, 146; Babbit, 19 Loesser, Arthur, Men, Women and Pianos, 264 London Review of Books, 6 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, “The Song of Hiawatha,” 110 Lucretius, 71 Luhmann, Niklas, 94; Art as a Social System, 92, 102– 7, 112, 118; on the role of modern criticism, 102–3; on the work of art and social systems, 103–5; “Globalization or World Society,” 116; connections to Gaddis, 114–17 Lyotard, Jean-Francois: The Postmodern Condition, 48; The Inhuman, 199 Malmgren, Carl, 87 Mann, Thomas, on Wagner, 218 Man, Paul de, 188 Marcus, Ben, on Jonathan Franzen, 180 Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man, 38 Markson, David, 244, 246, 247, 254 Martinelli, Sheri, 43, 45, 233, 239–40, 241, 243; her reaction to her portrayal in The Recognitions, 240–41; and Ezra Pound, 240; Gaddis’s letters to, 243 Marx, Karl, 97 Massumi, Brian, Parables of the Virtual, 8 Matanle, Stephen, 88 Maturana, Humberto: and the positing of second-order cybernetics as constructivist paradigm, 77; the era of second-order cybernetics and cognitive theory, 83–84; the cybernetic “blind-spot,” 84 McCaffery, Larry, 18 McElroy, Joseph, 3, 94, 180; Gaddis’s in®uence on work of, 59 McLuhan, Marshall, 204; on “hot” and “cold” media, 210 McTammany, John, 208; The History of the Player Piano, 201, 257; his lawsuits, 264 Melville, Herman, 9, 10, 265; as an example of a uniquely American aesthetic, 9; and his

twentieth-century revival, 12; Moby Dick, 32, 52 Mendelson, Edward, 49–50; “Gravity’s Encyclopedia,” 49, 62; on Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, 49; his criteria for encyclopedic narratives, 49; on the six encyclopedic narratives, 49 Mill, John Stuart, 205 Misrecognition, 81; as a potential drawback of encyclopedic knowledge, 51; in Gogol’s The Double and Dead Souls, 98–99; in Agape Agape, 99; in a social context, 175; in Gaddis’s work, 179; as a hopeful sign in JR, 221 Mithraism, 19, 28 Modernism: Left critiques of and alternatives to modernism, 153; as an attempt to represent totality, 154; violation of the modernist canon of immanence in Carpenter’s Gothic, 158 Moody, Rick, 165 Moore, Steven, 79, 93, 121–22; A Reader’s Guide to The Recognitions, 50; “Agape Agape Annotations,” 208 Moretti, Franco, Modern Epic, 50, 95 Morris, Robert, 81 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 26, 68, 218, 221 Murphy, Muriel, 243, 249–50 Musil, Robert, as example of the encyclopedic impulse and modernist forms, 48 Nabokov, Vladimir, 165 Networks, JR as an example of, 69 New Yorker, 5, 238; on Faulkner, 206; on Gaddis’s JR, 206; “Szyrk v. Village of Tantamount, et. al.,” 250 New York Times, 204; New York Times Book Review, 6 Nietzche, Friedrich, 193, 197, 264; on Plato and The Birth of Tragedy, 70; The Birth of Tragedy, 190; on Wagner’s reappropriation of his work for political ends, 206 Norris, Frank, 186, 188 O’Connor, Frank, on the short story as “America’s national art form,” 48 O’Donnell, Patrick J., 88 Once at Antietam, 246–47, 260. See also A Frolic of His Own

Index / 289 On Torts, 251 Opéra Comique, 212–13 Oresman, Donald, 250–51 Ozick, Cynthia, 2, 10 Paderewski, Ignacy, 222 Paris Review, 250; “Interview with William Gaddis,” 18, 77 Park, Ed, on the connections between Thomas Bernhard’s novels and Agape Agape, 207 Pascal, Blaise, 71, 189 Pater, Walter, on the aesthetics of “art for art’s sake,” 77– 78, 81 Peck, Dale: Hatchet Jobs, 164; his aesthetic sensibility, 164; on high modern and postmodern aesthetics, 165; and William Gass’s “liberal” aesthetic, 166 Persson, Gunnar, 122; Repetition in English, 133 King Phillip II of Spain, 19 Pinter, Harold, The Proust Screenplay, 65–66 Plato, 70, 197–98, 264 Poe, Edgar Allan, 10, 95 Pound, Ezra, 43; The Cantos, 32; The Cantos as an example of the encyclopedic impulse and modernist forms, 48–49; on the connections between Joyce’s Ulysses and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, 52; and Sheri Martinelli, 240; and his elitist aesthetic politics 170, 206 Powers, Richard, 165, 255, 259; connections to Gaddis, 60; Galatea 2.2, 177 Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, 65–66 Purcell, Henry, “Dido and Aeneas,” 213 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 92 Pynchon, Thomas, 94, 105, 106, 165; Gravity’s Rainbow, 49, 52; Mason & Dixon, 95–96 Rabelais, Francois, as example of an early encyclopedic narrative, 47 Rabinowitz, S. J., Novel Epics, 95 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 222 Ravel, Maurice, 222 Recognition, as the “re-cognizing” of one author’s creation in the mind of another, 92 The Recognitions, 3, 12, 121, 129, 131, 132, 178; connections to Franzen’s The Corrections, 6–10; Walker Evans as a possible model for the character of Wyatt Gwyon 12–13; absence,

withholding, and the withdrawal of love as a central theme in, 19; nostalgia for order in, 19, 25; and comparisons to Joyce’s Ulysses, 19; as in®uenced by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 19; and parallels with Bruckner’s use of repetition and variation, 20; as example of the artist a self-conning, con¤dence man, 20; the order to the layers of ideas present in the work, 22; entropy as a concept in, 24–25; as statement of the obsolescence of recognition, 31; as bridge between modern and postmodern literary paradigms, 31–32; as blurring the boundaries between originality and repetition, 36; as self-re®exive inquiry into repetition as a technique in the cultural accretion of knowledge, 37; repetition reconceptualized as “re-cognition” in, 37; decrying the merely imitative process of repetitive doubling, 37; examples of repetition as mechanical reproduction in, 38–39; diverging aspects of repetition in, 39; positing of repetition as a powerful creative force, 42; as articulation of a longing for simplicity, 43; its initially poor reception, 48–49; as an example of an encyclopedic narrative, 49; the Encyclopedia Britannica and its appearance and in®uence on, 50–51; the Clementine Recognitions and Goethe’s Faust as narrative templates for, 54; two diverging conceptions of the encyclopedia in, 54; its contrasting approach to time and knowledge, 56; as contrasting Joyce’s encyclopedic model, 57; as example of the anti-sublime, 67; and Clementine texts at the British Museum, 67; and The Dark Night of the Soul, 67; Gaddis’s cameo in, 106; mentions of player pianos in, 259; Gaddis’ response to the commercial failure of, 244–45, 260; materials used in construction of, 233–34; historical sources for scenes in Latin America and Europe, 238– 39; Sheri Martinelli’s reaction to, 240; as “the last Christian novel,” 244 Reed, Ishmael, as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166 Relevance theory, 133; its claims about cognition and communication, 123 Repetition, 80; as the dominant narrative tech-

290 / Index nique of postmodernity, 30; as philosophical and spiritual “re-petitioning,” 32; as necessary for the production of an aesthetic gold standard, 35; as basis for a theory of artistic creation, 36; reconceptualized as “re-cognition” in The Recognitions, 37; as merely imitative process in Gaddis’s work, 37; examples of repetition as mechanical reproduction in The Recognitions, 39; diverging aspects of recognition in The Recognitions, 39; as a reconceptualization of time, 40–41; posited as a powerful creative force, 42; its “vertical” and “horizontal” contextual constructions, 131; as cognitive paradox, 134; as central to Gaddis’s work, 124; repetition and iteration as a theoretical topic, 122–24; as invitation to “readerly” involvement in Agape Agape, 227 Reproduction, as evidence of originality, authority, and authorship, 33–35 Review of Contemporary Fiction, “Gaddis interview with Steven Moore and John Kuehl,” 18 Robbins, Harold, 23 Rockefeller, John D., 23, 25, 146 Roehl, Harvey, Player Piano Treasury, 208, 209 Ross, Marion, 34 Rossum, Walter van, on Gaddis’s visit to Germany, 209 The Rush for Second Place, 5, 45, 57, 107, 108, 115, 146, 180, 186, 191–92, 199–202, 206– 7, 224; on collaboration between reader and writer, 113; on Samuel Butler as literary hero, 197; on Marshall McLuhan, 204; connections between William Faulker and Gaddis, 206; and early drafts of Agape Agape, 259–60 St. Augustine, 85–86 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 222 Sand, George, 91 San Francisco Review of Books, 10 Saroyan, William, 258 Sartre, Jean-Paul, on “leaving out” as a key to writing, 68 Saturday Evening Post, 258 Scher, Steven Paul, 212

Schnabel, Julian, 202; as part of a network of creators, 4 Schryer, Stephen, 117 Schubert, Franz, 223 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 35 Schwartz, Hillel, 35, 44 Scriabin, Alexander, 222 Seltzer, Mark, on the American “body machine complex,” 187 Serres, Michel, connections between Hermes and Gaddis’s Agape Agape, 190 Sexton, Anne, 105 Shannon, Claude, on the interdisciplinary theory of cybernetics, 83 Shaw, George Barnard, 66 Sheldon, Sidney, 23 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle, 249 Smith, Constance, 243, 249, 254–55 Smith, Stan, 52 Smith, Zadie, 60 Snow, John, 237 Socarides, Charles, 239, 243 Social Darwinism, its in®uence on success and failure, 23 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, and the love of absolutism, 19 Sorrentino, Christopher, 180 Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson, on relevance theory, 123–24 Sports Illustrated, 245 Steele, Danielle, 210 Steiner, George, 93; on Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, 95; on the epic qualities of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, 95; Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 95, 114 Stein, Gertrude, 10; The Making of Americans, 61 Stewart, Martha, 204 Stravinsky, Igor: the debut of Les Noces on the player piano, 191; on composing for the player piano in his Autobiography, 192–93, 209; on the player piano and polyphonic truth, 192 Strecker, Trey, 62 Strehle, Susan, 141 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, Authoritarian Fictions and its irrelevance to Gaddis’s work, 120–21

Index / 291 Swaggart, Jimmy, 250 Swanberg, W. A., 265 Systems Theory, 100; convergence of systems and the discourse of the epic in Gaddis, 110–11 Tabbi, Joseph, Gaddis’s letters to, 261 Tanner, Tony, City of Words, 106 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 189–90 Tennyson, Alfred, Locksley Hall, 76 Thomson, Judith, 247 Thoreau, Henry David, 42, 222; Walden, 38 Tillman, Lynne, as example of an underappreciated postmodern author, 166 Tolstoy, Leo, 205, 265; The Kreutzer Sonata, 91, 227 Toole, John Kennedy, A Confederacy of Dunces, 91, 264–65 Torschlußpanik, 252–53, 263–64; as return of the technological “repressed” 193–94; and Gaddis’s visit to Germany, 209. See also Agape Agape Troyat, Henri, 265 Twain, Mark, 66 Updike, John, 237 Valera, Francisco: and the positing of secondorder cybernetics as constructivist paradigm, 77; the era of second-order cybernetics and cognitive theory, 83–84 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 188 Vidal, Gore, 1876, 259 Voice(s): as an example of modernist authority in JR, 64; narrative as omniscient voice in JR, 64; as abstract connection to “other” in JR, 66–67; as acoustic presence, 68; and its effects upon the reader in JR, 68

Wagner, Richard, 68, 78; Rhinegold, 76, 89, 222; his reappropriation of Nietzche for political ends, 206; the Ring cycle, 212, 217, 259; the Ring cycle and JR, 218 Wallace, David Foster, 60, 165 Waste, as a central theme in Gaddis’s writing, 18, 24–25 Weber, Max, 180 Weiner, Norbert, 190–91; The Human Use of Human Beings, 82, 84–86, 264; and the era of ¤rst-order cybernetics, 76– 77; the interdisciplinary theory of cybernetics, 83; parallels between Weiner and the character Edward Bast in JR, 85–86; Cybernetics, 86; JR as a refutati on of Weiner’s epistemological optimism and belief in the infallibility of human order, 86–87 West, William N., Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, 54–56 White, Curtis: The Middle Mind, 172; and William Gass’s “conservative” aesthetic, 173; connections between White’s theory of the “middle mind” and Agape Agape, 173– 74 Whitehead, Colson, 165 Williams, William Carlos, 154 Williams, Margaret, 239 Wilson, William S., Why I Don’t Write Like Franz Kafka, 70 Winterson, Jeanette, 166 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 205 Wolfe, Peter, 121 Wolfe, Thomas, Look Homeward Angel, 129 Yeats, William Butler, “The Second Coming,” 20 Yeo, Richard, Encyclopedic Visions, 51, 54–56, 59 Young, Edward, 29, 35, 36; “Conjectures on Original Composition,” 29