El diálogo socrático: una forma especial de dialogar

From Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction XIX, no. 3, (1978). © 1978 by Heldref Publications.

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works. A character in the first novel comments about somebody writing a novel called The Recognitions: “My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn’t he.”⁶In JR one artist tells another whose important novel has gone unrecognized, “you must have known when you were writing it, you must have known you were writing it for a very small audience.”⁷If Gaddis’s novels have achieved only a very small audience because of their difficulties, they deserve a much larger one because of their importance. In particular, JR is an extraordinary achievement—richly funny and powerfully accurate; it is more successful in several ways than The Recognitions. We shall here characterize both works, with an emphasis on their differences, and then explore the themes of JR in detail. With its more limited ambitions and sustained black-humor vision, JR should assure William Gaddis a long overdue recognition and a prominent place in contemporary fiction.

The Recognitions portrays an artist, Wyatt Gwyon, who assumes heroic stature from the outset. When he is a child, his Aunt May tells him, “A hero is someone who serves something higher than himself with undying devotion” (R 38); Wyatt’s higher principle turns out to be a spiritually infused art. He rejects the notion of originality to become a dedicated forger of the Flemish Old Masters: “Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this ... and so in the painting every detail reflects ... God’s concern” (R 270). Though Wyatt’s works are sold at great profit and his abilities exploited, he successfully resists and refuses those who would possess him. Early on, he leaves his father and a New England family tradition of Calvinist ministry; later, he leaves his wife, Esther. He is exploited by the corrupt businessman, Recktall Brown, but remains uncorrupted and eventually rejects Brown by attempting to claim his own forgeries. When Brown dies, the art critic, Basil Valentine, tries to adopt Wyatt; Wyatt stabs him and leaves for Europe. There, the counterfeiter, Sinisterra, tries to enlist him in his scheme of mummy making, but Wyatt, renamed Stephen, flees to a Spanish monastery to “restore” old paintings by removing the paint. In our last glimpse of him, Wyatt/Stephen sets off alone, rejecting entanglements and other people’s schemes for deliberation and simplicity: “Now at last, to live deliberately [....] There’s no more you and I [....] The work will know its own reason [....] Yes, we’ll simplify. Hear?” (R 960).

One of the most extraordinary qualities of The Recognitions is its ambitiousness. It is vast in scope, covering a span of some thirty years and ranging from New York to Europe. It is encyclopedic in knowledge; the literary sources and references include not only Joyce but Augustine, Saint John of the Cross, Thoreau, Melville, T. S. Eliot, and dozens more. In

The Fiction of William Gaddis ¹⁹

tracing its religious themes, the book explores Catholicism, Calvinism, various forms of mysticism, and Mithraism, the worship of the sun. The scientific lore contained in the novel ranges from counterfeit mummy-making to counterfeit money-mummy-making to the method for analyzing the date of a painting. Several levels of discourse are included: from graffiti to sermons, from inebriated party chitchat to serious debates of aesthetic principles.⁸ The novel left several reviewers with the uncomfortable sensation that Gaddis had poured everything he knew into it; his character Stanley could speak for the author when he says: “And now it’s impossible to accomplish a body of work without a continuous sense of time, so instead you try to get all the parts together into one work that will stand by itself and serve the same thing a lifetime of separate works does” (R 658).

One reason for the heavy literary allusiveness of the novel is its presentation of artistic creation as an act of atonement; art has metaphysical significance in The Recognitions.⁹ Several characters experience artistic creation as a kind of transcendental perception of truth. The recognitions evoked in the title are revelations of religious certainty, when the fragmentation and chaos of modern culture are stripped away to reveal simplicity, necessity, and love. The poetess, Esme, struggles for epiphany: “It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin” (R 321). In Wyatt’s paintings, “the recognitions go much deeper, much further back” than in most forgeries, because when he paints “I’ve taken the Guild oath, not for the critics, the experts [....] the Guild oath, to use pure materials, to work in the sight of God” (R 269). Like them, the composer Stanley finds “a moment when love and necessity become the same thing” in his creation of music which “soared in atonement” at the novel’s end. Art, as the fragments of past creations, the creations of the characters, or Gaddis’s novel itself, has redemptive power in The Recognitions.

Gaddis’s first novel is a profoundly serious exploration of aesthetics and religion, with some moments of comic relief. As recognitions are treated with earnest respect in the novel, failures of recognition become ridiculous.

In one very funny incident, Otto arranges to meet his father for the first time in a large hotel; because he is unable to achieve any sort of recognition, he mistakes Mr. Sinisterra for his father and accepts counterfeit money as a genuine gift. Another blackly humorous episode involves a grotesque failure of recognition; during a large party, a little girl appears several times to ask for sleeping pills for her mother downstairs. None of the guests who give her pills understands the situation. Some two-hundred pages and several weeks

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later, the little girl stands guard over the decaying corpse, which she does not recognize for what it is, with a fly swatter: “She’s still asleep, and I’m keeping the flies off her” (R 801). Yet another humorous failure of recognition occurs when the monks at a Spanish monastery mistake the Reverend Gwyon’s ashes for wheat germ and bake them into loaves of bread. Rich in humor as it is, the novel is primarily concerned with an earnest exploration of aesthetic recognition, and the comic failures form a minor counterpoint to the dominant theme.

While JR shares a similar preoccupation with art, it is a very different novel in several respects. Its protagonist, Edward Bast, is not as heroic as Wyatt Gwyon; while he shares Wyatt’s innocence, he is successfully manipulated throughout the novel. He has been hired as a composer in residence at a Long Island elementary school, but he is fired when he injects too much grim reality into a televised lesson on the “fairy tale life of Mozart.” He is then taken up and used by JR Vansant, apathetically driven eleven-year-old with a runny nose, torn sweater and sneakers, and the cold ambition of Flem Snopes. Bast becomes “Edward Bast, Business Representative” for JR, whose business dealings are no more sophisticated than his spelling. Though Bast tries repeatedly to withdraw, his lack of money to pay a debt to JR and his innate courteous timidity make him continue. He works doggedly on his music in a disastrous apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street where hot water constantly gushes from a broken faucet.

As the novel ends, Bast finally achieves the heroism Wyatt had assumed from the beginning and, like him, rejects entanglements in other people’s schemes:

“no, no I’ve failed enough at other people’s things I’ve done enough other people’s damage from now on I’m just going to do my own, from now on I’m just going to fail at my own” (JR 718).

JR is far more limited in scope than The Recognitions. The time covered in the narrative is only three or four months; it is set in the fall, at some point during the Nixon presidency.¹⁰The novel opens as the leaves have begun to turn and closes before Christmas; the seasonal decline with no Nativity reflects the sterility of the natural and civilized world in the book. Similarly, it is much more restricted in space than its predecessor; the settings alternate between New York City and an unnamed Long Island community, with a few stops in Astoria along the way. While the book has no narrative divisions at all, a regular structural alternation is established between the city and the island, as characters scurry back and forth on the trains. Moreover, JR makes sparing and subtle use of allusions; for example, JR says “hurry up hey, it’s time” (JR 171), but the allusion fits his character—especially in the substitution of “hey” for “please”—without seeming ostentatious. Relatively

The Fiction of William Gaddis ²¹

few such allusions, however, are used; while aesthetic fragments could redeem the damaged world of The Recognitions, the world of JR is ruined past redemption.

The creation of art appears in JR as a worthy action, with no ability to save or redeem the world. Lake The Recognitions, the novel includes a great many plagiarists and failed artists: the teacher, Jack Gibbs, began a work on mechanization and the arts sixteen years ago and will never complete it; Mr.

Schramm succeeded in writing a movie Western but commits suicide before finishing his novel; Mr. Gall has written a Western novel lifted directly from Schramm’s movie; and Thomas Eigen has been working for years on a play which also turns out to be plagiarized from Schramm. Unlike The Recognitions, however, JR includes no truly successful artists: Bast is forced by his need for money to abandon project after project; the only composition he completes is a score for a stockbroker’s movie about hunting big game. The score does not “soar in atonement”; rather, it is sold to a maker of pornographic films. The painter, Schepperman, completes several works which are described as powerful, but they are owned and locked in a vault by the wealthy Zona Selk.

Art fails to redeem in the novel because its audience is incapable of exaltation—or even appreciation. Bast plays a recording of a Bach cantata for JR “to show you there’s such a thing as as, as intangible assets,” but all JR hears is “this here lady starts singing up yours up yours so then this man starts singing up mine.” Bast rages at his inability to respond:

There’s nothing you can’t destroy even, even music a glorious piece of music I thought it could rise above anything even your, even you I thought maybe you’d hear something there some speck just a speck in you somewhere might wake up might be exalted for an instant you hear me? Even an instant! (JR 658)

Because American culture as it is presented in the novel is incapable of awakening or exaltation, the artist’s problem becomes one of motivation: if his creation is considered worthless by his audience, can it have any worth?

In JR art has no culturally redemptive power, but it can achieve worth “for a very small audience.”

JR is far more concerned with failures of recognition than with moments of religious or aesthetic perception; thus the novel assumes a tone of sustained black humor. Where Gaddis’s first novel suggested solutions to the problem of despair in the perception of simplicity, necessity, and love, his second novel admits, in a tone of desperate glee, that the problem cannot be

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resolved. One source of humorous despair in the novel is the empty absurdity of the business world and the uselessness of its products. When a young man appears at the door selling greeting cards for all occasions, Jack Gibbs points out their inadequacy for all truly important occasions:

—Got a friend jumped out a window, got a card for that?

—Well gee I, maybe get well ...

—Can’t get well went home and hung himself got a card for that?

—Well gee I, I don’t think so but maybe you could ...

—Got a woman on alimony sleeping with a book salesman hell of an occasion, got a card for that?

—Well gee I, like here’s sympathy. (JR 405)

People, especially the wealthy and the busy, also prove humorously inadequate in their response to death. For the Mexican prostitute hired by General Motors to service Mr. Grynszpan, death offers another kinkier, possibility for business: “—I ave a busy schedule. Wen e’s ere?—Look he’s not here he’s gone he’s dead but come in, I ... —E’s dead? That’s not nice no, I don do that. Goodbye” (JR 722).

The inadequacy of sympathetic characters to take any useful action to relieve human suffering provides other rich instances of black humor. Bast, who is profoundly sympathetic but powerless and destitute, receives a poignant letter from a Mrs. Srskic: “Our famili is quite ruined. My husband is very sick, death sick, without hope of guerishing. I beg you to send for him some cloth and underwear, pijame, all very very used.” Bast’s friend, Rhoda, reads him the letter and suggests that he could send the woman some of the absurdly useless gifts that have poured in the JR Corp, which are literally all Bast owns:

—I mean like why don’t you send them those deluxe barbeque tools and this fucking computer for broiling steaks man [....] I mean her husband’s sitting there in no underwear without hope of guerishing man like you could send him that electric heated towel stand that came yesterday to hang his pijame on while his neckties rotate and Mrs. Zrk is running around with the deluxe barbeque tools waiting for this solid state computer to broil their steaks and chops to perf ...

—Look damn it what am I supp ... (JR 557–58)

Gaddis jokes about the destruction of language and ideals, about human inadequacy and death, about the cosmic absurdity of his characters’ quest for

The Fiction of William Gaddis ²³

order and beauty in a world of squalor and chaos. His jokes suggest that he finds neither a solution nor a fully adequate response to despair.

While both of Gaddis’s fictional worlds are characterized by a “sense of disappointment, of something irretrievably lost” (R 131), Gaddis radically shifts the way he defines the problem. The source of loss and despair in The Recognitions appears as the fragmentation and separation of a once-unified world; in JR these symptoms are traced to the entropic decline of a chaotic and random world. While fragments can be collected and ordered, to reverse the enervating process described in the second law of thermodynamics is impossible: Stanley manages “to get all the parts together into one work,”

but Bast cannot turn off the flow of hot water that represents a pointless loss of energy. At the Long Island school, another falsely optimistic televised lesson insists that “the total amount of energy in the world today is the same as it was at the beginning of time,” but Jack Gibbs turns the lesson off to tell his class about entropy: “Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos” (JR 20). Gibbs is preoccupied with entropy throughout the novel; he describes the autumn as “life draining out of the sky out of the world” and explains his own inability to write as

“problem just no God damned energy” (JR 119, 585). Gibbs marvels that Bast can compose in the Ninety-sixth Street apartment, where entropy defies any ordering process: “—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 those notes together know what it sounds like?” (JR 287). As the loss of energy, the decline toward inertness, and the increase of disorder, entropy dominates the world of JR.

One important manifestation of the entropic process, as it appears in the fiction of both Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, is the loss of communication. JR is made up almost entirely of spoken words, with very little narrative description or authorial comment, yet for all the speaking that occurs, little communicating is accomplished. Most of the dialogues in the novel become monologues because one character dominates and cuts the other off; JR is full of interruptions and sentence fragments. But even when both characters manage to complete their sentences, misunderstandings proliferate. Again, Jack Gibbs explains:

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

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get a God damned thing across, God damned much entropy going on say good morning she’s got a God damned headache thinks you don’t give a God damn how she feels, ask her how she feels she thinks you just want to get laid, try that she says it’s the only God damn thing you take seriously about her. (JR 403)

As Gibbs’s examples indicate, the marriages in the novel provide clear demonstrations of communication loss; with so “God damned much entropy going on,” no couple can achieve understanding. Gibbs’s wife has divorced him, Thomas Eigen’s wife leaves him, Amy Joubert’s husband leaves her, and the Stampers and Bartletts are among other minor couples who split up. But the marriages form only one among many examples; communications are also lost between friends, lovers, business partners, lawyers and clients, bosses and secretaries.

As human communication is lost and energy declines, inert things come to dominate the settings of JR. Two of the most important locales in the novel, the Long Island school and the Ninety-sixth Street apartment, literally fill up with objects so that people can no longer move about. At the school, unused testing equipment and appliances for a home ec center move the retarded children and the kindergarten “out of business,” as principal Whiteback explains to Major Hyde:

—Whiteback had to set the little retreads up in business over in east seven Vern ...

—No well in fact we had to put them into ahm, out of business that is to say Major [....] of course since kindergarten had been held in ahm, where first grade was scheduled before we ran into problems spacewise with ahm, schedulewise that is. (JR 453–54) At the apartment, which is crammed to the ceiling in some places with cartons of books and papers, film cans, old newspapers, and used paper bags, each day’s delivery of mail for the JR Corp threatens imminent catastrophe.

Books, brochures, gifts—like the electric letter-opener and the rotating necktie-rack—fill the apartment to the point where each trip to the door becomes increasingly dangerous.

Several recurring motifs reinforce the notion of entropic decline and

Several recurring motifs reinforce the notion of entropic decline and