I Really Like William Gaddis

This is the second entry in my ‘I really like_’ posts, following from the previous on Joyce,   I’d like to make this one more of an intro or something about a writer many of you may be unaware of. William Gaddis’ work is often associated with Pynchon, but this  triage is completely one-dimensional. Gaddis himself said he didn’t enjoy or understand Pynchon’s writing. Gaddis can be distinguished to have united Faulkner’s modernist proclivities (e.g. neutral and fractured literary styles) and Pynchon’s post-modernism (he also sequentially fits the criteria, writing exactly between the two). Gaddis is also sorta like America’s answer to Kafka; the former had a day job at a lawfirm filing documents his entire life. Somewhat cliché, but Gaddis abhorred the literary culture back then, and only ever acknowledged T.S. Eliot as his favorite writer.

In JR, his sophomore novel (which personally did something no other book has done, which I’ll explore later), he incorporated the vernacular of western bureaucracy so accurately that 50% of the book is paraphrase. He has been rumored to have made notes quoting his colleagues and implementing it into his book.

I think JR won the National Book Award, but Gaddis is still ‘underrated’ in the sense that only neurotics and academics read him in modern day. The award was also dished out hesitantly, similar to Gravity’s Rainbow, by a judging board whom some of which didn’t actually read the book. Gaddis only wrote four novels, and both the penultimate and final books were slight knock-offs of his first two.

The Recognitions, his first book, also left me speechless, and this is how: Gaddis took advantage the reader’s tendency to overlook things, or the casual beleif that the author’s foremost concern was to ‘look after’ the reader. He was mindful of how ‘fictional realism’ is constructed in the reader’s mind, and intently fucked with it. Jonathan Franzen, and other contemporary social-realists, don’t like that shit (and I can understand why), but if you like to be fucked with, Gaddis is your man.

Here are some examples of his method:

In The Recognitions, the characters names slowly become interchangeable. Gaddis purposely introduces other characters with almost identical names (Esme, Elise, Elsy, Elly, Elyse, etc.) to confuse the reader. But there is a surreal component to this: the story is about pastiche and the death of ‘the original,’ (a big deal back then, think Warhol) and so the characters ‘carica-turise’ themselves as being copies of one another. Gaddis also does a lot of funny things, like halfway through the book, the main character disappears and is never mentioned again. The subordinate characters go on and struggle for position as the main character. The book is about a painter who makes more money forging painting than painting his own, though that’s a really shallow description of the book. It’s really about the capacity of ‘character’ in a novel, and the artifice of its rendering. It’s also a haunting love story.

JR is 700 pages of un-cited dialog (absent from “said John,” “replied Lisa,” etc.) The reader basically has to ‘dive in’ and, like some archeologist, retro-actively create a logical world using a meager set of clues. The more the reader investigates, the more he/she discovers how intricate the novel was written, and how Gaddis leaves not only the right clues, but at the right time. So the ‘writing’ is not actually on the paper, it’s 80% in the reader’s mind. And, yes, he really fucks with you: there’s a scene where person A and person B are talking, and person A interrupts and says, “Oh, person C!” followed by descriptions which lead the reader to believe person C rang the door bell—and the reader bases the next 50pgs on that premise. 150 pages later, the reader realizes that person C came down the stairwell when person A says “Oh, person C,” and the person at the door was actually person D, which inverts the entire preceding narrative. Gaddis said he got the idea from T.S. Eliot’s play “The Cocktail Party,” in which a lot of the actor’s dialog takes place off-stage.

He also exploits the inherent fragmented perception that comes from reading fiction, how ‘truth’ (even fictional truth) is impossible. There’s a scene where a man looks in a rearview mirror from a taxi and sees a bouquet of flowers bouncing. It’s described in such a lyrical and memorable way, that it’s embedded in the reader’s memory like some archived signifier, some mental database which glue timelines together. Then some 200 pages later, another character in the book (in the context of the day the taxi ride took place) sees a penny on the ground and attempts numerous times to bend down and pick it up. And he’s holding a bouquet of flowers. These are just one of a myriad of moments when I was like, “holy fuck.”

This post is getting too long. I’ll finish quickly: If you want to be utterly mind fucked for a month straight, and carry the reading experience in your bone marrow forever, read The Recognitions or JR, just get a pen and pad of paper to take down notes. Flow charts and diagrams won’t hurt too.