Originally published last January.

I have been reading about a recent event that took place in Afghanistan — wondering why it hasn’t raised the same outrage in the U.S. as the Abu Ghraib photographs of a few years ago. There are a few elements of the story that relate it to drama, not the least of which is that the desecration of the corpses of the enemy dead is a driving factor in one of the greatest Greek tragedies as well. Nor have the political and psychological elements that led to Abu Ghraib been explicitly examined by American dramatists. While I can name off the top of my head two or three British dramatists who might explore the dynamics that led to both events, I can name few American dramatists who might do so, and it’s not merely because we are too close in time, as some would have it, to these events. The great American dramatist of the Vietnam War, David Rabe, wrote his fine trilogy of plays about that conflict (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the midst of the war, and they remain powerful today. It is also telling that all three of Rabe’s plays are set in the United States, not Vietnam. Rabe’s explorations were incisive examinations of the cultural, social, and psychological cost of the conflict, not only to combatants but on the home front as well. His conclusions were dark, pessimistic, and brutal, resisting easy answers or a twee unwarranted humanistic optimism, and perhaps these are unacceptable qualities in the new play sector today, even as the sector congratulates itself for its cultural relevance and political acumen.

The painful domestic cost of American brutalist colonialism and imperialism were a concern of novelist William Gaddis as well, especially in his 1985 novel Carpenter’s Gothic, which he discusses in the 1986 interview with Malcolm Bradbury below. A master of dialogue, Gaddis set his novel among five characters in a Hudson River house — the location never extends beyond the confines of the house or its five characters, not unlike many American realist plays — but it describes in intimate detail the means by which the outside world spiritually cripples and physically destroys those in whose name the colonialism and imperialism are being imposed half a world away. The 30-minute interview with Gaddis is a rare treat, and it’s a delight to see the kind of slouched gentlemanliness that is all too rare these days, in the world of literature or anywhere else. I should also note that Gaddis’ The Recognitions and J R are being reissued next month by the Dalkey Archive Press.

The shelf containing book-length critical writing on William Gaddis’ novels is short, but growing. A more comprehensive and exhaustive bibliography of the critical literature can be found at the Gaddis Annotations Web site here, but below is a selection of a few books and essay collections more or less readily available.

Newcomers to Gaddis’ novels will find the Moore 1989 monograph for Twayne an excellent start (apart from the work itself), even if it was published before A Frolic of His Own and Agape Agape were issued — though Jack Green’s churlish Fire the Bastards! is not to be missed either. Coming soon will be a collection of letters from the Dalkey Archive Press and a biography of the writer by Joseph Tabbi.

Alberts, Crystal, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck, eds. William Gaddis, “The Last of Something.” Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. A useful review of this collection can be found at the Quarterly Conversation Web site here.

Green, Jack. Fire the Bastards! Introduction by Steven Moore. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. This vituperative examination of the initial critical response to The Recognitions is in itself something of a Swiftian masterpiece; it can also be found online here.

Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984.

Knight, Christopher J. Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Moore, Steven. A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Out-of-print, but an updated and revised version can be found online here.

Moore, Steven. William Gaddis. New York: Twayne, 1989. This important volume is also out-of-print, but through the generosity of Moore the Gaddis Annotations Web site makes the full text of the book available here.

Tabbi, Joseph, and Rone Shavers, eds. Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Madison & Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.

One of the most often quoted excerpts from his Paris Review interview is William Gaddis’ brief dismissal of his recent contemporaries as influences on his work. “Speaking of influences, I think mine are more likely to be found going from Eliot back rather than forward to my contemporaries,” he told Zoltán Abádi-Nagy in 1986, and while many critics reference this they tend to ignore it in the attempt to draft Gaddis into the postmodern army. One more often finds references to Joyce’s work (with which Gaddis was largely unfamiliar, and which had little bearing on his own style and novels) than to any other novelist.

Gaddis admitted being most indebted to Eliot and Dostoevsky, and references to both writers are liberally strewn throughout all five novels. Both writers were obsessed by ideas of chaos, order, and finding redemption and individual integrity in a fallen world. While the style of all the novels has its origin in the polyglot allusiveness of The Waste Land, the quest for order and redemption in the Four Quartets and The Brothers Karamazov is just as important to the structure of these novels. Of course, Gaddis found himself fundamentally unable to accept organized religion as a passage towards redemption, a role that Anglo-Catholicism played for Eliot or Russian Orthodoxy for Dostoyevsky — instead, he looked to art, but an art crucially undermined by its secular divorce from religious origins.

Where this goes to the idea of accessibility is in our acceptance of The Waste Land as one of the integral literary works of the 20th century. Any poem or novel, it seems, is inaccessible until we spend a little time with it; we’ve now spent nearly a century with The Waste Land, and, like Ulysses and Waiting for Godot, it has made its way far enough into the culture that few readers may find it inaccessible today; phrases and situations from all three works are now common currency.

That we continue to have this problem with Gaddis’ novels may lie in the critics’ reluctance to admit that a third major influence on Gaddis’ work is all too ready to hand: American literature of the 19th century. The Recognitions, especially, is far more indebted to American writers like Hawthorne and Melville than Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway — especially Hawthorne. The first chapter of The Recognitions itself deploys most of Hawthorne’s concerns with art, originality, and the Puritan and Calvinistic cultures of early New England to set out the themes of the novel; and even Hawthorne’s narrative strategy (couching The Scarlet Letter, for example, within the satiric perspective of its opening chapter “The Custom-House” and establishing the baroque style of the novel) is a key ingredient in the composition of The Recognitions. [1] References to American Renaissance writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain — especially in Twain’s exploitation of American vernacular speech towards a dark satiric vision — are innumerable through Gaddis’ five novels, and if we see these writers as among Gaddis’ authentic antecedents, we may have an easier way into these books.

What Gaddis also shares with Melville and Hawthorne is a style which owes much to the “Loose Baroque,” a literary strategy defined in 1929 by Morris W. Croll. “The Loose Baroque sentence begins ‘without premeditation, stating its idea in the first form that occurs; the second member (clause) is determined by the situation in which the mind finds itself after the first has been spoken; and so on throughout the period (sentence), each member being an emergency of the situation (since each is suddenly called for by what preceded it). The period, in theory at least, is not made; it becomes. It completes itself and takes on form in the course of the motion of mind which it expresses.” [2] Most frequently found in the omniscient narration which ties together the sequences of dialogue, the Loose Baroque also permits the remarkable lyricism and music of these narrative periods in all five books, most obviously in Agape Agape.

I would go so far as to say that reading Hawthorne and Melville in the 21st century presents similar problems to reading Gaddis. We can’t expect to pick up Moby-Dick and find an easy path in, as we might a contemporary novel: the culture and aesthetic from which it emerged is far too distant from us for easy familiarity. It takes some time and some reading to enter into the narrative and linguistic worlds of these novels, and although so many of them are consigned now to high-school and college-freshman literature class syllabi, quick and facile readings of these books do them no justice. The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick will mean different things to a 48 year old reader than they would to an 18 year old: personal experience itself will inflect our reception of text, language, narrative, and style.

But they can still be read, and they are still magnificent works, as are Gaddis’ novels. What we need to do, in plunging into these novels, is to take that initial leap of faith: that despite their allusiveness and style, they may yet provide us with new perspectives on the world, once we permit them to do their work on us. A first reading of The Waste Land or Notes from Underground can be an alienating and dispiriting experience: much may seem like nonsense or conceit. But the poem or novel somehow affects us, and with each re-reading, and as we read more deeply, it reveals its power. Gaddis’ novels require that same leap of faith and, in the end, for the same reasons, reveal their power as well.

1. The theology of American Calvinism and Puritanism, as it affected American culture, would continue to interest Gaddis — when I took his Bard College course on “The Literature of Failure” in 1979, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was on the reading list. [↩]
2. Cited in Steven Moore, A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 23. [↩]

The cover photo is by Martin Dworkin. It depicts Gaddis in his Massapequa, Long Island, studio, c. 1952-53, as he was finishing The Recognitions.

Let’s explode one myth right at the outset — that The Recognitions and the other four novels of William Gaddis are difficult (whatever that could possibly mean these days). It is a misconception that has dogged the writer’s reputation and career since that first novel was published in 1955, and few passing references to Gaddis’ work manage to avoid that characterization. “Through the famous obscurity of The Recognitions, Mr. Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough,” goes Cynthia Ozick’s back-cover blurb on the recent Dalkey Archive Press reissue of the book; Jonathan Franzen’s characterization of the author himself as “Mr. Difficult” in the pages of the New Yorker some years ago may have given this impression a blunt edge, but no blunter than could be found in the twenty or thirty previous years of criticism, often from Gaddis enthusiasts themselves.

Well, as I read the novel again, about ten years after my last period with the book — I first read it in the late 1970s, shortly after the bulky and error-riddled Avon mass-market paperback edition appeared — I find that The Recognitions is not a difficult book to read, arguably no more than his other four books (among all five, his second novel, J R, might be considered his most difficult). The reputation, however, does not arise from nowhere. Gaddis’ reputation for obscurity and difficulty rests on two central features of his work: its allusiveness and its style.

Before taking each of these in turn, it’s worth noting that none of Gaddis’ themes are distant from our own contemporary concerns, and all are set in our times. At the center of all of his novels are concerns with love and family, but even the more external thematic emphases are pulled, as they say, from the headlines. The Recognitions: authenticity and art; J R: twentieth-century capitalism; Carpenter’s Gothic: empire and geopolitics; A Frolic of His Own: justice and the law; and, finally, with Agape Agape, authenticity and art once again.

And with the possible exception of this last, they are all comedies. “[The Recognitions] was a sometimes heavy-handed satire but I wanted it to be a large comic novel in the great tradition,” Gaddis told the Paris Review in a 1986 interview, and J R and A Frolic of His Own are also lengthy comic epics — and laugh-out-loud comic; there are excellent jokes to be found on nearly every one of The Recognitions‘ 956 closely-printed pages, from aphorism to physical slapstick to scatology (one of the main characters of the book, an art dealer, is named Recktall Brown).

The most formidable challenge to the reader new to Gaddis’ work is its length, at least of the first two novels: the nearly 1,000 pages of The Recognitions and the only slightly shorter (at 752 pages) of J R, but for anyone familiar with the 20th century novel this alone should not be enough to put most off. The 3,000 pages of Remembrance of Things Past, the 720 pages of The Magic Mountain, the 783 pages of Ulysses (not to mention, more recently, the 1,104 pages of Infinite Jest and the 784 pages of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon) — requiring substantial investments of time and attention to be sure, but not in themselves forbidding enough to be significant obstacles.

Obviously, though, there is length and there is length. Proust’s prose style is straightforward enough, as is Mann’s; once we’re on to Pynchon and Joyce, though, we’re on stickier territory, and the pages turn more slowly, requiring more of our attention. It is the allusive quality of Gaddis’ prose, especially in The Recognitions, that prevents us from easy entry, rather than the style itself. In the first chapter alone there are obscure references to mythology, to alchemy, to 15th century art — but as critic Steven Moore has pointed out, Gaddis found much of this material in no more than about a half-dozen easily available books, including Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, C.G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. (Despite this seeming academic expertise, Gaddis was an auto-didact; he attended, but never graduated from, Harvard University.) The allusions weave a fabric which ties past and present, mythology and history, art and science together, making connections both conscious and unconscious; for the worried neophyte, in any event, Moore’s useful annotations to nearly every arcane reference in the novel can be found, for free, online.

Moore, in his 1989 monograph on the author, also provided perhaps the most concise description of both Gaddis’ style and content when he described The Recognitions as “The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoyevski.” Apart from noting the two most important and acknowledged influences on Gaddis’ work, this also points the way to the most useful perspective on both Gaddis’ method and style. But more on this soon.