In the below excerpt from the 1984 BBC series Sea of Faith, presenter Don Cupitt discusses the role of Eastern religion in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought and quotes from the conclusion of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation. And in these quotations, dark as they are, Schopenhauer’s mordant wit is clear:
For more on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, see the hour-long conversation between Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston, posted here.
UPDATE: Appearing yesterday on The Paris Review Web site was “Mistaken Identity,” an essay by Jenny Hendrix about Fire the Bastards!, a book concerning the critical reception of The Recognitions by a mysterious “jack green.” The Dalkey Archive Press will also be republishing this most unusual book in February. Gaddis scholar Steven Moore provides an introduction.
Those seeking an additional introduction to Gaddis’ work can be referred to Cynthia Ozick’s fine review of Carpenter’s Gothic, his third novel, which appeared in the 7 July 1985 issue of the New York Times.
One of the pleasures of The Paris Review‘s new online archive of their author interviews is the availability of Zoltán Abádi-Negi’s 1987 talk with American novelist William Gaddis (1922-1998).
It would be nice to say that Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions (1955), “burst onto the scene,” but its appearance was greeted with a polite silence in most corners. The novel is among those monumental works of American modernism, like Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Mark Rothko’s paintings and Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, that beggar easy description: nearly 1,000 pages in its hardcover edition and not much less in the paperback, The Recognitions, along with Gaddis’ next book J R (1975), are essential to an understanding of the United States in the postwar period. More than this, though, as Sven Birkets wrote in his New York Times Book Review notice of Agapē Agape, Gaddis’ novels constitute in all their brilliance “the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art.”
And Gaddis was, quite explicitly, a modernist writer. “Speaking of influences, I think mine are more likely to be found going from Eliot back rather than forward to my contemporaries,” Gaddis told Abádi-Negi shortly after the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); in the interview Gaddis demonstrates little enthusiasm for either postmodern fiction or criticism. In form, style and content, Gaddis’ five novels are largely composed of Americans talking: J R is set out almost entirely in dialogue, and A Frolic of His Own (1994) incorporates most of Gaddis’ only (unproduced) play, Once at Antietam.
Gaddis is, on the surface, a satirist, but like Horace, Swift and Kraus he is far more than that. All of his novels painfully and often hilariously tear the scabs from the American experience, the Puritan ethic and Western capitalism, but underlying all of it is a firm faith in the redemptive qualities of aesthetic creation, always under siege from the administered society from which it rather wondrously and paradoxically emerges. He begins broadly — the locales of The Recognitions circle the globe — but as time goes on his focus becomes narrower. J R is set largely in Long Island and New York City; Carpenter’s Gothic in an isolated New England house (constantly barraged from within by television stories and telephone messages from far-off African lands); A Frolic of His Own, his satire of the legal system (and therefore the administered American culture), in a home on Eastern Long Island; and finally, in his brilliant short novel explicitly influenced by Thomas Bernhard, Agapē Agape (published posthumously in 2002), in the room and the mind of a dying man (also suggesting that other master of the rooms and minds of dying men, Samuel Beckett).
There is a development in Gaddis’ work from the monumental to the concise, stripping down to the core the essence of Gaddis’ satiric vision: that of opportunities lost, of humanity unable to achieve its hopes, in either art or life. As he writes in the very last pages of Agapē Agape:
Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you good God, Pozdnyshev [a character in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata], those words that Levochka gave you to transform the whole thing when “music carries you off into another state of being that’s not your own, of feeling things you don’t really feel, of understanding things you don’t really understand, of being able to do things you aren’t really able to do” yes, that transforms that transfigures you yourself into the self who can do more! That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.
The satirist’s vision is hung between the tragic and the ecstatic; it’s to Gaddis’ great talent that we can owe its brilliant containment in comic form (the events of A Frolic of His Own, for example, begin when the main character, novelist and Gaddis-double Oscar Crease, manages to run himself over with his own car); and though these last words are the cry of a dying man, Gaddis was a great one for first sentences, too:
Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. (The Recognitions)
– Money … ? in a voice that rustled. (J R)
Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. (A Frolic of His Own)
Gaddis’ work has been eclipsed by that of many of his contemporaries — among those living, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth; among those dead, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer — but it is heartening to see that, in 2010, his satiric vision hasn’t been entirely fulfilled, despite the notorious “Mr. Difficult” essay by Oprah’s Book Club favorite Jonathan Franzen, which in all its condescending and moronic glory appeared in a 2002 issue of The New Yorker. All of Gaddis’ novels, as well as his book of essays The Rush for Second Place (2002), remain in print. Though one shudders to think what Gaddis would think of the Internet after the cacophony of J R, the Internet has been kind to him. There is an excellent Web site devoted to his novels here; it includes the full text of Stephen Moore’s groundbreaking 1989 full-length study of the novelist. There is another excellent collection of Gaddis pages at The Modern Word‘s “Scriptorium” here. I was fortunate enough to take a class with William Gaddis at Bard College on “The Literature of Failure” in 1979, which I wrote about several years ago here (my contribution begins about halfway down the page).
dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth
stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk
mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal
According to Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Beckett’s early poem was a response to Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter”:
As a vulture would,
That on heavy clouds of morning
With gentle wing reposing,
Seeks for his prey –
Hover, my song. (Tr. Edwin H. Zeydel)
Harvey contrasts the two poems thusly:
The optimism, expansive joy, and religious mysticism of the original are missing in Beckett’s poem. … “The Vulture” might be called (by a critic) “The Artist on his Art.” It is the most explicit account in Echo’s Bones of the author’s views on the nature of poetry. While the model and its offshoot have in common the theme of artistic creation, even here the views disclosed differ greatly. Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk in search of its prey, for there is nothing in the above lines that suggests the carrion-consuming Accipitridae of science. Even the “heavy clouds” are heavy only in order to furnish a stable resting-place, and the poet’s heart is light. His poem is a song waiting to be born, and its author in his joyful moment of expectant creativity is in the state of poetic grace. There is little doubt that the poem will be born a healthy, happy offspring. Not so with the somber song of Samuel Beckett. (113)
The bitterness of Tay-Sachs disease and similar syndromes lies in its distillation of human existence. An infant with these syndromes is born quite normally and enters the world to recognize, make, and manipulate it: she begins to recognize light and dark, color; can begin to distinguish between the voices of her parents, those of others, and her own; though no small or gross motor skills have yet developed, she reaches for hands and can grasp. As the infant grows older, she might also learn that she can move things on her own. But before long, the progress of the disease takes its toll, and one by one these abilities fade: the eyes fail, the ears fail, her movements become uncontrollable, and eventually she slips away, just as she can begin to express love and need and exist as an individual self. This happens, usually, within three years’ time, but having watched both of my parents die over the past few years myself, I can see that this is mere concentration of the condition of existence. Visiting a father or a mother in a hospice, one sees the progression. One day they rise from the bed no more; they slowly lose the ability to see or hear or speak or express clearly; and one day, as the doctors say, they are not “there” any more. (For both the infant and the parent, the care is “palliative,” so that they may not suffer more, we imagine, than we ourselves ordinarily are capable of suffering.)
This occurs whether three or eighty-three. The sadness that attaches to the young life is that it is so new, and the door shuts just as it opens. It attests also to the truth of Pozzo’s realization, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” and of Vladimir’s conclusion built upon Pozzo’s truth, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.” We may find in this the invitation to compassion and love, but only if we accept this truth, if we imbue our art with it or remember it every single day.
“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.”
Bearing the humbling injunction from Arthur Schopenhauer above in mind, I recently attempted once again a sympathetic, open-minded reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and like my attempts to read Nietzsche sympathetically in the past, I failed once again. In some circles (but not in mine; I don’t have a circle), Nietzsche is the contemporary philosopher par excellence, esteemed for his style, his rhetoric, his polemic power; for me, ass though I may be, I find little sympathy for any of the three. There may be many reasons for this. No English translation of any of Nietzsche’s work sounds like anything but an English translation from a foreign language; if this were untrue of any of the translations I’ve come across (and I’ve tried three different translations of BT), I might blame the translator, but there may be something in Nietzsche’s thought itself which renders it so unaccommodating to my ears. The fetishization of the Dionysiac spirit, and of pre-Platonic Greece itself, is profoundly unconvincing to me (as is Bataille’s obsession with ritual and rite); again, this may be because by nature I am more sympathetic to the Apollonian spirit, but I am not at all sure that this is true. All that heightened rhetoric, all those exclamation points! Reading Nietzsche I can’t help but feel subjected to a loud never-ending harangue from a soapbox, punctuated with a loud, forced laughter and unhelpful references to abstractions like an Übermensch or an eternal recurrence (the concept of the latter, especially, is unpleasant). I have my suspicions as to why Nietzsche is one of the most popular and certainly most influential philosophers of the modern age, but perhaps these are best saved for another time.
I do not require that a philosopher be systematic. Nietzsche certainly is not. Neither, despite all of the secondary literature defining his system, is Schopenhauer, and he admits as much in the very first preface to the very first edition of The World as Will and Representation. But reading Schopenhauer I feel rather differently, as if in a quiet conversation in a dimly-lit study equipped with all the bourgeois pleasures of the mind and body — a roaring fireplace, a carafe of brandy, quiet talk, ironic laughter, as outside a snowstorm rages in the night. Schopenhauer’s manner convinces me as much as his insight; I am happier to admit his inconsistencies, as he himself admits he has them, especially when it comes to women and sex; as Schopenhauer said of Kant, great minds must be allowed to make occasional mistakes with impunity. For me it does not ameliorate the force of his thought or his writing.
I will be fifty in two months’ time, and perhaps I value these bourgeois pleasures more than I ever have: it is night outside, after all, and there is a fierce blizzard blowing. And I am perhaps less interested in popularity or community than ever before. I doubt that any sacrifices I might have to make to be popular or clubbable, whether it’s within a small circle or a large public arena, would justify the returns, quite small as I can imagine them in the larger scheme of things. I can see no justifiable or significant recompense to the exertion to be popular, or at least more widely read. I do not believe, like Nietzsche does (sometimes; sometimes he doesn’t; it depends on which of his aphorisms you quote, and that’s a game I’m not interested in playing, for I don’t have the time), that a culture or a civilization might somehow be recreated that reflects the characteristics of a society that would value tragedy, through revalorizing the Dionysian spirit or what-have-you, and I don’t have the desire for propagandizing those values within my portfolio as a writer.
When it comes to whatever I may write about drama or theatre, especially as it exists now in the country of my birth, I find myself to be more disconnected than ever before, no matter the blowsy and illusory “connections” that things like the blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook pretend to provide. I suppose I have a reluctance to be absorbed into the corporatized digital world that these represent. The mad desperate craze for connection, for accessibility, for popularity, for community, I find profoundly foreign and hostile to my nature as a writer and as a person, especially in an art form like theatre. And yet it is this nature which must be the source for my writings about and for the theatre and drama. This places me outside, which is where I suppose I prefer to be. “A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time,” Kenneth Tynan wrote in the foreword to his 1967 book Tynan Right and Left. “A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.” In both Word Made Flesh and in my writings about erotic tragedy, I have written about what is not happening. I make no pretense that I am, QED, a great critic. But Tynan suggests there is some value to it, and I am content to rest with that.
And besides — it is unfair to write about the dramatists and theatremakers in America without the opportunities to see and become more deeply acquainted with their work than is possible for me now. In acknowledging this, I trust that my readers will understand that from now on Superfluities Redux will be less about theatre and drama and more about other things (theatre and drama will inevitably be engaged on occasion as well, though, as I conceive it, rarely). I write for no community, but for you, if you would like to read it; no harm done at all if you would not and go elsewhere; I will be happy to sit alone with you in that quiet bourgeois den and speak quietly about those obscure, quiet things that matter to me and just may matter to you as well. We may even talk a little about that storm outside, for it is certainly spectacular. Together we can talk away the hours, sharing our resignation, until the blizzard finally slows and ceases and the endless night is peaceful once more.