| Style Notes

Style Notes

By Sonia Johnson

As Lee Konstantinou mentioned when he introduced me, I spent a week this May with the William Gaddis papers at Washington University’s special collection. While there I found a list of “style notes” sent to Robert Gottlieb, Gaddis’s editor at Knopf some time in 1974 (the original document is cut off as you see here.) It wasn’t clear from surrounding documents when exactly it was sent or what prompted it. Possibly it accompanied with the manuscript to preempt any editorial confusion or it was sent later at Gottlieb’s request. Either way, this document gives a glimpse into the meticulous crafting of J R at the level of individual letters and punctuation.

These notes get at one of my overall impressions from the archive: the distance between Gaddis’s professional competence and the frantic ineptitude of the artists in his novels. Gaddis talks here about the desire “to remove the narrator as much as possible.” Yet, as Lee discussed in his last post, there is still a strong sense of authorial judgment. This tension, for some of us, breeds an impulse to read the male artists as more or less stand-ins for the author. The Gaddis that Franzen talks about in “Mr. Difficult,” for example, is a clearly an amalgam of Jack Gibbs from J R and A Frolic of His Own’s Oscar Crease. This document could be a check to that impulse, prompting a more cautious approach to Gaddis’s implied presence.

In terms of actual content, though, I was most struck by the care with which Gaddis created a text that would read quickly. Rushing through sounds a lot like the standard advice for reading Pynchon’s novels: just give up, go along for the ride, have fun. Pynchon and Gaddis are cult authors, yes, but this has always seemed a little like brainwashing to me. The problem is that, like most avant-garde texts, J R teaches you how to read it as you go along and that makes it tough to do anything but hang on for the ride, at least in the beginning. I’m getting this argument from Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box, where he explains his theory of what makes a good story:

the story has boundaries like a playing field. The story can’t go simply anywhere. This […] invites the reader to come off the sidelines, to get into the game with the author. Where is the story going next? Where should it go? No fair! Hopeless situation! Touchdown! […] Where, outside the Groves of Academe, does anybody like a story where so much information is withheld or arcane that there is no way for readers to play along?

Is J R a story we can play along with (as many Gaddis scholars claim) or are we stranded on the sidelines like an unathletic kid in gym class?

The sports metaphor raises one the main ways that contemporary Americans understand reading. That is, as a means personal growth. Reading a difficult book is like going to the gym: no pain, no gain. This mandate of self-improvement, with the metric of being “relatable” at its core, is a particularly American and capitalist way of reading. Time and labor are invested into reading with the expectation of direct personal gain. Difficult writing like J R requires a big investment, therefore its payoff in terms of intellectual and personal growth is expected to be higher

Gym class also brings to me to another idea that’s been kicking around the various online discussions so far: difficulty as a form of hostility or sadism. Looking at it from this angle, difficult writing is a grim, painful affair inflicted upon the reader by a cruel author. Some people like this, even describing themselves as masochists. Others, like me, are put off by this sexual metaphor where the reader plays the submissive to a dominant text (especially when these texts are written by straight, white, American men). What both of these concepts share is the assumption that reading is all about the reader. A novel, in these terms, is valued according to what it can offer a reader and what its attitude towards readers seems to be.

Gaddis’s explanation of his style departures suggests something else. Asides from the general directive of speed at the beginning, readers disappear from the rest of the document. The concern with maintaining clarity implies attention to the reading experience but only peripherally. This isn’t about or training or punishing the reader. It’s about striving “to capture sound, to remove the narrator as much as possible and oblige the story to tell itself.” The story takes on its own life, its own importance and urgency beyond being a bearer for the author’s ideas or the reader’s self-reflection. In interviews and in other correspondence with editors, Gaddis frequently talks about his writing as though it was something autonomous with its own life and its own logic. That is, the novel and literature generally transcend the potential narcissism of writer and reader.

Image courtesy of the William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections

7th Jul 2012

Style Notes