So fall begins as Gaddis ends, with Lee Konstantinou wrapping up our #OccupyGaddis summer. Special thanks to Lee, Sonia Johnson and Joseph Tabbi for their contributions to the LARB blog, and to everyone who read along, tweeted, blogged, and commented.
Something weird happens at the end of William Gaddis’s J R. A few weird things, actually, connected to Doctor (aka Coach) Vogel. What we might have initially thought was a ruthlessly naturalistic novel – a novel set in a world very much like our own – moves in its last pages into openly science fictional territory. We learn that the JR Family of Companies tries to deploy a classified noise-reduction system known as the “Frigicom process,” developed by the Department of Defense and J R Family of Companies subsidiary Ray-X. It’s “a complex process employing liquid nitrogen” that dampens sounds through the creation of “sound shards,” which are then “collected and disposed of in remote areas or at sea” like so much auditory toxic waste. Near the end of the novel, the Frigicom process faces certain comic difficulties:
In what Doctor Vogel described as perhaps too ambitious a trial in this early state of the art, the shards comprising Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony proved more difficult to handle than had been anticipated, and the sequential thaw technique was not entirely reliable. Appearing before the committee with his left arm in a cast and his face partially hidden by bandages, the colorful research director stated that the injuries sustained by himself and three of his technicians occurred when the entire first movement thawed in an unscheduled four seconds, ascribing the damage mainly to the strident quality of the musical work’s opening bars…
These experimental hiccups come to us through a few layers of mediation – via a newspaper article read to Edward Bast while he’s convalescing in a hospital – so it’s possible that Vogel is misrepresenting his research to the public. But there’s more. What we suspected were fraudulent experiments in “Teletravel” – human teleportation across telephone networks – turn out to be (we learn in a conversation among Cates, Beaton, and Zona) less than fraudulent. Dan diCephalis – the former psychometrician at J R’s school in Massapequa – has been lost in a trial run of the teleportation system, also engineered by Doctor Vogel. We might come up with a plausible explanation for the Frigicom fiasco, but it’s hard to imagine that Dan’s disappearance is anything other than real. There’s no countervailing evidence, so I think we’re meant to take this as a real accident – which means that J R really is developing a human teleportation system within the world of the novel.
In one sense, these developments are very much in keeping with the themes we’ve already encountered in J R. Gaddis passionately attacks the idea that scientific discovery and technological change are forces for good, possibly implying that they’re more often disasters. Just as Jack Gibbs condemns the mechanization of the arts in his unfinished history of the player piano (a book actually Gaddis posthumously published in 2002 as the slim novel, Agapē Agape), the Gaddis of J R condemns the mechanization of the person, which amounts for him to more or less the same thing. The Teletravel process must have been, for Gaddis, the natural end of the mechanization of everyday life: the reduction of the fullness of the person to data, transmissible over a cable. Dan’s fate suggests, in a barely allegorical fashion, that it may not be possible to come out the other end of such a damaging change.
To make this point, Gaddis seems to have felt the need to change the genre of his book midstream. Why?
I don’t know whether Gaddis wrote J R in a linear order. It’s perfectly possible he wrote scenes in parallel, but it’s more interesting to imagine that as the story progresses, as we approach the final pages of the novel, we behold America – and American literature – change before our eyes. The shift to science fiction and a more openly postmodern aesthetic is perhaps an index of literary history – the different character of the American novel in 1955 and 1975. Moreover, it suggests that, circa 1975, following the implosion of the spirit of the Sixties, a spirit he never seems fully in accord with, Gaddis may have had a basically pessimistic attitude about the future.
What must it have felt like to spend twenty years writing a biting satire of American capitalism and discover, at the end of that period, that the satire was just as relevant as the day you started writing, if not more relevant? Was there ever a novel written that wished more passionately than J R that it didn’t need to be written?
It’s striking in these moments of science fictional forecast that there’s no imaginable resistance to the capitalist system. Unlike the novels of Thomas Pynchon – who in good countercultural fashion tries to represent attempts to fight the system – in Gaddis there are no forces of resistance, no political actors that in any way even attempt to arrest the inexorable forward movement of capitalist mechanization.
Though #OccupyGaddis has been over for a few weeks, I can’t help but linger on the summer’s reading, and wonder whether the existence of this reading community might in some small way belie Gaddis’s pessimism. I never expected that this social reading experiment would be as successful as it was. Infinite Summer was launched because of the occasion of the death of David Foster Wallace, but there wasn’t much of an occasion for a big read of J R. We tried to link the book to the the financial crisis – and, as it turned out, these links were very relevant. J R may be the great novel of Wall Street.
But J R may also be limited by its own inability to see the grounds for hope in the cacophony it so masterfully represents. The dialogue that happened on Twitter, on Goodreads, on Facebook, on individual blogs might resemble, on the surface, the entropic competing voices of Gaddis’s novel, but in actual practice it was a purposeful form of collective reading, one that wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as it was if it weren’t for the resources already made available by sites like The Gaddis Annotations. Though Gaddis’s novel ends on a note of posthuman desolation, then, I wonder whether the community that formed to read the novel might not offer grounds for posthuman hope. Might we not see in #OccupyGaddis a positive model for what online community can be?
Whether or not there are authentic grounds for such hope, I hope – even now, after the formal close of #OccupyGaddis – that new blog posts will be composed in the weeks or even months to come. Some of you will take longer than the scheduled time to finish the book. Some will formulate new ideas now that you have a chance to reflect upon the novel as a whole. Some will, I hope, think about J R again and again as you read new works. Some, perhaps, will want to return to page one and read again, with new eyes, the behemoth you have just finished, either immediately or at some future date. Thanks everyone for reading and blogging. It’s been a tremendous experiment, a great success. I hope we’ve helped bring more attention to an unjustly neglected American master and a novel that, in my view, as my formal review will make clear, deserves to be called a masterpiece.
Lee Konstantinou
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