Agapē Agape Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Agapē Agape

  AFTERWORD

  Notes

  What the critics said about Agapē Agape

  “Gaddis confronted our modern world without flinching. He mapped and delved. His reach was enormous . . . Agapē Agape is the deathbed summa, the parting shot—complete and fully realized . . . its every strange sentence carries full disciplined intention, hurtling towards synthesis even as it writhes and falls. . . . The book is an exalted, paranoid outcry, a last wounded proclamation of the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art . . . we bring to these pages our sense of his great authority and attainment.”

  —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review

  “An excellent prelude to the themes that so obsessed Gaddis . . . Gaddis’s strengths were in creating dazzling architectures for his fictions, and in capturing the ironies and rhythms of human speech.”

  —John Freeman, The Boston Globe

  “Gaddis’s final novel is perhaps his most poignant . . . the themes that obsess the novel’s hero go round and round his head in a kind of discordant symphony: Plato’s plot to banish poets as dangerous to the state. Freud’s elevation of the pleasure principle. Bentham’s utilitarian insistence on viewing pleasure as a question of quantity rather than quality.” —Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

  “For Gaddis, as well as his unnamed protagonist, the player piano represents everything that has gone wrong with America. It’s the perfect symbol for the mechanization of art, the death of creativity . . . it is also the novel’s jumping off point, allowing the protagonist to consider everything from the history of the digital computer to Glenn Gould, to mechanical birds, to modern medicine . . . there’s something on virtually every page—an idea, a turn of phrase, a bit of invective, a peculiar historical note—that stopped me for a moment. . . . In the end, the novel represents the perfect introduction to Gaddis’s work and thought, having condensed a lifetime into about 100 pages (though looking at it that way, of course, would have pissed him off as well).” —Jim Knipfel, New York Press

  “As a glimpse into the literary impulse exercised under difficult, even mortal circumstances, Agapē Agape is harrowing, resolute, deeply sad, very memorable.” —Rick Moody, Bookforum

  “A precisely cut diamond whose brilliance appears at first glance but whose myriad facets—a dance of light and shadow—multiply through reflection. . . . Gaddis rages against the world, but his novel is memorable because he channels this anger into a superb meditation on self-doubt, mortality, and the need for artists to persevere against deaf ears.” —J. Peder Zane, The Raleigh News Observer

  “Gaddis’s last blast, Agapē Agape, ultimately leads the reader back to The Recognitions itself . . . a breathless epilogue to an immense body of work, an acid tirade all too human with sentiment, Agapē Agape could not have cut a more affecting path back to the source, a nearly fifty-year course that affirms the ideal of the opus alchymicum, the work as self-generating recirculations. . . . It may seem to reach us too late, after its author’s death, but it actually comes at the proper time: posthumously.” —Ed Park, The Village Voice

  “A snarling jeremiad . . . the isolation of a forgotten writer, this time bedridden and moribund, preparing, Lear-like, to divide his property among his three daughters while distractedly arranging evidence of civilization’s collapse garnered from various mentors and sources (among them the theoretical physicist Willard Gibbs, cultural historian Johan Huizinga, Freud, Tolstoy’s bilious novella The Kreutzer Sonata, Svengali and Trilby, even Plato’s allegory of the cave and his theory of art as the rightful possession of a cultural elite), building his argument that the player piano epitomizes the death of individuality and the triumph of meretriciousness.”

  —Bruce Allen, Kirkus Reviews

  “In his incisive, caustically elegiac final novel, Gaddis conjures up an erudite, drug-addled old gent with a terminal illness, a true monomaniac, who delivers a torrential and trenchant monologue on art versus entertainment, authenticity versus imitation, and death and the dream of art’s immortality.”

  —Donna Seaman, Booklist

  “Agapē Agape was written by Gaddis with the understanding that it would be his last published act as an author. That crushing awareness of his own end is nearly palpable on every page. As a consequence, the writing is as deeply melancholic as it is directed. Thoughts are expressed without frills and with the utmost urgency.”

  —Paul Maliszewski, The Wilson Quarterly

  AGAPĒ AGAPE

  WILLIAM GADDIS (1922-1998) was twice awarded the National Book Award, for his novels J R and A Frolic of His Own. His other novels were The Recognitions and Carpenter’s Gothic; he was also the author of a collection of essays, The Rush for Second Place. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize.

  SVEN BIRKERTS is the author of My Sky Blue Trades, The Gutenberg Elegies, Readings, American Energies, and other books. He teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is the editor of the journal Agni. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

  JOSEPH TABBI is the author of Cognitive Fictions, a comprehensive look at the effect of new technologies on contemporary fiction, and the founding editor of ebr, the electronic book review. He was the first scholar to be given access to the Gaddis archives in the summer of 2001. Tabbi conducts research in American literature and new media writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

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  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  Copyright © the Estate of William Gaddis, 2002

  Introduction copyright © Sven Birkerts. 2003

  Afterword copyright © Joseph Tabbi, 2002

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from

  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Copyright © 1980 by Thelma D. Toole.

  .

  Excerpts from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock, Alfred A. Knopf,

  1984, and The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Jack Dawson, Knopf, 1991.

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  Introduction

  Separating a writer from his work is difficult under any circumstances. With a novelist as personally reticent and artistically challenging as William Gaddis, it’s almost impossible. There is no purchase. Legend and hearsay move into the crevices usually saved for biography. And how readily the man recedes into an image—a grainy mug shot, perhaps, as befits one so mysterious and threatening. After Thomas Pynchon, he is the most elusive of our masters, more a literary cipher than a known voice.

  The Gaddis of my fantasies exerts a powerful and shadowy appeal: the gaunt figure with his frayed patrician-cum-Jack Palance looks; an updated Ahab in doomed assault on that most persistent of chimeras, the great American novel. Call it romantic twaddle, but these imaginings play no small part in the manufacture of reputations, and Gaddis’ is all the more charged for his being so enigmatic.

  I’m not sure, though, that reading the novels dispels the mystique so much as changes it, grafting upon the image of the charismatic loner that of the ambitious maker, the artist who would draw his compass line around the vast theme-a-turgy of contemporary American life. Indeed, from his first book, The Recognitions (1955), his monumental cosmopolitan epic of forgery and fate, to JR (1975), his utterly sui generis voice-portrait of American enterprise, to his more accessible recent novels, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), Gaddis declared himself unapologetically serious, a man on the way to the big synthesis.

  Gaddis’ enterprise was not so much a search for themes as a search for ways to weave into some strong textile all the features and elements that shape our experience—political, economic, artistic, erotic, etc. Living writers who share this aspiration—and who have certainly drawn courage from his example—include William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joseph McElroy, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, Maureen Howard, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and Cynthia Ozick. The fact that they are mostly males makes for an unfashionable list in some ways, but it also testifies to a certain machismo impetus behind the maximalist assault on the novel. I don’t know how else to explain it.

  There is a certain symbolic aptness in the fact that the novelist who began on such a scale—covering continents and decades with his populous plots and conspiracies—should end, as many do who live long enough, carved back to essential bone and sinew. Not “sans teeth,” and not “sans everything,” but very much sans elaboration. Agapē Agape, the unstructured monologue of a man living through his last days, would seem to be the antipodean Gaddis, his minimalist rejoinder to the vast accumulations that preceded it. But as we will see, it is also a continuation of the arc of the work and its fitting terminus.

  To get the first orienting exposure to Gaddis’ method, his literary aesthetic, the reader needs only a strong thumb. Fanning through the first four novels, the manual exertion easing somewhat as the bulk thins from the thousand-plus pages of The Recognitions to the merely gargantuan JR, to the more conventionally graspable two works that followed, we are struck by the relentless visual punctuation of the dash, the author’s Joyce-derived way of indicating dialogue, as in this random example from JR:

  —What? Oh I . . .

  —Well what are you doing hiding in the closet

  —No I’m looking for some clothes, I just . . .

  —Why don’t you put the closet light on then. (316)

  And it goes on this way for pages at a stretch.

  If nothing else, this riffling of pages vividly discloses the extent to which Gaddis centered his narratives around transcriptions of the spoken voice—voices in combat and accord; voices vigorously staking out airspace, parrying, muscling for attention and advantage. The classic instance of this is JR, quite possibly the most spoken book in our literature, where the characters offer their lines with what can be a frustrating lack of identifying cues, often with nothing more than syncopation and subtle telltale recurrences to help the reader to differentiate between them. I was told by one Gaddis-adept that reading that novel was a swim-or-drown proposition, that to strive for exact coordinates was to court madness; that the only way to hold the sense was by moving forward in great gulps, and trusting the plot to come clear by degrees.

  But JR is just the extreme instance. The other three novels each in their way ask that we convert the eye-beam exertion of reading into a highly tuned-up form of listening. And when we do, we can, to crib from our founding bard, “hear America singing.” Except that this singing is really anything but. What we really hear is America cajoling, scheming, grieving, complaining, disputing, lying, seducing, explaining, litigating . . . It makes perfect sense that Gaddis was a great admirer of the work of Saul Bellow, in whose pages we likewise quicken to the many strains of the endless and ongoing daily American conversation.

  Which brings us, interestingly enough, to Agapē Agape, Gaddis’ thin-yet-crowded, posthumous-yet-intended last novel. Fanning through—the process takes less than six seconds, I timed it—we discover not a single dash in the margins. Fanning again—and one more time for confirmation—we note that there is also not a single paragraph indentation, not even at the very beginning. Doubtless there are other works in the modern canon that proceed thus, but I thought right away of Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete, and the association proved to be the right one—Gaddis in fact meant Agapē Agape to be an homage to Bernhard and, particularly, to that work.

  Before turning to Gaddis’ novel, though, I would linger for a moment on this one peculiarity of presentation, the fact that with this unfenestrated brickwork of prose—his last work—the author effects a complete reversal of the narrative ambition of The Recognitions, his first. Where those pages assembled a cast, a mob, of characters, moving them around in space and in time, this pared-down monologue cuts the anchoring line to the world at large and steps entirely into the vocalized thoughts of a dying man. It tells no story, orchestrates no conflicts except those that the narrator wages in his own embattled psyche—mainly between the given and the desired, the harsh grain of things and the vision of art that might redeem it. Yet paradoxically, where the big novels always seem to telegraph the unstated promise of the world they are rooted in—thus carrying a sense of yet unfilled spaces—Agapē Agape feels full to the brim with the pulsations of its inner life.

  It will not do, I think, to consider Agapē Agape as simply the fifth and last of Gaddis’ novels. There is an enormous subjective—psychological and metaphysical—difference between a book written as a book, for itself, as it were, and one written with the author’s apprehension of his own death. The pressure to make it a summa of some kind, a last word, has to be enormous. In Gaddis’ case that pressure dictated both the narrative conception—that these are the thoughts of a dying man—and the style, which is not only swift with the urgency of “last days,” but which palpably maps the jittery shifts of consciousness caused by the prednisone he takes for his cancer. How fitting that Gaddis should have claimed and incorporated Bernhard’s short novel as his shadow text; Concrete, too, surges with a literally mortal velocity, and also rides the prednisone-agitated states of its first-person narrator, Rudolph. But with this one all-important difference: Bernhard’s Rudolph is a device, the stand-in voice of a writer still some years from his own untimely death. Gaddis’ voice, if not point-for-point his own, is yet calculated to be close enough to generate the core tension of the work.

  The near superimposition of fictional identity upon the real intensifies the immediacy of the voice—its hold-you-fast-by-the-shirtfront quality—even as it has us hunting for correlations with what we know, or can easily find out, about the author. Primarily, of course, there is the fact that he was himself dying of cancer as he wrote his dying narrator. (Gaddis died in 1998, soon after finishing Agapē Agape.) But the few autobiographical references we get furthe
r confirm a near-identification of author and narrator. Among these, the most salient is the narrator’s long-standing obsession with the history of the player piano that he has been writing. Gaddis himself had just such a project underway for many years, as the excerpts gathered in his posthumous collection of pieces, The Rush for Second Place, attest. What’s more, the writing of just such a history occupies his character Jack Gibbs in JR, which should alert us to the fact that the author long made free with the materials of his own experience in his fiction.

  Gaddis all along had more in mind, however, than just documenting a particular interlude in the history of applied mechanization. The player piano was for him a significantly symbolic development and its history illuminated a great deal about the growth of binary thinking and what he saw as the epochal shift from artistic to entertainment values. In this way it lends itself perfectly to his several linked larger investigations, including the questioning of the authenticity and authority of artistic work (The Recognitions) and the warping force of capitalism ( JR), especially in the cultural arena. His views often recall those expressed by Walter Benjamin in his great essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which weighed the loss of “aura”—the immediacy of the unique work of art—against the proclaimed gains of a democratic dissemination of reproductions.