Saturday, April 09, 2005
William Gaddis
William Gaddis is one of those writers I acknowledge as a genius but whom I haven't (or hadn't until recently) managed to read. I've dipped into The Recognitions and JR, but never made much headway; it was good stuff, but required a lot of concentration that I couldn't provide at that time.
Well, I have now finished Agape Agape, and it was not easy reading but it was worthwhile. In fact, I'll probably read it at least once more at some point. Although it's a novella (80-something pages), there is an awful lot going on, and reading it over dinner, interspersed with newspapers and other books, is not the way to keep a grip on it. There are direct references to Nietzche, Plato, Tolstoy, Huizinga, and perhaps a score of others, and indirect ones beyond counting. There is a hint of Lear in the ravings of an old man (and more than a hint in his having divided his property between his three daughters), a hint of Krapp in the grasping for memory, and plenty of stuff that I'm sure I didn't catch.
The appended essay tells us that this short fiction was forged from decades' worth of notes toward a social history of the player piano, and that theme is strong in the book. The links to the Jacquard loom and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are obvious, perhaps, but necessary. Gaddis goes beyond that, of course, to the questions of the authenticity of the artistic experience: if you are operating a player piano, are you making music? This extends to questions of authorship (the unnamed narrator, whose fevered single paragraph makes the whole story, worries that his ideas may be stolen before he can write them down, before he can even create them) as well as audience.
I'm not even sure I can say much more than that, since the text is so dense, so digressive, so difficult. It's not a text to read, but to study, and I haven't done that. (This was my dining room book, not that I have time to study any text that I am not teaching.) But I can tell that it's worth studying, at least.
dmh
Well, I have now finished Agape Agape, and it was not easy reading but it was worthwhile. In fact, I'll probably read it at least once more at some point. Although it's a novella (80-something pages), there is an awful lot going on, and reading it over dinner, interspersed with newspapers and other books, is not the way to keep a grip on it. There are direct references to Nietzche, Plato, Tolstoy, Huizinga, and perhaps a score of others, and indirect ones beyond counting. There is a hint of Lear in the ravings of an old man (and more than a hint in his having divided his property between his three daughters), a hint of Krapp in the grasping for memory, and plenty of stuff that I'm sure I didn't catch.
The appended essay tells us that this short fiction was forged from decades' worth of notes toward a social history of the player piano, and that theme is strong in the book. The links to the Jacquard loom and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are obvious, perhaps, but necessary. Gaddis goes beyond that, of course, to the questions of the authenticity of the artistic experience: if you are operating a player piano, are you making music? This extends to questions of authorship (the unnamed narrator, whose fevered single paragraph makes the whole story, worries that his ideas may be stolen before he can write them down, before he can even create them) as well as audience.
I'm not even sure I can say much more than that, since the text is so dense, so digressive, so difficult. It's not a text to read, but to study, and I haven't done that. (This was my dining room book, not that I have time to study any text that I am not teaching.) But I can tell that it's worth studying, at least.
dmh
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Is there a market for fiction that difficult, or has TV and movies ruined us for slow, deliberate, dense narratives? The prize-winning fiction taught and appreciated in the MFA programs seems to be "clean" and spare.
Sure, there's a market. Books like that won't be best-sellers, of course, not along the lines of Tom Clancy or Stephen King or Umberto Eco -- oops! Eco doesn't write like Clancy, does he? O.K., he doesn't write like Gaddis, either, but there's plenty of room for good, difficult fiction to be published, as long as you don't define "published" as "best-selling with a movie deal."
dmh
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dmh
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