jr

Worthwhile?

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

So, we’re well into the book now, significantly past the halfway point, and chances are that if you’ve put in the time and effort to get this far, you won’t be turning back. I am curious whether anybody else is finding the length of the book, and especially of some passages, to be taxing.

I find that the portions of the book that take place in boardrooms and offices or on the phone between people situated in these locales get old pretty quickly. Gaddis really beats the horse to death and back again. I don’t know how many pages of this stuff we get, but it takes only a couple of good long scenes of this sort of satire for me to get the point. Yet he keeps hitting us with it at great length, and I can tell you (having finished the book a bit early the other night) that it doesn’t really let up. So why does he do it?

Well, maybe it’s a matter of pacing, for the other thing he really rams down our throats is the anger and bitterness that Gibbs and Eigen express as they try to make it through their grubby workaday lives while abandoning (or being abandoned by) the writerly pursuits they think are worthwhile. If he didn’t give us a comic (if infuriating) break from these sections, we’d all pull a Schramm.

And then of course there’s poor Bast, stuck between the two godawful types of scene.

It’s at about this point in the book that I tend to become almost overcome with despair, for though it is the kind of book that leaves you clutching your belly with laughter, it’s also a ghastly work of hopelessness. Take for example this forecast from page 359:

See he worked here [says Norman Angel] for a while just before I came, just real brilliant but, I don’t know but just to give you an idea, one time when we’d all three had lunch and he’d taken a few drinks a bum came up to us on the street with his hand out and the wind blowing his torn coat, a whole wreck of a man that couldn’t hardly see us anyway, but Jack all of a sudden reached out and gave him a dollar and that really, well you know a long time after that I said something about it once to Stella and all she said was she said he did it because what he saw coming toward him was himself.

What an outlook for poor Gibbs, and it doesn’t seem at all off the mark.

This is a book about art and artists. If what Gibbs and Eigen and Schramm and Schepperman and Bast have experienced is what artists have to look forward to, well, it’s little wonder that Gaddis wrote such a bitter second novel. The reception of his first novel was very much, after all, like the reception of Eigen’s first important but little-read novel.

Jonathan Franzen got not much farther than our current milestone in J R before he famously gave up on the book, a fact he mentions in an essay titled “Mr. Difficult.” It’s worth a read, particularly if you’re wondering whether you can see your way to the end of this book (and even if — maybe especially if — like me, you wouldn’t spit on Franzen if he were on fire unless you spat high-octane gasoline). The problem with Franzen’s critique is that he didn’t finish the damn book. That’s not to say that the book turns around to end  with a Puckish intervention and weddings all around. But writing a long essay criticizing a book you haven’t finished is irresponsible if nothing else.

Which brings me back to the curiosity I mentioned up there above the fold. How’re you holding up? Do you think you can manage 265 more pages of bitterness and anger? Does the humor make it all worthwhile? Or does Gaddis go on too long and too repetitively? Is the book striking you so far as more a comic novel or a tragic one, or something else altogether? If you’re reading it as a comic novel, is the comedy itself a worthwhile endeavor? And what exactly does it mean to be worthwhile?

Empedocles

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

As early as page 45, we see a reference to the presocratic philosopher Empedocles, who was responsible for things like the notion of the four elements and the idea that sight was the product of beams of light streaming out of our eyes. He also happened to basically go crazy and fling himself to his death in a volcano if the legends are to be believed. And he wrote about combatting forces Love and Strife, which basically battled to bring about mixtures of the four elements to form things in the world, many of which were strange and short-lived, but some of which were good combinations and stuck around to become things like human beings. I’m paraphrasing from the Wikipedia article here, though I confirmed some of it by skimming bits and pieces of The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, available here.

The first mention of Empedocles in J R falls from the mouth of Jack Gibbs, who goes on as follows (ellipses both mine and Gaddis’s):

— I think it’s a fragment from the second generation of his cosmogony, maybe even the first . . .

— When limbs and parts of bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unattached eyes looking for foreheads . . .

— Never read it? In the second generation these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless hands, faces looking in different directions . . .

This is in the midst of the chaos surrounding Bast’s televised lesson on Mozart, and that word chaos is really the crux of J R, both its content and its form. In fact, even earlier in the book, way back on pages 20 and 21, we have this from Gibbs:

Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .

He goes on to try to define for his class the term “entropy,” which of course has a meaning specific to thermodynamics but also pertains to measurements of both disorder and loss of information in a transmitted message, both of which escalate to the point of hysteria in the book. (Curiously, the more fragmented information Gaddis flings at you in the mounting maelstrom, the more certain bits of the plot begin to come together in spite of it all.)

I’m reading ahead a bit and am going to go ahead and quote ahead a little, but not in a spoily way. On page 403, Gibbs again:

. . . read Wiener on communication, more complicated the message more God damned chance for errors, take a few years of marriage such a God damned complex of messages going both ways can’t get a God damned thing across, God damned much entropy going on . . .

And on 406:

. . . looks like the God damned dawn of the world in here necks without heads arms seeking shoulders, only God damned person live here’s Empedocles . . .

And again on 407:

— Point God damned point only audience sit through it’s Empedocles, shambling creatures with countless hands eyes wandering around looking for a God damned forehead parts joining up all wrong make a hell of a musical just telling Bast . . .

So, love and strife, chaos molded into a sort of order from a stew of disparate parts, and that cacophony of voices that we as readers begin over time to assemble into something meaningful. It’s neat how all of this comes together, and it makes me think that while I had previously figured a reading of the myths that informed Wagner’s Ring might be central to an even cursory understanding of J R, maybe it’s more important to go back to some of the old Greek philosophers.

Welcome Sonia Johnson

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

Sonia  Johnson is a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa working on a dissertation on William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, so she’ll fit right in as a blogger here at Infinite Zombies. Although she’s currently studying in Iowa, she’s a New Zealander and professes therefore to be culturally inept at self-promotion. She’s researching gender and marketing in and around the works of the aforementioned authors and will be writing a few posts for #OccupyGaddis at the LA Review of Books blog  and contributing a bit here as well. Welcome, Sonia!

That E Flat Chord

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

It’s curious, given all my false starts with books like Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses — which share with J R long passages of rambling, essentially contextless prose — that the first time I read J R years ago, I made it through without major impediment. Oh, sure, bits of it were rough going, and I was lost a lot of the time, but I never hit the sort of wall that I did with these other books.

This’ll be my third full time through J R, and I’ve done a partial read at least once before, so there’s a lot of distance between my current impressions and how I received the book as a new reader. For years (pre-Ulysses), I think I labeled J R the hardest book I had ever read, but now I’m thinking it’s not so hard after all. Maybe that’s just experience and familiarity talking. At any rate, having now read Joyce’s novel (which Gaddis purports not to have read, though I have trouble believing it, especially given echoes both allusive and quoted outright of other Modernist writers like Yeats and Eliot that appear in J R), I’ve developed a little theory as to why I managed to get through it the first time.

While Gaddis rapidly changes voice and context time after time in J R, he maintains a consistent method of story-telling throughout the book. Once you’ve begun to get a feel for how the book works and have begun to suss out the various voices, it goes down a lot more easily than when you first encounter the book’s cacophony. By a third of the way through the book (if not before), you’re probably pretty comfortable with how the book operates, so that the mechanics of understanding it require much less effort and you can absorb the voices.

I had something similar to say about the Ulysses read a couple of years ago:

When I started reading “Ithaca,” I flipped forward after just a couple of pages because I feared that all of the 70+ pages in this batch would follow the question/answer format that opened the episode. I may have groaned audibly when I saw that they would. It was a cute trick, I thought, but who needed 70 pages of it? Who needed 20 pages of it? But as I read on, a neat thing happened that has happened several (though by no means all) times for me in this book: However unsettling the form of the episode was at the beginning, I internalized it somehow and found a way to read past the form, or maybe to embrace it. What had at first seemed an obstacle or a cutesy-pie trick turned into maybe a sort of prism through which to read the content of the episode.

Of course, Joyce switches modes on you every few dozen pages, so that once you’ve begun to learn how to read a given section, you have to start over and adapt to a new method of storytelling. Pynchon does something similar, though with less clear demarcation than Joyce provides. So Gaddis, for all that he may be considered antagonistic to his reader, is actually in some ways gentler  to his reader than these other difficult authors, requiring endurance more than malleability once you’ve settled in.

As you read on and on, the effect is pretty amazing. You learn to determine very quickly who’s speaking what unattributed line of dialogue and when you’ve moved from the school to the train station to the old Bast house. You begin to hear the voices intuitively more than to read and parse them, and a real world begins to emerge. It turns out that Gaddis had something similar to say about Wagner on page 111:

— Yes but that’s what you mean isn’t it, about creating an entirely different world when you write an opera, about asking the audience to suspend its belief in the . . .
— No not asking them making them, like that E flat chord that opens the Rhinegold goes on and on it goes on for a hundred and thirty-six bars until the idea that everything’s happening under water is more real than sitting in a hot plush seat with tight shoes on and . . .

If you’re having trouble getting used to Gaddis’s storytelling, stick it out a bit longer. The noise begins to make sense over time, and there’s reward aplenty.

Welcome Another Zombie for the J R Read

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

Those who participated in the read of Gravity’s Rainbow may recall the occasional comments of David Nahm (DCN in those comments). Well, it turns out that he’s a big fan of Gaddis and is excited to write about J R here at Infinite Zombies. I’m excited to add a new voice to the mix. David lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches Constitutional Law and Law and Literature.

#OccupyGaddis

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

Well, I was going to go and spend a few months reading short things and producing things of my own after Gravity’s Rainbow, but then Lee Konstantinou had to go and spring #OccupyGaddis on us. It’s to be an Infinite Summer style read of Gaddis’s JR, which I’ve read a couple of times (but not in many years) and had been hankering to reread soon anyway. I don’t know that I’ll have time to give it a close reading or to blog about it here (famous last words for me), and I had hoped to do some pre-reading, but this thing starts in four days, so pre-reading’s out the window. In any case, I thought I’d spread the word here. If you’re on Twitter and want to follow along, keep tabs on the #OccupyGaddis hash tag. The schedule’s a 10-pages-per-day schedule blocked out as follows (note that those are two week blocks):

June 29: pp. 150

July 15: pp. 300

July 31: pp. 460

August 15: pp. 610

August 26: done!

I don’t think I’ve got it in me to make this an official read here.  If you’re already a blogger here and want to write about the book, by all means do (Paul will be writing as he can over at his blog). If you’ve been pretty active in the comments in the past or are especially keen to write about JR here at IZ, let me know and chances are pretty good that I’d be willing to set you up with an account. If you’ll be writing about JR elsewhere, please do let us know in the comments.

Difficulty

Daryl L. L. Houston11 Comments

I keep my eye on tweets mentioning Gravity’s Rainbow and today saw one asking if GR was readable and worth it. The person also asked if his followers had read Infinite Jest, and which of the two books was better. Well, that judgment is awfully hard to make, but it sent me off to think about which was more difficult, since I tend to think Pynchon’s book is a lot harder to read than Wallace’s and so in some ways is less pleasurable and by extension not as good.

As evidence of GR‘s difficulty, I cite the fact that I read IJ for the first time in a 10-day marathon of 15-hour days over a Christmas holiday while in college. I pretty much couldn’t put the book down. As further evidence, I cite the probably half dozen times I read the first half dozen pages of GR before putting it aside. I believe I once read significantly more of the book but put it down again.

So, why was GR so much harder a book for me than IJ was? Part of it has to do, I suppose, with the fact that Pynchon writes about a lot of more or less factual things, and when confronted with so much real-world information that I didn’t know, or knew only very shallowly, I felt stupid and inadequate and didn’t want to feel that way anymore, so I quit. Wallace, on the other hand, writes less with history in mind and about experiences that aren’t so terribly different from my own. I never attended a tennis academy, but I have been a young man in locker rooms, and I’ve been to summer camps and eaten in cafeterias. I’ve never been addicted to drugs or spent time in a halfway house, but the experiences as Wallace presents them are very human experiences, whereas Pynchon so often writes at a greater distance from the people whose trials he’s documenting, and with a much greater emphasis (generally) on the technology and the argot of the fields and histories he writes about.

But there’s something else, too. (Well, there’s lots else, but one something else I’ll write about for now.) For all the guff Wallace took about writing a too-long book, being self-indulgent with the end notes,  needing an editor, etc., it occurred to me tonight that IJ is actually very user friendly in a way that certain important books we’ve read here (or may yet read here) are not.

It all starts with Ulysses, of course. Joyce gave us pretty much unfettered access to the inside of Leopold Bloom’s head and wrote often without much in the way of transition or explicit stage direction. It’s really hard to get oriented within the book, and by the time you settle in to the style of one episode, Joyce goes off and changes the game on you by writing in another mode altogether. In 1973 and 1975 we got Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’s JR. Gaddis too puts you inside the heads of his characters with precious little in the way of landmarks to help you navigate the prose. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue, JR requires that you learn how to read it before you can really begin to understand what it’s even saying. It’s fun, but capital-D Difficult. Pynchon’s not as freewheeling as Gaddis, since Pynchon at least breaks his book down into sections and provides exposition. But he also makes those crazy leaps. Miss a “. . . .” in the text as he jumps from one time or place to another and you’ll find yourself suddenly lost. Wait, when the fuck did I start reading about dodo birds? I thought this was a story about Hansel and Gretel.

Infinite Jest covers a lot of people over a period of time that’s kind of hard to pin down as you’re reading. Like Pynchon, Wallace provides landmarks in the form of clear section breaks. But unlike Pynchon, he tends to stay within the boundaries of a defined section. If he’s writing about Mario, you don’t suddenly find an unmarked leap over to Marathe and Steeply at another time and place within the same section. Further, Wallace conveniently puts a lot of the extra, technical, information in end notes. He’s been accused, on the basis of the 100 pages of notes, of being antagonistic to the reader, but it occurs to me that maybe putting the tangential information in end notes is his attempt at something like mercy. Where his forebears just dump the info on you inline, Wallace gives you a little break, slows down the information intake just a touch.

It’s as if Joyce came to the conclusion that he could lay on his readers everything in a character’s head and the postmodernists extended that idea, trying to give their readers not just the contents of their characters’ heads but everything under the sun and doing so in a way that sort of mimicked the awful burden of information-influx after the rise of radio and television and billboards. Wallace, then, says “too much,” or, if not “too much,” something like “slow down; let’s take this in pieces.”

And for me, I think that’s part of what makes Infinite Jest a much easier book than Gravity’s Rainbow. For all the information Wallace’s book contains, its information flow is more modulated than these earlier books, and it’s a relief. One reads that Wallace was also a proponent of a new sincerity, that he rejected the postmodern tendency toward irony as ultimately a non-productive (if not outright toxic) mode to write in. It’s interesting to me to suggest, then, that he sought to throttle information overload as he hoped to throttle irony, that he was pulling back from his smirking, hyper-intelligent forebears in a couple of ways, an après-garde all his own.