When I was in sixth grade, I got in trouble for starting a business at school. It was 1986 and friendship bracelets were a BIG THING. It felt like everyone had those braids of thread tied around their wrists and ankles, gifts from friends or secret loves. Everyone but me. Feeling left out, I stole some of my mother’s thread and tried to make my own, but the raveling mess was a metonym for my essentially friendless state. That I was friendless was largely my fault. The year before I’d stopped hanging out with my best friend because a girl I had a crush on didn’t like him. Of course, she didn’t like me either, so my plan backfired.

One day during recess, I watched girls in the shadow of the school, their backs against the windowless brick wall, making the bracelets—and I had an idea. I told them that if they would make me some bracelets, I would sell them to people and split the money with them. They’d been buying embroidery floss and giving bracelets away to people they liked, but faced with the possibility of having some money for gum and Little Debbies, they agreed. Realizing that I wasn’t popular enough to convince anyone to buy something that had previously been free, I approached two of the most well-liked boys in the class and told them that if they talked people into buying the new bracelets, I’d split the money with them. My business model was a success and after a few days I could afford to pay a much taller classmate to be my bodyguard. The problem arose when everyone realized that I was making most of the money and was doing none of the work. My bodyguard turned on me, took my money, called me a few pointed names, and just like that, I was on the outside again. To make matters worse, later in the day, our teacher pulled me into the hall and tell me that selling things on school grounds was against school policy and that she was going to have to write me up. I tried to explain to her that she should be proud of how smart I was. This argument did not gain traction.

…his cheerless patterned sweater of black diamonds…

While I was an awkward child and far from the most popular boy in my class, I was well aware that I was also nowhere near the bottom. While it felt like everyone had friendship bracelets but me, it was only because I didn’t notice those in my class less fortunate than I. One of those on the bottom of the school social pyramid is J R. A true social outcast: poor and unkempt and unpopular. His hair sticks out at rough angles, uncombed. He wears the same sweater on consecutive days. His classmates barely seem to know his name.

In Edward Bast’s Ring, J R is Alberich, the dwarf who steals the Rheingold from the Rheinmaidens. In the opera, Alberich is an outcast as well, mocked by the Rheinmaidens that he has professed his love to. Like Alberich, J R is spurned by his classmates. The girl playing Wotan refers to him dismissively as “that boy J R” and says that “[h]e’s already littler than us.” Wotan chides him for not having a costume like the rest of the class, but we can see that he probably doesn’t have a costume because he can’t afford one. In just a few lines, J R’s social position is clearly marked: poor, small, unpopular. Spurned like Alberich, J R swoops in, rejects the love of others, and steals away with the class’s bag of Rheingold.

The power of money radiates through the ages of myth and through the quotidian chatter of children. While it appears comic to us to hear the teachers and businessmen attempting to talk to the students about stocks and corporations, money is just as much at the core of their world. Were J R the handsome son of a wealthy family, his lot would be different and the Rheinmaidens would be singing to him.

 –I just mean, maybe we can use each other sometime…okay?

J R is not totally alone in the world, but he has turned every relationship into an exchange. His only friendship, with Major Hyde’s son, is based solely on trading the catalogs and free offers that will be the basis for his empire. J R’s real companionship comes from the offers and not the Hyde boy. It is, after all, the advertisements that address J R as “Dear Friend.”

When he walks home with Edward Bast on the night before the trip to Manhattan, rather than have a moment of teacher/student bonding, J R exploits the walk as an opportunity to network, offering Edward inside information about the zoning near his family’s home.  The next day, J R walks home with Edward again and tries to get money out of him, calling as Edward runs away: –didn’t I tell you we could maybe use each other?

During the class trip to Wall Street, J R’s voice lurks behind the noise, one of the few that asks questions. J R is hoping for an actual answer, rather than just waiting his turn to talk. J R takes every piece of information he can get his hands on and uses them as the fundamental building blocks of his new self that he is creating.

 —-It means a very poor person and and, yes and we don’t like to think about poor people, no…

We all remember what middle school was like: If you weren’t someone, you were no one. J R is no one, cast out from his classmates. He is just a voice in the void. Of course, everyone is just a voice in J R, but it is his novel. Just as he has been reduced by his classmates, he has reduced everyone else to a tapestry of voices and information for him to pick through.

Like I did twelve years later, J R uses money and business to craft a new identity. While I was only seeking entry into the middle school social market, J R, having renounced love, is seeking something higher, something that reaches beyond the confines of the playground. In truth, no matter how much of an outcast I felt like at the time, I was not J R. I had friends and family, and I never had to wear the same shirt to school two days in a row. My middle-school scheme was never about money—it was about crafting something to bond me to my classmates;  the fact that I could get the business up and running speaks to how non-outside I was. And my fall just became a funny story I could tell, a different kind of social capital that I could use to work my way into social circles. If I had been J R, no one would have even heard me asking about the friendship bracelets. If I had been J R, I wouldn’t have cared. I would have renounced it all and disappeared with the Rheingold.

When James and Thomas Bast meet in a foreign city, they put down their suitcases and fight.

 –It was more of a philosophical dispute, Thomas insisting the magic touch of these virtuosos could be preserved on these piano rolls, and James…

For people who listen to music that exists primarily as unencrypted bits floating in the atmosphere, the argument about whether a roll of paper can contain the beauty of music may seem quaint and distant. The mechanical reproduction of music is now taken for granted. Like money, one copy of Thriller is the same as any other. In fact, most popular music of the last 40 years never existed anywhere other than on a 2” strip of magnetic tape or on a computer’s hard drive. A series of sounds created primarily for the purpose of replication. This carries over into live performances, events where most people have a certain expectation about how the music they will hear will sound. Imagine if you had gone to see the Grateful Dead and they didn’t jam.

In a way, the recording and replication of music is our age’s version of sheet music–the instructions by which a piece of music will be heard. What would James Bast’s response be? Would he suggest that between the lifeless piece of paper and the sounds we here, the musician adds something that a machine cannot? That a laser interpreting  ones and zeros off of the face of a spinning piece of plastic cannot compare to being in the same room with a musician as the music is created?

–I thought people had radios and things today.

And even now, the world of records and tapes and compact discs that I grew up with is gone. Limitless copies of limitless songs exist. Songs are silently filling the air all around us at every moment. At this very moment, someone may be downloading a song you hate through your body.

In my earlier years, some part of the beauty of music I loved came from its scarcity. Growing up in rural Kentucky in the late 80s and early 90s, it was difficult to find music. Not just music that I liked, but any sort of music at all. There was a record store for a short time, but it closed not long after I started high school. My only other option in town was Wal-Mart, and while many of my first cassette tapes came from there, I soon outgrew their stock. So I had to wait until my family made a trip to Fayette Mall in Lexington before I could buy new tapes. These trips’ infrequency didn’t bother me, since I rarely had enough money to buy anything. Acquiring a new album was a strange and unusual thing. I listened to those records until they were warped beyond listening, curled under my covers at night, my Walkman’s red light on, the tape reels whining, taking in each sound and silence as thought they were the only songs ever recorded.

–But without them where do you get art?

–Get it? Art? You get it where you get anything you buy it, listen Gibbs don’t try to tell me in this day an age there isn’t enough around for everybody great art, pictures music books who’s heard all the great music there is, you? You read all the great books there are? seen all the great pictures? Records of any symphony you want reproductions you can get them that are almost perfect, the greatest books ever written you can get them at the drugstore…

Now I have no trouble tracking down the most obscure music, conjuring it on my computer instantly and deleting it off of my iPod a few days later when I realize I don’t really care for it much. The ritual aspect to listening, fed by exiguity, is gone now. But, I recognize that this lost of ritual on my part is not a problem with the medium, but with me. I developed my habits in a different time. The young people who are now discovering music are developing their own rituals, ones that will be as different from mine as the ritual expectations of the generations who came before me—who had to go to go to music halls or read sheet music.

Does such abundance devalue art—devalue art? While we might be inclined to sympathize with James Bast, with the desire to have an authentic artistic experience and to shun the common, the phony and the commercially motivated, and while we might agree that the intrinsic value of art must be kept high, we must remember that there is a compromise embedded in this expectation. The higher the value of a thing, the fewer that will be able to experience it. The rarer the object, the more expensive. While I might be confusing artistic value with the economic value of an object, it is undeniable that they are related. Original works by famous artists or front row tickets at a Madonna concert are out of reach for most people. While intrinsic artistic value and economic value are not the same, the latter is a bar to experiencing the former. After the Penguin edition of J R went out-of-print, but before the Dalkey Archive announced their reissue of the novel, copies of the recent Penguin edition were selling on Amazon for over $300. While the price on the jacket is not an indicator of a novel’s value, scarcity can keep art out of the hands of those who want it, but cannot afford it.

Gaddis surprises us by allowing Thomas Bast, the business tycoon, to be the one to bring art to everyone, democratizing the artistic experience, removing it form the hands of those in the upper classes who can afford it. While money may bring art low, it can bring it to us who are low as well.

My first memory of money: Sitting on my mother and father’s bed one evening when I was very young, bathed in a red-orange light that only existed from 1978 to 1981, with a pencil and a blank piece of paper. My mother told me that I was now old enough to help out around the house and in exchange for my labor, I would be paid an allowance. She handed me the pencil and paper and told me to write down how much money I wanted to be paid. I was very young, I’d never had money of my own before and had little understanding of what money was, beyond the fact that I knew that quarters could be put into the mouths of machines in exchange for bouncing balls containing amazing colors. Suddenly given the opportunity to not only possess some of my own, but also to select exactly how much I would receive, a thrill filled my body. Images of vast piles of cash rose before my eyes and a vision all of the toys that I would buy crowded my eyes. I didn’t really know what money was, but I wanted as much as I could get. Boldly, and with the expectation that my parents, upon reading my demand, would scoff and possibly punish me for my greed, I wrote 60 CENTS.

J R opens with the memory of two kinds of money: money that is alive and money that is dead. Julia and Anne Bast remember the first time they saw paper money, a lifeless thing compared to the harmony of metal coins they remember making music in their father’s pocket. These two monetary visions are poles between which the world of the novel will move. Money is a primal thing, its existence taken for granted. The only question is what manner of money it will be. In law school I learned that money is fungible. One dollar bill is as good as any other dollar bill. This is not entirely true, however. Forests, rocks, oceans—all elemental forces contain spirits and shadows, some good and some evil. Money is just another haunted element.

And yet, J R’s subject is not just money. In the first twenty lines, Gaddis introduces money and immediately pairs it with art. Like Wagner, Gaddis introduces the novel’s leitmotif which will be developed over the rest of the novel.

When the Bast Sisters remember money, they remember its sound and how their father made a living teaching piano. They remember how he used the money that his piano students would pay him to improve their technique by placing the coins on their hands. This new, paper money may be lifeless, but the sisters remember a time when money was key in creating something good.

In the minds of most people, money and art sit on opposite ends of utility, yet they are inextricably linked. Throughout the novel’s first day, nearly every reference to art is paired with a reference to money.

The sisters remember when their father first fell in love with music, to his own father’s violent dismay (–We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn’t do things that didn’t pay.) Rachmaninoff’s insured fingers. The children unable to practice their Ring without a bag of money on the table in front of them (–See? Like for the Rhinegold, with real money so we can really pretend, see?). Mozart begging for support and writing himself into the ground. Schepperman selling his blood to buy paint. The great composer James Bast, unable to make ends meet with the money from his awards, engaging in real estate scams. Just as coins are paired to nurturing art, lifeless paper money is paired with lifeless paper music, the piano rolls for player pianos. James and Thomas Bast fight over whether or not music can live in those paper rolls that Thomas’s company creates.

–Nevertheless I would not have imagined that there was still so much money in piano rolls…

When we talk about money and art, we usually think in terms of commercialization and commodification. We think of art consumed into investment portfolios. We think of art as a tool for creating more money. Yet, money is there at the creation of art as well. Though some idealize the idea of the Starving Artist, it is a myth. If you don’t have some sort of income stream, you cannot create art.

—-rich people who commissioned work from artists and gave them money.

You must either be of independent means, have a spouse or parents willing to support you, a job that allows you enough spare time for your art, or people must pay you for your art. In every case, you must have money. Money to buy food while taking the time to write. Money to buy materials to sculpt or paint. Money to rent space to rehearse and perform.

–Hiring musicians to play his compositions, getting them recorded and all the rest of it his royalty checks aren’t a drop in the bucket, even the awards seem to cost twice what they bring in.

With a novel of this scope, it is fruitless to try and say anything definitive or profound about the relationship between money and art at this point. However, it strikes me as interesting that this first linking of money and art is not a corrosive one. The novel begins not by considering the corrupting power of money on art, but rather with the memory of money being used in a positive way to create art, to foster the talent of young musicians.

The question for us to answer is where this relationship goes wrong. Remember: that idyllic vision of Father Bast using money to teach ends with his sons–the composer and the business man–trying to sink his bust in the harbor, the old man’s ashes blowing back in their beards.