William Gaddis,
Interviewed by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy
The Art
of Fiction No. 101
William Gaddis was interviewed on November 4, 1986, in
Budapest where he had stopped for a day on his way home from a conference in
Sofia. The proposal of an interview survived his discouraging reputation for
being reclusive and avoiding interviews. A gentle and genial man welcomed me in
his Atrium Hyatt suite: grey hair; an absorbed and attentive, hard-featured,
longish face with strict yet amiable, contemplative eyes; and a relaxed,
unassuming manner. He had a ghastly cold and spoke hoarsely, coughing slightly,
and sipping meditatively at his whiskey.
He listened to the questions with untiring
patience. The remorseless logic as well as the profound care of his answers
convinced me that this satiric chronicler of chaotic existence and entropic
disintegration is indeed a fearful causal thinker deeply concerned about the
human condition.
William Gaddis was born in 1922 in New
York, where he lives now. In the mid-fifties he produced The
Recognitions, an entropic, black humor, postmodern novel. Yet in
spite of his books’ considerable artistic achievement, William Gaddis has still
not received the degree of recognition that his talent and work deserve.
Animated by a deep-seated humanism, he is a satirist who has no tolerance for
stupidity and absurdity. With extraordinary erudition he examines man’s
relation to the world in witty, sarcastic, often mordant social-epistemological
parables. His novels are: The Recognitions (1955); JR,
a National Book Award winner, (1975); and Carpenter’s Gothic (1985).
INTERVIEWER
Since over the years you’ve acquired a
reputation for avoiding interviews, particularly those that address your work,
let me ask why you are submitting to this one?
WILLIAM GADDIS
I suppose because I’ve got some illusion
about finally getting the whole thing out of the way once for all. In the past
I’ve resisted partly because of the tendency I’ve observed of putting the man
in the place of his work, and that goes back more than thirty years; it comes
up in a conversation early in The Recognitions. That, and
the conviction that the work has got to stand on its own—when ambiguities
appear they are deliberate and I’ve no intention of running after them with
explanations—and finally, of course, the threat of questions from someone
unfamiliar with the work itself: Do you work on a fixed schedule every day? On
which side of the paper do you write? That sort of talk-show pap, five-minute
celebrity, turning the creative artist into a performing one, which doesn’t
look to be the case here.
INTERVIEWER
Thank you for the vote of confidence.
GADDIS
And so I’ve the hope of laying a few
things to rest; an interview I can simply refer people to when the threat of
another appears, without having to go through it again.
INTERVIEWER
You say a work has got to stand on its
own. Isn’t it hard for a writer sometimes to adhere to this principle
steadfastly? In other words, are you never annoyed by misinterpretations of
your works?
GADDIS
What writer is not? And unless you’re
writing “what they want”—I mean, some formula simply for the money—isn’t that
our history, from Melville on? It comes with the territory, as the playwright
said.
INTERVIEWER
Now that you have decided to step out of
your reclusiveness—and before stepping back into it—perhaps you’re dissatisfied
with the image that is in circulation concerning your life and personality and
views that you’d like to correct?
GADDIS
I’d hoped this interview would clear up
some of that—what can be cleared up, that is to say, because
trying to correct one’s “image” is as futile as it is irrelevant. Of course, if
your image is really all you’ve got going—which is hardly uncommon these days,
take a Henry Kissinger, for instance—you’ll want to deliberately distort the
record to make yourself look good. I’d go back to The
Recognitions where
Wyatt asks what people want from the man they didn’t get from his work, because
presumably that’s where he’s tried to distill this “life and personality and
views” you speak of. What’s any artist but the dregs of his work: I gave that
line to Wyatt thirty-odd years ago and as far as I’m concerned it’s still
valid.
INTERVIEWER
Here is another obligatory question. You
have received recognition in the form of various grants and awards, including
the substantial MacArthur Prize Fellowship. What is your feeling about that?
How have they changed things?
GADDIS
Well, I almost think that if I’d gotten
the Nobel Prize when The Recognitions was published I wouldn’t have been
terribly surprised. I mean that’s the grand intoxication of youth, or what’s a
heaven for. And so the book’s reception was a sobering experience, quite a
humbling one. When finally help did come along, recognition as you say, a
Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment
for the Arts, they came in difficult times and allowed and encouraged me to
keep on with the second book and start the third. Without them, I wonder if I
might not just have dropped the whole damned business, though God knows what
else I might have done, too late even to be any of the things I never wanted to
be. There’s always the talk about feeding at the public trough, disdaining
grants because you’ve never been given one. I mean we’d all wish to come out
with the fierce integrity of Samuel Butler, say, who never wrote simply to
publish or published everything he wrote—The
Way of All Flesh was
posthumous after all—and that has been the luxury of the MacArthur. But then I
never was a fellow to rush into print.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say something about the genesis
of your own novels? Can you reconstruct what was involved in your getting
started with The Recognitions?
GADDIS
I think first it was that towering kind of
confidence of being quite young, that one can do anything —“All’s brave that
youth mounts and folly guides,” as we’re told in As
You Like It.The
Recognitions started
as a short piece of work, quite undirected, but based on the Faust story. Then
as I got into the idea of forgery, the entire concept of forgery became—I
wouldn’t say an obsession—but a central part of everything I thought and saw;
so the book expanded from simply the central character of the forger to
forgery, falsification and cheapening of values and what have you, everywhere.
Looking at it now with its various faults, I suppose excess would be the main charge.
I remember Clive Bell looking back on his small fine book, Art,
thirty-five years after it was published in 1913, and listing its faults, finding it too confident and
aggressive, even too optimistic—I was never accused of that!—but still feeling,
as he said, “a little envious of the adventurous young man who wrote it.”
INTERVIEWER
What moved you to write JR?
GADDIS
Even though I should have known from The
Recognitions that the
world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and
was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d
always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called
free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a
“people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All
of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of
the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred
million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that
people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they
are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but
simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad
you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In
many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which
is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a
commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking
around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of
private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble,
it seems to have been rather prophetic.
INTERVIEWER
Carpenter’s Gothic?
GADDIS
Well, that was rather different. I cannot
really work unless I set a problem for myself to solve. In Carpenter’s
Gothic the problems
were largely of style and technique and form. I wanted to write a shorter book,
one that observes the unities of time and place to the point that everything,
even though it expands into the world, takes place in one house, and a country
house at that, with a small number of characters, in a short span of time. It
became really largely an exercise in style and technique. And also, I wanted to
take all these clichés of fiction to bring them to life and make them work. So
we have the older man and the younger woman, the marriage breaking up, the
obligatory adultery, the locked room, the mysterious stranger, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
To have a more detailed look at the novels
now. The Recognitions takes its title fromRecognitions, a work
attributed to St. Clement of Rome. The Wyatt Gwyon of your novel is thus a
Clement figure with a dispersed family—there are many more dispersed families
in the novel—and with a story that becomes a dialogue between pagan and
Christian ideologies, and becomes a search for salvation, to mention the most
obvious parallels. What was your main intention in introducing a Clement figure
into the twentieth century, in a story that starts a few years after the First
World War and takes place mainly at the turn of the decades of the forties and
fifties?
GADDIS
We come back to the Faust story and to the
original Clementine Recognitions, which has been
called the first Christian novel (I remember thinking mine was going to be the
last one), about his search for salvation, redemption, and so forth. And I had
these notions of basingThe
Recognitions on the
constant presence of the past and of its imposition of myth in different forms
that eventually come down to the same stories in any culture. I think they
titled the Italian edition The Pilgrim or The Pilgrimage or something like that. In a sense it isthat:
a pilgrimage toward salvation.
INTERVIEWER
Disregarding now the immense
symbolic-thematic complexity that the myth itself entails in the novel, I think
that the logic of the Faust story lends itself particularly well to the message
about the postmodern world, namely, manipulation and forgery. The Faustian pact
with the devil is nothing but giving up originality, isn’t it? And vice versa,
a painter, Wyatt, manipulated into selling his soul, giving up originality, is
bound to be Faustian, besides being emblematic of the artist’s position in a
corrupt, manipulative, counterfeit world. Is this a correct interpretation of
Wyatt’s central function as a Faust figure?
GADDIS
It is, yes, originality also being Satan’s
“original sin” if you like. I think also, further, I tried to make clear that
Wyatt was the very height of a talent but not a genius—quite a different
thing. Which is why he shrinks from going ahead in, say, works of originality.
He shrinks from this and takes refuge in what is already there, which he can handle, manipulate. He can do quite
perfect forgeries, because the parameters of perfection are already there.
INTERVIEWER
If Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus of the Portrait was the archetypal modernist artist,
your Wyatt’s story seems to be a postmodern variation on the Künstlerroman.
Wyatt does, in fact, come to be called Stephen at the end of the novel. He,
too, abandons the idea of priesthood to become a priest of the imagination. But
with a difference. He will paintforgeries,
that is, he will become the priest of other people’s imagination. Stephen Dedalus’snon serviam—an attitude that
echoes down in Ulysses, too—is no longer
possible.
GADDIS
This is quite a complicated question.
First, what is interesting is this business of Ulysses . . .
INTERVIEWER
I mean the Portrait.
I know you had not read Ulysses before you wrote The
Recognitions.
GADDIS
Right. Many of these similarities that
critics and doctoral students have dug up are absolutely coincidences. Stephen,
for instance—the reason I chose that name is he was the first Christian martyr.
INTERVIEWER
That’s why Joyce decided on that name. It
was one of his reasons.
GADDIS
News to me. The coincidences turn up down
to the smallest details. There is, for instance, a character who has covered
the mirrors with handkerchiefs. Apparently this happens somewhere in Ulysses,
too. And they said, Ah! This is where he got that. Where I got it was when I
was in a hotel in Panama and I had washed my handkerchiefs and spread them on
the windows and the mirrors to dry—they almost look pressed when they’re peeled
away that way—a Panamanian friend came in and said, “All the mirrors are
covered. Who’s dead? What’s happened?” I said, “No, I’m just drying my
handkerchiefs.” Then I found the same incident in McTeague in what? 1903 or 1905, whenever McTeague was written. This always strikes me as
dangerous—finding “sources.”
INTERVIEWER
So let’s forget about Joyce. Let me repeat
the main point of my question to make it clearer, perhaps. It was something
like this: Though on the one hand there is this forgery and serving other
people’s imagination, on the other hand, at a deeper level, isn’t there a
deeper appreciation of the real, genuine art of the past, an appreciation of
tradition as a source of inspiration for the present?
GADDIS
Looking back—of course this is thirty-five
years ago—the essential point was that these painters lived in an age of
belief, and so they were, from Giotto on, very safely encased in a frame of
reference, working in a frame of absolutes for their talents or their genius, in
works largely for the Church. And this is exactly what Wyatt does not have
around him. So he is really taking refuge in that framework of belief, as
Stanley, his counterpoint, is the one whois within this framework of belief, the
good Catholic boy, who finally pays the price.
INTERVIEWER
The Recognitions is a very serious book. Especially if one considers
that it begins and ends with death and that there is much of the apocalyptic in
between. If it is read as a piece of satire, it only makes it an even more
serious book since it seems to have been written in the best tradition of
“noble indignation.” On the other hand I wonder if it is not read too earnestly
by too many critics. Especially if one considers that it opens on All Saints’
Day when somebody—whose body will be canonized as a result of a ridiculous
mistake—dies of appendicitis at the hands of a fake doctor, and ends on Easter
Sunday when, instead of resurrection, a devout organist (Stanley, the good
Catholic boy) is buried in the collapse of a church. This is closer to
burlesque.
GADDIS
Well, what I wanted was a large comic
novel. I was very frustrated when it came out and so many reviewers saw it as .
. . that terrible word erudition kept appearing. That it was difficult—
INTERVIEWER
And it is difficult.
GADDIS
—that it was among the first books of
black humor and so forth, but, of course, we all came out of Mark Twain’s vest
pocket. No one has ever beaten “The Mysterious Stranger.” But that whole world
of the amount of information, what they called erudition, frightened off many
people. Very very few reviewers said it is often very funny. It was a sometimes
heavy-handed satire but I wanted it to be a large comic novel in the great
tradition.
INTERVIEWER
In other senses the novel is not read
earnestly enough. Most critics point out that the novel is about
disintegration, about a world that is in a mess, is entropic. But Steven
Moore’s arguments about Wyatt finding human integrity amidst disintegration
seem convincing. So the novel itself is negentropic rather than entropic in the
last analysis.
GADDIS
Well, we hope. Many reviewers and critics
draw attention to all my books as being hopeless, that no good is going to come
of anything, that everything is winding down in the entire entropic concept.
But Wyatt’s line—I think late in the book—says that one must simply live
through the corruption, even become part of it. As Esme, the model, is a quite
corrupted person but still an innocent in some way. Well, Wyatt has been part
of the corruption, but at the end he says we must simply live it through and
make a fresh start. I mean you could almost say—though the way the phrase is
used now is not what I mean—that it is a notion of
being born again in this life—with no reference to our “born
again” Christians—and the next one.
INTERVIEWER
Apropos of Wyatt being born again: Can his
struggle for originality be regarded as the antihero’s struggle to become a
hero? He is a student of perspective, who reaches “the vanishing point” early
in the novel but begins to emerge as a sovereign personality again at the end.
GADDIS
The latter part of what you say is true.
The earlier part about antihero and hero is an interesting interpretation. I
did want to, in a sense, create a novel without a hero, but while he remains
the central figure, facets all about him are carrying out his—the fashionable
word today I guess—persona. Otto is a kind of two-dimensional imitation of
Wyatt; he wants to be Wyatt but has none of the equipment. Stanley has the
belief and so forth. Anselm has the despair. So they’re all reflections of him.
They carry the activity—you don’t say action, you say activity—of
the novel, while he is not anywhere in sight.
INTERVIEWER
Alchemy has an important role to play in The
Recognitions. What attracted you to alchemy and what makes it a
relevant device in a satiric exploration of early- and mid-twentieth-century reality?
GADDIS
My early impression was that the
alchemists were simply trying to turn base metals into gold. Later I came to
the more involved reading and better understanding of it all: that it was
something between religion and magic and that it did not necessarily mean
literally lead and gold. So the gold in many of the symbolic senses in alchemy
is the perfection, is the sun, is a kind of redemption. When at some despairing
moment Wyatt says—when he realizes that the table of the Seven Deadly Sins is
the original and not his copy —“Thank God there was the gold to forge,” that is
very much the key line to the whole book.
INTERVIEWER
The Recognitions—says John Aldridge—was published before the
literature to which it was pioneer came into vogue. Did you discern signs of an
influence that your novel exerted on the fabulators and black-humor writers?
GADDIS
No, because I don’t read a great deal of
current fiction, especially when I’m working on my own. I don’t look for these
influences. Even if I did, I would prefer not to say, Yes, I think he learnt
from me, or what have you. Let the critics do that.
INTERVIEWER
While The Recognitions prefigured the style of the Pynchon
generation, I wonder if there was any Pynchonian influence that went into your
second novel, JR, which opens with a direct discussion of the questions of energy,
disorder, chaos, entropy, the second law of thermodynamics?
GADDIS
Well, going back a bit further, Nathanael
West had sketched entropy nicely in Miss Lonelyhearts in the early thirties. Norbert Wiener
extrapolated the concept to communications around 1950, and, of course, entropy
was mentioned in connection withThe
Recognitions. So I think both Pynchon and I—and I don’t know
him—are simply involved with different aspects of the same problems. I would
doubt that my work has influenced him; his has certainly not influenced mine in
any way at all.
INTERVIEWER
Although there is a time-honored tradition
of the satirical treatment of human stupidity from Aristophanes through
Erasmus, Swift, Twain to Vonnegut—it is Vonnegut’s Jonah, the narrator of Cat’s
Cradle with his
interest in “the history of human stupidity,” that I am especially reminded of
by your theoretician of stupidity, McCandless, in Carpenter’s
Gothic.
GADDIS
Again, I think writers work from their own
energies, their own concepts. I don’t think there is any influence among us.
After all, stupidity—and I don’t mean ignorance—is a central issue of our time.
In my own case, going back to entropy, I’m most intrigued by its correlation as
the loss of available energy in a closed system with stupidity as the
corresponding loss of available intelligence in our own political
establishment, especially as regards foreign policy and the economy—its
collapse that is to say—where Wiener sees physics’ view of the world as it
actually exists replaced by one as we observe it, a kind of one way
communication.
INTERVIEWER
The story of the dwarfish sixth grader,
who begins with mail-order enterprise and becomes the head of a huge business
conglomerate, is also about the American family—a bitter indictment of the
corroding effect that profit-oriented corporate operations exert not only on
education and art in particular, but also on social values and human
relationships in general.
GADDIS
It is insofar as it is very much about the
absence of the family. We know nothing about his father. All that we know about
his mother is that she’s a nurse, who keeps odd hours because of her work. He
has no past, in other words, and so he’s obliged to invent himself, not in the
terms of a father, a mother, and a family, but in terms of what he sees around
him. And all he sees around him—in all discussions in the principal’s office at
the school—there is never any mention of actual educational content. They talk
about nothing but paving the parking lot, about buying new teaching machines
and teaching equipment and storing what they already have because no one knows
how to use it, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
And there is that other family, the
musician’s. I forget the name . . .
GADDIS
Yes, Bast, who is, of course, a captive
remnant of the past, of the “old family,” Turgenev’s romantic Arkady meeting up
with the hard-nosed pragmatist Bazarov as it were. Speaking of influences, I
think mine are more likely to be found going from Eliot back rather than forward to my
contemporaries.
INTERVIEWER
Is JR’s story something you extrapolated
from life only, or did you rely on sociologies devoted to how the corporate
world works upon social values, human qualities, and relationships in American
culture?
GADDIS
The boy himself is a total invention,
completely sui generis. The reason he is eleven is because he is in this
prepubescent age where he is amoral, with a clear conscience, dealing with
people who are immoral, unscrupulous; they realize what scruples are, but push
them aside, whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal. He
thinks this is what you’re supposed to do; he is not going to wait around; he
is in a hurry, as you should be in America—get on with it, get going. He is
very scrupulous about obeying the letter of the law and then (never making the
distinction) evading the spirit of the law at every possible turn. He is in these ways an innocent and is
well-meaning, a sincere hypocrite. With Bast, he does think he’s helping him
out. As for the corporate world, I do read the newspapers, clip things, ideas,
articles, and just use them as fodder. But all that hardly requires a text in
sociology. And this may be the place to make a further point. I’m frequently
seen in the conservative press as being out there on the barricades shouting:
Down with capitalism! I do see it in the end as really the most workable system
we’ve produced. So what we’re talking about is not the system itself, but its
abuses, I don’t mean criminal but the abundant abuses just within the letter of the law. The essential
question is whether it can survive these abuses given free rein and whether
these abuses are inherent in the system itself. I should think it is perfectly
clear in my work—calling attention, satirizing these abuses—that our best hope
lies in bringing things under better and more equitable control, cutting back
the temptations to unmitigated greed and bemused dishonesty . . . in other
words that these abuses the system has fostered are not essential, but running
out of moral or ethical control can certainly threaten its survival.
INTERVIEWER
What JR is about is a radically new situation
from the point of view of the American dream, too, and radically new as a
literary treatment of that theme: the novel seems to be about how the American
dream claims you before you are socially mature enough to dream it.
GADDIS
Fine, yes, well put. Very much the heart
of it in fact.
INTERVIEWER
But the writer of JR must have commanded an immense inward
knowledge of the mentality and the clichés of the jungle of speculation and
manipulation to enable him to write the book. Is this formidable
“documentation” mainly veristic or intuitive?
GADDIS
I think both, in the sense that the
earlier book was too. It is getting a central idea—in one case the forgery, in
the other case the American dream turned inside out—and then seeking the documentation, in areas
that essentially don’t greatly interest me, that simply provide vehicles. But I
wanted them right, thinking if someone who is well-versed and
familiar with the world of finance, with what goes on in the market and so
forth, read JR . . . that even though it’s a quite
improbable story, it is still possible. So that JR backs into the situation; he
isn’t sure really what is happening. But in the beginning, what is very
important, he is not viewed as one of these computer-wizard brilliant kids. He
buys defaulted bond issues simply because they’re cheap—it says a thousand
dollars up in the corner, but selling at seven cents on the dollar, he’s
getting them for seventy dollars apiece. So it’s simple, cheerful greed. Then,
when finally the corporation is thrown into bankruptcy, and they wipe out all
of the stock, all the equities, he becomes the largest holder of preferred
stock and takes control pretty much by default. This is not through his
brilliance. But, of course, when he does end up with this textile mill, Eagle Mills,
and reads in the paper about this brilliant financial person in New York who
has taken over, he believes the myth that has been created around him. And,
finally, by the end of the book, he is a prisoner of his own myth: he thinks
that heis a brilliant financial operator. When
it all collapses, he says, “Well, why do they blame me?”
INTERVIEWER
Earlier you mentioned the irrelevant
activities of educators in JR’s world. Your satire concerning education is
quite passionate. You must have had bad experiences.
GADDIS
No, really the opposite, in fact. I went
to boarding school in New England when I was very young, and to college at
Harvard, and had a good education. And so it was: looking around me as I became
thirty and forty and fifty at what goes on, thinking this is not what serious
education is all about.
INTERVIEWER
The humanities can do anything but
humanize these school children in JR. And your view of art has
not changed since The Recognitions, as
evidenced by figures like Bast, the composer, Eigen, the novelist, and Gibbs,
the encyclopedist. What makes you place art at the center of fraud and
counterfeit in the modern world?
GADDIS
Let me start off with this observation,
touching perhaps on my earlier ones on the crushing abuses of capitalism.
Frequently enough, careless or predisposed readers, John Gardner for instance,
see these books as chronicles of the dedicated artist crushed by commerce,
which is, of course, to miss, or misread, or simply disregard all the evidence
oftheir own appetite for destruction, their
frequently eager embrace of the forces to be blamed for their failure to pursue
the difficult task for which their talents have equipped them, failure to
pursue their destiny if you like, taking art at the center, as you say, as
redemption in, and of and from, a world of material values, overwhelmed by the
material demands it imposes. The embittered character in JR,
for instance, who is Eigen, is obviously based in part on my own experience
with The Recognitions, that it was not a success when
it was published and I was obliged to go and work in a pharmaceutical company,
which I did not like, but I had a family and had to make a living. Next, Gibbs,
who is very much a persona; obviously his name is from Willard Gibbs of the
second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. Gibbs is the man who
has all of the feelings and the competency but is overcome, overwhelmed by a
sense of the futility of doing anything and the consequent question of what is
worth doing, which he cannot respond to. And so even though he could’ve done this, he could’ve done this, he could’ve done this, he doesn’t finishanything
because he just thinks it’s not worth it, whatever it is. So that finally, when
he has been quite a negative figure all the way through, and meets a woman who
has great confidence and faith and love for him, and wants him to complete his
own work, he tries to go back, but it’s too late. Bast starts with great
confidence, the sort I mentioned earlier, that confidence of youth. He’s going
to write grand opera. And gradually, if you noticed— because of pressures of
reality on him and money and so forth—his ambitions shrink. The grand opera
becomes a cantata where we have the orchestra and the voices. Then it becomes a
piece for orchestra, then a piece for small orchestra, and finally at the end
he’s writing a piece for unaccompanied cello, his own that is to say, one small
voice trying to rescue it all and say,Yes, there is hope. Again, like Wyatt, living it
through, and in his adventure with JR having lived through all the nonsense, he
will rescue this one small, hard, gem-like flame, if you like. Because it is
that real note
of hope in JR that is very important. It’s the kind
of thing that someone like John Gardner totally missed. Finally, it’s the artist
as “inner-directed” confronting a materialistic world—brokers, bankers,
salesmen, factory workers, most politicians, the lot—that JR himself
represents, and which is “outer-directed,” if you want it in sociological
terms.
INTERVIEWER
What do the letters J and R stand for?
GADDIS
A sort of abbreviation for Junior.
INTERVIEWER
And also his class at school perhaps. He
is going to 6J. If that has got anything to do with it at all.
GADDIS
No, no, no, that J is Mrs. Joubert, the teacher. This is
what I mean about being wary of tracing down sources, inferences; Gardner, I
think, traced the name Bast down to some Greek reference, which was, of course,
nonsense.
INTERVIEWER
Africa seems to be very much on your mind
both in JR and in Carpenter’s
Gothic. Why does Africa figure so conspicuously in your
imagination?
GADDIS
In this last book, in Carpenter’s
Gothic, it is very important because of what the scheme of the book
becomes, which is the book of Genesis emerging from the fiery holocaust that
created the Great Rift Valley from Lebanon down through Israel, down through
the Red Sea and all the way down East Africa, as where man was born, where he
emerged, as in fact much of modern paleontology confirms. In Genesis, we have
prehistory told in the Lord raining down fire and brimstone, and by the time we
get to the last book of the New Testament in Revelation, this whole apocalyptic
notion, which many people, especially in the fundamentalist Christian movement
in America, read literally, and feel that all this talk about the bomb is a
kind of logical apocalypse and Marxism the great beast, and they put that
together with what they read in Revelation. And so, as McCandless says in the
book, many of these people who feel that apocalypse is coming must make peace,
not with God, but with Jesus, as the go-between, take Jesus as one’s savior so
that when he does appear, and calls up the faithful, they all rise to heaven
and are saved in this self-fulfilling prophecy. If a war did start in Africa or
any place else with the nuclear bombs and so forth, they would feel, Ah! now
the wrongdoers, the ones who did not accept Jesus, are going to get it, that we
are going to be—of course they’re also going to be—incinerated.
INTERVIEWER
The title of Carpenter’s
Gothic is explained
in the novel by the owner of the Victorian house built in that style as the
Hudson Valley country architects’ derivative style, “to be seen from the
outside,” and “a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions.” More than one
critic suggested that the other meaning of gothic functions in the novel, too, the novel
being “a spoof of gothic romances,” as Peter S. Prescott puts it. Let me wonder
about the first half of the title, carpenter, though. Has it got
anything to do with the town carpenter ofThe
Recognitions—Wyatt’s maternal grandfather, who is a storehouse of
adventurous stories just as McCandless in Carpenter’s Gothic is the mysterious adventurer, whose
adventures turn out to exist in a madman’s imagination in the end, mere
stories?
GADDIS
It never occurred to me—we’re back with
this second-guessing sources, connections—but ideas do come forth and then
submerge and come out in another form, which in a way both books are all about.
One critical discussion I read discussed Wyatt’s first job with a bridge-building
concern, which I’d conceived simply to get across his fascination with the idea
of tensions, the delicacy of bridges and the tensions that are involved, the
idea of strength in delicacy, in tension, but this dissertation ingeniously
related his career as bridge builder to his father as pontifex, a priest, the
bridge between God and man, and I thought this was marvelous. When I read
things like that, I just keep quiet. I think, Well, if they want to think I’m
that clever—fine.
INTERVIEWER
McCandless is a good “carpenter,” anyway,
since he exposes what is behind the fanciful religious and political facade of
those other “carpenters”: Reverend Ude, the fake evangelist and Senator
Teakell, the corrupt politician. So contrary to what his name suggests—“candle-less,”
namely, absence of light (perhaps a reference to his madness)—this “mad”
carpenter is a molder of correct theories about how things fall into a
pattern in the world, theories thatdo shed light on what is going on. But
why must a seer be a lunatic?
GADDIS
A seer being an illuminated person and an
illuminator—is this what you . . .
INTERVIEWER
I meant the wife’s revelation about him at
the end, with the implication that he has spent time in a mental institution.
GADDIS
But that’s simply an implication isn’t it?
I mean these are areas in my work that I don’t care to comment on. I think it
says somewhere in The Recognitions that you cannot run along after your
work saying what I really meant was this or this or this. Generally of all
these questions: When I’ve worked on a book, I’ve put just as much into it as I
wanted to, and if there are ambiguities, well, life is filled with them.
INTERVIEWER
I’m not asking if he was or was not really
mad. What I mean is that the hint that he was, or even the ambiguity created
about his sanity makes one wonder why it is that an illuminator should be at
least potentially mad?
GADDIS
Well, you may make that inference—or
comment. I have no objection.
INTERVIEWER
McCandless is ironically undercut as a
Messiah at the end—this much is perhaps safe to say. Where does it leave us
with the novel? Is the ironic undercutting “a straw of hope” as Cynthia Ozick
hopes it is: that the world is not so dark after all, that it was only a
madman’s vision?
GADDIS
Again, there’s an informed and positive
interpretation; after all, if our situation—or what I see as our situation—were
utterly hopeless, why would I have written the book at all? But I will say that
this novel probably contains the least hope of the three. Because McCandless, who
had got it all figured out, comes out at the end—when we realize that he is
just leaving the scene and wants Liz to go with him—as hardly the great hero.
It is sort of sauve-qui-peutand she refuses
him. Incidentally, carpenter without the apostrophe, “carpenter
gothic” is the correct phrase for this style of architecture, as Lester
mentions in the book. So the apostrophe, yes, is a play on the architectural
style, and on McCandless, and on the Lord’s Father’s ramshackle house wherein
“are many mansions” and on the author too as “the carpenter.”
INTERVIEWER
What Paul helps the fundamentalist Ude and
other anti-evolutionist carpenters to cut, frame, join, and hammer into shape
is something political that may turn out to be an Armageddon for America,
according to the novel. Amidst all this Liz is “the only straight number.” If
this is a bit exaggerated, the second half of what her brother, Billy—yet
another carpenter of yet another counterfeit front (counterculture)—says is
true: Liz is “the only thing that holds things together.” It occurs to me to
ask if she is not an embodiment of the female universe that Wyatt’s quest is
for in The Recognitions? The female
universe is not absent from the world of Carpenter’s Gothic, as it was
not from the world of The Recognitions; rather, the
world stifles it, kills it—Liz is asthmatic and is dead in the end.
GADDIS
I think that is valid. Just as in JR where Madame Joubert is this force of love, trust, hope, what
have you. The ewigweibliche and so forth, but the thwarted, betrayed
by lack of loveewigweibliche,
the defeated Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (as is Esme in The
Recognitions) they are all the realm of intuitive wisdom in a world
of masculine materialism and so, as you may have noticed, at the end of JR it is the two unloved women who are
going to be locked in a legal battle, reduced to being men you might say, after
the men have messed everything up. In that book they’re the despairing
survivors.
INTERVIEWER
Although Carpenter’s Gothic seems to be a little like the schoolbooks
that are criticized in the novel—questions are asked to which no firm answers
are offered—it is a book of beliefs and not, as Gardner
would have said, “dramatization without belief.” This is satire and the beliefs
are present indirectly: the satirist believes in those things whose absence is
resented when what is negative is destroyed.
GADDIS
Deeply resented, yes, because we’re really
back to the heart of it here, aren’t we? What we’re really talking about—what
the book is so largely talking about, leaving behind alchemy and Wyatt’s “thank
God there was the gold to forge”—is precisely this courage to live without
absolutes, which is, really, nothing more than growing up, the courage to
accept a relative universe and even one verging upon chance, certainly at least
in its human component, since these absolutes are essentially childish, born
out of fear of a purposeless existence and, finally, out of the desperate
denial of the one unacceptable inevitable outrage, the prospect of one’s own
death itself. Of course all this leads us into the sketchy refuge of situation
ethics, old foes with new faces, because looked at another way, this collapse
of absolutes going on around us may be simply another form of entropy, a
spiritual entropy winding down eventually to total equilibrium, the ultimate
chaos where everything equals everything else: the ultimate senseless universe.
But then that, fighting that off, or succumbing to it, isn’t that what
Dostoyevsky, what the great fictions have always been about?
INTERVIEWER
The man who wrote these three books seems
to be just about fed up with two thousand years of wars and especially with the
modern world, which is all fraud and forgery. Is it that bad?
GADDIS
I think it is but we must simply live with it.
INTERVIEWER
The Gaddis novels are also difficult
books; this has become a critical commonplace.
GADDIS
I’m afraid.
INTERVIEWER
So let me ask some obligatory questions
about your art in general. First, why the proliferation of characters in the
first two books?
GADDIS
In the first two books. Well, as I say,
the first one I wanted to be a large comic novel . . . with characters
reflecting facets of the central figure, who, for all practical purposes,
disappears; they carry on. This was part of the reason for that proliferation. In JR it was much more in the realm of these
theories of entropy in communication and the breakdown of communication. So
that especially in the school, where most of the time no one is listening to
anyone else—they’re all talking—there’s some attempt in their patterns of
speech to differentiate. Some readers have said: I don’t know who’s talking
about what, and I give up. But that’s the chance, the risk that I took.
INTERVIEWER
Are you guided by theoretical
preconceptions concerning the human personality and character when you sit down
to write your—as they have also been called—post-psychological novels?
GADDIS
Insofar as these are a culmination of
one’s experiences and ideas and impressions, prejudices and inner doubts, of
course. But the task is to make the characters alive and come off the page as
real. In JR it’s much more a number of voices
creating the story, the world they live in. In Carpenter’s
Gothic it’s much more
the point of very few characters, each of whom is forcefully and severely
self-delineated.
INTERVIEWER
Do you deploy preconceived aesthetic
philosophies concerning language and communication when you sit down to work?
GADDIS
As I say, it is all simply in sitting down to work and the working,
not with any theoretic notions. I did make the basic decision in JR largely, as I’ve said, in terms of
setting a problem to solve. Often it’s very frustrating, but otherwise I would
die of boredom at the typewriter. So I have to—in order to avoid boredom—have
the energy . . . set a problem. InJR it was writing a long book almost
entirely in dialogue with no chapter breaks and so forth, which led me into the
problem of real time because I could not say, “Chapter Four,” or “two weeks
later.” I had somehow to make that time pass in dialogue.
INTERVIEWER
So there must have been aesthetic
decisions . . .
GADDIS
But they’re not out of a theory.
INTERVIEWER
I call your book-length dialogues floated
dialogue because while you present everything through dialogues—background
information, letters, newspaper articles, radio texts, tv texts—too many
outlines become blurred, persons and objects are externally undifferentiated,
everything is allowed to be viewed through what is spoken only. The omniscient
narrator gives insignificant, descriptive details of the physical
situation in which
the dialogue is carried on, but he is of no help with what the reader would be
really interested in.
GADDIS
I will tell you something in that area, if
you like a theory, which I may have come up with after I wrote the book—I’m not
sure. It is the notion that the reader is brought in almost as a collaborator
in creating the picture that emerges of the characters, of the situation, of
what they look like—everything. So this authorial absence, which everyone from
Flaubert to Barthes talks about, is the sense that the book is a collaboration
between the reader and what is on the pages.
INTERVIEWER
But the floated dialogue makes the
reader’s part very difficult. The omniscient narrator expresses no view of his
own. The reader is left to imagine the psychological motivation behind what is
said. What the reader is left with—in the absence of reliable
authorial/narratorial information and of the psychologically more reliable
direct interior monologue form—is what could be called vocal behaviorism.
GADDIS
Well, this interior monologue you speak of is just too easy, obvious, boring, lazy,
and I would agree right up to the last; I always cringe at the word behaviorism.
But again it is very much this notion of what the reader is obliged to supply.
We go back to McLuhan and his talk about hot and cool media. Television is the
hot medium, to which one contributes nothing except a blank state, and the next
day you say, What was that show we saw last night on television? It disappears
because you put nothing into it. So nothing remains, as Gibbs remarks in JR.
In this case it was my hope—for many readers it worked, for others it did
not—that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and
carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth. It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read
and be swept along—to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle,
laugh along the way.
INTERVIEWER
But if they read along like that, they may
miss a lot.
GADDIS
This is a risk I take, but isn’t that what
life is, after all? Missing something that’s right there before you?
INTERVIEWER
The flood of dialogues may intensify the
sense of claustrophobia some readers experience. Several critics believe that
you lose control over your talent in your first two novels, this is why they
are so long, 956 pages and 726 pages. Are you concerned with structure when you
write?
GADDIS
Of course, acutely so, with outline after
outline even to paragraphs. And this sounds very odd for me to say—not of The
Recognitions perhaps,
but JR and Carpenter’s
Gothic both—JR especially is a very economical novel.
That is one thing I hope I learned from Evelyn Waugh: economy. No one would
believe this. I think a great deal of information is
there of every sort, very economically got together. But critics will say
whatever . . .
INTERVIEWER
Do you write the way you do because this
is the easiest way for you to write, or, are such “difficult” works difficult
to write too? What is it that causes particular difficulty in creating this
type of a novel?
GADDIS
Well, as I’ve tried to make clear, if the
work weren’t difficult I’d die of boredom. AfterThe Recognitions, where there is a great deal of
authorial intrusion and little essays along the way—on alchemy or what have
you—I found it was too easy and I didn’t want to do it again. I wanted to write
something different. I wanted to do something that was challenging, to create
other problems, to force this discipline on myself, particularly with the last
book. It’s all discipline. But I certainly can’t agree with that notion of
whatever talent I may have going out of control. I think whatever talent there
may be has been very painfully controlled, perhaps too much so.
INTERVIEWER
Do you regard yourself an experimental
writer?
GADDIS
No. I think of “experimental” as something
that may not work. When I sit down with a concept and what I’ve said about
discipline and so on—what I’m going to do—I don’t think it’s experimental.
INTERVIEWER
It’s probably the dialogue form primarily
that makes people label you as experimental. The novel is turned into a drama,
as if it were, staged almost, “theatricalized.” The narrator is just a kind of
stage director who does not interfere with the play.
GADDIS
But that’s exactly the point isn’t it, not
to interfere. The attempt in the last two books was to make the characters
create themselves, which is true of movies or the stage, and essentially of
life itself. Of course, on the stage you can see the people. You see that he’s tall or
short or fat or what have you. Here the only devices are: Where did you get
that terrible suit? Or one person may say to the other something that is descriptive of that person. But only
if it’s essential because this, to me, is again for the reader to supply, and I
think feel rewarded in doing so.
INTERVIEWER
Creative reading. Critics have also
created various labels that they affixed to your work: the encyclopedic novel,
novel of excess, and so on. If you were to stamp a label that would describe
your works best the way you see them, what would that label be?
GADDIS
Maybe in ten years, when I am finished, I
will give you an answer to that.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of labels like
“postmodern,” “black humor,” “metafiction”?
GADDIS
I don’t read a great deal of this kind of
criticism. When it’s applied to me . . . When I’m put in one of these areas, I
think, “Well, then that is what ‘postmodernism’ is.” But I
don’t either court it or pursue it or protest. I mean there are fashions—the
most extreme, I gather now, being structuralism, deconstruction, what have you,
much of which I just read askance. I’m not sure what is going on, but it’s
surely not on my mind when I write.
INTERVIEWER
Isn’t one of the commonly accepted
features of the postmodern that there is a suspension of causation? Is this
illustrated in your work?
GADDIS
No, no, there is always a thread of
causation, threads, many of them, and on a different level I would say to that
that form and content must coalesce, they must reflect each other. So particularly
with JR, being very largely about a shattered world,
about a fragmented world, the style there is fragmentation. So that was a basic
early decision: to try to reflect the fragmentation, but to create the fabric
threaded with causation of however attenuated or even illogical a sort.
INTERVIEWER
Do you want readers to like what you do?
GADDIS
Heavens yes.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of audience do you think of when
you write?
GADDIS
When I write I don’t think of the audience. After the fact
I think, Well there. I hope they like it.
INTERVIEWER
Somehow it is always emphasized in
connection with The Recognitions that it is an “underground classic,”
that it is “for a very small audience.” Did you want to break out of this when
you wrote more accessible novels? If not, what is it that made your second
novel more accessible than the first, and the third more accessible than the
second?
GADDIS
That’s interesting. I think of the first one, The
Recognitions, as being the most accessible. Much the most. If we
get into this terrible word, accessible, which has been
used in many reviews usually with the prefix in-: I should think that
because of the demand on the reader to put in a little work, JR is the least accessible of the three.
The last one, I think, is quite accessible. Although because of the background
that the first two created, they’re inclined to pursue it in the same way. The
daily reviewer for The New York Times was relieved because it was short, so
I believe he actually read it. Though he reviewed JR ten years before, in reviewing Carpenter’s
Gothic he said he had not read JR—couldn’t follow it, too
long and complicated. That kind of irresponsibility doesn’t cheer a writer up,
but, of course, these things are not on my mind when I’m working.
INTERVIEWER
The self-reflexive element is gone from
your work at this point.
GADDIS
I want to get rid of it, yes. None of the
books has got any interior monologue, easy effects, any of “he wished he could
see her that afternoon.” I mean he’s got to show it, to tellsomeone,
I wish I could see her this afternoon. Authorial absence so that the characters
create the situation. I find this much more provocative to me both as a writer
when I’m working on it and as a reader. Interestingly, The
Recognitions, which came out thirty-five years ago, was regarded as
quite inaccessible at the time. Now I think it is read without much
difficulty.
INTERVIEWER
Which is the novel you care most for?
GADDIS
I think that I care most for JR because I’m awfully fond of the boy
himself.
INTERVIEWER
What are your feelings about the American
novel today?
GADDIS
I wouldn’t make a great statement on that,
but I do think there is a good number of excellent novelists, and then there is
the usual . . . the others. But I think—since they say American novel in
contradistinction to the French, the British, or what have you—we are turning
out proportionately much more good fiction in America of all kinds.
INTERVIEWER
What is happening in the novel is
happening mostly in America. What, in your view, can the goal of literary
workmanship be in the last quarter of the twentieth century?
GADDIS
In Bulgaria, when we were talking at a
conference dedicated to peace, the hope of the planet, there were some two
hundred writers there from fifty-two countries, discussing what the writer can
do for peace. Obviously peace is the issue driving everyone mad, so that most
of that conference was sheer and desperate propaganda. I suppose in all three
books I constantly try to call attention to what my mother had told me once at some
paranoid moment of mine: “You must always remember that there is much more
stupidity than there is malice in the world.” This is what I talked about in
Sofia. This is what we must—if we can’t teach it, which we can’t—at least call
attention to.
INTERVIEWER
Plans?
GADDIS
I have got another novel nicely under way.
INTERVIEWER
This conversation is being conducted in
Budapest. Being a Hungarian, I am particularly interested in why Hungary,
Hungarian literature and language, have a relatively large role to play in The
Recognitions?
GADDIS
I think because I pictured them—Hungary
and Budapest—as mysterious, exciting, highly civilized, sophisticated. But mysterious,
mainly.
INTERVIEWER
One of the central characters, Valentine,
is Hungarian. Why?
GADDIS
I suppose for these reasons, and that he
is completely cynical, in that traditional American mistrust of European guile
going back, again, to Mark Twain.
INTERVIEWER
Is he purely fictional or is he somebody
you knew? I am asking this because he is the one in The
Recognitions who
informs Willie— obviously the author, William Gaddis—about Clement’s Recognitions.
GADDIS
No. He is a totally fictional character.
INTERVIEWER
And the references to Sámuel Brassai,
Pázmány, Mikszáth, Bródy, Gárdonyi, Móricz, Molnár? Is there more behind it
than the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Even if there is not, why Hungarian
literature? Because Valentine and Inononu are Hungarian characters in the
novel?
GADDIS
I was trying to make them legitimately
characters of this very sophisticated, very cynical, very mysterious world as I
viewed it thirty-five years ago.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you pick up the Hungarian
phrases?
GADDIS
Well, I had written those scenes in
English because I try to get things right, and so if they are in Hungary, if
they’re in a Hungarian hospital, obviously they are speaking Hungarian. So I
took these passages to a bar in the Upper East Side of New York, where there is
a large Hungarian community, had a drink, and approached the bartender. I told
him I had a problem, that I wanted these passages in Hungarian. He called
someone over. Finally there must have been ten people around me arguing about
exactly the correct accent, the nuance of the phrase. When I had written it all
down, he said, “Now, the man who was the leading figure in this conversation,
whom everyone else bowed to, as it were, is a great Hungarian actor. If he said
you got it right, you know you have it right.” And, of course, as it all turned
out, when I’d gone up there ready to buy a drink for anyone who would help me,
it was they who bought mine.
INTERVIEWER
If there are Hungarian phrases and
literary references, why couldn’t the two Hungarian characters have Hungarian
names?
GADDIS
Valentine, of course, is named after the
alchemist, Basil Valentine, who . . .
INTERVIEWER
So there were more important thematic
concerns.
GADDIS
Yes, who knows, maybe he changed his name,
I don’t know.
INTERVIEWER
Did you visit Hungary in the years when
you were writing The Recognitions?
GADDIS
I’ve never been to Hungary until today.
INTERVIEWER
And since you flew in yesterday, it’s too
early to ask you about the impressions.
GADDIS
What I see of Budapest is splendid. It is
everything one has been led to imagine.
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