William Gaddis, c/d?

this is totally where I got with it. It's weird bcz I flicked through a couple critical things acclaiming it as a precursor of Pynchon etc and so the version I'd constructed in my head was so at odds the one I was reading seemed like Dickens or something.

i thought the bit with the sacrifice was awesome, mind.

I think GOTHIC is a good place to start with Gaddis because you can get a feel for his prose style (mostly all dialogue) and the book is a much more reasonable length.

(ALSO: I just have to comment on the fact this book has one of the most eloquently described BJ's in all of literature.)

a question about that though: TR is his first book so did he find his "voice" (i.e. the focus on dialogue) about 1/10th of the way into the book and not look back from then on? if that's the case is it not strange that he didn't go back and revise the first part of the book (which contains almost no dialogue)? or does the switch happen for plot reasons or some other factor? i may go back to this book at some point.

not sure about his plight-of-the-artistisms, or his america-and-money stuff: i dunno, it's the same vein of (ironically?) overdetermined, uh, symbolism that annoys me in DFW ... since someone revived a thing to talk about him ... "look look j r is alberich" = "look look they are eating roses" ...

i really like that at one point someone reads something in a greek alphabet, and follows it by noting they'll have to get the translators in: but what they read is actually english words written in the greek alphabet ... that's pretty clever.

(i might be wrong there, admittedly)

http://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/jlebedindex.shtml

the next two - which are the same gimmick, rght? - do they get more or less uh "realistic" - like on occasion i can imagine him ending up writing under milk wood

I've waded through three hundred pages of The Recognitions and now I'm in the weeds. The Otto-Esme stuff – where is this going? I enjoyed the scenes in paris between Wyatt and his girlfriend, and the Wyatt-girlfriend-Otto love triangle.

ha i never finished 'the recognitions' btw

lol I never finished JR either. I hit a point somewhere where I became less and less able to follow who was who and what was going on in each scene, and I kept rereading to that point and not getting past it.

Never finished it myself, but if I went back to it I think I'd probably use this resource.

i had trouble with the opening of 'the recognitions' and reread it at least a few times—it gained in depth each time. but i haven't gotten further than that. probably partly because i keep starting over.

Yeah if I kept starting over I'd never finish. I think he is v funny (his sense of humour strikes more of a chord with me than any other door stopping US writer I've read) so I anchor myself to that when turning the pages at bits that don't make much sense.

That resource is really good tho'.

Finished JR, but not The Recognitions. Feels like a slightly stiff 1950s American novel in places, a bit conventional - I like having Wyatt around, Otto less interesting. Will finish it one of these days

JR benefits from fast reading for a first read I think, big chunks fairly close together at a decent crack. Tuning in to the style is the tricky part, but immersion also gives you better odds on catching the recurring minor characters or the stuff getting smaller, more confused, worse - entropic descent.

his sense of humour strikes more of a chord with me than any other door stopping US writer I've read

Agree, with bits of Pynchon as an exception. Gaddis amazing at organising social noise, and deadpanning through chaos and madness in a way I really like. I think he was more astute & more right about the stuff of now - capitalism, entropy, art, law etc – than any other post-war Eng Lang novelist (tho' I don't necessarily go to a novel for rightness, so he's not quite my favourite)

Its just as compelling when a novelist is really wrong.

Sitting here and trying to generalise I do like a novelist to have strong convictions but strong doubts too (it shows a mind that has thought deeply enough to have them in the first place); that these should be surprising and unusual and provoke doubt in your own.

negative capability, rite

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/04/22/mysterious-skin-the-realia-of-william-gaddis/

almost bought 'jr' once for a friend of mine named j.r. but thought better of it after skimming through it.

I think he was more astute & more right about the stuff of now - capitalism, entropy, art, law etc – than any other post-war Eng Lang novelist
― portrait of velleity (woof), Thursday, 23 December 2010 10:42 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

woah wait really??

well who are the other contenders (taking post-war as in the immediate 10 yr period or so)?

i remember j.r. being sort of banal on art-under-capitalism. it's possible there were levels of irony and inflection i was missing.

i assumed that was "post-war" as in "since 1945," though, too, not "first book published before 1960."

I have a feeling that if I read any actual essays by him on the subject I'd disagree, but he's such a brilliant skewerer in his novels

(disagree with his views, I mean)

Well fwiw I started Recognitions. The prose is amazing, and it's not as hard to follow as I thought (more narrative and less dialogue than the others), but we'll see how it goes.

Great, great book imo.

I wish I wasn't so inarticulate when it came to describing any work of art, but I can definitely say that this book is pretty much consistently great from start to finish. Excellent prose throughout, and some of the best *scenes* I've ever read.

agree with the above. the early part of the novel is primarily narrative, but once it hits the party scenes there's definitely no lack of dialogue.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/much-god-damned-entropy/

this is great, really opened up J.R..

I need to read this now.

bro would you just kick back with an agatha christie for once

Maybe when I retire.

lol

william gaddis' literature of failure @ bard college 1979

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtoU6mtVIAAh3En.jpg

I just started JR, and obviously the narrative syntax is difficult. Any strategies for fixing, for example, the time or POV for any given passage, or is the ambiguity the entire point?

Annotations: http://williamgaddis.org/jr/index.shtml

I found after a while I had a pretty good handle on who was talking, Gaddis gives each character a pretty strong voice - but then characters will imitate other characters' tics and catchphrases, just to add to the cacophony

With setting (when not provided by the brief snippets of omniscient narration) you just have to figure it out from the dialogue

I'm quite enjoying JR (120ish pages left), though a lot of scenes remain opaque -- namely, all the ones that deal with financial jargon. I have to assume that's the case with most readers?

The bit where Edward lights Mrs. Joubert's cracker made me laugh really hard, aloud, in a quiet office.

Took me a while to disentagle this scene with the one between Bast and Rhoda rendered through euphemism.

I'll level one critique against how he characterizes a lot of his women. Either harridans (Eigen's wife, Ann D.) or meek pushovers (Joubert, though Bast is one too). Rhoda's great though.

I'm definitely considering The Recognitions next.

have been dipping into the rush for second place - a selection of his occasional writings and essays. enjoyable but too early for me to form any sense of time or shape to emerge from the general (perfectly understandable) incoherence.

also - a bit of an oddity - william gaddis crops up in the ios game/ultima rip lowerlander II, in a gaddis-themed village where you can buy a copy of JR.

Damn just stayed up well past my bedtime reading the scene around page 635+ is totally engrossing.

I'm well into reading The Recognitions now, but the Wyatt scenes (especially with Valentine) are impenetrable. The hyper-allusiveness is so dense that it crowds out the narrative (something I have trouble with Stephen's chapters in Ulysses, too) -- anyone have suggestions on extracting meaning from it?

Otherwise, there are some hilarious scenes outside of those episodes.

For me the biggest hump was the sections with the priest - which, to be honest, I got over by skimming - and after that I got into its groove. At some point I’d like to reread it and bother googling the art and mythical references I don’t get, but I’ll probably read some other Gaddis before I do so

Which priest? John Huss or Rev. Gwyon?

I'm referencing Gaddis Annotations a lot but I find that the author gives away a lot of plot details, which I object to from a misplaced literary rockism.

Rev gwyon, the mad rural priest with the bull - I don’t even remember who huss is

I don't think I would've known who Huss was if not for the online annotations; he appears only a handful of times, and when he does, I wasn't even able to tell what other characters were present.

J R was great, I’m less enchanted with The R and maybe it suffers from having less formal constraint than J R but there’s plenty to like about it anyway

i like carpenters gothic the most or a frolic of his own. i liked how carpenter's gothic was told from the point of view of the house. sometimes i wish he would just write -said susan idk once in a while

"She lives just outside Paris, in a place called Banlieu."

"Mi playa!"

Loved the Recognitions and only kinda liked Frolic.

Oddly I don't have a single memory of Carpenter's Gothic. I guess it is possible that I never read it. Doesn't seem like me not to have ever tried - back in my 20s it was exactly the sort of thing I would have been into. But I really don't remember. Weird.

frolic is the funniest one

Cranky old guy writes cranky old guy, film at eleven

Where do I sign up?

I'm listening to the audiobook of J R now and it's quite a performance by Nick Sullivan.

Here’s a 2020 article on how it was done if anyone’s interested. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/17/i-cried-actor-120-characters-to-life-jr-william-gaddis-nick-sullivan-audiobook