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Agapē Agape: The Making and Unmaking of William
Gaddis’s World |
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For William Gaddis’s final work of
fiction, Agapē Agape, which he knew would be
published posthumously (and so it was in 2002), the author tried finally to
come to terms with the project he had been grappling with for fifty
years: the history of the player piano
as emblematic of technology’s assault on the arts in the twentieth century. At times, Gaddis intended the project to be
nonfictional but ultimately weaved his thesis about
the player piano into a first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative from
a character who is dying of cancer (as was Gaddis as
he worked to finish the novella in 1998).
Gaddis penned five novels, beginning with the gargantuan The Recognitions, published in 1955,
and, as Joseph Tabbi describes his oeuvre, “the
succeeding books each took off, in their turn, from the leftover drafts of
the work that preceded it until, at the end of his life, Gaddis determined to
transform his accumulated research into one gemlike meditation without false
illusions or consolations” (101). This
solitary “gemlike meditation” was the 84-page typescript sent to Gaddis’s
agent after his death in mid December 1998. |
This paper was presented at the Literature and Culture Since 1900 Conference,
February 2008, Gaddis’s novels are The Recognitions (1955), J R
(1975), Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), A Frolic of His Own (1994),
and Agapē Agape (2002). Online references are linked marginally
and in the Works Cited section. |
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Fittingly, in these parting words
titled Agapē Agape Gaddis not only distills his
notions about technology’s assault on the arts in its facilitation of
reproduction over creative innovation, but he does so by fully embracing
chaos theory—elements of which appear in nearly all of Gaddis’s works—to the
extent of making his novella a metachaotic text;
meaning that he overtly references chaos principles in a narrative whose
structural underpinning and whose thematic core are derived from chaos theory
as well. In fact, in his final work,
Gaddis goes beyond the science of chaology, back to
the original Greek theology of Chaos.
This return to the beginning—on which I will elaborate later—is
especially apropos to the metachaotic text. |
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There is no question that chaos was
a primary concern for Gaddis while working on Agapē. Tabbi reports,
“Handwritten reminders, in a hand whose changes can be discerned over half a
century, appear in the margins, or on whatever scraps of paper he had
around. ‘Chaos theory as a means
toward order,’ reads one note among the strips and folders that Gaddis would
refer to when composing his last work” (99).
References to chaos, entropy, order and disorder abound in the
novella; and the few commentators who have bothered to discuss Agapē have
made some critical use of them.
However, no one has gone beyond the theory of chaos to the Hellenic theology of Chaos that seems to me to be central to the novella
and to its ultimate meaning. For
example, Tabbi cites Tom LeClair,
who characterizes all of Gaddis’s creative work as “systems novels” (100). And certainly Gaddis made much use of chaos
or systems theory. Most conspicuously
perhaps, early in the 1975 novel J R
a Gaddis alter-ego character named Jack Gibbs instructs his students, “Order
is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of
chaos” (20). A bit later in the
lesson, Gibbs writes the word “entropy” on the blackboard and breaks “the
chalk in emphatic underline” (21). |
Posting to the Gaddis discussion group on Yahoo!, Bernard J. Looks writes, “Gaddis’s close friend, Martin S. Dworkin, who met Gaddis in 1950, published an article in 1951 […] entitled ‘Poetry and the Machine,’ which can be considered his poet’s credo. […] Dworkin was already concerned with the same question [of the machine age’s effects on poets and poetry] in view of his already considerable interest in and knowledge of Greek philosophy, which I can attest was already in evidence at the time, possibly the time of Dworkin’s greatest influence upon Gaddis’s thinking. […] Perhaps we than think if [Jack Gibbs] as a fictionalized version of his friend Martin Dworkin.” (quoted with permission) |
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It is difficult to pinpoint when Gaddis
was introduced to Chaos in a classical sense, but the author described his
education at Harvard as “old fashioned” and was pleased with the college’s
traditional literature curriculum, saying in a 1985 interview, “I’m
delighted, I’m very glad of. I always
have been very happy about that” (qtd. in Moore, William Gaddis 6). In particular, while at Harvard Gaddis was
exposed to Hellenic modes of thought, I presume, while attending F. O. Matthiessen’s lectures on Greek drama (6). Gaddis left Harvard without a degree in
1945, which is about the time he began work on his debut novel, The Recognitions, wherein he
references classical mythology and specifically alludes to Night and Chaos
(378). In J R, in addition to Jack Gibbs’s lecturing on chaos and entropy,
Gaddis mentions Chaos’s son Erebus (471), who is darkness personified in
Greek mythology. So Gaddis seemed to
be ruminating on classical Chaos for at least as long as he was obsessed with
the history of the player piano. |
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Chaos in a classical sense is
introduced with the novella’s odd title.
Several writers have noted that the first word agapē is Greek and
translates as “brotherly love”—eventually coming to mean an altruistic,
neighborly sort of love that is different from eros, or sexual love. Regarding the second word of the title, agape, some have read it as a
straight-forward English word. In his
introduction to Agapē,
Sven Birkerts describes the “most peculiar title”
as “[f]ive syllables, two languages and an
oxymoronic opposition of meanings” (xix), which ultimately implies that the
Christian concept of agapē
has been “torn asunder” (xx). Tabbi, in the novella’s afterword,
explains the title in this way: “Agapē—the
community of brotherly love celebrated by early Christian writers—has come
apart (agape) through mechanization and a technological democracy that
reduces art to the level of light entertainment, a spectacle for the gaze of
the masses” (108). Neither Birkerts nor Tabbi is wrong in
his interpretation, but I think Gaddis was teasing a lot more from the word agape.
The strange title, after all, appeared in Gaddis’s player piano notes
as early as the 1960s (Tabbi 108), so he had nearly
forty years to explore its various strata of meaning. Given the novella’s metachaotic
nature and the fact that the title’s first word is of Greek origin, it seems
to me that Gaddis was playing with the fact that the word chaos, in Greek, means “to yawn or
gape” (OED online). This seems like a good time to remind
ourselves of the original Hellenic notion of capital-C Chaos. As described in Bulfinch’s Mythology, “Before earth and sea and heaven were created, all
things were one aspect, to which we give the name of Chaos—a confused and
shapeless mass, nothing but dead weight, in which, however, slumbered the
seeds of everything. Earth, sea, and
air were all mixed up together” (17).
This mixture was brought to order when God and Nature interceded in
the process. Possibly a contemporary
of Homer in the eighth century BCE, Hesiod’s Theogony puts the
tale more theatrically: Tell
me, O Muses who dwell on Olympos, and observe
proper order for
each thing as it first came into being. Chaos
was born first and after her came Gaia[.…] Chaos
gave birth to Erebos and black Night; then
Erebos mated with Night and made her pregnant and
she in turn gave birth to Ether and Day. (lines 114-25) So from Chaos not only came earth, sea and
heaven, but also day and night—the latter concept being especially important
in our discussion of Agapē
because it suggests the cyclical essence of Hellenic Chaos: Just as day becomes night becomes day,
chaos becomes order becomes chaos … ad infinitum. |
Theogony translation by Apostolos N. Anthanassakis. |
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These Hellenic ideas are introduced
quickly by Gaddis in his novella. First, there is the title with its obvious
and not so obvious Greek origins (more regarding the title later). Then in the, well, chaotic opening sentence
we discover that the narrator, who remains nameless throughout, has a trio of
chaotic processes to bring to order: No
but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how
much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of
mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages
clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this
property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they
keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again […] feel
like I’m being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards
[…] and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled
before everything collapses and it’s
all swallowed up by the lawyers and taxes like everything else […] (1). Clarifications follow, in dribs and drabs, and
we find that the narrator is recovering from surgery because of cancer, so
one of the three processes he is working on is moving from the chaos of life
to the order of death; second, the “books notes pages clippings” he is trying
to organize in an on-going post-surgical hallucination are for his monumental
treatise on the player piano as metaphor for mechanization’s assault on the
creative spirit in the twentieth century; and third, he feels the need to get
his last will and testament in order to divide the properties fairly amongst
his three daughters. |
Posting to the Gaddis discussion group on
Yahoo!, Rex Lawson of the Pianola
Institute writes, “[I]t’s a shame that
Gaddis equated the player piano with an attack on creativity. The original pianola
was intended simply as a means of providing the notes of music, no
expression, no performance, and it was meant to be the pianolist
who turned it into real music, just like a conductor does with an
orchestra. In a sense it was an
attempt to expand the possibility of creativity to those whose digital
technique was not up to the difficulty of the music. Unfortunately, in the |
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In addition to the title, which gets
us thinking Greek from the start, Gaddis has packed all sorts of other clues into
this long, rambling first sentence to signal the reader that we should be
thinking more than mathematical chaos theory—though that is warranted,
too—and be mindful of Hellenic capital-C Chaos. To begin, Gaddis sets up a binary between
“sort[ing] and organiz[ing]” versus “divid[ing]” and dismantl[ing]”—between order and chaos in other words. His reference to “piece by piece” suggests
that his affairs will be reduced to their elemental parts, reminding us of
classical Chaos’s role as repository of everything-waiting-to-be-formed. The theological or divine sense of Chaos is
hinted at with the phrase “God knows what,” and the fact that the narrator
includes (unconsciously) his own mortality as one of the three chaotic
processes dealt with in the novella, both amplifies the theological sense of
Chaos and connects with the classical through personification; that is, in
Hellenic theology Chaos and Chaos’s offspring were beings, not mere abstractions. |
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Most significant perhaps, Gaddis’s
narrator wants to bring “everything” to order before it all “collapses” and
is “swallowed up.” In this imagery,
Gaddis suggests the Hellenic origins of the word Chaos as an open or gaping
mouth, but instead of its contents being the matter that will form
everything, it is ingesting everything to be cyclically reconstituted. This trio of chaotic processes—physical
life, material life, and intellectual life—is mirrored in the fact that the
narrator must bequeath his worldly goods among three daughters: He says, “[…] dividing the properties three ways one for each daughter all
settled ahead of time before the lawyers and taxes swallow it up in
dislocation and disorder getting it organized the only way to defend it
against the tide of entropy […]”
(5). Steven Moore tells us that
Gaddis’s choice of the narrator’s having three daughters is a remnant from an
earlier concept of the story based on King
Lear (“Secret History”), and that “[t]races remain throughout the
finished novella” (“Agapē”
note 5.2). I have no doubt this
assertion is true; however, I think there is more to it than that. After all, in this painfully
autobiographical work about a dying man trying to come to terms with his life
and his lifework authored by a dying man trying to come to terms with his
life and his lifework, why not simply change the three daughters to a son and
a daughter (Gaddis’s offspring)? A
reasonable answer is that in the three daughters Gaddis saw the potential for
more intersections with Greek mythology in general and Chaos in particular. The number three and its multiples were
especially significant for the ancient Greeks. A brief catalog includes the nine Muses,
daughters of Zeus and Memory, who each presided over disciplines within three
broad categories of knowledge:
literature, art, and science (all of which are concerns of Agapē’s
narrator). Moreover, the three Graces
gave gifts to mankind to enhance both body and mind, like banquets, dances,
and exhibits of art. We mustn’t forget
the three Furies, or Eumenides, who punished
wrong-doers that avoided human justice—wrong-doers, perhaps, like the
inventors of player pianos, computers, and television (all referenced in Agapē) who
became incredibly wealthy while assaulting the arts and degrading human
creativity in the twentieth century.
The most intriguing connection may be to the three Fates, generally
regarded as representing the past, present, and future, whose “office was to
spin the thread of human destiny, and they were armed with shears, with which
the cut it off when they pleased” (Bulfinch
14). The Fates were the daughters of Themis or Law of Nature, who gave counsel to Jove. Note that Gaddis’s narrator is attempting
to bring order, Themis-like, throughout the
story. Granted, Themis
was considered female, whereas Agapē’s narrator is, we assume, male; but in the
novella there is no mention of a wife/mother figure, suggesting—very
obliquely—a male-generated origin for the three daughters, something akin to
Athena’s birth from Zeus after he swallowed her pregnant mother Metis. |
Link to Link to Moore et al.’s “Agapē.” (Right click to open in a new window.) The genderless narrator/parent who
mentions no spouse/partner in regards to the three children suggests an
interesting study in itself. |
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Furthermore, the Greeks, in their fascination
with the number three, may have been sensing and expressing what more modern chaologists have come to articulate as stochastic
processes. Just before the dawn of the
twentieth century, Henri Poincaré came to the
conclusion that “equations useful in explaining the orderly activity of
planetary systems were only valid in the instance of the relationship of two
bodies. More than two bodies […] randomized the process and the equations
became problematic” (Sleuthag xx). Therefore, Agapē’s narrator’s three
daughters may illustrate the complexity associated with transforming chaos to
order. Achieving balance or
equilibrium between two objects is relatively simple compared to the task of
balancing three objects. |
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Chaos as a cyclical process can be
seen in various ways in the text of the novella, but among the most telling
is the narrator’s insistence that his player piano work has been plagiarized
before he’s had a chance to write it.
He quotes from Thomas Bernhard’s novel Concrete at length, then declares, “It’s my opening page, he’s
plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I’ve even written it!”
(12). The only way for plagiarism to
occur before the original is
created is for time to be seen as a repeating circle or loop and not a
straight line. Gaddis picks up this
notion a few pages later and intersects it with classical Greece when the
narrator imagines going back in time and preventing his younger self from
beginning work on the player piano project:
“[…] all those years before
when all this started these books and notes and papers piled in front of me
I’d go back, I’d go back, pack it all up and […] get a fresh start where it all began, see myself running through
the streets went to Sparta, went to Pylos see
myself at some sidewalk cafe making a note […]” (21). Note that the
narrator’s work on the player piano project began in the birthplace of
classical Chaos. This is but one
example in the novella of repetition, of returning to the beginning. This idea of circular pursuit is echoed and
transmuted throughout the narrative; the copious references include “Count
Tolstoy […] stalking Turgenev, following him everywhere […]” (86) and “Golyadkin
pursuing his doppelgänger or Golyadkin’s
doppelgänger pursuing Golyadkin
[…]” (89), and “Youth with its reckless exuberance
when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back
at what we destroyed […]”
(96). This would seem a shatteringly
negative note to end on, but Gaddis reverses it with his last words intended
for publication: “[…] that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth
who could do anything” (96). For
Gaddis devotees these words harken back to the
young novelist toiling away for ten long years on what would become The Recognitions, perhaps the most
important book of the twentieth century that is rarely read. Peter Dempsey, writing upon the occasion of
Gaddis’s death, has characterized the import of The Recognitions most succinctly:
It
has now come to be seen as a Janus-faced text that looks back in its
complexity to the great Modernists of the inter-war years such as Joyce and
Faulkner and forward to the post-war American writers such as Barth, Coover, Pynchon, De Lillo and Gass in its taste for black humor, literary play and
absurdity. It has established itself
as a unique and influential novel, a pivotal work that makes connections
between Modernism and what has come to be called Postmodernism, both as a
literary style and as a philosophical position. The Youth who could do anything—indeed. |
Link to Dempsey’s essay. (Right click to open in a new window.) |
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By ending Agapē on this chord,
Gaddis seems to be encouraging readers to go back to the beginning, to read
him (or read him again) from start to finish, the artist’s wish for
immortality through his art. This
reading of the novella’s conclusion is consistent with my view of the odd title—not
communal love (the sort of love shared by devotees of the same text) torn
asunder (agape), but rather that devotion swallowed in a capital-C Chaotic
sense that will reconstitute the text and begin the process of literary
creation again. Day becomes Night
becomes Day. |
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Similarly, in Agapē the narrator becomes
his text-in-process, and his text-in-process becomes him. This transformation is hinted at early in
the novella when he begins bleeding on the imagined piles of research: “Where the tissues, just get cold water on
it stop the bleeding, you see? Scrape
my wrist against this drawer corner tears the skin open blood all over the
place it doesn’t hurt no, skin’s like parchment […]” (11).
Joseph Tabbi writes, “Composition, for
Gaddis, was a distinctly material practice, involving a literal organization
and arrangement of found materials, even as the narrator struggles literally
to hold himself together. In a sense,
the writer becomes the page on which he’s writing” (100). This merging of text and flesh, especially
flesh that has been lacerated and is sensing the injury intensely, is
particularly significant when viewed through the lens of Elaine Scarry’s landmark book The Body in Pain: The Making
and Unmaking of the World, published in 1985. “Intense pain is world-destroying,” writes Scarry. “[T]he
created world of thought and feeling, all the psychological and mental
content that constitutes both one’s self and one’s world, and that gives rise
to and is in turn made possible by language, ceases to exist” (29, 30). Pain, then, is the unmaking of the
individual’s world; pain is order dissolving into chaos. Gaddis, like his last narrator, raged
against the pain of his cancer through literary creation. Scarry discusses
this phenomenon, too, in the “Making” section of her book: That
pain and the imagination are each other’s missing intentional counterpart,
and that they together provide a framing identity of man-as-creator within
which all other […] events occur, is perhaps most succinctly suggested [… by]
the word “work.” [… Work] has been repeatedly placed by the side of physical
suffering yet has, at the same time and almost as often, been placed in the
company of pleasure, art, imagination, civilization—phenomena that in varying
degrees express man’s expansive possibility, the movement out into the world
that is the opposite of pain’s contractive potential. (169) Therefore, Agapē Agape was more than a final, distilled critique of the |
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In his article titled “Narrative and
Chaos,” Alex Argyros argues that “[n]arrative offers culture both a powerful data bank in
which to store and transmit cultural knowledge, and a flexible and turbulent
laboratory in which to invent new knowledge” (670). In this positive light, I prefer to think
of the flexible and turbulent laboratory of Agapē Agape as not so much William Gaddis’s lament for the death of
originality in the twentieth century, but rather his exuberant plea for
artists of the twenty-first to invent anew. |
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Works Cited Argyros, Alex.
“Narrative and Chaos.” New Literary History 23 (1992): 659-73. Birkerts, Sven. Introduction. Agapē Agape. ix-xxii. Bulfinch, Thomas.
Bulfinch’s Mythology. Dempsey, Peter.
“William Gaddis: Life &
Work.” 2000. The
Gaddis Annotations: Introductory &
General Information. 14 July
2007. <http://www.williamgaddis.org/life&work.shtml>.
(Link) Gaddis, William. Agapē Agape. —.
J R. 1975.
—.
The Recognitions. 1955.
Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Apostolos Moore, Steven. “The Secret History of Agapē Agape.” 2000. The
Gaddis Annotations Project: Critical
& Interpretive Essays. 14 July
2007 <http://www.williamgaddis.org/critinterpessays/secrethistoryaa.shtml>.
(Link) —.
William Gaddis. Moore, Steven, et al. “Agapē Agape
Notes.” 2000. Notes,
Sources, References for Agapē Agape. 14 July 2007
<http://www.williamgaddis.org/agape/aanotes.shtml>. (Link) Scarry, Elaine.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. 1985.
Slethaug, Gordon E.
Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics
in Recent American Fiction. Tabbi, Joseph.
Afterword. Agapē Agape. 99-112. |
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Ted Morrissey teaches
literature and writing courses at |
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Text © 2008 Ted
Morrissey |
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