William gaddis biography review

For many years novelist William Gaddis, despite having won two National Book Critics Circle Awards and a MacArthur Foundation's "genius award," suffered from commercial and critical neglect. However, Gaddis has more recently experienced a resurgence in his popularity among both groups and is now considered one of the strongest American novelists.

This collection of essays explores the interrelation between Gaddis's writing and the culture that helped to engender it. The essays cover such topics as technique, genre, religion, art, economics, colonialism and the role played by Gaddis's own travels through Europe and North Africa. This essay explores political and aesthetic 'failure' in the work of William Gaddis, specifically arguing that failure was his critical response to the triumphalism of an emerging neo-liberalism.

In the first half I argue that Gaddis drew on Norbert Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society as a 'sourcebook' for his novel JR because it offered a critical counter-point to an increasingly hegemonic positivism. I specifically explore the parallels and divergences between the work of Weiner and his erstwhile colleague Milton Friedman to suggest that Weiner provided Gaddis with a formal and methodological alternative to the modelling of conservative economics.

The william gaddis biography review half of the article focuses on JR, drawing out the ways in which the novel draws on Wiener in order to make evident the importance of failure as a site of political and aesthetic critique. In this section I highlight how the 'difficult' formal properties of the novel offer their own parodic response to an empirical methodology: as they force us to question what it is that we know we know in an entirely different way.

The archive, though, reveals a close, sustained relationship between his corporate work and fiction. Once again the Roman qualities of America overwhelm one: everything based on power, on mean gold rather than the golden mean. America is in a way the inability to think of gold metaphorically. Routledge Companion to Literature and Class American author".

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Gaddis belongs to the first camp, though that was perilous living at times. That concern over being subsidized and owned by, to use a familiar term, The Man is elaborated in chapters six through nine which deal largely with the work experiences Gaddis had after the utter critical and commercial failure of his first book. That twenty-year pause allowed him to absorb the language and attitudes behind business practices and accrue material on communication theory that, married to an obsession with the mechanization of the arts through the invention of the player piano, informed his second novel, J Rperhaps his most brilliant and hilarious work.

It features an amoral eleven-year-old boy, J R Vansant, who, through the manipulation of penny stocks and the adults at his school, becomes a business mogul. Among other things, the novel is an indictment of a capitalist system that had replaced the social and cultural connections Gaddis knew from his childhood, where progress and creativity were aligned, with companies buying, selling, and leveraging solely out a desire for profit.

This is what it means to say that J R is about the conditions underlying the impossibility of its own reception. Later access to grants, and a move into teaching at universities, eased certain financial worries, and introduced Gaddis to younger writers and those who wanted to be. There are deaths and the imminent promise of Armageddon in this close-packed novel.

William gaddis biography review

In his New Yorker days Gaddis had attempted to write a history of the player piano. His novels from The Recognitions to A Frolic of His Own ask: When forgeries and lawsuits make more than the artworks themselves, what is worth doing? A full life and a life he made more and more transparent in his fictions, which, after the bounty of The Recognitions pages with almost a dozen main characters, who go to many of the countries where Gaddis traveledgrew dialogue-centric, minimizing any narrative voice so that characters would dig their own graves with their scintillating and sloppy language.

As Bast, the failed composer in JR, says:. Yet this is not just a critical biography or a work of literary criticism, but a prolegomenon on how to persist in the creative world.