Agape Agape (2 page)

Gaddis' enterprise was not so much a search for themes as a search for ways to weave into some strong textile all the features and elements that shape our experience—political, economic, artistic, erotic, etc. Living writers who share this aspiration—and who have certainly drawn courage from his example—include William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joseph McElroy, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, Maureen Howard, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and Cynthia Ozick. The fact that they are mostly males makes for an unfashionable list in some ways, but it also testifies to a certain machismo impetus behind the maximalist assault on the novel. I don't know how else to explain it.

There is a certain symbolic aptness in the fact that the novelist who began on such a scale—covering continents and decades with his populous plots and conspiracies—should end, as many do who live long enough, carved back to essential bone and sinew. Not “sans teeth,” and not “sans everything,” but very much sans elaboration.
Agapē Agape,
the unstructured monologue of a man living through his last days, would seem to be the antipodean Gaddis, his minimalist rejoinder to the vast accumulations that preceded it. But as we will see, it is also a continuation of the arc of the work and its fitting terminus.

To get the first orienting exposure to Gaddis' method, his literary aesthetic, the reader needs only a strong thumb. Fanning through the first four novels, the manual exertion easing somewhat as the bulk thins from the thousand-plus pages of
The Recognitions
to the merely gargantuan
JR,
to the more conventionally graspable two works that followed, we are struck by the relentless visual punctuation of the dash, the author's Joyce-derived way of indicating dialogue, as in this random example from
JR
:

—What? Oh I . . .

—Well what are you doing hiding in the closet

—No I'm looking for some clothes, I just . . .

—Why don't you put the closet light on then. (316)

 

And it goes on this way for pages at a stretch.

 

If nothing else, this riffling of pages vividly discloses the extent to which Gaddis centered his narratives around transcriptions of the spoken voice—voices in combat and accord; voices vigorously staking out airspace, parrying, muscling for attention and advantage. The classic instance of this is
JR,
quite possibly the most spoken book in our literature, where the characters offer their lines with what can be a frustrating lack of identifying cues, often with nothing more than syncopation and subtle telltale recurrences to help the reader to differentiate between them. I was told by one Gaddis-adept that reading that novel was a swim-or-drown proposition, that to strive for exact coordinates was to court madness; that the only way to hold the sense was by moving forward in great gulps, and trusting the plot to come clear by degrees.

But
JR
is just the extreme instance. The other three novels each in their way ask that we convert the eye-beam exertion of reading into a highly tuned-up form of listening. And when we do, we can, to crib from our founding bard, “hear America singing.” Except that this singing is really anything but. What we really hear is America cajoling, scheming, grieving, complaining, disputing, lying, seducing, explaining, litigating . . . It makes perfect sense that Gaddis was a great admirer of the work of Saul Bellow, in whose pages we likewise quicken to the many strains of the endless and ongoing daily American conversation.

Which brings us, interestingly enough, to
Agapē Agape,
Gaddis' thin-yet-crowded, posthumous-yet-intended last novel. Fanning through—the process takes less than six seconds, I timed it—we discover not a single dash in the margins. Fanning again—and one more time for confirmation—we note that there is also not a single paragraph indentation, not even at the very beginning. Doubtless there are other works in the modern canon that proceed thus, but I thought right away of Thomas Bernhard's
Concrete,
and the association proved to be the right one—Gaddis in fact meant
Agapē Agape
to be an homage to Bernhard and, particularly, to that work.

Before turning to Gaddis' novel, though, I would linger for a moment on this one peculiarity of presentation, the fact that with this unfenestrated brickwork of prose—his last work—the author effects a complete reversal of the narrative ambition of
The Recognitions,
his first. Where those pages assembled a cast, a mob, of characters, moving them around in space and in time, this pared-down monologue cuts the anchoring line to the world at large and steps entirely into the vocalized thoughts of a dying man. It tells no story, orchestrates no conflicts except those that the narrator wages in his own embattled psyche—mainly between the given and the desired, the harsh grain of things and the vision of art that might redeem it. Yet paradoxically, where the big novels always seem to telegraph the unstated promise of the world they are rooted in—thus carrying a sense of yet unfilled spaces—
Agapē Agape
feels full to the brim with the pulsations of its inner life.

It will not do, I think, to consider
Agapē Agape
as simply the fifth and last of Gaddis' novels. There is an enormous subjective—psychological and metaphysical—difference between a book written as a book, for itself, as it were, and one written with the author's apprehension of his own death. The pressure to make it a summa of some kind, a last word, has to be enormous. In Gaddis' case that pressure dictated both the narrative conception—that these are the thoughts of a dying man—and the style, which is not only swift with the urgency of “last days,” but which palpably maps the jittery shifts of consciousness caused by the prednisone he takes for his cancer. How fitting that Gaddis should have claimed and incorporated Bernhard's short novel as his shadow text;
Concrete,
too, surges with a literally mortal velocity, and also rides the prednisone-agitated states of its first-person narrator, Rudolph. But with this one all-important difference: Bernhard's Rudolph is a device, the stand-in voice of a writer still some years from his own untimely death. Gaddis' voice, if not point-for-point his own, is yet calculated to be close enough to generate the core tension of the work.

The near superimposition of fictional identity upon the real intensifies the immediacy of the voice—its hold-you-fast-by-the-shirtfront quality—even as it has us hunting for correlations with what we know, or can easily find out, about the author. Primarily, of course, there is the fact that he was himself dying of cancer as he wrote his dying narrator. (Gaddis died in 1998, soon after finishing
Agapē Agape.
) But the few autobiographical references we get further confirm a near-identification of author and narrator. Among these, the most salient is the narrator's long-standing obsession with the history of the player piano that he has been writing. Gaddis himself had just such a project underway for many years, as the excerpts gathered in his posthumous collection of pieces,
The Rush for Second Place,
attest. What's more, the writing of just such a history occupies his character Jack Gibbs in
JR,
which should alert us to the fact that the author long made free with the materials of his own experience in his fiction.

Gaddis all along had more in mind, however, than just documenting a particular interlude in the history of applied mechanization. The player piano was for him a significantly symbolic development and its history illuminated a great deal about the growth of binary thinking and what he saw as the epochal shift from artistic to entertainment values. In this way it lends itself perfectly to his several linked larger investigations, including the questioning of the authenticity and authority of artistic work (
The Recognitions
) and the warping force of capitalism (
JR
), especially in the cultural arena. His views often recall those expressed by Walter Benjamin in his great essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which weighed the loss of “aura”—the immediacy of the unique work of art—against the proclaimed gains of a democratic dissemination of reproductions.

But of course Walter Benjamin got there first. Moreover, Benjamin mounted a sustained argument, whereas Gaddis' treatment, either via Jack Gibbs, in his voluminous notes, or in his protagonist's drug-inflected musings in
Agapē Agape,
was impressionistic at best. He used his research to make what is finally an emotional argument about the decline of culture, the compromise of quality and uniqueness by lock-step standardization and the popular ethos of relativism. Still, the serious intellectual grounding is there and his critique lends considerable power to this transcription of a dying man's outcry.

Gaddis begins: “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 from here the prose pushes on, without pauses or rests, gathering and losing momentum as the narrator's thought-fugue plays itself out.

The writing plunges us straightaway into the distressed mind-state of a dying man. It is, on that level, mimetic. It is also complexly calculated. Aside from the obvious debt to the stream-of-consciousness strains of modernism (James Joyce and Virginia Woolf), we can point to the click-and-rewind line disruptions of Samuel Beckett, most obviously in
Krapp's Last Tape,
and the staggered syncopations of the player piano itself, or of Glenn Gould (invoked admiringly in these pages) imposing his peculiar discipline on the idea of the melodic. But the true root influence remains Bernhard's disturbing novel
Concrete,
and Gaddis' incorporation of the Austrian master deserves our attention, not least because in the process of invoking him he more or less offers us a cross section view of both his procedure and his themes.

The key passage comes early in the book. The narrator—he is in the hospital—has already begun to inveigh against the proliferation of the player piano: “. . . it was the plague,” he states, “spreading across America a hundred years ago with its punched paper roll at the heart of the whole thing, of the frenzy of invention and mechanization and democracy and how to have art without the artist and automation, cybernetics, you can see where the damn!” The exclamation does not signal the end of the thought by any means. It merely marks a shift of focus—the narrator has suddenly discovered that he is bleeding. By this point we are already schooled in the jerky disruptions of the style, how they signal abrupt swerves of consciousness. We tune in as he resumes, almost detached: “. . . blood all over the place it doesn't hurt no, skin's like parchment that's the prednisone, turns the skin into dry old parchment tear it open with a feather that's the prednisone, reach for a book reach for anything tear myself to pieces reaching for this book listen, you'll see what I mean, opening page you'll see what I mean,” whereupon—and now we must pay very close attention—he shifts again, this time moving directly into the translated prose of Bernhard. The narrator now enfolds the opening sentence of
Concrete
—never directly identified as such—into his own thought, connecting Bernhard's words directly to the preceding, as follows: “‘From March to December,' he says, ‘while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone,' same thing as prednisone, ‘I assembled every possible book and article written by' you see what I mean? ‘and visited every possible and impossible and impossible library' this whole pile of books and papers here? ‘preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing' . . .”

Gaddis has never been what we could call “reader-friendly.” Indeed, if his own staggering, impacted style were not enough, he must tax us further with the stitched in phrases of another equally disjunctive, headlong stylist. His homage. But then, a few sentences farther on, he exclaims: “It's my opening page, he's plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I've even written it!” (p. 12). What a wonderful, addled, utterly appropriate move, to fuse paranoia and idolatry into a preemptive reversal, the borrower accusing the originator of taking his words before he's written them. It wouldn't stand up in a court of law, but damn the logic—it's the fondest soldering of sensibilities that happens here, or, to vary the metaphor, a kind of literary author-pophagy. And the point of the alliance? To me it betokens a strategy of acceleration and intensification. If a poet wants to offer a lyric memorial, she reaches for the elegy form. Just so, when Gaddis, a novelist, would speak from the edge of extinction, he seizes on a precedent. And not just any precedent—after all, he could have used Hermann Broch's
The Death of Virgil,
Marguerite Yourcenar's
Hadrian's Memoirs,
Carlos Fuentes'
The Death of Artemio Cruz,
and doubtless many others—but that of Bernhard, the fierce, enraged, principled, scornful, headlong denouncer of Western decline, the author who can scarcely speak for the contending pressure of his many vituperations.

Yes, Gaddis' dying protagonist is enraged, and as he says himself: “all writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge” (p. 63). It is a pronouncement we may not entirely endorse, but in this context we do paid heed, for Gaddis' novel is fueled on many levels by the darker emotions. Primarily, of course,
Agapē Agape
is a lacerating cry against bodily pain and death—the man is actively suffering. And his suffering puts the edge on the big questions, the old questions. In the absence of plot, they are what survives. What has my life been? What is in store? What is the point of our strife and toiling—the very questions raised by Tolstoy (who is invoked often in these pages) in
The Death of Ivan Ilych
and elsewhere. And so we find the author interrogating everything, blasting corruption and cowardice, inveighing against bodily dissolution with one breath and the timorous-ness of literary prize committees with the next.