“How can I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. . . . Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another, but why this happens I don't know.”
12
Â
The experience Pózdnyshev struggles to define is neither exaltation nor entertainment. It is something akin, rather, to the mental communion enacted by Gaddis in
AgapÄ Agape.
Against all forgeries, simulations, and wastes of the world, this was the one consolation that Gaddis held on to during the last stages of composition: that the life of the mind in collaboration with other minds, the fraternal love that he felt in his recollection of a friend no longer here, and the disciplined recognition of the achievements of past writers would give to his work a staying power beyond his own, finally human, powers of caring and invention.
Notes
1
Tom LeClair,
The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
2
As told to Matthew Gaddis, who did some minor secretarial work for his father during the years when Gaddis worked on the player-piano essay and the fiction that evolved out of it.
3
Concrete
, trans. David McLintock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 3.
4
As told to Matthew Gaddis.
5
Paris Review,
Winter 1987, p. 71.
7
Patrick O'Donnell, “His Master's Voice: Commodifying Identity in
J R,”
in
Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), p. 176.
8
“O Heaven, Heaven, Heaven!
Who's robbed me of myself
Who's closer to myself
Or can do more with me than I ever can?”
Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo,
trans. Creighton Gilbert (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 7.
9
From Gaddis's working papers.
11
Leo Tolstoy, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in Tolstoy,
Collected Shorter Fiction
, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude and Nigel J. Cooper (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 299.