JR

BY WILLIAM GADDIS

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
JR

William Gaddis, one of America's outstanding novelists, received the National Book Award in 1976 for
JR,
his second novel. Mr. Gaddis is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other books include
The Recognitions
(1955),
Carpenter's Gothic
(1985), and
A Frolic of His Own
(1994).

Frederick R. Karl, professor of English at New York University, is the author of numerous articles and books on the novel, as well as an encyclopedic study,
American Fictions: 1940-1980.

WILLIAM GADDIS

with an Introduction by
Frederick R. Karl

Copyright © William Gaddis, 1971, 1974, 1975 Introduction copyright © Frederick R. Karl, 1993

Portions of this book were first published in
The Dutton Review, Antaeus,
and
Harpers
magazine, June 1975 issue.

It is altogether fitting that William Gaddis's novel of voices,
J R,
first published in 1975, should be reissued in Penguin's Twentieth-Century Classics series. For
JR
has become just that, part of the canon of fictions that help define what America was like in the post-World War II years. Although the novel experienced very rocky reviews, and was neglected for many years despite having won the National Book Award, it has remained alive and well through a cadre of devoted readers both inside and outside of the academy. For many readers, as well as for students,

it seemed a forbidding work, despite its power and intensity; and yet it is quite accessible once one gives it the opportunity to establish its own terms, in the way James Joyce's
Ulysses
and Vladimir Nabokov's
Pale Fire
have proven to be.

Some early reviewers such as George Steiner, writing in the
New Yorker
—traditionally unaccommodating to unconventional American

fiction—deemed it an "unreadable text" and commended Gaddis for having the powers to sustain this unreadability for "over 726 pages.'' In the
New Republic,
Alfred Kazin, locked in to American realism, said Gaddis's novel is "like nothing else around, and is not a masterpiece. " The reviews, incidentally, were not that different in gratuitous hostility and witlessness from those received by Gaddis's mammoth 1955 novel,
The Recognitions.

Nevertheless, what we see occurring with both novels is something very curious and encouraging in American fiction: The two books have made their way despite opposition from hurried daily reviewers, professional hit men and women, and serious critics who have their own agendas. Furthermore, Gaddis has proven in both novels to be not only a technically adroit and comprehensive writer but a prophet, the kind of author Thomas Carlyle once labeled "a hero of literature. ' Clearly, if we want to understand America in the later 1950s, through the '60s and '70s, and then into the 1980s and early '90s,
The Recognitions
and
J R
should be our guides. Gaddis's labyrinthine novels capture the "real America"—inasmuch as anyone can—far more than those so-called realistic portrayals of American life that claim authenticity.

For Gaddis, everything in America is a metaphor, a cartoon version of who and what we are. This is a paradox as well as an irony, and his novels are attempts to unravel the conundrum. The unraveling, not unexpectedly, requires considerable adroitness. His twin metaphors in
JR
are counterfeiting—A theme continuous with the major thrust of
The Recognitions
—And invisibility, also reminiscent of the earlier novel. Creating a tension or counterpoint with energy and action, counterfeiting uses imitative forms and derivative artificial life posing as the "real"; whereas invisibility is a negation of spatiality and expansiveness, a substitution of murkiness and shadows for light, intense innerness for movement.

The context for this is a unique format, an extraordinary page. Print appears within a great void. The novel's unattributed sources create a spatial emptying out, a denial of expectation, in which only words coming, seemingly, from nowhere can attempt to fill the void. In some respects, / R recalls Stéphane Mallarmé's great symbolist poem of 1897, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance." In that, the words on the page suggest not the presence of something but what is absent or what might possibly be. The matter there—And we have
JR
in mind—is a mere suggestion of the major element, what is omitted or invisible; and the reader is forced to think not of what he or she is given, but of what is being held back. That withheld material may prove to be more important—Although as readers we can never know, for the very point of holding back is to maintain invisibility. In such a formulation, whether the Mallarmé poem or Gaddis's novel, the incompletion and lack of center of the artwork are what the reader must grapple with.

Emptiness or absence is not a lack of meaning but the very nature of

meaning. / R's use of the void, of emptiness confronting words, of words struggling to assert themselves against a sea of space and against the inarticulation of the speaker, of language welling up not as expression but as a survivor of absence, is to turn language into a huge metaphor of America.

Language in this way plays the role of an intruder, even as it communicates the counterfeit and suggests the invisible. As an intruder, it becomes a quasivisual as well as an aural image. We see or experience it differently, just as we hear it differently, since it comes, apparently, out of nowhere or nothing. Stated another way, when words are intruders on the page—when they have no stated source, no attributed voice—they become like notes or sounds breaking the silence; and language in this respect becomes almost indistinguishable from musical notation. Not surprisingly,
JR
is loaded with musical imagery.
The Recognitions,
we recall, ended with
Gotterdämmerung,
the tumbling down of the walls that suggests the twilight of the gods in Wagner's Ring Cycle; and
J R
begins with a school production of
Das Rheingold,
which Wagner intended as the overture or entrance into the remainder of the Ring. Not surprisingly, also, our J R, or Junior, of the title, our sixth-grader, is Alberich in the school production, the

dwarfish Alberich whose love of gold helps turn the Ring into a story of greed and power working against the potential for human love. This is one way to read the novel.

If the business of America is counterfeiting, imitation, fakery, Gaddis has discovered a way in: through a discontinuous, aborted language serving as a vehicle for both the energy and the depletion of American ideals. Yet we should add that
JR
also has undertones of idealism; it is not all negation, in which J R's riotous ventures are simply forms of greed, a Huck Finn for the postwar era. Alongside J R is the composer, Edward Bast, who must learn that all the get-rich policies of his young business partner are destructive of his own talents; and that his sole recovery must come not through outside temptations but through himself. Bast is a man seemingly destined to be a classic Gaddis failure; he cannot even inherit a fortune for lack of a birth certificate. Yet he possesses integrity and some dim purpose. The possible conventionality and even sentimentality of this plotting is, fortunately, contravened by Gaddis's sense of play, his parodic vision, his ability to limn a living American language, his capacity for turning jargon and lingo and entire vocabularies into self-mockery. Yet through it all, through the composer's trial by counterfeit values, he does not lose sight of the fact that what finally counts is Bast's own talent, his belief in himself. It is not earned easily.

Bast is constantly undercut not only by counterfeiters who tempt him with outlandish money-making schemes, not only by those like Crawley who want him to write "zebra music" for a big game film; but by institutions that should be supporting him. The school from which he is dismissed is concerned less with education than with contracts, real

estate deals, mortgages, stock options, sales, and the like. The chief educational tool seems to be not classroom instruction but field trips, as students come and go, mill around, get on and off one form of transportation or another. The principal of the school operation, Whiteback, also heads a bank; and all the moves the school makes interact with business, not with education. Whenever any school activity arises, Whiteback is interrupted on his telephone by bank business; until school and bank become interchangeable in the incomplete, unattributed speech which characterizes most dialogue. So intermixed are they, in fact, that one scheme seriously advanced is to advertise in textbooks certain products to appeal to the student, depending on his or her level: in advanced algebra or French III, for

example, deodorant tampons. Within this context, J R, a sixth-grader, is keyed into money-making as the chief education tool; and he moves accordingly. The school becomes his base for a vast capitalistic enterprise.

Once this is established, and it takes a good many pages, Gaddis is unbending in guiding J R toward his fortune, all based on his taking advantage of special offers in catalogs, in filling out coupons and claiming free samples or calculating how he can make use of military surplus and other detritus in a throwaway society. But because nearly all of J R's operation lies tucked away in the seams of an ungiving dialogue, in which there is only an occasional insert of third-person narrative, the element of invisibility persists. While the dashes indicating dialogue do offer the reader some minimal help, the original plan, with no differentiation between dialogue and narration, is far purer and much closer to what the novel suggests: that the line between dialogue and narration should be invisible, since what occurs

as the theme of the novel is also invisible. Method and content intermix and reinforce each other.

Once J R activates the elements of a throwaway society, he puts into motion an almost seamless delivery of goods and materials to an apartment on New York's East 96th Street. This apartment, incidentally, is not only a warehouse for J R's enterprises, it is also a meeting ground for several of the characters in the novel: the floundering Bast, the failed writer Gibbs, the streetwise Rhoda, and others. Nevertheless, nearly all of the energy flowing in and around J R's activities is "beyond" or "outside,'' not quite visible. Since so little is definitely stated, and so much is suggested, we may feel Gaddis is carrying on an extended, obsessively detailed dialogue with himself; that he is the programmer and he receives the printout. All voices echo against each other, a true universe of words delivered, heard or misheard, and then recycled. Only language counts, and yet it is bastardized, discontinuous, severely seamed, dislodged often from sense, and given, on most occasions, no defined voice. One recognizes speakers only by virtue of their words, and not surprisingly one of the

chief conduits for all information is the telephone, another the mails. In

both of these mediums, words are disengaged from their speaker by some mechanical device; the speaker remains hidden, as it were, even if identified.

The author's vision lies here, in that world where words come at us from every side, engulf us, inundate our attempts to be anything except a conduit for language; and yet at the same time, Gaddis recognizes that words create something, even when they seem to subvert meaning. If they can become part of an arrangement, they are the stuff of art. We may be damned by words, but we may also be saved by them. Not a small child, but Bast ("enough"? "bastard"?) will lead us.

Is the telephone, then, the work of the devil? Why the persistence of telephones? The need for booths, making change, placing calls, finding a suitable language, and then gathering information without appearing? The telephone makes invisibility viable; it also makes for counterfeiting, since voices can be raised or lowered, disguised, mis- identified. A whole range of strategies is made possible by the telephone, even more effectively than with the mails, since with the latter a return address gives away identity. Only the radio can compete, and it is a brilliant stroke that in that critical 96th Street apartment a radio lies buried under the detritus so that its incessant sound cannot

be turned off. Added to this is another very important factor, and that is that when J R does appear, it is as a voice, with an outpouring of American colloquial speech. The strategy is clear: J R cannot appear too often, since as a sixth-grader he will neither inspire confidence as a high-flying businessman nor prove intellectually stimulating. He must remain a disembodied, disguised voice, or else a signature on a printed form requesting free goods. His is a prophetic voice of American finance, concealed, buried, a high-roller in low-roller form. The telphone plays its role: While it may seem to damn him to deceptiveness, it also gives shape to his aspirations, optimism, and energies; and for Bast, also damned by the telephone, he learns what he must rebel against to validate himself.