JR (2 page)

Another form of damnation is linked to Gaddis's sense of "recycling." In this view, the goods of the world are not produced but merely redirected; so that use goes to detritus, back to use as a way in which money can be raised, and then the cycle re-begins. The basis of J R's fortune is a shipment of about a million navy forks. Originally ordered by the navy, the forks were then dumped as detritus, only to be picked up by J R through the mails and started through the system again, becoming the basis for further deals, all of which involve recycled materials, contracts, penny stocks (a prophetic view of the 1980s' indulgence in junk bonds), goods that, having become unfashionable and dysfunctional, are then returned into fashion. J R— A young Michael Milken prototype—is the new generation of entrepreneurs, and his fortune will result from his intuition that goods shuffling through the system become themselves the touchstones of

wealth. Movement, not production, not increase, is all. Without money or visible goods—without anything produced—the J R Family of Companies becomes worth millions. It is a house of cards, all made possible by the telephone and mails (no fax as yet).

From the novel's very first word, Gaddis stresses the depersonalization of money-making as part of the wasteland in which people operate and thrive. The oral shorthand of the method, so to speak, the interrupted dialogue, the discontinuities are all integral elements of the depersonalization, a distinct part of the vision. As in
The Recognitions,
where identification is often difficult, Gaddis has tried to do for the oral American tradition what Joyce did for written English: rediscover it as a literary voice and defamiliarize it so it seems fresh. His is the poetry, flow, rhythm of routine speech, as much code as communication, as much gesture as word; in fact, a kind of code that has settled in as our major form of communication. Halfway through, we find J R on the phone to Bast:

… I mean about you remember that Ace Development Company which I bought all that stock of? Well see what just happened was this underwriter Mister Decker what he did was when he set it up all it had was these claims to explore for these virgin minerals see so to bring the stock up he found this here Alberta and Western Power Company to merge them by exchanging their stock but see this Alberta and

Western was already losing like ten thousand dollars a month so he hires this shit Mister Wall see for … No but he is because listen, they give him this big expense allowance and like this twenty-five percent sales commission to handle their financing so like remember I got those debentures which I was getting this interest on the Series B right after they put out the Series C? Well see like what he did was first he put out this Series A which then when the interest on it was due he put out this here Series B and used that money to pay it see, see then when the interest on the Series B was due he just put out this … No but so what

if he goes to jail, I mean I'm the one that… No like Piscator [a fly-by- night lawyer] just said maybe we have this lousy bunch of mineral rights and like drilling rights or something on these old Alberta right of ways so wait have you got a map there hey… ?

This is the language of politics (Reagan and Bush without syntax, Clinton without grammar, Perot with neither), television (anchors, sports announcers, interviewers), finance, advertisements and publicity, and our popular musical forms.

That the sound of voices has engulfed the meaning of the novel suggests more than the bombardment of the senses or the disorientation of expectations. "Meaning" is clearly not to be found solely in words or in passages, or in thematic development, certainly not in plot or character; rather, meaning derives from the assault on our ears, from the waves of Americanese suggesting how business is

done. There is a loving sense of language rolling in like surf. The incomplete sounds are like the visual images in a stock market tape— part of an abbreviated, truncated language that, nevertheless, contains very large meanings; and in the same way, J R's periodic appearances— As if from some Wagnerian underworld—Are forms of a coded world that has replaced human communication. Although we hear voices, we do not hear humanity; although we see words, they are not words that shape up to orderliness; and although we recognize that the code must be penetrated, we are denied firm decoding. Gaddis has created something of a hologram: a three-dimensional photograph created by a reflection or an illumination; and he has done it not visually, but auditorily. Words take on not only their printed, sequential look, but a chaotic, disoriented sound, the buzz that lies just beyond us. In one respect, as readers we overhear; and Gaddis's novel is an act of "auditory voyeurism," if we can coin such a phrase.

However much depersonalization is one of the thematic presences of the novel, it is not for Gaddis the end of the matter. He insists on tensions, with the latter deriving from counterpointing depersonalized voices with their (futile) effort to communicate. These are virtually all desperately lonely voices reaching out to express themselves but coming away frustrated and baffled. Language fails them when they attempt to communicate, whether J R with Bast, or Jack Gibbs, another failed teacher at the school, or Mrs. Joubert, or even the people, like the lawyer Coen, who seem to call the financial tune. They all retreat before the bafflement of language, which somehow fails to connect.

Yet the novel indicates they do not succumb; voices and language keep coming even if they miss their target, even if they have no differentiated target at all.

Ultimately, a novel in which language abounds and yet fails is a novel about how feeling, emotion, mutual response no longer function.

Education, finance, acquisition, materiality, each of them neutral when separate, become highly inflammable when intermixed. The school is concerned with finance; J R is himself "educated" into catalog marketing, amassing goods, drawn to nonproductivity. The world of finance is itself bogus, based on counterfeit offers, legal scams, and unthinking responses, on surplus goods being invisibly circulated through the system; with the accumulation of materials based not on their usefulness but on their availability.

While / ñ tells us more bad things about the country than any other postwar American novel, not all of what it says is negative. On the contrary, Gaddis reveals the energy, the push, the optimism involved even in deals that might turn sour.
JR
returns us to the archetypal American boy, Huck Finn, and his—Gaddis's—use of colloquial language winds back to Twain and his effort to forge an American lingo. But echoes of an entire world of American writing reverberate through
J R:
not only Huck and Twain, but Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths in
An American Tragedy
and Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby; in Bast, we sense Hemingway's

defeated romantics. And in that 96th Street apartment, we have something of Melville's "white whale," something mysterious and unsinkable, with J R himself an indomitable Ahab slowly succumbing to watery depths. By recapitulating American literature, Gaddis has provided continuity with the grand themes of our major fictions, and by re-energizing the language in its most colloquial forms he has revealed something unique, in a sense a language within a language.

At its best, the incomplete and interrupted passages rise to the

intensity we associate with poetic expression; at their usual, they create their own terms and force the reader to reposition his or her expectations.

The silent movement of goods from J R's telephone orders to the apartment on 96th Street takes on qualities of a magical process. The myth of capitalism is being re-defined. If J R for a time has the "Midas touch," it is a touch that nobody really feels. It does not involve contact, physicality, anything tangibly occurring. Like the Tristero language in Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49,
Gaddis's has transformed the mailing system into a broader sense of the country's business; so that whatever creates wealth, or destroys creativity, or makes for achievement does so without leaving any real trace of itself. In this

secretive, conspiratorial process, a serious man like Bast cannot flourish. He must either give way to its strange modes, one of which is to compose "zebra music" for a documentary, or distance himself, finally, from J R and his enterprises.

Because so much of the activity occurs on public telephones, or else in casual conversations against a background of competing sounds, the mainstream material, such as it is, leaves virtually no record; and the competing noise from television and radio at the school or in the apartment interacts with other forms of communication to create a confusion of realms. This is clearly Gaddis's point, part of his deconstruction of communication: to intermix noise and silence, to cross over various sounds so as to create misinformation, not fact, and to use the telephone as the instrument of unrecorded interchange so that once words float through wires they vanish. "Thin air" is the context for dialogue, for sources of information, for processes in which goods become transferred from one place to another. This is the making of a capitalistic myth of invisible and conspiratorial power.

Amidst this, almost the sole sustained figure, is J R himself, the sixth- grader, a corporate manager and financial plunger once he gets his enterprises going. After he has studied the market, and mastered futures, pork bellies, and margins, he decides to go for it. Mrs. Joubert, his sympathetic teacher who supposedly knows something of the market, cannot respond to his queries about "hedged commodities" or hedging in "futures" and the like. Yet while J R is obsessed with the ideology of money-making—pointing to water-fountain millionaires and light-bulb millionaires, even locker millionaires—she tries to divert him with images of the evening, the sky, the moon. Health, she

suggests, lies outside, whereas he is linked to insider deals, financial coups, turning nothing into something—All interiors, mysterious and secretive presences. She wants to lure him to "left field," but his is the world of indoor sports, not baseball. In one respect, his education is a success, for he has assimilated the lessons of Whiteback, principal as well as bank owner. The course of this part of
JR
recalls Dickens's
Hard Times,
in which the schoolmaster, Gradgrind, has worked his magic on his student, Bitzer, who has absorbed all the worst features of the former's "choking" philosophy. In
JR,
with school and bank indistinguishable, the good student considers his education marketable.

Despite the energy, the verve, the refusal to quit, the reinvention of the language, despite all this, we return to the novel's major thrust, a terrible indictment of what we have become in the postwar years.

Typical is a passage that describes "Frigcom," an example of technological development gone crazy:

… Dateline New York, Frigcom, comma, a process now being developed to solve the noise pollution problem comma may one day take the place of records comma books comma even personal letters in our daily lives comma, according to a report released jointly today by the Department of Defense and Ray hyphen X Corporation comma a member of the caps J R Family of Companies period new paragraph.

The still secret Frigcom process is attracting the attention of our major cities as the latest scientific breakthrough promising noise elimination by the placement of absorbent screens at what are called quote shard intervals unquote in noise polluted areas period operating at faster hyphen than hyphen sound speeds comma a complex process employing liquid nitrogen will be used to convert the noise shards comma as they are known comma at temperatures so low they may be handled with comparative ease by trained personnel immediately upon emission before the noise element is released into the atmosphere period.…

Translation: Sounds can be frozen into a solid state. All institutions and practices having become sources of parody, only art, Bast's dim prospect, holds any hope of redemption, any chance of balancing venality and corruption.

One of the major conflicts in the novel is between the forces of order—those elements reviled above, in education, the media, finance—And those that create extreme disorder. What is compelling is that they are usually the same forces. Despite all the efforts to contain it, disorder always breaks through; it is systemic. The theme is the assault of disorder on order; the method, flow, stream, inundation. We catch glimpses of this early on, well before J R is clear in our mind. In the character of Jack Gibbs, we have someone who assimilated all the tensions of order and disorder. Gibbs is a kind of Panurge, a man of supreme disarray who is trying to find order in history in a book he is

writing. Yet the book is itself part of Gibbs's disorder, inasmuch as after ten years of sporadic work on it, it exists only fragmentarily. In his efforts to complete this treatise on "a social history of mechanization and the arts"—A kind of parallel idea to what J R represents—he

allows himself to be distracted, interrupted as he is by telephone calls and the chaos of his own life.

Nevertheless, his insights into disorder are clearly those that govern many parts of
JR,
since Gibbs understands that everything we consider order—information, knowledge, fact, detail—is itself an arbitrary imposition on a disorderly, rather different process. Since disorder is so threatening, he reasons, we have created an "orderly" version of things—the most orderly being mechanization—And thus we can come away assured that the world out there is reachable through a schematic imagination. Gibbs, then, is working against the grain, and of course in Gaddis's messy world he must fail, as does anyone who attempts either to tell the truth or to run up against received opinion.

The best Gibbs can do is to read aloud from early passages, or relate his ideas, to Mrs. Joubert; for when he finds his notes in one of the hundreds of cartons littering the 96th Street apartment—Milton's Pandemonium redefined—he is incapable of ordering them into his thesis of disorder. He falls victim, as he must, to the very forces he is attempting to explain. He is part of Gaddis's grand plan of "American failure," which permeates all three of his novels and was, indeed, the subject of a course he taught at Bard College. Its thesis is straightforward: The American failure projects some inchoate ideal but is incapable of finding his (or her) way out of the morass, which can be accomplished only rarely through some form of art. All else is counterfeit. The failure screams "fake," while the successful ones deny that disorder has won.