JR (3 page)

The implications for this are large, and they have attracted an entire generation of the more innovative writers: those novelists willing to forgo more traditional narrative and more conventional forms of language. Joining the author of J R in these respects are Thomas Pynchon, whose novels seem to work in and out of Gaddis's, in a kind of give and take; Donald Barthelme, whose most successful short stories are obsessed with the disorder that lies beneath every aspect of

our civilization; a little earlier, John Hawkes, an experimenter in jagged, often nonsequential language, a subverter of narrative process. To these we should add John Barth, a steady experimenter in the 1960s, and Joseph McElroy, the maker of arbitrary imaginary worlds. Behind and around them all is Borges, whose short fictions lie as a presence over nearly all innovative postwar American writing.

Although each writer has a different agenda, there is considerable overlap; for besides their commitment to an experimental strain in American fiction, they are concerned with the social and political residue lying in the interstices of order and disorder. Their verbal constructs are not solely self-reflexive, not merely bodies of words

circling back upon themselves. They touch upon information and the way knowledge is transmitted; and how transmission affects our senses, our impressions, inevitably our experience of the realities around us. Of this group, Hawkes and McElroy may appear to be moving us further inward, without regard for larger reverberations; but all of the others, and even these two, are social critics as well as impressionists.

An example: Published within a year of each other,
J R
and Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow
show a remarkable overlapping of concerns. In the first, America is a corporate empire; in the latter, it is part of a multinational cartel. Their barrage of words creates not a wall but a centrifugal force, thrusting us into the world, not away from it. For both, corporate empires embody tremendous energies, rocketry in Pynchon, but an equal burst in the rocket-like J R, a pint-sized phenomenon who touches on several important elements: art, the natural life, the question of information, the ways in which people arrange their experiences. He is like the bottled fuel that burns up to drive the rocket; his telephone calls, so essential to his empire, are

made from inside the rocket, an uncanny image; and interrupted spurts of language are like the other forms of energy driving the engine. Junk may be the ultimate product, but along the way the body politic is infected.

Parallel to these matters, there are other entanglements, reverberations, and modes of disorder in
J R,
one of them connected to inheritance. Taking hints from Dickens's
Bleak House
and its Jarndyce case languishing in Chancery, Gaddis has also integrated such legal complications into his novel.
JR
opens with a scene that involves an inheritance of shares of stock, and an attempt by a lawyer (Coen) to unravel the details so that the heirs can ultimately be cheated out of their due. Playing through is the entire question of what inheritance means when the heirs are diffused about the country, are unable to respond to what is theirs, are indeed unable to find out what is theirs. The point of the inheritance is not only money, but discovery, the detective element, sleuthing, conspiracy, deception. Disentangling the heirs means disentangling questions of authenticity and counterfeit. As in
The Recognitions,
with similar qualities at stake, Gaddis is interested in the chase because it creates not only confusion but unpredictability, uncertainty, indeterminancy. The heirs, such as they are, heave into sight, then vanish, or else become absorbed into other activities; the legal system, such as it is—And a preoccupation with Gaddis because of its potential for doubletalk—breaks down because it depends on complicity and mutuality. Clearly, the disarray of the inheritance theme is part of the more general disarray characterizing all other elements of the novel.

Along these lines, in the apartment, Gibbs and Eigen discuss a new board game called "Split," about divorce. Struggling against his own divorce and losing control of his child, Gibbs lays it out, in typical Gad-

disese:

Wait wait listen Tom listen, idea make a million dollars God damn it listen. Invent a God damned parlor game where's the bottle listen, game about divorce sweep the God damned country parlor game call it Divorce how's that. Every God damned married couple young and old alike sublimate their God damned can't stand each other can't afford to split buy the God damned game for ten dollars sublimate their God damned divorce game call it Split make a million dollars how's that.

This passage and the following seem casual, throwaways, but are really integral parts of how the conflict between order and disorder falls prey to randomness. Gibbs speaks of tossing the dice and ending up with a $2000 orthodontist bill, or he passes Go and owes alimony; or else he picks a card and pays his wife's back psychiatrist bills for $1200. "Split" is endemic to the novel: incompatability of people, obviously; more profoundly, the splits in society that victimize anyone unable to ride the financial crest; finally, the sheer disarray that awaits all.

Happenstance is destiny. With the throw of the dice and the movement around a fateful series of circumstances, the board game is the arrangement
JR
in its largest sense presents. You land on strange squares, randomly, and that circumstantial event leads to a sequence of steps that can undermine the individual. In the throw of the dice, one is abandoned not only to chance but to consequences that are a form of doom.

In the background of all this is a complicated point of view that controls
J R.
There is a Calvinist sense of predetermination, of eternal damnation unless—by chance—one is among the elect. The game "Split" suggests that one enters the world of indeterminancy which, withal its uncertainty, has as a definite end financial and emotional distress. The "game " superficially involves the play between an uncertain throw and the destiny lying on the board's squares; or in more magisterial terms, between life as we move from one stage to another and the fate or doom awaiting us once we make our move. It is both an ironical and a paradoxical metaphor. Among other things,

we can never know where we may end up, however optimistic the toss; just as in Calvinism, despite hopeful signs to the contrary, we may end up doomed and damned. Gaddis's Congregationalist background, with its overtones of Calvinism, rumbles through not only "Split" but the whole "play" of the novel. Whether one chooses, stumbles, or tosses the dice, the Protestant spirit of playing the game for all it is worth is constantly balanced out by the penalties waiting in the shadows.

In one of its ironies, the title would seem to indicate the world of the child. But
J R
or Junior is also a kind of pop title, a form of shorthand for the larger world, a metonymy. The title reflects the way Gaddis works, starting with seemingly minor details of an inheritance and then building slowly and conspiratorily into the making of an empire. After

the "junior" quality of
JR
is validated, the sixth-grader takes on the legendary qualities of a Ford or Rockefeller or Carnegie, except that in his case he produces nothing but a paper trail and a warehouse of surplus goods. The pop title is suitable for the toy-like quality of the enterprises: whatever is excess or surplus becomes part of J R's toy shop; and the "pop" element further derives not only from the popular game of finance but from the fact J R has plenty of pop and also seems to lack a pop or father. In the American mode, he recreates himself so as to emerge not as a junior but as someone larger than life, like those images in pop art that have been with us so long we ignore them until they call attention to themselves by being portrayed in places we do not expect.

So, too, J R—A boy who is ordinarily overlooked, "just another sixth- grader," a preteen with the usual juices—suddenly becomes visible in other ways once he begins to reshape junk. "Junior" is now seen operating in the context of adults, the lawyers, brokers, dealers, and the like who surround him. The title, finally, throws us into a crazy-quilt world in which younger and older crisscross and no longer have any conventional hold on us. Part of the disorder the novel communicates derives from J R's precocity in baffling an adult world, an inversion of expectations. He is not victim, but victimizer; not conquered, but conqueror. Pop has triumphed over tradition.

Another area, not so much of pop culture, but of a parallel youthful world, concerns physicality, chiefly the way in which bodies and limbs are arranged and rearranged, as though in some Picasso-like reorientation of physical elements. Although there is little overt sexual play in
J R,
there is a good deal of rearrangement of bodies, touching, limbs intertwining, running into each other, twisting and becoming indistinguishable. The sixth-grader is awkward in his movements, so that his hands, knees, legs, elbows are constantly brushing others' limbs. He is, as the saying goes, "all arms and legs"; and this youthful awkwardness—particularly noticeable when he tries to get at the telephone— extends to other members of the cast. Jerky physical contact becomes part of the financial world, as though skewed body parts have replaced any emotional involvement. Early on, Bast's elbow catches Mrs. Joubert "a reeling blow in the breast" and she drops the sack of coins intended for a student field trip. The sack breaks—the sexual intimation is clear but goes no further until later, when Gibbs, not Bast, and Amy Joubert spend a weekend together. When Bast attempts to gather the coins on the ground, she tramples on his hand; further contact is then made, but through "reeling," "trampling," "blows." Gibbs is himself angular and awkward in his arrangement of his limbs, out of step, tripping on himself.

What does it all mean, this repetition of awkwardness? It would seem, at first, to be keyed in to the type of disorder that characterizes every other facet of the novel. Limbs are not graceful or symmetrical but, as part of the physical landscape, they reinforce how angular and

out of shape everything is. In another respect, the difficulty with limbs suggests how feeling, love, romance have eluded these characters; so that for the most part, their physicality extends only to elbowing, brushing, grazing. In still another way, the difficulty in finding space for limbs, or for using limbs gracefully, is part of the artificiality of the entire enterprise. The body, which is supposed to be a fluid arrangement of tasteful parts, becomes like the cogs and gears, the pistons and rods of a machine; a robotic object rather than human, lacking softness or give. In such a scene, the body functions not as

something that bends to another and seeks or gives pleasure, but as an element that falls outside human feeling. In a final respect, the entanglement of limbs suggests a jigsaw puzzle in which the parts have not yet been fitted together; or a puzzle in which they do not fit because they do not or cannot connect. Limbs fly free of the body they belong to. Elbows and knees, even hands, are disengaged parts. The fragmentation of the body is not only the collapse of a normalized world but the subverting of possibility, the undermining of meaningful human relationships.

What Gaddis is after is very big game, nothing less than capturing America in its most destructive postwar poses. He is, of course, presenting a metaphor of what we have become, but he is also prophesying where we are going and suggesting that a cultural hell— now and later—is the destiny of the players. A high moral sense lies in this: not the moral sense that is only condemnatory, but one that is outraged at the waste of human resources. People of considerable achievement and potentiality pass through the novel: Bast of course, but Jack Gibbs, platoons of legal experts and financial whizzes, the wizard J R himself, the humanitarian Amy Joubert. All of them, even the hypocrites and masters of scams, Whiteback, Crawley, and their ilk, have wasted their goods. All have been pre-empted, needless to say, by systems, ideas, attitudes, traditions, and conventions that subvert behavior, abort abilities, undermine human capacity, destroy potential. In their interaction, they have proven that social intercourse breeds contempt, that a narrowly focussed desire for achievement leads to waste. Only Bast may be salvageable, because he retains the face of humanity: the starving artist who hopes to practice his art but who, throughout the novel, is addled by everything calculated to suborn his craft.

In matters of form, that there are no chapters, no breaks, no interruption of the continuity of text all suggest that these voices emanating from undescribed presences are part of a particular temporal sequencing. While this may imply a kind of order, it is precisely the opposite. Time in
J R
is not only elusive but imaginatively created; so that present and past are caught up in a relentless, disorderly flow. The fragmentation of dialogue, character, and scene— All aspects of Gaddis's intense modernistic practices—reinforces the

skewed flow of time: future caught up with past and present, past recapitulated in present, and present swept up by J R's various enterprises, some of them already past. In a further play on time, Gaddis keeps referring to "futures," those aspects of the stock market based on calculated risks, the potential performances of a given stock; but these "futures" are also linked to time, in that their performance paradoxically helps to define where the characters are in past and present.

As in so many modernistic fictions—one thinks especially of Virginia Woolf's novels or Joyce's—"real time" is located through various clocks; "novel time," however, breaks free of real time, to create a flow that parallels inner consciousness. The latter is attached to what art

explores, while clock time is linked to the barren matters of the real world: dissolution of marriages, rejection of children by parents or the loss of the children, financial scams, and the rest. All of these are part of the contemporary scene, as Amy Joubert's marriage to Lucien breaks up and he attempts to remove his son from her custody; or Jack Gibbs, in a forlorn love for his cousin Stella, sees his marriage dissolve and further loses his daughter. The same is true of Thomas Eigen: a broken marriage, a lost child. J R himself seems parentless, a Dickens-like waif; and Edward Bast is slowly divested of his family, whether aunts, uncle, or others.