William Gaddis - The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings

Table of Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE RUSH FOR SECOND PLACE

William Gaddis (1922-1998) was twice awarded the National Book Award, for his novels J R and A Frolic of His Own. His other novels were The Recognitions, Carpenters Gothic, and Agap Agape. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize.

Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions, a comprehensive look at the effect of new technologies on contemporary fiction, and the founding editor of ebr, the electronic book review. He was the first scholar to be given access to the Gaddis archives in the summer of 2001. Tabbi conducts research in American literature and new media writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,
London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads,
Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in Penguin Books 2002

Copyright the Estate of William Gaddis, 2002

Introduction and notes copyright Joseph Tabbi, 2002
All rights reserved

Stop Player. Joke No. 4 first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly; In the Zone
in The New York Times; The Rush for Second Place in Harpers; J R Up to Date
(in different form), An Instinct for the Dangerous Wife, and Erewhon and the
Contract with America in The New York Times Book Review; Old Foes with
New Faces in The Yale Review; J. Danforth Quayle in Esquire; and tributes
to Dostoevski and Mothers in Frankfurter Allgemenine Zeitung.

eISBN : 978-1-101-17697-9

CIP data available

Paul

INTRODUCTION

NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative
will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will
be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
By order of the author.

Mark Twain

WILLIAM GADDISS EARLY TREATMENT by unprepared reviewers is well known; perhaps less known is the fact that he wrote a good deal of criticism himselfmore than Thomas Pynchon so far, more than Don DeLillo or David Markson, and much that approaches the best critical writing by William Gass, Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, or Robert Coover. Criticism as a way of commingling with the work of other writers was not congenial to him, and apart from one front-page review of Saul Bellows novel More Die of Heartbreak (for which he wildly overprepared, as though he were getting ready to do a dissertation), he published very few commentaries on the work of his contemporaries. Still less was he inclined to comment on his own work or point the way for other commentators. The handwritten notices he left here and there throughout his papers were posted, evidently, only for posterity.

Gaddis did not depreciate the critical faculty; on the contrary, he widened the boundaries of fiction to include criticism. His novels are critical in the sense that each one creates out of past literatures and current languages a separate standard for itself: Disciplined recognitions, as Wyatt Gwyon says in The Recognitions. The nonfiction project that overwhelms Jack Gibbs in J R is quarried from a book-length essay Gaddis himself had worked on throughout the sixties: a social history of mechanization and the arts that brings insights from cybernetics and classical political theory to bear on the artists marginal position in society. Gaddiss final fiction, Agap Agape, continues this critical engagement with technology in relation to the arts, even as his earliest, unpublished parodiesanother form of criticismmight portray Kit Marlowes death at the hands of his anthologists and commercial handlers. In Carpenters Gothic, secular liberalisms argument with Christian fundamentalism plays itself out in a devils debate, with McCandless defending his roman clef against Lesters accusation that the book is mean and empty like everybody in it. And what is all the legal hairsplitting over Oscars play in A Frolic of His Own, if not a continuation of Gaddiss lifelong obsession with issues of copyright, plagiarism, and intellectual ownership? The novel as a generic form was all things to Gaddis; not least, it was a medium for criticism.

Although Gaddis refused to follow after his books with explanations, he would on occasion elaborate themes from the novels in pieces written for radio, monthly magazines, award ceremonies, university colloquia, and one scholarly journal; there even exist film scripts, treatments, and executive speeches from the period when he made a living writing for small businesses and trans-national corporations. As disciplined recognitions, the essays and occasional writings are, in fact, largely patchworks of quotations, not all of them literaryand like his fiction they may be read (or, more properly, listened to) as a score for many voices, from every class and corner of American life. Not all of the pieces are first-rate. Some were never published and a few remain in the rough, as notes for a verbal presentation. In one of the speeches, upon receiving his second National Book Award in 1995, Gaddis mentions the decree by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that all his papers would be burned. He said, simply, I want to be known by the finished productthe opinions and dissentshow I got there is no one elses business. Gaddis felt that way, too. Still, we have the archive, and as a guide through it we have documents that Gaddis entrusted to literary agents and project directors, occasional live audiences, librarians, and future editors and translators. Taken together, the essays, working papers, and project descriptions create a sense of the environment in which Gaddis worked and they reveal, for the first time, continuities between the novels and every form of critical writing that he undertook during his varied professional life.

Gaddiss account of the player piano projectwhich he revived and set aside periodically but never wholly droppedis perhaps the most lucid statement of what he would accomplish, over time, in his novels: a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy. In the archive, boxed together with the essay drafts are pages upon pages of notes that Gaddis assembled over the period of half a century on the history of the player piano. These are the same notes, evidently, that Jack Gibbs in J R and the man in the bed in the late fiction Agap Agape despaired of ever organizing and turning into a finished work. Each of these protagonists, and Oscar Crease immobilized amid boxes of evidence for his original play in