Should I read them before I read The Recognitions? Do any of you have any experience with them?

Hi all, I saw an old post here where someone asked about Agapē Agape and AI, and remembered that I wrote an essay about very topic this a couple years ago. At the time I just threw it up on Substack and didn't really make an effort to find an audience for it, but I discovered this sub recently while starting to read JR, and it seems like a good place to share it. Happy to discuss further if anyone has thoughts!

A member of my twitter list "Gaddis Readers" tweeted a link to Ryan 'Reality On Toast' Sweeney, @TheCautiousCrip. I found his substack entry to be a worthwhile read FWIW:

Losing Friends, Influencing No One - Issue #2: The Road to The Recognitions Blague, Banana Republics, Books, Books, Books

Ryan Sweeney, Oct 08, 2024:

https://realityontoast.substack.com/p/losing-friends-influencing-no-one-81e?r=28jj8q&triedRedirect=true

He is covering that same pre-Recognitions timeframe this subreddit recently addressed regarding Thomas Wolfe.

I don’t know if this was intentional but I’ve noticed quite often in the prose segments, the fabric of a character’s clothing is mentioned

I wanted to write a longer post but whatever. Gaddis is often mentioned together with names like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Pynchon, but Wolfe bears just as many (if not more... actually, like way more) similarities with Gaddis as those other authors. Thomas Wolfe's most famous book is Look Homeward, Angel, and in reading it I am absolutely stunned at how much it influenced WG. Here are the main things:

• Long, meandering dialogue excerpts exactly like they appear in The Recognitions. I want to emphasize the "exactly" in that sentence.
• A phrase from Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, "the unswerving punctuality of chance", appears in all five of Gaddis's books
• Besides all of that, the prose is extremely similar; Wolfe is almost as allusive as Gaddis to art and literature, not to mention that his method of describing people and things influenced Gaddis heavily.

Regardless, Wolfe is an amazing writer anyway and I highly suggest that all of you read him (especially if you love the first chapter of Recognitions; Wolfe's novels are pretty much just that, but extended to 600-900 pages). I am only now starting to realize how important he was to 20th-century American literature along with guys like Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac.

On Twitter a reader asked, "Why does Emily Joubert go by 'Amy', or vice-versa?". I got into finding an answeer a bit and noted for that reader:

pg 103, my Borzoi Book/Knopf edition, has she, herself, asking, "...how should I sign it Emily? Amy? isn't my legal . . ." pg 703, her father asks, "Talk to Emily since they got back?" pg 712 he refers to her as "Emily" & as "Amy".

My search of the most recently available editon on Google Books showed 37 instances of "Amy" to 9 instances of "Emily".

I've not read it, but my quick scan of The Letters of William Gaddis has him signing himself as "Bill" to his mother, "W" to his intimate friends, "W.Gaddis" to strangers, "W G" to peers, and "William Gaddis" to Steven Moore. Accordingly, I reckon Amy/Emily is simply the author observing that anyone goes by one's name or one's nickname depending upon circumstances.

But is there anything more to it? Does any plot point hinge on her name with the Emily Cates Moncrieff Foundation, especially in regards to her having obtained a court injunction to freeze the assets of both foundations, hers and her brother's?

Hello dear readers of this magnificent artist. My todays question might be of a little less quality that is a norm here, but I would love to ask, if any of you have a Gaddis themed tattoo, or, if you dont, if you have any ideas for one, if you have ever thought about one.

I would love to get a tattoo, that symbolizes that Gaddis is an incredible influential author for me, formative even, as I wrote my thesis about him, as I reread him constantly, as I am trying to devour everything and anything that he wrote and was written about him. One can say that he and Joyce are among my biggest influences and writers that I will forever adore.

For Joyce its simple, maybe you will thinks its even basic, but a big Riverrun on the forearm should do the trick.

William Gaddis on the other hand is a bit trickier, because there isnt really one exact image that I would connect with him, and I do not really want to do passages, as I think anything more than one big word is going to look bad after couple of years. (If it wouldnt, I would certainly get "if it isnt beautifull for someone, it does not exist)

So, with my broken english, I am trying to find inspiration among you, good people of reddit.

Thank you for reading my post.

Hello everybody! I'm reading J R right now and loving it. I'm having a hard time keeping track of all the economic stuff. I know some of it is meant to be chaotic and confusing, but I'm interested in J R's progress in the corporate world.

Does anyone here have a good overview or idea of how he manages to build the J R Family of Companies? Are you meant to follow and understand it? Is it realistic or meant to be realistic?

Alternatively, do you know of any good sources that explain this part of the novel? Like a plot overview with a focus on his business ventures.

Thanks!

Was going through a few boxes today and came across the obituary that ran in The Washington Post a few days after Gaddis's passing.

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.

From my previous post.

https://preview.redd.it/5b8af9u6xaad1.jpg?width=371&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e9195985a81451e50def6a52d77f54a4175ff299

https://www.ilsaggiatore.com/libro/le-perizie

Finally, after so many years from the Mondadori edition that is now almost impossible to find on the used market, il Saggiatore is reprinting it. Still in the original translation of V. Mantovani if I am correct.

I know that editions play a role in that, but if you can help me find a more or less close measurement I would be grateful

The email from the Gaddis Centenary list came yesterday with links to the last two parts of the Centenary special journal issue "Gathering."

These are two work by work guides to all Gaddis's archived but unpublished creative writing.

Links and descriptions from the email are below, and since it seems like this fulfils the complete issue, here is the link to that issue's central introduction page with the full table of contents at the end - https://electronicbookreview.com/gathering/william-gaddis-at-his-centenary/

Ali Chetwynd & Joel Minor - William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished prose fiction, particularly short stories from before The Recognitions and incomplete forerunner projects for his eventually published novels. Those include the two aborted novels that evolved into The Recognitions, notes toward a projected novel about filmmaking that provided foundational material for Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own, and more. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

Ali Chetwynd - William Gaddis’s Unpublished Screenplays, Stage-Drama Scripts, Prospectuses for Film & TV, and Poetry: An Archival Guide

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished creative work in poetry and drama, from a parodic Elizabethan play and the complete script of Once at Antietam to a full western film screenplay and a year of failed pitches for TV drama. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

SPOILERS

I just finished it on audiobook so forgive me if I misspell some of the characters' names.

1. Why and how did Stanley end up as a patient in the hospital ward of the ship near the end of the book? What was the event he kept referring to with Father Martin? A dream?

2. Why did Basil Valentine want Father Martin dead? Unrequited love from the seminary?

3. What happened to Basil at the end? Was Mr. Inononu (the assassin) getting ready to kill him there at the hospital?

4. Did Esme really die or did Stanley make it up to cope with the fact she was going to become a nun?

Also did anyone feel like the book started out more like an honest mirror of society and gradually become darker and misanthropic? I feel like Gaddis killing half his characters at the end was like a statement on his anger with what he perceived to be the state of things. I was very sad (but also found it kind of funny) that he writes in a lobotomy for Mr. Pivner.

Just flicked through my copy (NYRB edition) and I noticed that quite a few words are crossed out on pages 866 and 867. I haven’t read the book yet so I don’t know if this is deliberate or a printing mistake. Could someone please confirm?

Hi everyone, the email announcement of this month's Gaddis Centenary publications just came.

Below are this month's articles, with descriptions and links. There is apparently one more batch to come after this.

Elliot Yates – “Gaddis at Textron: From Fruits of Diversification to Financialization”

Elliot Yates examines Gaddis’s first corporate writing assignment, with the company Textron, which seems to coincide directly with his first conception of the plot for J R. Textron was one of the first US corporations to explicitly pursue conglomerate “diversification” through buying up seemingly unrelated businesses, and Yates shows how this not only helped generate the plot of J R, but functions as a key to understanding its formal design.

David Ting – “Indeterminacy as Invention: How William Gaddis Met Physicists, Cybernetics, and Mephistopheles on the Way to Agapē Agape**”**

David Ting excavates the archived compositional history of Agapē Agape to test what we can learn from the marginal annotations in Gaddis’s working library, focusing on his copy of Susan Stebbing’s Philosophy and the Physicists*. Ting finds Gaddis testing his own ideas against those of Stebbing and her sources, while making outward connections between this technical material and his literary reading in Plato and Faust. Illuminating the novel’s chronological evolution, Ting also provides us a case study in tracking how authors use their reading as a “means of invention.”*

Kate Michelson Goldkamp – “Juvenilia in the William Gaddis Papers”

Kate Michelson Goldkamp surveys the Juvenilia preserved in Gaddis’s archive, finding, among other things, early prefigurations of his “delight[] in the macabre” in some illustrated mini-stories, hints of the boy JR's worldview in studies of US geography, and doodles that prefigure some of the published fiction’s hand-drawn illustrations.

Alan Bigelow – “Gaddis’s Broken Doorknob”

Further memories from yet another student of William Gaddis during the time when WG taught at Bard.

Scott Zieher – “Reflections on and Appreciation of A Pile Fabric Primer**”**

Scott Zieher offers some creative non-fiction in praise of perhaps Gaddis’s least-lauded publication: the lavishly illustrated and sample-provisioned “masterwork of printed ephemera” A Pile Fabric Primer*. How did this mysterious document come to be, and what does it tell us about the creative writer's working conditions?*

Lalita Kashoba Mohan – “Why We Shouldn’t Abandon Postmodern Approaches to William Gaddis: J R**, American Antihero Traditions, and His Indian Inheritors”**

After noting how J R was a reflection of postmodern society and antiheroic traditions in America in the 1970s, Lalita Kashoba Mohan signals a similar postmodern turn in her homeland, India, and other countries "whose economic development is now following America’s earlier path."

Cole Fishman – “William Gaddis as Philosopher: Kierkegaard, Style, and the Spirit of Hegel”

Cole Fishman argues that Gaddis should be recognized for his contributions to philosophy, no matter what the "disciplinary gatekeepers" think.

Francine Fabiana Ozaki – “Originality, Authenticity, Translation, Forgery: Why Translators and Translation Theorists Should Read The Recognitions**”**

Translator Francine Ozaki reads The Recognitions through the overarching debates of twentieth-century translation theory, finding the conflict between Wyatt’s and Otto’s handling of Forgery, Originality, and Authenticity illuminating the concerns of today's professional translators. Questions of credit, treachery, allegiance, payment, and dependency are so fully addressed in the novel that translators and translation theorists should be reading it to help make sense of their own artistic and professional roles.

I’ve read a few novels along with guides, and never have they included information such as “mention of this penknife alludes to so-and-so using one to murder so-and-so.”

Is it inadvisable to use it for one’s first read through? I fear I’m too much of a dummy to read it without one. Are revelations like that really ruined by knowing beforehand?

So I plan to read the recognitions soon but I read here that some people dislike the NYRB edition and how the text is printed so that steven moores readers guide cant be used easily or something? Just wondering if this is true as I like the NYRB editions and its the only one available new.

Hi everyone,

here's the most recent set of publications from the Gaddis Centenary special journal issue. Reddit won't let me post with all the individual links, but you can access all the papers mentioned below from the main page of the special issue, which is here, with a table of contents of everything published so far - https://electronicbookreview.com/gathering/william-gaddis-at-his-centenary/

This reddit forum gets mentioned in the Roundtable about "Para-academic venues."

Then there's a whole article about an unpublished play (Severs on "Faire Exchange No Robbery"), and then some archival research material in the Gold article, a previously unseen Gaddis photo in the Madigan memoir, some Gaddis shopping bags in "Gaddis in Germany," and a letter of Gaddis's feedback on student writing in the memoir by Fain...

New contents below, from the editors' email...

Rochelle Gold – "Pre-Written Business Correspondences and Computer Therapists: William Gaddis’s J R**, ELIZA, and Literacies in Conflict"**

Rochelle Gold brings Gaddis’s early critique of mid-century capitalism into contact with current criticism by Alan Liu and others, who suggest that humanists must bring their own questions, interests, and values to the table, rather than acquiescing to the economic logic of post-industrialism.

Lisa Siraganian – "William Gaddis’s Frolics in Corporate Law"

Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University, applies her expertise in legal theory to Gaddis’s penultimate novel. Following discussions on business law and the controversial notion of corporate personhood, Siraganian reads Gaddis's fourth novel to explore how a business-dominated legal culture transforms our conceptions and narratives of the individual person.

Jeffrey Severs – “Faire Exchange, No Robbery: Critiques of Anthologies and Contracts in an Unpublished Gaddis Play”

Written by William Gaddis in the mid-1940s, “Faire Exchange No Robbery” is a short, mock-Elizabethan play in verse, about early poetry anthologies and the death of Christopher Marlowe. Jeffrey Severs brings this unpublished document to light, finding in it the germ of Gaddis’s career-long interests in art’s relationship to commerce, and in the significance of contracts.

Various – “Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Translating Gaddis”

This roundtable discussion of translating William Gaddis's fiction, with Spanish translator Mariano Peyrou, Portugese translator Francine Ozaki, and Ukrainian translator Max Nestelieiev, took place online on September 3rd 2023. Russian translator Sergey Karpov and Japanese translator Yoshihiko Kihara, unable to join on that day, sent written responses to some of the roundtable questions, which have been incorporated below where the relevant question was asked. The transcript has been reviewed, annotated, and lightly edited for clarity and cohesion by roundtable moderator, Marie Fahd.

Various – “Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: ParaAcademic Venues for discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction”

This roundtable discussion took place online in August 2023: it has been lightly edited for focus and clarity. The Chair was Ali Chetwynd, with Jeff Bursey, Victoria Harding, Chad Post, Edwin Turner, Chris Via as speakers. More about each participant, including links to their individual projects, can be found in their electronic book review author biographies.

Jon Fain – “A Student with Mr Gaddis”

Jon Fain studied creative writing with William Gaddis at Bard College between 1976 and 1978, during Gaddis’s first university teaching job. It didn’t go perfectly, as Fain discusses in this retrospective, which includes a letter of Gaddis’s writing-feedback.

Paul Ingendaay - "'The Most Curious Career': William Gaddis in Germany"

A personal recitation of Paul Ingendaay's career as a "lifelong" associate editor with the Frankfurter Allgemeine*. Ingendaay also shares with us a recollection of the slow, belated but definitive situation of Gaddis's lifework in the German literary canon.*

Mark Madigan – “William Gaddis at St Michael’s College: Memoir and Photograph”

Mark Madigan shares a photograph of William Gaddis, captured by John Puleio, during one of his largely improvised lectures.

​

Alright so this is my first time reading Gaddis, and I decided to tackle The Recognitions. I’m about 130 pages in. I was hooked in the first two sections about Wyatt’s parents (the hunker was fantastic) and the way he grew up but the relationship between Wyatt and Esther has completely taken away my motivation here.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get the nuances here, or maybe this part is intentionally….for lack of a better word, boring?

Does it pick up again? How soon?

Note: I include the All the Pretty Horses film question because it provides better context for his commment.

Taken from the 2009 WSJ interview:

WSJ: "All the Pretty Horses" was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

CM: It could've been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

Hey gang,

I was thinking about what Gaddis might have thought about AI (because why not?) and realized that we probably know quite a bit given his, shall we say "fascination" with the player piano and lamentations about art. In other words, it's not a very interesting thing to think about although it led me to think some other thoughts that maybe are a little more interesting. (Or maybe not, that's for you to decide, I've already decided to post this!)

We know, for example, that Gaddis revered masters who apprenticed and learned how to do things the right way as opposed to the sin of originality where everyone was satisfied with their mess provided it was they who were actually responsible. So, in terms of art, Gaddis strongly felt there was a right way and a wrong way.

Additionally, the Gaddis mouthpieces in his work are very concerned about "things worth doing" as opposed to the absurd things that comprise most of our existence. It seems there are two criteria defining "art" in the Gaddis universe, the thing must be worth doing and then it must be right, which implies following tradition.

In contrast, though, the rise of internet culture and pervasive online access/addiction is the seemingly fundamental truth that our brains are hardwired to chase novelty. I'll be bold here and define two forms of novelty: a familiar thing or reference seen in a new light or from a different perspective and the denotative 'new, original, or unusual'.

With the set-up completed, I can now ask my question: How can we square Gaddis's concept of art (life) as being defined as things worth doing and done the right way which is both explicitly and implicitly traditional against our seemingly innate desire for novelty? I mean, there is a path in the familiar made new, but what about originality?