J R
Scenes 21 - 30 | pages 149 - 194

Annotations by Steven Moore except as [noted].

< scenes 1--10 | pp. 3 - 59   $   scenes 31--40 | pp. 194 - 251 >

J R
annotations with scene outline
scenes 1 - 10 | pp. 3 - 59    
 scenes 11 - 20 | pp. 59 - 149   
scenes 21 - 30 | pp. 149 - 194
scenes 31--40 | pp. 194 - 251
scenes 41--50 | pp. 251--352
scenes 51 - 60 | pp. 352 - 449
scenes 61 - 70 | pp. 449 - 580
scenes 71 - 83 | pp. 580 - 726
scene outline only  

160.44] Statue of Liberty [...] refuse from one teeming shore: an allusion to the verses inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” (1883):

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

161.18] the dawn of the world: from Empedocles’ cosmogony: see 45.6.

162.7] El hedouli [...] el modakheli [...] barake: from the The Perfumed Garden, a sex manual from the 16th century compiled by Umar ibn-Muhammed Nafzawi.

166.30] Role Therapy and the Decision Making Process: unidentified. 

167.37] Kidder . . . Hornblower:  :  prior to its acquisition by GE in 1986, Kidder Peabody was an investment bank with a history dating back to the 1850s [MR]. Gaddis owned stock in Hornblower, Weeks, Noyes & Trask, a Manhattan brokerage firm.

170.36 Selma Krupskaya. See also 583.12 where the first name is Olga. Maybe an (ironic) allusion to W.I. Lenin's wife Nadezhda K. Krupskaya. [AZ]

171.24] hurry up [...] it’s time: cf. the pubkeeper’s refrain in part 2 of Eliot’s The Waste Land.

175.23] catching light from nowhere, his lenses went blank: see 18.21. [MR]

176.16] what was his name that shot the president over a washing machine: satirizing the many theories for Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John K. Kennedy, it was proposed a dispute with his wife over a washing machine evoked in Oswald "the wish to strike and hurt someone." The supposed theory is mentioned in the May 1967 issue of Esquire, which may have been WG's source. [Greg Werge and Keith McMullen]

178.36] Mongst the giants of money [...] the little church so shy, it whispers I am . . .: unidentified.

179.7] I am the song the Brahmin sings [...] I am the . . .: misquoted from Emerson’s poem “Brahma.”

182.34] that painter of his cutting off his ear: see 49.10.

188.5] Chloe: words by Gus Kahn, music by Neil Moret (1927), parodied by Spike Jones in the 1940s.

188.15] Jack's Little Green Card: a horse-racing tipsheet popular from the 1940s through the 1980s. It is also perhaps the source of the pseudonym Jack Green, author of Fire the Bastards! and a gambling man.

189.33] Gott-trunkener Mensch: a “God-intoxicated man” is what Novalis called Spinoza (ODQ).

189.33] Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens: “With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain”—from Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans (3.6)(ODQ).

190.45] old Shirley Temple movies, Jack Haley [...] she comes out the other: see Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), directed by Irving Cummings.

191.6] The Charge of the Light Brigade: Tennyson’s famous poem (1854).

194.6] The Light Cavalry Overture: from the 1866 operetta Die leichte Kavallerie by Austrian composer Franz Suppé (1819-95).

194.22] The Peanut Vendor: words by L. Wolfe Gilbert and Marion Sunshine, music adapted by Moises Simons from the popular Latin American song “El Mansiero” (1931). Popularized in this country by Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, and Xavier Cugat and their orchestras.

194.29] a demented Virgil for the amorphous Dante: Virgil leads Dante through the underworld in the latter’s Inferno. 

Abbreviated Bibliography
A.  Gaddis' Books
CG: Carpenter’s Gothic. 1985. New York: Penguin, 1999.
FHO: A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon, 1994.
JR: J R 1975. New York: Penguin, 1993.
R: The Recognitions. 1955. New York: Penguin, 1993.

B.  Gaddis’s Sources
EB: Encyclopædia Britannica. 14th  ed., 1929.
ODQ: The Oxford Dictionary of  Quotations, 1st ed., 6th impression (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). Gaddis owned this particular impression, given to him by Ormande de Kay in Paris in 1950.

C.  Gaddis Criticism
Knight, Christopher, Hints and Guesses:  William Gaddis and the Fiction of Longing, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Wolfe, Peter, A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis, Madison & Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1997.  

J R
annotations with scene outline
scenes 1 - 10 | pp. 3 - 59    
 scenes 11 - 20 | pp. 59 - 149   
scenes 21 - 30 | pp. 149 - 194
scenes 31--40 | pp. 194 - 251
scenes 41--50 | pp. 251--352
scenes 51 - 60 | pp. 352 - 449
scenes 61 - 70 | pp. 449 - 580
scenes 71 - 83 | pp. 580 - 726
scene outline only