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Review Fakery and Stony Truths New York Times by Cynthia Ozick © 1997 The New York Times Company |
CARPENTER’S
GOTHIC THIS
is William Gaddis’s third work of fiction in 30 years. That sounds
like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Mr. Gaddis
is a deluge. “The Recognitions,” his first novel, published in
1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary
novels. His second, “JR,” a burlesquing supplementary footnote
appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three
or four. For those whom tonnage has kept away, “Carpenter’s Gothic” -
a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others
- should disclose Mr. Gaddis’s
terrifying artfulness once and for all. “Carpenter’s Gothic” may
be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim. With
fewer publications so far than he can count on one hand, Mr. Gaddis
has not been “prolific” (that spendthrift coin); instead he has
been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions
under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults
or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal - omniscience thrown
into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Mr. Gaddis knows almost
everything: not only how the world works - the pragmatic cynical
business-machine that we call worldliness - but also how myth flies
into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money. To
call this mammoth reach ambition is again to misrepresent. When “The
Recognitions” arrived on the scene, it was already too late for
those large acts of literary power ambition used to be good for.
Joyce had come and gone. Imperially equipped for masterliness in
range, language and ironic penetration, born to wrest out a modernist
masterpiece but born untimely, Mr. Gaddis nonetheless took a long
draught of Joyce’s advice and responded with surge after surge
of virtuoso cunning. “The
Recognitions” is a mocking recognition of the implausibility of
originality: a vast fiction about fabrication and forgery,
about the thousand faces of the counterfeit, and therefore, ineluctably,
about art and religion. In the desert years of long ago, when I
was a deluded young would-be writer tangled up in my own crapulous
ambition, “The Recognitions” landed on my grim table (and on the
grim tables of how many other aspirants to the holy cloak of Art?)
and stayed there, month after month, as a last burnished talisman
of - well, of Greatness, of a refusal to relinquish the latter-day
possibilities of Joyce, Mann, James, Woolf, Proust, the whole sacral
crew of those old solar boats. That,
I think now, was a misreading of Mr. Gaddis’s chosen ground. He
knew what monuments had gathered behind him. He willingly moved
on. He was not imitating a received literature; he was not a facsimile
Joyce. Mr. Gaddis
was, in fact - and is - new coinage: an American original. To claim
this is to fall into his own comedy of “enamored parodies weighed
down with testimonial ruins.” Originality is exactly what he has
made absurd; unrecognizable. Yet if it is ob-ligatory to recapitulate
Mr. Gaddis’s mockery
through the impact - the dazzling irruption - of his three-decades-old
first novel, it is because “The Recognitions” is always spoken
of as the most overlooked important work of the last several literary
generations. Tony Tanner: “The critical neglect of this book is
really extraordinary.” David Madden: “An underground reputation
has kept it on the brink of oblivion.” Through the famous obscurity
of “The Recognitions,” Mr. Gaddis has become famous for not being
famous enough. “Carpenter’s
Gothic” should mark a turning. The title itself, the name of an
architectural vogue, is a dangerous joke. It alludes to a style
of charm that dissembles - that resplendent carved-wood fakery
seductively laid out along the Hudson a century ago, “built to
be seen from the outside,” its unplanned insides crammed to fit
in any which way - “a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions,” according
to McCandless, the owner of one of these “grandiose visions . .
. foolish inventions . . . towering heights and cupolas.” McCandless
is a geologist, a novelist, a heavy smoker with a confusing past.
He has locked up one room containing his papers, reserving the
right to visit it, and rented the house to a young married couple,
Paul and Elizabeth Booth. Paul, like the house, has grandiose visions.
He works as a public relations man for Reverend Ude’s evangelical
operations, which reach as far as Africa; when Ude drowns a boy
while baptizing him, Paul in his inventive fecundity - he is a
desperately hollow promoter - twists this into a usable miracle.
Liz, Paul’s wife - wistful, abused, hopeful, humble, herself quietly
deceitful - is, along with her ne’er-do-well brother, Billy, heir
to a mining combine intent on scheming itself back into a business
empire’s version of African colonialism. Paul, a combat veteran,
was formerly bagman for the company under the chairmanship of Liz’s
father, a suicide; the company is now in the hands of Adolph, the
trustee. Adolph keeps Liz, Billy and Paul on short rations. Obedient
to Paul’s several scams, Liz goes from doctor to doctor, patiently
pursuing an insurance fraud. McCandless reveals himself as the
discoverer of the African gold the company is after, and seduces
Liz. But there is no gold; McCandless is a lunatic impostor. In
the end, brother and sister die of too much imposture. A LL this
crammed-in conspiring, told bare, is pointless soap-opera recounting.
We have run into these fictional scalawags before, rotted-out families,
rotted-out corporations, seedy greedy preachers and poachers, either
in cahoots with or victims of one another, and sometimes both.
They are American staples; but “plot” is Mr. Gaddis’s prey, and
also his play. Triteness
is his trap and toy. He has light-fingered all the detritus that
pours through the news machines and the storytelling machines -
the fake claims, fake Bible schools, fake holy water out of the
Pee Dee River spreading typhus, a bought-and-paid-for senator,
an armed “Christian survival camp,” fake identities (Paul, pretending
to be a WASP Southerner, is probably a Jew), the mugger Paul kills.
Plot is what Mr. Gaddis travesties and teases and two-times and
swindles. Yet these
stereotypical illusions, these familiar dumping grounds of chicanery,
harden into stony truths under Mr. Gaddis’s eye - or, rather, against
his ear. He is a possessed receiver of voices, a maniacal eavesdropper,
a secret prophet and moralizer. His method is pure voice, relentless
dialogue melting off into the panning of a camera in the speaker’s
head. It is dialogue that does without quotation marks, preceded
instead by a serenely poised dash - a brilliantly significant Joycean
smudge that allows no closure and dissolves voices into narrative,
turning the clearest verisimilitude into something spectral. Speech is fragmented, piecemeal, halting and stunted, finally
headlong - into telephones continually, out of radio and television.
Through all these throats and machines the foul world spills. The
radio is a perpetual chorus of mishap and mayhem, pumping out its
impassive dooms while the human voice lamenting in the kitchen
moans on: “—Problem
Liz you just don’t grasp how serious the whole God damn thing is
. . . the bottle trembled against the rim of the glass, - after
him they’re after me they’re after all of us . . . He’d slumped
back against word of two tractor trailer trucks overturned and
on fire at an entrance to the George Washington bridge, - fit the
pieces together you see how all the God damn pieces fit together.
SEC comes in claims some little irregularity on a Bible school
bond issue next thing you’ve got the IRS in there right behind
them with misappropriation of church funds for openers, problem’s
their new computer down there’s just geared to their mailing list
if they don’t build their mailing list there won’t be any funds
what the whole God damn thing is all about, you get these Bible
students they’re smart enough digging up Ephusians but they count
on their fingers nobody knows where in hell the last nickel went.
. . .” And
on and on: fire, death, fraud, money, voice voice voice. The voices
are humanity seeping out, drop by drop, a gradual bloodletting.
It isn’t “theme” Mr. Gaddis deals in (his themes are plain) so
much as a theory of organism and disease. In “Carpenter’s Gothic” the
world is a poisonous organism, humankind dying of itself. The
process is gargoylish: a vaudeville turn. Paul’s scribbled diagram
of a promotion scheme, with all its arrows pointing cause-and-consequence,
is mistaken for a map of the 14th-century Battle of
Crecy. The “big ore find on the mission tract,” a lie, is designed
to lure American military imperialism into Africa. Liz, roused
against McCandless, cries out (quoting Paul muddying it up: Ephusians
for Ephesians, now Clausnitz for Clausewitz), “Clausnitz was wrong,
it’s not that war is politics carried on by other means it’s the
family carried on by other means,” and McCandless, sneering at
tribe against tribe, nation against nation, replies: “—Well good
God! They’ve been doing that for two thousand years haven’t they?” McCandless
is Mr. Gaddis’s strong seer, a philosophical trader in scourging
tirades: “talk about a dark continent I’ll tell you something,
revelation’s the last refuge ignorance finds from reason. Revealed
truth is the one weapon stupidity’s got against intelligence and
that’s what the whole damned thing is all about. . . . you’ve got
enough sects slaughtering each other from Londonderry to Chandigarh
to wipe out the whole damned thing. . . . just try the Children’s
Crusade for a sideshow, thousands of kids led into slavery and
death by a twelve year old with a letter from Jesus. . . .—all
four horsemen riding across the hills of Africa with every damned
kind of war you could ask for. . . . seven hundred languages they’ve
all been at each other’s throats since the creation war, famine,
pestilence, death, they ask for food and water somebody hands them
an AK47. . . .” Paul, meanwhile, is Mr. Gaddis’s weak seer, discloser
of the shoddy morning news: “Draw the line, run a carrier group
off Mombasa and a couple of destroyers down the Mozambique channel,
bring in the RDF and put the SAC on red alert. They’ve got what
they want.” Is “Carpenter’s
Gothic” a “political” novel? An “apocalyptic” novel? A novel of
original sin without an illusion of salvation? It is tempting to
judge Mr. Gaddis as Liz finally judges McCandless: " -- Because
you’re the one who wants it,” she accuses him, “-- to see them
all go up like that smoke in the furnace all the stupid, ignorant,
blown up in the clouds and there’s nobody there, there’s no rapture
no anything just to see them wiped away for good it’s really you,
isn’t it. That you’re the one who wants Apocalypse, Armageddon all the
sun going out and the sea turned to blood you can’t wait no, you’re
the one who can’t wait! . . . because you despise their, not their
stupidity no, their hopes because you haven’t any, because you
haven’t any left.” But not long after this outburst Liz learns
from McCandless’s wife - who appears out of nowhere like a clarifying
messenger - that McCandless was once in a mental hospital. Another
clue hints at a frontal lobotomy. A world saturated in wild despair,
and only in despair, turns out to be a madman’s image. Even
while he is handing over this straw of hope -that the evangelist
of darkest calamity is deranged -Gaddis the trickster may be leading
us more deeply into hopelessness. If McCandless, the god of the
novel and its intellectual sovereign, the owner of that false-front
house of disaster, whose pitiless portrait of our soiled planet
we can recognize as exactly congruent with truth-telling - if McCandless
is not to be trusted, then where are we? Does Mr. Gaddis mean us
to conclude that whoever sees things-as-they-are in their fullest
tragic illumination will never be credible except under the badge
of lunacy? Or does he mean McCandless -whose name, after all, suggests
he is the scion of darkness - to speak for the devil? And if so,
is Mr. Gaddis on the devil’s side, if only because the devil is
the most eloquent moralist of all? And a novelist to boot, whose
papers are irredeemably scrambled in that secret messy room he
is forever cleaning up, that room “like Dachau” where the Bible
is stored upside down? The
true god of the novel - god of invention, commerce and cunning
- is of course mercurial Gaddis himself. He is a preternatural
technician and engineer: whatever turns, turns out to turn again;
things recur, allusions multiply, pretexts accrete, duplicities
merge, greed proliferates, nuances breed and repeat. The center
holds horribly: “you see how all the God damn pieces fit together.” No
one in “Carpenter’s Gothic” is innocent or uninjured or unheard.
It is an unholy landmark of a novel - an extra turret added on
to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion William Gaddis
has slowly been building in American letters. To
coincide with the release of “Carpenter’s Gothic,” “JR” and his
first novel, “The Recognitions,” are being reissued in paperback
editions. Mr. Gaddis, who is 62 years old, is already at work on
his next novel, but he is not rushing -- talking or writing, Mr.
Gaddis takes his own good time between sentences. “It’s in the
concept and note-making stage,” he said. There is no underlying
scheme to his novels, the author said. But there is a constant.
Without giving away any secrets, he said: “There is an obligation
not to bore or be bored yourself in doing your work. If a writer
is bored, the reader will be too.” -- Herbert
Mitgang Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company |
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