Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System

By Joseph Tabbi, Michael Wutz, Jeff Bursey and 11 more

Celebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America’s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelists

In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis’s collected nonfiction and his final novel and Jonathan Franzen’s lengthy attack on him in The New Yorker, a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis’s legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis’s reputation: Gaddis’s unique hybridity, his ability to “write in the gap between two dispensations—between science and literature, theory and narrative, and—different orders of linguistic imagination.
 
Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels—The Recognitions, JR, Carpenter’s Gothic, and A Frolic of His Own—are notable in the ways that they often restrict themselves to the language and communication systems of the worlds he portrays. Issues of corporate finance, the American legal system, economics, simulation and authenticity, bureaucracy, transportation, and mass communication permeate his narratives in subject, setting, and method. The essays address subjects as diverse as cybernetics theory, the law, media theory, race and class, music, and the perils and benefits of globalization. The collection also contains a memoir by Gaddis’s son, an unpublished interview with Gaddis from just after the publication of JR, and an essay on the Gaddis archive, newly opened at Washington University in St. Louis.
 
The editors acknowledge that we live in an age of heightened global awareness. But as these essays testify, few American writers have illuminated as poignantly or incisively just how much the systemic forces of capitalism and mass communication have impacted individual lives and identity—imparting global dimensions to private pursuits and desires—than William Gaddis.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9780817381523

Michael Wutz

Michael Wutz, Ogden, Utah, is Rodney H. Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of English at Weber State University and editor of Weber, The Contemporary West.

Book preview

piano

Introduction

Joseph Tabbi

Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, June 2000: in the 300-foot-long gallery of a converted textile mill hangs the Überorgan, a combination bagpipe, pipe organ, and player piano elegantly jury-rigged mostly out of materials you might find at your local Home Depot and RadioShack. Cardboard ducts wrapped in aluminum foil convey bellows, bleats, and moans from air-filled bags of woven polyethylene; a nylon net holds the bags in place; and the ensemble is connected by wires and alligator clips to electronic sensors that detect the movements of gallery visitors. At the Composer Console, twelve ink pens record notes on butcher paper. These dabs and dashes are then transferred with black paint to a 200-foot-long role of Mylar, which winds over twelve photoelectric sensors arrayed like piano keys. The score, derived from church hymns, sailors’ ditties, and the American standard, Heart and Soul, is suitably hybrid; its sound, both familiar and hard to place, is not unlike the discordant musicality of William Gaddis’s last work, Agapē Agape.

Under a ceiling whose structure resembles a ribcage, the Überorgan’s massive biomorphic bags appear delicately traced with blood vessels and nerve endings. The enormous room now houses a human form—but one whose body, heart, and soul are no less mechanized than the turbines and massive looms formerly housed there. The scale of the installation is at once monumental and cartoonish; the sound we hear with a familiarity that fades in and out is also the sound of our own breathing and our own blood coursing through our veins. The idea of making a vast pipe organ from notional organs of the body surely would have appealed to Gaddis, as would the epic construction out of secondhand materials using low-tech sophistication. The Überorgan is, after all, an instrument of organization, a means of overcoming chaos in ourselves and disorder in a world without certainty or absolute values. A combined Übermensch (overman) and overhead pipe organ, the huge installation gives us technology writ large as the human body, belonging to us but also detachable, responding to us but with a dangerous life and energy of its own.

The factory that once embodied nineteenth-century industry in all its vast, alienating power has been turned into an echo chamber—still vast, but now oddly, bodily intimate. Key to the installation is the vent that forces air into the massive bags. These fill out the organ(s), floating them, and making them audible. Gaddis in his last fiction, following Homer, instead of characters invented a number of belly talkers, hallucinated interlocutors who function as a surrogate audience. Gaddis in this last work addresses his lifework to the dead—not to individuals he has known in his life, but to past poets, dead writers, philosophers, inventors, and visual artists. The Überorgan vent is also relevant to the fiction: a sort of ventriloquy, a belly-speak or dream of the dead. This mode of address—irritable, unresigned, a final unrestrained venting—is all the more plangent in that Gaddis knew, during the composition, that the manuscript would be read after he himself was gone; the book would be recognized and received, like all of his work, long after his personal interest in the subject matter had passed.

An umlauted u, printed discretely on the wall at the gallery entranceway, could almost be a smiley face, letting the visitor know that it’s all just corporate fun after all and the bellows and moans are only the sound of the Überorgan having the last laugh.

Composer’s Consolation

William Gaddis’s status as a neglected writer has been repeated so often, with so many sighs and urgent claims for rediscovery, that one is hard put to present his work, posthumously, in any other context: He is the writer who is famous for not being famous enough, as Cynthia Ozick wrote on the 1985 publication of Carpenter’s Gothic; Mr. Difficult, in the words of novelist Jonathan Franzen. Even admirers of his work have come to depend on the trope of neglect. That and his so-called difficulty somehow put him in advance of the literary fashions, a postmodernist avant la letter, with the unfortunate consequence that, when postmodernism would itself become a dead letter commercially, the publishing industry would find yet another reason to dismiss Gaddis.

What is unnoticed, by detractors and even many admirers, is that for a long time Gaddis has been neither neglected nor especially difficult. He has never been popular, this is true, but he enjoyed more than respectable sales from the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic, his third novel, to the end of his life. He received National Book Awards for J R (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994). Late in life, he experienced a celebrity’s welcome in Germany; and he traveled to Russia and the Far East as a kind of literary ambassador under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. The muted response to the publication of the posthumous work, similar in too many ways to the reception of his two early, major novels, was answered a year later by an outpouring of appreciations in Conjunctions from more than twenty fellow novelists and writers. There were detailed essay-narratives by near contemporaries such as Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gass, and Joseph McElroy, but many more, tonally surprising, entries from novelists one, two, and three literary generations younger, Gaddis’s lifelong audience and posthumous hope. All this indicates that the work continues its own existence, a self-sustaining, indeed autopoietic re-creation that Gaddis found most gratifying especially among young people (as he told Tom LeClair in an early, comparatively unguarded interview, published in the present volume for the first time).

Rather than repeat the trope of neglect or attempt once again to introduce Gaddis to a book-buying audience that remains, and probably must remain, recalcitrant, the critical writers featured in this volume place the work in context. Rather than seek to widen the audience (to what purpose?), we follow Gaddis’s own lead in Agapē Agape, a book that addresses itself exclusively to the dead (including the dead within and among us). With that remarkable ultimate scaling down, at once generous in its stance toward reality but concentrated in its aesthetic purpose, Gaddis made no attempt at widening the very small audience he had already foreseen for himself in his first novel, The Recognitions (1955). Gaddis criticism likewise can do without attempts at overt promotion. What is needed is to continue building the network of allusions, literary and historical references, and recognized sources for the similarly networked, similarly integrated world system that Gaddis inhabited, more fully than any American literary contemporary or follower so far.

Networked Narrative

The literary network, as its construction continues, needn’t be limited to readers of fiction. No one who has encountered the installations of Tim Hawkinson (the Überorgan depicted on the cover of this book for example); no one who has experienced the hand-drawn films of William Kentridge (the crisscrossing telephone lines interlinking one man, his office phone, his family, his lover, the Johannesburg city infrastructure, and, ultimately, Schrödinger’s cat in a box); no one who has seen the collage-work of Julian Schnabel (who composed a portrait of Gaddis reproduced alongside the essay in this volume by Crystal Alberts)—none of these diverse audiences would find anything abstruse about a lifelong investigation of networks, systems of organization, or modernity as a continuing standoff between mechanization and the arts. No reader of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri should balk at Gaddis’s expansiveness. After A. R. Ammons, no reader should find it strange that poetry and a narrative of surprising intimacy can be generated by the sheer garbage, both verbal and material, that American corporate culture produces in unprecedented quantities. There is no mass audience for these massive works of contemporary art, poetry, and political philosophy, but the audience is nonetheless sizeable, sustainable on its own terms long after the work’s appearance. The individuals who make up, not a public, not even an audience of nearby listeners but rather a network of fellow creators, are in touch with one another through the same systems and communicative structures that the artists, poets, and philosophers take as their point of reference. The publishing industry in America, for reasons discerned by Gaddis and amply documented in his novels, has largely abandoned any serious interest, let alone the sustaining critical discussion, necessary to reproduce literary works (in stable editions available in libraries and through forums of scholars and co-creators capable of referencing past work as a measure for current production). On every front, commercial, academic, and political, serious writing recedes to near invisibility. Yet none of this means that a readership for serious fiction doesn’t exist. The challenge to Gaddis scholarship and criticism, now that the body of work is complete, the archive is available, and edited editions are in circulation through the Viking Contemporary Classics series, is to bring this work and its readers in touch with affiliated threads in the newly emerging, only partially public, networks linking narrative, philosophy, literary theory, and the visual and sound arts.

Gaddis’s work, uniquely among American post-(cold) war fictions, details the supports and structures hidden from view—hidden by the proliferating languages of commerce, law, economics, technoculture and other professions concerned, necessarily, with their self-regulation, their own survival and reproduction, and their distinction from the codes and languages of competing professions. Most of all, the professional activities so well documented by Gaddis are in constant need of insulation from the mass of disorganized, noisesome, unprofessionalized, procreative life. All professions, as the lawyer Harry Lutz says in A Frolic of His Own, are conspiracies against the public, every profession protects itself with a language of its own, look at that psychiatrist they’re sending me to, ever try to read a balance sheet? (251). Ever try to read a sincere narrative of personal witness by an author who has been taught to write what you know? What can such advice mean, except that apprentice writers should protect themselves from the proliferating knowledges and purposely impersonal expression of professions and disciplines? That the academic representatives of both literary and extra-literary disciplines are housed in close proximity, in the same colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences where most published authors in America now receive their training, hasn’t kept scientific and professional content from being reduced, in fiction, to its exclusively human effects, those that contain all the affects needed for emotional stimulation but only a fraction of the truth about contemporary systems and structures. Technologies, economics, legal mechanisms—in most fiction today these are knowable only to the extent that they can be domesticated, known only as symptoms of something else—namely, in individual pathologies, neuroses, home, and private circumstances that everyone can understand, however vaguely these domestic conditions are linked to deeper, material conditions that produce them. (It may be no accident that Gaddis succeeds least when he purposely reduces the space of literary representation, in Carpenter’s Gothic, to the domestic space of a single home, and registers global conditions exclusively as they affect the lives of a restricted set of characters: on this valuation most contributors now agree, including both Nicholas Brown, writing from a postcolonial perspective, and Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong, taking a cognitive approach.)

With a shift toward a world system come shifts in power that are still not resolved—not least the power to determine literary value, to determine what counts as Contemporary, what counts as American, or even what counts as Fiction. (The question, How Does the State Imagine? and the grand fictions of religious belief are topics of sustained reflection in Gaddis’s essays and occasional writings, collected posthumously in The Rush for Second Place [2002].) Nowhere are the fault lines in the contemporary literary landscape more clearly defined than in the multiple receptions accorded to Gaddis’s posthumous work. Published a few weeks in advance of Agapē Agape, Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay set the tone for subsequent treatment (or, more often, encouraged neglect) in most national review media. Sven Birkerts’s response in the New York Times Book Review, with its gratuitous attack on deconstruction and academic literary criticism, worked to contain any positive reception within the terms of a defensive American literary avant-garde. Among prominent reviews only Hal Foster’s, in the London Review of Books, pointed to the larger context of Gaddis’s art, his participation in a combined literary and technological exploration that opens out (notably in the imaginative critical writing of Walter Benjamin) to an international—one might now say global—conception of literature in relation to technology and the arts.

VR and the Virtual: Gaddis Compared with Franzen

Significantly, Foster points to Gaddis’s hybridity, his ability to write in the gap between the two dispensations, between science and literature, theory and narrative, different orders of linguistic imagination. Taking up this manifold approach, Paper Empire offers a set of fourteen essays by both practical and conceptual critics, writers of essays as well as fictions who in every case move beyond the controversy to a more sustained view of a remarkable American literary presence. More is at stake here than an argument for one author’s importance. By seeking to understand Gaddis, the contributors probe what it means to write realistically in the current global culture and media-dominated age. Systems nowadays rarely conform to our intuitive understanding—shaped as such understanding has been by causal, classical mechanics, by managed economies and official national languages. Least of all can systems be said to be systematic, in the mechanical sense that outcomes can be predicated on the basis of known inputs and initial conditions. Likewise the novel, which emerged out of these same national programs and mechanistic paradigms, has evolved various nonintuitive, antirepresentational stances—although these, too, are resisted by a narrowly literary aesthetic that remains, for the most part, within the terms of nineteenth-century social realism.

To circumscribe the effects of contemporary systems into what can be known, by a single protagonist, a specific community, or an author’s own narrative self-projection (however ironical or limited in omniscience), is drastically to reduce the literary work and its critical understanding. One can find no better measure of this reduction than in the work of Franzen himself. Topically, The Corrections (2001) deals with the same global issues that preoccupy Gaddis. The historical roots of the changing global culture are ably, and often humorously, explored in an international context, though always, inevitably, the effects are registered through a series of individual witnesses, with the coming into spiritual, financial, and sexual awareness of three siblings and their midwestern parents. When news of the world reaches these characters, it is mostly, inevitably, through talk: table talk, bedroom talk, bar talk, boardroom talk, or that most talkative of modern media, the Internet. Rarely however does the author of The Corrections reflect on the material supports for his own medium, in the way, for example, that Gaddis channels talk in J R and Frolic through telephone lines, televisions, and all the other nonliterary media that emerged after the novel itself had already come into its own. The novel of manners, the novel of ideas, and the nineteenth-century realistic novel certainly remain viable as ways of talking about modern developments—but the altered circulation of talk itself can only be hinted at when talk is unaccompanied by the novelist’s self-conscious engagement, in his own medium, with other media and other (less easily registered) modes of communication. As Joseph McElroy notices in his contribution to this volume, the voices in J R are important not only for what they say but also for all that they screen: a wild urban suburban miscellany brought to our attention but not so it sticks together like features of a portrait.

The programmatic refusal of difficulty in fiction, while it holds that living complexity in the background, also limits the way a novelist can engage with an emerging global culture. Like Gaddis in The Recognitions, Franzen often transports his characters overseas, to gain perspective on their American circumstance. In The Corrections, for example, a Lithuanian diplomat and businessman can point out, rightly, that after the fall of the Soviet Union and the achievement of a nominal independence, there is "no positive definition of my country. The dissidence and unofficial culture of critique that helped move the Baltic nations to a precarious political independence (eventuating in a greater dependence on the world system of economic and informational exchange) has no purchase against the capitalist order: ‘How Lithuanian we all felt,’ Gitanas said, ‘when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we’re not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized—this doesn’t make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age’" (447).

The situation is not specific to one post-Soviet state (a rather fortunate one, in comparison for example with the many peripheral states that emerged after the dismantling of the Soviet empire). Franzen’s character Chip Lambert, an accidental American expatriate whose failure is given as a background and measure of the author’s conception of literary success, does little better than his Lithuanian counterpart in explaining recent changes in his own country. Despite his capacity as a one-time assistant professor of Textual Artifacts and the extensive training he’s undergone in all modes of ideological critique, Chip changes nobody’s mind about anything, certainly not the minds of private university students situated to benefit most from the world system. His critical disposition, in fact, fits him only to a career composing fraudulent press releases for Lithuania.com, originally a joke Web site but one that attracts credulous investment, cash in the mail, to this newly fashioned country-as-corporation. Chip does not lack imagination, or pathos—but his serious play, effectual in the realm of Public and Virtual Relations, hardly compares with the focused, boundless, and not yet civilized or even fully sexualized imagination of the adolescent antihero of Gaddis’s great novel of American capitalism.¹

Before Chip gets real, finds a girl, and settles down to write seriously, he engages himself (like so many of Franzen’s contemporaries, and mine) in the creation of a virtual reality (VR), part image, part verbiage, fully constructed and built knowingly, whole cloth, from illusions easily seen through and readily made into objects of satire and cultural critique. The boy J R’s activities are of a different order altogether, comical, to be sure, but not reducible to the terms of parody. The pay phone outside J R’s shabby Long Island grade school is all the boy needs, by way of a communications infrastructure—that and a handkerchief stuffed into the receiver to make him sound big, to create a (patently false) impression of power and authority. No further illusion is needed, because the system is geared, in its operations if not its imagery, toward flows of money and information that need very little human intervention—or rather, since human input is never entirely avoidable, agency tends to be reduced to coded anonymity. In deals that are more dervish than devious, J R engages not in the virtual reality of digital technology but in something more fundamental—what contemporary philosophy terms the virtual. The virtual, as opposed to VR, has little to do with illusion, it is open-ended in its constructions, mostly analogue in its effects despite its frequently digital source code. The virtual moreover remains largely untouched by critique in its many cultural or ideological forms. It is approached, rather, through paradox and parable, the preferred mode for cognitive and philosophical fictions adopted most successfully by Donald Barthelme in fiction and Brian Massumi in his book, Parables for the Virtual. Unlike VR, which preempts rather than promotes creativity, the virtual describes a condition of continued poiesis, emergenc(y), distribution of agency, and transformation. The virtual, as opposed to VR, is more cognitive than reflective, a product of self-referential play rather than a structure built on foundations (even the weightless foundation of computer code). For all these reasons, the virtual is a condition better suited to the limited, socially inexperienced, incompletely formed consciousness of the adolescent mind.

Huckleberry Finn stands as the mostly unknowing agent of American postemancipation racism (and its ongoing expansion into the current world system, notably in offshore, instrumentalized service industries whose phones are operated often by men and women of color). The boy J R, similarly, is the agent of postindustrial capitalism and its as yet incomplete transformation to the network form.

The network model is by now well known, it is no longer a concept belonging exclusively to the avant-garde. In Multitude, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out that the state, particularly the corporate American state that has the most extensive outreach militarily if no longer culturally or economically, has become fully aware of the resisting power of cells and networks, a kind of informal global militia using the same monetary and technological tools that support the world system, to irritate it. (That such irritations can be catastrophic for numberless human beings does not mean that the system itself is threatened with destruction, no more than a natural disaster taking hundreds of thousands of lives much affects the overall South Pacific economy.) But awareness by itself is not enough: to engage with the new reality and operationally to thrive, argue Hardt and Negri, the state itself needs to become a network. The prospect emerges that American fiction too, to be adequate to the changing nature of state power (and the changing power of nature), might also become a network. This argument is implicit in my own essay in this volume, and in the essays on economics, cybernetics, and cognition by Nicholas Spencer, Steven Schryer and Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong. Adequacy, in this case, doesn’t mean a simple repetition or representational accuracy, but a means of understanding, or reproducing in narrative the founding fictions of state and financial power, of pointing a direction for the changes taking place in these spheres. What’s called for is not a change in attitude or a modernization of content, but a far-reaching network aesthetic that has, uniquely in American world literature, models going back to Melville, Emerson, Crane, and Dos Passos. It is to this tradition that Gaddis rightly belongs, not literary modernism, not the literary avant-garde although elements of both can also be identified in Gaddis’s work. Franzen (and a wave of affiliated novelists of the public sphere discussed by Rone Shavers in his essay) may be aware of networks at a topical level. They are certainly adept at the art of literary networking. Franzen for example can have his character Chip post e-mails from a fictional domain named "gaddisfly.com." This is another nod—like the very title, The Corrections, to the author of The Recognitions. It signals a kind of awareness, at the user end, of network power; but Franzen, unlike Gaddis, never goes so far as to recast narrative itself as a network.

American World Literature

The authors collected in this volume are not the first to speak of Gaddis’s accomplishment as uniquely American. Our use of the term, however, especially in the context of an emerging world system, needs some qualification, and a clear differentiation from earlier uses. Gaddis the American original, in Cynthia Ozick’s phrase; the author of the long-awaited great American novel, as the San Francisco Review of Books claimed on the publication of J R—such formulations sound dated not because Gaddis’s claim to preeminence has diminished. The invocation of America as a bounded nation-state has itself come to seem more limiting than otherwise. When we call Gaddis a quintessential American novelist, the term needs to be defined broadly, on the order of an American World Literature. Just as America itself has become a political and cultural force globally, so has our literature taken on global concerns merely by engaging with the materials, messages, concrete speech, and abstract operations of power at home and in its worldwide circulation.

One might argue that it has always been so. From its modern foundations in Emerson, Melville, Poe, and Stein, American writing has been remarkably specific about the making of its own Americanness, its self-fashioning both politically and aesthetically even as the nation (in another formulation advanced by Hardt and Negri) has from its foundation defined sovereignty on a different model from that of the Roman Empire or the European nation-state, not to speak of the short century of Soviet Eastern European and pan-Asian domination. Liberty in the United States, write Hardt and Negri, is made sovereign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of expansion (169). This formulation, while it responds to the receding power of authoritarian states, is not always attentive to the way that an expanding popular sovereignty can also repress egalitarian aspirations. Gaddis does attend to repression and he goes even further, to show in detail how the system is capable of producing deep inequalities regardless of who is operating the controls. The authoritarian Governor John Cates, a formidable intelligence, ultimately has no more power over events than the boy J R, whose unruly energy gives expression to the emerging sovereignty of the multitude. Both Cates and J R are constrained by the same democratic rules and market forces, and both, in the end, make parallel decisions that result in huge losses, creating on balance further inequality but neither one ever stops: Cates is still barking out commands (which will go unheeded) as he enters the hospital operating room, possibly for the last time; J R, the adolescent who’s always asking for help just this once, at the novel’s end has one more idea that he tells to the telephone, left hanging at the other end by a recipient who has stopped listening.

Gaddis is consistent both with his country and his American literary precursors in finding an altogether unique form for such continuity and expansiveness, the space-time compression described in detail by one contributor, Nicholas Spencer, and the overall economic need for continuous growth and market expansion just to maintain the current living standard. We can observe a formal parallel, for example, in the mostly continuous narrative present (from J R on) built largely from recorded speech, and (no less remarkably) we see both the constraints and expansiveness of such power in Gaddis’s decision to restrict his language and his own literary voice to what can be said through actual, existing networks of communication and what can be conveyed (from one scene to the next) through actual systems of transportation. America is the first technological mass society, yet it uniquely and structurally defines the mass, its multitudes and its mobility, in the singular. Gaddis responds with characters no less distinct and individual than those in Dickens, although (unlike Dickens) he refuses to psychologize them: their qualities, like the poetic qualities of Gaddis’s language, are made to emerge through the same networks and systems that impart global dimensions to their individual pursuits and desires, a canvas much larger than that experienced by the bourgeois self in conventional novels.

The perennial neglect of Gaddis is probably a result, not of any inherent difficulty in his work, but of the categories that criticism uses to distinguish types of American writing (not to mention powerful review media whose authors, working on strict deadlines, are operationally incapable of processing long, complex texts). As Klaus Benesch argues in his contribution, to be properly understood, Gaddis should be placed not along the modernist/postmodern divide, nor dropped into the naturalist/aestheticist gulch. High/low distinctions only get overturned at every turn in the writing, sometimes rendering the work generically indistinct. Carpenter’s Gothic, in the end, is neither a modernist narrative of immanence and authorial absence nor the old-fashioned didactic novel it sometimes strives to be, rendering this work neither fish nor fowl, neither Cognitive Map, Aesthetic Object, nor National Allegory, in the terms posited, only to be serially rejected, by Nicholas Brown in his contribution. Rather—or because of this generic undecideability—Gaddis is best understood fully in the American mainstream, a mainstream that has always included a small number of writers (compared to the total national production of fictions), working for a very small audience (The Recognitions), but an audience that (like the country itself) has staying power. Like the Carpenter Gothic houses built in New England, it’s stood here, hasn’t it, foolish inventions and all it’s stood here for ninety years (Carpenter’s Gothic 228).

An American Gothic, then: such work has also, traditionally, found its best advocates among those who can bring the literary to bear on the arts, and on the most exciting (if also contradictory) currents of contemporary thought. The Melville revival in the first half of the twentieth century, though grounded on a continuing, underground popularity, depended to no small degree on the activism of an art critic, Lincoln Kirstein, a man who was also a close friend of Walker Evans. The intervention of an art critic, Michael Fried, was needed to fully establish Steven Crane’s position in American literature, not as a naturalist whose work had these odd, uncontainable elements of impressionism, but as a comprehensive literary artist who, like the great American painter Thomas Eakins, allowed the materiality of writing to surface through the naturalistic content of the work. (See for example the many descriptions, taken it seems from any page of The Red Badge of Courage and the stories, of black lines as they appear on various white surfaces, most of which have the dimensions of the human face and its horizontal counterpart, the page; and see also Michael Wutz’s discussion in this volume, detailing the extensive literary effects of such media-specific notions of embodiment.)

Evans, incidentally, was known to Gaddis and may have been one model for the character Wyatt Gwyon in The Recognitions—a model not for the fictional painter himself, whose works were counterfeits, but for the aura that this young man has among the circle of writers, artists, critics, hangers-on, and just alcoholics (in the lyrics of John Cale) who make up the postwar Greenwich Village art scene. When the literary biography of Gaddis is written, it will be as much about that scene as about Gaddis himself—about the postwar shift of the art world’s center from Paris to New York City (a prelude to the internationalization and expanded franchise evident in the various Guggenheims and MoMAs worldwide), and the generalization of visual, sound, and media art into popular culture and advertising. When the autonomy of the arts is lost, their autopoiesis is possible: the arts, and literature, construct themselves, on terms set neither wholly by the artist nor the culture, but rather, as Gaddis says in his interview with LeClair, by what a specific scene requires, what the work as a whole demands. The length of such work is neither an indulgence nor the result of a preset formal challenge; neither is it a simple reflection of the endless new materials and processes thrown up by modern history and the media environment in which the artist works. In engaging these materials, processes, and new histories, the work finds its own distinct but communicating form, long enough "to accomplish what it comes to need to