Agape Agape

Table of Contents

 

 

“Gaddis confronted our modern world without flinching. He mapped and delved. His reach was enormous . . .
Agapē Agape
is the deathbed summa, the parting shot—complete and fully realized . . . its every strange sentence carries full disciplined intention, hurtling towards synthesis even as it writhes and falls. . . . The book is an exalted, paranoid outcry, a last wounded proclamation of the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art . . . we bring to these pages our sense of his great authority and attainment.”

—
Sven Birkerts,
The New York Times Book Review

 

“An excellent prelude to the themes that so obsessed Gaddis . . . Gaddis's strengths were in creating dazzling architectures for his fictions, and in capturing the ironies and rhythms of human speech.”

—
John Freeman,
The Boston Globe

 

“Gaddis's final novel is perhaps his most poignant . . . the themes that obsess the novel's hero go round and round his head in a kind of discordant symphony: Plato's plot to banish poets as dangerous to the state. Freud's elevation of the pleasure principle. Bentham's utilitarian insistence on viewing pleasure as a question of quantity rather than quality.”
—
Merle Rubin,
Los Angeles Times

 

“For Gaddis, as well as his unnamed protagonist, the player piano represents everything that has gone wrong with America. It's the perfect symbol for the mechanization of art, the death of creativity . . . it is also the novel's jumping off point, allowing the protagonist to consider everything from the history of the digital computer to Glenn Gould, to mechanical birds, to modern medicine . . . there's something on virtually every page—an idea, a turn of phrase, a bit of invective, a peculiar historical note—that stopped me for a moment. . . . In the end, the novel represents the perfect introduction to Gaddis's work and thought, having condensed a lifetime into about 100 pages (though looking at it that way, of course, would have pissed him off as well).”
—
Jim Knipfel,
New York Press

 

“As a glimpse into the literary impulse exercised under difficult, even mortal circumstances,
Agapē Agape
is harrowing, resolute, deeply sad, very memorable.”
—
Rick Moody,
Bookforum

“A precisely cut diamond whose brilliance appears at first glance but whose myriad facets—a dance of light and shadow—multiply through reflection. . . . Gaddis rages against the world, but his novel is memorable because he channels this anger into a superb meditation on self-doubt, mortality, and the need for artists to persevere against deaf ears.”
—
J. Peder Zane,
The Raleigh News Observer

 

“Gaddis's last blast,
Agapē Agape
, ultimately leads the reader back to
The Recognitions
itself . . . a breathless epilogue to an immense body of work, an acid tirade all too human with sentiment,
Agapē Agape
could not have cut a more affecting path back to the source, a nearly fifty-year course that affirms the ideal of the opus alchymicum, the work as self-generating recirculations. . . . It may seem to reach us
too late
, after its author's death, but it actually comes
at the proper time
: posthumously.”
—
Ed Park,
The Village Voice

 

“A snarling jeremiad . . . the isolation of a forgotten writer, this time bedridden and moribund, preparing, Lear-like, to divide his property among his three daughters while distractedly arranging evidence of civilization's collapse garnered from various mentors and sources (among them the theoretical physicist Willard Gibbs, cultural historian Johan Huizinga, Freud, Tolstoy's bilious novella
The Kreutzer Sonata
, Svengali and Trilby, even Plato's allegory of the cave and his theory of art as the rightful possession of a cultural elite), building his argument that the player piano epitomizes the death of individuality and the triumph of meretriciousness.”

—
Bruce Allen,
Kirkus Reviews

 

“In his incisive, caustically elegiac final novel, Gaddis conjures up an erudite, drug-addled old gent with a terminal illness, a true monomaniac, who delivers a torrential and trenchant monologue on art versus entertainment, authenticity versus imitation, and death and the dream of art's immortality.”

—
Donna Seaman,
Booklist

 

“
Agapē Agape
was written by Gaddis with the understanding that it would be his last published act as an author. That crushing awareness of his own end is nearly palpable on every page. As a consequence, the writing is as deeply melancholic as it is directed. Thoughts are expressed without frills and with the utmost urgency.”

—
Paul Maliszewski,
The Wilson Quarterly

AGAPĒ AGAPE

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
and
Carpenter's Gothic
; he was also the author of a collection of essays,
The Rush for Second Place
. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize.

 

SVEN BIRKERTS is the author of
My Sky Blue Trades, The Gutenberg Elegies, Readings, American Energies,
and other books. He teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is the editor of the journal
Agni.
He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

 

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.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2003

 

Copyright © the Estate of William Gaddis, 2002

Introduction copyright © Sven Birkerts. 2003
Afterword copyright © Joseph Tabbi, 2002
All rights reserved

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole. Copyright © 1980 by Thelma D. Toole.
.

 

Excerpts from
Concrete
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock, Alfred A. Knopf,
1984, and
The Loser
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Jack Dawson, Knopf, 1991.

 

PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

eISBN : 978-0-142-43763-6

 

 

 

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Introduction

Separating a writer from his work is difficult under any circumstances. With a novelist as personally reticent and artistically challenging as William Gaddis, it's almost impossible. There is no purchase. Legend and hearsay move into the crevices usually saved for biography. And how readily the man recedes into an image—a grainy mug shot, perhaps, as befits one so mysterious and threatening. After Thomas Pynchon, he is the most elusive of our masters, more a literary cipher than a known voice.

The Gaddis of my fantasies exerts a powerful and shadowy appeal: the gaunt figure with his frayed patrician-cum-Jack Palance looks; an updated Ahab in doomed assault on that most persistent of chimeras, the great American novel. Call it romantic twaddle, but these imaginings play no small part in the manufacture of reputations, and Gaddis' is all the more charged for his being so enigmatic.

I'm not sure, though, that reading the novels dispels the mystique so much as changes it, grafting upon the image of the charismatic loner that of the ambitious maker, the artist who would draw his compass line around the vast theme-a-turgy of contemporary American life. Indeed, from his first book,
The Recognitions
(1955), his monumental cosmopolitan epic of forgery and fate, to
JR
(1975), his utterly
sui generis
voice-portrait of American enterprise, to his more accessible recent novels,
Carpenter's Gothic
(1985) and
A Frolic of His Own
(1994), Gaddis declared himself unapologetically serious, a man on the way to the big synthesis.