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INFORMATION to USERS the Most Advanced Technology Has Been Used to Photo­ Graph and Reproduce This Manuscript from the Microfilm Master "On the hole business is very good."-- William Gaddis' rewriting of novelistic tradition in "JR" (1975) Item Type text; Thesis-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Thomas, Rainer Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 05/10/2021 10:15:18 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291833 INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photo­ graph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are re­ produced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. These are also available as one exposure on a standard 35mm slide or as a 17" x 23" black and white photographic print for an additional charge. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 1337987 "On the hole business is very good."—William Gaddis' rewriting of novelistic tradition in "JR" (1975) Thomas, Rainer, M.A. The University of Arizona, 1989 U-M-I 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 1 "On the hole business is very good."- WILLIAM GADDIS'REWRITING OF NOVELISTIC TRADITION IN JR (1975). by Rainer Thomas A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 8 9 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Rainer Thomas APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR This thesis has been approved on the date shown below: Professor of English 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am very grateful for the steady support, encouragement and patience that I have experienced in the course of this project from the University of Arizona professors Professor Jerrold Hogle, Professor Patrick O'Donnell, and Professor Tenny Nathanson. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT 5 I. INTRODUCTION 6 II. CHARACTERS IN JR? CPHERENT ENTITIES OR "MARIONETTES WITH STRINGS IN TANGLES?" 16 III. LANGUAGE AS A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT IN GADDIS' JR? 35 IV. MAIN PART: GADDIS' JR - THE NOVEL AS VERBAL PYROTECHNICS 52 V. AUTHOR AND READER AS SHAREHOLDER IN THE CORPORATE DEMOCRACY OF THE TEST 85 VI. CONCLUSION 102 VII LIST OF WORKS CITED 105 5 ABSTRACT The thesis examines how the American novelist William Gaddis replenishes the tradition of the novel by way of a parodic subversion of its enabling assumptions. In the face of the subject's on-going marginalization, mimetic narrative appears as an "exhausted" literary form. JR (1975) directs the reader's attention to the complexity of language. In that sense, the novel problematizes the conditions for the existence of meaning in fiction. By means of narrative dissemination, Gaddis points to those anarchic energies in oral speech, which thwart efforts to instrumentalize language. Human beings in JR do not possess a recognizable personality, they are metonymic functions of cultural discourses. Deprived of their origins, they have to cope with an orphaned existence. The author also suspends his controlling functions and becomes a narrative stumbling block through disconcerting intrusions. Thus the text is constituted from the diversity of linguistic material in popular culture. 6 A patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions, the inside's a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale, because it's stood here, hasn't it, foolish inventions and all it's stood here for ninety years...(Carpenter's Gothic 227/ 228) "On the hole business is very good."- WILLIAM GADDIS'REWRITING OF NOVELISTIC TRADITION IN (1975). I. INTRODUCTION Most artists that we encounter in William Gaddis' second novel JR (1975) are paralyzed by a problem that might easily be one of the central philosophical aporiae of the twentieth century: the question whether human action is worth doing at all. In a world where the individual cannot find any plausible teleological patterns by which to realize his own nature as a human being and in which the capitalist system increasingly marginalizes the power of the subject, a human being may regard meaningful action as virtually pointless. The French thinker Michel Foucault connects this predicament with the transition between two major epistemes which has taken place around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century: from a cultural system where the human subject was the unified dominant consciousness of the universe, we have moved into the awareness that we can only picture the self as a plurality of fragile subjectivities which can never be identical with its own consciousness. Due to recent developments in the New Physics, information theory, and microbiology, the human being must feel completely alienated from his own species, from the processes of labor, and from nature. Western culture does not reproduce itself mainly through human ideas, but through means and materials of production. In the Postmodern age, every branch of cultural systems has been totally subsumed under Capitalist modes of production, so that we can no longer imagine cultural alternatives to what exists at the moment.* The detrimental consequences of Capitalist production are ubiquitous, because everywhere meaningful use-value is transformed into mere exchange- value. Whereas a prominent Modernist thinker like Theodor Adorno could still insist on Utopian possibilities conceived out of a negative dialectic, Postmodern thinkers do not foresee a reversability of present damages.^ The destruction of culture has left a disturbing vacancy of plausible truths and a puzzling heterogeneity of critical angles which can no longer presume a monopoly of interpretation. This century has eroded traditional definitions of the self. Jacques Lacan's revisions of Freudian psychoanalysis in particular have provided a theory that imagines the constitution of the self in a materialist light as emerging from linguistic processes.3 According to Lacan, the individual is positioned under the symbolic order in socialization, because such a system of cultural signification always * In these passages I am indebted to Frederic Jameson's essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," translated in Huyssen/Scherpe Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels. 2 On the subject of Adorno, I consulted Rainer Nagele's illustrative essay "The Scene of the Other: Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectic in the Context of Poststructuralism." 3 In my remarks on Lacan I am indebted to chapter 6 in John Coward's and Rosalind Ellis' book Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Sub.iect. exists prior to language. A preliminary concept of reality is forged during the mirror stage, because the child recognizes its distinctness from the mother and misperceives itself as an ideal ego which preserves narcissistic self-regard. The child compensates the temporary absence of the mother in the fort/da game. The substitution of the toy for the mother in this game introduces the child to the symbolic order. The negation of the mother's plenitude is modified into positive value with the child's subordination to the symbolic chain of signifiers. By way of language, a culture adapts the child to the law of the Father, the linguistic function of patriarchal rule. This privileging of the father is based on the figural representation of difference as an absolute criterion of value based on the perception of absence or presence of the penis after the castration complex. This actualization of the semiotic self takes place for Lacan along continuous movements from the signifier to the signified. The individual is deprived of the totality of his desires, as the introduction to the order of signs causes an irrevocable loss of emotional plenitude. Each realization of different versions of fragile subjectivities promises and defers the self.
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