Chaired by Rone Shavers, transcribed by Marie Fahd, and joined by Jeff Jackson and Jacob Singer, this roundtable and discussion took place at the Gaddis Centenary Conference in St Louis, on October 22nd 2022. It has been lightly edited and expanded.
INTRODUCTION: Rone Shavers
For the William Gaddis centenary conference, I wanted to gather together a group of scholars and authors to discuss a subject that I find to be as topical as it is crucial to the future of Gaddis studies: How to approach teaching the work of a man who has sometimes been accused of presenting women and minority characters in a troubling and problematic light? Given current critical demands for racial, sexual, and gender-based accountability in fiction, how to best make a case for Gaddis’s relevance?
What I sought were fresh critical and pedagogical perspectives on the subject, ones that tackled accusations of racial and gender-based inequities in Gaddis’s work head-on. I was not disappointed by what I received. I very much looked forward to hearing the full spectrum of ideas put forth by the four selected panelists, but at the last minute, two participants (Joyce Tsai and Ryan Hacek, you were sorely missed!) were unfortunately not able to attend. Additionally, as our panel was one of the last scheduled conference events, my fellow panelists and I decided to change things up. Impressed by much of what we’d seen and heard prior to our panel, we agreed among ourselves to invite and encourage audience participation by devoting the bulk of our allotted time to a freewheeling, roundtable discussion on approaches to teaching Gaddis, especially during such a politically charged and fraught moment as our own. Thus, what appears below not only answers my question on how best to approach teaching Gaddis and his work, but also goes far beyond my initial expectations. It highlights some very useful ideas on how to incorporate several other strands of important critical discourse—theories on race, reading, and the relation between the two, to be precise—so that the field of Gaddis studies remains well-positioned for the 21st century.
Jacob Singer started things off by presenting “The Racial Subject in A Frolic of His Own,” wherein he uses Toni Morrison’s conception of “racial subjects” and “racial objects” to reveal how Gaddis’s characters, and not the author himself, effectively highlight the racialized “othering” that is subjected to marginalized communities.
Jeff Jackson then followed with “A Reparative Reading of Carpenter’s Gothic,” which, as the title suggests, uses Eve Sedgwick’s conception of “paranoid” versus “reparative” reading as a way by which to illustrate useful, possible ways to navigate problematic content.
This was followed by a Discussion among the roundtable participants, which then opened up for our audience to illuminate further aspects of teaching Gaddis’s works.
Jacob Singer: “The Racial Subject in A Frolic of His Own”
The title of A Frolic of His Own comes to us from the legal system and deals with liability in tort law. Here is an example of the legal notion of “a frolic of his own.” Imagine an Amazon delivery driver has put in a long day at work and has been in some gnarly traffic and will be late getting home. Knowing that she doesn’t have time to cook dinner, the driver goes out of the way to get a pre-made meal at the grocery store. There, she gets into an accident. Who is liable, Amazon or the driver? In tort law, “frolic” places liability on the shoulders of the driver. Amazon can’t be held accountable because the driver went out of her way for personal reasons—hence the term, “frolic.” A legal court needs to consider the difference between carelessness and rogue behavior. As a result, one can conclude that Gaddis uses the title to center the reader’s attention on holding appropriate agents accountable for their actions, making legal “responsibility” and justice central themes in the book.
While there are a number of avenues one could take to explore the ethics of Gaddis’s book, this paper will use Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark to focus our critical gaze on the “racial subject,” defined by characters who describe and imagine “racial objects” within texts. Morrison’s emphasis shifts the focus from the study of people of color to the study of how white characters (the racial subject) describe and imagine people of color (the racial object). As a critical tool, one could easily apply this approach to any marginalized community, as determined by gender, socio-economic status, and/or faith. By using this tool, readers will observe that William Gaddis dramatizes how Oscar's and Christina's racial gaze functions to marginalize others in a failed attempt to elevate their social standing and self-worth.
Before examining the text of Frolic, one should understand Toni Morrison’s scholarship in Playing in the Dark and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s writing on racism, nationalism, and plot. While these approaches can be used to examine Frolic as a product of culture, which is valid and meaningful, this paper will center on Gaddis’s craft as a writer who intentionally uses racism to make his legal satire. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison writes:
I wish to close by saying that these deliberations are not about a particular author’s attitudes toward race. That is another matter. Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanist presence and personae have been constructed—invented—in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served [….] My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served. (Morrison 90)
First, this shifts the critical focus from Gaddis to the characters. Second, readers need to place individuals in larger aggerate groups and recognize how these groups act like an ecosystem for ideas and values—a blend of history, culture, and economics. Understanding the movement of ideas and values between individuals and aggregate groups help readers find nuanced meaning with regards to how they hold characters responsible for their actions, as well as how culture shapes characters. This dynamic relationship is central to a writer’s craft. In other words, every writer has choices when building a character. The writer can present a character as racist but also present how characters became racist as a result of their culture; the latter creates a more rounded and dynamic character. In the case of Frolic, the result is a more nuanced social satire. Readers of Frolic can easily recognize that Oscar and Christina Crease say and do racist acts, but Gaddis also presents how they learned these values from aggregate groups that have shaped their ideology: the Crease family being the most focused group, and greater American culture, as presented in the book, being the broadest group.
Toni Morrison argues that most of American literature is created by and for white audiences. As a result, it might be difficult for some readers to see the racial subject without Morrison’s critical approach, which makes cultural assumptions and values explicit and accessible. By tying Morrison’s scholarship with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay “Race,” readers gain insight into the interplay between characters and plot in novels. Appiah argues that “the hierarchy of races becomes an essential element in structuring the plot” within a number of texts he explores (Appiah 282). From there he proceeds to connect race, nationality, and literature by looking at the formation of European states from smaller nations, like Italy and Germany. He claims, “because political geography did not correspond to nationalities, eighteenth-century theorists were obliged to draw a distinction between the nation as a natural entity and the state as the product of culture, as a human artifice” (282). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalism used “imaginative recreation of a common cultural past” (284) to manufacture national identity. In Frolic, Gaddis dramatizes this hierarchy between white culture’s “othered” groups, such as African-Americans, Southeast Asians, Jewish people, and those of Latinx descent.
In Frolic, Oscar and Christina Crease demonstrate behaviors that swing from racial understandings of individuals to blatant racism. Through this critical lens, readers see that Oscar and Christina use racism to distinguish themselves from racial others in a failed attempt to elevate their own social status. They imagine and describe marginalized communities to create a sense of identity based on a sentimental and manufactured narrative. This is central to their character and, as we will see, the plot.
Gaddis presents Oscar as down on his luck and as someone who doesn’t take responsibilities for his shortcomings. While not a deadbeat loser, he hasn’t lived up to his expectations. He thinks of himself as a serious writer, but he neither derives an income from being a writer nor does he have his plays performed. During a court deposition he is called an amateur because he doesn’t earn a salary as a writer, discrediting him. Professionally, he isn’t taken seriously. Gaddis describes him as coming from old money but nonetheless he has financial problems and is incapable of paying his bills, fixing his car, and maintaining his home. This paints a picture of a person who has fallen on hard times. The result is a character who is down on his luck and underappreciated. Oscar uses the legal system to sue Constantine Kiester in an attempt to overcome his own failures as a writer.
Oscar hires Harold Basie, a black lawyer, in his lawsuit regarding copyright infringement by Kiester. Gaddis makes the absurdity of the case abundantly clear to the reader through puns, hyperbole, and slapstick. Instead of recognizing the absurdity of his lawsuits, Oscar blames Basie for his legal struggles. This gap between the reader’s and character’s understanding creates a sense of dramatic irony that supports the genre of satire. One can also see Oscar’s use of an artificial racial hierarchy when he constantly references getting a Jewish lawyer to replace Basie, falling back on ethnic stereotypes on pages 55, 162, and 280. These moments of racism dramatize Oscar’s ideology and values. But Oscar’s racism isn’t isolated. Christina acts in a similar fashion when describing Basie as a token black in his law firm and when she uses pseudo-science to justify her racist belief that blacks are incapable of counting. She later says that the Indian lawyer Madhar Pai is used as cultural revenge. Gaddis is clearly dramatizing how both siblings share racist ideation, revealing to the reader an intentional pattern by the author. This is done to create an emotional distance between the reader and characters, something that fits nicely in a social and legal satire full of dark humor. Additionally, while there is ample evidence of racism within the Crease families, Gaddis includes American culture in general. The presentation of African-Americans by the media with regards to the incident of the dog being trapped in the Cyclone Seven art installation contextualizes the Crease family as part of a culture that “others” communities of color and teaches and reinforces the ideation of the racial subject. This pattern doesn’t seem accidental, but rather an essential part of the book. While racism can be used for nationalist or economic reasons, Oscar’s case for “othering” is a personally-driven one, an attempt to compensate for his failure to live up to the family legacy of both his father and grandfather having been successful judges.
Central to the book is Oscar’s play Once At Antietam, based on a manuscript Gaddis wrote but never published, and Constantine Kiester’s film, which shares historical source material. The plot centers on two substitutes, who are stand-ins for the same man, who die at the battle of Antietam. Oscar’s play contains elaborate dialogue and an allegorical plot based on his grandfather’s experience in the Civil War. Oscar has meticulously researched the event and presented it in a manner that is historically accurate. Ultimately, the play reads as a sophomoric thought experiment while ignoring much of the drama of war, especially regarding the abhorrent treatment of slaves, thus creating what Morrison calls a “dehistoricized allegory.” Oscar seems more interested in his ideas and elevating his family’s status than telling a story that engages the audience.
One of the most fascinating examples of this allegory is the presentation of the central family’s former slave John Israel, who is described as a “noble savage” (Gaddis 72, 93) who can “turn wood and read” (72), and as a black Epictetus (91). While described in a positive light, he never comes on stage (94). Oscar marginalizes John Israel by never showing him, never allowing him to speak, think, or act. Let’s be clear: John Israel isn’t even a minor character—he’s merely backdrop (94). And while Gaddis is known for using unattributed dialogue and letting characters speak for themselves, in the “play within the play” the pivotal character of John Israel never speaks. This doesn’t seem accidental. This seems to be Gaddis intentionally developing emotional distance between Oscar and his reader. (On a sidenote, it would be interesting to examine archival Gaddis materials in order to get a better understanding of Gaddis’s version of Once Upon Antietam and how his view of the play changed over time.) As Oscar’s play is a commercial and artistic failure, a significant part of the book centers around Oscar’s attempt to sue Constantine Kiester, a successful Hollywood producer, who made the movie The Blood in the Red, White, and Blue, which parallels Oscar’s play. The crux of the lawsuit is that one can’t own history. Both stories share characters and a plot based on the same Civil War battle, but Oscar believes that Kiester stole his manuscript and that Oscar has ownership of that history because it relates to his family. Central to this tension is the notion of popularity and money being determining factors for success.
However, one of the sharpest demarcations between the scripts is that Oscar refuses to put a black body on the stage while in his earlier African-set film Kiester presents “The most widely discussed mass rape scene in screen history? That Uburuwhatever it was, people throwing up in the aisles?” (78). Beyond that, “Constantine Kiester, is charged with using actual film footage of the gruesome sequences which made Uruburu an overnight sensation and broke box office records throughout the country” (78). Here the reader can clearly see Morrison’s notion of “fetishization” play out in Uruburu. Gaddis is clearly criticizing Hollywood, entertainment, and American audiences.
The uroboro, a symbol of a dragon eating its own tail, can be seen as a feedback cycle that emphasizes structure and creates an image that attempts to remove moral responsibility from agents. For example, a Hollywood producer wouldn’t release a gruesome film if an audience didn’t buy tickets to see it, and an audience wouldn’t buy tickets to see a gruesome film if a producer didn’t release it, which echoes the opening scene of the book when Oscar sues himself for running himself over with his car. While the audiences and producers can use this feedback structure to avoid responsibility, the reality is that both parties are guilty and responsible. This pattern is repeated throughout the book, and therefore we can assume intentional.
The examination of Frolic through Morrison’s lens shows readers that Gaddis is aware of how racism is used in American society and savvy in how he dramatizes these problems for his audience. In an age of cancel culture, #MeToo, and racial reckoning, some may fear that any discussion of race, gender, or sexual orientation will result in an unfair exclusion or cancellation of writers like William Gaddis, but by ignoring these conversations much will be lost. The absurdity of social satire only works if the audience becomes aware of what the author is satirizing, and satire never points to just the text alone. It is always in conversation with individuals and groups. In Frolic, Gaddis seemed to have his eyes set on certain targets within the world of literature, entertainment, and the legal world. His book still resonates with readers because the issues being satirized are still present and relevant.
Jeff Jackson:“A Reparative Reading of Carpenter’s Gothic”
When I was asked to contribute to this panel, the first thing that came to mind was an essay by the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” was written in 1995, but it rings loudly in today’s environment where there’s little space given to examining ethical and aesthetic nuance. As Sedgwick notes: “The methodological centrality of suspicion in current critical practice has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia” (125).
In the most basic terms, a paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading searches for the positive in a work of art – what might be useful – even if that work is deeply flawed. Crucially, a reparative reading also considers what might be beneficial and pleasurable in the work for someone who isn’t you.
Sedgwick isn’t ignoring the genuine reasons we have to be suspicious toward various cultures and institutions, not to mention individuals. Instead, she’s insisting on the true complexity of how we engage with art. She writes: “What we can learn from reparative practices are the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-1).
I’ve found this reparative approach incredibly productive in talking with students about films and literature, especially works whose social and political stances aren’t immediately obvious. Instead of students racing to form a critical judgement, they’re encouraged to consider what they might find personally useful about the work.
I thought it might be useful to suggest some possibilities for a reparative reading of Carpenter’s Gothic. Partly because the novel’s relatively concise length makes it more approachable for today’s students. Partly because the text doesn’t possess the formidable surface difficulties of Gaddis’s larger works. And lastly because in re-reading the novel, I was struck by how it engages with politics and history in ways that feel incredibly timely.
So what elements of Carpenter’s Gothic and Gaddis’s overall project might students find useful? At the most basic level, there’s the value of encountering a literary text that requires their active participation. Students have to use their critical faculties to make sense of the story and account for the many actions that take place off the page. They’ll be forced to learn – in Rone Shavers’s words – “the process of processing literature.”
From my perspective as a novelist and teacher of writing, Carpenter’s Gothic could also be studied for its distinctive dramatic and formal maneuvers. Each chapter stages an unbroken moment that plays out in something like real time. And each new chapter forces us to reorient ourselves in time and discover what’s happened since we turned the page.
For students interested in writing fiction, perhaps the most immediate takeaways are Gaddis’s striking use of setting and his virtuoso dialogue. His decision to locate the novel within the walls of a single house focuses the drama in fascinating ways. This grounds the reader in a familiar and increasingly claustrophobic setting—creating an environment that ratchets up the story’s emotional intensity.
Gaddis’s dialogue captures the stuttering rhythms of spoken speech as well as the overlapping and often tangled patterns of conversation like few others. It would be interesting to study the novel alongside Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1968 book Talk, which is comprised entirely of edited transcripts of hundreds of hours of conversation. Both offer startling insights into how people really speak.
Carpenter’s Gothic encourages students to develop a keen ear—not just for the characters’ voices, but for the lies they tell, their fantasies and evasions, their shifting motivations. What do the characters really mean—and what’s really a means to an end? The novel refuses to let you take their statements, no matter how passionately argued, at face value.
Looking beyond the surface of the text offers another important opportunity. In my experience, many students struggle to differentiate the racist and sexist opinions and actions of characters in a text from the opinions of its author. This is a symptom of paranoid reading, which Sedgwick explains is “drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations” (126). In the case of Carpenter’s Gothic, Gaddis dramatizes these corrosive opinions in order to critique them in ways both broad and incredibly subtle.
In many ways, the novel comprises a study of whiteness—its privileges and contradictions. There are probing views of the power structure of WASP-y northern elites as well as Southern white identity where racism holds sway to the point that Paul, a character who may be Jewish, is actively promoting an anti-Semitic agenda.
Carpenter’s Gothic also offers an unusual critique of gender relations. The character of Liz sits at the novel’s center, but she’s often eclipsed by the domineering presences of her husband Paul, her brother Billy, and her lover McCandless. Through these three men, the book deftly dramatizes differing shades of what we’d today term toxic masculinity.
These men paint an inaccurate picture of Liz as uncomprehending and ineffectual, so they won’t have to deal with her real personality. It’s a powerful example of how sexism distorts and erases women.
Gaddis offers various clues that we shouldn’t buy into this portrait of Liz. Billy remarks on Liz’s quiet strength and cunning in managing situations. He says: “They think they’ve taken over, they never even suspect you’ve always got the upper hand.”
Many of the men’s monologues form spectacular examples of mansplaining. Liz sees these torrents of self-regarding speech for what they are. She tells her brother: “Sometimes I almost can’t tell you apart, you and Paul. You sound the same. You sound exactly the same. If I closed my eyes, it could be either one of you.” In an almost purely auditory novel, it’s a particularly damning indictment.
Liz has been called a weak character, but I think that’s missing Gaddis’s larger point. He lets us decide whether we want to dig through the wall of words the men have placed in front of Liz to uncover her true personality. Shallow readings of her character re-enact the reductive view of Liz shared by the men around her.
Throughout the novel, McCandless—with his historical knowledge and political savvy—seems to serve as its intellectual center. Perhaps even as a proxy for the author. But at the end, it’s Liz who is revealed as the book’s moral center. She’s the one who calls McCandless on his ethical bankruptcy and consuming nihilism. She sees his desire for an all-out apocalypse that runs deeper than any fundamentalist preacher’s.
There’s an irony in offering a reparative reading of Carpenter’s Gothic since so much of its charged subject matter could be labelled as paranoid. Though what played as satirical and even cartoonish in 1985 now appears merely factual. The book is so prescient it often seems like reportage.
There’s the novel’s examination of the dangerous alliance between extreme right-wing politics and fundamentalist Christianity that’s currently shaping our country’s future. The section on how the Texas legislature rewrites, distorts, and removes key parts of science and history from its school textbooks might have appeared in tomorrow’s New York Times. There’s even an aside about GMO seeds and how companies like Monsanto are destroying the planet’s biodiversity for their own profit.
Carpenter’s Gothic also provides a more detailed history of colonialism and its brutal exploitations than you’ll find in most history books. In this way, it echoes recent documentaries like Cold Case Hammerskjöld and Exterminate the Brutes. The character of McCandless questions the entire thrust of Western Civilization, seeing much of it as an act of unfettered imperialism and white supremacy.
The novel’s ending deflates all certainties and leaves the reader to decide what’s true and what agenda that truth might be serving. It skilfully avoids what Sedgwick terms “defensive narrative stiffness” (147) – one of the key attributes of a paranoid reading. The subtitle of Sedgwick’s essay is “You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” And of course, she’s talking about all of us. She acknowledges that in deeply troubled times, there are many instances when it seems like we can’t be paranoid enough.
She writes about reparative reading not as a theoretical ideology but as a position—a flexible and ever-changing relational stance toward a text. Her insistence on complexity, nuance, and questioning is a generous reminder of how our most deeply held verities can sometimes be the very things that lead us into becoming our worst selves.
Finally, in the interests of time and audience engagement, we panelists spoke among ourselves before soliciting the ideas and opinions of the audience. What follows has been condensed and edited for clarity, but remains absolutely faithful to our conversation.
Rone Shavers: Jeff, how do your students respond to pedagogical strategies involving either metacognition, reparative reading, or my emphasis on an intertextuality that is also referential and calls into question other texts while the text is simultaneously being written? For example, if you are engaged in the practice of reparative reading, has that been particularly useful in terms of having students approach and understand the text and then be able to unpack it and not make a shallow judgment?
Jeff Jackson: I’ve found reparative reading useful as a way of trying to change the emphasis of how students look at texts. I think it’s important that they have room to feel whatever they want about the text and to acknowledge where they might be triggered as well as areas that are problematic—but not to stop there. I encourage them to stay with the text and move beyond that. I’m speaking from the limited experience of someone who has taught as an adjunct at various schools, but I have seen a tendency for students to find reasons to throw out a text so that they don’t have to engage with it. Reparative reading encourages them to look for specific approaches, moments, and techniques that can be useful to them. And when you start with that, the students tend to surprise themselves in what they find. When you also talk about what might be useful in a text for someone who is not you, it also starts to take the students’ egos out of the discussion.
Jacob Singer: For me, as a high school teacher, the idea of using something like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark relies on people viewing a text in a new way. I think that is for me maybe the most pragmatic tool—looking at the subject and object. There is so much value in a bunch of guys in class seeing that their female counterparts have experienced catcalling and harassment, something that is theoretical to the guys is very real to the ladies in class. There is a moment of empathy and growth that takes place. And the same thing for white students to hear how students of color have experienced racism on and off campus. It can be silencing to have that conversation. But weeks, months, sometimes even years later, a conversation comes up about the fact that that was the only time they have ever been able to talk about sexual harassment and racism in an explicit context. I keep thinking about my moral obligation as a teacher, which is to get these students to be young adults. And what do I want young adults in America to look like? It is part of being able to have empathy, to understand and to envision others. For me, that is also a bedrock experience in being a strong reader.
Rone Shavers: Even as you were saying that, Jacob, my immediate thought was, “How can Gaddis help?” Not that the man itself is going to help, but how we can use his works to bring up these larger sorts of issues? Speaking from personal experience, one of the things I have noticed is that I use Agapē Agape in the classroom partially because it is a text that you can actually unpack. It is very dense. A lot of people tend to overlook it as it being Gaddis’s last work, so I can even pontificate about that. It is a way to approach major issues, such as the death of the elite on page 48, and bring up questions of “the hows,” “the whats,” and “the whys” in terms of aesthetics and art. How to think about art. How to think about or raise these larger aesthetic issues and say: “These ideas and grand debates about art have already been in progress. There is already a tension around them. What you are doing and saying, how you are reacting to the text and what is in it is nothing new, but do not throw the baby out with the bath water. It is important to read and read broadly, even stuff that you initially think requires shallow reading.” The deeper and deeper you go into it, the more you realise that Gaddis is calling all of these things into question. What Gaddis is ultimately raising is the idea that he does not believe in the democratisation of the arts, he is actually writing against that idea, but then how do you decide what is good? And when I drop that kind of information on them, I ask: “Is a ‘Dick and Jane’ book as good as Harry Potter, as good as War and Peace?” They have been taught to believe that “democracy equals good” without actually unpacking what democracy really is, or anything else, or even just being aesthetically cognizant that they are already bringing their own biases into it. So, I think it is a useful way to get them to focus on not only their own aesthetic processes, but also how they got there. I think that Agapē Agape is a wonderful text for that.
But there was another issue I wanted to raise, just among us all. I find it very interesting that we all picked Gaddis’s shorter works. Do you think they serve as a useful entry point for getting students into Gaddis?
Jeff Jackson: I think so. Edwin Frank from New York Review Books alluded to this yesterday when he spoke about the general shrinking of readers. One of the real issues that we face is that there are just fewer serious readers of fiction right now. As we are three fiction writers up here, we feel it personally. It is a real issue. At Davidson College where I teach, I have had seniors who were Liberal Arts majors who told me they had not read a novel since the 8th grade. And so their ability to engage with complex texts is qualitatively different than it would have been fifteen to twenty years ago. That it is something as teachers we need to take into account. I really wish it was not the case, but it is something that I have come up against again and again. I hope when we open this up to questions that people in the audience will have had radically different experiences. I hope my experience is an outlier because it’s been truly sobering. I do think the short texts offer good possibilities given the general lack of skills in reading narrative literary work, especially work that is as challenging as Gaddis. Another possibility might be using excerpts from Gaddis’s longer works as part of teaching. What does it look like to use sections from J R to talk about dialogue, or excerpts from A Frolic of His Own or parts of The Recognitions? At least when you are dealing with undergrads, you might have to surrender the idea of teaching the totality of a work, but at least you are able to give them some of what Gaddis offers. Hopefully this gives students a hunger to experience the works on a greater level and in their full glory on their own.
Jacob Singer: I’m really optimistic about students because of how quickly they can learn when set up with clear learning targets, rubrics, and mentor text. In literature and creative writing classes, I will explicitly state in the assignment prompt that students need to have at least twenty lines of dialogue between the characters. In preparation for that, the students study standard rules for good dialogue and examples. I have taught Hemingway alongside an excerpt of J R. This is how I have brought Gaddis into class. We read passages out loud, talk about aspects of orality in contrast with narration as well as contrast different representations of dialogue.
Jeff Jackson: One of the things I was thinking about with Carpenter’s Gothic is: “What are some other texts and even other readings that are similar?” When I was rereading Carpenter’s Gothic, it struck me that the opening chapter is the closest thing I have read in prose to a John Cassavetes film. It has the same immersive quality and incredible emotional intensity. There’s also a sense of realism that is so subtly stylized that almost seems wrong at first until you get a handle on it, and then it becomes addictive. Both Cassavetes and Carpenters Gothic provide an extraordinary aesthetic experience that’s also piercingly emotional. I think it’s important to make connections to other works—especially across genres—to give younger students multiple ways into Gaddis’s texts. It shows how these works can be in conversation with each other.
Rone Shavers: That is creative. I am struck by this notion of a mentor text. How can we take a Gaddis book and use it as a critical mentor text?
Jacob Singer: As I look at what makes up a normal textbook of creative writing, I feel like there is that sense of: “Here is what you should all be aiming for if you ever want to get published” and “There is all the stuff that you read for fun.” This has long been an issue with genre. There is a lot of room for growth in pedagogy in creative writing programs. Avant-garde works, as mentor texts, provide a whole spectrum of ways of representing dialogue, whether you are using the em-dash to start the sentence à la Joyce or Gaddis, or whether it is this idea of extended conversations that weave through a range of topics. Forcing students to revise their own stories using different techniques can help them to find their voice. What would it be like if you typed out an entire page of Gaddis—or for that matter any writer—and then transitioned it into your own manuscript? Could that exercise bring an inkling of Gaddis into your own prose, as a little spice on top of your dish? Maybe that takes you in a new direction, maybe that helps you define your voice. How can it take you somewhere that you are not capable of getting on your own?
Jeff Jackson: In Gaddis’s texts, especially in Carpenter’s Gothic, I think it’s important to look at the way Gaddis examines racism and issues of class. In that novel, he interrogates imperialism and colonialism and the ways that capitalism and the language of politics can dehumanize us. That’s also activated both in the legal language of A Frolic of His Own and in the business language of J R. I think these are ways in which we can open students’ eyes to how the language around us shapes our views, often without us even realizing it, and how pervasive this phenomenon is in the world. One of the things Gaddis does so well is that he gets us to step back and see this world of language that we are enmeshed in and see how it is putting pressure on us in ways we do not even realize in our daily lives.
I would love to open it up to the audience and hear questions, but also experiences from people who either taught Gaddis or similar difficult texts. Our experiences are necessarily limited, so it would be very useful to hear from others.
Audience Question: Thinking about the threat of difficulty and not understating the fact that Gaddis’s books are difficult books, there is also the question of the reputation of difficulty. I was thinking of my own experience of being daunted for the first thirty years of my life by not being able to read Ulysses until I decided to take a course on it. I discovered it is difficult, but it is also extremely entertaining and pleasurable even when, maybe especially when, it is “difficult.” I was wondering if all of you had anything to say about the reputation of difficulty and how we might address that. I do get the sense that a lot of people maybe were not trying to pick up a Gaddis book because some jerk wrote an article in The New Yorker.
Rone Shavers: Thanks for the question, I think that this is really interesting. When I teach Agapē Agape, I teach it in conjunction with Franzen’s article “Mr. Difficult,” and then teaching through the book, have them realise that it is not difficult at all. It is just written in a style that they are completely not used to. That gives me an entry way into talking about form in literary fiction, or form and literature, and to bring up the formal approaches and the formal choices that Gaddis makes. There is also a Ben Marcus response to Franzen. Then there was a response from Cynthia Ozick to both of them [in “Literary Entrails”] that says: “You are both arguing over types of readerships, when actually this is where criticism comes into play and why criticism is good.” Once again, I am just going to seize on this notion of shallow reading. People think things are difficult simply because they are only used to what they have already encountered. Part of why I really like giving students Gaddis is because of its defamiliarizing process. It defamiliarizes them in a very good way. I think that once you just prepare them for it and say: “You have not read anything like this before,” it removes this initially hesitant barrier of thinking that it is somehow bad because it is not familiar. I also think that it gives you another avenue in which to teach the book and to explain things, by whatever approach that you want to take; it gives you a nice little entry point. As you said, you were daunted by Ulysses until you took a course on it, and you felt like you had to take a course on it. Well, by just slipping them this little, thin book that they think they can read in a weekend… Part of why I like to teach the short texts is that they are useful because students think that they already know what they are going to get and then they are just not ready for what they encounter. It sometimes gets them to the doorstops.
Jeff Jackson: My approach is generally a bit different, as I never use words like “experimental” or “difficult” whenever I can help it. The idea is to say to the students that these are types of works that they have never encountered before. I also emphasize the fact that they understand more of this than they think. When someone tells you a text is difficult that can be a way to dismiss the work and even dismiss your own interest towards it. Even if it doesn’t happen in the classroom, I believe you are planting seeds for students that they will understand later. I also think that they are getting more from an initial reading than they can articulate. One of the things Steven Moore mentioned in his keynote is that Gaddis thought of himself as a conventional writer. I really think that Gaddis thought about the reader’s pleasure. I think that it was important for him. This is something for us to remember when teaching the work, the fact that Gaddis is there considering the reader and providing that pleasure, and to trust that this pleasure will be available to students. We just maybe need to help them get out of their own way so that they can experience some of the pleasures that Gaddis has so carefully planned out for them.
Audience Question: I wanted to ask about history and the teaching of history as maybe a preliminary to certain Gaddis texts. I think that it is a question that often occurs to me as I teach contemporary novelists. Things that I do not think of as historical but, of course, much younger students do. So Jeff’s reading of Carpenter’s Gothic lets me ask the question in a focused way. 1985 is an interesting moment to consider, given what you were saying about the text’s propheticness: in terms of toxic masculinity, for instance, which might be enhanced by understanding what Ronald Reagan meant in the culture. I probably think about these things all the more so because I teach American texts in Canada and I often make the remark that I would fail all sorts of quizzes about Canadian history and geography, and so I cannot expect my students to know certain things but of course, it takes time. Something that occurs to me is that I only taught Carpenter’s Gothic to graduate students. But the evil empire speech of McCandless and playing a clip of Reagan’s one, I am thinking of ideas for, in a compact way, introducing some key concepts that help with the teaching of history, or literature through history. And I think too, and I wonder if it is connected to this issue that often comes intertwined with the inability to unhinge a racist character from the racism of the author—that is, a presentism about things. I often end up saying to students that we need to study the history of racist thoughts in order to have a better understanding of them, as distasteful as that might be. I welcome hearing other perspectives on that key problem of teaching.
Jeff Jackson: I think you are absolutely right about that. The moment that Carpenter’s Gothic is written, the moment of Reagan, is crucial and such an important context for the book. I definitely find that today’s students do not have as much historical context as I would like. Their knowledge of history is something that I can’t take for granted. Even a little bit of historicizing is always useful in terms of trying to place students in the moment of the work. You were mentioning presentism. I wonder about it, too. We live in a world where these racist thoughts and racist actions are so much more at the forefront. In 1985, there are many hateful things that would have been hard for someone to say in public and not find themselves written out of public life. Maybe it’s harder for students today to separate out a racist character from the possible racism of the author because Gaddis was writing at a time when there was an assumed distance between character and author. Things that were unacceptable to say in public then are now overtly said and even officially written into the GOP platform. Back then, there was certainly a lot of racism, but it was coded in a way that is now absolutely overt. Students are not used to reading these codes because they do not have to. So much hateful ideology is now out in the open. I know there’s a lot more to say about this. It’s an interesting point.
Rone Shavers: Yes. I just want to build on that. I found that when teaching undergraduates, especially with Gaddis, there is always a kind of constant contextualising that you have to do. We all love Gaddis but we understand a lot of the connections that he is making throughout the text and a lot of subjects, things, and people he is referring to when he writes. Every semester, I deliberately have to remind myself that I am dealing with nineteen- or twenty-year-old students who now were not even born on 9/11/2001. I have to contextualise things repeatedly, things that I take for granted. Take for example, the notion of JR buying penny stock and converting it into a million-dollar empire. You have to go through and explain how this was before the dot-com boom, before there was even the notion of the internet. And the students are kind of like: “What?” It is important to go through those moves. It can be history, geography, it can be nearly anything. But you have to put things in a framework in order for them to really understand the issues. That is kind of my approach.
Jacob Singer: One of my ongoing concerns is how we use our libraries to teach research. I think that books like J R encourage us to go to the library and maybe look at contemporary history to look at the idea of penny stocks and of corporations. Then try to find out a way to appropriately use the right amount of time so that it does not take over the literature class but instead contextualizes it. Again, meaning is always determined by contexts. So when we provide them with that historical information, it makes things a lot easier to understand. But that puts the onus on us, as instructors, to be omniscient when we are not. Yet, if we teach them research skills and how to utilize the library, there are moments where instead of one person doing the heavy lifting, twenty-five people are doing a little bit of lifting. If they all give a quick presentation at the beginning of the class about what they have learned for homework, all of a sudden you have this ability to create that encyclopedic envelope that again, I think, allows us insight and different pathways into the book.
Audience Question: I know we are running out of time but I just wanted to add this. First, I do not know if you realise this but forging and memorising the masters is exactly the lessons that Gaddis taught us to do. If we were to learn how to write, the idea would be to copy the masters. That is what you are talking about with your creative pedagogy. Take an excerpt and learn to do what the masters did and continue writing until you find your own voice, which is what Wyatt does in The Recognitions. I just wanted to say that I have actually taught A Frolic of His Own to undergrads. I recognised that not everybody is going to be a creative writer and not everybody is going to be an English major, as much as I would like them to. There are a lot of pre-law majors running around. There is also—and you will recognise this—form and form’s content. There will never be a student that comes to my class that does not hear that. And so, I actually use A Frolic of His Own for my pre-law majors, and in my literature course, I entice them over. They read court cases in conjunction with creative writing that is all about the law, and A Frolic of His Own is front and center. So it moves out into other departments and other majors. I think that that is an opportunity for all of us to inspire, especially in pre-law, close reading. I do not know if you have found other ways to incorporate other majors into your literature pedagogy. I am curious if anybody else has done that.
Jeff Jackson: Everyone here has some examples.
Audience Comment: I was just going to add that I studied critical theory under Stanley Fish at John Hopkins University. Fish had gone from writing about Milton to doing law and really close readings of the laws. It was almost the exact same thing. Take a court case and take some of the simple texts like Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and show how the meaning is built up in the first paragraph, and then show a law case. It is pretty effective.
Audience Comment: I am not a teacher so no experience teaching, but just a suggestion to throw out there about disciplines. Just as A Frolic of His Own would work in a law literature course, I imagine that The Recognitions would be wonderful for anyone teaching art history, religion and religious history, or anything to do with myths. I think J R might have interesting connections with the history of the telephone and digital communications, based on the presentations we have seen. This could be another interesting entry point for a lot of students.
Audience Comment: Interdisciplinary classes seem good for a writer who was so deliberate about building fictions around these fully researched profession-worlds. The first time I finally pushed myself to finish reading J R it was to do an off-syllabus paper for a class called “Fictions of Finance.” But I have not taught Gaddis at all. I work in Iraq and the vast majority our students have no literary background at all. Many said that they have never read a novel before the class. I taught Gass, even to non-majors like that, where I think he’s actually maybe even better suited. I think Gass is brilliant for teaching people untrained in interpretation or textual analysis, because he’s so systematic building his fictions up from a fully worked-out philosophy of literature that starts from individual word-choices and how those make fiction. There is this essay [“The Ontology of the Sentence”] where he just runs through all the different ways you can write a description of someone’s hand and compares every version of it and shows how it makes an entirely different universe if you say: “It was plump, pale, stubby, damp” as opposed to “It was damp, stubby, pale, plump” or whatever (330). Making a world as opposed to Rendering a world, he calls it. So you can teach like two pages of his philosophy and then get into almost any of his fiction the way he wants you to get into it. But Gaddis seems almost the opposite to me: I’d assumed you do need all sorts of background or even trained competence to be able to get a handle on the specifics, and that the way to learn how to read Gaddis is to read, or have read, lots of Gaddis. I think it’s generally very interesting to hear from all the people who have taught Gaddis how they found the experience. Not just what they have done, and how have they gone about it, but especially I’m intrigued to hear what they found to be the ways in for students not already predisposed.
Audience Comment: One of the exercises before people would start Gaddis… This is a way from prep school. I have them do an exercise that is, “Put two people in a dialogue and get the dialogue interesting and get it flowing and then try to add a third.” The students often could not get the third voice in. It is some kind of a combinatorial problem that went wrong. It took a while for them to get that. But then we went into J R. I could only do a short part but it helped them see how difficult it was to do what Gaddis was doing.
Audience Comment: I mentioned how I taught A Frolic of His Own, which was in law and in literature. I also taught Agapē Agape, although I think I took an approach much like Rone. It was short and I tried to unpack it intertextually, among other things. I also taught J R. It was on a graduate level and I taught it more than once. I would likely do it differently now because when I taught it, it was much earlier in my career. What I noticed is that I had to slow down with how I teach and what I teach in terms of how much I assign, because between form and content and contexts, things have to take significantly longer. If I can get away with it in my department I would probably take the approach that an undergraduate mentor took with teaching Ulysses and probably take up almost all of the entire semester with just J R. Slow way down because it does have to be heard and it does have all these historical contexts. But teaching the long work now is something that my partner and I discuss frequently because he is a Victorianist. We have debates. He is like: “Dickens is difficult,” and I am like: “Try teaching Pynchon.” It is a matter of slowing down and then teaching them how to read and how to listen. Trying to read it out loud in class is another way. I actually mentioned it to Matthew [Clemmer]. We were talking about Gaddis and we were talking about J R and saying: “J R, you have to hear it.” Usually, my example would be: “Imagine yourself sitting in the middle of Manhattan and just listening to all the sounds and the people talking around you, because that is the best way to absorb it.” But I teach in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The vast majority of my students have not been to New York City. So, I have to try to find something comparable and there are only 760,000 people in the entire state, and we are a pretty big state. So, to get that sort of compactness is something that is going to pedagogically challenge me the next time I teach it. I do not have an answer, but I think how to teach the long novel is something that all of us are going to face, for those of us who do teach encyclopedic works. It is going to take some serious thought to do it well, to inspire that kind of passion that you are talking about, even if those are excerpts, the tease to get them in. If they can read Harry Potter, which is the same length of book and they think nothing of it, and I show them a copy of The Recognitions, which is roughly equally the same number of pages, I can show them the difference between shallow reading and deep reading, with all the notes. I think this is an ongoing thing, no matter whether you are creative, whether you are critical, or whether you are somewhere in between. I did not answer anything, but that has been my experience.
Works Cited
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Race: An Interpretation” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and the African American Experience. Basic Civitas Books,1999: 1576-1582
Franzen, Jonathan. “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books.” The New Yorker (September 2002): 100-11
Gaddis, William. Agapē Agape. Viking, 2002
—. Carpenter’s Gothic. Viking, 1985
—. A Frolic of His Own. Poseidon Books, 1994
Gass, William. “The Ontology of the Sentence,” in The World Within the Word. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978: 308-338
Marcus, Ben. “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as we Know it: A Correction.” Harper’s Magazine 1865 (October 2005): 39-52
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992
Ozick, Cynthia. “Literary Entrails: The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin.” Harpers Magazine 1883 (April 2007): 67
Rosenkrantz, Linda. Talk [1968]. New York Review Books, 2015
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003: 123–52