Benjamin Bergholz provides a detailed description of the neoliberal hellscape prophesized in J R. Bergholz identifies a dialectical relationship between our necessary failure as readers to fully comprehend the full details of J R's world, and the historical developments—mainly, the "end of history"—that drive this failure. He asks, how might Gaddis’s decision to impair the reader’s "ability to see what is happening" in the world of his novel help us better engage with "what is happening" in the world outside of it?
William Gaddis’s J R (1975) anticipates and formally embodies the "end of history."1Derived from the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, the "end of history" thesis has most recently been adopted, to contrasting ends, by neoconservative economist Francis Fukuyama, on the one hand, and Marxist theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other. To be clear, neither Fukuyama nor Hardt and Negri believe that the fall of the Soviet Union somehow brought about the "end" of historical events. As Fukuyama writes in The End of History and the Last Man, "what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times" (xii). While Hardt and Negri do not find this development as salubrious as Fukuyama, they agree that once capitalism becomes an "Empire" that covers the entire globe, it "presents its rule not as a transitory moment of history but a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history" (xiv-xv). Popularized in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article (and, later, book) of the same name, the "end of history" denotes a post-Cold War landscape in which the "universalization of Western liberal democracy" would inaugurate, in Fukuyama’s view, not merely "the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such" ("End of History?" 4). J R complicates this rosy conclusion, of course, but it does a lot more than that. Published more than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall precipitated Fukuyama’s "end of history" thesis, J R not only satirizes the idea that the marriage of liberal democracy and free market capitalism would spell the end of "history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process" (End of History, xii); through the novel’s perplexing and paradoxical formal construction, it also performs a nightmarish version of this end.2On the novel’s prescience, see, for example, Joseph Tabbi’s remarks in Nobody Grew but the Business (2015): "One will not find in American fiction a more prescient vision of a collective, corporate life-world than what we have in J R, and none of the direct citations in current fiction of e-mail exchanges, text messages, chat sessions, pings, and tweets have caught so well the spirit of corporatization that underlies these symptoms" (123). Nominally a satire of the excesses of finance capitalism, Gaddis’s novel is most notable for what it omits: the reader is given no chapter breaks, no dialogue tags, no narrative commentary, and no easy way to make sense of the deluge of financial transactions, technical jargon, and chaotic noise emanating from its New York City world. Placed on the same flattened, ahistorical plane as the novel’s characters, J R’s readers begin to see that the "end of history" is more than the logical endpoint of capitalist expansion that is, in some sense, the apotheosis of globalization. It is also the lived experience of global capitalism’s subjects, whose ability to develop a sense of history amidst the blistering pace of capital’s perpetual present can be as difficult as the reader’s ability to make sense of the blistering pace of Gaddis’s novel.
Like a number of other massive and meandering "maximalist" novels published in the last half-century, then, J R is a novel whose formal construction recreates (in readers) the same aspects of globalization that it represents (in characters).3Indeed, as I argue in my book, Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (Nebraska, Oct 2024), J R’s engagement with globalization typifies a broader shift in the sweeping and self-reflexive genre of fiction that has been dubbed the "maximalist novel." Placing Gaddis alongside ambitious and interconnected novelists publishing all over the globe—including Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Marlon James, Zia Haider Rahman, and Namwali Serpell—Swallowing a World argues that the maximalist novel is no longer (only) an American genre; it is a global genre whose members are increasingly interested in contesting the effects of globalization. For different approaches to the maximalist novel, see Stefano Ercolino’s The Maximalist Novel (2014) and Nick Levey’s Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature (2016). For other approaches to the "big, ambitious novel" engaging directly with Gaddis, see Frederick Karl’s "The Mega-Novel" (1985); Tom LeClair’s The Art of Excess (1989); and Stephen Burn’s "The Collapse of Everything" (2007). Gaddis’s novel addresses the globalization of capitalism, of course, but it also addresses how this process impacts what Frederic Jameson famously describes as the "waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way" (21).4That Jameson makes this observation in a book that charges postmodern art with ignoring, misconstruing, and otherwise abdicating its relationship to the past points to a subtext of this article: that postmodern authors do not necessarily embrace the loss or abandonment of historicity, as Jameson contends, but often address this "loss" directly in their fiction. While it is beyond the scope of this article to engage at length in the debate concerning postmodernism’s complicated relationship to history, it is worth noting that postmodern literature is often interested, and even obsessed, with history: with its impact on the present, its unsettling relationship with fiction, and art’s always-already limited ability to re-present it. Written by a novelist whose connection to postmodernism has been a matter of some contention, J R fits but also modifies this mold. As self-reflexive as the "historiographic metafiction" studied by Linda Hutcheon (among others), J R is less interested in art’s inability to represent the past—à la, say, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—than its (and our) inability to respond to the present. For an elaboration and defense of "historiographic metafiction," see Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988). For a broader history of postmodernism as a concept, see Hans Bertens’s The Idea of Postmodernism (1995). For a more recent work attempting to eschew the "top-down (theory-led)" (2) approaches of Jameson as well as Hutcheon, see Theophilus Savvas’s American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past (2011). For J R’s characters, the global expansion of (late) capitalism—particularly the fast-paced, decontextualized world of finance capitalism—occludes the "active" experience of history because the speed and complexity of financial exchange requires that those who "play to win" (107) obliterate all qualitative, contextual, and historical distinctions under the aegis of abstract quantification. "I mean it’s just different electric numbers on these checks," as the novel’s eleven-year old title character puts it, "that’s all Mary Lou honey that’s all this Mister Wall that’s all these here forks that’s all any of it is" (173).5All nonbracketed ellipses, grammatical errors, and nonstandard punctuation in quotations are Gaddis’s In a perverse sense, JR is quite right; as the "outstanding Americans" (91) he meets during a field trip to Wall Street repeatedly instruct him, JR’s ability to "play to win" is contingent upon his ability to treat sex workers ("Mary Lou honey"), forks, and even entire nations as "different electric numbers," to be forgotten as soon as they can be exchanged for other electric numbers in a process that repeats itself ad infinitum. Gaddis is clearly critical of the deleterious effects that this process of abstraction has on the individuals and communities being reduced to "different electric numbers," but he also incorporates it into the structure of his novel. Because J R abandons most of the formal structures—dialogue tags, paragraph and chapter breaks, narrative commentary—by which one might convert its cacophony of noise into coherent, comprehensible, and thus historical bits of information, the novel puts readers in the position of forgetting about the qualitative differences between sex workers and forks as well. Without a narrator to help recall previous scenes, interpret the action at hand, or even signify who is speaking, the reader’s relation to the historical situation begins to mimic that of the characters. We, too, are stuck in the bleak world that Mark Fisher has dubbed "capitalist realism," where linking cause with effect, and therefore assigning historical responsibility or imagining alternative futures, can feel as difficult as keeping up with the deluge of voices surrounding us.
All of this sounds, and indeed is, rather challenging. But it is also consistent with one of the fundamental challenges facing any individual or group hoping to change the version of (neoliberal, neocolonial, global) capitalism that is so expertly anticipated and embodied in J R: overcoming its complexity.6For more on J R’s engagement with neoliberalism, see David Sugarman’s "A little space problem" (2021). For more on the novel’s global contours, see Joseph Tabbi’s "Introduction" in Paper Empire (2007). For more on J R’s engagement with neocolonialism, see the second section of this article. "The more complex a system is," as globalization theorist Saskia Sassen argues, "the harder it is to understand, the harder it is to pinpoint accountability, and the harder it is for anyone in the system to feel accountable" (215). Following Sassen, we might say that the speed and complexity of the global financial system imagined in J R amount to internal antidotes to resistance, because they occlude understanding and accountability at the same time. J R’s formal presentation also occludes understanding, and the central question of the present article is what value such aesthetic occlusion might serve. Put differently, if one accepts Sassen’s claim that finance capitalism’s "enormous capacities for intermediation . . . function as a kind of haze, impairing our ability to see what is happening" (14), then how might Gaddis’s decision to impair the reader’s "ability to see what is happening" in the world of his novel help us better engage with "what is happening" in the world outside of it? Once asked in an interview what "positive social/political effect" he would want his fiction to have, Gaddis replied, "[o]bviously quite the opposite of what the work portrays" ("PW Interviews", 57). To what extent, if any, does his decision to formally recreate the "social/political" problems represented in J R contribute to this goal?
This is, in some sense, the question that has beguiled J R’s readers since it was first published. My emphasis on the "end of history" is new, yes, but critics have debated the (cognitive, ethical, political, imaginative) consequences of engaging with J R’s paradoxical and perplexing form for more than four decades. Patrick O’Donnell, for example, asserts that "Gaddis’s parody is so systematic . . . that it becomes a discursive, parasitic ‘order’ that replicates, in part, what it parodies" (176). O'Donnell then looks to the brief moments in J R when "the body is represented as an ‘alternative’ to voice" (179), the latter of which is always-already complicit in the systems the novel satirizes. Steven Moore follows a similar line of reasoning, arguing that the fleeting aesthetic victory of Edward Bast, in the form of a piece for unaccompanied cello scribbled with a crayon, signifies a sign of redemption (98). In this argument Moore echoes Gaddis himself, who once claimed that Bast’s ability to (finally) create something on his own terms represents the “real note of hope in J R” ("The Art of Fiction", 289).
The assumption shared by O’Donnell, Moore, and apparently Gaddis is one that undergirds many debates about J R. Readers searching for a path out of the neoliberal hellscape prophesized in J R, in this line of thinking, should look to the content of Gaddis’s novel—to the romantic composition of Bast, or the kindness of Amy Joubert, or the quiet resistance of Beaton.7Scholars who locate hope in the novel’s content include the aforementioned O’Donnell and Moore as well as Christopher J. Knight and Tim Conley. See Knight’s Hints and Guesses (1997) and Conley’s "This Little Prodigy Went to Market" (2010). Pairing theorists of globalization with the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno—a Frankfurt School philosopher whose absence from conversations about Gaddis is somewhat surprising, given their shared interest in the intersections of art and capitalism—this article takes a different approach. Taking as my starting point Adorno’s assertion that a "successful work of art . . . is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure" ("Cultural Criticism and Society", 32), I argue that J R’s most significant "social/political effect" appears in neither its satirical treatment of capitalism nor in the minor but meaningful moments when characters challenge the hegemony of this system. It does not "appear" in the novel at all, strictly speaking, but is instead embedded in the tension between J R’s critical treatment of the "end of history" and its formal enactment of this "end." Since the latter "embod[ies] the contradictions" of the former, the novel challenges readers to engage in a relentless form of (historical, social, self) reflection which Adorno would call "dialectical.8The theoretical coalition employed in this article also forms the bedrock of my forthcoming Swallowing a World. There, I pair theorists of globalization (e.g., Jameson, Sassen, Bauman, Appadurai, Giddens, etc.) with the aesthetics of Adorno to both (a) understand the historical problems represented in maximalist novels but also (b) analyze how the paradoxes of maximalist form challenge readers to dialectically recognize, reflect upon, and potentially resist these problems in our own lives.
To understand the value of this approach, we might briefly consider its opposite. Broadly speaking, the content of J R delivers the "news," as Jonathan Franzen remarks in "Mr. Difficult," that "American life is shallow, fraudulent, venal, and hostile to artists." But, in itself, this "news" is not particularly new, since, as Franzen laments, "there never has been and never will be a reader who is unpersuaded of this ‘news’ on page 10 but persuaded on page 726" (262). A reader who actually gets to page 726 (Franzen claims to have stopped at page 469 [248]), however, might realize that the value of reading J R comes less from the "news" offered by the novel than from the ongoing, unsettling, and dialectical process through which readers receive such news. Because this process exposes the brutal asymmetries of capitalist expansion and formally embodies the speed, complexity, and penchant for abstraction that allows these asymmetries to persist in the present, it challenges readers to not only analyze but to also experience the ways in which the global financial system limits "our ability to see what is happening" and, hence, to do anything about it. Tasked with experiencing this "objective contradiction" through the "innermost structure" of Gaddis’s novel, readers can move in one of two directions. We can declare that we have "failed" and move on to "warmer books" (248), as Franzen would have it, or we can dialectically consider the relationship between our failure as readers and the historical developments—mainly, the "end of history"—that drive this failure.9In this sense, J R arguably enacts a version of the "cognitive mapping" that was originally theorized in the final pages of Jameson’s postmodernism essay, and has since been updated by "planetary" critics such as Christian Moraru. Described as an "as yet unimaginable new mode of representing" the "world space of multinational capital"—an apt description, one might argue, for J R—Jameson argues that the "projection of a global cognitive mapping" may help us "begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as social confusion" (54). Amending Jameson in the context of "planetary" literature and "postcritique," Moraru calls for a form of "planetary cognitive mapping" (308) whose "suspicious hermeneutic of the portentous, ominous, and apocalyptic makes room, accordingly, for a more auspicious hermeneutic of the possible" (309). This seesaw between the apocalyptic and the possible, as this essay will suggest, is enacted in J R’s paradoxical treatment of the "end of history."
I believe that the novel pushes us in the latter direction, for several reasons. For starters, as critics ranging from Joseph Tabbi and David Letzler to David Sugarman and Ali Chetwynd have argued in recent years, J R is not merely "an imitation of the society it depicts" (Tabbi, "Autopoiesis", 113). Pushing against the tendency to reduce J R’s radical form to what Sugarman calls the "now classic and well-trodden postmodern tropes of ‘entropy’ and ‘chaos’" (266), these scholars have highlighted the ways in which J R’s form exposes "ideological frictions," in Chetwynd’s useful phrase, which "restore the possibility" of "meanings and perspectives" that move beyond the flat, chaotic world imposed on the novel’s characters and readers alike. These "meanings and perspectives" can be developed through a consideration of J R’s "second-order observations" (Tabbi, "Autopoiesis", 113), its "cruft"-filled pages (Letzler, 38-46), its symbolic structural criticism (Sugarman, 267), and its malapropisms and narration (Chetwynd), as these critics have demonstrated, but they can also be developed through a consideration of Gaddis’s penchant for metafiction. Through the portrayal of a group of artists who are entangled in the same historical antagonisms plaguing the rest of the novel’s characters, Gaddis encourages readers to consider the degree to which these antagonisms impact writer and reader alike. Interpreted alongside the other "ideological frictions" pervading the novel, J R’s artists suggest that aesthetic failure may be inevitable in art but also, somewhat paradoxically, a precondition of aesthetic success.
To understand how J R illustrates and embodies this paradox, this article proceeds as follows. To set up my analysis of Gaddis’s metafictive performance of the "end of history," I first analyze the performances of the artists appearing in his novel. Like Gaddis himself, Thomas Eigen, Jack Gibbs, and Edward Bast are simultaneously enmeshed in the historical contradictions they mean to critique and preoccupied with a question that, as Gaddis remarked in a letter sent while finishing J R, "has dogged me all my life": "what is worth doing?" (Letters 280).10In addition to its inclusion in J R and various letters, this question appears in Gaddis’s 1985 novel Carpenter’s Gothic (166-167; 228; 230), and it is also the subject of Gaddis’s 1981 essay "The Rush for Second Place." Drawing on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970), I demonstrate that while Gaddis’s artists and Gaddis-as-artist fail to provide an adequate answer to this question, the failure of J R’s author is qualitatively different from the failures of its artists. Whereas Gaddis’s artists either fail to produce anything at all (Eigen, Gibbs) or produce works which retreat from the historical problems imagined in the novel (Bast), Gaddis-as-artist exorcises the failures of art, in effect, by forcing the reader to share in them. Gaddis accomplishes this feat, I suggest, by developing a "compositional strategy" that is, in Stephen Schryer’s words, "the opposite of Bast’s." Whereas Bast’s "aesthetic of presentness" (82) asks JR to look away from the world of capitalist domination, Gaddis’s aesthetic asks—or rather forces—readers to look directly at it. This perplexing strategy does not provide didactic answers as to what is "worth doing" in a world in which the forces of neocolonialism and neoliberal capitalism intersect, as I will demonstrate through a sustained reading of Typhon’s machinations in Africa. Instead, because it places the cognitive and affective aporias of responding to such a world in the hands, or rather minds, of its readers, J R makes the act of reading a staging ground through which readers must dialectically grapple with this question again and again.
Art at the "End of History"
The easiest way to understand the role that art plays in J R is to compare its artists with Wyatt Gwyon, the artist-protagonist of Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955).11Another way to illustrate this theme, as several critics have noted, is to consider the entropic 96th street apartment in which J R’s artists attempt to work. Ostensibly a safe haven for aesthetic creation, the place becomes a dumping ground for JR’s paper empire, with leaky faucets and a daily deluge of mail literally flooding the apartment’s floors. At the end of that novel, Wyatt promises to follow Henry David Thoreau’s advice and "live deliberately" (900), implicitly suggesting that he might create something compelling others to "live deliberately" as well. In the totally commodified world imagined in J R, Thoreau’s advice appears on a "[m]onogrammed doormat" on sale for "sixteen ninety-five" (477). This transition aptly sums up the crisis of art at the "end of history," where advertisements appear in novels (692) and artists are as implicated in the market as everyone else. To illustrate this point, consider the novel’s major artists. Schramm, haunted by the question as to whether his work is "worth doing even if he couldn’t do it" (621), commits suicide. Thomas Eigen, who once wrote "one of the most important books in American literature" (417), now helps engineer wars in foreign lands as a speechwriter for the multinational financial firm Typhon International. Jack Gibbs, whose long-dormant project Agapē Agape shares the name (606), encyclopedic range (588), and subject (604) of Gaddis’s own final novel, fails to complete his ambitious work while working alongside Bast at a school whose principal doubles as the president of a bank.12The posthumously published Agapē Agape (2003) is effectively a 96-page version of Gibbs’s own project, and its often incoherent, encyclopedic narrator would be familiar with anyone who recalls Gibbs’s rambling attempt to complete his "social history of mechanization and the arts, the destructive element" (244). Schepperman appears to escape the commercial chaos engulfing the novel’s other artists, but he may actually be in the worst position of all. Since his patron, Zona Selk, is only interested in the price that Schepperman’s paintings may one day fetch on the open market, she makes literal Adorno’s assertion that "[n]eutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy" (AT, 228) by granting Schepperman complete control of his artwork—so long as he keeps this work withheld from the public.
This brings us to Edward Bast. A would-be composer of grand operas, part-time teacher at JR’s school, and increasingly full-time "business representative" of JR’s burgeoning empire (200), Bast spends the majority of the novel trying to either extricate himself from JR or influence the young boy to play by a more humane set of "rules" (301). While these efforts prove futile (more on this in a moment), Bast achieves a measure of success at novel’s end. Having abandoned his grand ambitions, and having very nearly abandoned art altogether after his exhausting work with JR leaves him hospitalized, Bast ends the novel by rescuing from the hospital waste bin the single work of art that he has successfully composed: a piece for unaccompanied cello, written with a crayon. Explaining his decision to keep his composition rather than throw it away, Bast says that he has "failed enough at other people’s things I’ve done enough other people’s damage from now on I’m just going to do my own" (718). Following Gaddis’s previously-mentioned remarks in the Paris Review interview, several critics have interpreted Bast’s success as the "real note of hope in J R" ("Art of Fiction", 289). In this reading, Bast’s decision to hold onto what Gaddis describes as his "small, hard, gemlike, flame" (289) is comparable to Wyatt’s final resolution to "live deliberately" in The Recognitions and indicative of the fact, as Moore puts it, that "only by being true to his art" can Bast—and, by implication, other artists—"create art that will be true for others" (98).
With respect to J R’s author and perhaps its most influential reader (Moore), I am not sure that, in a world in which, to return to Jameson, "we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own experience" (21) "being true" to one’s art is the primary prerequisite for creating art that is "true for others." Bast’s ability to produce anything at all, and his promise to "do my own" work instead of subordinating this work to the monetary machinations of people like JR and corporations like Typhon, certainly represents a "note of hope" for Bast. But whether Bast’s small act of resistance gives anyone else hope of resisting the historical problems embedded in J R is, as John Johnston notes, another question entirely: "The diminution of Bast’s ambitions and the relative insignificance of his achievement raise a question about the possibility of art in the almost totally commodified world that J R depicts" (148). Bast, Johnston continues, represents "one kind of resolution" to this question, but the "minor scale and ambition" (153) of this resolution is both categorically different from the maximalist scale of his author and, at least in the novel, completely ineffective at inspiring change in others.
Evidence of Bast’s ineffectuality can be found, for example, in his attempts to introduce JR to a world outside of economic exchange. When Bast forces the boy to listen to Bach’s 21st cantata, his romantic remarks about the "sheer wonder" (655) of great music fall not so much on deaf ears as on distorted ones. Bast repeatedly exhorts JR to "tell me what you heard then, just tell me what you heard" (656), and JR replies that "this here lady starts singing up yours up yours so then this man starts singing up mine" (658). JR’s misinterpretation of Bach’s "ach nein" as "up mine" is humorous and horrific at the same time, but is it fair to assume that he is the only one whose perception is distorted? JR’s explanation for his mistake, particularly his allusion to a similar encounter with his teacher Amy Joubert, is telling:
—No sir boy you, I mean like you’re telling me listen to this here singing just tell me what you hear so when I tell you you get so pissed off you smash it because I didn’t hear what I’m suppose to like you’re telling me how great the sky is and all like, I mean like this here night Mrs. Joubert grabs me to make me look at the sky where she’s pointing back there? That top of that like round white thing lit up [. . .] telling me see the moon over there coming up? Is there this millionaire for that? [. . .] Well tell her it’s this top of this here Carvel icecream cone stand? Tell her does she want to bet her ass if there’s this millionaire for that? (Gaddis, 661)
This passage, while typically opaque, complicates the assumption that JR is the only character whose vision of the world is warped. For while it is obvious that JR’s view is the product of an educational system so steeped in the ideology of the market that it believes a field trip to Wall Street is the most effective way to teach "our boys and girls what America is all about" (19), the possibility that what his teacher (Amy Joubert) believes to be the antithesis of a commodity (the moon) is actually an "icecream cone stand" suggests the less obvious: that characters like Bast and Amy, who seek to resist the pecuniary perspective of JR and company by pointing to objects ostensibly outside of exchange—"Just stop and look . . .!," Amy insists, at "the sky, the wind," and the (alleged) "moon" (474)—fail to recognize that even these "immediate" objects are mediated in the commodified world represented in J R. Neither side of this conflict offers an adequate understanding of the world as it actually exists. The romantic naïveté of Amy and Bast, who are apt to mistake an "icecream cone stand" for the moon, is the inverse of JR’s cynical instrumentalism, which leads him to assume that "there’s this millionaire" for "everything you see" (473)—even the moon.13J R may have been more clairvoyant than we would like to believe. With companies including SpaceX and Space Adventures planning to fly tourists around the moon in the 2020s and 2030s, there may well be a millionaire behind the moon soon enough.
The incompatibility of these views brings us back to the question of aesthetics, or rather to what role art can have in a world in which capitalism, as Fisher hauntingly puts it, "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable" (8). According to Bast, Amy, and several of Gaddis’s readers, the best way to resist the commodified world depicted in J R is to observe and create "intangible assets," which are apparently untouched by exchange relations.14See, for example, Knight’s discussion of Bast in Hints and Guesses (116-121). Bast defends this perspective when he introduces JR to Bach’s 21st cantata:
listen all I want you to do take your mind off these nickel deductions these tangible assets for a minute and listen to a piece of great music, it’s a cantata by Bach cantata number twenty-one by Johann Sebastian Bach damn it JR can’t you understand what I’m trying to, to show you there’s such a thing as as, as intangible assets? What I was trying to tell you that night the sky do you remember it? (Gaddis, 655)
These comments, while poignant, unwittingly reveal why the romantic aesthetic embodied by characters such as Bast and Amy is an inadequate response to the historical problems addressed in the novel. Just as their idealism leads them to misunderstand the ways in which natural beauty is mediated in the unnatural world of J R (the "icecream cone"/moon problem), it leads them to misrepresent the degree to which art itself is mediated. Unlike the sky to which he inaccurately compares it, Bach’s 21st cantata is a tangible asset. Not only is it a made thing—and, hence, the opposite of nature—but it is a commodity which, as characters like Major Hyde are so fond of exclaiming, can be bought and sold like any other: "Get it? Art? You get it where you get anything you buy [. . .] the greatest books ever written can get them at the drugstore" (48).
Hyde is a philistine, but his blunt observation regarding art’s commodity character underscores the insufficiency of Bast’s aesthetic to the realities of the "end of history" and, crucially, its incommensurability with that of his author. To understand this incommensurability, allow me to briefly contrast Bast’s beliefs about art with those articulated by Adorno. For Bast, art and nature are "intangible assets" whose beauty is immediate, hence the assumption that Bach’s cantata, like the night sky and the moon, will be able to "rise above anything" and leave JR "exalted for an instant" (658). But as Adorno argues and J R illustrates, these arguments are valid for nature, but not for art: "Pure immediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience. Along with the involuntary it requires volition, concentrating consciousness" (AT, 69).15In contrast to art, Adorno argues that the "more intensively one observes nature, the less one is aware of its beauty, unless it was already involuntarily recognized" (69). Art requires "concentrating consciousness" because the relationship between art and nature is not straightforward and simple, as Bast would have it, but circuitous and paradoxical: "Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hopes to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature’s promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise" (65).
Like much of Adorno’s prismatic prose, the idea that art must break nature’s "promise" in order to keep it requires some parsing. Let’s start with the idea that nature and art both make a "promise." For Adorno, "nature’s promise" is the promise of a world free from the brutality and barbarism of this one. This "promise" is implicit in nature by virtue of its existence, but it is also implicit in art: "even as total negation, artworks make a promise, just as the gesture with which narratives once began or the initial sound struck on a sitar promised what was yet to be heard, yet to be seen" (135). That both art and nature gesture to what has "yet to be heard" is an idea that Adorno and Bast appear to share, as evidenced by the latter’s remark that listening to Bach and looking at the moon will help JR appreciate the "intangible assets" that exist beyond the exchange principle. But what Bast fails to recognize, perhaps because he treats art as an intangible asset rather than a gesture toward its possibility, is that art cannot keep "nature’s promise" without also breaking it: "Art is the rescue of nature—or of immediacy—through its negation, that is, total mediation. It makes itself like what is free of domination by the limitless domination over its material" (288). Since artists’ ability to mimic "what is free" in nature presupposes that they both (a) turn away from the domination of this world but also (b) engage in the "limitless domination of [their] material," the work of art and the world of domination are not distinct or separate, as Bast assumes, but inevitably enmeshed.
Gaddis, unlike Bast, seems to recognize the aporias born of this paradox. If "the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth" (ND, 17-18), as Adorno writes, then any utopian representation of nature is false insofar as this image occludes the suffering and domination of nature under capitalism. But simply replacing images of nature with images of its destruction is equally insufficient, because this hides the fact that even artworks critical of systems of domination (e.g., capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy) must "assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination" (AT, 289). For reasons both historical and technical, then, the relationship between nature and art is not immediate and unambiguous, as Bast believes, but mediated and aporetic. What makes Gaddis’s novel unique—and uniquely Adornian—is not that it overcomes art’s aporias or fulfills "nature’s promise" in any unequivocal manner, but that its paradoxical presentation encourages us to confront the structures of domination that make fulfilling this promise impossible in the present. J R accomplishes this feat, as I argue in the next section of this article, by embodying rather than avoiding the cognitive and affective challenges of the "end of history."
Experiencing the "End of History"
Roughly halfway through the 726-page block of text that is J R, JR tells an exasperated Fred Hopper, one of a series of bankers and lawyers employed by the budding business mogul, "sure I can hear you okay, we been having trouble with the connections" (334). Not for the first time, JR is being disingenuous; having stuffed a filthy handkerchief into a payphone to disguise his prepubescent voice, the "trouble" to which JR refers is entirely his own doing, and to his benefit. Though his listeners can hardly understand him, JR "can hear you fine" (335), as he reiterates moments later.
JR’s small act of duplicity seems trivial, but it is actually symptomatic of the larger methods through which global finance operates, or rather occludes its operations, in Gaddis’s novel. In creating and exploiting asymmetrical, troubled connections, JR mimics the behavior on display at Typhon, the multinational conglomerate that JR’s school visits to "buy a share in America" (18) early in the novel. The success of both Typhon and JR is predicated on manipulating, concealing, and otherwise "troubling" the connections made available through the world market in such a way that neither comprehension of their actions nor resistance to them seems possible. Somewhat paradoxically, the success of J R as a novel is also predicated on troubling connections, since its ability to "trouble" its readers’ "connections" with the material implicitly encourages reflection upon the relationship between this aesthetic challenge and the historical challenges from which it is born.
To defend this point, I’d like to take an extended look at the interpretive challenges presented by a single exchange, focusing first on the exchange’s content, then on the dialectical thought encouraged by its formal presentation. The speaker here is Dave Davidoff, one of Typhon’s "PR boys" (83), and the listener is Thomas Eigen, the erstwhile "important" American novelist (417) who now finds himself, as a speechwriter for Typhon, as unable to extricate himself from the grip of capital as the novel’s other artists:
Hello? Where’s that call I had in to Senator Broos? Miss Bulcke? Who’s this? Eigen? What’s this about somebody from Thailand . . . Taiwan? No, that’s a Chinese medical relief group he was supposed to come over for the fifty cent tour before lunch, did you check his hotel? . . . No a donation, just take him out to lunch and tie, one, on, I said tie . . . never mind, look. This Box speech for Gandia you’ve got a delicate situation, you’ve got the defense minister Doctor De and President Nowunda both up there on the platform, work them both in but so one of them can come out at the last minute . . . Yes it’s top priority the General’s in Bonn waiting for it now, one of us may have to go over there and spoon feed it to him we can’t have him pull another one of those Plato rhymes with tomato . . . oh Mrs. Joubert? Wait you don’t need to leave, just a couple of brush fires you can tell your dad when you see him what it’s like tending the store here with no executive officer on board. (J R, 216)
This "conversation" is fairly typical, but it highlights an element of Gaddis’s fiction that, in Mathieu Duplay’s words, "has been largely ignored by commentators": its analysis of "the lingering spirit of colonialism and its many manifestations" (143). In this passage in particular and J R’s engagement with Africa in general, this "spirit" manifests in a grotesque, but largely invisible, marriage between neocolonial international relations and neoliberal economic arrangements.
The invisibility of this marriage, as Davidoff’s rapid-fire instructions indicate, is by design. Like the frenetic telephone calls of the child who will eventually employ him, Davidoff transitions from one conversation about a Taiwanese company to another about a potential civil war in the (apparently) fictional African nation of Gandia in a matter of seconds.16I write "apparently" because both Gandia and Malwi appear to be inventions of Gaddis. However, given their sonic and lexical semblance to the actual African nations of Zambia, The Gambia, and Malawi, a case could be made that employees of Typhon, rather than Gaddis himself, misspell and mispronounce these countries in the same way that they misspell and mispronounce Alaska as "Alsaka" (448, 511) when following JR’s lead. In this reading, Typhon’s inability to correctly name the countries that they exploit would offer further evidence of their ignorance of and indifference toward the exploitation that they organize. (Meanwhile, he barely acknowledges the daughter of his boss sitting in front of him.) Davidoff’s blithe movement between these so-called "brush fires" is made possible by connections in four continents that are as troubled—and troubling—as JR’s connection with Hopper. Just as JR disguises his voice so that Hopper cannot identify him, Davidoff instructs Eigen to disguise Typhon’s role in engendering civil war in Gandia by "work[ing] them both in [Doctor De and President Nowunda] but so one of them can come out at the last minute." This tactic allows Typhon, which is building a smaltite factory in Gandia with the financial blessing of the U.S. government, to maintain the public front that participation in the conflict, in director Cates’s words, is "nobody’s business but these damn Africans’" (96) while actively participating privately through Gandia’s Defense Minister Doctor De.
The entire speech, then, is designed to trouble the connection between neoliberal business practices, neocolonial international relations, and war. Though both the smaltite factory’s placement in Africa and Gandia’s civil war are subservient to Typhon’s economic interests, Typhon occludes this fact and makes the U.S.’s (nominal) nonintervention a virtue at the same time by standing the President of Gandia "up there on the platform" (216) just hours before Doctor De declares the "secession of Uaso province" (428), and, hence, the start of war. The speech works brilliantly—from Typhon’s perspective—resulting in "peace groups wearing signs keep out of Gandia and Africa for Africans" (428), on the one hand, and the (planned) death of thousands of Gandian citizens, on the other. All of this enables Cates to celebrate employing the even-poorer people of neighboring Malwi, instead of the now-devastated Gandia, as quickly and casually as his minions organized Gandia’s devastation: "Little country right there east of Gandia Zona about the size of Stamper’s place, get all the labor for the mines there so damn poor’ll work for peanuts, now Beaton what’s this all about . . ." (429).
Cates is a caricature, but the speed with which he moves from discussing the calculated catastrophe in Gandia to the next topic at hand ("now Beaton what’s this all about") is paradigmatic of the historical problem introduced at the onset of this article: namely, that the technological innovations that allow commodities and capital to rapidly flow across the globe also allow those organizing these global flows to occlude and ignore their human cost. Put another way, the technology that makes the "end of history" a plausible sociopolitical effect of globalization also allows those (ab)using this technology to skirt any historical responsibility: "Whoever is free to run away from the locality," as Zygmunt Bauman pithily puts it in Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998), "is free to run away from the consequences" (8-9).
Gaddis illustrates the danger of this "freedom" on every page, but he also incorporates a version of it into the structure of his novel. On the one hand, it is clear that Typhon’s capacity to not only exploit but also organize the deaths of its laborers is dependent upon its ability to (a) treat these laborers as abstract capital and (b) "run away from the consequences" of this treatment. Davidoff and Cates can foster a civil war without remorse because they imagine the people fighting this war in the same manner that JR imagines forks and Mary Lou: as "different electric numbers," entirely disconnected from their own experience in New York City and therefore both fungible and forgettable. On the other hand, the formal presentation of J R risks reproducing (in readers) the process of forgetting that it satirizes (in characters) insofar as it allows, and arguably forces, readers to "run away from the consequences" as well. Not only does Gaddis spread over many hundreds of pages details that I’ve consolidated into a few paragraphs, but he gives no hint as to the importance of such details when they do arrive amidst a deluge of other details—about the mining rights of Native Americans, employee pensions in Union Falls, exploration disputes in Alaska, and so on. Hence, while the reader knows, as Bast puts it, that "there are real people up there" in Union Falls (296)—and Alaska, and Gandia, and Malwi—the novel puts us in the position of thinking about these "real people" in the same way that Typhon and JR think about them: as abstractions.
With this, we can begin to understand how Gaddis’s Adornian aesthetic operates, breaking nature’s promise in order to keep it. "If a work opens itself completely," writes Adorno, "it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question ‘What is it?’" (AT, 121). Readers who think they understand J R may conclude, quite rightly, that the novel is devoted to satirizing the homogenizing effects of the "end of history." These effects are on display on virtually every page of the novel, after all, and I tend to agree with O’Donnell’s conclusion that J R enacts a "nightmare version of Bakhtinian heteroglossia" that "homogenizes," rather than pluralizes, speech (161): Typhon’s speech "homogenizes" the speech of JR, whose speech "homogenizes" the speech of Bast, whose speech "homogenizes" the speech of Gibbs, and so on. If we consider the reader’s role in this "nightmare," however, we begin to see the "overwhelming" challenge that second reflection reveals to be at the heart of the novel: since Gaddis gives us little but these homogenizing voices, without authorial explanation or commentary, for 700-plus pages, the structural scheme of the novel produces the same sort of exasperation in its readers that it presents in its characters.
Confronting this confusion is challenging, but it is precisely this confrontation that grants J R in particular and maximalism in general the political and ethical force attributed to the genre in Stefano Ercolino’s The Maximalist Novel (2014). I prefer the term "force" to Ercolino’s "ethical commitment" because, as the Gandia example indicates, the political power of maximalist novels such as Gaddis’s J R, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) comes less from their commitment to illustrating "themes of great historical, political, and social relevance" (Ercolino, 136) than from the manner in which their formal construction forces readers to experience the aporias created by the historical problems thematized in their pages.17As suggested in footnote three, this claim is explored in much greater depth in my forthcoming book, Swallowing a World. In the case of J R, Gaddis’s ability to formally recreate the effects of the "end of history" gives us the chance not only to recognize Sassen’s assertion that "speculative financial constructions can be so complex [that] they challenge empirical analysis, let alone moral examination" (Sassen, 117), but also to reflect upon the degree to which this empirical and moral challenge impedes our own thought.
To understand how the novel invites this recognition and reflection, I would like to take a second look at the Davidoff-Eigen conversation vis-à-vis Gandia. Comprehending this "conversation" is difficult for several reasons, starting with the fact that Typhon’s unscrupulous actions in Gandia are thrice removed from readers: they occur on a side of the world to which Gaddis’s American readers are unlikely to ever travel; they depend upon a side of a telephone call of which Gaddis’s readers can never hear; and—because they interrupt our access to a character with whom readers are already familiar and potentially sympathetic (Amy Joubert)—these actions almost "naturally" seem secondary, or even subordinate, to the action at hand. The (ostensible) insignificance of Typhon’s actions in Gandia is also exacerbated by the novel’s pace and inclusion of abstruse technical jargon. On the single page analyzed above, Davidoff mentions, among other things, the acquisition of a "ten day TDY" for Eigen’s trip to Germany, the speech General Box will give therein, Eigen’s upcoming lunch with a Chinese medical relief group, and, finally, his own plans to doctor photos of Amy’s "culturally deprived" students to appear in Typhon’s upcoming Annual Report (216). One never hears the speech, or sees the lunch, or learns what "TDY" stands for (military slang, surely unbeknownst to many readers, for "temporary duty yonder"), and Gaddis moves so quickly from this bombardment of details to another that piecing together the relations between them seems not only difficult but, as Letzler argues in his study of the "Mega-Novel," meaningless. The novel’s "barrage of technical and otherwise irrelevant financial jargon may seem extremely complicated, but we will also probably barely think about it, because we lack the larger structure of [Typhon’s] accrued financial acumen to contextualize these points within [its] larger empire" (45).
Barely thinking about J R’s barrage of information makes it possible to continue reading the novel, but it also means, as Letzler implies, that readers mimic the exact sort of cognitive resignation that allows financial firms like Typhon to run wild in the real world: "If we cannot cut through the enormous amount of junk information produced by our culture to the truly vital material, we will be absolutely at the mercy of anyone who can" (46). Letzler’s argument helps illustrate why, in a globalizing world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, fake news, and (mis)information overload, the aesthetic difficulties of Gaddis’s novel may have real political value.
Our analysis of the Gandia conflict, however, suggests we augment his claim that any defense of the novel should rest "on a cognitive basis" (43). The speed and complexity of the financial system so expertly satirized in J R certainly obstruct cognition of their operations, but they also obstruct our affective, ethical, and imaginative connections to their effects. These problems are reciprocal, as the following telephone call between Cates and Monty Moncrieff, an outgoing executive set to begin a position in Washington D.C., helps illustrate:
—Saw all that in the paper Monty damn nonsense [ . . .] leftwing press want to make it sound like this smaltite contract’s why your quitting what’s the damn difference a contract’s a contract, just want to be damn sure this one’s honored see that smelter we built them over there’s declared surplus sold back to Typhon, ought to be in operation right now finished their fool war country’s running like a company town labor pool pulled in from . . . what? Place next door there Malwi yes I told Blaufinger to annex it while they were at it favor to . . . No no favor to Zona, having some trouble here parking her damn car [. . .] how the devil’d that happen said there wouldn’t be any resistance, Blaufinger didn’t think they had a damn slingshot between them said these Uaso troops just walk in and . . . well by God . . . Well by God decima . . . What? Poor buggers where’d they . . . thought they were real? Where the devil’d they get them never heard such a . . . don’t know damn it means we’ll have to drag in labor from Angola or some other damn hold on. (Gaddis, 698)
Like the rest of the novel, this passage inundates the reader with information integral to understanding the machinations of Typhon’s financial empire and, I believe, empathizing in any meaningful way with those who suffer under it. Among other things, this passage highlights Cates’s indifference to the negative publicity accompanying Moncrieff’s corrupt appointment with the U.S. government ("contract’s a contract"); the advantages this appointment will bring to Typhon (the Gandia plant will be "declared surplus [and] sold back to Typhon"); Cates’s absurd justification for annexing Malwi (a major shareholder is "having some trouble here parking her damn car" because a Malwian diplomat is using her parking spot [428]); the calamitous results of Malwi’s annexation (Doctor De’s soldiers, under the aegis of Typhon, have "decima[ted]" the Malwians because they believed their toy weapons "were real"); and, finally, Cates’s plan to "drag in labor" from "some other damn" African nation.
All of this is grotesque, and it is obvious that readers are meant to recoil at the repulsive rationale that allows an entire country to be "decima[ted]" over a parking dispute. But again, the speed with which Cates, and with him the reader, moves from thinking about Typhon’s actions in Malwi to thinking about "some other damn" country makes it difficult for readers to comprehend the complexities of the passage (a cognitive problem) and to consider the individual countries and people affected by it (an affective, ethical, and imaginative one). Malwi, Gandia, and now Angola remain "places on the map" in the minds of Gaddis’s characters (105), as Christopher Knight argues, but also in the minds of his readers. Their individual histories look and feel less like a series of contingent events and more like the "single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage" invoked in Walter Benjamin’s famous analysis of the "angel of history." Like Benjamin’s angel, J R’s reader may wish "to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed" (257), but because the book formally embodies the speed and complexity of the global financial system that it describes, it becomes increasingly difficult to consider the individual countries and communities affected by this system, to say nothing of constructing alternatives to it. It becomes easier, in Letzler’s words, to "barely think about it"— which is, as I argued at the onset of this article, precisely how the system presented in J R reproduces itself in the world outside of it.
Conclusions: Gaddis’s Negative Dialectic
What we have in J R, then, is a novel whose formal construction invites its readers to experience the same problems that are evident in its characters. If one of the most daunting problems for anyone hoping to change the chaotic world imagined in J R is comprehending the complicated systems that help produce this chaos—and comprehending that complexity itself is a key tool to stymie understanding and empathy—then J R reproduces, rather than resolves, this problem. But this, as I have indicated here, is precisely the source of the novel’s aesthetic value. By simultaneously satirizing and recreating what Bauman calls the "unprecedented" "disconnection of power from obligations" (9) through which global finance operates, J R encourages readers to both recognize our "obligations" to the historical problems imagined in the novel and dialectically reflect on the affective and cognitive challenges of making good on these obligations. It encourages readers, to modify Timothy Bewes’s recent radical reconception of the novel, to develop a dialectical form of thinking that "refuses the ideological formations of our world" (18).18The modification performed in this sentence highlights a crucial difference between Bewes’s provocative use of the term "thought" and my own. Like Bewes, I am interested in understanding aspects of the (maximalist) novel that offer the chance for "a rediscovery of the possibility of thought" at a time "when a thought without interest has seemingly become inconceivable" (38). But whereas Bewes sees this possibility emanating from the "free indirect" thought of the novel itself (38), I see it developing from the reader’s dialectical interaction with maximalist novels, such as J R, which challenge readers to confront the limitations of their own thought. Put simply, Bewes is interested in "the novel’s capacity for thought" (8); I am interested in our capacity to think with it. For more, see Bewes’s Free Indirect (2022).
The value of this form of thinking is evident by considering its opposite. "If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking," as Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics,
the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims. (Adorno, 365)
Adorno’s assertion surely seems hyperbolic, but consider the ways in which Gaddis’s dialectical novel forces his readers—particularly his Western readers—to confront the sort of complicated cognitive and affective trade-offs that, consciously or not, we face every day. Not knowing the arcane technical jargon of Cates and company, it is very easy to "barely think" about how the elaborate processes of exploitation practiced in the novel actually operate. Similarly, not seeing or hearing the voices of those most affected by these processes—in Gandia, Alaska, Union Falls, and so on—it is tempting to lump these voices together under the abstract concept of human suffering under globalization. At first glance, the novel invites readers to choose this option; because Gaddis takes away the means by which readers can organize its deluge of quantitative data into qualitative pieces of history, the reader, like Schramm, may wonder "whether what he [is] trying to do [is] worth doing even if he couldn’t do it" (621). This conclusion is understandable, but it is also nihilistic. If readers conclude that trying to understand the historical problems embodied in the novel is not worth the effort in the world outside of it, then we cede control of the future to the powerful countries, corporations, and individuals who have frequently engineered these problems. Moreover, if readers choose this option, then our thought may not rise above abstraction, making it "from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment" with which Typhon and JR, if not the SS, "drown out" the qualitative differences of their victims.
The other option, then, is to read the novel "against itself," to engage in a dialectical form of thinking that is motivated by its own insufficiency rather than crippled by it. The dialectical thinker, as Adorno argues, "is driven to it [the dialect] by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking" (ND, 5). Thinking dialectically about J R means recognizing the problems embodied in the novel without succumbing to them. It means recognizing that the speed and complexity of the world market occlude the ability of J R’s characters to understand history and refusing to allow the speed and complexity of the novel to occlude our attempt to understand it. It means recognizing that those who "play to win" in J R do so by reducing the particularity of human life to abstract quantification and refusing to let our own thought rest on this abstract recognition alone. Finally, it means recognizing the value of a novel and genre that analyze aspects of globalization that infect the entire world and the risk that the sweeping scope required by such a novel and genre may replicate the totalizing scope of the problems they mean to critique.
The skeptical reader might complain, with good reason, that making good on all aspects of this movement is a difficult, if not impossible, task. Gaddis himself would likely agree with this contention. But this does not mean, as Gibbs’s reflections on the aesthetic paralysis that consumed Schramm indicate, that it isn’t worth trying: "Christ look can’t you see it wasn’t any of that! it was worse than that? It was whether what he was trying to do was worth doing even if he couldn’t do it? whether anything was worth writing even if he couldn’t write it?" (621). Generally regarded as one of the bleaker passages in a bleak novel, there is a utopian kernel at the heart of Gibbs’s words that helps us understand the value of trying, and failing, to think through the problems embedded in Gaddis’s novel. To locate this kernel, we should understand that though success is unlikely in Gibbs’s formulation ("even if he couldn’t write it"), Schramm’s despair does not revolve around his own personal failure. Schramm’s fear is more fundamental, and it is one that Gaddis both illustrates in J R and repeats throughout his oeuvre: in a world where for the "first time in history [there are] so many opportunities to do so many God damned many things not worth doing" (477), there isn’t a single thing worth doing.19Gaddis would repeat this line in his essay, "The Rush for Second Place." This is the fear of the totally commodified society; it is the fear of a world, as Gibbs notes elsewhere, that "banish[es] failure to inherent vice" (571) and eliminates "the very possibility of failure as a condition for success precisely in the arts where one’s best is never good enough" (604).20Different versions of Gibbs's phrase, which would later double as the title of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009), appear throughout The Recognitions (182; 234; 355; 949). This world is hostile to failure for the same reason it is hostile to art: since "the rules are only for if you’re playing to win" (301), anything that refuses to submit to the rules of the game is a priori anathema.
For those who believe that attempting to change such a world is "worth doing," then, we should recognize, as Adorno and Schramm and Gibbs and Gaddis did, that our best will never be "good enough." How could the reflection fostered by art ever be "good enough" when, as Adorno writes, "the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains only reflection, without altering the existence to which its failure bears witness" ("Cultural Criticism and Society", 32-33)? The answer, in short, is that it cannot. There can be no "good enough" in art because art, in itself, changes nothing. But it is just this "radical reflection," the sort of reflection that J R prompts again and again, that proves failure is "a condition of success precisely in the arts," and particularly in the art of Gaddis: by highlighting, rather than hiding from, the failures of artists and readers alike, Gaddis’s fiction encourages readers to not only recognize the inadequacy of our own thinking, but to push beyond it.
J R invites this sort of "radical reflection," as I have suggested here, through the tension between its satirical and formal treatment of the "end of history." By placing its artists, its readers, and itself on the same flattened plane as the financial systems attempting to engineer the "end of history," the novel simultaneously satirizes the notion that we really have reached history’s end and it forces us to experience a nightmarish version of this end. This experience does not provide a panacea from which one might escape the cognitive and affective aporias which, nearly fifty years after J R's publication, continue to shape contemporary life. Instead, because it reproduces these aporias in the consciousness of its readers, J R gives us the chance to consider the degree to which the problems embedded in its pages are both entrenched in our own thought and, crucially, subject to change. To alter an "end of history" that is itself historically contingent, such "radical reflection" is "worth doing" even if—especially if—it is "never good enough."
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