Traces of Vaihinger appear in Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions. But what of the rest of his corpus? John Soutter explores Vaihinger's influence on Gaddis.
In memory of my old friend, Jonathan Neylon.
Towards the end of his career, William Gaddis, in an interview conducted by Paul Ingendaay, is asked about an antidote to the world’s absurdity. He replies that the whole situation is “absurd” because we “all live in fictions,” yet “fiction is the only possibility to get us through the night […]” (in Ingendaay, 90-1). To get through the night or through some impasse, we configure a fiction with causality, praxis and direction; but these, like fiction itself, are not to be found in reality. Fiction, though neither reflecting nor changing reality, does condition our belief and behavior. Should a fiction, after resolving an impasse, be elevated into an absolute on par with reality, then its indiscriminate application to other problems, for which it was not designed, could be injurious. Gaddis urges, therefore, that it is “best to act as if conventional ethics were true” and cites the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, that “pure morality must” be “based on a fiction. We must act,” Gaddis continues, “as if our duties were imposed” by God. But when an “as if” becomes “a because ethics evaporates and our behavior is ruled by base instinct.”1Ingendaay, my translation: original German “Die ganze situation ist […] absurd. Wir leben in Fiktionen, und [… sie sind] die einzige Möglichkeit, diese dunkle Nacht zu überstehen. […] Die Beste ist, so zu tun, als ob bestimmte ethische Grenzziehungen wahr sind. [… Vaihinger schreibt daß] echte Moralität immer auf einer fiktiven Basis beruhen muß. Wir müssen uns so verhalten, als ob unsere Pflichten uns von Gott auferlegt wären [...]. Aber sobald dies Als-Ob zu einem Weil gemacht wird, verflüchtigt sich der ethische Charakter, und unser Verhalten wird von niederen Instinkten bestimmt.”
Gaddis’s detailed reference to Vaihinger here might lead one to expect frequent references to him in Gaddis’s published work. But as Petrus van Ewijk remarks, Vaihinger’s name is “only fleetingly present” in The Recognitions (1955), Gaddis’s first novel, and gets no further explicit mention in Gaddis’s subsequent published works (381). Ewijk’s study, though among the first to focus on Vaihinger’s influence on Gaddis, concentrates only on The Recognitions and chiefly on its principle protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon. My paper, however, will examine Vaihinger’s relevance to Gaddis’s ideas about fiction across his whole career.
Vaihinger’s first appearance in The Recognitions is in an early party scene. Otto, a young man always out but usually failing to impress, mentions him, yet mispronounces his name as “Vainiger […]” (120.)2For the remarks in this paragraph (not forgetting others in this paper), I am indebted (as I always am) to Steven Moore. At another party, Otto is mocked for delivering a “lecture” on Vaihinger’s magnum opus, The Philosophy of “As if” (1911), but fails to recognize its German title (Die Philosophie des Als Ob): “On what?” he asks (530). Vaihinger, it seems, is being given short shrift. Otto discloses that the little he knows about him is from a source of some importance, the forger, Wyatt Gwyon, who has read Vaihinger. Otto, although getting Vaihinger’s name wrong, then gives a pithy summary, filched from Wyatt, of Vaihinger’s philosophy: “we have to live in the dark and only assume postulates as true” (120). But though redolent of Gaddis’s getting through the night, this is no direct quote. After The Recognitions, Vaihinger’s name never appears again in Gaddis’s published writing because Gaddis wishes to hide his influence; yet he does make further occasional nods to The Philosophy of “As if.” This paper intends to show how Vaihinger’s ideas about fiction – what it is and does – influence Gaddis’s own ideas. In J R (1975), Jack Gibbs, a teacher, drunkard, failed writer and thumb-nail sketch of Gaddis himself, recommends that we “read Wiener on communication” to make sense of the novel’s chaos (403). We might also read Vaihinger on fictions, to see how Vaihingerian Gaddis’s novels are.
In Ingendaay’s interview, Gaddis refers specifically to Vaihinger’s argument about morality resting “upon a fictional basis” so that moral consciousness neither goes beyond “as if the duty were imposed by God,” nor shifts a conditional as if into an absolute because (Vaihinger 49, original emphases). The as if, Vaihinger continues, is to choose to “behave ethically,” despite acknowledging the absence of a “moral world-order,” yet act “as if there were one”; conversely, to adhere to the because is to decide that one “can only act ethically because such an order exists,” making the moral into an order one can do nothing but conform to (326). In As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017), a recent study that brings Vaihinger to a wider reading public, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that to believe in a “rational agency,” we must “act as if we were free,” even though our “understanding shows that we are governed by deterministic laws”; yet we might act as if what we know “to be false is true because it is useful for some purpose” (3, original emphases). To assume that a moral world-order exists is to condition oneself to the replicable but mindless ethic of if a, then always z – irrespective of any other consequence. Brian McHale writes that Vaihinger’s fictions are intended to be “temporary expedients” and are “constructed” to “surmount particular conceptual difficulties,” but should be “discarded as soon as they have served their purpose” (37). Fictions that have served their purpose but remain undiscarded become, van Ewijk argues, “self-preserving” (381). Like “dogmas” they take “on a life of their own,” and as they preserve their mimetic hegemony the behavior of those within that structure is also preserved (384). In a similar vein, I have argued in another paper on Gaddis that since representation does not reflect reality but “our notions of it,” it is our own notions that condition “our behavior […]” (Soutter 115). Changing the fiction might also bring about change in our behavior.
Gaddis begins The Recognitions with a funeral cortége – that of Camilla Gwyon, Wyatt’s mother. Before she died, however, she “had enjoyed masquerades” but “of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality” (3). Gaddis begins not just his first novel but his entire oeuvre with a masquerade. But within this, he introduces two categories of fiction: the safe sort which, though presumed to be reality, is easily dropped or replaced with another fiction; and the second category which, however, is merely implied: the dangerous sort. Dangerous because those who adhere to it do not drop the mask, being unaware of Vaihinger’s warning—which underlies this passage—about shifting a fiction’s conditional as if into an absolute and fatal because.
In his later talk “How Does the State Imagine? The Willing Suspension of Disbelief,” Gaddis demonstrates how a fiction’s dangerous self-preservation comes about. The state, he writes, “may be the grandest fiction” ever “concocted” and would “preserve and protect” its “imagined version of itself” by trying “to flee from reality in fictions […]” One “refuge” is the “invisible realm of revealed wisdom,” “truths,” and “divine revelations,” which all testify, as did the religious fictions of the “Middle Ages,” to a metaphysical foundation (123-4). The state, David Wayne Thomas writes, lays “claim” to a “metaphysical perception” that is “neither provable nor disprovable” and, therefore, avoids “discursive understanding […]” (257). This deceitful imposition helps the state “keep things as they are even though they are not […]” Gaddis thus expresses his concern about presuming a fiction as reality, the confused relationship between the two being “one of the real problems of our times” (in Logan and Mirkowicz, 179). The supposed correspondence between fiction and reality is in the cross-hairs of Gaddis’s cognitive reorientation, in which he satirizes the futility of imposing a past conception as the present criterion for perceiving reality. Such a criterion makes a fiction’s view of reality a replicable template that is quite Medieval. For example, Wyatt in The Recognitions forges Medieval paintings as though he were a member of a Medieval guild, but in service of a mid-twentieth-century counterfeiting ring. To justify this incongruity, he would “work in the sight of God” (250). But he fails—despite having read Vaihinger—to realize that he has turned a conditional as if – working in the sight of God – into a because, thereby assuming a metaphysical foundation to be integral within reality. A fiction perceived as integral becomes integral, thus becoming dangerous.
Other authors too are wary about fiction. John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance (1932) is as ambitious an enquiry as The Recognitions into the creation of “ultimate mystery”; but Powys calls this inquiry “meaningless” because the “reality of Being is forever changing […]” We apply “erudite names” to “the primordial mysteries of life” and “think things are explained. Nothing is explained” (665). Fiction is “an aesthetic verisimilitude” that “seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature” (666). This mimesis in A Glastonbury Romance that dismisses the chaos of reality is nothing but a “life-illusion” (992). Gaddis’s characters also delude themselves by presuming that reality conforms to their life-illusion, that this is adequate with reality and that adequacy is attained with “no tricks” – or so they “pretend” until they “finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is, when really …” (113). Gaddis’s hallmark hiatus after really undermines all presumptions yet still opens to the possibility of reality being other than expected. His characters, he observes, “reflect the fragmented reality we all live in” but, though admitting that his “work is social realism,” a “thoroughly other kind of reality” is the result (in Logan and Mirkowicz, 179). His realism is rendered recalcitrant with his radical reorientation, wherein a view about reality, as soon as formulated, becomes invalid.
Gaddis explains to Tom LeClair in an interview that both The Recognitions and J R are designed around Gaddis’s ideas of “the artist” as a “confidence man” and of “a willing suspension of disbelief […]” Such suspension should be the default position before engaging with any belief. But his artists, like Wyatt, “con themselves” by failing to “avoid the possibility of being taken over” by their “own fiction” (in LeClair, 20-1). Peter Wolfe states that fiction in Gaddis’s worlds should be a “means to beneficial ends […]” but the willing suspension of disbelief might short-circuit a fiction into an absolute so that critical choice is surrendered and a fiction’s self-awareness shed (73). A passage in The Recognitions about the potential transformation offered by alchemy with its “countless revolutions” “may have been in the way of progressive revelation […]” (132). But in the way of is extremely ambiguous: it might suggest either a means of disclosing a “way” for revelation, or the blocking of any re-assessment of reality so that one fiction holds sway. This leads to the fiction’s assumed correspondence with reality being mindlessly applied like a template under the further assumption that doing the same results in the same.
To ensure that his fiction remains safe, Gaddis, in another interview, tells Zoltán Abádi-Nagy about how he expects his readers to “participate” in J R. This novel is designed “almost entirely in dialogue with no chapter breaks” so that readers can be “a collaborator,” while Gaddis’s “authorial absence” in the lack of direct narration fosters further “collaboration […]” (79-80). Participation relinquishes both authority and its preconditions. Gaddis’s reduction rather than removal of authorial presence lets readers make sense but avoids forcing a dangerous fiction. J R refers implicitly to—rather than quoting directly from—a passage of Vaihinger that urges us to “avoid all hypostatization” (Vaihinger 203). “Hypostatization” would be to crystalize a fiction from an as if into a because. The world we conceive, Vaihinger continues, is but “a secondary or tertiary construction” which arises only “in our heads” [My emphasis]. Though only a supplement to but not part of reality, fiction should be “an instrument for grasping and subjectively understanding” it (63). But his assertion that fiction might help us “find our way back to actuality” is contradictory, for our conceptions arise only in our heads (56). Fiction is no “deviation from” reality but an “arbitrary alteration,” where something “unreal” is “substituted for something real” (39).
J R’s nod to this passage of Vaihinger comes when Edward Bast, JR’s teacher, confronts him about the disreputable practices that he has used to build his business empire. These practices, JR claims, are based on inside information. “Inside?” Bast retorts, there “isn’t any inside!” The “only inside’s the one inside your head” (644). But Bast is equally guilty, as his answer to JR asking him how he composes music reveals: “you make it up right inside your head” (134). A similar intervention from Vaihinger appears in Carpenter’s Gothic (1985). Gaddis’s third novel takes place in a house, whose inside and outside do not match. Its owner, McCandless, explains its architecture to his tenant, Elizabeth Booth, but breaks off looking at the “towering heights and cupolas” of his house “as though for some echo” that would confirm his view. But that echo is from an uncertain voice that tells him, “It’s like the inside of your head McCandless […]” (328). This voice continues Gaddis’s career-long inside-one’s-head motif that implicitly refers to Vaihinger’s warning about hypostatization.
If the world we perceive is merely a fiction that emanates from inside our head, to get through the night is possible, but to return to reality beyond fiction’s mediation impossible. But Gaddis never abandons what Barry Stampfl calls “Vaihinger’s assumption […] of an objectively given reality” (440). Fiction is not just an abstraction, but a series of abstractions and substitutions that replace each other as they are formulated. Gaddis’s characters might seek “a system” with which to “comfortably approach reality” but they are already irreconcilably separate from that reality (van Ewijk 372). Carpenter’s Gothic refers to a “good serviceable fiction” (121), which is another fleeting but direct nod to Vaihinger that, though leaving him unnamed, demonstrates his important – even complex – influence on Gaddis. Through the concept of good serviceable fiction, Vaihinger introduces his law of ideational shifts, which describes how a “fiction” can shift to “dogma” and vice versa (124). The shift is caused by the ambiguity of the copula – the verb is – which, despite having “many meanings,” is a “short abbreviation,” but this form causes a statement “intended” as “a conscious fictive judgment” to be mistakenly turned into “a dogmatic assertion […]” This mistake is “dangerous,” especially “in religion,” because its ideational shift causes a “statement made by the founder of a religion” – Christ’s “conscious fiction” to “regard God” as if “he were your father” – to be “transformed into the unconscious dogma of the disciples.” Vaihinger applauds how his own era takes this “petrified dogma” as “a living conscious fiction” so that, when expressed, its “deeper significance” is retained. But this is not the case in Carpenter’s Gothic: fiction shifts to dogma, since hardly any of the novel’s characters—especially its Christian fundamentalists—are of Vaihinger’s “more subtle spirits,” who interpret “spiritually” that which “was meant spiritually” and who accept “allegories” for what they are – fictions (Vaihinger 264-5). The characters dismiss any suggestion about what reality might be in order to adhere to a dogmatic statement about how reality must be seen. Such an absolute stance is symptomatic of the ascendency of dogma in the novel. The serviceability provided by Vaihinger’s fiction now leads to followers prioritizing a fiction, but not humanity.
Reason and rationality are abandoned because of what McCandless in Carpenter’s Gothic identifies as the human penchant for “any lunatic fiction to get through the night and the more farfetched the better” (157). No passage is made through the night, for the novel ends with a nuclear explosion, detonated by The United States so that its deceitful claim on an African state’s mineral reserve becomes absolute. McCandless, owner of the novel’s central house, is also the geologist who excavated that reserve and claims that it holds “nothing but bush”: with this information he could shed light on the novel’s underhanded schemes, or even put a halt to them (238). But he refuses to do so, hence his name that suggests a lack of light. He reveals the reserve’s emptiness to his house tenant, Elizabeth Booth, who happens to be the daughter of an executive of Vorakers, a company heavily involved in the land-grab of the reserve. Her husband, Paul, a pathological liar, works for the same company, liaising between it and the fundamentalists, who also claim the site for themselves and whom Vorakers claims to be protecting. The claims, falsehoods and coincidences in Carpenter’s Gothic are all part of Gaddis’s constant narrative revelation, but McCandless would put a stop to the illumination of new information: he judges that his refusal to reveal that the reserve is spent would stop the spread of neither the fictions already made nor those to come, particularly from the fundamentalists, to counter his revelation. But it is Gaddis’s participation that McCandless rejects: rather than create another fiction, he willingly succumbs to, but also sides with, one sole, hypostatized fiction that is certainly not progressive but Medievally regressive. Elizabeth tells McCandless that his refusal is not because he despises the Christian fundamentalists’ “stupidity” but their “hopes” no matter how dire, for he has none himself (244). All the novel’s characters become “convicts locked up in some shabby fiction” whose dogma is devoid of any beneficial end. This “fiction’s all your own” (169), McCandless observes, vainly trying to absolve himself by blaming everyone else for projecting one dangerous fiction that subjugates all to its chaos and destruction. The narrator of Agapē Agape (2002) condemns a similar “ultimate fiction” (“only you!”) as “the maddest” and “the most tyrannous because they believe it kill for it, die for it” (68). Dangerous fictions bring alienation and destruction, and like any fiction they bring deception too, but unlike safe fictions the deceptions in dangerous fictions benefit no-one.
The literary theorist Wolfgang Iser, whom Vaihinger’s work has also influenced, states that the vital difference between a safe and a dangerous fiction, is that the former “reveals its own fictionality” and signals “that a change of attitude is required,” while the latter “masks its fictionality” so that “attitudes continue unchanged […]” (Iser 12). Fiction “is not meant to represent reality” but point “to something that it is not” and “make that something conceivable” (13). But this difference between these two types of fiction means that their “function must be radically different” because fiction, like “masking,” does “not necessarily” intend “to deceive,” but deceit might be justified if it breaks limits (12). Fiction, for Iser, should consequently be “identified with its use,” for this “testifies to the function and not to the foundation” (xvi). Wyatt in The Recognitions might give his forgery a metaphysical foundation, but that does not justify the consequential collapse of his marriage, of his social life and mental health.
Gaddis’s entire oeuvre upholds this distinction between a dangerous and a safe fiction. In The Recognitions, a former Jesuit priest, Basil Valentine, who falsely authenticates Wyatt’s forgeries so that they might bring a better price on the market, comments that the “priest” – an advocate of total revelation – “is the guardian of mysteries” but the “artist” – an advocate of a piece-meal revelation – “is driven to expose them” (261). Some forty years later, Gaddis’s late essay, the belligerent “Old Foes with New Faces” reaffirms that the “priest is the guardian of mysteries; the artist is driven to expose them” but their “difference” is that the writer is “a secret-teller,” who, “grappling with his audience, one reader, one page at a time,” uses fiction as a means of apperception brought about by an agreed suspension of disbelief (36). Yet the priest’s “collective delusion” of the “congregation all at once” imposes a dangerous fiction (37). Writer and priest might be “in the same line of business of concocting, arranging, and peddling fictions” in order again “to get us safely through the night,” but of vital importance is that a fiction must intend safe arrival (38).
One exemplary manifesto about what fiction should do by Joseph Conrad, to which Gaddis often refers, says that it should try “to make you hear, to make you feel” and “to make you see,” for fiction should offer “that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask” and a “feeling of unavoidable solidarity” in “mysterious origin […]” (Conrad 5). Fiction can project an intuition of the transcendental yet still bind “mankind to the visible world.” This is not simply a picture of how the world is but of how it could be improved.
Iser argues that fiction is not in opposition to reality but “interferes” in it to make it “serve a purpose” (146). Reality is indifferent to its use, but fiction’s positive effects – the vitalization and affirmation of humanity – should “take us beyond the limits of what we are” (xiii). But countering limitation is problematic. Gore Vidal would “rectify the language,” were it “used to disguise” rather than “illuminate” experience (22). But because language is indifferent to its use, the desire to conceal rather than reveal is not the fault of language but of its user. Robert Coover’s narrator in The Public Burning (1977) comments that society is “bent, not on ennobling” but “on demeaning” people (112). Yet the narrator, one Richard Nixon, is interested not in beneficial ends, but in having the innocent Rosenbergs executed. He blames not himself but society. He represents Iser’s “mask” that, intending to deceive, unintentionally “discloses itself” as one of the many “modes of revelation” (Iser 76). Disclosure is achieved despite the intention to avoid it. David Foster Wallace’s assassin Marathe in Infinite Jest (1996) equivocates that he has “merely pretended to pretend to pretend,” leaving his intentions uncertain (94). Infinite Jest’s insistent use of pretense makes any agreement about how to presume reality recede further into Wallace’s accumulating fictions.
For William H. Gass, fiction is “material upon which further forms can be imposed” (25). Iser urges the abandonment of the “fiction/reality dichotomy” in order to conceive fiction as “an operational mode of consciousness that makes inroads into existing versions” of the world (xiv). Reality should be open to interference and participation. The eradication of the fiction/reality divide not only refashions apperception by assimilating new perceptions among those already formulated but also “brings to light purposes, attitudes, and experiences” that are not “part of the reality produced” and should, therefore, not necessarily be dismissed (2). When unrestricted by “the limitations” that determine “institutionalized organizations,” a “panorama” of the “possible” is revealed in spite of limitation (xviii).
In order to push against a self-imposed limitation produced by conforming to a presumed objective understanding of reality, other novels adopt the in-your-head motif that Gaddis derived from Vaihinger. A notable earlier case is Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Gaddis was “stunned” when reading Kafka and, to be rid of him, imitated him (Moore 10). But he must have found Kafka’s almost Vaihingerian tropes impressive enough to adopt them as his own. In The Trial, the law is drawn to Joseph K.’s guilt maintained with the law’s quasi-objective view. K. tells his warders that this law “probably exists only in your heads,” as if trying to use it as a heuristic instrument for his own “advantage […]” (5). Although assumed as infallible, the law is but a fiction full of contradictions; yet these might serve as an escape made by sidestepping a pre-given reality to reveal a new panorama. Kafka’s priest explains: “one does not have to believe everything is true, one only has to believe it is necessary” (172). K. protests that this “makes the lie fundamental to world order.” Yet K. is “too tired to follow all the deductions” and is led “into unaccustomed trains of thought” quite “removed from reality.” Without his realizing, a new fiction, albeit a lie, emerges which might be regarded, like Vaihinger’s liberty, as “an indispensable fiction,” for, though nothing in the real world corresponds “to the idea of liberty,” in practice “it is an exceedingly necessary fiction” (Vaihinger 43). Kafka’s painter explains how two different levels of the law can be exploited; the first is “what is stated in the law” and the second “what I personally have found out. You should not confuse these two” (120), otherwise one’s subjective experience is surrendered to a pseudo-objective view.
Gaddis’s in-your-head motif also anticipates current novelists. Perhaps they might have read either him or Vaihinger, but even if unaware of both, they acknowledge that fiction can have an ameliorative function in society by broadening how it sees itself and the world. In Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) a housewife confronts the terror of death – she is recovering from cancer – with “the fact that” when “this monologue in my head finally stops, I’ll be dead” (514): the narration inside her head is a means for her own engagement with the world and continuation – as is her baking, with which she occupies herself during her recuperation. The novel’s repeated commencement of new clauses with “the fact that” is a stylistic lynch-pin that makes the novel deceitfully appear to unfold in one sentence. Though always swamped by brute fact, the narrator outlines another particular fact: “there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be” as many “internal monologues […]” (515). Other means can order reality without inducing restriction, conformity or a compulsion to order. Order should lead to expansion and convenience, for it “has no meaning” that is necessary or integral in itself; it is but “an agreed code for organizing stuff” and can be, therefore, freely entered (359).
When Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, won The Booker Prize in 2018, her novel’s Vaihingerian element must have impressed the prize’s Chair of Judges, one Kwame Anthony Appiah, who had just published his study on Vaihinger. One “fictitious premise” in Milkman assumed by the narrator’s mother is to rid her daughter of men who have never existed “except in her own head” (47). Nonetheless, “the very thing” that neither woman wants appears: Milkman, a gunman. To produce new possibilities, characters are identified with unconventional terms such as “maybe-boyfriend” or “maybe territory” (9). But this perspective does not establish any security, for everyone has a “maybe-category” but can still as likely “be done to death” (294). Yet not only has the mother made things up, but so has the community: the narrator’s reputation as Milkman’s girlfriend arises from her neighbors, who have also “made it up” (229). A change of perspective and even behavior is possible. Milkman uses his status as gunman, however, to terrorize the maybe-categories to be subjugated before his as-if hypostatized as the sole “because” despite other “becauses” (306).
J. G. Ballard’s later novels also use a cognitive reorientation taken if not from Gaddis, then possibly from Vaihinger. Cocaine Nights (1996) would solve a murder by revealing “what’s been going on inside” someone’s “head” (187). A psychiatrist in Super-Cannes (2000) has the residents of a complex of business parks and apartments put “under house arrest inside their own heads” (199-200). The psychiatrist also runs for them an “adventure playground” that is “inside their heads” (95-6). Thoughts and fictions infiltrate a supposedly discrete reality, in which we nonetheless deploy fictions to make sense or even create some message. But Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come (2006) issues a curious message that “there is no message. Nothing has any meaning, so at last we’re free” (256). Millennium People (2003), however, would fill this void created by being free with “ballast,” such as “moral universes,” in order to provide stability; but these introduce restrictive determinism (136). Should we accept that “a meaningless universe has meaning” so that, rather than slide into nihilism, we might arrive at “a new kind of sense” and recreate not only our own meaning but also recreate the world around us (137)? “We emerge from the void,” but losing faith in ourselves, Ballard asserts, we “rejoin” it (261).
Ballard’s insistent in-one’s-head illustrates how the “outer world of everyday reality and the inner one inside my [Ballard’s] head, are constantly” offering “clues to what is going on” (in Self, 316). He posits interference between inner fiction and outer reality. Noetic constructions can be catalysts for change, but change is neither fully determinable nor necessarily ameliorative. The as-if, ideally a means of amelioration, can become a dangerous because, whose re-establishment of the fiction/reality dichotomy discourages interference that the fictions in our head can afford. Should we relinquish that interference, we relinquish our responsibility in creation, whose “constructions,” Ballard maintains, are “mental”; they “exist inside our heads” but are “not out there” (in Weiss, 454).
For Ballard, “fiction and reality have” been “reversed” so that “our world” is “almost entirely fictional” and our “only point of reality” is “inside our heads” (Nordlund 228). For Gaddis, the relation between fiction and reality has been “turned upside down”: reality was once “the stone Doctor Johnson kicked,” while fiction took “place in the mind,” but “now everything out there is the hallucination and the mind where the work is done is the only reality” (Agapē 84). Despite the loss of a shared though mind-numbing reality, Gaddis and Ballard would regenerate the fiction posited around us as reality with thought. Ballard questions writers’ “moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world” where they can “preside” over “characters like an examiner,” and know, God-like, “all the questions in advance” (“Introduction to Crash”). Writers can only offer readers “the contents” of their “own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives” to “devise various hypotheses and test” them against the facts.
Gaddis’s cognitive reorientation disrupts the idea of a social realism that micromanages readers into a novel’s framework that would only establish another perceptual constriction ripe for refashioning. John Beer describes Gaddis’s recalcitrant realism as a “naturalistic means put to non-naturalistic ends” (76). The framework is “as molten metals” that having been “spilled harden instantly” into “unpredictable patterns of breakage” (Recognitions 114). The patterns, despite supplying some incidental form, are random but they cannot shed the breakage whence they originate. It is from such chaos, however, that order is forged – even in an illicit sense – from the noetic abstraction – freezing – of dynamic events; this process should not be allowed to keep things as they are although they are not. It is in such a disruptive realism that readers can, to a degree, participate to find new order.
Gaddis states that “the artist is an agent of change. That is the artist’s function” (in Ingendaay, 89). He seems to be echoing Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967), a study that as Stampfl observes was responsible for undermining “the assumption that Vaihinger” is only “of slight importance” to literature (437). But Gaddis also uses the phrase “agent of change” to define artists elsewhere (“On Creative Writing…” 117). Kermode’s study might have introduced Vaihinger to other writers like Ellmann, Burns and Ballard, but its definition of fiction seems similar to Gaddis’s ideas on the topic. Fictions, Kermode writes in a similar mode to Vaihinger, “degenerate into myths” if “not consciously held to be fictive” (39). Myths presuppose “total and adequate explanations of things” and are “a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures.” Fictions, however, “are for finding things out” and “change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent.” The latter are also “verified by their practical effects”; but should “the world” be made “to conform with a fiction” – as the regulating fictions of Nazism led in reality to “the murder of Jews” – the “effect is to insult reality” (109). Gaddis, by including Holocaust denial in “Old Foes with New Faces,” seems again to echo Kermode’s insult. That essay features a dangerous fiction that has embraced “revelation as ultimate Truth,” but from which “no greater night has descended than this formula” – a reversal of the use of fiction to get through the night; Holocaust denial attempts “to pass off historical reality” as a “mischievous concoction […]” (42). “Old Foes with New Faces” also emphasizes the unethical consequences of a fiction that exhorts Christians “to follow the example of the shotgun slayer” who “simply carried out his theology” by murdering a doctor working in an abortion clinic (44). Indiscriminate pro-life beliefs “sorely” test “the willing suspension of disbelief” (44). The refusal to drop such dangerous beliefs reverses the warning from the beginning of The Recognitions: there, fictions presumed as reality should be easily dropped, but here, at the end of Gaddis’s career, he sees them dogmatically held. He observes and condemns the growing predilection for dogmatic assertions about the nature of reality. These fictions, instead of leading to birth and renewal, like Gwyon’s final rebirth in The Recognitions (which began with a funeral) accelerate the drift towards death.
Don DeLillo also observes a deathly drift. He praises Gaddis “for extending the possibilities of the novel,” as if following Gaddis’s cognitive reorientation in order to blur any rigid distinction between fiction and reality (in Harris, 19). DeLillo appears to have a similar debt to Vaihinger as does Gaddis. In The Body Artist (2001), DeLillo focuses on a safe fiction that moves towards life, but, in Cosmopolis (2003), he focuses on a dangerous fiction that moves towards death. Both novels also acknowledge Vaihinger’s as-if.
White Noise (1985) affirms that all “plots tend to move deathward” (26). But they must also devise “a shape, a plan,” for, although “a failed scheme,” they must “affirm life” (291-2). The Body Artist demonstrates how a safe fiction helps renew life. When trying to put her husband’s suicide behind her, Lauren Hartke discovers a “voice in her head” which though, indistinct, flows “from a story in the paper”; it seems “to rise out of the inky lines of print” that “gather her into it” (18). Lauren’s voice and the voice in her head merge as the verb gather suggests. She is especially helped by inexact words such as somehow, described as one of the “weakest” in “the language. And more or less. And maybe. Always maybe,” for she is “always maybeing” (92). This maybe fiction, like Burns’s maybe-category, helps fashion a new perception. The Body Artist’s narrative even addresses the reader to suggest a malleable individuality: you – both reader and Lauren – “become someone else” in “the story, doing dialogue” that is “of your own devising. You become a man at times” – a shift in gender – “living between the lines” – a subtlety to facilitate “another version of the story” (19-20). Lauren also learns “to speak in a voice that is hers” because, paradoxically, “it issues from someone else” – a Mr. Tuttle, who is a “symbol of Lauren’s inchoate new self […]” (Osteen 146-7). Tuttle’s inchoateness is a solvent that DeLillo takes from Vaihinger more than Gaddis: for Tuttle, it is “always as if. He” does “this or that as if […]” (45 my emphases.) Tuttle’s maybeing helps Lauren adapt herself in the world with an as-if. She, the body artist, might contort herself into a constricting fiction but abandons it for another. Tuttle, however, can neither “improvise” nor “make himself up” but must submit to the inchoate “howl of the world” that rejects ambiguity and the intervention of mind. It is “the not-as-if of things” (90) – a dangerous not-as-if that permeates DeLillo’s next novel.
Cosmopolis moves deathward. The greater part of its narration is told by Eric Packer, a 28-year-old businessman. His ex-employee, Richard Sheets, now known as Benno Levin, interrupts Packer’s narration twice. Moments before his first interruption, Levin has already murdered Packer, but his second interruption narrates that murder. DeLillo’s reversal follows the trope hysteron proteron – the last as first – which places “an effect” – Packer’s death – “before its cause” – his murder. This trope gives death such prominence that Packer realizes “he is already dead” before being shot (Conte 186).
Cosmopolis has an inseparable “interaction between technology and capital” in which the former maintains the latter’s deathliness (Cosmopolis 23). A “digital imperative” is “fully realized in electronic form” whose technological not-as-if defines “every breath of the planet’s living billions” (24). Vija Kinski, Packer’s specialist in theory, explains how people are “a fantasy generated by the market” and do not “exist outside” it because there is “no outside” (90-1). This passage in a novel that focuses upon the digital economy is a direct but inverted allusion to Bast’s outburst in J R (which I discussed earlier – J R 644). The passage in which we hear that nothing “existed around” Packer, for there “was only the noise in his head” (6) alludes to Gaddis’s inside-one’s-head motif which he takes from Vaihinger.
Before being murdered and after a stream of film noir clichés, Packer thinks “of firing a shot” for the “cinematic stupidity of the gesture” as well as “the fiction of kicking in a door” (182/6). He calls Levin’s “crime” a “cheap imitation” and “stale fantasy,” which nomenclature suggests a clichéd mimetic template strictly adhered to “because other people do it.” Moreover, Packer tells Levin, “Your crime is in your head. Another fool shooting up a diner,” or another Vaihingerian fiction arising in our head that conditions our perception of—and our praxis within—reality “because because” (193-6, my emphases). A double because reinforces the not-as-if of things as a mindless repetition of the absolute if a, then always z irrespective of consequence. This not-as-if holds such an unshakable grip on perception that any ethic concluded from the fiction is abandoned to the howl of the world.
Appiah observes that “too many” are “inclined to speak untruth because it is politically useful to do so” (3). He worries that Vaihinger might provide a “highminded philosophical defense” of a ‘lowminded political practice” (Appiah 3). Yet Vaihinger investigates “the role of untruth in thinking about reality, not in the usefulness of speaking untruths” which attempt to block further interpretation. That “a thought might be useful for some purpose other than mirroring reality invites us to consider” whether the purpose of that thought “is good or evil […]” (4). If “all we know about the world is how it seems,” there is “no difference” between “how things seem” and “how things are” (20). If we insist that we perceive how things really are, we deceive ourselves with a fiction hypostatized as solid reality. Vaihinger’s as-if helps “a person control the world” (183), but not by imposing that as-if upon others.
The mismatch in pretending things to be as they are though they are not is the target of Gaddis’s satirical social realism that points to another form – perhaps ameliorative – of reality. Any fiction can be dropped for another that should be more accommodative; but, unfortunately, when asked what “positive social/political effect” his work would have, Gaddis replied, “Obviously quite the opposite of what the work portrays” (in Berkley, 57). Fiction has no worth taken as a straightforward reflection of reality because it can only distort; that distortion, however, could serve as a means to envision a better reality.
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