After noting how J R was a reflection of postmodern society and antiheroic traditions in America in the 1970s, Lalita Kashoba Mohan signals a similar postmodern turn in her homeland, India, and other countries "whose economic development is now following America’s earlier path."
Two common questions in Gaddis Studies are actually closely linked: what kind of a protagonist is JR? and how relevant is "postmodernism" for reading Gaddis today? As postmodernism has become less academically urgent, recently the more discussed of the two has been the protagonist issue. JR is seen by some scholars as a villain, by others as a "pathetic victim" (Strehle, 70), by others as no protagonist at all but a cipher in a world of mindless systems. I will argue that JR is a familiar kind of American antihero, though one whose emergence in that tradition marks a turning point. A turning point that is all about postmodernism, hence showing that this remains an important framework for understanding Gaddis, and that Gaddis might be particularly relevant today in nations (like India, my own) that are going through the postmodernizing shifts that the US went through at the time Gaddis wrote J R (1975).
JR in the American Antihero Tradition
Why should we think of JR as a protagonist, not a minor character or sub-character? He makes things happen in the novel’s world that would not happen without him, and that world cannot be understood without understanding him. Characters like Bast or Amy Joubert are acted upon by JR: we may have more access to their experiences than to his, but he is the cause of those experiences. The novel does represent national and global economic systems, but they are systems whose outcomes depend on the actions of the eleven-year-old boy within them. Not only is JR causal in the novel, but he is also a focal point for our sympathy or distaste. What makes us feel good or bad about the experiences of other characters depends on JR’s actions, which we can judge for their harm and motivation. JR himself can be felt sympathy for, as Gaddis himself later admitted to feeling in interviews.1See his Paris Review interview for an example.
Despite Gaddis’s sympathy, JR is no simple hero. He negates the expectations of charisma that make a conventional hero heroic. And by the novel’s value-system it is clear that he makes the world worse, and is shown to be blameworthy for this, despite his young age. All this makes him an antihero. Specifically, he is identifiable within a particularly American tradition of antiheroes, and he marks the moment at which that tradition becomes identifiably postmodern. This is a new context in which we see JR, the young antihero, and J R the novel.
We might call this tradition the American "Conventionalist" Antihero. They are characterised by subordination of personal character to rule-exploiting. Essentially empty and characterless, they adopt the conventions, behaviours and apparent values of those around them in order to succeed. The ways they treat people are mercilessly pragmatic and instrumentalist. Lacking any morality of their own beyond the craving for success, their lack of interest in whether the rules are justified or not makes them better players than those who worry about the principles behind the rules. The conventionalist antihero lacks family or context before they come on the scene of their narratives, fabricating their own backstories even when these are clearly at odds with reality. And yet they bend reality to fit with these groundless, convention-flattering, aspirational self-images. Unbound by ties to kin, principle, place, or reality, they can navigate any system frictionlessly. And unlike more traditional antiheroes, they rarely undergo any kind of fall or tragedy. Their schemes may eventually run out of steam, but (especially as the tradition matures) they themselves survive to try again.
JR’s predecessors in this line include Norris’s McTeague, the mindless brute of money accumulation who plays only by the law of physical strength, Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (who as a child answers "what are you interested in?" with "money" and who never evolves a motive beyond accumulating more of it), Gatsby whose social success comes from mastering how to throw a gossip-worthy party,2Though Gatsby differs from the others of this lineage by clinging to illusions of his own, which leads him to harm. and Tom Ripley the identity-inhabiting chameleon who charms away investigation into his murders with perfectly calibrated social etiquette.3Editor Chetwynd in a personal email also suggested Undine Spragg from Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country for a female example of this tradition, as she "comes to New York from the unknown midwest and proceeds to win by her new society’s rules by bypassing its ineffectual surface etiquette. Wharton has a character describe her—in terms that match many readings of JR—as ‘a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph’" (email). In Gaddis’s novel, the characters JR learns from—like Major Hyde, overseeing the school as a part-time job beyond his military and business commitments, or Governor Cates the coordinator of the business conglomeration that is reaching out to absorb the school—are the charisma-less modern versions of single-minded accumulators or brutish simplifiers like Cowperwood and McTeague. JR is "educated" by eavesdropping on conversations between these men in the washroom where they set up deals or threaten each other. For a boy with no background and no commitments like JR, these figures with their positions of conspicuous power emerge as torchbearers, rescuers who provide him the prospect of escapades from the heart of capitalist life. JR’s successors then include Patrick Bateman of American Psycho and Tyler Durden of Fight Club, who both combine the successful convention-exploitation with a furthering of the impersonality that JR and Tom Ripley introduced into the tradition. They are personally unnoticed or invisible or imaginary to the point we must question whether they and their actions exist at all in their novels’ worlds, even as they succeed and cause chaos or harm.
To see the uniqueness of this kind of antihero, we can compare it to more usual antiheroes in both the American and European traditions. The European antiheroes come from the Romantic tradition and tend to be, whether high-born or low, intelligent and deliberate rejectors of society’s conventions. They are conscious rebels, and their stories are most often full of internal moral debates as they go. From Raskolnikov to Meursault, they are often aware of the ideas of contemporary philosophers and meet their society on philosophical terms. They have independent insights, and if what they do is often for harmful or destructive ends, it compels us because it reflects critical understanding of a traditional hierarchy and society that is equally corrupt behind its façade of rightness.
One tradition of American antiheroes is closer to this line. These begin with Twain’s Birdofredum Sawin and Huck Finn, moving through Holden Caulfield toward (from Gaddis’s era) Randle McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Like the European model, these are Romantic rejectors of an overly rationalized civilization, but unlike the Europeans they are often anti-intellectual and wilfully naïve,4Sawin, who aims to be intellectual but reveals truths by his failure, is the exception, as he comes before the tradition is fully established. hence a greater proportion of them are children. Their stories are often fundamentally comic as the world improves when they unravel the hypocrisy in established laws. The kind of figures society and its values normally overlook, they critique that society by their authenticity and simplicity, which stand against it to assert an alternative principle. The veil of social acceptability and unacceptability is blurred. They seem to have overcome a troubled conscience to fit into the real world, even if it means surpassing socially acceptable morals, ethics and standard codes of conduct. This is where they differ from JR and his lineage: the Cowperwoods, Spraggs, Ripleys, and Batemans who have no alternative worldview to offer but rather inhabit groundless conventions with greater amoral skill. JR is a waif like Huck, but brings no counter-standard of authenticity with him. We could call this more traditional model of American antiheroes "Authenticity Antiheroes" and JR’s lineage "Conventionalist Antiheroes."
Many of the Authenticity antiheroes are children like JR, but the usual Conventionalist antihero is a cynical adult. So why is JR, lacking that cynicism, still an antihero rather than a sympathetic figure? William Gaddis himself said in a number of interviews that he rather liked the boy JR, seeing the root of his scheme in "good natured greed" rather than evil (see Abádi-Nagy). But liking, or even sympathizing, does not mean endorsing. Gaddis makes clear the damage that JR’s schemes do to the innocent and the guilty alike. The boy has repeated disregard for the minorities and under-trodden although he himself comes from such a background: he directs his PR man Davidoff’s influence to use race as a means to manipulate and control. He can be accused of overlooking environmental concerns. He withdraws basic safety nets from nameless and marginalized employees with the same lack of recognition and care as he himself has been treated with. Not only does he do harm, but he knows it and so, despite his young age, bears responsibility for all this.
A defining feature of an American conventionalist antihero is that he chooses his influences, models, rules, and conventions. He gives up his character and purpose to them, but that choice comes before them and is what defines him. Gaddis, despite his sympathy, does set out that JR chooses not to go along with better options for role models: he chooses the wrong influences, the empty, the cheap, the deranged. As he imagines the Eskimo models at the Natural History Museum to be stuffed dead humans, so he chooses to taxidermy his eleven-year-old skin with the ideological stuffing of vacuous figures like the gibbering jargon-baffled school principal Whiteback and the machine-like profit-loss processor Governor Cates. The places where JR thrives are those that are already vacuums and interstices. He rejects mentoring or influence from characters who reach out to him with better influence, like Bast or Amy, who he instead turns into instrumental servants. Had he followed them, the world of the novel would be better off, and JR himself would be less to blame for the world’s harms. But then he would not be such an important example of an American conventionalist antihero.
Though the conventionalists do great harm, they remain heroes earning our strained sympathy, as what others do to them (or try to) is often as unjustified as what they do to others. And though they themselves offer us no philosophy or social diagnosis through dialogue or thoughts, still their stories do lead to insight for us as readers. Without us being able to see how their appropriation of the conventions succeeds, we could not notice how conventional, hollow, and exploitable the structures of social success are. Through the conventionalist antihero we get a clear vision of the existing system and its flaws.
JR’s Antiheroism is Postmodern
As JR is the kind of antihero who succeeds by unquestioningly absorbing and exploiting the conventions and expectations of his society, the fact that he lives in the postmodern era means that he is exploiting and succeeding within postmodern expectations and conventions. Within his tradition of antiheroes, he reflects the historical change where personal presence and charisma are no longer necessary for conventional success. While McTeague or Cowperwood must apply personal force, and Ripley or Gatsby work through personal charm and mastery of etiquette, JR can inhabit his era’s conventions all the better because no one has to meet him and he can do everything through the phone, the mail, or a delegated representative. While some postmodernist claims about the nature of language or philosophy are not taken as seriously today as they once were, JR remains a very relevant antihero because he embodies important postmodern insights about the social effects of the changing economy, and how the concrete and the personal were becoming simulated out of existence, a tendency that has only increased since Gaddis’s time.
JR’s antiheroism foreshadows Jean Baudrillard’s simulacral vision of the changing culture. Baudrillard’s prophetic view of a surreally groundless America reflects today’s online culture. In our age of social media—where the craze of ‘influencers’ on Instagram pulls more followers and subscribers into business as youth aim to simulate what they scroll through on their mobile phones—there is no scope for authenticity, whether in our heroes or our antiheroes. People young and old now feel distorted, alienated, reified, and lost, just like JR, and they latch onto reductive dehumanised models of success just as readily as he does. JR, though, understands the situation enough to deliberately become a "result of the system" (Wharton) and succeed, where today’s youth are just given promises that will not be fulfilled.
As Baudrillard writes: "We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning" (Simulacra, 79). JR values nothing outside the game, so is mostly busy planning, working, and conversing over the telephone, trying to make virtual transactions. The obsession with earning money overtakes his senses so completely that he is never seen in neat clothes or shoes; his hair is always ruffled. His diet is sparse. Though he plays a game, he doesn’t "play" in the sense of doing anything for fun or without reward. JR never spends any of the money that he supposedly earned, except to keep on going deeper into the game.
John Johnston wrote the fullest Baudrillardian reading of Gaddis, but his work is mainly on The Recognitions and focused particularly on Baudrillard’s theory of language and media. Johnston’s work is less cited now that the heyday of postmodern criticism has passed. But Baudrillard’s more strictly social criticism can illuminate J R and its protagonist’s American conventionalist antiheroism. Baudrillard rejected the idea that the kind of world J R shows us allowed for a revolution within the system, asserting that all his era’s revolutionary heroes ultimately turn into tired, antiheroic figures of consumption. In such a world, "fatigue," a "groundless" dysfunction like a repressed revolution, would take over from the real revolutionary threat of "hunger." The Baudrillardian postmodern antihero is less viciously violent (compared to the naturalist model of McTeague) than tired and mentally strained. The source of his emptiness and of his achievement is not a muscular or physical exertion, but a mental strain, a nervous wreck, a depression or a lack of energy that contributes to the cynical willingness to abdicate any ideal of authenticity and go along with the conventions as frictionlessly as possible. JR maintains his own energy, but he has this entropic effect on everyone around him.
Baudrillard even seems to share some of Gaddis’s diagnosis of how this culture came to pass in America: both identify the dominance of television in education as a problem,5Baudrillard in America passes scathing criticism on the televised American education system, which J R also addresses as a source for the distortion of JR’s innocence (see Conley and Chetwynd for studies of this). as well as the false educational promise of computing.6America also claims that the computer has turned out to be a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic; all the interactions JR learns how to do come down to endless exchanges with a machine. The child sitting in front of the computer at school is deluded into feeling connected to the practical issues of the world, but "[c]hild and machine have merely joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has found at last what the teenager gets from his stereo and his Walkman, a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen" (35). JR’s disconnected education matches the mobile phone addiction that children face today. A fuller Baudrillardian reading of J R and its diagnosis of simulacral education is thus something that scholars should pursue if they want to understand how the novel remains relevant, and to do this they must see that "postmodernism" remains an important framework for studying Gaddis even though it has become less popular in the last decades.
Postmodern Relevance Expanded: The Indian Capitalist Connection to J R
J R was a reflection of the postmodern society in America at its time, and its protagonist evolves his tradition of antiheroes into the postmodern depersonalized era. Other countries whose economic development is now following America’s earlier path may thus find the novel especially relevant today. For example, this is why J R is of interest for contemporary India.
In recent years, comparisons have been made between JR and Donald Trump: someone who fibs, alters, and restructures the law, narratives and news to make reality bend to his advantage. Trump popularized the term "Fake News" (initially used to attack him) as a relativistic discrediting of any disagreement. My current academic work is on how the Fake News concept—and the related term "post-truth"—applies to current Indian political disputes. For example, how indigenous Indian farmers were demonized by mainstream media sponsored by the state, which twisted their protests into a reason to call them anti-nationals, urban Naxalites, and terrorists of an enemy nation. J R demonstrates how in the postmodern business world ideas are circulated and realities are built on the basis of wishes and machinations rather than substantial facts, figures and evidence. Reading it is a primer for anyone interested in the current patterns of Indian politics as the country enters its own postmodern era.
The connection and influence are then even more direct when we look at the emergence of new kinds of antihero in recent Indian fiction. What we see is that many protagonists of the most internationally recognized recent fiction from India are antiheroes of the exact same conventionalist kind as JR embodied when America was going through postmodern shifts in its economy and culture.
In Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) for example, the protagonist Balram is characterized by greed, contempt and a competitive spirit, which he has no values other than to fulfil. Like JR, he did not come upon these attributes by nature, but by being inspired to fill his own emptiness with the most immediate model of social success: his owner Mr. Ashok. Mimicking how Ashok goes through the world, Balram develops only through increasing refinement of the dominant social codes of fraud, fabrication, manipulation, and the shunning of moral and ethical values.
Like JR, he learns what conventions to inhabit mainly through eavesdropping. As he says in a letter to a former employer "Many of my ideas come from my ex-employer, I am not an original thinker, but an original listener" (31). Pursuing this more perfect embodiment of the rules that govern his "system," with increasing requirements to lie and fabricate (which he worries less and less about the more they reward him) takes him from being an ordinary servant to a successful entrepreneur. He compares those who question or otherwise fail to adopt the rules to chickens in the "rooster coop" who willingly wait for their chance to get slaughtered rather than escaping. Success is measured only in terms of accumulating wealth, and Balram gradually gives up the pretence of sending any money home for his family—of making money for any reason other than to help make more of it. As in McTeague, the natural outcome of such a life of pure competition by the system’s rules is violent conflict, and by the end of the novel, like JR, Balram leaves the destruction he has caused behind him and is ready to start again playing by new rules in a new role, a new game.
India turned into a post-truth nation with the turn of the 21st century, as its economy caught up to postmodernity, and its national literature has reflected this. The advent of the American-template corporate capitalist system offered scope for speculation and fabrication. The rise of social media networks and platforms with the decline in traditional media accounts led to bombardment of a multiplicity of views-expanding options for the masses. The shift from rural to urban requires learning and unlearning skills, values, and traits simultaneously within a short span. This meant that more and more people with no investment in the conventions of high-society business and etiquette were exposed to those conventions on screens and learned how to mimic them. The recent literature from India creates new kinds of protagonist within its national tradition. Just as America went through comparable social evolutions forty years before, so the contemporary Indian novel reflects parallels to the kinds of protagonist that a novel like J R created in the postmodern era.
One important context for reading William Gaddis in the future years will be to see how his novels can either directly influence or reflect the literature of other countries going through the same kinds of social transformation as America went through during the time of his writing. Gaddis’s most urgent readers in the near future might be in India and the other BRICS countries.
Works Cited:
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Adiga, Arvind. The White Tiger. Free Press, 2008
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Chetwynd, Ali. "William Gaddis’ Ford Foundation Fiasco and J R’s Elision of the Teacher’s-Eye View." Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 8.1 (2020). http://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.3
Conley, Tim. "This Little Prodigy Went to Market: The Education of JR." In William Gaddis: ‘The Last of Something,’ eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck. Jefferson, McFarland, 2010: 126–42.
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Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr Ripley. Coward-McCann, 1955.
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Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. Doubleday, 1899.
Strehle Klemtner, Susan. "‘For a Very Small Audience’: The Fiction of William Gaddis." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 19.3 (1978): 61–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1978.10690173
Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country [1913]. Scribner, 1997