Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University, applies her expertise in legal theory to Gaddis’s penultimate novel. Following discussions on business law and the controversial notion of corporate personhood, Siraganian reads Gaddis's fourth novel to explore how a business-dominated legal culture transforms our conceptions and narratives of the individual person.
Towards the end of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own (1994), Christina Lutz recalls a court case she once heard about, probably from her stepfather, District Court Judge Thomas Crease:
[T]hey had an old night watchman who couldn’t write[,] signed his pension checks with his thumbprint till somebody noticed he must be over a hundred and ten years old with the checks still coming through and when they investigated they found his thumb in a bottle of formaldehyde up on a kitchen shelf with the green tomato preserves… (441)
Christina is not a lawyer, but, like many of the characters in the novel, she frequently meditates on the strange scenarios legal reasoning creates. In the story she is remembering, the law requires someone to produce a willful signature. If that signing body—or pickled thumb, in this case—can be detached from its mortal coil, then pension checks will continue to be sent to it, at least for a few decades until the fraud is uncovered. More generally, Frolic takes time to explore the complicated relationship between the law’s understanding of willful, contractual persons versus a lay conception of what a person is. Checks can be endorsed by dismembered thumbs through agents that collect and deposit them, and money exchanges live hands, or at least, flush bank accounts. Like a legal corporate person, the night watchman inadvertently transfers his pension to agents acting for him, when they synecdochically substitute a body part for his former self.
This essay puts Gaddis’s penultimate novel in the context of discussions on business law, particularly the controversial notion of corporate personhood: the legal fiction or construct that corporations and certain other business entities can be understood, in various ways, as legal persons. Frolic, I suggest, explores some sophisticated and nuanced ways to think about how and why the differences between natural personhood and corporate personhood matter, a topic that concerned a broad range of American legal theorists and creative writers from the early twentieth century till the present.1See my Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). On the relevance of legal and other accounts of “persons” in American literature of the 20th century and beyond, see books by Chodat, Izenberg, or Naimou. Although excellent existing scholarship has discussed various aspects of Frolic in relation to law and American culture, thus far little has been said about issues of corporate personhood as explored in Gaddis’s novel.2See, for example, Larry Wertheim’s “Law as Frolic,” which offers an early, comprehensive examination of the novel’s robustly imagined world of law, and Helle Porsdam’s Legally Speaking, which focuses on “Gaddis’ discussion of law as an engine for cultural redemption” (196). But these issues thread through the narrative in all sorts of ways. Consider that, in the case that Christina recalls, we see the perverse vision of an unknown, shadowy agent using a pickled thumb of a non-living entity to deposit a check into some other account. This, in essence, is a version of the agency relationship in any corporate form. Gaddis’s insights, like those of writers who both preceded and followed him, help us articulate why conceptions of literary and aesthetic experience are essential to understand the distinctions between forms of personhood (“natural” versus “corporate”) and to understand the limitations and hazards of business law more generally.3Gaddis belongs in a multifarious group of creative writers contemplating the corporate form and its problematics throughout the century. In Corporate Persons, I discuss the exploration of corporate theorizing in the work of earlier novelists of the corporate form (Frank Norris, Theodor Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Schuyler, Ralph Ellison), experimental poets whose work might be thought of as working (slightly earlier) in the spirit of Gaddis’s prose (Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff), and contemporary writers who followed (sometimes both chronologically and stylistically) in Gaddis’s path: Richard Powers, George Saunders, and Jena Osman. Along the way, we will see how these distinctions offer Gaddis a way to explore issues of aesthetics and paraphrase, as well as problems of value and ethical responsibility.
First, some context: corporate personhood, as a legal fiction and a cultural reality, entered public consciousness after Citizens United v. F.E.C. (2010), the infamous U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that corporations had the right to free speech protections because they “speak” with their money. Mitt Romney memorably declared that “Corporations are persons, my friend,” with the “my friend,” perhaps aligning his audience with his corporate friends, while the progressive wing of the Democratic party (exemplified by Elizabeth Warren’s challenge to Romney’s line) has sometimes opposed the concept altogether. Later decisions, such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) have added to the corporate person’s civil protections. The concept is far from new—its official American birth is usually recorded as the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1886). But it still confuses many.
The general corporate form that dominates today matured over the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries to become, essentially, one of the most successful “social program[s] for economic growth,” as political scientist David Ciepley characterizes it; incorporation is essentially “a state-sponsored, socialized property system” (276, 285). Incorporation, especially the doctrine of limited liability, supported business’s desire to accumulate and manage capital efficiently and with reduced risk (see Friedman, 201). The emerging dominance of this form transformed American law, forcing judges to “objectivize legal concepts” instead of protecting “eccentric individual will” (Horwitz, 48-49). As the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legal system became more amenable to business concerns over those of individuals, the “natural entity theory” of corporations developed (70-73). According to “natural entity theory,” corporations are not merely aggregates of individuals—each with different, complicated wills, actions, and responsibilities—but natural entities (artificial persons) each with a single will and with a kind of emergent unity.
Turning corporations into unified, albeit “artificial” persons (as opposed to “natural” human beings) provided a way to legitimately acknowledge these entities while also protecting their owners and managers from legal and financial exposure. Today, the corporate person shares certain common traits with natural persons: like human beings, they can own property, enter into contracts, and sue and be sued. They also possess some controversial constitutional protections (with Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, this included First Amendment protections).
But in other ways corporations remain very different from human beings, both legally and, more obviously, ontologically. First, corporations are limited by their capital and their contracts such that legal theorists sometimes define corporations as a “nexus” of calculated contracts; that is, as a set of interconnected agreements that could continue indefinitely. Second, large companies strictly compartmentalize their managerial and ownership functions, such that a corporation’s owners and even managers might be unaware of some aspects of the business’s daily actions. Third, their “identity” is a brand soldered onto a legal entity, and their commitment to social norms is vague, disallowed, or nonexistent. As corporate law critic Kent Greenfield writes, tools to control individual wrongdoing do not work well when applied to corporations: they “cannot be incarcerated, have no conscience, are typically very complex institutions, and are not subject to the same social controls and reputational constraints as individuals” (74). They are like us, and they are not like us. They are more like some agent, for some entity, using the preserved thumb of a night watchman to cash checks.
This corporate story has been part of our American cultural heritage since the late nineteenth century, whether we have embraced that truth or not. Yet for a long time we have preferred to see this person and its story in shadow, in its traces, in its cultural productions of commodities. In the process, we inadvertently have helped sustain the authority of corporate law in our lives. I think this is one of the ideas that Gaddis is exploring in his novel, and Frolic is one of the best dramatizations of our cultural inheritance of the law of businesses and corporate personhood. The novel explores how a business-dominated legal culture transforms our conceptions and narrations of the individual person. That is, the novel depicts how the presence and cultural dominance of the legal power of businesses, not just in our daily life but in our narrative lives, transforms how we are able to imagine ourselves and our actions, our relations to others, and our artistic creations.4It is worth noting that that the familial world that Frolic portrays (primarily, the Crease and Lutz families) are a very different kind of “entity” or unit than the corporate one: while each of these families function (more or less) as one unit based on binding together disparate unreconcilable wills, the corporations and legal system that Oscar deals with function through selfish manipulation by individuals who stand to gain, but who appeal to the supra-human unified entity they're part of in order not to have to acknowledge their individual wills and interests. We might say that there is a centrifugal quality to the social units in Frolic that throws the idealized coherent corporate entity into relief (thanks to Ali Chetwynd and an anonymous reviewer for helping me articulate this point).
Gaddis deliberately became very knowledgeable about business law while writing Frolic, seeking out experts who could explain arcane aspects of intellectual property law, for example, or source him legal materials that were hard to acquire in the pre-internet era. One frequent correspondence was with Donald Oresman, general counsel at the Gulf & Western, Inc. film company, which then became Paramount Communications, Inc. (where he was also general counsel), and then later transformed into Viacom, Inc. From Oresman, Gaddis first requested “a cheap set of the Corpus Juris Secondum which is kind of a Reader’s Digest of the Law, every sort of case & human foible & precedent & plot one might imagine so there may be spark somewhere there…” (Gaddis to Nappers, 30 March 1986, 422). Oresman instead found Gaddis the 81 volumes of American Jurisprudence, 2nd edition (1975). Gaddis later sent Oresman and other lawyers drafts of parts of the novel, requesting feedback and corrections (“of course any blue penciling would be . . . welcome”) (Gaddis to Oresman, 6 May 1987, 432). One of these drafts included an early section that includes the fictional lawsuit “Szryk v. Village of Tatamount et al” (Gaddis to Oresman, 6 August 1987, 438). Oresman complied, while also sending along potential legal decisions he thought might be relevant and interesting, such as an appeal in the case about the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) sculpture; the controversy about this sculpture was Gaddis’s source material for the Szryk section of the novel (Gaddis to Oresman, 16 June 1988, 451).
Writing about his developing work to Jim Cappio, another of the lawyers serving as unpaid verisimilitude advisors, Gaddis described the Frolic manuscript as “a novel in the form of a network of lawsuits of every variety” (Gaddis to Cappio, 10 January 1988, 447). Incorporating fictional depositions, court opinions, and legal reasoning of all kinds, Gaddis weaves plots into and with his distinctive dialogue. Oscar Crease, amateur playwright and historian, spends his time engaged in several lawsuits while recovering from injuries. He was injured on his driveway, at his dilapidated Long Island estate, while attempting to hotwire his faulty car. His lawyers can’t quite figure out who should be sued for damages since, technically, no one was driving the car. He is also suing a Hollywood production company for a blockbuster movie that he thinks plagiarizes from a play he wrote years before about his family’s complicated involvement in the Civil War. When he eventually wins this case, the Eugene O’Neill estate promptly sues him for copyright infringement on Mourning Becomes Electra (392).
Oscar is looked after by his young girlfriend, Lily, and his stepsister, Christina Lutz, who we have already heard from, and who is also one of the novel’s best critics of the law’s absurdities. Her husband, Harry Lutz, is a brilliant corporate lawyer who dies protecting his firm while trying to attain the golden ring of senior partner. Harry works himself to exhaustion defending Pepsi-Cola against the charge of copyright infringement by the Episcopal Church; the Church claims that Pepsi profits from ecclesiastical associations by using an anagram of the church’s name (Pepsi-cola / Episcopal). Lastly, Oscar’s father and Christina’s stepfather, Thomas Crease, is a wily, idiosyncratic, and possibly senile Virginia judge whose own father supposedly tormented Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. while both were Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Crease writes opinions on the legal standing of art (among other things) and becomes involved in the various lawsuits of his extended family. He never appears, however, except at the novel’s end via his ashes (in a coffee can) delivered by his Court clerk. The Judge’s deep love of the law means he only communicates through his opinions, legal memoranda, and court officers executing his last will and testament.
As readers of Gaddis know, that’s not the half of it. Nonetheless, we might start by observing three general points the novel makes about the civil legal system, particularly the areas that interest him most: “Liability, Risk, Negligence” (Gaddis to Oresman, 17 April 1986, 433).5In the same letter, Gaddis observes that his interests run more towards civil rather than criminal law. First, Frolic shows us, the law creates distortions in individuals' actions, and changes ways of making sense of people’s actions, because of its single-minded focus on questions with definite answers. As Harry tries to explain to Oscar, “the whole of the law is all about, questions that do have answers” (398). This commitment to answerable questions means that other serious ethical and aesthetic quandaries are rendered irrelevant or untouchable. Simultaneously, the law emphasizes past events over current or future ones. It privileges the past, both because previous actions with concrete outcomes are the easiest type to be investigated, evaluated, and redressed with financial compensation, but also because court cases—and particularly cases involving disputes in corporate law—take so long to reach a settlement or judgment. Harry’s Pepsi-Cola/Episcopal case lasts for five years (at one point Gaddis considered having it appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court). Although a number of judgments are made and then appealed, none of the depicted court cases are finalized by the novel’s end; that is to say, all are unsettled, and could and likely would be taken to the next step in the appeals process. There is a strong sense that everyone’s actions can only function secondarily within the legal world’s language and broader systems.
Oscar’s long-suffering girlfriend Lily is particularly weighed down by Oscar’s fixation on the trifling past and legal recognition. She finally criticizes him directly late in the novel:
…your father he’s dead and your grandfather he’s dead and this raw deal you got on this play you wrote about this war that happened a thousand years ago [i.e., the Civil War] that’s like some sickness where everybody’s been nursing you through it till we all catch it and the whole house is like living in this hospital out of the past, it’s the past all of it’s the past! (455)
In Lily’s not unreasonable view, the present, for Oscar, has become merely an incubator to heal historical actions through legal motions. The law supports a structure of egocentricity because it requires people to think in terms of individual responsibility and harm, even if those “persons” are not natural ones. Oscar quotes a legal argument to this effect early in the novel: “The concept that the individual is the basic and ultimate unit in society must be supported by recognition of the value of one’s physical, mental and emotional integrity” (85). And, for Oscar, legal action becomes a way for him to project the heroic, uber-masculine version of himself he desires to have recognized: an author of a play worth plagiarizing to generate a multimillion-dollar film.6Relevant here is Katja Kanzler’s point that Oscar functions as a “de-mystification and critique of patriarchal masculinity” (202). As another lawyer puts it, people litigate “because they don’t know what they are and it makes them feel real, gives them an identity when they see their names on a docket” (318-19).
Beyond these general observations, Frolic is even more damning about the effects of corporate-dominated law. As context, note that the influential “law and economics” movement has advanced a view of corporations in which a business can be imagined “as a bundle of contracts entered by the managers with persons who provide different things, or ‘inputs’” (Hamilton and Freer, 35). What developed in the nineteenth-century as a kind of “contractual man,” was modeled on the corporation and continues to dominate our legal system today (see Kreitner, 233). And those contracts, as various characters in the novel recognize, consist entirely of language: “it all evaporates into language confronted by language turning language itself into theory” (251). But law in particular tends to devalue or ignore relations—particularly ethical connections—that are not neatly bound or defined by contractual language.
One of the clearest versions of this scenario is Oscar’s relationship to his scrupulous lawyer, an African American named Harold Basie, who is determined to win Oscar’s plagiarism case against the Hollywood movie company. When Basie is eventually revealed as an ex-felon who never went to law school but taught himself law, successfully passed the New York Bar Exam, and joined a prestigious law firm, Oscar feels outraged. A professional contract has been broken, since lawyers are not supposed to lie about their past histories and standing to practice the law. But Christina correctly insists that Basie was a far better legal representative of Oscar and his interests than any of his other legitimate lawyers: “I mean my God Oscar think about it will you?… [Basie] was our friend!” (491). Basie strategizes their lawsuit carefully and accurately, and he anticipates that they will win on the appeal—which they do. Relationships and friendships based on care and consideration, as Christina notes of Basie’s and Oscar's, might have more to offer than a legal ethics based on a code of supposed truth-telling and mandated professional responsibility. This is one of the careful ironies of the novel: unofficial or even fraudulent lawyers might be better advocates and ethical supporters than those professional lawyers and judges who determine the protagonists’ fate.
More generally, Frolic takes this particular irony about fraud, professionalism, and clients' interests and thematically connects it to the issues raised by the contrast between corporate and individual human personhood. To put it another way, professionals in the novel seem to operate on something like corporate personhood principles, treating issues of intent, blame, and responsibility as liabilities or risks to be managed or taken, rather than as moral strictures that guide behavior. Harry gives up his body and will for the firm, because, in the novel, professionalism requires that kind of rule-following self-abnegation for someone of Harry’s stature in a prestigious law firm. In contrast, a fraud like Basie is not fully (that is, legitimately) integrated into the law firm or the legal system, and so is freer to interact with his clients like a human being—their friend—as Christina observes to Oscar.
Other characters desire the kind of thoughtful listening and advocacy that Basie and Christina each provide, but the business-focused law devalues it, by, quite simply, not being able to monetize it. They have not (yet) found a way to tie thoughtful, empathetic listening directly to increased profits for the firm. Lily, Oscar’s girlfriend, especially desires careful observation and reasoned analysis. Lily frequently requests that Oscar examine a suspicious lump in her breast, but he repeatedly ignores her, preoccupied with his own anxieties and lawsuits. After Christina finally lends Lily the money for a mammogram, Lily discovers that her silicone breast implants have ruptured, provoking another lawsuit. Simultaneously, she perceives that Oscar’s fixation on past breaches of contract (as outlined in his court cases) are rendering him insensitive or simply blind to ethical relations of the present moment: in this case, his girlfriend’s serious concern about cancer. “I mean look at me, do you ever look at me? [...] do you!” (455), she challenges him.7The more complicated irony is that at this moment Lily is driving their car in heavy traffic and has to look at Oscar in the rear-view mirror in order to see his reaction to her outburst. Thus, she herself is abdicating the ethical responsibility she has to drive her car with attention, especially in heavy and quickly moving traffic. No one in Gaddis’s universe is a moral innocent or saint. It’s a real question disguised in Gaddis’s brocade of quotidian dialogue. The nexus of contracts preoccupying Oscar never requires him to see his girlfriend, which is to say that he breaks no legal contracts when he repeatedly ignores her.
Corporate-driven law devalues ways of listening or responding to one another outside the contractual, effectively diminishing how one is able to recognize and respond to the distress of our intimate relations. The entire formal structure of Gaddis’s novel makes this point by narratively burying the most important and tragic revelations in its thick layers of legal language and household conversations. Christina tries to warn her husband Harry that she is seriously worried about his tendency to overwork himself to the point of exhaustion, and that she misses him deeply. He, just as sincerely, tries to explain that he no longer has himself to give: “it’s their time, the law firm’s time” (39). As a rising partner in the firm, he is fully liable for his partners’ work and risks getting “sucked under when the whole ship goes down” (422). Tragically, Harry ends up sacrificing himself for the survival of the firm and his professional partnership, forgoing his other, personal partnership with Christina. Yet these fleeting observations before his death require the most careful, sensitive, watchful reader, as Gaddis asks us to pay attention to their struggles in the way Lily requests, and not only in the way Oscar manages to do. Just reading for the novel’s strata of law neglects these moments of recognition. From a different perspective, we might also consider what a reader misses about these personal relationships if they are only paying attention to the human or emotional aspects of the text and not attending to the specifics of the legal machinations. Understanding their conversation also within the legal frame of corporations and business forms (such as legal partnerships), rather than just seeing the legality as a distraction from the value of human personhood, seems also to be Gaddis’s aim.
Most interestingly, perhaps, Frolic condemns the cultural dominance of corporate persons in our lives—especially our narrative lives—by illustrating how business law generates an entirely impoverished account of the artist and her creations, which even the business lawyers themselves seem to notice. Gaddis shows us in excruciating detail how the embodied corporate person struggles, and fails to make sense of, aesthetic experience. As Robert Weisberg so nicely puts it, “while normal conversation and casual affective language in the book may be stilted, stereotypical, and unexpressive, the loonier manipulations of legal jargon are its true poetry of feeling and idealism” (446). In what remains my favorite fifty pages of the book, Gaddis “records” an ostensibly fictional deposition between Oscar, his lawyer Basie, and the defendant’s corporate attorney, a farcical yet quite brilliant character named Jawaharlal (Jerry) Madhar Pai, the Anglo-Indian lawyer for Swyne and Dour, also the firm where Harry is a partner.
In a letter to James Cappio, one of his corporate law advisory correspondents, Gaddis admitted of the deposition that “much of it [was] line for line lifted from Saul Steinberg’s deposition in his suit v. Columbia Pictures” (Gaddis to Cappio, 5 January 1990, 459). Steinberg had sued Columbia Pictures for blatantly copying, without attribution or compensation, his famous New Yorker cover of America (with New York as the center of the universe) to promote the Robin Williams’s comedic film vehicle Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Steinberg won on summary judgement (Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. [1987]). The court admits “that defendants cannot be held liable for using the idea of a map of the world from an egocentrically myopic perspective,” and that making a decision isn’t straightforward: “No rigid principle has been developed, however, to ascertain when one has gone beyond the idea to the expression.” But in this case, the situation is clear. “Even at first glance,” reads the opinion, “one can see the striking stylistic relationship between the [two images], and since style is one ingredient of ‘expression,’ this relationship is significant” (Steinberg, 712). The court then carefully analyzes the many similarities between Steinberg’s characteristic drawing and the movie poster, in the kind of explication humanities majors learn to perform.
In Frolic, officially, the three men are debating whether Oscar’s play is as unique as he claims, and thus whether Oscar (like Steinberg) has a basis to argue that the film company defrauded him when they made a film about the same topic. But the discussion, incorporating philosophical explorations and literary analysis of the originality of Shakespeare, Plato, O’Neill, and more, reads like an academic conversation during the heyday of New Criticism. For the real topic of debate here is none other than Cleanth Brooks’ “Heresy of Paraphrase,” namely, the mistaken belief (the heresy) that a statement that paraphrases a work can capture its full meaning. In Brooks’s account, the substitute—the paraphrase—is never legitimate because art enables a different category of experience than paraphrasable (scientific) meaning.
In the deposition, Oscar takes Brooks’ position: “you can’t divide a work of art, the idea from the technique that expressed it” (200). The defense attorney, meanwhile, disputes that view from a legal perspective: “that’s exactly what you’re going to have to do in a court of law” (200). This is also why, throughout the deposition, Oscar’s lawyer (Mr. Basie) keeps objecting to matters of “form” that the other lawyer believes are really matters of “content.” The two lawyers cannot agree; they cannot agree on what counts as form versus what counts as content, which, of course, is the point of “the heresy of paraphrase.” Gaddis is playing with the fact that the fundamental disputes within copyright law effectively reiterate this hoary literary-critical debate. But the larger problem Gaddis is identifying is that in attempting to clarify experience to enable justice, legal language designed for business contracts fails to make sense of aesthetic experience without deforming it. Oscar cannot elucidate his point in the deposition, easily led into traps the Hollywood studio’s pricey lawyer sets for him. In that sense, corporate law cannot make sense of the heresy of paraphrase because it does not see the profit in the heresy and cannot monetize the particular aesthetic experience represented (and heresied).8See Brooks’ idea, in “Heresy,” that to take “the meandering of a good poem” as negative is the wrong way to think about poetry; instead, you have to see “what their positive function is,” that is, you have to see what the work’s meanderings are doing when they are not directly moving from point a to b to make a statement (Brooks, 208).
Moreover, the form of their dispute as presented in the novel is also critical to this issue of paraphrase. In Frolic, the deposition is presented in a different typeface from the rest of the narrative (a courier-like font), incorporated as if a kind of facsimile of a recorded transcript, rather than presented either as in a more conventional free indirect discourse, or dialogue, or in Gaddis’ standard, untagged narration-infiltrated dialogue. The deposition seems to be operating something like the poem does for Brooks, giving the reader an unparaphrasable aesthetic experience of the substance of the argument. Presumably a paraphrase of the deposition could have been stated in fewer than fifty pages, probably conveyed in a few brief paragraphs. By giving us a loquacious, Socratic-like dialogue, Gaddis dramatizes for us Oscar’s argument. That is, he shows us exactly why “the idea and the expression of the idea” both “are separate things” but also, cannot really be separated out (179). “Can we separate the idea from its expression?” (181). That is the key question, and Oscar’s answer, in the end, is also Gaddis’s: “The idea executed is the idea expressed, transformed into a play, in other words it’s definitely bound to the execution” (183). Or, as he puts it a bit later, reversing the locution but making the same point of their inseparability: “the idea expressed is the idea executed” (194).
As Christina recognizes, from a movie corporation’s perspective, those commitments are irrelevant if they cannot be commodified; as such, an artist such as Oscar is merely on “a frolic of his own.” The novel’s titular phrase refers to tort decisions when courts must determine whether a company employee’s case of “imputed negligence” occurs while working on the clock, as an agent of the company, or not. As Harry explains, with his customary indelicacy:
[…] an office worker puts out an eye shooting paperclips with a rubberband they say he’s on a frolic of his own, no intention of advancing his employer’s business his employer’s not liable, there may be a case if the employer knew about this horseplay and hadn’t tried to [stop it]… (348)
Intellectual property laws, Gaddis implies, define creative writers in terms of various firms’ jurisdiction and demands, not on the aesthetic value of the art produced. The artist might be on her own “frolic” when she works, but the law only understands and values that work in terms of its potential advantages (profits) or liabilities (deficits) to corporate entities. Art is a source capital, or a potential tort (from negligence), or a broken contract (if deemed fraudulent). This is a set of options that utterly fails to capture the ambitions, value, and true purpose of artistic action. And it is also a set of options that has no use or value for the kinds of aesthetic points about expressed ideas that Oscar is trying to articulate.
Summing up the point here, we might say that Gaddis explores why a film corporation (for instance), created by corporate law, fails to understand or make sense of aesthetic experience. It must convert symbolic meaning across kinds (from capital, to commodities, to social exchange value) instead of employing symbolic meaning to unify disparate experiences.9See also Bosse Ekelund’s argument that the novel is working on opposing principles of recognition, one financial and one that is not. More speculatively, we might say that one possible ramification implied by Gaddis’s novel is that the recurrent challenge of (or crisis in) the humanities more generally is the difficulty of translating aesthetic experience (and not just commodities) into terms of value that are meaningful to corporate persons. There is a basic conceptual difficulty, even impossibility, with this act of rendering. The cultural dominance of the corporate person’s understanding of aesthetic experience (in terms of copyright and exchange value) is the problem.
Combatting the problem will mean articulating, with the help of writers such as Gaddis, the insufficiency of how a law designed for businesses and their contractual agreements understands the experience of reading a great work of art. At one point in the deposition, Madhar Pai admits to Oscar, “Maybe you’re not even aware of how many of us envy these gifts you’ve got, look around at all the bad poems and bad art by people who can’t spell and can’t draw” (318). Frolic insists that art’s value should not capitulate to the corporate legal version, which also requires explaining someone like Madhar Pai’s misconceptions of art. Gaddis suggested what that path might look like; it’s up to us to follow him or not.
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