Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis by Joseph Tabbi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Art From Lemons

Isn't it remarkable how great artists are able to use even the most sordid events and conditions to create art? This transformative capacity is akin to, perhaps even the origin of, religious liturgy, sanctifying not just the mundane and banal aspects of life, but also establishing an understanding of the underlying forces at work where there appears to be only chaos and randomness. By this criterion alone, William Gaddis is a great artist.

Isn't it also remarkable how the genealogy of art is traceable not only in the specifics of style or 'isms' but more importantly to the continuity of human concerns? In this, William Gaddis stands not so much on the shoulders of but rather side by side with other American artists like Louis Auchincloss and John Dos Passos in revealing the often barely perceived changes that dominate our lives, changes that it takes social science decades to name, describe and analyse. In this historical context, Gaddis demonstrates his even broader artistic credentials.

Dos Passos, Auchincloss and Gaddis each largely devoted his artistic career to the same end: the exposure of the emerging corporate society of the 20th century. From Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer in 1925, through his USA trilogy (1930-36), he documents, long in advance of academic assessments, the existential character of the new America dominated not by the factory, or democratic government, or even conflict, but by the commercial corporation. From the social trauma of the First War and its aftermath, Dos Passos appreciates what is inexorably shaping the world, that which appears as an almost non-existent abstraction - this queer non-living thing, the corporation, and its ideology. This at a time of severe economic depression and uncertainty, coupled with the rise of European totalitarianism which effectively masked the underlying American reality from popular or even social scientific awareness.

Auchincloss, from a somewhat loftier but entirely complementary perspective, continued the phenomenology of corporate existence in fictional portrayals of upper middle class professionals. As with Dos Passos, New York City is the stage-set of his drama of continuing change from the mere corporate power created by two world wars, to the corporate culture which was penetrating and undermining traditional social structures. His 1960's novels The Rector of Justin (1964) and The World of Profit (1968), for example, represent just this change, perhaps at its moment of greatest inflexion. A comparison with Dos Passos's 1936 Big Money helps to make the point: Dos Passos describes the striving to reach the inner circle American capitalism; Auchincloss chronicles the disintegration of that same circle. The world at large may have been mesmerised by the Beatles, hippies and foreign wars, but Auchincloss saw the shifts occurring in the centres of cultural power with more subtlety and broader effect than the contemporary formulation of the military/industrial complex of Eisenhower or the New Industrial State of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Gaddis too uses New York City as the epicentre of the increasingly intense earthquake in American, and from there global, life. First in his profound, and profoundly unrecognised, Recognitions (1955), the first chapter of which takes place in a boarding school that could well be mistaken for Auchincloss's Justin Martyr Academy (with a Congregational rather than Episcopalian tinge), or with Dos Passos's memories of Choate; and twenty years later in his equally masterful JR (1975), Gaddis penetrates to the core meaning of the new corporate state of America. Falsity, forgery, and facade have been raised to the status of the authentic. The rules of corporate existence have been so naturalised that they literally constitute a child's game of bluff and counter-bluff. Politics has not so much been co-opted as assimilated without residue by corporate culture. The country saw Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator; Gaddis saw the wilful entry into a Neverland of unlimited corporate power.

Literature, then, at the hands of these three men is clearly in the van of social awareness. And their literary greatness has to do in largest part not with their innovations in style, but with their appreciation and expression of the conditions of the their lives, which are also our lives. As Tabbi says of Gaddis, "Gaddis's fiction chronicles the advanced corporatization of American culture more fully and earlier than any other post-war novelist in the United States..." His stylistic tropes and modes of expression are useful to the extent that they facilitated doing exactly this. He is sometimes difficult to read because this difficulty is essential for understanding the overwhelming novelty of the culture in which we find ourselves. Dos Passos saw it coming in his modernist idiom; Auchincloss saw it happening in his almost psycho-analytic style; Gaddis saw its consequences in a post-modernism that influenced de Lillo and Foster Wallace, not just in the way they write but in the way they see.

Turning many of the obscenities of the new corporate world into art is no easy task. Dos Passos, Auchincloss, and Gaddis didn't just see how people act, they listened to how they talk. Behaviour changes from the driven stick-to-it-ivness in Dos Passos, to gentile inaction and concern with mere form in Auchincloss, to movement which is neither stream of consciousness nor even observable by third parties in Gaddis. Likewise, talk tends to be frantic and peppered with non sequiturs in Dos Passos, bewildered and resigned in Auchincloss, and pitifully scattered and fragmented in Gaddis. These are carefully crafted epochs of speech and manners that emerge from one another so incrementally it takes great sensitivity to notice much less express them.

Art is obviously not meant to rationalise much less to justify the conditions in which it is created. But neither is it meant to change those conditions by identifying some external enemy or threat which needs to be overcome in order to improve, let's say, social justice. Art identifies; literary art names. It names what we are at the moment. Usually what we are is what we value most. And what we value most is usually the cause of the conditions in which we live, no matter how absurd. In the 1930's, it is ambition which is most highly valued in order to raise us from economic depths; in the 1950's, the sober, responsible shepherding of wealth is necessary after the ad hoc-ism demanded by 30 years of war and the threat of more war; in the 1970's it is the cutting-edge managerial techniques that are required by global business. Each successive obsession being the solution to the previous and the reason for the next. This is certainly a dynamic, but it can't be called progress. Hence the necessary progression of art.

Tabbi's title comes from a title originally used by Gaddis for a section of JR. It refers to the idea, common in corporate business, that the purpose of corporate life is quite independent of human needs. Corporate existence, it is contended in our culture, depends on measures of financial success. These measures relate not at all to needs for food, or shelter, or community, or even pleasure. They are entirely abstract, and equally arbitrary, measures that may be manipulated to rationalise the actions and outcomes of corporate power. Dos Passos, Auchincloss and Gaddis knew what we were up to and they each reacted in the only way possible: by transforming the ghastliness of corporate life into art. The moral seems to be that you don't have to make lemonade if all you've got is lemons.

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