I analyze William Gaddis’ transmutation, in J R (1975), of material from his abandoned book on instructional TV for the Ford Foundation (1962-3). Finding previously unknown sources for numerous passages of the novel, I focus on a pattern of changed emphasis. Gaddis’ work for Ford is scrupulous about the pedagogical potential of TV, which it sees as a viable classroom tool threatened by administrative misuse. The novel, however, turns material that initially focused on teachers’ experiences and dilemmas into indictments of administrative culture alone. I show how central the Ford project’s conception of administrative problems becomes to J R, trace the way that material originally organized around pedagogical concerns is repurposed to evoke administrative overreach and dysfunction, and demonstrate this transmutation-pattern’s implications for understanding the novel’s narrative and rhetorical drama.

https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/488/galley/3312/download/

William Gaddis' 'Ford Foundation Fiasco' and J R's Elision of the Teacher's-Eye View

The work of William Gaddis has been described as both “encyclopedic” and, less charitably, “unreadable.” This essay explores Gaddis’s evolving attitudes about the aesthetic of the “unreadable” and its didactic value through a reading of J R and Agapē Agape. While many antirealist writers disavow cognitivist approaches to literature, which assert that fiction may convey knowledge, Gaddis’s work, I argue, harbors more complex attitudes about the postmodern novelist’s didactic agency. In staging its characters’ repeated failure to teach, learn from, or “read” each other, J R calls for an alternative model of apprehending experience, one in which readers must remain open to the potential cognitive value of initial misunderstandings. Gaddis’s posthumously published Agapē Agape, however, is characterized by a more retrograde elitism in which unstructured antirealist excess courts failure of an unproductive variety, suggesting that a deliberate shift toward unreadability alone cannot reinvigorate fiction...

Glen Stosic

Papers

“Paradox, Perversity, Opacity, Obscurity”: William Gaddis and the Antirealist Syllabus