William Gaddis: Below Deck on the Ship of Fools | Hacker News Reader

William Gaddis: Below Deck on the Ship of Fools

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You should really read about JR, not the R. https://bookbrat.substack.com/p/william-gaddis-below-deck-on...

His masterpiece, the book with no author.

Both were such a pleasure to read. It's like I have a new favourite author without ever having read anything by him. Deep, blistering satire that bordered on the kind of cruelty that could only have started as love, for me, was Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop," and W. Sommerset Maughm's "The Magician," but Gaddis sounds like someone to take a week off and rent a cottage somewhere to read it. I read a couple of Pynchon books but the thing about post modern writers to me was I always got the sense that if it didn't grab you, it was about you and that kind of put me off.

The only Gaddis book I've read is A Frolic of His Own. It is essentially nothing but dialogue among upper class lawyers (& associated ilk), and I won't pretend it's a page-turner, but my word, it was masterfully crafted. Dialogue in novels is often so artificial, yet he managed to make it not only accurate and natural but also perfectly adept at carrying the novel along as well as if it were written in standard prose.

The Recognitions is a fantastic and rewarding book. It made an impact on my thinking that will probably never go away. Be patient with it and enjoy it.

I discovered Gaddis at an impressionable age and his books, especially The Recognitions, had a massive influence on me. What I took away was basically a spiritual critique of capitalist modernity and nostalgia for the pace, longtermism, and religious meaning of the middle ages (while recognising that we can't go back to it). Definitely not ideas he invented (you can find some of this in Wordsworth and Blake, without the fatalism, and a lot in Eliot) but Gaddis was my gateway drug.

Would you say The Recognitions is readible? I've wanted to read it for a while but it felt intimidating and it was lumped into the 'post modern' category in book stores etc which has made me afraid it's one of those samuel beckett-esque books where they just repeat the same word or phrase for pages and pages (maybe meaningful through some lens but also somewhat nonsense and not really worth my limited time). I read a few pages of The Recognitions and it seemed pretty novel-y so I feel like it might be not too bad. What's your take (reviews I've read doesn't give me a satisfying answer)?

Absolutely! Reading it with notes (I used Steven Moore's from here https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml ) makes it totally understandable, and it is very novel-like. Totally unlike e.g. Beckett or Gertrude Stein or Finnegans Wake where the text isn't meant to have a clear meaning.

How did I get to 2022 without having heard of William Gaddis?

Maybe never having lived a significant amount of time amongst NYC lit types ;)

Another author mentioned in the same breath: Renata Adler & Speedboat. And perhaps, Don DeLillo's White Noise.

William Gaddis' "Literature of Failure" course syllabus (Bard College, 1979)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gaddis/comments/fai45d/william_gadd...

It's deliberate - Gaddis did not like publicity and did not want to be a celebrity. Here is part of his reponse to winning the National Book Award for JR in 1975 [1]:

"... I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think that this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.

... it seems to me the only way to keep writers writing well, or trying to write well, is to read what we write."

1. in The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (2002)

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