📗 -> Agapē-Agape
- Actual book starts at page 22
Themes
Art
Quality vs Quantity
Death of art
- Commercialization
- Reduction of ideas / Mass appeal
Pandering to the massses - Participation medals, creating values
Motivations
We have one character in the book, effectively a self insert for William Gaddis himself. This is his last work, and he speaks directly through his narrator. He lays this out clearly, his first words in the book is:
No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left…
The afterword by Joseph Tabbi (page 65 of pdf) lays it all out very well. Gaddis speaks directly to the reader, and a lot of the more fictitious elements of the books are still direct parallels of his own life. His feeble, failing body and his cluttered work space are really how he found himself as he approached the end.
This book was published post-homously, Gaddis succumbing to prostate cancer (1998) before his final work was released (2002). In these moments, he thrashes out at the world and the failings he sees the world developing in his lifetime, and will continue after he passes.
Personal Thoughts
Enjoyment
Its a short book, but still a bit of a hard read for me. His character is so venomously cynical that at some point in the book, you will find yourself personally attacked.
I’m still getting back into the groove of reading, and the style of the book doesn’t help. It’s a wall of text without chapters, paragraph breaks or resolution. Through it, it’s purely a rant focused on things
View of themes
Not metioned in the other analysis, I think the narrator can be characterized by his impotence. Physically weak, mentally going (at least his character is, self admittedly), and unable to enact any change to the world he sees passing him by
Player Piano
This is the central lens through which Gaddis angles his rage. The player piano is the embodiment of the death of art, the propagation and dispersal of mediocrity, and the detachment of artists. The afterword mentions that Gaddis initially intended to release a scholarly history of the player piano, and much of the clutter of his working material was due to this endeavor. He leverages it in his novel to some extent (the clutter) to motivate his meandering and distracted rants.
Elitism
To reach the enormous markets of the non-musical and half-musical and to conquer the growing prejudice of the truly musical” what are we going to do, educate this pleasure seeking rabble? There’s Plato again agreeing that the excellence of music is measured by pleasure, but for this gang out there playing You’re a Dog-gone Daisy Girl with its feet? Good God no, for them Plato rhymes with tomato, it can’t be the pleasure of chance persons, he says, it’s got to be music that delights the best educated…
Gaddis LOATHS the masses, the plebes, the proletariat. He hates to think that they would like his work in the first place. He says receiving a Pulitzer is a mark against you, a sign of crystalized mediocrity.
- Also I love the plato rhyming with tomato line, very funny (I also pronounce it like tomato)
write what they want you’ll end up with a Pulitzer Prize follow you right to the grave. Maybe won the Medal of Honor the George Cross even the Nobel but once you’ve been stigmatized with the ultimate seal of mediocrity your obit will read Pulitzer Prize Novelist Dies…
Lucky him he never won one!
I think there’s a merit to this, the fact that a democracy does not find the best option/idea/works. However, he holds this view this with such contempt and repeats the idea so repeatedly that its grating to read.
This also ties to another theme that I don’t quite understand:
Everyone’s hidden talent and teacher player piano rolls
At the same time he loaths the masses for consuming slop, he also hates them trying to do things to differentiate themselves.
Coming events cast their shadows and all the rest of it for Sigi’s stupefied trash out there gaping at television dollar sign’s all they see where we are today aren’t we? Waiting to be entertained because that’s where it started and that’s where it ends up, avoiding pain and seeking pleasure play the piano with your feet, play cards, play pool play pushpin…
He repeatedly attacks the idea of “playing piano with your feet”. I don’t get whats particularly offensive about this?
- Update: playng piano with your feet is a reference to player piano played by their feet
- Specifically, he mentions later the development of technology slowly takes away the involvement of people in art:
discovering his unsuspected talent with his feet, this romantic illusion of participating, playing Beethoven yourself that was being destroyed by the technology that had made it possible in the first place, the mechanization exploding everywhere and the phantom hands the, Kannst du mich mit Genuss betrügen yes that, If I ever say to the moment don’t go! Verweile doch! du bist so schön! no match for the march of science that made it possible, marches right on and leaves it in the dust, pianos nobody can play and millions of piano rolls left in the dust while their splendid phantom hands are pushed further from reach by the gramophone and finally paralyzed by the radio teaching birds to sing birdsongs
He both hates them trying to be useful, and the fact they are not on his level. I don’t know if this is just a character flaw from his elitism, or a genuine criticism I missed.
Literature
Gaddis can’t resist himself from references to high art and literature. Not a page goes by in the book where he doesn’t bring up a figure like Pythagoras, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Plato, Rachmaninoff and countless more.
He attaches himselves to these figures to make himself feel grander. Im not like the plebes, I know Tolstoy! It comes off a bit hollow to me. Everything he writes could be boiled down to a 5-10 page open letter if he so pleased. Instead, he produces this vitriolic venom. It doesn’t sit right to me.