William Gaddis
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr.was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place. The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth29 December 1922
CountryUnited States of America
. . . That's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight . . . that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon . . .
Can't you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don't give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch of vice presidents some place you never heard of like the ones that turned this out, this wood product they call it, they spot you and launch an offer and all of a sudden you're working for them trimming and cutting and finally bringing in people to turn something out they don't care what the hell it is, there's no pride in their work because what you've got them turning out nobody could be proud of in the first place.
What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.
Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as "rank presumption".
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
We want someone to bring us the news.
That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.
...mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.
We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.