Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

William Gaddis was one of the most groundbreaking of post-war American novelists-- a stylistic precursor to Pynchon and Delillo, a towering master behind such youngsters as Franzen. His first two massive novels (Recognitions and JR) grappled with huge themes of artistic authenticity and the culture of capitalism. He wrote two more relatively accessible novels, and then this, his fifth and last.

I read "Agape Agape" (96 pages) while taking a break from reading his first novel, "The Recognitions," (956 pages). The earlier work is intimidating in much more than scope. It maps a vast sky of erudite references that overlaps the constellations of my own learning only at the edges.

"Agape Agape" (two different words, actually-- the first from the Greek for spiritual love and the second the English one meaning open or in a state of gap) was written as Gaddis lay dying of cancer. It was published posthumously in 2002 and hailed immediately as one of a handful of works (like Delillo's "Underworld") that straddled the new millenium in its sensibility.

Actually, the book seems to project a modernist, if not romanticist, sensibility into the digital age. The dying protagonist (a version of Beckett's Krapp) fumbles at his lecture notes, accumulated over decades, trying to piece together his magnum opus as the Prednisone ravages his consciousness. The struggle is basically Benjaminian-- the speaker champions some kind of artistic authenticity against the mechanization of the arts. And he tells this central modernist story through a social history of the player piano-- a cipher for all machines that replace human artistic conduct. Along the way, Benjamin holds discourse with Huizinga while Plato looks on.

For Gaddis, the history of the player piano situates the arts at the center of the digital revolution. His protagonist laments the binary-based player piano roll as a triumph in the impulse to replace (admittedly elite) artistic experience with consumer entertainment and to make the human artist obsolete. The apotheosis of this development would be the replacement of new musicians by sophisticated computer-driven mashup programs or the replacement of fiction films and tv by cinematic video games.

This is one of a small number of books (Woolf's The Waves is another) that will remain on my A-list of novels worth reading more than once. It isn't that I hear my own voice in Gaddis. Or Woolf. Both authors are far too unique for me to empathize that directly. These works reach me not by identification with character or familiarity of voice, but by directly, poetically stirring an empty feeling in my gut, the ongoing aching failure to reconcile my desire to make a mark on this world with an acute sense that the crucial moment has already passed.

Joseph Tabbi, in a thoughtful Afterward, offers Gaddis' translation of a passage by Michelangelo: "Who nearer to me Or more mighty yes, more mighty than I Tore me away from myself. Tore me away!" It is the power of the machine to become "a detachable self" (as Gaddis puts it throughout the novel) that makes it a menace as terrible as God himself. Artaud, likewise going mad at the end of his life, proclaimed that there could be no artist, no real freedom until we have done with the judgment of God.

God, who inspirits the automaton and casts out Adam from the Garden.