3.5
Agape Agape
ByPublisher Description
William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.
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3.5
Joy
Created about 1 month agoShare
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“What did I read….😃”Adam F
Created 3 months agoShare
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“"That's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation where you look, entropy drowning everything in sight,, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?"
What starts as a social history of the player piano, quickly descends or ascends (depending on how you see it) into a elitist, paranoid, diatribe against “the mechanization of the arts.” Primarily concerned with the period of 1876-1929 “when the player piano world and everything else collapsed”, Gaddis’ narrator rants and raves against the technological advances that have taken the soul and authenticity of the arts in order to be reproduced for the masses. He delves into the uneven balances between artistic reality and hallucination, authenticity and mass culture, elitist and democratic values, that have been brought on by a “digital age that owes itself to the arts.” The solution has become the problem. This proliferation and commodification of has created both place mats with the Mona Lisa’s face staring back from underneath your breakfast bowl or listening to the binary coded Beethoven symphonies on your Spotify playlist. Gaddis is elitist and still kinda punk.
"Authenticity's wiped out when the uniqueness of every reality is overcome by the acceptance of its reproduction, so art is so designed for its reproducibility."
Citing many artists and philosophers, the narrator at times is paranoid about taxes while arranging for his three daughters before he dies, his rusting stitches, his leftover research materials, and perhaps, just maybe collating and piecing together fifty years of clippings and readings creating an order through the chaos just may maintain his existence. Agape Agape is a man strong in his convictions and facing the morbid brink of mortality that only age and experience can relate to. Though similar in narrative styles to Bernhard novels such as The Loser, and continuation of concepts explored in The Recognitions and J R, Agape Agape shows Gaddis summing a lifetime’s worth of literary themes in this fiery and frantically feverish push in a race against time.
"That natural merging of created life in this creation in love that transcends it, a celebration of the love that created it they called agapē, that love feast in the early church, yes. That's what's lost, what you don't find in these products of the imitative arts that are made from reproduction on a grand scale got to find some paper, piece of blank paper I've finally got the pencil now, now. "
"Imitations, sort of shadowy images useful when you're dealing with an enemy whose name purses its victims to the grave yes but, no but listen. Since all writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge, there must still be a way to deal with some serious ideas here without risking this seal."
"More what! Are you crazy? You think some phantom hand some, some significant Other will burst out of the bushes and redeems any shred of value hidden in your grand hallucination? Provide some refuge from it where your reality prevails?"
"I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, get it all sorted and organized before everything collapses and it's all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that's what it's about the collapse of everything of, of, I can't even go into it you see that's what I have to go into before all my ideas are stolen before I get them written down before my work is distorted misunderstood turned into a cartoon and, towel here in this mess somewhere sheet's cold and wet dry my leg before I start to rust, back of my hand all these little criss-crosses looks like broiled bluefish but, a little music."”
Suwachn
Created 4 months agoShare
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Swade
Created 4 months agoShare
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danny
Created 7 months agoShare
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About William Gaddis
William Gaddis (1922-1998) was a master of the American novel who was frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and Pynchon. Two of his novels, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the National Book Award. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize.
Other books by William Gaddis
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