[This file continues ODONNE-1 and completes Patrick J.
O'Donnell's essay "His Master's Voice: on Williams Gaddis's _JR_"
(Copyright (c) 1991 by Patrick J. O'Donnell, all rights reserved.
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.2 (January, 1991)]
 
 
                                 Notes
 
 
          ^1^ Jean Baudrillard, 25, says that this "compulsion
     toward liquidity" marks the capitalization of the human
     body, thus setting him at odds with Irigaray, for whom
     "fluidity" is a mark of the radical otherness of the
     feminine.  This is a "debate" carried on, to some extent,
     within the terms of Gaddis's novel.
 
          ^2^ See Walter Benjamin, 217-52.  Benjamin alternates
     between nostalgia for the lost authenticity of the truly
     original work before the onset of technocratic era, and
     recognition of the power of mechanical processes of
     reproduction to break through certain barriers separating
     art from history and the public.  The contradictions of
     Benjamin's position are replicated, I would argue, in
     Gaddis's fiction, particularly in _The Recognitions_ and
     _JR_, where "originality" is both parodied and made the
     subject of nostalgic longing.
 
          ^3^ Tom LeClair notes the crucial connections between
     education and the business world in _JR_: "They [JR and
     Governor Cates, the latter the head of a huge conglomerate
     which subsumes the JR Corporation at the end of the novel]
     are the Horatio Alger story at its two extremes--ragged
     youth and old age--and the book moves to this rhythm.  _JR_
     shifts from the school, where J.R. is trained to profit, to
     the adult corporate world, and concludes in a hospital
     [where Cates is a patient] where the aged and the
     prematurely wasted have their end" (97).
 
          ^4^ Marc Chenetier, 357; my translation.  Chenetier's
     wide-ranging discussion of "voice" in contemporary American
     fiction contained in his chapter, "La bouche et l'oreille"
     (321-64) is an invaluable resource, and has been essential
     to my understanding of voice in Gaddis and in postmodern
     literature.
 
          ^5^ Alan Singer has suggested how Gaddis's _Carpenter's
     Gothic_ can serve as a critique of Bakhtin's notions of
     subject and agency, as well as participating in Bakhtinian
     "heteroglossia." See Singer's "The Ventriloquism of History:
     Voice, Parody, Dialogue."
 
          ^6^ Mann's phrase occurs in "Psychoanalysis, the Lived
     Myth, and Fiction," in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of
     Modern Literature, 672; LeClair's comments on Gaddis's
     deconstructions of vocal immediacy appear in _The Art of
     Excess_, 90.
 
          ^7^ For important discussions of the "paper empires" of
     _JR_ and their homologous relation to acts of writing and
     the exchanging of signs see Steven Weisenburger and Joel
     Dana Black in _In Recognition of William Gaddis_, 147-61 and
     162-73 respectively.
 
          ^8^ For a discussion of the connections between
     language and excrement in JR, see Stephen Moore, 76-80.
 
          ^9^ LeClair, in _The Art of Excess_, provides important
     commentary on mastery in _JR_; cf. 87-105.  LeClair's sense
     of "mastery" in the novel is somewhat different from that in
     which I am using the term here: for LeClair, "mastery"
     resides in Gaddis's ability to provide an encyclopedic
     encompassing of the excessive, noisy, interlocking
     discourses of contemporary reality.  My approach focuses on
     the lack of mastery at the "micropolitical" or
     "microlinguistic" level, where individual speakers in the
     novel give voice to a connective semiosis whose totality (if
     it exists) is only partially available to them; more
     precisely, I would argue, they speak as if a non-existent
     totality were theirs to impose or deploy; therein lies the
     delusion of mastery in the novel.
 
          ^10^ Stephen Matanle discusses the fragmentation of
     bodies in _JR_ in light of the Empedoclean themes of "love"
     and "strife," the novel representing the contentions extreme
     of competition, dissociation, discord.  Our readings vary
     significantly in my viewing Matanle's (or Empedocles')
     "strife" as the upsurging of the "semiotic."
 
 
          ^11^ Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 153.  I am
     indebted here to John Johnston's _Carnival of Repetition:
     Gaddis's The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory_ for his
     compelling discussions of Deleuze and Guattari in relation
     to Gaddis's first novel.
 
 
          ^12^ In _Versions of Pygmalion_ (Cambridge: Harvard
     University Press, 1990), J. Hillis Miller writes evocatively
     of the "work" of prosopopoeia and its paradoxical masking
     and projection of death.  See especially his chapter, "Death
     Mask: Blanchot's L'arret de mort," 179-210.
 
 
     ------------------------------------------------------------
 
                              Works Cited
 
     Baudrillard, Jean.  _Forget Foucault_.  Trans. Nicole
          Dufresne.  New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
 
     Benjamin, Walter.  "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
          Reproduction."  _Illuminations_.  Ed. Hannah Arendt.
          New York: Shocken, 1969.  217-52.
 
     Black, Joel Dana.  "The Paper Empires and Empirical Fictions
          of William Gaddis."  _In Recognition of William
          Gaddis_.  Ed. John Kuehl and Steven Moore.  Syracuse,
          NY: Syracuse UP, 1984.  162-73.
 
     Chenetier, Marc.  _Au-dela du soupcon: La nouvelle fiction
          americaine de 1960 a nos jours_.  Paris: Seuil, 1989.
 
     Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari.  _A Thousand Plateaus:
          Capitalism and Schizophrenia_.  Trans. Brian Massumi.
          Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
 
     Di-Nagy, Zolt n Ab.  "The Art of Fiction CI: William
          Gaddis."  _Paris Review_ (1988): 71-2.
 
     Gaddis, William.  _JR_.  1975.  New York: Penguin, 1985.
 
     Irigaray, Luce.  "The Power of Discourse and the
          Subordination of the Feminine."  _This Sex Which is Not
          One_.  Trans. Catherine Porter.  Ithaca: Cornell UP,
          1985.  68-85.
 
     Johnston, John.  _Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis's _The
          Recognitions_ and Postmodern Theory_.  Philadelphia: U
          of Pennsylvania P, 1990.
 
     LeClair, Tom.  _The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary
          American Fiction_.  Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.
 
     Matanle, Stephen.  "Love and Strife in William Gaddis's
          _JR_."  _In Recognition of William Gaddis_.  106-18.
 
     Moore, Stephen.  _William Gaddis_.  Boston: Twayne, 1989.
 
     Pecora, Vincent.  _Self and Form in Modern Narrative_.
          Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
 
     Ronell, Avital.  _The Telephone Book: Technology,
          Schizophrenia, Electric Speech_.  Lincoln: U of
          Nebraska P, 1989.
 
     Said, Edward W.  "On Originality."  _The World, The Text,
          and the Critic_.  Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.  133.
 
     Serres, Michel.  "Michelet: The Soup."  _Hermes: Literature,
          Science, Philosophy_.  Ed. Josue V. Harari and David F.
          Bell.  Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.  38.
 
     Singer, Alan.  "The Ventriloquism of History: Voice, Parody,
          Dialogue."  _Intertextuality and Contemporary American
          Fiction_.  Ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson,
          Jr.  New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
 
     Weisenburger, Steven.  "Paper Currencies: Reading william
          Gaddis."  _In Recognition of William Gaddis_.  147-61.