more real people

[TERRY CAESAR]

       Now that we're agreed to be talking about Gaddis not as the only example
but as merely one example of a real person in a fictional text, well, sure, I
think he undoubtedly is in The Recognitions. But he is in far more complicated
ways than, say, Ted Williams in Continental Drift (which reference I'm grateful
for). 

       For one thing, Gaddis-as-Willie has to construct (and rename) his reality
--and so it has a status differ from Ted Williams, whose reality comes already
recognizable. Maybe the difference doesn't ultimately matter very much. But it
seems to me it does, at least for the naive question I had in mind in asking
about examples of real people in the first place. Gaddis/Willie can't be real
as Williams can because his reality has to be--let's say--verbal. Williams, in
contrast, needs only to be alluded to; we've seen him and heard him already in
the public realm. 

       Then there's the further problem of an author--any author--alluding to
himself, not to say construcing a narrative, like Philip Roth, in which he's
a character, or at least the name of one. Why is it such an available gesture
now for all sorts of contemporary authors to routinely mention their real names
in fictional narratives? Perhaps it could be claimed that Gaddis-as-Willie is
the locus classus of this sort of gesture (not the right word). Whether or no,
discussing the phenomenon now would take many pages, and include some on mixing
genres, celebrity culture, etc., etc. and as much postmodernism as you care to
name. I just think that autoreferentiality is quite different than--what to call
it?--the referentiality of the real. 

       Autoreferentiality probably also can't be very happily separated from the
sort of routinized self-indulgence Andrew claims for Amis. I don't know in the
case of Amis himself. I haven't read any of his novels. (NO particular reason,
though I suppose, if any, it would be a suspicion of the sort of thing Andrew
mentions.) But consider Nabokov--surely the master of magisterially knowing
self-portraiture in modern fiction. Some people find it insufferable. I don't
see how anybody can find it entirely free from, let's say, "onanistic" impulses.

       Indeed, maybe one reason an author puts real people in books is to try
to stand away from such impulses. I dunno. I brought the matter up just to hope
for a few more examples, not to start a discussion. If Andrew really meant to
start a discussion with his examples rather than foreclose one, then count me
in, let's all be friends again, and on with whatever-it-is we're all about here,
including finding out more about Mickey Rooney in the 40s as well as relating
him to Ted Williams as a real novelistic presence. I still wish somebody could
tell me the name of that novel in which Norman Mailer is murdered, whether or
not we have to find that this Norman Mailer is really only "Norman Mailer."