more real people

[Andrew Dinn]

TERRY CAESAR writes:

> 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.

Well, maybe when Gaddis wrote `The Recognitions' this distinction was
clear cut but Gaddis *is* a recognisable literary personality now. And
what is more, when he wrote the book he thought he was going to be a
literary personality then, a James Joyce at the least - ok, so it's a
shaggy dog story which fell flat thanks to its 40 year punch line.

But I think your `naive' question merits a less naive answer. I think
there is merely a difference in degree between these cases. Ted
Williams (who he? - not known in my UK household I am afraid) is
immediately identifiable becaus ehe is a `name' whose associated
persona is mediated through representations outside the book. But then
Willie is identifiable for sure as Gaddis, actually Gaddis, rather
than, say, a character who resembles/is based on Gaddis, because he is
*called* Willie, because he is writing this 1000 page book to do with
religion etc. i.e.  because he is a `name' whose associated persona we
know by virtue of having this 1000 page book in our hands with the
name William Gaddis on the cover. It's not actually the text which
tells us that Willie is Gaddis but these external facts which we
*must* be party to since we are reading the book. That's why I called
it the `locus classicus' - although probably it's the wrong phrase -
because the trick works not because of instant recognition through a
bland commonplace association related to a particular place, time and
television scheduling policy but because of recognition through
circumstances we are necessarily involved in but not necessarily aware
of. It's a much, much, much cleverer version of the same trick.

> 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.

Yes, but I don't see Willie's entry in `The Recognitions' as being
related to what you call `auto-referentiality'. The purpose of the
trick in `The Recognitions' is to conflate the arena of the novel with
`our' world just as the mentions of Williams or Mickey Rooney do.
This is not an imaginary Greenwich Village it is `our' Greenwich
Village. This may be a cheap shot at realism, a deliberate raising of
expectations to enable later confusion or a paradoxical blurring of
narrative levels but other auto-references I can think of work
differently. There is the author-narrator included by virtue of
his/her role as narrator and participant in events. There is the
author of the tale within the tale, etc. Although Willie is a
representation of the author he is neither Ishmael nor Tristram
Shandy, tipping a wink at you as you read. He is a conventional
product of the author's craft, a rendering of Gaddis, in this case by
Gaddis, but Willie could equally well have appeared as a character in
someone else's novel set in Greenwich Village in the 50s. He just
happens to appear in Gaddis' novel.

> 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.

Well, I hope the above distinction does separate Willie out from the
rest of the in-crowd (in their own novels that is). Which is maybe why
I don't see it an act of onanism. Actually, with a name like Willie we
are on thin ice here. Let's eschew masturbation, as `twere.

> 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."

I could be cruel and suggest that the book was `Advertisements for
Myself'... but actually I quite liked much of it.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
Daran, nachdem die Wasserwogen / Von unsrer Suendflut sich verzogen
Der allerschoenste Regenbogen / Als Gottes Gnadenzeichen steht!