Read Online Agape Agape by William Gaddis - Free Book Online Page B

Everywhere present and nowhere visible leads him right into the embrace of the death of the author whose intentions have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway, a multidimensional space where the modern scriptor is born with this, this detachable self this second voice inside predicting the future in its hoarse belly-voice, Strabo? You hear me? Strip the romantic veil off the naked animal’s only purpose perpetuating the species the race the tribe the family for everybody else sex is for pleasure like the flute, pushpin or poetry “the most intense pleasure of which man is capable” says my golden Sigi, seek pleasure avoid not a clue what they’re being used for even that they’re being used till the roof falls in, doctors lawyers abortions adulteries thimble theatre learned nothing forgotten nothing go right back and do it all again. “My one impulse is to work and forget” says Tolstoy “but forget what. There’s nothing to forget” and then? here’s the scrap, “I shall write no more fiction,” he’s about thirty, “people are weeping, dying, marrying, and I should sit down and write books telling ‘how she loved him’? It’s shameful!” And where else yes here, “reading bad books helps me to detect my own faults more than good ones. Good books reduce me to despair” maybe where the idea for this whole absurd project of mine here came from this fear of failure, the technology the artist created being used to eliminate him and the piano, the player piano and its offspring the computer barricades against this fear of chance, of probability and indeterminacy that’s so American, this fear this stigma of failure which separates the crowd from the elite when Flaubert writes to George Sand “I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable. Nothing is important save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch” try to sit up straight here stopped shivering and dry out mind’s clear as a bell, everything falling right into place get it all down before the belly-talkers come back with the death of the author, the artist’s solitary enterprise with the individual reader Hawthorne talked about horrified at success with the public taste, with the crowd meant you must have sold out, send the author of The Marble Faun out on a book tour? Out giving readings from The Blithedale Romance to entertain this gaping clutch of pleasure seeking chance persons, this enormous market of the non-literate and half-literate devouring the poets who compose to please the bad taste of their reviewers end up instructing one another, what this glorious democracy in the arts is all about isn’t it? Get up there and perform with what Hawthorne called “that damned mob of scribbling women,” even Poe with his mechanized genius for forcing order on chaos scorning the public and thirsting for fame, and Melville, good God Melville? Begins Moby Dick wants everybody to read it finishes daring them to, has to borrow money to write it because Harper’s won’t give him an advance, they publish it and he still owes them a hundred and forty-five dollars and eighty-three cents never forget that figure, “dollars damn me!” he tells Hawthorne, writes that terrible Pierre you can’t get thirty pages into hates feeling he must take his readers where they expect to go, talk about elitism about setting yourself apart from the common herd beyond reason above reason on the shelf with the dead white guys ends up in the Custom House at four dollars a day reduced to a nonperson, to herd anonymity humiliated castrated eliminated as a threat that’s what it’s all about that’s what I have to explain. Of course you can’t really explain anything to anybody that’s why all we hear are explanations of these explanations get right back to Wiener with his