The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Gaddis · a novel of speech and legal documents, with a play set out whole · Poseidon Press, 1994 · scored on Gaddis’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Comic novel of the law and its institutions, told in speech and in documents; a family novel and a novel of the artist in one book
Mythos
The Civil War as the founding American lawsuit, brother against brother, and the family’s war handed down as a story a son must own; the son who cannot win the father’s word and is given a ruling instead; substitution throughout, the lawyer for the client, the damages for the wrong, the film for the play, the law for justice
Phase
From the opening sentence on justice and law, through suits begun, deposed, argued and decided, to a death in the family and the suits still running
Presentation
Fiction; chiefly unattributed speech, each speech opened by a dash and seldom tagged, with short stretches of run-on narrative between; legal opinions, a deposition, complaints, briefs, correspondence and long portions of a playscript given in their own forms
Register
The lawyers’ telephone shorthand, the sister’s brittle impatience, Lily’s Southern helplessness and Oscar’s grievance, against the dry cadence of the judge’s opinions and the stale dignity of a Civil War play
Scale
One family across three generations, its house and its quarrels, and the courts, firms, studio and car maker its suits reach
Governing Proposition
Oscar Crease, a failed playwright and the son of an old federal judge, sues the makers of a Civil War film he says was taken from his play, and is drawn into suits on every side of him, while his father writes an opinion on a steel sculpture with a boy’s dog trapped inside it. The wager of the novel is that in late twentieth century America the law has become the one public language left, so that every human claim can be heard only once it is turned into a claim to property and damages, and that a novel built of the law’s own documents can show the conversion emptying the claim of the thing it was for.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on its thesis: “Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” The sentence is spoken, not narrated, and like nearly every speech in the book it is opened by a dash and left without a name. The scene is a sister and a lawyer. From that page the book does not leave the law, and the law does not leave anyone in it.
A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis’s fourth novel, published by Poseidon Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in January 1994, and given the National Book Award for Fiction that year. It came after The Recognitions, JR and the short Carpenter’s Gothic, and it was the last of his novels to appear in his lifetime; he died in 1998. Its method is the method of JR, speech without tags, each voice known by its rhythm and its cant, with short stretches of run-on narrative between, used here at somewhat less density.
What is new is what the speech is set among. Whole documents stand in the book in their own forms: judicial opinions, a deposition, complaints, briefs and letters, and long portions of a play. They are not summarised or framed. The reader reads them as the parties do, and must weigh them as a court would. The title is itself a term of the law of torts: a servant who leaves his master’s business for his own purposes is on a frolic of his own, and the master is not liable.
Movement II
Oscar Crease has written a play of the Civil War, Once at Antietam, about his own family and its part in the war. A film has been made of the war, and Oscar sues its makers, claiming the film was taken from his play. What he wants is to be acknowledged as the author of his family’s story. What the law can give him is a damages figure. The book’s disclosure is in that gap: the claim to authorship is heard only once it is turned into a claim to property, and the turning empties it.
The play is given at length, as a playscript, inside the record of the suit over whether it was stolen. It reaches for tragic dignity, brother against brother at Antietam, and it is stale. Gaddis writes it badly in exactly the way Oscar would write it, which is harder than writing it well, and the reader is made to weigh it twice, as evidence in a case of copying and as art. What is original, and who owns a story, is the question the court must answer; the book puts it first to the reader.
Whether the play’s weakness is Oscar’s or Gaddis’s is one of the questions the book keeps alive. The war in it is the founding American lawsuit, brother against brother, handed down as a story a son must own, and the novel turns on substitution in every quarter: the lawyer for the client, the damages for the wrong, the film for the play, the law for justice.
Movement III
Oscar’s father is Judge Thomas Crease, an old judge of the federal bench, and the book sets his opinions out whole. The longest concerns Cyclone Seven, an outdoor steel sculpture in a small Virginia town, in which a boy’s dog is trapped. In the dry language of the law, with the right cadence and the right habit of citation, the judge defends the sculpture as art, and his passage on art and utility is the summit of the book.
The opinion is good law and the work of a real mind, a mind of the old republic writing against the noise of the telephone and the kitchen. It is also the book’s most exact demonstration of its thesis. The law at its wisest, in a judge who reasons well, still cannot give what is asked of it. A satire of a corrupt court would show less. Here the institution performs well, and the claim, won or lost, does not return the thing.
The son wants the father’s word and is given a ruling. The judge and the playwright, the ancient father and the failed son, carry one of the oldest patterns the book holds, and the book keeps them apart as the law keeps the parties apart: each speaks in his own form, the one in opinions, the other in grievance and in verse. The dog in the steel is a small sacrifice, and the case over it is the book’s clearest picture of a world that can say what is owed only at law.
Movement IV
Oscar is deposed, and the deposition is given in its form, question and answer. The law draws out a man’s life in questions he cannot answer. The questions are the law’s ordinary questions, and they take his life apart. The form is the knowledge here more plainly than anywhere in the book; to change it into narration would be to lose the thing it shows.
Around the documents the speech runs on. Oscar laments to Lily; Christina, his sister, laments to Oscar; lawyers speak in telephone fragments. The voices crowd one another as suits do, and the reader must work out who speaks and what is being claimed. The ear is exact, but the circling runs long. The quarrels repeat a fixed set of complaints well past the point where the repetition has made its case, and there the method is habit, confirming what is already known.
Oscar is run over by his own car, and must sue its maker: a suit in which he stands, in effect, against himself. The joke is the book’s law in small. Every injury becomes a claim, and every claim is brought against someone, even where the only someone is the claimant. The suits beget suits, the grievance is rehearsed in new jargon, and the book’s comedy, mostly exasperation, rarely lifts higher than wit.
Movement V
The suits reach every order of the book’s world. The family’s three generations, the sister’s marriage, the courts from a small town’s council to the federal bench, the law firm, the car maker and the studio, the play, the film and the sculpture: each arrives as a case. A house floods; a dog is trapped. The natural world enters the book only where it can be litigated, and the world beyond the suits enters only as more suits.
Late in the book there is a death in the family, and a passage of grief that has weight. It is one of the few places where the noise stops. Then the talk resumes, and the suits with it. The book does not resolve its cases into justice, because its first sentence has already said where justice is to be had; it shows what the law can give, which is a ruling, a figure, an opinion well reasoned.
The title names a servant gone off on his own business, for whom no master answers. The book leaves open whether the law’s emptiness is its failure or its honesty. What it has shown, across a family and its claims, is a country that can say what is owed between persons only as a claim at law, and a man who wanted to be acknowledged and was answered instead with the law.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it bites. The main structures are required: the opening scene, the opinion on Cyclone Seven, Oscar’s deposition, the play. Each is a different instrument through which the same failure of justice sounds, and the book loses an argument if any one goes. But the chosen subject is repetition, suits begetting suits and the same grievance rehearsed in new jargon, and the scale is more permitted than compelled. Oscar’s laments to Lily, Christina’s to Oscar and the telephone fragments with lawyers circle a fixed set of complaints well past the point where the circling has shown what it shows. The defence, that the tedium is the knowledge, is the book’s own and partly holds; it holds better over a scene than over five hundred pages. Perhaps a fifth of the domestic exchanges could go without the book knowing less.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in late twentieth century America the law has become the one public language left, so that every human claim (to authorship, to injury, to love, to a dead dog, to one’s grandfather’s war) can be heard only once it is converted into a claim to property and damages, and the conversion empties the claim of the thing it was for. Oscar wants to be acknowledged as the author of his family’s story and can get only a damages figure. The opening sentence states the thesis, and the book proves it: the judge’s opinion on Cyclone Seven shows the law wise and still not just, which is a stronger finding than a satire of a corrupt court. Held below the top because the disclosure is spoken often, by Christina and by Oscar.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is comic, and the comedy is low in elevation by design. The heights are real and rare. Judge Crease’s opinions rise to a dry grandeur, a mind of the old republic writing against the noise, and the opinion on Cyclone Seven, with its passage on art and utility, is the book’s summit. Once at Antietam reaches for tragic dignity, and the book makes its reader see both the reach and the staleness, which is the point but caps the lift. A late passage of grief, around a death in the family, has weight. For most of its length the book works in the key of exasperation, and its comedy seldom rises past wit into the hilarity of JR. Two or three heights across six hundred pages hold the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The deep pattern most nearly built is the Civil War as the founding American lawsuit: brother against brother, and the family’s war passed down as a story that a son must own. The whole novel is a variation on substitution: the lawyer for the client, the damages for the wrong, the film for the play, the law for justice. That pattern is load-bearing. The father and the son, the ancient judge and the failed playwright seeking his acknowledgment, carry the old pattern of the son who cannot win the father’s word and is given a ruling instead. The rest is evoked: Job in the litigant’s cry, the dog in the steel as a small sacrifice. The myths are thought through more than embodied, and none rises to a structure the plot must obey.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the American comic novel of institutions, Melville’s “Bartleby” and Twain, with Dickens’s Chancery in Bleak House as the nearest ancestor, and Gaddis’s own method of untagged speech from JR. The turn is a novel built of legal documents carried whole and in their own forms, so that the opinion, the deposition and the brief become fictional genres beside the speech, and the reader adjudicates. No American novelist had given the law’s prose this much of a novel, or made it so exactly funny. The stake was real: a writer of seventy, whose last novel had been short and his readership small, staking six hundred pages on legal pastiche and a mediocre play. Held below the bar because the master instrument was proven twenty years earlier, and the swerve is in matter more than in means.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The unattributed speech means the reader must work out who speaks and what is being claimed, as a court must, and the voices crowd one another as suits do. The documents are the knowledge itself: the judge’s opinion shows the law thinking well; the deposition shows the law drawing out a man’s life in questions he cannot answer; and the play, read inside the record of a suit over whether it was stolen, is weighed as evidence and as art at once, so that the question the court must decide, what is original and who owns a story, is put to the reader’s own judgment. The form is the instrument. Held off the top because the stretches of domestic quarrel between the documents use the method as habit, where it confirms rather than discovers.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over thirty-two years, though thinner than for Gaddis’s first two novels. The book is read within a real body of Gaddis scholarship, in the collections and studies of his work and of his use of law, and it is taught in courses on law and literature, where its documents reward close reading: the opinion on Cyclone Seven repays study as a statement on art and utility, and the play keeps raising the question whether its weakness is Oscar’s or Gaddis’s. The semantic question the book plants, whether the law’s emptiness is its failure or its honesty, is real and does not exhaust. Held where it is because much of the commentary is reconstruction of the suits and identification of their targets, which is difficulty before it is depth.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century. The force is real: the book made the law’s language an instrument of fiction at full length, and showed that the systems novel’s satire of institutions could be carried through the institutions’ own documents; it is the major American novel of litigation. But it extends Gaddis’s own reorganisation rather than making one, and its force is narrower than that of JR, whose method it applies. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction of 1994; a steady place in the teaching of law and literature; and the admiration of novelists who prize Gaddis. No practice or school can be shown to have turned on this book; the reach of the method belongs to JR, and the legal novel after it went the way of the thriller.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has been kept in print with Gaddis’s other novels. Fabric: the surface is in part fixed to its moment, the Japanese car, the litigation boom of the 1980s and early 1990s, the Hollywood Civil War epic. The charge is lightened because the matter, Americans suing over everything, has grown more pertinent since, not less. Presence is where the charge falls: the book is read mainly by Gaddis’s readers and in the academy, and it has a smaller public than his two great novels. Three decades, with that presence, are weighed as three decades.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The ear for speech is exact: the sister’s brittle impatience, Lily’s Southern helplessness, the lawyers’ telephone shorthand, all unattributed and almost always identifiable. The pastiche of legal prose is not parody but mastery: the judge’s opinions are good law, in the right cadence and the right habit of citation, and read as the work of a real mind. The play is written badly in exactly the way Oscar would write it, a harder feat than writing it well. The structure moves several suits in parallel without a narrator and lands them. Charged: the method’s tics, the fragmentary dashes and interruptions in series, harden over the length, and Lily’s voice is held to one note far longer than its function needs.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Oscar’s play of brothers at Antietam, and the judge’s opinion on a dog trapped in a steel sculpture in a small town. They obey one law: a society that has lost the means of saying what is owed between persons can say it only as a claim at law, and the claim, won or lost, does not return the thing. The comic and the elegiac in the book share that law; so do the car, the film and the death in the family. The range is wide, from the slapstick of a car that runs over its owner to the old judge’s last opinion, and the same law holds. Charged because the minor suits sometimes run as jokes in a looser physics, outside the law that governs the rest.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Many orders, and the law holds them all. Consciousness, in Oscar’s grievance and Christina’s exhaustion. The family, three generations of Creases and the sister’s marriage. The state and its courts, from a small town’s council to a federal bench. History, in the Civil War and the family’s place in it. Money and the corporation: the law firm, the car maker, the studio. Art: the play, the film, the sculpture and the question of what is original. Labour, as the lawyers’ and the judge’s work. They are integrated, not listed: each order arrives as a case. Held below the top because the natural order is absent but for a flooded house and a dog, the sacred is thin, the range of class is narrow, the comfortable and their counsel, and the world beyond the suits enters only as more suits.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.6. An ear that carries every voice untagged and a mastery of legal prose that writes good law, with a play written badly in exactly the way its author would write it; a disclosure that holds, that the law has become the one public language left and that converting a claim into damages empties it, proved where the law is wisest; a form in which the opinion, the deposition and the play are the knowledge itself and the reader must judge as a court judges; and one law, that what is owed between persons can be said only as a claim that does not return the thing, holding from a Civil War play to a dog in a sculpture.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.4: heights that are real, the opinion on Cyclone Seven, the reach of the play, a late passage of grief, but two or three across six hundred pages in the key of exasperation. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.8, held by the domestic quarrels and telephone fragments that circle their complaints well past the point made, perhaps a fifth of them. Then The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: a pattern of substitution and a Civil War handed down, thought through more than embodied; and a force that extends the method of JR rather than making one, with no practice traceable to this book.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.2, from a sum of 98.7, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, his fourth novel, published by Poseidon Press (Simon and Schuster), New York, in January 1994, and given the National Book Award for Fiction in 1994. It is scored as one work, the novel as published in a single book, its speech, its legal documents and the portions of Oscar Crease’s play Once at Antietam together; later editions are the same work and bear only on survival. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening sentence, given without the dash that opens the speech in the book. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count of the first edition, the case in which the title’s phrase arose, the history of Oscar’s play outside the novel, the circumstances of Oscar’s accident, whose deaths the late pages mourn, the course of Lily’s suits and of the appeals, the later editions, and the particular studies of the book, are not given.