The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Gaddis · a novel in one unbroken text, without chapters · Alfred A. Knopf, 1975 · scored on Gaddis’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Satirical social novel of money and institutions, told in dialogue; novel of systems and novel of the artist in one book
Mythos
The self-made boy of the American success story, built into the plot and inverted; Wagner’s Rheingold, the gold won by renouncing love, set at the start as a school production; a family house and its company in decline
Phase
From a class trip that buys one share to the rise and collapse of a paper empire, without a break
Presentation
Fiction; one unbroken text with no chapters, parts or numbered sections; almost wholly dialogue, each speech opened by a dash and few tagged with a speaker, joined by passages of narrative prose that carry the reader from one scene to the next
Register
The schoolboy’s half-understood business jargon, the publicist’s pitch, the cant of a superintendent who is also a banker, the aunts’ circling talk and Gibbs’s learned bitterness, against long sentences of streets, trees and weather
Scale
A school, an apartment and a family company, and a corporate world reaching from a mill town to a foreign concession
Governing Proposition
A schoolboy whose class trip buys one share of stock takes the lesson to the letter, and from the mail and the school’s pay phone builds a paper empire that buys and closes mills, disturbs a conglomerate and draws a composer in as its agent while his music shrinks, as his teachers fail at their books in an apartment filling with the cartons of the boy’s companies. The wager of the novel is that the American economy of paper has come loose from any human purpose, so that a child who obeys its rules without judgment can rule in it, and that a novel made only of talk, without chapters or rest, can show a world that exists only as talk.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins in talk, and in old age: two old women speaking of money and of death, one of them “in a voice that rustled”. Nothing introduces them and nothing frames what they say. The first subject of the book is money, and its first sound is a voice. From that page to the last the book does not stop. It has no chapters, no parts and no numbered sections: it is one unbroken text.
Almost all of it is dialogue. Each speech is opened by a dash, and few are tagged with the name of the speaker, so that the reader must know who speaks from how they speak. Telephone calls run at once, several voices in several rooms; speakers interrupt one another, mishear, answer the wrong question and go on. The book gives almost no body, setting or interior except what the talk lets slip, and the reader is made to do the listening that the people in it do not do.
Between the scenes, and only there, the talk gives way. Passages of narrative prose carry the reader from one place to the next without a break, long sentences that move through streets, trees and weather, and in them the noise stops. What they describe is land being cleared and sold. JR was Gaddis’s second novel, published by Knopf in 1975, twenty years after The Recognitions, and it was given the National Book Award for Fiction the following year.
Movement II
A class goes on a trip to buy one share of stock, so that the children may learn how the economy works. One of them, JR, learns it. He takes the lesson to the letter: the point is to win, and the rules permit whatever they do not forbid. He is not a villain and he is not a prodigy of malice. He is a sharp schoolboy and a perfect student of what he has been taught, and the book’s whole indictment rests on the fact that he has been taught correctly.
From the mail and the school’s pay phone he builds an empire. It exists only on the telephone and on paper, never as a thing; it grows by orders placed and letters answered. JR at the pay phone, placing an order with a broker, is the book’s emblem of its world: a child moving property he will never see, through a market that asks nothing of him but the order.
The school he does it from is itself run as a business, its superintendent also a banker, its teaching handed to machines. The empire’s paper rises out of it and touches the corporate world above, Typhon and Governor Cates, senators and contracts and a mining concession abroad, and that world, which thinks itself in command, is disturbed by a schoolboy’s orders. The comedy is exact, and its point is not that a child can do this but that the system cannot tell.
Movement III
In an apartment on 96th Street two teachers, Gibbs and Eigen, fail at their books. The apartment fills with the cartons of JR’s companies, while a tap runs and the radio talks. The drunken scenes held there go on, and they run past their turn. The room is the empire’s warehouse and the artists’ ruin at once, and it is the book’s comic sublime.
Gibbs has abandoned a book on the mechanisation of the arts, and in the apartment he reads from it, drunk, with an eloquence the rest of the novel denies its speakers. His subject is the book’s subject seen from the side of the arts, and the machines of the book, the player piano and the teaching machine, stand around it. His learned bitterness is one of the most distinct voices in the book.
Gibbs names the law of the book: entropy, order running down into noise. The book enacts it everywhere, in the school, in the apartment, in the teachers’ marriages, in the land. Whether the novel’s own order escapes the law it describes is a question the book plants and leaves open: a form made of noise, held together by an ear that hears every voice, against a world in which nobody listens.
Movement IV
At the start of the book Edward Bast, a composer, rehearses a school production of Wagner’s Rheingold. The opera’s pattern is the book’s: gold is won by one who renounces love. The pattern is set early and holds, though the book does not make its people into the opera’s figures; JR remains a schoolboy and not an Alberich, and the opera is a key the reader carries rather than a plan the plot obeys.
Bast is drawn into JR’s empire as its agent, the adult face of a business run by a child, and as the empire grows his music shrinks. His commissions dwindle and his music grows smaller; the art is what the gold consumes. Whether this shrinking is defeat, or a purification of the art down to what cannot be bought, is one of the questions the book leaves live.
Bast has a family, and the family has a company, an inheritance contested among its heirs. The Bast house is in decline, and its past is the chief way history enters a book otherwise held in the present tense of the telephone. The aunts’ talk, like everyone’s, circles what it means without arriving at it.
Movement V
The empire reaches real things. JR’s paper buys the mills of a small town and closes them, and the workers who lose their work are as real as the empire is insubstantial. Land is cleared for development in the bridging passages, trees and streets and weather described with a care the dialogue never has, and what is described is being sold. The effects are real and the substance is nothing: that is the disclosure, and the book makes it in its matter rather than stating it.
The collapse comes as the rise came, through the talk of those who half understand it. It runs on the mechanics of the market, deal on deal, and the reader reconstructs it from fragments, as the reader reconstructed the rise. No one in the book sees the whole, and the book gives no narrator to see it for them. The market does not close, and the book, which has no chapters, gives the reader no place to rest while it falls.
At the end JR is still talking on the telephone. The empire has fallen and the boy is still talking. Whether he is innocent the book does not say. It has shown a world in which a child who obeys the rules can do all this, and a culture that cannot tell him from itself, and it leaves the reader where it began, in a voice that has not stopped talking about money.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book is built to resist it and partly fails. The design is required: the class trip that buys one share; JR’s empire grown from the mail and the school’s pay phone; Edward Bast drawn in as its agent while his music shrinks; the teachers, Gibbs and Eigen, failing at their books in the apartment on 96th Street; the corporate world of Typhon and Governor Cates that JR’s paper touches and disturbs. The repetition is functional: a world of unceasing transaction must be heard unceasing, and the reader’s fatigue is part of the knowledge. But the test still bites. The drunken scenes in the apartment run long past their turn, the school administration’s calls recur with diminishing return, and some of the corporate talk restates what is already plain. Perhaps a tenth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the American economy of paper has become autonomous of any human purpose, so that a child who follows its rules to the letter, without judgment, can build an empire in it, and the empire’s effects on towns, mills, workers and artists are real while its substance is nothing. JR is not a villain. He is a perfect student of what he has been taught, that the point is to win and that the rules permit whatever they do not forbid. Around him the school is run as a business, the arts are bought, used and dropped, and nearly everyone speaks and nobody listens. The book uncovered in 1975 what the decades after it made plain: the conglomerate, the leveraged deal, the corporation as person. It is found in action and speech, not stated by an author. Held off the top because the satire’s view of its adults is narrow, most of them fools or knaves.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Elevation is rare by design, in a book of voices that interrupt one another. The opening, two old women’s talk of money and death, begun “in a voice that rustled”, has a dry grandeur. The passages of narrative prose that carry the reader between scenes, through streets, trees and weather on land being cleared for development, are the book’s lyric heights, the only places where the noise stops. Gibbs reading from his abandoned book on the mechanisation of the arts has a drunken eloquence. The comic sublime is the apartment itself, choked with the cartons of JR’s companies while a tap runs and the radio talks. But the heights are few and the register mostly flat, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve: it is the form’s cost on this axis, and not a failure of power.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The myths are present, and partly built. The American myth of the self-made boy, the Alger hero who rises by pluck, is built into the plot and inverted: JR rises by literal obedience to the market, and the rise is a ruin. Wagner’s Rheingold is set at the start, a school production rehearsed by Bast: the gold won by renouncing love is the book’s governing pattern, and Bast’s art is what JR’s gold consumes. The Bast family’s inheritance and its contested company give the book a house in decline. The inverted success story and the pattern of the gold are built into the plot, and they bring the axis to the bar. What holds it at the bar and not above is that these patterns are more frame and allusion than archetype made particular: JR remains a sharp schoolboy rather than an Alberich, and the collapse in the second half runs on the mechanics of the market rather than on the mythic structure. The opera is used as a key more than as a structure the plot must obey.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the dialogue novel of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green, the party chapters of Gaddis’s own The Recognitions, and Joyce behind them. The turn is a long novel with no chapters, no breaks and almost no narration, in which the reader must identify the speaker from the speech, follow simultaneous telephone calls and reconstruct a corporate plot from the fragments its participants let fall. Nothing in the American novel of 1975 was built this way at this scale. The stake was real: twenty years after a first novel of great length and difficulty, Gaddis made a second more demanding still, on a form that could repel every reader. Held below the top because part of the instrument is his own, from the parties of the first novel, and part is Green’s and Compton-Burnett’s.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is made only of talk because the world it shows is made only of talk: JR’s empire exists on the telephone and in the mail, never as a thing, and the novel exists as speech, with almost no body, setting or interiority except what speech lets slip. There are no chapters because the market does not close; the reader gets no rest because no one in the book gets any. Speakers interrupt, mishear and answer the wrong question, and the reader must do the listening they do not do. The bridging passages are the one place where description rules, and what they describe is the natural world being sold off. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Held a step below the top because the monotony the form requires is at moments only monotony, and the labour of identification is not always repaid by what is identified.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-one years. The book has drawn a steady criticism, the work of Steven Moore and others on Gaddis, an annotation project, and a recurring public argument over whether it can be read at all. It yields on return as few books do, because the first reading is spent identifying speakers and the second can hear what they say. The questions it plants are live: whether JR is innocent; whether Bast’s shrinking art is defeat or purification; what Gibbs’s entropy means for the book’s own order. Held lower than its difficulty on a first reading suggests because much of the return is reconstruction, which is difficulty before it is depth, and the critical community is small.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the novel of the 1970s. The force is high: the book is a real reorganisation of what the novel of money and institutions could be, a social novel with the narrator removed and the economy rendered as its own noise; with Gravity’s Rainbow it defined the American novel of systems. The force carries the axis over the bar; what holds it near the bar is reach. Its form, the novel told wholly in unattributed dialogue, was not taken up as a method, and the field’s redirection in that decade is credited more to Pynchon and to other novelists, in America and in Europe, than to this book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976; its standing among novelists as a model of the corporate and financial novel; and its subject, the economy of paper, become one of the central subjects of American fiction in the decades after it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published. Fabric: nothing to charge. Its surface is in part fixed to its moment, the penny stocks and conglomerates of the early 1970s, but that is its matter, and the economy it satirised has become more like the book since, so that it is read as forecast more than as period. Presence is where the charge falls: it has been kept in print and reissued, but it is read by a small devoted readership and in courses on postwar fiction, and it is better known as a famously difficult book than read. Five decades of survival, with that presence, do not stand with centuries.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. To carry dozens of speakers through the whole length of the book with almost no tags, so that each is known by rhythm, cant and evasion (the schoolboy’s half-understood business jargon, the superintendent who is also a banker, the publicist’s pitch, the aunts’ circling talk, Gibbs’s learned bitterness), is a feat of the ear few novels attempt and fewer sustain. The bridging passages, long sentences that move the reader through space and weather from one scene to the next, are controlled prose of a different order from the dialogue. The plotting of the empire’s rise and fall, given only through the talk of those who half understand it, is exact. Three charges hold it below the top: the businessmen’s voices blur at moments; some running jokes are pressed past their use; and the women, Amy Joubert above all, are thinner than the men.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a bridging passage of trees, streets and weather, and JR at the school’s pay phone placing an order with a broker. They obey one law: order runs down into noise, and what holds things together is sold off piece by piece. Gibbs names the law as entropy; the book enacts it in the school, the apartment, the Bast inheritance, Bast’s dwindling commissions and the landscape alike. The range is wide, from slapstick to elegy, from a schoolroom to a foreign mining concession, and the same law holds. Charged: the corporate satire at the top, Governor Cates and the Washington figures, runs on a broader physics of caricature than the teachers and artists in the apartment, and the narrowing of nearly every adult to folly or venality makes part of the coherence a matter of tone.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure by one law of transaction. Childhood and the school, run as a business and taught by machine. Money and the corporation, from penny stocks to a conglomerate. Labour, in the mills of a small town that JR’s paper buys and closes. The state, in senators, contracts and a foreign concession. The arts, music, fiction and painting, each bought, used or abandoned. The family, in the Bast inheritance and the teachers’ failing marriages. Technology, in the player piano and the teaching machine. The natural order, in the land being developed. Held below the top because the form excludes most interiority: consciousness is given only as speech, and the sacred is nearly absent. History reaches the book chiefly through the Bast family’s past and its company.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.3, then The Unconcealment, The Swerve and The Inner Law at 9.2. A form made only of talk because the world it shows is made only of talk, an empire that exists on the telephone and in the mail; a disclosure that holds, that an economy of paper rewards literal obedience over judgment and that its effects are real while its substance is nothing; a long novel with no chapters, no breaks and almost no narration, built as nothing else in the American novel of 1975 was built, on a form that could repel every reader; and one law, that order runs down into noise, holding from a passage of trees and weather to a schoolboy placing an order at a pay phone.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.8: heights that are real, the opening, the bridging passages, Gibbs’s drunken eloquence, but few by the form’s design. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.0, held by what passes the point of a functional repetition: the drunken scenes in the 96th Street apartment, the recurring calls of the school administration and corporate talk that restates the plain, perhaps a tenth of the book. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 8.5, at the bar: the self-made boy inverted and the Rheingold pattern set, but used as a key more than built into a structure the plot obeys; and five decades of survival with a narrow presence, better known as a difficult book than read.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5, by five tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Made at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable each meet it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Gaddis’s JR, his second novel, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1975, and given the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976. It is scored as one work, the novel as published, a single unbroken text without chapters, parts or numbered sections; 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, the share of dialogue included, 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: five words of the opening. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count of the first edition, the grade and the town of JR’s school, the names of the mill town and its mills, a death in the apartment, the later editions and translations, the particular studies and essays on the book, and Gaddis’s later work on the player piano, are not given.