For over half a century, the novelist William Gaddis worked intermittently on a manuscript about the short life of the player piano in the United States. Why toil so long on an outdated entertainment? “Agapē Agape is a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy,” Gaddis wrote in a proposal for the book from the early 1960s. “As ‘The Secret History of the Player Piano’ it pursues America’s growth in terms of the evolution of the programming and organizational aspects of mechanization in industry and science, education, crime, sociology and leisure and the arts, between 1876 and 1929.”1 This is a vast project, and it got away from Gaddis. Luckily, his four great novels intervened, each a satirical celebration in its own right, and all important to the postwar development of American literature: The Recognitions (1955), JR (1975), Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), and A Frolic of His Own (1994). “The Secret History of the Player Piano” did not disappear; in fact, Gaddis often borrowed from its themes. A figure furiously at work on an unwieldy treatise is a staple of his fiction (in JR a character named Jack Gibbs struggles over this very manuscript), and, over the years, he wrote several essays on related topics, which were collected posthumously in The Rush for Second Place (2002). In early 1997, Gaddis was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which prompted him to distill his mass of notes, clippings, outlines, and drafts into a fiction of eighty-four manuscript pages. This is the version of Agapē Agape (2002) that was left when he died a year later.
Like his other novels, Agapē Agape is nearly all spoken, the soliloquy of a dying man in bed, who is and is not Gaddis. In a frantic state of distraction (heightened by doses of prednisone, which Gaddis took for emphysema), he struggles to patch together both his book and his body in order to conclude and to die; he has a deadline without extension. For his earlier fiction, Gaddis tracked his many characters, ideas, and riffs in rows of notes pinned to the walls around him. Agapē Agape is also composed as a collage of texts, a last delirious solo. More than the other books, this one makes a subject of its own (un)making and dramatizes the predicament of the author in the process. Imagine Marcel Proust, propped up in bed, rambling about his writing life, crossed with Walter Benjamin, in his last days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, rearranging his Arcades notes, and add a little of the “I can’t go on, I will go on” of Samuel Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate accuses of plagiarism before the fact. (The charge could also be reversed: Agapē Agape recalls Concrete [1982], the Bernhard novel about a writer unable to begin a biography of a composer.) In the end, as the dying man rushes to get his affairs in order, he identifies with Lear, but his Lear is a high modernist maddened by a neglectful world gone to the mass-cultural dogs. Book and body in pieces around him, he fixes on a note here, a symptom there; he pulls them out like threads that he lets drop again in a tangle of observations and obsessions. He has no time to lose, yet with his veering thoughts and stuttering entreaties he lets it slip away:
No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized … that’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four-year-old with a computer, everyone his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?2
For the dying man, this struggle between order and entropy is personal, but it is also the philosophical crux of his book and the practical question of his age.
Eccentric as a displaced artifact, the player piano is central to the secret history that is the pretext of the novel, the open sesame to “the patterned structure of modern technology and the successful democratization of the arts in America.”3 The outmoded objects that intrigued the Surrealists possessed this rich ambiguity too, and Benjamin also looked to such things for the “profane illumination” of historical dreams that they encrypted. (In his 1929 essay on Surrealism he listed “the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos.”)4 In this light, the idée fixe of the dying man, which he telegraphs as “my whole thesis entertainment the parent of technology,” might well have interested Benjamin, who is given a cameo in the book. Yet the notion that mechanization is internal to art, even initiated there, seems to reverse the Benjaminian view that it revolutionized art from the outside, from the world of industry. In dialectical (not to say diabolical) fashion, the dying man laments the effects of mechanization even as he implicates art in this technological degradation.
For this Gaddis double, the relevant history of mechanization begins with the Enlightenment automata of Jacques de Vaucanson (though he also notes the water organs of Hero of Alexandria and the golden birds of Byzantium cherished by Yeats). The inventor of a playing flautist and a shitting duck in the 1730s, Vaucanson became Inspector of Silk Manufactures in France, and in 1756 he transformed the industry with mechanical looms controlled by pierced cylinders. It was literally from the pieces of this apparatus, restored at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, that Joseph Jacquard devised his punch-card loom in 1804, which, three decades later, inspired Charles Babbage in his Analytical Engine, a key predecessor of the contemporary computer. For the dying man, the player piano is a lost term between these last two machines, the vanishing mediator between industrial and digital ages: “the beginning of key-sort and punched cards and IBM and NCR and the whole driven world we’ve inherited from some rinky-dink piano roll.” It becomes the magical cipher in his own account of automatization, which is why “getting the whole chronology in order 1876 to 1929” is so important to him. Why these dates? A chronology in The Rush for Second Place tells us that the Pianista player was first exhibited in 1876 at the Philadelphia Exposition along with an electric organ; 1876 is also the birth date of the telephone. The demise of the player came in 1929 with the spread of gramophones and radios (the latter grew from 5,000 in the US in 1920 to 2,500,000 in 1924), the advent of sound film, and the first public demonstration of television. This history is intentionally potted. Under 1876, for example, Gaddis also lists the Christian Science Association, whose charismatic founder, Mary Baker Eddy, is taken at her word: “I affix for all time the word Science to Christianity; and error to personal sense; and call the world to battle on this issue.”5 For Gaddis, this “elimination of failure through analysis, measurement, and prediction” is the great power of technoscience, but it is one that can overwhelm all matters of the spirit, in religion and in art, “where truth and error are interdependent possibilities in the search for unpredetermined perfection.”6 In addition, Gaddis argues in his proposal, “the career of the player paralleled the zeal for order and patriotic proclivities for standardization and programming contributed by McCormick (patents), Rockefeller (industry), Woolworth (merchandising), Eastman (photography), Morgan (credit), Ford (assembly line, plant police), Pullman (model town), Mary Baker Eddy (applied ontology), Taylor (time studies), Watson (behaviorism), Sanger (sex) etc., etc.”7 Clearly, Gaddis is concerned less with mechanization per se than with the “more pervasive principle of organization” that continues to govern “automation and cybernetics, mathematics and physics, sociology, game theory, and, finally, genetics.”8 Clearly, too, this project pushed Gaddis into a semi-paranoid “zeal for order” of his own. At the same time, his short history of outmoded techniques also points to a counterargument to his vision of total organization: rationalization is not always rational, media invention is littered with dead ends, and scientific advance is often bound up with technological catastrophe.
For the dying man, the player piano also provides an occasion to reflect on representation and reproduction, and here he draws on three conservative lines in pop-Platonic thought: that representation is illusory and thus dangerous; that reproduction is dispersive and thus entropic (he is swamped by versions of his own text, a common enough condition for writers in the age of electronic reproducibility); and, finally, that replication is uncanny and thus subversive, “this dangerous demon you can’t control not really part of you but can force you to do things.” This last point updates the old view of technology as a Frankenstein’s monster run amok, and the dying man does riff on an assortment of strange dolls from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Olympia to Ian Wilmut’s Dolly, in whose honor he transforms a Blakean song of innocence into a Mephistophelean rag of experience: “Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? … Doctor Wilmut made thee, Doctor Ian Wilmut cloned thee outside Edinburgh.” For the dying man the dangerous demon of replication targets the artist in particular, “the technology the artist created being used to eliminate him.” And in this automatization of art the player piano figures between the Vaucanson flautist and “every four-year-old with a computer”: according to Gaddis, the player served to dissuade potential performers and to deskill actual ones, so that its very success (by 1919 more player pianos were produced than conventional ones) nearly doomed the middle-class cultivation of actual performance.
The years 1876–1929 saw the advent of both modernist art and spectacular society—again, sound film and early television emerged toward the close of this period. Nonetheless, the implicit opposition between active practice and passive entertainment is a cliché of cultural criticism, and it conforms to other familiar binaries, such as serious art versus mass culture and avant-garde versus kitsch. In this regard, the dying man holds to the elitist line of critics associated with The Criterion (both new and old versions) and the Partisan Review, though, at times, his diatribe is not so reactive. If he does not treat high and low culture in Adornian terms as “torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up,” he does sketch a dialectic of musical composition and mechanical reproduction.9 Some composers like Franz Liszt, the dying man suggests, tended toward a “banjo beat” in order to suit the clunky regularity of the player piano, while others like Maurice Ravel favored complex rhythms in order to foil it. This is too deterministic by half, yet his thinking is more nuanced when he considers Glenn Gould. As is well known, this ultimate performer withdrew into the recording studio, but in doing so, the dying man implies, Gould was so given over to technological manipulation that he overcame the opposition between performance and mechanization, so steeped in mediation that he passed through the other side into immediacy again: “He wanted to be the Steinway because he hated the idea of being between Bach and the Steinway … he’d be in total control with his splicing and editing and altering pitch what he called creative cheating for the perfect performance.” Music has long represented this kind of grace in art—the dying man quotes T. S. Eliot on “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts.” Clearly Gaddis sees a kindred spirit in Gould, for he too seeks an immediacy of pure voice through a mediation of collaged texts: “between the reader and the page what it’s all about, that solitary enterprise.” Nevertheless, this quest for “immediate reality”—or “the Blue Flower in the land of technology,” as Benjamin put it in his famous essay on mechanical reproduction–-can be bewitched (such is the prime problem with much new media art), and Gaddis is more subtle in practice than the dying man is in theory.10 For his novels do not seek to transcend the mundane discourses that they rewrite—the languages of advertising in JR, of Christian fundamentalism in Carpenter’s Gothic, and of law in A Frolic of His Own. In the precise words of Joseph Tabbi, editor of both Agapē Agape and The Rush for Second Place, Gaddis worked by “watching the operations of power, appropriating its language, recycling its massive waste products” in order to create a critical space “under regimes of information, unreality, and bureaucratic domination.”11 In this light, he is less a high-modernist Lear than a gadfly jester of everyday discourse.
Again, his history of technology by way of the player piano is sketchy, but that sketchiness makes its own point: that history is a sticking together of found pieces in more or less persuasive versions. Gaddis derives some of his own bits from Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Norbert Wiener, Johan Huizinga, and Benjamin (the last two take part in a hilarious dialogue in Agapē Agape), but others not cited also come to mind: Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934), Sigfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command (1955), and Hugh Kenner in The Counterfeiters (1968) and The Mechanic Muse (1987), as well as, more distantly, Friedrich Kittler (with his notion of discourse networks), Gilles Deleuze (with his idea of control society), and Jacques Attali (with his account of the political economy of music). Although more technologically deterministic than these thinkers, Gaddis is not oblivious to social agency. This concern is signaled by his enigmatic title. Agapē, the dying man tells us, is “that love feast in the early church” that celebrated the creation of the universe and that is reenacted in miniature, he believes, in every artistic performance: “That’s what’s lost, what you don’t find in these products of the imitative arts that are made for reproduction on a grand scale.” Here, the negative force of mechanization in art is the withering away less of Benjaminian aura than of two other qualities–-individual risk on the one hand and communal participation on the other. The dying man plays further on this word agapē: the community of love conjured by art, he suggests, is always aghast at its opposite number, “the herd numbed and silenced agape at blood sex and guns … no more elite no wherever you turn just the spread of the crowd with its, what did he call it, what Huizinga called its insatiable thirst for trivial recreation and crude sensationalism, the mass of the mediocre widening the gap.” All these ideas–art as eucharistic ritual, the lost community of aesthetic experience, the mindless herd of mass culture–-are staples of high-modernist discourse, and, again, they are often reactionary (and sometimes anti-Semitic to boot). But Gaddis is too smart to leave matters there, and the dying man is not identical with him in any case. Gaddis is also fascinated by another Greek word, aporia, which he defines as “difference, discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, ambiguity, irony, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy, chaos,” and salutes with a “long live!”12 Although Gaddis might bemoan the gap between elite art and mass entertainment in the name of agapē, he appreciates other gaps, other aporias, that open up spaces for experiment and doubt, creative endeavor and critical thought. For Gaddis, then, agapē and aporia are in tension, perhaps in the way that order and entropy are; the former term in each pair offers some hope and reason, the latter some running-room and illumination.
This is where the dying man and Gaddis part company. The dying man quotes Flaubert on democracy—“the entire dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity”—and adds a nasty revision of his own: “to bring the stupidity level of the bourgeoisie down to the subliterate appetite of the proles.”13 Here he passes beyond high-modernist belief in aesthetic detachment and artistic difficulty into political reaction and class racism: “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.” For a moment, the dying man considers the attempts to bridge the gap between elite and herd undertaken by Tolstoy and Whitman, but dismisses them as absurd today: “Our literary language isn’t suited to this common herd of millions out there maybe they’re inventing their own, been to the movies lately? Listened to their lyrics?! Man I mean like I’ve heard it you dumb asshole give this muthrfuckr a blowjob everyman his own artist in this democracy of the arts.”
For his part, Gaddis is drawn to moments of dissociation in a way that the dying man is not—in the Eliotic sense of a “dissociation of sensibility” too—and he makes the most of them. For all his sympathy for high-minded modernists, Gaddis also partakes in the demotic language experiments of postmodern authors like Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, and, above all, Thomas Pynchon (whose interest in entropy, not to mention proclivity for paranoia, he shares). Often, this distinction between modernists and postmodernists is artificial, and Gaddis seems to write in the gap between the two orders of linguistic imagination. And, here, other peers come to mind as well, not only Bernhard in Concrete but also Max Frisch in Man in the Holocene (1979) and William Gass in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968). Like these works, Agapē Agape exists on the threshold between modernist techniques of collage and later modes of writing now called archival and autofictional. Unlike the dying man, Gaddis does not lament the postmodernist death of the author because he knows that the writer is always about to be incarnated in a new guise. In the meantime, he has his surrogate test out different positions on art, technology, and society, mocking and defending them in turn, suspended between agapē and aporia, order and entropy. At one moment, the dying man is a resentful truth-teller; at another a cynical trickster whose rant is so much blague: “I’m clearly the one person qualified for a piece of work like this one, first because I can’t read music and can’t play anything but a comb. Second because I use only secondhand material which any court would dismiss as hearsay so we can reduce it to gossip like everything else, and finally. Finally I really don’t believe any of it.” In still another moment, his last in fact, the dying man is hopeful, as he calls out to his own former artistic self, who is always also a future one in the making: “that Youth who could do anything.”