Agape Agape

William Gaddis et al

Editions

Review

Agapé Agape is a dramatic monologue by a dying man who is trying to explain his obsession with player pianos.  It is a single paragraph, a stream of consciousness fraught with the desperate urgency of a man trying to convey something difficult which he knows he has neither the time, physical strength, nor clarity of mind to articulate clearly.  The narrator jumps back and forth, cramming in associated thoughts and memories, too frantic to get them down on paper while he can to worry about the exact context.  Plato, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Babbage, Byron, Michelangelo, Homer and a host of others all appear in a tumble of allusions and abandoned sentences, interrupted by furious references to his physical decrepitude as he knocks over a glass of water or finds he cannot reach his notes.  ‘Just, hold on just hold on to something or I’ll go with it just, no! Help! The whole heap it’s, good God all over the floor try to, try not to move get my breath sweating and shaking… How could, all going backward braced myself against that heap like a pillar of salt whole thing yes, the unswerving punctuality of chance, clock without the clockmaker perfectly simple in word and deed says Plato,…’

Veering wildly from cogent argument to rant, the narrative tone is brilliantly realised, and yet the central thread remains clear.  Player pianos are a prototype for mechanisation in the arts, and as such a discussion of them is a metaphor for an analysis of the decay of civilisation – which is mirrored by the narrator’s own decay and the corruption of the text itself and exemplified by the our culture of computers and a supposed democracy of aesthetics where artistic genius is available to everyone, which Gaddis’s narrator regards as aesthetically meaningless.

Although not in itself an original idea, the way in which Gaddis expresses it is striking not only for its force but also for its paradoxical coherence.  For though the narrative seems fragmented, the form enables him to link all kinds of thing together, achieving coherence precisely by means of incoherence.  If this seems surprising, it is in keeping with the ending of this remarkable, contrary work of art. - review by Johnny de Falbe