The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Agape- Agape, by William Gaddis
reviewed by Thomas Hove

William Gaddis. Agape- Agape. Afterword Joseph Tabbi. Viking, 2002. 113 pp. $23.95.

Although anything by William Gaddis is a major literary event, this final work marks his exit with a whimper. Not so much a novel, Agape- Agape is an inconsistently dramatized monologue delivered by a dying man who bears many resemblances to Gaddis himself. As he weathers the effects of illness and prescription drugs, he rants about the loss of artistic authenticity and the impoverishment of an individual life in this age of technologized production and consumption. Many of his remarks about the mechanical reproduction of art echo ideas famously developed by critics like Walter Benjamin, Hugh Kenner, and John Berger (though according to Joseph Tabbi’s superb afterword, these ideas first occurred to Gaddis independently). In certain intellectual circles, it has become second nature to worry over the ambivalent trade-off between the democratization of culture and the resultant loss of artistic standards and achievement. Gaddis himself has dramatized this trade-off much more successfully in his long novels The Recognitions, JR, and A Frolic of His Own. Even though, as Tabbi has noted, Thomas Bernhard looms behind this work as a significant new influence, Gaddis enthusiasts looking for anything particularly original in Agape- Agape will be disappointed. But for anyone who wants to see the familiar Gaddis references and themes played out one last time, it’s an extremely interesting final testament of a great artist facing that most ruthless of all democratizers, death: “problem is you have to be wiped out. Have to be reduced to this herd anonymity, humiliated and eliminated as an artist like Melville.” In its occasional autobiographical sincerity, the sadness of this testament can be painfully direct. But in its final few pages, some of the mortal gloom lifts in a way reminiscent of a motto from Schiller that sustained Melville during his own depressing last years: “Keep true to the dream of thy youth.” For Gaddis this has always meant sustaining hope in “that self who could do more.” And for those of us who know The Recognitions, these final pages can leave us with the comforting reminder that Gaddis was indeed “that Youth who could do anything.”