Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo

Conclusion: Person and Presence, Stories and Theories

233 Conclusion Person and Presence, Stories and Theories At one of the many bustling parties depicted in William Gaddis’s massive mid-century novel The Recognitions (1955), Esther, one of the main characters in the book, is introduced by someone named Buster Brown to someone named Mr. Crotcher, who describes himself as a writer. —My book has been translated into nineteen languages. —I must know it, Esther said.—I must know of it. —Doubt it, said the modest author.—Never been published. —But you said... —I’ve translated it myself. Nineteen languages. Only sixty-six more to go,not counting dialects....It’s Celtic now....It took me only eight months to learn Celtic. It ought to go in Celtic. —You mean be published? —Yes, published in Celtic. Sooner or later I’ll hit a language where they’ll publish it. Then I can retire to the country.... —It must be an awfully dirty book, said Buster. Mr. Crotcher gave him a look of firm academic hatred which no amount of love, in any expression, could hope to erase.—It is a novel about ant life, he said.1 1 William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955; New York: Penguin, 1993), 582–83. 234 CONCLUSION Mr. Crotcher doesn’t say what he means by “a novel about ant life.”As entomologists know, a drone’s memoir would have a different plotline than that of a queen, and the story of a South American bullet ant would look quite different in setting and atmosphere than the tale of a common wood ant in southern England. This is to say nothing of the possibility that by “life” Mr. Crotcher means the life of an entire colony. The behavior of an ant colony can often seem the stuff of great fiction, not least in the spectacular nests and bridges that many colonies build, accomplishments that go well beyond the rather predictable capacities of any single organism.2 Mr. Crotcher is as egoistic and absurd as most of the party-goers in Gaddis’s novel, but whatever “a novel about ant life” means, the preceding chapters are meant to suggest that his book may have more appeal to publishers than Gaddis’s satire implies. Modern and contemporary literature,I’ve been arguing, is filled with a remarkable range of sentient things, purposive speakers and actors, and in this gallery Mr. Crotcher’s ants would not look badly out of place. By no means have I tried to offer an exhaustive list of such entities, and along the way the reader will probably have thought of other anomalous agents who appeared in the decades both before and after The Recognitions: the Upanishads’ thunder sounding in The Waste Land, the judging eyes of T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, the malignantly hissing hair-spray of The Crying of Lot 49, the Kafkan breast of Philip Roth’s The Breast, the dogs of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the vengeful winds and storms of Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, Toni Morrison’s numerous ghosts. On offer have been classifications more than catalogues. The basic taxonomy I have outlined—embodied persons, presences within, presences without—gets us to the heart of much recent literature and philosophy, and gives us some of the broad strategies at our disposal for describing ideas of meaningful action generally. At different points I have suggested that the variety of things to which literary and theoretical texts have attributed beliefs and desires is expressive of a great uncertainty about how to describe both ourselves and the world. Something animate and sapient under one description may be a mere huddle of atoms, cells, or organs under another; Mr. Crotcher might appear wholly ridiculous to one editor and wholly brilliant to another. In recent decades, and in varying tones of delight and scorn, theorists have talked much of the notion of the cyborg, a being that is both animal and machine, populating 2 For some reflection on ant colonies as intentional systems, with a “life” over and above that of any individual ant, see Donald R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage, 1979), 311–36. PERSON AND PRESENCE, STORIES AND THEORIES 235 worlds ambiguously natural and crafted, problematizing the line between human and artifact, blurring identities, categories, and relationships.3 From the point of view of the preceding chapters, however, such instabilities were common well before and well beyond debates...