Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis's Fiction of Longing (review)

Hints and Guesses contains lots of both. One of the most provocative hints, for example, is Knight’s remark that JR is “the most interesting fictional child since Huck Finn.” But the book contains less in the way of sustained analysis and argument. (One incidental argument that does stand out concerns the cause of Elizabeth Booth’s death in Carpenter’s Gothic.) It has useful information: minilessons on Abstract Expressionism, the Flemish masters, art forgery, proxy wars for control of mineral wealth in Africa, carpenter Gothic architecture, the recent history of litigation principles and practices, and legal pragmatism. These might best serve, however, as prompts to one’s own further research. And the discussions, while generally sound (on the reign of exchange value, for instance), rarely explore new ground. As when he cites Marx and Weber, Knight provides more reminders than illuminations.

The longing in Knight’s subtitle seems more explicitly his own than Gaddis’s. He repeatedly invokes the religious (“not necessarily churchly”), the numinous, the transcendent, the sublime. Even though he acknowledges that to do so may go against the grain of the times, he assumes a common ground of religious yearning with readers (“the question that dogs us all: to what purpose does the world exist?”), defines truth as dependent on a metaphysical or religious dimension, defines love as predicated “on a hope respecting the future,” and even claims that “[t]here can be no small acts of goodness without a recognition of a greater good.” I find these assumptions unwarranted, but some readers may find Knight’s frank appeal to a kind of spirituality among his book’s attractions. Knight insists the appeal is Gaddis’s.

Gaddis would hardly be Gaddis without both his profound seriousness and a humor that ranges from the sophisticated and subtle to the vulgar and uproarious, so Knight could use a lighter touch or show more sensitivity to Gaddis’s humor. Though he does ample justice to Gaddis’s pathos, he doesn’t give his irony its due. Knight struggles to rationalize readings in which “hope and order [manage] to eke out a small victory” over despair and entropy. This will to optimism, with religious overtones, is coupled with a will to niceness that leads Knight to downplay the savagery of Gaddis’s satire, as if the genre of attack, for all its reformist implications, were not quite decent. For instance, Knight criticizes McCandless for “too much anger and too little empathy” in distinguishing between ignorance and stupidity.

Knight’s study is also resolutely nonpostmodern, almost antipostmodern. Knight acknowledges that much of the best Gaddis criticism is postmodernist, yet he wants to “reclaim Gaddis’s work from postmodernism’s exclusive realm,” claiming that even the best postmodernist criticism is too partial and skeptical. Knight’s stance seems willfully partial itself, but again, it may appeal to some readers.

Discussing “the motif of sight and hearing” in JR, Knight quotes Adorno on expecting to hear the unheard of and see the unseen in the arts. I expect the same of the best criticism, and I wish that expectation were more largely fulfilled by Hints and Guesses.