"Centaur Meditating on a Saddle": Fabric and Function of the Narrative Voice in William Gaddis' JR
Rent from DeepDyveOddly enough, concerning a novel where the phone never stops ringing, it wasn't the phone that asked me, but an email: "Hey, listen, we need a title for your paper." At the time, I was reading French poet's Hubert Haddad's Saintes beuveries. On the spur—if I may—of the moment, with ill-understood reluctance, I followed up on the heuristic hunch a bad pun provided. Voice in JR being an insistent concern, the adjective "stentorian" kept coming to mind, and mind kept changing it to "centaurian." In his dark little book, Haddad writes:
Language is the dream of presence in the dimension that osculates it. Symbolization makes exile inescapable: a ghost returns where an absent body was . . . [It] short-circuits the chains of discursivity to find again the secret gleam of babble when the brains explode against the wall of representation.
And the poet ends up wondering:
This music among the trees that seems to come where I come from? Who am I at this mortal instant? Centaur meditating on a saddle.
(Haddad 9, 11, 15)
I then remembered Steven Moore used the verb, in his book, stating that "Puritanism saddled America with 'a capitalistic way of life,'" and quoted Gaddis' own Emersonian use: "God damned things in the saddle and ride mankind" (73, 80). My reluctance sprang from the poor reputation of mythological creatures whose body's brutal power eclipsed its being led by a human heart and brains. It was alleviated, as Gaddis prods his readers on, when Mnemosyne insisted "centaur" meant "he who goads the bulls." It was overcome by the memory of centaur Chiron, he with the hand in his name, wise tutor of Apollo, versed in [End Page 252] music, whose strength could be equated with a joy in and longing for the poetic that gave him a frolic all his own. Remaining scruples were dismissed at the thought that "horses, nightmares and books are three things that step back when looked in the face" (Quignard 1990, 440). I was reconciled with a mysterious polysemantic metaphor that suggested the unharnessed power of a writing burdened with a repugnant load and described a dramatically hybridized form in which two narrative regimes cohabitated.
Because, of course, JR is not what first impressions tell us. It is not the "seamless" "flow" and verbal allover dear to Frederick Karl, "moving from one long segment to another without any shading" (188); nor is it the "726 pages of dialogue" Steven Moore mentions (96). "The narrative voice" is not "almost always absent" (50) as Brigitte Félix puts it, even though she tracks it down (59-60), suggesting that the syntax of descriptions and transitional passages "blurs the supposed immediacy of the reference" (61). Tom LeClair notes that "the novel's dialogue . . . hyperthrophies far beyond its usual proportion in conventional realism," but I hope to show that the "passages of description or narration" are not "always short," that the proportion hardly warrants that "Gaddis almost completely absents himself from the text" even though "this excess of oral information at the expense of visual depictions of setting and action, the extreme fragmentation of situations and sentences, and the massive scale of the novel suggest that JR is out of authorial control, somehow self-generating" (88, 102; my emphasis).
To me, Gaddis filigrees himself in the interstitial passages, in a strategic move without which the question of value in JR would become moot; to me, narrative segments are the locus of literary stakes, the place where the centaur "meditates upon a saddle," where "authorial control" is at its most powerful, where the poetic urge and life of the text become palpable, where takes place "Gaddis's dialogue with himself" (Karl 188), a dialogue essentially different from those that draw the eye, one where all "intangible" literary...
