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William Gaddis: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)

William Gaddis

Considered an "experimental" writer, William Gaddis stripped his novel JR of description and internal voice, crafting a volume developed almost entirely in dialogue with no chapter breaks.  What follows is a conversation between the interviewer, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, and Gaddis about this decision back in 1987:

Interviewer

I call your book-length dialogues floated dialogues because while you present everything through dialogues -- background information, letters, newspaper articles, radio texts, TV texts -- too many outlines become blurred, persons and objects are externally undifferentiated, everything is allowed to be viewed through what is spoken only.  The omniscient narrator gives insignificant, descriptive details of the physical situation in which the dialogue is carried on, but he is of no help with what the reader would be interested in.

Gaddis

I will tell you something in that area, if you like a theory, which I may have come up with after I wrote the book -- I'm not sure.  It is the notion that the reader is brought in almost as a collaborator in creating the picture that emerges of the characters, of the situation, of what they look like -- everything.  So this authorial absence, which everyone from Flaubert to Barthes talks about, is the sense that the book is a collaboration between the reader and what is on the page.

Interviewer

But the floated dialogue makes the reader's part very difficult.  The omniscient narrator expresses no view of his own.  The reader is left to imagine the psychological motivation behind what is said.  What the reader is left with -- in the absence of reliable authorial/narratorial information and of the pyschologically more reliable direct interior monologue form -- is what could be called vocal behaviorism.

Gaddis

Well, this interior monologue you speak of is just too easy, obvious, boring, lazy, and I would agree right up to the last; I always cringe at the world behaviorism.  But again it is very much this notion of what the reader is obliged to supply.  We go back to McLuhan and his talk about hot and cool media.  Television is the hot medium, to which one contributes nothing except a blank slate, and the next day you say, What was that show we saw last night on television?  It disappears because you put nothing into it.  So nothing remains, as Gibbs remarks in JR.  In this case it was my hope -- for many readers it worked, for others it did not -- that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth.  It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate.  And enjoy it.  And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way.