Abstract
The chapter explores how William Gaddis’s novel A Frolic of His Own uses the law as a systemic backdrop to probe into the dangers and possibilities of a postmodern world, placing at its center a protagonist who grapples with his own position in this world. It develops around this protagonist a narrative of ‘post-patriarchal malaise’, a discontent with the present that allegedly cheats him out of his ‘rightful’ patrimony. The pathetic story of the protagonist’s malaise exposes not only the anachronism of the patriarchal masculinity he wants to, but cannot quite, claim, but also its internal divisions and self-defeating effects. The novel juxtaposes the impossibility and ‘deadness’ of the patriarchal mastery for which the protagonist strives with the postmodern manhood embodied by other characters, as well as its own decentered literary form. The possibility that these represent remains haphazard, demanding, and unruly, as contingent as the postmodernity they reflect.
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Notes
- 1.
Novelist Jonathan Franzen’s (2002) much-discussed essay, with the indicative title “Mr. Difficult”, also reflects on the demanding nature of Gaddis’s writing.
- 2.
In so doing, my reading diverges from previous approaches to the novel, which I do not so much wish to contest as to complement. As a quintessential systems novel, A Frolic of His Own is too complex to allow reduction to any one reading. For example, Christopher Knight (2003) reads the novel as “a meditation on justice” (174); Peter Schneck (2011) primarily approaches it as a critique of the litigiousness of contemporary American society; Gregory Comnes (1998) explores the novel’s ethical dimension, the ways in which it raises the question of “how to ‘live deliberately’ in a world dominated by the ‘unswerving punctuality of chance’” (355); and Robert Weisberg (1995) discusses the novel as a piece of anti-postmodernism.
- 3.
See, for example, Marilyn Chandler’s (1991) discussion of the tradition of literary houses.
- 4.
In one of several references to Freud, Christina and her husband discuss his essay “Medusa’s Head”, one of Freud’s most iconic texts on castration anxiety (cf. Gaddis 1995, 242–243).
- 5.
Dragging on through much of the plot, the Cyclone Seven case revolves around an experimental steel sculpture installed in a Southern village, in which a dog gets itself entrapped. First, the dog’s owner wants to have the sculpture disassembled to free his dog, against which the artist asks for an injunction. While this dispute is still under way, the dog gets killed by a bolt of lightning, upon which its owner sues the village for damages on the grounds of negligence. The village, having previously sued for the sculpture’s removal, eventually sues for its retention because it had “‘put [the village] on the map’ bringing substantial tourist revenues and jobs to this chronically depressed area” (Gaddis 1995, 393).
- 6.
This phrase echoes a symbolically ripe conversation Oscar has with the lawyer of the insurance company that he sues regarding his car accident. While Oscar repeatedly insists “I’m the victim” (Gaddis 1995, 544–545), the lawyer corrects him: “this is a suit between who you are and who you think you are” (ibid.).
- 7.
Gregory Comnes makes a similar point in his reading of the novel when he suggests that “[e]choing J.-F. Lyotard’s thesis in The Postmodern Condition, A Frolic argues that there is no providential justice, no ‘Master’ and no ‘Master Narrative’” (1998, 356).
- 8.
Iterating the novel’s motif of multiplying interpretations that are divorced from the actual texts, none of these articles are based on knowledge of the play. All that the writers of these reports know is the movie, which they simply conflate with Oscar’s drama.
- 9.
LeClair’s study is entitled In the Loop (1988). The figure of the loop highlights his approach to systems novels as fictional engagements with the dynamics and dangers of closed systems and the possibilities of systems that are open and living.
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Kanzler, K. (2017). Law, Language, and Post-Patriarchal Malaise in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own. In: Horlacher, S., Floyd, K. (eds) Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_11
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