William Gaddis's Writings

William Gaddis’s novels stood out to me like they’d released a crate of pigeons on their high school graduation day or painted over a businessman’s face plastered across the skyline on a billboard. I found him during junior year, when I was asked to choose from a list of several hundred influential American authors for a research paper and I resolved to choose another. His style, his way of twisting sentences using expectations to tell two stories at once, the layered allusions, how his writing satirized itself at times, grabbed me. It inspired me. Finishing the project, I felt a profound internal conflict on the relationship of writers to their works and influences. The pieces were fundamentally different from any other works I’d read, but did they stand on their own? An enormous part of the depth of the incredible novels comes from their allusions, often covert references to obscure poems, musicians, or historical events. The experience left me with an urge to create, and with one resolution, I began to write.

I initially didn’t even know what to focus on. While Gaddis abandoned conventions in formatting, or lack thereof, narrators are delineated and stories continue linearly. Interconnected short stories let me represent ideas that touched me, but write so it was ambiguous where in the text one character’s story stopped and another’s started, even centuries apart. I decided placing exposition and resolution unconventionally, or not at all, can reinforce a story. So, to start I draw character arcs on the back of a poster, curves representing story development on a timeline, while dividing the text’s parts by Strauss and Howe’s four generational