While the fictional achievement of William Gaddis is massive, both in importance and in sheer volume, the critical reception of his two novels has been skimpy and uncertain. (p. 61)

The uncertain reception of Gaddis's novels is understandable; the reviews indicate common problems in both for a casual reader: complexity of event and structure, unusual treatment of character, a difficult narrative surface. Gaddis self-consciously anticipates his lack of an audience in both works…. If Gaddis's novels have achieved only a very small audience because of their difficulties, they deserve a much larger one because of their importance. In particular, JR is an extraordinary achievement—richly funny and powerfully accurate; it is more successful in several ways than The Recognitions. (pp. 61-2)

One of the most extraordinary qualities of The Recognitions is its ambitiousness. It is vast in scope, covering a span of some thirty years and ranging from New York to Europe. It is encyclopedic in knowledge; the literary sources and references include not only Joyce but Augustine, Saint John of the Cross, Thoreau, Melville, T. S. Eliot, and dozens more. In tracing its religious themes, the book explores Catholicism, Calvinism, various forms of mysticism, and Mithraism, the worship of the sun. The scientific lore contained in the novel ranges from counterfeit mummy-making to counterfeit money-making to the method for analyzing the date of a painting. Several levels of discourse are included: from graffiti to sermons, from inebriated party chitchat to serious debates of aesthetic principles. The novel left several reviewers with the uncomfortable sensation that Gaddis had poured everything he knew into it…. (pp. 62-3)

One reason for the heavy literary allusiveness of the novel is its presentation of artistic creation as an act of atonement; art has metaphysical significance in The Recognitions. Several characters experience artistic creation as a kind of transcendental perception of truth. The recognitions evoked in the title are revelations of religious certainty, when the fragmentation and chaos of modern culture are stripped away to reveal simplicity, necessity, and love…. Art, as the fragments of past creations, the creations of the characters, or Gaddis's novel itself, has redemptive power in The Recognitions.

Gaddis's first novel is a profoundly serious exploration of aesthetics and religion, with some moments of comic relief. As recognitions are treated with earnest respect in the novel, failures of recognition become ridiculous…. Rich in humor as it is, the novel is primarily concerned with an earnest exploration of aesthetic recognition, and the comic failures form a minor counterpoint to the dominant theme.

While JR shares a similar preoccupation with art, it is a very different novel in several respects. Its protagonist, Edward Bast, is not as heroic as Wyatt Gwyon; while he shares Wyatt's innocence, he is successfully manipulated throughout the novel. (pp. 63-4)

JR is far more limited in scope than The Recognitions. The time covered in the narrative is only three or four months…. The novel opens as the leaves have begun to turn and closes before Christmas; the seasonal decline with no Nativity reflects the sterility of the natural and civilized world in the book…. Relatively few … allusions … are used; while aesthetic fragments could redeem the damaged world of The Recognitions, the world of JR is ruined past redemption.

The creation of art appears in JR as a worthy action, with no ability to save or redeem the world. Like The Recognitions, the novel includes a great many plagiarists and failed artists…. Unlike The Recognitions, however, JR includes no truly successful artists…. (pp. 64-5)

Art fails to redeem in the novel because its audience is incapable of exaltation—or even appreciation…. Because American culture as it is presented in the novel is incapable of awakening or exaltation, the artist's problem becomes one of motivation: if his creation is considered worthless by his audience, can it have any worth? In JR art has no culturally redemptive power, but it can achieve worth "for a very small audience."

JR is far more concerned with failures of recognition than with moments of religious or aesthetic perception; thus the novel assumes a tone of sustained black humor. Where Gaddis's first novel suggested solutions to the problem of despair in the perception of simplicity, necessity, and love, his second novel admits, in a tone of desperate glee, that the problem cannot be resolved. (p. 65)

Gaddis jokes about the destruction of language and ideals, about human inadequacy and death, about the cosmic absurdity of his characters' quest for order and beauty in a world of squalor and chaos. His jokes suggest that he finds neither a solution nor a fully adequate response to despair.

While both of Gaddis's fictional worlds are characterized by a "sense of disappointment, of something irretrievably lost,"… Gaddis radically shifts the way he defines the problem. The source of loss and despair in The Recognitions appears as the fragmentation and separation of a once-unified world; in JR these symptoms are traced to the entropic decline of a chaotic and random world. While fragments can be collected and ordered, to reverse the enervating process described in the second law of thermodynamics is impossible: Stanley manages "to get all the parts together into one work," but Bast cannot turn off the flow of hot water that represents a pointless loss of energy…. As the loss of energy, the decline toward inertness, and the increase of disorder, entropy dominates the world of JR.

One important manifestation of the entropic process, as it appears in the fiction of both Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, is the loss of communication. JR is made up almost entirely of spoken words, with very little narrative description or authorial comment, yet for all the speaking that occurs, little communicating is accomplished. Most of the dialogues in the novel become monologues because one character dominates and cuts the other off; JR is full of interruptions and sentence fragments. But even when both characters manage to complete their sentences, misunderstandings proliferate. (pp. 66-7)

As human communication is lost and energy declines, inert things come to dominate the settings of JR. Two of the most important locales in the novel, the Long Island school and the Ninety-sixth Street apartment, literally fill up with objects so that people can no longer move about….

Several recurring motifs reinforce the notion of entropic decline and also unify the novel. Among these, the most significant is a repeated pattern of spilling, falling, and scattering; these actions increase randomness and disorder. (p. 68)

All of the spilling and scattering underscores Gaddis's more explicit suggestion that order is imposed perilously "on the basic reality of chaos."

People are similarly afflicted by the manifestations of chaotic randomness in another recurring motif: injuries and accidents are prevalent throughout JR….

[The numerous] "walking wounded" reinforce the accidental quality of experience in an advanced entropic state.

Because they live in a chaotic world without a sense of history or culture, most of the characters respond by seeking the ordering power of money. Money lifts one about the entropic process; it gives one the power to control inert objects, to manipulate other people, and to create constellations of order around one's own central importance. (p. 69)

JR himself is at once the chief symbol and the most pathetic victim of the drive for money and power. (p. 70)

But for all his undeniable greed, JR is also a touchingly helpless product of the world around him…. In all his corporate exploits, he has simply been trying to find a purpose, "trying to find out what I'm suppose to do," and he has quite naturally looked to the adults around him and imitated them. At several points he has even quoted from John Cates, Whiteback, Hyde, and others in justifying his actions. While we never learn what his initials actually stand for, they clearly suggest "Junior," as his character clearly suggests a junior reflection of his elders. If this eleven-year-old's obsession with money is ominous, it is also typical of every one of his peers…. (pp. 70-1)

JR's empire is constructed of paper, and while he becomes a millionaire on paper he never appears one in reality. He never uses his paper money, not even to replace the torn sneakers or sweater. By the novel's end, money is clearly not only lifeless but an agent of lifelessness; its worth is called into question at the beginning, and its worthlessness firmly established by the end.

The search for some form of worthy activity preoccupies most of the sympathetic characters in the novel; like Wyatt Gwyon in The Recognitions, they realize that "looking around us today, there doesn't seem to be much that's worth doing."… For Schramm, Eigen, and Gibbs, worthy art must redeem the insignificance of the artist and the illiteracy of the audience; their efforts are doomed to failure. For Bast and for Gaddis, art may be worthy without being able to redeem anything; JR creates its worth out of the tacit admission that experience cannot be turned "into something more than one more stupid tank battle." (pp. 71-2)

For Bast, as perhaps for Gaddis, his art was and continues to be worth creating, whatever the condition of his audience. He does not expect to win fame or money, as he does not expect others to recognize the worth of his creations. In a conversation with Eigen as the novel ends, Bast says of his new composition, "I mean until a performer hears what I hear and can make other people hear what he hears it's just trash isn't it Mister Eigen, it's just trash like everything in this place."… Bast's heavily ironic statement can also be taken as a final comment on JR; the audience of both works may be small, but neither creation is "just trash." Both works stand on their own, with or without recognition, proving the worth of the art and the artist. (p. 72)

Susan Strehle Klemtner, "'For a Very Small Audience': The Fiction of William Gaddis," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction (copyright © by James Dean Young 1978), Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978, pp. 61-72.