With the dawn of my law school career, friends who had been down this path before me started recommending must-read books for 1Ls. One friend was particularly insistent that I read A Civil Action, going even so far as to send me a copy in the mail. Such is the inordinate contrariness of my nature, however, that the very fact of its being recommended has so far proved an insuperable barrier to my reading it. Instead, I would forward my own candidate for essential law student reading: William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own, in which the great postmodern novelist does for the legal profession what he did in J R for the worlds of high finance and corporate America.
While all of Gaddis's books are delightful, I'm confident now in stating that Frolic is my personal favorite. Partly it's just that I read it at exactly the right time. Perhaps alone among novelists, Gaddis has realized the literary potential latent in the art of judicial opinion-writing, as well as the possibilities for Socratic dialogue that exist within the method of civil deposition-taking (in this novel's case, the extended transcript of a deposition furnishes grounds for a Socratic dialogue about Socratic dialogues, specifically—the "self-referential" nature of contemporary art being another sub-theme of the novel).
Reading Frolic as I now have in my first year of law school, I not only find it to be a thorough introduction to the stages of civil litigation and a number of rules in tort law; I even had to remind myself going through it this weekend that I was not still working through a casebook. The (fictional) judicial opinions Gaddis incorporates into the narrative are so plausible, so thoroughly and convincingly cited, so riddled with the kind of arch humor that appears more frequently than one might expect in actual court decisions, that I found my brain slipping into the same mode of reading it assumes when toiling through a torts or contracts assignment.
With the finishing of Frolic, I have now added the final brick to the edifice of my Gaddis knowledge. I've read every one of his books; even the collection of essays. And so I feel well-provisioned to make my humble contribution to the corpus of Gaddis scholarship. I have expressed before my admiration for and reliance on the website Gaddis Annotations, which provides invaluable guidance for navigating the author's thickets of allusions and meta-references. But what fun would there be for the rest of us if the website had already attained completeness?
In order to do my part for the larger community of Gaddis readers, I would like to flesh out the list. As I did upon finishing Carpenter's Gothic, I once again offer my personal additions to the stock of Gaddis annotations. I am here relying on the same edition and pagination as the Annotations website, namely, the 1995 Scribner paperback.
p. 29: "Mr. Szyrk, a sculptor of some wide reputation [...]" In the details of the whole Szyrk case that features so prominently in the novel and proves such a headache to Oscar's jurist father, there is surely intended some subtle reference to the work of American sculptor Richard Serra, who is known for likewise creating enormous outdoor metallic installations that have been embroiled in tragedy, litigation, and public controversy as to their location on public property. But I do not currently see this possibility referenced in the Annotations, unless I missed it.
p. 157: The charge of plagiarism that forms the basis for this legal complaint—and for much of the plot and thematic content of the whole novel—is also a subject explored in The Recognitions. Just as Oscar has been the victim of copyright infringement here, while also appropriating various elements of other preexisting works in the course of his creative process (O'Neill, Plato, etc.), Otto in that earlier fiction was the perpetrator of various acts of unconscious plagiary. And the scheme between Recktall Brown and Wyatt Gwyon amounts to a formalized system of unlawfully mimicking or copying the works of others. The question of whether and to what extent originality is possible in a work of art, and whether creation always involves some element of plagiarism, clearly interests Gaddis throughout his career.
p. 194: "we agreed characters are largely defined by dialogue [...]" In context, this is a reference to Oscar's unpublished play, but it also serves as a meta-commentary on Gaddis's own work. In Frolic as in all the novels, Gaddis relies almost exclusively on the characterization that emerges organically from spoken words to clue the reader in as to who is speaking and what they are doing; he almost never uses narration to tell us the speakers or the context. Yet an incredibly vivid cast of personalities emerges, simply from the words they speak: here, Christina, Oscar, Lily, Harry, Trish, etc.
p. 196: Dale Carnegie, referenced here and elsewhere in the novel, is a longstanding bête noire of Gaddis's, appearing also in this role in The Recognitions.
p. 262: The discussion here of what can be ascribed to stupidity vs. malice echoes a line that appears frequently in Gaddis's works, and which he attributed originally to his mother. See my earlier annotations.
p. 320: "it's the smell of money [....] Harry's read Freud." The Freudian notion that cash is linked to feces in the unconscious (mentioned already in the Annotations) appears elsewhere in Gaddis's work as well. One thinks, for instance, of the unsubtle associations of the name "Recktall Brown," the sinister financial trickster and art forger in The Recognitions. In that novel, images of alchemy are linked to excrement as well, perhaps suggesting that money and feces are really one and the same thing, simply having gone through a process of transmutation one into the other.
p. 452: "exit westward where — look, she muttered to him, the land was bright[...]": an allusion echoing the closing line of Arthur Hugh Clough's "Say not the Struggle nought Availeth." The Annotations website catches two earlier references to Clough's poem but leaves out the poem's closing line; thus, they appear to have missed this final instance of Gaddis borrowing from the poem. Clough's closing line reads: "But westward, look, the land is bright." I've read it too many times from the pulpit, where it has served as my closing words for many a sermon, not to recognize the phrase.
p. 461 "failing at something worth doing" — a phrase that, with variations, appears in multiple Gaddis works, including his book of essays, The Rush for Second Place (see my earlier annotations on Carpenter's Gothic for a list of references). It holds special meaning in that it conveys a central Gaddis theme—in this novel as elsewhere—about the role of money in U.S. society as a yardstick for success. In this novel, multiple characters bemoan the extent to which money is the only way to carry a point or be "taken seriously" in American society. Here, Christina offers a counterpoint, describing how Harry always longed to "fail[...] at something worth doing because there was nothing worse for a man than failing at something that wasn't worth doing in the first place simply because that's where the money was[.]"
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