JR by William Gaddis
"JR" is a novel by William Gaddis that explores themes of capitalism, art, and the complexities of inheritance through the life of its protagonist, JR Vansant, a sixth grader who embodies the relentless pursuit of financial success in a monetized culture. The narrative begins with the backdrop of Edward Bast, an artist struggling against a world increasingly dominated by commercial interests and usury. As JR becomes embroiled in a series of business ventures, including the purchase and resale of surplus military supplies, he creates a sprawling enterprise dubbed "The JR Family of Companies," which symbolizes the hollow success of a culture that prioritizes profit over genuine human values.
The novel critiques various societal institutions, including Wall Street and educational systems, through the cynical perspectives of characters like Jack Gibbs, a science teacher who laments the decay of both familial and economic structures. Gaddis juxtaposes JR's financial ascendancy with Edward Bast's artistic struggles, highlighting the tension between artistic integrity and commercial aspirations. Ultimately, the narrative leads to a national financial crisis triggered by JR's schemes, prompting reflections on the corrosive effects of unchecked ambition and the degradation of meaningful connections amidst a chaotic capitalist landscape. Through its intricate structure and poignant satire, "JR" offers a profound commentary on the intersection of art and commerce.
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JR by William Gaddis
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1975
Type of work: Novel
The Work
In JR, the society of “middlemen” has spread, virus-like, and the resulting depreciation of all values is Gaddis’s main theme. The characters’ desires for commercial and aesthetic success highlight a crisis in values: Artistic significations (words and musical sounds, for example) are conflated with money, and a monetized culture further governed by the principal of usury (the extracting of “interest”) diminishes things all around. In this novel, therefore, money almost literally talks—and does so in relentless, rapid-fire sentences that threaten to drown out meaning. Edward Bast, the artist figure of this novel, must struggle relentlessly to free himself from these conditions. Mostly he struggles with a vastly institutionalized usury that drives him, at novel’s end, into a feverish delirium (brought on by exhaustion and pneumonia) that recalls Wyatt’s at the beginning of The Recognitions.
JR opens in the Long Island home of Bast’s two aging aunts, who are engaged with a lawyer in discussing the settlement of the estate of Thomas Bast—their brother, Edward’s father, and the owner of a business that manufactures player piano rolls. Thomas has died intestate, and thus, as in Gaddis’s first novel, the constituting theme is inheritance. Edward’s appears to be a purely financial legacy, but the characters’ dialogues unfold complications: Thomas’s first wife bore him a daughter, Stella, with claims on the estate; it also becomes evident that Thomas’s second wife, Nellie, may have conceived Edward during an adulterous affair with Thomas’s brother, James. Edward might therefore lay claim to the Bast wealth through either, or both, of these potential fathers. The overriding question, however, is whether he will choose to inherit the gifts of art or money.
Enter J. R. Vansant, a sixth grader at the Long Island school where Bast has been hired to teach music—absurdly, he is teaching Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung for an upcoming performance. JR’s part of the opera is, significantly, that of Alberich, the grotesque gnome who renounces love for money and sets out to enslave men by possessing the golden ring of the Nibelung. Having just returned from a field trip to a Wall Street brokerage house, JR is filled with dreams of unlimited financial success.
A bit of epithetic advice proferred by one of the cynical brokers—“buy for credit, sell for cash”—inspires JR. Scanning the newspaper want ads, working from a phone booth, and aided by an unwitting Edward Bast, JR purchases (on credit) four-and-a-half million surplus picnic forks from the U.S. Air Force, and as quickly sells them (for cash) to the Army. His ventures burgeon from that point, as JR acquires bankrupt companies, empty mining claims, an entire bankrupted New England mill town full of pensioned employees, a chain of nursing homes that services the pensioned millworkers (and is tied to another chain of funeral homes), as well as the Bast family company. In sum, “The JR Family of Companies” (as it is eventually known) balloons around the empty, the incomplete, the aged, and the dead. Yet it is wildly successful. By novel’s end, when JR’s enterprise comes crashing down, it triggers a national financial crisis.
JR functions as the consummate middleman in a society of cynical dealers. Along the way, Gaddis’s satire took aim at Wall Street, at government, and especially at school administrators driven by chances to profit at the same kinds of “business tie-ins” that JR finagles. The novel’s most consistent voice for this corrosive satire is Jack Gibbs, a science teacher at JR’s school. He first appears in the text while trying to teach students the concept of entropy, which predicts the ultimate thermodynamic degradation of any closed system. This theory sets forward a crucial analogy in Gaddis’s novel: in the closed (adulterous and nearly incestuous) system of the Bast family, entropy has seemed to lay their entire estate to waste, and that result is duplicated in the equally closed “family” of JR’s companies, or indeed throughout the economy of which JR’s ventures are simply a part. Gibbs rages against these abuses, and he tries (and in the course of the novel fails) both to love and to write. Thus, he exits the novel an impotent, sickly figure who cannot arrest the general decay, a failure he shares with a swarm of would-be artists around him.
Bast’s story is more suggestive, however. Although plunged into the chaos of JR’s school and business dealings, Bast struggles to compose a vastly orchestrated opera. Frustrated and broke, he barters his services on Wall Street by agreeing to write the musical accompaniment to a documentary film. Failing at both of these—in short, failing at both art and moneymaking—Bast begins limiting his artistic work. In succession he starts, and leaves aside, a cantata and then a suite. His frantic involvements as JR’s “financial manager” drag him down until, exhausted and feverish in the hospital, he composes a brief solo work for cello. Initially he tosses this work in a hospital trash can but, leaving the hospital, he rescues the composition for the simple reason that a deceased roommate had liked the “idea” of Bast’s music.
As in The Recognitions, Gaddis ended his second novel with suggestions that his artistic hero has, at last, managed to get “outside” the social contradictions hemming him in and has done so chiefly by working in a minimalist form. Even so, Gaddis gave his Alberich, JR, the last word. JR is a celebrity now, working the college lecture circuit, appearing in parades and on talk shows, and even contemplating writing a book. His business emerges from the chaos just as recuperated as Bast’s aesthetic spirit. Gaddis’s satire thus turned darker: His artist exits the novel a shambling and harried figure, as money triumphs over all.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. William Gaddis: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.
Comnes, Gregory. The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.
Johnston, John. Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” and Postmodern Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Knight, Christopher J. Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984.
Moore, Steven. A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Moore, Steven. William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.