Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of J R

Abstract

William Gaddis’ corporate writing in the years between his first two novels was as important to J R’s (1975) formal innovations as to its business-world plot. While previous J R criticism has dealt in formal tropes of flatness, depth, and flow, the corporate writing preserved in Gaddis’ archive offers grounds for reading the novel’s plot andstyle through the related but under-examined concept of friction. Through various archival discoveries, I sketch the case for a friction-centric reading of J R. I show what Gaddis’ work in the slide-show medium and assembling speeches out of contradictory source material contributed to the novel’s sentence-level innovations in style, and finally offer a style-driven re-reading of the novel’s overall narrative design. While Gaddis’ corporate work taught him techniques for eliminating traces of ideological friction, J R’s formal innovations first draw on those techniques to establish a world that tends toward frictionlessness, then invert them to restore friction within that world’s terms.