Faust: We still need an essay tracing the importance of Faust to Gaddis. Some critics have mentioned it, of course, but they’ve only skimmed the surface. Faust obviously plays a role in The Recognitions, which started off as a parody of it, but there’s a need to explore the Faust references in J R via Schramm’s Western (i.e. Gaddis’s screenplay Dirty Tricks). A Frolic of His Own too: In a 1988 letter, Gaddis compares Judge Crease’s law clerk to Faust’s assistant Wagner. Gaddis repeatedly cites both Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust; Dostoevsky cites the latter, so those two could be tied together. Gaddis even owned a signed copy of George Haimsohn’s The Bedside Faust, which is apparently a graphic novel version. Faust was also paramount in the nonfiction Gaddis was reading when he was composing The Recognitions: he is especially prominent in Spengler’s book, and to a lesser extent in Toynbee. The Faust figure was big in postwar fiction: Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus came out in 1947 (and was treated in one early dissertation on Gaddis), and Faustian man (via Spengler) was a recurring topic among the Beats: the subtitle to Jack Kerouac’s novel Dr. Sax, written in the early ’50s, is Faust Part Three, all of which could be brought in to widen the scope of a paper. Gaddis had a perhaps unique take on the subject: in a 1973 letter, he confessed to a “preoccupation with the Faust legend as pivotal posing the question: what is worth doing?” That question might even be the unifying theme of all of Gaddis’s work; all his novels can be regarded as dramatized responses to that question.
From “New Directions for Gaddis Scholarship,” Steven Moore’s address to the William Gaddis Centenary Conference at Washington University St Louis in October of 2022. The transcription is gathered as part of Electronic Book Review’s special issue, “Gaddis at His Centenary,” which includes Gaddis scholarship, histories, unpublished Gaddisalia, and some roundtable discussions (I was privileged enough to attend one and even opened my stupid mouth a few times).
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