Title: Gorland at Large
Location in archive (Box.Folder): 82.1
Date: Not dated
Complete? Yes
Extent of preserved material: A five-page lightly-corrected typescript, plus an earlier draft of five pages, heavily corrected and with other holograph notes.
The Story: Gorland as a boy of nine shoplifted cheap fishing tackle, and then his cousin stole a pocket knife from him. This sense that even those who steal for fun can be stolen from fills him with disappointment. As an adult in the narrative present, he meets a young woman who tells him that her friends are of two kinds: those who feel shame when they steal and those who don’t: Gorland feels sadness at this vision of a world of thieves. Gorland as an adult is a collector of books and finds out that an unpleasant bookshop owner has somehow stolen some of his, making him wonder if all the books in her shop are stolen. He thinks of different ways to shoplift a book, and takes a new standard edition of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love on his way out as she is distracted.
Works of Love is Kierkegaard’s most direct engagement with the concept of love-across-humankind: that is, agapē. The relevance is presumably that the model of human relations in which everyone steals from everyone else as a way of getting even and balancing their debts is a purely inverted counterpart to an Agapeic world of interaction through love.
Relation to Gaddis’s Published Writings: Ends with direct reference to a theorist of agapē, and hence a relevant text for Agapē Agape. A character in the shop asks for a book of poetry by WH Auden, whose early poems (eg “A Summer Night” or “Lullaby”) often suggest the precedence of love for all people over love for individuals.
Also a mention of central character “felt for a moment like Raskolnikov,” so another source for Gaddis’s explicit reference to the 19th-century Russians.
Other Notes and Mentions Elsewhere? N/A
The above selection is included in an exhaustive (but not exhausting) trip through the Gaddis archives, part of Electronic Book Review’s special issue, “Gaddis at His Centenary.” Our trip conductors are Gaddis scholars Ali Chetwynd (who organized and edited the special issue) and Joel Minor (who curates Washington University’s marvelous Modern Literature Collection. Titled “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide,” the piece diligently details Gaddis’s unpublished prose fiction, situating the pieces in the larger context of his five published novels. There are even some plot charts for Ducdame, a precursor for The Recognitions.
I chose to share the entry for “Gorland at Large” above because it concerns a biblioklept.
Biblioklept 