Free Agape Agape by William Gaddis Page B

stunning naked black women and his symphony of liqueurs, his symphony of flowers and the flowers that look fake, that everything is fake like the room like a ship with mechanical fish and that marvelous description of two new locomotives as women, the deliberate cultivation of the fake and the false in this French novel more than a century ago, À Rebours in 1884 even then an elitist gloss on a culture whose literature and art are being ruined by greed and the embrace of the mob, the what, the epiphany, the embodiment of mediocrity and everything repellent about it even then! and the source of this rot even then yes, America, no news there is there? Lies and falsehood bursting from the mob’s mistrust of the elite wherever you looked, mistrust of the intellectual who Tolstoy called untrustworthy, useless and artificial nourished on books not experience who’d never fought in a war or plowed a field so their writings produced nothing but lies why you don’t believe me because they’re the common currency aren’t they. Falsehood’s the common currency and we’re back where we started, not the pure unadulterated falsehood but what Plato calls the lie in words that’s only sort of an imitation, a shadowy image that’s useful sometimes when you’re dealing with an enemy for instance that’s all we do isn’t it? Why Tolstoy says it’s our duty to edify the masses, our vocation to edify mankind even for the ones who think you can teach without knowing anything since artists and poets teach unconsciously, that music, literature, painting all the arts are just a stew of nonsense and falsehood if the masses don’t support them because where is it yes yes here. “Perhaps they don’t understand and don’t want to understand our literary language because it’s not suited to them and they’re in the process of inventing their own literature” Tolstoy wrote that, we must write what they want or not write at all, “we are thousands and they are millions” Tolstoy writes, obey the law of the greatest number talk about the tyranny of the majority here’s Ezra Pound widening the gap to the degree the serious artist lets his audience’s values shape his own vision, he lies, can’t say Tolstoy wasn’t serious can you? That our literary language isn’t suited to his common herd of millions out there maybe they’re inventing their own, been to the movies lately? Listened to their lyrics?! Man I mean like I’ve heard it you dumb ass-hole give this muhthrfuckr a blowjob every man his own artist in this democracy of the arts lined up Walt Whitman singing his body electric didn’t we? American classic Leaves of Grass he says the poet’s merit is determined by the multitude good God, write what they want you’ll end up with a Pulitzer Prize follow you right to the grave. Maybe won the Medal of Honor the George Cross even the Nobel but once you’ve been stigmatized with the ultimate seal of mediocrity your obit will read Pulitzer Prize Novelist Dies at whatever because they’re not advertising the winner no. No, like this whole plague of prizes wherever you look, it’s the prize givers promoting themselves, trying to rescue their thoroughly discredited profession of journalism. “The press is a school that serves to turn men into brutes,” Flaubert writes to George Sand “because it relieves them from thinking.” The prize winners? They’re just props, cartoonists, sports writers, political pundits, front page photos the bloodier the better for that instant of fame wrap the fish in tomorrow, good God how many Pulitzer Prizes are there? Over fifteen hundred entries, fourteen categories for journalists because if you started your bondage there you’re halfway home with that whole gang of sponsors, trustees, juries, God knows what who’ve survived that Slough of Despond and floated to the