ABSTRACT
William Gaddis' novel does at least acknowledge its ties to music. Gaddis based Agape Agape on material he had collected over the last 50 years of his life, all of which circles the history of the player piano in America, and the effect of mechanization on the arts. Gaddis also takes his run-on, stream of consciousness technique from Joyce, and he relates this work to other musically linked ones, such as Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and to a musical moment from du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson. Though Gaddis' goal may not have been the creation of a musical work, this surface is remarkably similar to that of Anthony Burgess' Napoleon Symphony, a novel that was a very clear attempt at mimicking musical form and development. Like Napoleon Symphony, the Gaddis brings back whole phrases, and even brief passages repeat. Much of Gaddis' material originates in various non-fiction sources, such as player piano advertisements.
