L’art de l’échec dans The Recognitions et JR de William Gaddis

The art of failure in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and JR. William Gaddis’s novels are all centered to a greater or lesser degree around plots involving the issue of artistic creation, but the first two, The Recognitions and JR, certainly provide a more thorough examination of the situation of the artist. Starting with an analysis and description of the relationship between the notion of originality and the work of art as it appears in The Recognitions through the figure of the painter and forger Wyatt Gwyon, this paper tries to explore the ways in which the reader is gradually led to recognize failure as the dominant and even constitutive feature in artistic creation. Since art no longer offers an ultimate refuge for transcendent values that could replace the absence of other, more religious, transcendent references, JR stages the passage from the art of failure to the failure of art even more systematically as the overpowering presence of money and the financial jargon seem to rule out the necessity of and need for artistic creation.