Used book – William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic: The Scandal of Writing, Mathieu Duplay

From beginning to end, Carpenter's Gothic does nothing but disown America, from its (false) Puritan origins to the present of the Reagan era. Yet to repudiate everything is paradoxically the only way to fully accompany the very movement of writing, which, as Deleuze writes, is drift and betrayal. The novel accumulates images of fall, decay, and death; evoking a world on the verge of extinction, it is a journey, if not toward nothingness, then at least toward the almost-nothing that still precariously subsists in the final pages, when all is consumed and yet, at the end of a final sentence without terminal punctuation, the possibility of an indefinite continuation remains. And this almost-nothing, thus laid bare at the very moment it plunges into the illegible blank page, is precisely what makes a text still possible. This is what gives rise to the extraordinary splendor of the black diamond that is Carpenter's Gothic: its way of stripping bare the act of writing, of isolating it from all that is not it, of revealing as never before its power of deviance and escape, of showing it suspended in anticipation of an encounter with the indeterminate which takes the place of the absent origin and, always-already there, precedes all foundation as well as all project.

SUMMARY Chapter One – THE TYRANNY OF TRUTH Chapter Two – WRITING AND SOPHISTRY Chapter Three – KILLING INTERPRETATION Chapter Four – THE TREE AND THE FLESH Chapter Five – THE RISK OF LISTENING Conclusion – THE SCANDAL OF WRITING Bibliography