Chapter 5 Immanent Realism: Time and the Corporate Form in William Gaddis’s jr
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Absract: This essay reads the unresolved temporal structures in jr as productive of an immanent form of realism, one that speaks to the shared structural forms through which both aesthetic form and political critique operate. The disjunction and disconnection between two registers of time in the novel corresponds to the contemporary model of communicative labor in which every moment of the day, and every type of labor, is potentially wage labor. I argue that the novel’s formal experiment with time structurally conflates the work of the artist and the work of the ‘organization man’ in such a way as to make the immanent relationship between aesthetic and economic labor visible in the form of the novel.