L’aspirateur de Socrate : l’électroménager dans Carpenter’s Gothic de William Gaddis

Abstract

If the novel is indeed a house, as Hawthorne and James suggest, then Carpenter's Gothic is about what happens when no one does any housework there, least of all Madame Socrate with her useless vacuum cleaner : Gaddis 's text no longer seeks to reflect a transcendent Truth, and the metaphysical pattern invented by Plato thus loses its relevance. This is the logical outcome of the process by which Western culture has tended to eliminate the sacred aura that once surrounded writing and art, as Walter Benjamin explains. However, Gaddis 's refusal to subscribe to a theology of writing can also be understood as a response to the Puritan distinction between religion and art, and thus as a paradoxical endorsement of Puritan theology : words and the Word inevitably overlap, despite all attempts at severing the connection between them.