• Source: J R

J R is a novel by William Gaddis published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. It tells the story of a schoolboy secretly amassing a fortune in penny stocks. J R won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976. It was Gaddis' first novel since the 1955 publication of The Recognitions.
To complete the novel, Gaddis received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.




Synopsis


J R tells the story of the eponymous J R Vansant, an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called "the American dream turned inside out". One critic called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature." Novelist Louis Auchincloss thought it "worthy of Swift."




Literary analysis


The writing style of J R is intended to mimic Gaddis' view of contemporary society: "a chaos of disconnections, a blizzard of noise." The novel is told almost entirely in dialogue, and there is often little indication (other than conversational context) of which character is speaking. (Gaddis later said he did this in order to make the reader a collaborator in the process of creating the characters.) There are also no chapters, with transitions between scenes occurring by way of shifts in focalization: for example, a character who is in a meeting may leave the meeting, get in his car, and drive off, passing another character, who becomes the subject of the next scene without any break in the continuity of the narration (though the novel is written in a discontinuous or fragmentary tone). The novel is thus broken only into French scenes (or perhaps "French chapters"). Gaddis later advised the reader not to put too much effort into figuring out each word but to read the novel at a normal talking speed; "it was the flow that I wanted," he said, "for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way."
This chaotic writing style may, some critics argue, reflect Gaddis' preoccupation with entropy and with the 20th century's rejection of Newtonian physics, the narrative style thus reflecting a quantum and Heisenbergian world of "waste, flux and chaos." In this world, the characters who devise complex systems to acquire as much material wealth as possible are founding their lives on illusion because matter is impermanent and because, as Gaddis himself wrote in an essay, "the more complex the message, the greater the chance for error. Entropy rears as a central preoccupation of our time." In J R, entropy manifests itself as "a malign and centrifugal force of cosmic disruption at work scattering everything in [people's] heads, homes and work"
One of the epicenters of entropy is a seedy, run-down tenement apartment on East 96th Street (Manhattan). The apartment is stacked floor to ceiling with useless goods J R has acquired at bargain prices; a blaring radio, blocked by those boxes, cannot be turned off; the faucets, always running, threaten to flood the apartment (and indeed later drown a cat); characters flit in and out on useless errands; and the clock runs backwards. One critic compares the craziness of this locale to a Marx Brothers film and finds it superior. Gaddis lived in a tenement on E. 96 St. and probably based the fictional apartment in part on his unpleasant experiences there.
Gaddis' real-life experiences figure in other locales as well. Much of the novel takes place in a desolate, nightmarish version of Massapequa, New York and features a ludicrously dysfunctional school board. Gaddis, who in real life spent many years in Massapequa and had much of his property seized (using eminent domain) by the school board there, said, half in jest, that he "wrote J R in revenge against Massapequa." One of the most memorable characters in the novel is fired by that school board for independent thinking. He is Mr Bast, J R's music teacher. Bast is a young composer employed casually by the school. Bast is drawn into assisting J R and becomes a critical link for the development of the business empire J R assembles. When Bast starts at the school his ambition is to write an opera. As the novel develops he is increasingly burdened by the business accumulations J R makes and his musical ambitions are sidelined. Bast's ambitions slide from opera to symphony, then to sonata and by the end of the novel he aspires to compose a suite. The responsibilities that come from being involved with the childish shenanigans of corporate takeovers and asset stripping has had a corrosive effect on Bast's capacity to create art. Indeed, the corrosive effect of today's messy, noisy society on everyone's capacity to create and appreciate art is a major theme of this novel—and, arguably, of all of Gaddis' novels. (Gaddis later qualified this by stating that when Bast and his fellow-artists Eigen and Gibbs abandon their dreams, this is due in part to their own self-destructive nature; and when, in the last scenes, Bast begins work on a humble cello piece, it represents a "real note of hope".)




"JR Goes to Washington" (1987)


Years later, Gaddis wrote the title character "J R" into a piece of political satire, which the New York Times published in 1987. "Trickle-Up Economics: JR Goes to Washington" is written as the transcript of a U.S. congressional hearing on the federal budget, and J R is an official at the Office of Management and Budget.




See also


Jonathan Lebed




References






External links


Annotations to J R at williamgaddis.org
New York Times review
Much God damned entropy – A Dialogue Review of JR
"JR: William Gaddis's 11-Year-Old Tycoon" (Ted Gioia)
• Source: J&R

J, or j, is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is jay (pronounced ), with a now-uncommon variant jy .
When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiced palatal approximant (the sound of "y" in "yes") it may be called yod or jod (pronounced or ).




History



The letter J used to be used as the swash letter I, used for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral twenty-three. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German. Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524. Originally, 'I' and 'J' were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing /i/, /iː/, and /j/; however, Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and /ɡ/) that came to be represented as 'I' and 'J'; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from /j/ (which represents the initial sound in the English language word "yet").




Use in writing systems






= English

=
In English, ⟨j⟩ most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/. In Old English, /dʒ/ was represented orthographically with ⟨cᵹ⟩ (equivalent to ⟨cg⟩, as ⟨ᵹ⟩ in Old English was simply the regular form of the letter G, called Insular G). Middle English scribes began to use ⟨i⟩ (later ⟨j⟩) to represent word-initial /dʒ/ under the influence of Old French, which had a similarly pronounced phoneme deriving from Latin /j/ (for example, iest and later jest), while the same sound in other positions could be spelled as ⟨dg⟩ (for example, hedge). The first English language books to make a clear distinction in writing between ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were the King James Bible 1st Revision Cambridge 1629 and an English grammar book published in 1633.
Later, many other uses of ⟨i⟩ (later ⟨j⟩) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. adjoin, junta). In loanwords such as bijou or Dijon, ⟨j⟩ may represent /ʒ/, as in modern French. In some loanwords, including raj, Azerbaijan, Taj Mahal and Beijing, the regular pronunciation /dʒ/ is actually closer to the native pronunciation, making the use of /ʒ/ an instance of hyperforeignism, a type of hypercorrection. Occasionally, ⟨j⟩ represents its original /j/ sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord. In words of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño, English speakers usually pronounce ⟨j⟩ as the voiceless glottal fricative , an approximation of the Spanish pronunciation of ⟨j⟩ (usually transcribed as a voiceless velar fricative [x], although some varieties of Spanish use glottal [h]).
In English, ⟨j⟩ is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨z⟩, ⟨q⟩, and ⟨x⟩. It is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names.




= Romance languages

=
In the Romance languages, ⟨j⟩ has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative. In French, Portuguese, Catalan (except Valencian), and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ (like ⟨s⟩ in English measure). In Valencian and Occitan, it has the same sound as in English, /dʒ/. In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier /ʝ/ to a present-day /x/ or /h/, with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect.
⟨j⟩ is not commonly used in modern standard Italian spelling. Only proper nouns (such as Jesi and Letojanni), Latin words (Juventus), or words borrowed from foreign languages have ⟨j⟩. The proper nouns and Latin words are pronounced with the palatal approximant /j/, while words borrowed from foreign languages tend to follow that language's pronunciation of ⟨j⟩. Until the 19th century, ⟨j⟩ was used instead of ⟨i⟩ in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict in official writing. ⟨j⟩ is also used to render /j/ in dialectal spelling, e.g. Romanesco dialect ⟨ajo⟩ [ajo] (garlic; cf. Italian aglio [aʎo]). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used ⟨j⟩ in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still uses the letter ⟨j⟩ to represent /j/ (and sometimes also [dʒ] or [gj], depending on its environment).




= Other European languages

=
The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, use ⟨j⟩ for the palatal approximant /j/, which is usually represented by the letter ⟨y⟩ in English. Other than English, notable exceptions are Scots, where it represents /dʒ/, and Luxembourgish, where it represents both /j/ and /ʒ/.
The letter also represents /j/ in Albanian, the Uralic languages spoken in Europe, and those Slavic and Baltic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Some related languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, also adopted ⟨j⟩ into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose.
The Maltese language, though a Semitic language, has been deeply influenced by the Romance languages (especially Sicilian), and also uses ⟨j⟩ for /j/.
In Basque, the diaphoneme represented by ⟨j⟩ has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: [j, ʝ, ɟ, ʒ, ʃ, x] (the last one is typical of Gipuzkoa).




= Other languages

=
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, ⟨j⟩ stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish and Azerbaijani, for /ʐ/ in Tatar, and for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu. It represents a voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ in Konkani, Yoruba and Swahili. In Kiowa, ⟨j⟩ stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, /t/.
⟨j⟩ stands for /dʒ/ in the romanization systems of most of the languages of India, such as Hindi and Telugu, and stands for /dʑ/ in the romanization of Japanese and Korean.
For Chinese languages, ⟨j⟩ stands for /t͡ɕ/ in the Mandarin Chinese pinyin system, the unaspirated equivalent of ⟨q⟩ (/t͡ɕʰ/). In Wade–Giles, ⟨j⟩ stands for Mandarin Chinese /ʐ/. Pe̍h-ōe-jī of Hokkien and Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien, ⟨j⟩ stands for /z/ and /ʑ/, or /d͡z/ and /d͡ʑ/, depending on accents. In Cantonese, ⟨j⟩ stands for /j/ in Jyutping and /t͡s/ in Yale.
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription does not use the letter ⟨j⟩, although it is used in some proper names and non-standard transcriptions to represent either จ [tɕ] or ช [tɕʰ] (the latter following Pali/Sanskrit root equivalents).
In romanized Pashto, ⟨j⟩ represents ځ, pronounced [dz].
In Greenlandic and in the Qaniujaaqpait spelling of the Inuktitut language, ⟨j⟩ is used to transcribe /j/.
Following Spanish usage, ⟨j⟩ represents [x] or similar sounds in many Latin-alphabet-based writing systems for indigenous languages of the Americas, such as [χ] in Mayan languages (ALMG alphabet) and a glottal fricative [h] in some spelling systems used for Aymara.




= Other writing systems

=
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨j⟩ is used for the voiced palatal approximant, and a superscript ⟨ʲ⟩ is used to represent palatalization.




Other uses



In international licence plate codes, J stands for Japan.
In mathematics, j is one of the three imaginary units of quaternions.
Also in mathematics, j is one of the three unit vectors.
In the Metric system, J is the symbol for the joule, the SI derived unit for energy.
In some areas of physics, electrical engineering and related fields, j is the symbol for the imaginary unit (the square root of −1) (in other fields, the letter i is used, but this would be ambiguous as it is also the symbol for current).
A J can be a slang term for a joint (marijuana cigarette)




Related characters


𐤉 : Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive:
I i : Latin letter I, from which J derives
ȷ : Dotless j
ᶡ : Modifier letter small dotless j with stroke
ᶨ : Modifier letter small j with crossed-tail
IPA-specific symbols related to J: ʝ ɟ ʲ ʄ 𐞘
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to J:
U+1D0A ᴊ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL J
U+1D36 ᴶ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL J
U+2C7C ⱼ LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER J
J with diacritics: J́ j́ Ĵ ĵ J̌ ǰ Ɉ ɉ J̃ j̇̃




Other representations






= Computing

=

1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237). It is primarily used in Landsmålsalfabet and in mathematics. It is not intended to be used with diacritics since the normal j is softdotted in Unicode (that is, the dot is removed if a diacritic is to be placed above; Unicode further states that, for example, i+ ¨ ≠ ı+¨ and the same holds true for j and ȷ).
In Unicode, a duplicate of 'J' for use as a special phonetic character in historical Greek linguistics is encoded in the Greek script block as ϳ (Unicode U+03F3). It is used to denote the palatal glide /j/ in the context of Greek script. It is called "Yot" in the Unicode standard, after the German name of the letter J. An uppercase version of this letter was added to the Unicode Standard at U+037F with the release of version 7.0 in June 2014.



Wingdings smiley issue

In the Wingdings font by Microsoft, the letter "J" is rendered as a smiley face, sometimes creating confusion in emails after formatting is removed and a smiley turns back into an out-of-context "J". (This is distinct from the Unicode code point U+263A, which renders as ☺︎). In Microsoft applications, ":)" is automatically replaced by a smiley rendered in a specific font face when composing rich text documents or HTML emails. This autocorrection feature can be switched off or changed to a Unicode smiley.




= Other

=




References






External links



The dictionary definition of J at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of j at Wiktionary
"J" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 15 (11th ed.). 1911.

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