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The Recognitions
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.
976 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
About the author
William Gaddis
14 books785 followersWilliam Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation.
The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely projected the best of themselves in their work. He has been frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and especially Pynchon.
Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955) is a 956-page saga of forgery, pretension, and desires misguided and inexpressible. Critical response to the book ranged from cool to hostile, but in most cases (as Jack Green took pains to show in his book of rebuke, Fire the Bastards!). Reviewers were ill-prepared to deal with the challenge, and evidently many who began to read The Recognitions did not finish. The novel’s sometimes great leaps in time and location and the breadth and arcane pedigree of allusions are, it turns out, fairly mild complications for the reader when compared with what would become the writer’s trademark: the unrestrained confusion of detached and fragmentary dialogue.
Gaddis’s second book, JR (1975) won the National Book Award. It was only a 726 pages long driven by dialogue. The chaos of the unceasing deluge of talk of JR drove critics to declare the text “unreadable”. Reading Gaddis is by no means easy, but it is a more lacerating and artfully sustained attack on capitalism than JR, and The Recognitions.
Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own (1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. There are even two Japanese cars called the Isuyu and the Sosumi.
His final work was the novella Agapē Agape which was published in 2002. Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16th, 1998.
The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely projected the best of themselves in their work. He has been frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and especially Pynchon.
Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955) is a 956-page saga of forgery, pretension, and desires misguided and inexpressible. Critical response to the book ranged from cool to hostile, but in most cases (as Jack Green took pains to show in his book of rebuke, Fire the Bastards!). Reviewers were ill-prepared to deal with the challenge, and evidently many who began to read The Recognitions did not finish. The novel’s sometimes great leaps in time and location and the breadth and arcane pedigree of allusions are, it turns out, fairly mild complications for the reader when compared with what would become the writer’s trademark: the unrestrained confusion of detached and fragmentary dialogue.
Gaddis’s second book, JR (1975) won the National Book Award. It was only a 726 pages long driven by dialogue. The chaos of the unceasing deluge of talk of JR drove critics to declare the text “unreadable”. Reading Gaddis is by no means easy, but it is a more lacerating and artfully sustained attack on capitalism than JR, and The Recognitions.
Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own (1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. There are even two Japanese cars called the Isuyu and the Sosumi.
His final work was the novella Agapē Agape which was published in 2002. Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16th, 1998.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 726 reviews
August 6, 2023
There is so much falseness in the world… And so little authenticity has left… So on seeing some authentic thing now one feels deceived and prefers tawdry falsehood…
Reading The Recognitions is similar to looking for one’s way in the thickest jungle but it pays manyfold – the novel is like a crock of gold found at the end of the rainbow.
The book is a painstaking investigation of all possible types of falsehood – in history, in art, in love, in religion, in human beings. And it is an authentic tour de force without any hints at dishonesty.
He who dwells in the world of fake values is compelled to become a fraud.
– He invited me there, in fact, to see the mummy. He had made one himself for me! Oh, but with such ingenuity, it was really a masterpiece…
– Really, my dear fellow…
– I confess I did not have heart to finish our business so immediately, I spent a few minutes congratulating him. He became very angry when I appeared to question the… authenticity? of this thing, but he was very proud. I saw in his eyes, he was very proud, when we finished our business together.
Reading The Recognitions is similar to looking for one’s way in the thickest jungle but it pays manyfold – the novel is like a crock of gold found at the end of the rainbow.
What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason?
The book is a painstaking investigation of all possible types of falsehood – in history, in art, in love, in religion, in human beings. And it is an authentic tour de force without any hints at dishonesty.
How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible?
He who dwells in the world of fake values is compelled to become a fraud.
March 26, 2017
See the face on the book cover? That is my face now as I finish this book. That was my face every step of the way.
I heard somewhere while reading this that Gaddis is praised for this work in that he made it the ultimate challenge for the reader. Yay! Let's make reading hard! #sarcasm
You know how you might read a book with 5 storylines that will change each chapter. It might be a bit confusing, but at least chapter breaks give you the chance to regroup. This book frequently mixes many storylines, changing paragraph to paragraph with no break - it is up to you to figure out which one is going on! To add to this, there are no quotation marks for dialogue - good luck figuring out who is talking.
In response to one of my updates while reading this, someone posted an article about this book (I am too exhausted from this book right now to find the article and directly quote it, but if you Google "Why are large, painful books considered classics?" and you will find it.) The gist of it is that people tend to rate these books highly because they are rating their accomplishment of finishing a chunky tome and not necessarily the quality of said tome. I can definitely see that being the case with The Recognitions.
Another thing that I read was that the book was not well received at first, but then it started getting accolades later on because of its complexity and difficulty to read. I am not sure why that is a good thing, but it was enough for it to become a staple on many "must read before you die" lists.
Summary - I am glad this is over. I only recommend it if you like difficult and painful reading experiences - or so you can check another book off a list.
I heard somewhere while reading this that Gaddis is praised for this work in that he made it the ultimate challenge for the reader. Yay! Let's make reading hard! #sarcasm
You know how you might read a book with 5 storylines that will change each chapter. It might be a bit confusing, but at least chapter breaks give you the chance to regroup. This book frequently mixes many storylines, changing paragraph to paragraph with no break - it is up to you to figure out which one is going on! To add to this, there are no quotation marks for dialogue - good luck figuring out who is talking.
In response to one of my updates while reading this, someone posted an article about this book (I am too exhausted from this book right now to find the article and directly quote it, but if you Google "Why are large, painful books considered classics?" and you will find it.) The gist of it is that people tend to rate these books highly because they are rating their accomplishment of finishing a chunky tome and not necessarily the quality of said tome. I can definitely see that being the case with The Recognitions.
Another thing that I read was that the book was not well received at first, but then it started getting accolades later on because of its complexity and difficulty to read. I am not sure why that is a good thing, but it was enough for it to become a staple on many "must read before you die" lists.
Summary - I am glad this is over. I only recommend it if you like difficult and painful reading experiences - or so you can check another book off a list.
June 13, 2012
This book has me in its grip.
Reading The Recognitions is like wandering in a labyrinth, and around each corner there's a new revelation. One feels a little lost at times, but there are familiar sights. Can we trust our guide? Gaddis gives you the sense he knows the way...until he lets go of your hand...and pushes you into the darkness saying, dilige et quod vis fac. You must cling to those words, because that's the only thread this Ariadne offers - except for the follow up text message he sends: btw thngs fal aprt :-()
We begin our recognitions...at the beginning. The title. It's a reference to a text mistakenly attributed to Pope Clement I. One of the characters, Basil Valentine, later explains,
The what? The Recognitions ? No, it's Clement of Rome. Mostly talk, talk, talk. The young man's deepest concern is for the immortality of his soul, he goes to Egypt to find the magicians and learn their secrets. It's been referred to as the first Christian novel. What? Yes, it's really the beginning of the whole Faust legend…What can drive anyone to write novel...?
That's almost an outline of Gaddis's book too.
There's an apocryphal account that Clement was martyred, thrown into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck.
The Recognitions revisits this in various ways with the reoccurring image of "that tale about the sky being a sea, the celestial sea, and a man coming down a rope to undo an anchor that's gotten caught on a tombstone".
This novel is an exercise in recognitions - within the text, the characters, ourselves. Gaddis intended that we recognize and understand these references and allusions, and apply their meaning to the overall story. He has paid us a high compliment, and respects us as thinking readers who are willing to work with him,
What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page . . . What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him. - William Gaddis, Albany, April 4, 1990
The effort is worth it, for this book is a delight. But never mind - it stands on its own even if we don't get all the references. As Jonathan Franzen says about it, "Peel away the erudition, and you have The Catcher in the Rye: a grim winter sojourn in a seedy Manhattan, a quest for authenticity in a phony modern world."
There's help with the erudition - it's been enthusiastically annotated
Gaddis has a style of writing that I easily respond to. His themes are ones I want to read and think about.
Eliot and Dostoyevski are the most significant names here; none of Gaddis's reviewers described The Recognitions as The Waste Land rewritten by Dostoyevski (with additional dialogue by Ronald Firbank), but that would be a more accurate description than the Ulysses parallel so many of them harped upon. Not only do Gaddis's novels contain dozens of "whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot," but The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon using The Waste Land as its text. The novel employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, collage, multiple perspective, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth; and both call for the same kinds of artistic, moral, and religious sensibilities.
...Life proved terrible enough by the 1950s to produce in The Recognitions the most "Russian" novel in American literature. Gaddis's love for nineteenth-century Russian literature in general crops up in his novels, his letters, and in his few lectures, where references are made to the major works of Dostoyevski, Tolstoy (especially the plays), Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, Goncharov, and Chekhov. Gaddis shares with these authors not only their metaphysical concerns and often bizarre sense of humor, but their nationalistic impulses as well. - William Gaddis by Steven Moore
The first few pages of The Recognitions are like a separate novel, pared to its essentials. Call it The Spanish Affair . It's an account of the ship Purdue Victory , Camilla, Spain, and Reverend Gwyon. It ends with "They never forgave him for not bringing the body home". These pages sit in my memory like whole other books do.
The rest of the novel can be seen as the sequel. The story continues with the son Wyatt. We first meet him as a "small disgruntled person", four years old, shocking his stern (great) Aunt May by exclaiming "You're the by-Goddest rabbit I ever damn saw!" I wanted to hug that child right there. I love this unhappy mirror version of Christopher Robin.
IN WHICH WYATT EMPTIES THE POT ON WHICH HE MEDITATED FOR AN HOUR OR SO EACH MORNING INTO A FLOOR REGISTER.
The old Aunt May who raises him is a hard woman, yet oh, she breaks one's heart too, "when she made things, even her baking, she kept the blinds closed in the butler's pantry when she frosted a cake, nobody ever saw anything of hers until it was done".
The father, Reverend Gwyon, had "the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before", buries himself in old obscured religious writings...but "the book most often taken from its place was Obras Completas de S Juan de la Cruz, a volume large enough to hold a bottle of schnapps in the cavity cut ruthlessly out of the Dark Night of the Soul.
Later he falls under Mithra's spell.
Wyatt grows up warped by this upbringing.
He becomes the man who seems to believe that, where there is God, do not stay; where there is no God run away as fast as you can. He planned to enter the ministry, but early on had found the Christian system suspect.
There's a long cast of characters that drift in and out and we lose sight of Wyatt for long stretches. Names are changed! Identities are mistaken! Life and art are so entangled that their boundaries are not clear. We constantly overhear fragments of conversations, catch glimpses of the characters as they hurry by.
The frame of The Recognitions is forgery: in culture, religion, art, relationships, sex, business, money. Its subject is an examination of meaning - what is real? what is love? what is God? can we ever really know who we are?
The personage Wyatt was in part based on the real life infamous art forger Han van Meegeren. His paintings are at best competent, and without mystery or depth. See if you agree from this sample.
And take a quiz: Vermeer or Meegeren?
Meegeren made clumsy technical mistakes that should have alarmed the experts.
Copying masterpieces is now an industry in Southern China, "the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year — most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day."
Millions of *masterpieces* churned out like cheap garments...(said in the voice of an angry Dr. McCoy).
Wyatt, I think, was a better painter than all these, starting with his copy of Bosch's table painting. He carried its themes in his head too, the ever watching eye of God and The Seven Deadly Sins.
The copy of this painting underscores one of the themes of The Recognitions, the theme of forgery, and it is asking: what is original? Is it even possible to be original?
That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original...Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates...you do not invent shapes, you know them, atiswendig wissen Sie, by heart...
And to carry the question further, has mankind, that master forger, outdone the creator? Each one of us is merely the latest link in the chain of human experience. Everything we know, believe, have, is founded on what has been passed down from the previous generations. Religion, culture, music, science, art. Nursery rhymes. Jokes. What claim to originality do we really have?
Everything is a collage built from previous works, a blatant example being The WasteLand yes, and The Recognitions too.
So, we can search out the allusions, and the bits and pieces directly copied from other writers. Our understanding is deeper, the experience is richer of course. But the new work stands on its own.
Bosch's painting is also used to introduce the theme of existential meaning and purpose. Its watchful eye of God raises a question: does anything mean anything at all, if it is not looked at by God? Wyatt says,
This...these...the art historians and the critics talking about every object and...everything having its own form and density and ...its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this...and so in the painting every detail reflects...God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. -There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there...I take five or six or ten...the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it...Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and...and shape and smell, being looked at by God.
The cynic Basil Valentine replies:
Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence, its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that's why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn't watching. Maybe he doesn't see. Oh, this pious cult of the Middle Ages! Being looked at by God! Is there a moment of faith in any of their work, in one centimeter of canvas? or is it vanity and fear, the same decadence that surrounds us now. A profound mistrust in God, and they need every idea out where they can see it, where they can get their hands on it. Your...detail, he commenced to falter a little,- your Bouts, was there ever a worse bourgeois than your Dierick Bouts? and his damned details? Talk to me of separate consciousness, being looked at by God, and then swear by all that's ugly!
Like Eliot, sometimes Gaddis steals his material outright. The letter that begins "You: The demands of painting have the most astonishing consequences" was entirely written by Sheri Martinelli and used without her knowledge. She was the inspiration for the character who wrote it, Esme.
There are so many odd characters in this book worthy of mention:
Ed Feasley "He was not afraid: not a grain of that fear which is granted in any definition of sanity. In college, he had entertained himself and others, quiet evenings in his rooms when his allowance was cut off, by beating the back of his fist with a stiff-bristled hairbrush, then swinging his hand in circles until the pressure of descending blood broke small capillaries and spotted the rug and ceiling with spots turned brown by morning; or standing before a mirror with thumb and forefinger pressed against his carotid arteries until his face lost all color and he was caught by consciousness as he fell....He liked a Good Time."
Fuller "We would believe that Fuller had had a childhood only in helpless empiricism, because we all have. But it was as unreal to him by now as to anyone looking at his face, where time had long since stopped experimenting. That childhood was like a book read, misplaced, forgotten, to be recalled when one sees another copy, the cheap edition in a railway station newsstand, which is bought, thumbed through, and like as not left on the train when the station is called."
Recktall Brown "Recktall Brown's laughter might seem to rise the entire distance of his frame, a laborious journey, complicated by ducts and veins, cavities and sedulous organs whose functions are interrupted by the passage of this billowing shape which escapes in shambles of smoke"
Basil Valentine "There were moments when Basil Valentine looked sixteen, days when he looked sixty. In profile, his face was strong and flexible; but, when he turned full face as he did now, the narrowness of his chin seemed to sap the face of that strength so impressive an instant before. Temples faintly graying, distinguished enough to be artificial (though the time was gone when anyone might have said premature, and gone the time when it was necessary to dye them so, instead now to tint them with black occasionally), he looked like an old person who looks very young, hair-ends slightly too long, he wore a perfectly fitted gray pinstripe suit, soft powder-blue Oxford-cloth shirt, and a slender black tie whose pattern, woven in the silk, was barely discernible. He raised a gold cigarette case in long fingers. Gold glittered at his cuff."
Agnes Deigh "...a stout woman [with a muscular arm which, on a man, might have been called brawny] She wore a knee-length fur cape, a green summer cocktail dress with a scalloped hem, what appeared to be gold paper stars pasted on it, and décolletage which exposed a neckline of woolen underwear. She advanced with a distinct rattling sound"
Frank Sinisterra "...he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in the faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world....he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisection."
Gaddis obviously was fond of these creations of his, in spite of their flaws.
And there are so many quotable passages - if God did not relax for an instant in the Flemish paintings, neither did Gaddis in his descriptions. A character's suit is given a paragraph,
Crémer's shrug still hung in his shoulders, and he emphasized it with a twitch, throwing the exact lines of his neat blue suit off, for it was a thing of careful French construction, and fit only when the figure inside it was apathetically erect, arms hung at the sides, at which choice moment the coat stood up neat and square as a box, and the trousers did not billow as they did in walking, but hung in wide envelopes with all the elegance that right angles confer, until they broke over the shoes, which they were, fortunately, almost wide enough at the bottoms, and enough too long, to cover.
That's too much - and it's brilliant.
I think of the infamous opening,
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Ha, that makes me laugh every time. Though I'm laughing *at* it.
There's a lot of laughing *with* in The Recognitions. It's satire at its finest.
And there are animals: a Barbary ape; a black poodle that "spies" on Fuller; an ill-fated kitten; Huki-lau the Hawaiian poodle dog in a chastity belt; Paris cats that "go to sleep on Paris windowsills and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo; "cats hung in telephone wires, Cow kills woman. Rooster kills woman. Dogs eat Eskimo".
And Mad Men ad men campaigns:
Kanthold Korsets
Necrostyle - the wafer-shaped sleeping pill, no chewing, no aftertaste.
Zap - the wonder-wakener.
Cuff - it's on the cuff.
Pubies - for men and women over forty, start living again.
THE GHOST ARTISTS ...We Paint It You Sign It Why Not Give an Exhibition?
Arsole Acres - from the Latin ars meaning art
Some of the many motifs that run through The Recognitions: the constant random snatches of overheard conversations are like a Greek chorus; Christianity is relentlessly contrasted to its pagan origin; characters pause in distress to brush a spot of moonlight off the sleeve; mirrors - distorting, creating, confirming, paralyzing "Wyatt was sent to bed for saying he could not move, as though the mirrors in the arms of the cross on the wall had gripped him from behind". Art, so much art - paintings, sculptures, churches, ornaments. Mummies and babies, roses and lavender, windows. Body parts. And death: suicide, murder, disease, drowning, calamity.
And suits!
Jonathan Franzen bitterly claims The Recognitions is "difficult". Maybe. I'll confess that I was better prepared for it than most people. I shrewdly majored in painting at university. The skeletons in my closet were helpful too - some closely resemble the characters in this book. Perhaps that is why I... umm...I tell you The Recognitions is MY book...I don't want to share it. I...I'll bury it. And dig it up from time to time! just as I did with those poor feral kittens from my childhood: dead from worms, buried elaborately with solemn service, the free Gideon bible from school in hand, laying flowers kindly donated from mommy's flowerbed - and yes - exhumed on the odd occasion to see how things were coming along.
February 6, 2017
This book clearly influenced Pynchon and DFW and I would imagine Cormac McCarthy as well, but it is pretty damn unreadable. Looking behind The Recognitions, many level that criticism at Ulysses. Well, Ulysses does require some work, but the difference is that Stephen Daedalus as well as the Blooms are fantastic deeply moving and well-drawn characters and we WANT to see them succeed. In The Recognitions, there is a plethora of characters, but none of which I could have more than a shred of sympathy for: Otto is too pathetic, Wyatt is too broken, Recktail disappears before the end...and the characters around the have amusing characteristics (like the guy measuring the cracks in the ceiling, but I was like, so what.
As for comparing it to the next of post-moderns, I think that Pynchon tells a more interesting story, that DFW draws more interesting characters and McCarthy doesn't overload his novels with 1000s of irrelevant characters.
The book is written as a triptych where, for me, the first part starts clean and becomes incoherent, the second part is incoherent and the 3rd parts starts coherent and makes a tiny bit of sense at the end. This generates quite a lot of stress to me as a reader.
The term "recognition" is used a lot in part 1 and then disappears which left me a bit rudderless.
I think this book is interesting only in the historical part it played in influencing other writers, but as a standalone piece of art, it does not hold much appeal.
As for comparing it to the next of post-moderns, I think that Pynchon tells a more interesting story, that DFW draws more interesting characters and McCarthy doesn't overload his novels with 1000s of irrelevant characters.
The book is written as a triptych where, for me, the first part starts clean and becomes incoherent, the second part is incoherent and the 3rd parts starts coherent and makes a tiny bit of sense at the end. This generates quite a lot of stress to me as a reader.
The term "recognition" is used a lot in part 1 and then disappears which left me a bit rudderless.
I think this book is interesting only in the historical part it played in influencing other writers, but as a standalone piece of art, it does not hold much appeal.
Shelved as 'reviews-of-books-i-didnt-read'
October 8, 2017I found a great article on
LITERARY STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
by Mark O'Connell which uses The Recognitions as its main example - here is the bit I liked, but the whole article is worth a read (http://www.themillions.com/2011/05/th...)
the greatness of a novel in the mind of its readers is often alloyed with those readers’ sense of their own greatness (as readers) for having conquered it. I don’t think William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, for instance, is nearly as fantastic a novel as people often claim it is. But it is one of the most memorable and monumental experiences of my reading life. And these are the reasons why: because the thing was just so long; because I had such a hard time with it; and because I eventually finished it. (I read it as part of an academic reading group devoted to long and difficult American novels, and I’m not sure I would have got to the end of it otherwise). Reading a novel of punishing difficulty and length is a version of climbing Everest for people who prefer not to leave the house. And people who climb Everest don’t howl with exhilaration at the summit because the mountain was a good or a well made or an interesting mountain per se, but because they’re overawed at themselves for having done such a fantastically difficult thing. (I’m willing to concede that they may not howl with exhilaration at all, what with the tiredness, the lack of oxygen and very possibly the frostbite. I’ll admit to being on shaky ground here, as I’ve never met anyone who’s climbed Everest, nor am I likely to if I continue not going out of the house.)
And there is, connected with this phenomenon, what I think of as Long Novel Stockholm syndrome. My own first experience of it—or at least my first conscious experience of it—was, again, with The Recognitions. With any novel of that difficulty and length (976 pages in my prestigiously scuffed and battered Penguin edition), the reader’s aggregate experience is bound to be composed of a mixture of frustrations and pleasures. But what I found with Gaddis’s gigantic exploration of fraudulence and creativity was that, though they were greatly outnumbered by the frustrations, the pleasures seemed to register much more firmly. If I were fully honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was finding the novel gruelingly, unsparingly tedious. But I wasn’t prepared to be fully honest with myself. Because every couple of hundred pages or so, Gaddis would take pity on me and throw me a bone in the form of an engaging, genuinely compelling set piece. Like the wonderful episode in which one of the characters, under the impression that he is being given a gift of $5,000 by his long-lost father whom he has arranged to meet at a hotel, is in fact mistakenly being given a suitcase full of counterfeit cash by a failed confidence man. And then Gaddis would roll up his sleeves again and get back to the real business of boring me insensible with endless pages of direct-dialogue bluster about art, theology and the shallowness of post-war American culture.
I kept at it, doughtily ploughing my way through this seemingly inexhaustible stuff, holding out for another interlude of clemency from an author I knew was capable of entertaining and provoking me. At some point towards the end of the book it occurred to me that what I was experiencing could be looked at as a kind of literary variant of the Stockholm syndrome phenomenon, whereby hostages experience a perverse devotion to their captors, interpreting any abstention from violence and cruelty, however brief or arbitrary, as acts of kindness and even love. Psychologically, this is understood as a defense mechanism in which the victim fabricates a “good” side of the aggressor in order to avoid confronting the overwhelming terror of his or her situation. Perhaps I’m stretching the bonds of credulity by implicitly comparing William Gaddis to a FARC guerilla commander, but I’m convinced there’s something that happens when we get into a captive situation with a long and difficult book that is roughly analogous to the Stockholm syndrome scenario. For a start, the book’s very length lays out (for a certain kind of reader, at least) its own special form of imperative—part challenge, part command. The thousand-pager is something you measure yourself against, something you psyche yourself up for and tell yourself you’re going to endure and/or conquer. And this does, I think, amount to a kind of captivity: once you’ve got to Everest base camp, you really don’t want to pack up your stuff and turn back. I think it’s this principle that explains, for example, the fact that I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow but gave up halfway through The Crying of Lot 49, when the latter could be used as a handy little bookmark for the former. When you combine this (admittedly self-imposed) captivity with a novel’s formidable reputation for greatness, you’ve got a perfect set of conditions for the literary Stockholm syndrome to kick in.
In order for a very long novel to get away with long, cruel sessions of boredom-torture, it has to commit, every so often, an act of kindness such as the counterfeit cash set piece in The Recognitions. This is why Ulysses is so deeply loved by so many readers—as well it should be—while Finnegans Wake has been read almost exclusively by Joyce scholars (of whom I’m tempted to think as the Patty Hearsts of literature). After the grueling ordeal of the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, in which Stephen stands around in the National Library for dozens of pages boring everyone to damn-near-literal tears with his theories about the provenance of Hamlet, we are given the unrestrained pleasure of the “Wandering Rocks” episode. Ulysses might treat us like crap for seemingly interminable stretches of time, but it extends just enough in the way of writerly benevolence to keep us onside. And this kindness is the key to Stockholm syndrome. You don’t know when it’s going to come, or what form it’s going to take, but you get enough of it to keep you from despising your captor, or mounting a brave escape attempt by flinging the wretched thing across the room.
LITERARY STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
by Mark O'Connell which uses The Recognitions as its main example - here is the bit I liked, but the whole article is worth a read (http://www.themillions.com/2011/05/th...)
the greatness of a novel in the mind of its readers is often alloyed with those readers’ sense of their own greatness (as readers) for having conquered it. I don’t think William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, for instance, is nearly as fantastic a novel as people often claim it is. But it is one of the most memorable and monumental experiences of my reading life. And these are the reasons why: because the thing was just so long; because I had such a hard time with it; and because I eventually finished it. (I read it as part of an academic reading group devoted to long and difficult American novels, and I’m not sure I would have got to the end of it otherwise). Reading a novel of punishing difficulty and length is a version of climbing Everest for people who prefer not to leave the house. And people who climb Everest don’t howl with exhilaration at the summit because the mountain was a good or a well made or an interesting mountain per se, but because they’re overawed at themselves for having done such a fantastically difficult thing. (I’m willing to concede that they may not howl with exhilaration at all, what with the tiredness, the lack of oxygen and very possibly the frostbite. I’ll admit to being on shaky ground here, as I’ve never met anyone who’s climbed Everest, nor am I likely to if I continue not going out of the house.)
And there is, connected with this phenomenon, what I think of as Long Novel Stockholm syndrome. My own first experience of it—or at least my first conscious experience of it—was, again, with The Recognitions. With any novel of that difficulty and length (976 pages in my prestigiously scuffed and battered Penguin edition), the reader’s aggregate experience is bound to be composed of a mixture of frustrations and pleasures. But what I found with Gaddis’s gigantic exploration of fraudulence and creativity was that, though they were greatly outnumbered by the frustrations, the pleasures seemed to register much more firmly. If I were fully honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was finding the novel gruelingly, unsparingly tedious. But I wasn’t prepared to be fully honest with myself. Because every couple of hundred pages or so, Gaddis would take pity on me and throw me a bone in the form of an engaging, genuinely compelling set piece. Like the wonderful episode in which one of the characters, under the impression that he is being given a gift of $5,000 by his long-lost father whom he has arranged to meet at a hotel, is in fact mistakenly being given a suitcase full of counterfeit cash by a failed confidence man. And then Gaddis would roll up his sleeves again and get back to the real business of boring me insensible with endless pages of direct-dialogue bluster about art, theology and the shallowness of post-war American culture.
I kept at it, doughtily ploughing my way through this seemingly inexhaustible stuff, holding out for another interlude of clemency from an author I knew was capable of entertaining and provoking me. At some point towards the end of the book it occurred to me that what I was experiencing could be looked at as a kind of literary variant of the Stockholm syndrome phenomenon, whereby hostages experience a perverse devotion to their captors, interpreting any abstention from violence and cruelty, however brief or arbitrary, as acts of kindness and even love. Psychologically, this is understood as a defense mechanism in which the victim fabricates a “good” side of the aggressor in order to avoid confronting the overwhelming terror of his or her situation. Perhaps I’m stretching the bonds of credulity by implicitly comparing William Gaddis to a FARC guerilla commander, but I’m convinced there’s something that happens when we get into a captive situation with a long and difficult book that is roughly analogous to the Stockholm syndrome scenario. For a start, the book’s very length lays out (for a certain kind of reader, at least) its own special form of imperative—part challenge, part command. The thousand-pager is something you measure yourself against, something you psyche yourself up for and tell yourself you’re going to endure and/or conquer. And this does, I think, amount to a kind of captivity: once you’ve got to Everest base camp, you really don’t want to pack up your stuff and turn back. I think it’s this principle that explains, for example, the fact that I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow but gave up halfway through The Crying of Lot 49, when the latter could be used as a handy little bookmark for the former. When you combine this (admittedly self-imposed) captivity with a novel’s formidable reputation for greatness, you’ve got a perfect set of conditions for the literary Stockholm syndrome to kick in.
In order for a very long novel to get away with long, cruel sessions of boredom-torture, it has to commit, every so often, an act of kindness such as the counterfeit cash set piece in The Recognitions. This is why Ulysses is so deeply loved by so many readers—as well it should be—while Finnegans Wake has been read almost exclusively by Joyce scholars (of whom I’m tempted to think as the Patty Hearsts of literature). After the grueling ordeal of the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, in which Stephen stands around in the National Library for dozens of pages boring everyone to damn-near-literal tears with his theories about the provenance of Hamlet, we are given the unrestrained pleasure of the “Wandering Rocks” episode. Ulysses might treat us like crap for seemingly interminable stretches of time, but it extends just enough in the way of writerly benevolence to keep us onside. And this kindness is the key to Stockholm syndrome. You don’t know when it’s going to come, or what form it’s going to take, but you get enough of it to keep you from despising your captor, or mounting a brave escape attempt by flinging the wretched thing across the room.
August 6, 2014
Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition.Shocked, surprised and mesmerized by these Recognitions. Sometimes reading of a book happens without any noticeable event while other times, a single sentence affords the brilliance of a memorable experience. The perceptible sameness of things stimulates an unalterable change, a connection emerges out of nowhere and the voice of a stranger becomes familiar and captivating since it seems to carry the virtues and vices of the whole wide universe within it. This all happened for me after reading Gaddis’s tour-de-force and I can vouch for the same simply because:
There are words- Words which are in perfect harmony with each other and words which constantly try to find a visible shore for themselves amidst the sea of inadmissible emotions. Everything from the lucid description of a private space to the reckless telling of bared thoughts is done so masterfully here that one can’t help but wonder at the images that are born out of the revelation of retrospective truth and concealment of destined lies. In between, I found poetry too.
There are colors- Colors of the patient sky and impatient homes. Colors of Flemish paintings and forged wonders. Colors of innovative minds and frustrated hearts. Colors of a colorful history and colorless present. And a quest. A quest for identifying real and fake behind the several layers of these colors that emphasize the purity of a blank canvass and the misery of a disquieted soul. I became acquainted with many new shades whose existence was unknown to me.
There is music- In this Flamenco music [there is] this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it's what's so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that's so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it's a precision of suffering. I listened.
There is nature- A customary meeting that takes place between sun and moon to greet a new dawn and dusk is an essential and my most favorite part of this book. I have never read any writer who embraced nature so intimately and unifies it effortlessly with the emotional upheavals experienced by mankind.
The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve, that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.Wherever Gaddis took me, he offered the sublime company of warm rays and bright moonlight and during the instances of foggy days; I relished the unusual beauty of a silent landscape. I walked.
There is noise- People meet everywhere here. At a random café, at causeless parties, on busy streets, in desolate apartments and in distant lands. They always have so much to say to each other and there is so much which is left unsaid. Chaos prevails, which overwhelms at times but otherwise these voices convey the most profound, entertaining and sarcastic elements that present human psychology both as fascinating and a pitiful spectacle. The trick is to find a comfortable sitting position that will give you the best view possible.
—We've had plenty of experiences to write home about already, said the woman with the ring at the long table where lunch had just commenced.
—We even got held up by a highwayman, her husband confirmed.
—It was on a train.
—You still call it a highwayman anyway, her husband said patiently, smiling his cheery smile.
—And he even talked English.
—It was broken English. And what do you think he told us? That we're just as much to blame, because we're there, that the victim abets the violence just by being there, he said, and he even made a quotation to prove it.
—From Dante he told us. He took all our money, at gun-point.
I laughed.
There is meditation- The Recognitions screamed ‘challenging’ from every angle. It is. The challenge lies not in following the thoughts of countless characters or placing the source of various cultural/religious references but rather not bothering too much about the same. This book is mainly made up of numerous moments, each bearing a significant thread to a central message. There are things which will remain incomprehensible and elusive due to different reasons for different readers, so going-with-the-flow worked pretty well for me. With a little concentration, a little acceptance and a little surrender, it was all akin to a sort of meditation. I was at peace.
There is everything- Including a plot which I didn’t describe and several names which I didn’t take, the beauty which is inexplicable and ugliness that is inevitable, a madness which is the sanest and sanity which is fatal; this book certainly have everything to give a reader small but substantial rewards which slowly and steadily culminates into a nonpareil experience.
Do recognize these Recognitions.
What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason? Triumph! as though it were any cleaner, or happier, or more bare of disappointment, than the deadening shock of re-encounter with the object of love.
April 28, 2024
A Slight Case of Dissentary
Apart from music and film, my two great intellectual passions at University (and subsequently) were English Literature and Political Science.
I failed to reach my potential at Literature, partly because I never attended any lectures or tutorials.
At the same time (and the more scientific among you might be able to perceive a causal connection), I grew very adept at billiards, snooker and drinking (though not usually in this order).
My non-attendance wasn’t purely motivated by my desire to improve my ball skills.
It resulted directly from a traumatic conversation with my Lecturer, in which I gave the incorrect response to his question as to why I wanted to study English at University.
I replied that I wanted to learn more about the Self and Identity (well, myself and me, actually, not to mention any females who might be impressed by my recently acquired ball skills).
My interest in Political Science was equally motivated by an interest in the role of the Individual in Society.
Little did I know that my Lecturer, academically at least, was a proponent of the New Criticism and unadulterated textual analysis.
He positively scorned my interest in Marx, Freud, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, let alone Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing and Erica Jong.
I proceeded to educate myself in the manner I imagined a Liberal Education might have been dispensed.
I became an auto-didact, which means that I became didactic and only had myself to blame.
However, because of my dual interest in Literature and Political Science, I became captivated by the largely Jewish descendants of Eastern European migrants who became known as the New York Intellectuals and wrote for magazines like Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary and Encounter (in 1977’s “Annie Hall”, Woody Allen dismissed my entire cultural heritage when he complained, “I'm so tired of spending evenings making fake insights with people who work for "Dissentary").
If you asked me to narrow them down to two key influences on me, I would say Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe.
Both were widely-read, urbane, eloquent and easy to read, though the latter was more overtly political.
Their prose sparkled with insight and verbal precision.
I desperately wanted to fake insights like theirs.
There’s Something about Mary
At the same time that these critics were at their peak, William Gaddis was writing “The Recognitions”, which he published in 1955 at the age of 32 (the same age as Herman Melville when he published “Moby-Dick”).
I don’t recall ever reading (and haven’t been able to find) any mention of his work in the criticism of Trilling or Howe, so I have no idea how they regarded Gaddis.
However, one of their peers, Mary McCarthy, was a fiction judge (along with William Gass) in 1976 when Gaddis received the National Book Award for “JR” (notwithstanding competition from Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift”, which won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to the award of the Nobel Prize that same year).
When Gaddis was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989, he felt honored to be assigned the Mary McCarthy chair.
They had both taught at various times at Bard College, although I haven’t been able to determine whether they taught at the same time or met there.
McCarthy also wrote the blurb that is republished on the back of my 1993 Penguin Classic edition:
“William Gaddis is pure prodigy. He has a fantastic ear for American speech with the strictest attention and exactitude such an ear demands but, strangely crossed with that, the wildest of imaginations…His novels are massive in ambition and dazzling in execution.”
A Life of Passionate Dissent
In Gerald Sorin’s biography of Irving Howe (“Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent”), he suggests that “Howe explicitly indicted the literature of the sixties (which included such talented and innovative writers as John Barth, William Gaddis and John Hawkes)… for being impatient with ideas and contemptuous of rationality”.
Howe’s comments are contained in his essay “The New York Intellectuals”, which was published.
They are more a defence of the Old Left tradition against the New Left. There is no mention of Gaddis or any of the other authors.
However, I want to make a case that Gaddis is exactly the opposite of what Sorin suggests [Howe thought] he was.
In doing so, I’d like to quote Howe more fully, because I think that, whether or not he had Gaddis in mind or had him in sight, he describes perfectly what Gaddis is not, and therefore what Gaddis so rallied against in “The Recognitions”:
"We are confronting, then, a new phase in our culture, which in motive and spring represents a wish to shake off the bleeding heritage of modernism and reinstate one of those periods of the collective naïf which seem endemic to American experience.
The new sensibility is impatient with ideas. It is impatient with literary structures of complexity and coherence. It wants instead works of literature…that will be as absolute as the sun, as unarguable as orgasm, and as delicious as a lollipop.
It schemes to throw off the weight of nuance and ambiguity, legacies of high consciousness and tired blood. It is weary of the habit of reflection, the making of distinctions, the squareness of dialectic, the tarnished gold of inherited wisdom. It cares nothing for the haunted memories of old Jews...
It is sick of those magnifications of irony than Mann gave us, sick of those visions of entrapment to which Kafka led us, sick of those shufflings of daily horror and grace that Joyce left us.
It breathes contempt for rationality, impatience with mind, and a hostility to the artifices and decorums of high culture. It despises liberal values, liberal cautions, liberal virtues. It is bored with the past: for the past is a fink.”
Irving Howe was writing in 1968. I want to argue that Gaddis saw exactly the same warning signals, that he detected the same trends of anti-intellectualism and that he rallied against them for the same reasons as Irving Howe.
Only he started at least 13 years earlier, he did it in a magnificent work of fiction and this work is an early product of “A Life of Passionate Dissent”.
Part 2
Sincerity and Authenticity
In 1970, Lionel Trilling gave a number of lectures about the literary tradition at Harvard that were eventually published in his book, “Sincerity and Authenticity”.
In a general sense, “sincerity” concerns the interaction of the Self or Individual with Society and other Individuals.
It contrasts good and bad faith, truth and deception, honesty and dishonesty, forthrightness and secretiveness.
On the other hand, “authenticity” concerns the relationship of the Self to itself (or me and myself), an internal rather than an external relationship.
It involves issues as to whether an Individual is being “true” to themselves.
In a way, when you are being true to yourself, you are recognizing and realizing “the real you”, the real Self, your essence, perhaps you are even asserting or trying to give effect to your “ideal” self.
Arguably, if you are authentic, your Self is a united, undivided Self, rather than a troubled or Divided Self.
You can be troubled or divided by your own internal issues (your “demons”) or external issues (family or society).
The concept of “authenticity” has become more prevalent in Mass Society, in which Individuals can feel that they are subsumed by or at war with Society.
Irving Howe comments on Trilling’s distinction perceptively:
”Sincerity is a social virtue, a compact between me, myself, and you; authenticity is an assertion, a defiance, a claim to cut away the falsities of culture.
It takes two to be sincere, only one to be authentic. Sincerity speaks for a conduct of should; authenticity for a potential of is.
Sincerity is a virtue of public consciousness, authenticity a repudiation of its bad faith.
Sincerity implies a recognition of our limits, authenticity asserts the self as absolute.”
Part 3 (170312)
The Culture of Narcissism
In 1979 (24 years after the publication of "The Recognitions"), Christopher Lasch published "The Culture of Narcissism".
In a way, he suggested that the preoccupation with Self and Authenticity and the retreat from Sincerity and engagement with Society in the modern era was akin to pathological Narcissism.
Ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, we had weakened our sense of Self and created a dependence on "constant external validation" (Wiki).
The external world had no intrinsic value, except as a reinforcement of our diminished sense of Self and as a medicine or salve for our troubled, divided or demon-plagued Selves.
Ironically, if this world proved to be beyond our control, it would cease to play this fake or ersatz-therapeutic role and exacerbate our depression and paranoia.
In a way, this is the world that Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace would describe in the footsteps of William Gaddis.
Perhaps, Lasch was suggesting that we had to "do" something about our Selves, that we had to pull our Divided Selves together.
And perhaps this was also Gaddis' diagnosis and prescription.
A Prisoner of My Own Auto-Didactic Prism
I've harped on about the work of these cultural and literary critics, partly because I believe that "The Recognitions" is a deeply philosophical and even theological work.
It puzzles me that the novel failed to be embraced by Gaddis' contemporaries (apart perhaps from Mary McCarthy) and that, now so much later, I find myself (I find my Self) embracing it within a framework that they created for me.
Inevitably, in my own life, the concerns and methodology of his contemporaries have become the prism through which I view the novel.
In this quest, I have to concede that I might have misread both Gaddis and his contemporaries.
If that's the case, well, so be it.
Tales of Brave Youlysses
Almost immediately on publication, critics and reviewers compared “The Recognitions” with James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
This is a superficial and intellectually lazy analogy, which Gaddis hilariously dismissed in the following terms:
“I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.”
[Still, in an interview with New York Magazine in 1994, he describes his reaction to the first reviews in terms of Joyce's work:
"Instead of being hailed on the front page as a new 'Ulysses", it disappeared completely. I was towering in all the vanity of a young writer thinking I'd written an important book."
Apart from the richness of their allusions, the one thing the books have in common is their size.
They are both fat books. Indeed, Gaddis’ work is even fatter and longer than “Ulysses”.
However, to equate the books on this ground is like saying that all Fat Men in History are the same.
“Ulysses” is above all an exercise in style, in fact it’s an exercise in multiple styles.
The story is a coathanger upon which these styles are draped.
Gaddis' work is by and large an extended exercise in one persistent style, both lyrical and probing.
Joyce took Homer’s tales of brave Ulysses and transformed them into a story about Bloom’s journey through the Dublin of his memory, out the front door and back home again, during the course of a single day.
In a sense, it was a hero’s journey, only the hero was not a God, but one of us.
It’s possible to say that “The Recognitions” is equally a hero’s journey.
However, again this is a superficial judgment.
The modern novel and much theatre before it has been about such journeys.
It’s a post-modern rarity that doesn’t contain such a journey.
To the extent that they are both journeys, it’s also arguable that “The Recognitions” is unique in that the hero (or is he an anti-hero?) actually goes missing for a large part of the novel, while the world of the narrative rages around and without him.
We are almost left to wonder whether this particular hero, like God, might be dead.
If so, will he be resurrected?
Part 4 (180312)
How to Forge a Head
Superficially, “TR” concerns forgery and plagiarism.
However, to understand the significance of forgery in the novel, we need to burrow into the meaning of the word “forge”.
It doesn’t just mean plagiarism, it derives from the process of making something and the tools that are necessary to make it (like a blacksmith’s forge).
Only when we have made something the first time (the original), can we make it a second or subsequent time (a copy or replica).
A forge is the apparatus for making both the original and the copies.
It allows us to fabricate something a first time and then to fabricate it again. (Note the negative connotation of the word “fabricate”.)
It is this ability and this relationship that makes humans “Homo Faber” (Man the Creator), a capacity that arguably differentiates us from other animals.
In some cases, the “original” has some special significance (art).
However, in others (mass production), there is no particular meaning given to the chronological first. (See Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.)
In the latter case, we are in the province of multiplication, reproduction and replication. Mass production in order to satisfy mass consumption.
The quotation at the head of the first chapter alerts us to the act of creation.
It’s a quote from Goethe’s “Faust”, which effectively asks “what’s going on?” and responds “a Man is being made”.
Over the course of TR, we see a Man being made, we see Man copying and being copied, and we see the original Man and others being unmade.
” Thank God There was the Gold to Forge”
TR also refers to Alchemy and its desire to transform base metals into gold.
Gold has become the Ideal, and the purpose of Alchemy is to realise the Ideal.
However, while Gaddis is interested in the relationship between Religion, Magic and Alchemy, ultimately he uses Gold as a metaphor for the Ideal and Perfection.
Religion posits an Ideal (or essence) and then encourages us to or demands that we achieve it.
It defines Perfection for us and then places us on the never-ending conveyor belt that is Perfectibility.
We are the stuff or base metal of which Human Gold is made.
Christians must “Thank God” for this privilege and opportunity.
Original Sin
One of the challenges of Christianity is that it places an obstacle in the path of our quest for Perfection: Original Sin.
We are born flawed and, no matter what we accomplish during our lifetimes, we remain flawed, until we meet our Creator.
We are behind the eight ball the whole of our lives.
Some people deal with the pressure that this imposes better than others.
Inherent Vice
Gaddis uses the term “Inherent Vice” to describe our plight.
In artistic terms, it means a flaw in the foundation of a work that might one day impact on the surface or integrity of the work as a whole.
In other words, the whole might suffer as a result of a flaw in an underlying part.
In insurance terms, it means that insurance cover will not apply if there is a pre-existing flaw that could not be detected at the time the policy was acquired.
Insurance or assurance gives us confidence that, if something wrong occurs, we will be compensated.
An inherent vice deprives us of both compensation and confidence.
In religious terms, we are born with an Inherent Vice.
Nobody will give us assurance.
Saving Grace
What this all adds up to is a need for self-assurance and self-confidence.
Not all of us get it from within; most of us need it from outside.
This is the role of Religion: collectively, we need to believe and have faith in God and Religion in order to understand ourselves and the world around us.
However, Religion imposes forms and expectations of Perfection on us.
It creates role models and moulds for us to conform to.
It requires conformity, when we aspire to individuality.
It expects us to emerge from the forge uniform, when we want to be unique.
It’s difficult for us to break the mould or forge ahead.
Yet, in the words of Oscar Wilde, our intuitive response is to “be yourself; everyone else is taken.”
Gaddis’ view is that God and Religion are not the right answers to our question.
Where Art Thou?
Man created God in his own image to address his concerns.
Originally, he created Art to support his Faith.
However, over time, Art has disintegrated into different art forms that either support or question Religion.
Either way, it seeks to address our quest for the Meaning of Life.
Our need is so great that we fall victim to real and pretend solutions.
We succumb to fraud and pretence.
We want an answer so badly, that we’re prepared to believe anything that sounds like the right answer.
In the realm of Art, if it looks right, we’re prepared to believe it’s right:
"If the public believes that a picture is by Raphael, and will pay the price of a Raphael, then it is a Raphael."
What Is to Be Done?
Gaddis questions what we’re prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve happiness or the meaning of life.
He questions what we’re prepared to believe in, in order to remove self-doubt and obtain certainty.
TR is effectively a dramatization of this issue: what have we got to do in order to be happy?
If we’re not happy , what are we doing wrong?
He doesn’t make any definitive prescription.
Instead, he finds a solution in activity.
He argues that capitalism tries to distract attention from the underlying problem by focusing on making and possessing money.
Wealth creation becomes our dominant activity and source of happiness.
Except that, even in 1955, he could see that it doesn’t really make us happy:
"They make money...it gives them something to do...most of the trouble in the world is made by people finding something to do."
Conversely:
”You get into mischief doing nothing.”
His response is to endorse Saint Augustine:
”Love, and do what you want to.”
In other words, we must love and we must be active, in order to be happy.
/2 (see messages 121 and 122 for the rest of this review)
Apart from music and film, my two great intellectual passions at University (and subsequently) were English Literature and Political Science.
I failed to reach my potential at Literature, partly because I never attended any lectures or tutorials.
At the same time (and the more scientific among you might be able to perceive a causal connection), I grew very adept at billiards, snooker and drinking (though not usually in this order).
My non-attendance wasn’t purely motivated by my desire to improve my ball skills.
It resulted directly from a traumatic conversation with my Lecturer, in which I gave the incorrect response to his question as to why I wanted to study English at University.
I replied that I wanted to learn more about the Self and Identity (well, myself and me, actually, not to mention any females who might be impressed by my recently acquired ball skills).
My interest in Political Science was equally motivated by an interest in the role of the Individual in Society.
Little did I know that my Lecturer, academically at least, was a proponent of the New Criticism and unadulterated textual analysis.
He positively scorned my interest in Marx, Freud, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, let alone Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing and Erica Jong.
I proceeded to educate myself in the manner I imagined a Liberal Education might have been dispensed.
I became an auto-didact, which means that I became didactic and only had myself to blame.
However, because of my dual interest in Literature and Political Science, I became captivated by the largely Jewish descendants of Eastern European migrants who became known as the New York Intellectuals and wrote for magazines like Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary and Encounter (in 1977’s “Annie Hall”, Woody Allen dismissed my entire cultural heritage when he complained, “I'm so tired of spending evenings making fake insights with people who work for "Dissentary").
If you asked me to narrow them down to two key influences on me, I would say Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe.
Both were widely-read, urbane, eloquent and easy to read, though the latter was more overtly political.
Their prose sparkled with insight and verbal precision.
I desperately wanted to fake insights like theirs.
There’s Something about Mary
At the same time that these critics were at their peak, William Gaddis was writing “The Recognitions”, which he published in 1955 at the age of 32 (the same age as Herman Melville when he published “Moby-Dick”).
I don’t recall ever reading (and haven’t been able to find) any mention of his work in the criticism of Trilling or Howe, so I have no idea how they regarded Gaddis.
However, one of their peers, Mary McCarthy, was a fiction judge (along with William Gass) in 1976 when Gaddis received the National Book Award for “JR” (notwithstanding competition from Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift”, which won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to the award of the Nobel Prize that same year).
When Gaddis was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989, he felt honored to be assigned the Mary McCarthy chair.
They had both taught at various times at Bard College, although I haven’t been able to determine whether they taught at the same time or met there.
McCarthy also wrote the blurb that is republished on the back of my 1993 Penguin Classic edition:
“William Gaddis is pure prodigy. He has a fantastic ear for American speech with the strictest attention and exactitude such an ear demands but, strangely crossed with that, the wildest of imaginations…His novels are massive in ambition and dazzling in execution.”
A Life of Passionate Dissent
In Gerald Sorin’s biography of Irving Howe (“Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent”), he suggests that “Howe explicitly indicted the literature of the sixties (which included such talented and innovative writers as John Barth, William Gaddis and John Hawkes)… for being impatient with ideas and contemptuous of rationality”.
Howe’s comments are contained in his essay “The New York Intellectuals”, which was published.
They are more a defence of the Old Left tradition against the New Left. There is no mention of Gaddis or any of the other authors.
However, I want to make a case that Gaddis is exactly the opposite of what Sorin suggests [Howe thought] he was.
In doing so, I’d like to quote Howe more fully, because I think that, whether or not he had Gaddis in mind or had him in sight, he describes perfectly what Gaddis is not, and therefore what Gaddis so rallied against in “The Recognitions”:
"We are confronting, then, a new phase in our culture, which in motive and spring represents a wish to shake off the bleeding heritage of modernism and reinstate one of those periods of the collective naïf which seem endemic to American experience.
The new sensibility is impatient with ideas. It is impatient with literary structures of complexity and coherence. It wants instead works of literature…that will be as absolute as the sun, as unarguable as orgasm, and as delicious as a lollipop.
It schemes to throw off the weight of nuance and ambiguity, legacies of high consciousness and tired blood. It is weary of the habit of reflection, the making of distinctions, the squareness of dialectic, the tarnished gold of inherited wisdom. It cares nothing for the haunted memories of old Jews...
It is sick of those magnifications of irony than Mann gave us, sick of those visions of entrapment to which Kafka led us, sick of those shufflings of daily horror and grace that Joyce left us.
It breathes contempt for rationality, impatience with mind, and a hostility to the artifices and decorums of high culture. It despises liberal values, liberal cautions, liberal virtues. It is bored with the past: for the past is a fink.”
Irving Howe was writing in 1968. I want to argue that Gaddis saw exactly the same warning signals, that he detected the same trends of anti-intellectualism and that he rallied against them for the same reasons as Irving Howe.
Only he started at least 13 years earlier, he did it in a magnificent work of fiction and this work is an early product of “A Life of Passionate Dissent”.
Part 2
Sincerity and Authenticity
In 1970, Lionel Trilling gave a number of lectures about the literary tradition at Harvard that were eventually published in his book, “Sincerity and Authenticity”.
In a general sense, “sincerity” concerns the interaction of the Self or Individual with Society and other Individuals.
It contrasts good and bad faith, truth and deception, honesty and dishonesty, forthrightness and secretiveness.
On the other hand, “authenticity” concerns the relationship of the Self to itself (or me and myself), an internal rather than an external relationship.
It involves issues as to whether an Individual is being “true” to themselves.
In a way, when you are being true to yourself, you are recognizing and realizing “the real you”, the real Self, your essence, perhaps you are even asserting or trying to give effect to your “ideal” self.
Arguably, if you are authentic, your Self is a united, undivided Self, rather than a troubled or Divided Self.
You can be troubled or divided by your own internal issues (your “demons”) or external issues (family or society).
The concept of “authenticity” has become more prevalent in Mass Society, in which Individuals can feel that they are subsumed by or at war with Society.
Irving Howe comments on Trilling’s distinction perceptively:
”Sincerity is a social virtue, a compact between me, myself, and you; authenticity is an assertion, a defiance, a claim to cut away the falsities of culture.
It takes two to be sincere, only one to be authentic. Sincerity speaks for a conduct of should; authenticity for a potential of is.
Sincerity is a virtue of public consciousness, authenticity a repudiation of its bad faith.
Sincerity implies a recognition of our limits, authenticity asserts the self as absolute.”
Part 3 (170312)
The Culture of Narcissism
In 1979 (24 years after the publication of "The Recognitions"), Christopher Lasch published "The Culture of Narcissism".
In a way, he suggested that the preoccupation with Self and Authenticity and the retreat from Sincerity and engagement with Society in the modern era was akin to pathological Narcissism.
Ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, we had weakened our sense of Self and created a dependence on "constant external validation" (Wiki).
The external world had no intrinsic value, except as a reinforcement of our diminished sense of Self and as a medicine or salve for our troubled, divided or demon-plagued Selves.
Ironically, if this world proved to be beyond our control, it would cease to play this fake or ersatz-therapeutic role and exacerbate our depression and paranoia.
In a way, this is the world that Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace would describe in the footsteps of William Gaddis.
Perhaps, Lasch was suggesting that we had to "do" something about our Selves, that we had to pull our Divided Selves together.
And perhaps this was also Gaddis' diagnosis and prescription.
A Prisoner of My Own Auto-Didactic Prism
I've harped on about the work of these cultural and literary critics, partly because I believe that "The Recognitions" is a deeply philosophical and even theological work.
It puzzles me that the novel failed to be embraced by Gaddis' contemporaries (apart perhaps from Mary McCarthy) and that, now so much later, I find myself (I find my Self) embracing it within a framework that they created for me.
Inevitably, in my own life, the concerns and methodology of his contemporaries have become the prism through which I view the novel.
In this quest, I have to concede that I might have misread both Gaddis and his contemporaries.
If that's the case, well, so be it.
Tales of Brave Youlysses
Almost immediately on publication, critics and reviewers compared “The Recognitions” with James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
This is a superficial and intellectually lazy analogy, which Gaddis hilariously dismissed in the following terms:
“I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.”
[Still, in an interview with New York Magazine in 1994, he describes his reaction to the first reviews in terms of Joyce's work:
"Instead of being hailed on the front page as a new 'Ulysses", it disappeared completely. I was towering in all the vanity of a young writer thinking I'd written an important book."
Apart from the richness of their allusions, the one thing the books have in common is their size.
They are both fat books. Indeed, Gaddis’ work is even fatter and longer than “Ulysses”.
However, to equate the books on this ground is like saying that all Fat Men in History are the same.
“Ulysses” is above all an exercise in style, in fact it’s an exercise in multiple styles.
The story is a coathanger upon which these styles are draped.
Gaddis' work is by and large an extended exercise in one persistent style, both lyrical and probing.
Joyce took Homer’s tales of brave Ulysses and transformed them into a story about Bloom’s journey through the Dublin of his memory, out the front door and back home again, during the course of a single day.
In a sense, it was a hero’s journey, only the hero was not a God, but one of us.
It’s possible to say that “The Recognitions” is equally a hero’s journey.
However, again this is a superficial judgment.
The modern novel and much theatre before it has been about such journeys.
It’s a post-modern rarity that doesn’t contain such a journey.
To the extent that they are both journeys, it’s also arguable that “The Recognitions” is unique in that the hero (or is he an anti-hero?) actually goes missing for a large part of the novel, while the world of the narrative rages around and without him.
We are almost left to wonder whether this particular hero, like God, might be dead.
If so, will he be resurrected?
Part 4 (180312)
How to Forge a Head
Superficially, “TR” concerns forgery and plagiarism.
However, to understand the significance of forgery in the novel, we need to burrow into the meaning of the word “forge”.
It doesn’t just mean plagiarism, it derives from the process of making something and the tools that are necessary to make it (like a blacksmith’s forge).
Only when we have made something the first time (the original), can we make it a second or subsequent time (a copy or replica).
A forge is the apparatus for making both the original and the copies.
It allows us to fabricate something a first time and then to fabricate it again. (Note the negative connotation of the word “fabricate”.)
It is this ability and this relationship that makes humans “Homo Faber” (Man the Creator), a capacity that arguably differentiates us from other animals.
In some cases, the “original” has some special significance (art).
However, in others (mass production), there is no particular meaning given to the chronological first. (See Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.)
In the latter case, we are in the province of multiplication, reproduction and replication. Mass production in order to satisfy mass consumption.
The quotation at the head of the first chapter alerts us to the act of creation.
It’s a quote from Goethe’s “Faust”, which effectively asks “what’s going on?” and responds “a Man is being made”.
Over the course of TR, we see a Man being made, we see Man copying and being copied, and we see the original Man and others being unmade.
” Thank God There was the Gold to Forge”
TR also refers to Alchemy and its desire to transform base metals into gold.
Gold has become the Ideal, and the purpose of Alchemy is to realise the Ideal.
However, while Gaddis is interested in the relationship between Religion, Magic and Alchemy, ultimately he uses Gold as a metaphor for the Ideal and Perfection.
Religion posits an Ideal (or essence) and then encourages us to or demands that we achieve it.
It defines Perfection for us and then places us on the never-ending conveyor belt that is Perfectibility.
We are the stuff or base metal of which Human Gold is made.
Christians must “Thank God” for this privilege and opportunity.
Original Sin
One of the challenges of Christianity is that it places an obstacle in the path of our quest for Perfection: Original Sin.
We are born flawed and, no matter what we accomplish during our lifetimes, we remain flawed, until we meet our Creator.
We are behind the eight ball the whole of our lives.
Some people deal with the pressure that this imposes better than others.
Inherent Vice
Gaddis uses the term “Inherent Vice” to describe our plight.
In artistic terms, it means a flaw in the foundation of a work that might one day impact on the surface or integrity of the work as a whole.
In other words, the whole might suffer as a result of a flaw in an underlying part.
In insurance terms, it means that insurance cover will not apply if there is a pre-existing flaw that could not be detected at the time the policy was acquired.
Insurance or assurance gives us confidence that, if something wrong occurs, we will be compensated.
An inherent vice deprives us of both compensation and confidence.
In religious terms, we are born with an Inherent Vice.
Nobody will give us assurance.
Saving Grace
What this all adds up to is a need for self-assurance and self-confidence.
Not all of us get it from within; most of us need it from outside.
This is the role of Religion: collectively, we need to believe and have faith in God and Religion in order to understand ourselves and the world around us.
However, Religion imposes forms and expectations of Perfection on us.
It creates role models and moulds for us to conform to.
It requires conformity, when we aspire to individuality.
It expects us to emerge from the forge uniform, when we want to be unique.
It’s difficult for us to break the mould or forge ahead.
Yet, in the words of Oscar Wilde, our intuitive response is to “be yourself; everyone else is taken.”
Gaddis’ view is that God and Religion are not the right answers to our question.
Where Art Thou?
Man created God in his own image to address his concerns.
Originally, he created Art to support his Faith.
However, over time, Art has disintegrated into different art forms that either support or question Religion.
Either way, it seeks to address our quest for the Meaning of Life.
Our need is so great that we fall victim to real and pretend solutions.
We succumb to fraud and pretence.
We want an answer so badly, that we’re prepared to believe anything that sounds like the right answer.
In the realm of Art, if it looks right, we’re prepared to believe it’s right:
"If the public believes that a picture is by Raphael, and will pay the price of a Raphael, then it is a Raphael."
What Is to Be Done?
Gaddis questions what we’re prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve happiness or the meaning of life.
He questions what we’re prepared to believe in, in order to remove self-doubt and obtain certainty.
TR is effectively a dramatization of this issue: what have we got to do in order to be happy?
If we’re not happy , what are we doing wrong?
He doesn’t make any definitive prescription.
Instead, he finds a solution in activity.
He argues that capitalism tries to distract attention from the underlying problem by focusing on making and possessing money.
Wealth creation becomes our dominant activity and source of happiness.
Except that, even in 1955, he could see that it doesn’t really make us happy:
"They make money...it gives them something to do...most of the trouble in the world is made by people finding something to do."
Conversely:
”You get into mischief doing nothing.”
His response is to endorse Saint Augustine:
”Love, and do what you want to.”
In other words, we must love and we must be active, in order to be happy.
/2 (see messages 121 and 122 for the rest of this review)
April 21, 2020
I’ve had The Recognitions on my horizon for some time. What really spurred me on to read it was a fellow Goodreader; Bonnie, whose review of this book is magnificent. Sadly Bonnie died last year and I still miss her wit, wisdom and perspicacity; she survives in her reviews and I would recommend you read her review of this.
This is not a book that you can pick up and casually read; it demands work of the reader. However erudite or well read you are you will not get all the references because they are so varied. There are sites available which provide annotated notes so you can follow the references and I would recommend one of these as you can get more out of the whole experience. Gaddis quotes Shakespeare a good deal; there is also a lot of T S Eliot, especially the Four Quartets and The Wasteland. On reflection it is more difficult to list things that are not included! As there is a religious theme running through the book knowledge of the Early Christian Fathers and varieties of theology (not to mention the cult of Mithras) is a necessity (hence the need for a guide). Gaddis also makes reference to a great deal of early twentieth century popular American culture (songs and popular novels). Goethe’s Faust is a backdrop and starting point and the relationship between Wyatt and Recktall Brown is fascinating. The Faust legend goes back to Clementine literature, supposedly written by an early Pope called Clement. Part of this literature is the Clementine Recognitions (hence the title) and here is found the story of Faustus. There are myriads of other references and it is a complex and enthralling work.
The story itself is fairly simple; Wyatt means to follow his father into the Christian ministry, but takes to art and forgery for a dealer called Recktall Brown. He becomes disillusioned, his father becomes attracted to Mithras and succumbs to mental illness and there is a supporting cast of many interesting characters who revolve around Wyatt and his doings. Most of the story is set in New York around Christmas. As stories go it is ok and would rattle along nicely in a 200 page novel. There is humour; the suit of armour, counterfeit money (forgery and what is real figures a lot) and there is tragedy; all the necessary ingredients. The minor characters are excellent; Otto in particular, Agnes Deigh (the play on words of course has meaning). Anselm is fascinating and there is a self-inflicted Abelard moment in a public toilet.
So far I’ve managed to avoid saying what I thought of it. The Recognitions is undoubtedly a great novel and it was fun and challenging to read. I loved the trails that Gaddis leaves and following links and it is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece, worthy of its place in all the lists. The “but” you are sensing is that although I thoroughly enjoyed reading it; I didn’t love it. It didn’t invoke the passion that my favourite novels have, great though it is. But do read it for yourself and make your own mind up.
This is not a book that you can pick up and casually read; it demands work of the reader. However erudite or well read you are you will not get all the references because they are so varied. There are sites available which provide annotated notes so you can follow the references and I would recommend one of these as you can get more out of the whole experience. Gaddis quotes Shakespeare a good deal; there is also a lot of T S Eliot, especially the Four Quartets and The Wasteland. On reflection it is more difficult to list things that are not included! As there is a religious theme running through the book knowledge of the Early Christian Fathers and varieties of theology (not to mention the cult of Mithras) is a necessity (hence the need for a guide). Gaddis also makes reference to a great deal of early twentieth century popular American culture (songs and popular novels). Goethe’s Faust is a backdrop and starting point and the relationship between Wyatt and Recktall Brown is fascinating. The Faust legend goes back to Clementine literature, supposedly written by an early Pope called Clement. Part of this literature is the Clementine Recognitions (hence the title) and here is found the story of Faustus. There are myriads of other references and it is a complex and enthralling work.
The story itself is fairly simple; Wyatt means to follow his father into the Christian ministry, but takes to art and forgery for a dealer called Recktall Brown. He becomes disillusioned, his father becomes attracted to Mithras and succumbs to mental illness and there is a supporting cast of many interesting characters who revolve around Wyatt and his doings. Most of the story is set in New York around Christmas. As stories go it is ok and would rattle along nicely in a 200 page novel. There is humour; the suit of armour, counterfeit money (forgery and what is real figures a lot) and there is tragedy; all the necessary ingredients. The minor characters are excellent; Otto in particular, Agnes Deigh (the play on words of course has meaning). Anselm is fascinating and there is a self-inflicted Abelard moment in a public toilet.
So far I’ve managed to avoid saying what I thought of it. The Recognitions is undoubtedly a great novel and it was fun and challenging to read. I loved the trails that Gaddis leaves and following links and it is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece, worthy of its place in all the lists. The “but” you are sensing is that although I thoroughly enjoyed reading it; I didn’t love it. It didn’t invoke the passion that my favourite novels have, great though it is. But do read it for yourself and make your own mind up.
August 8, 2022
Initial reaction:
But in the words of the one of the characters:
“A man having, or about to have, or at the very least valiantly fighting off, a religious experience”
That is how i feel. “Religious” not in the sense of a certain system of beliefs, but in the sense of a mixture of exultation and awe:-).
Any comparisons are always reductive, but just for the sake of impression: it has started as a Moby Dick, but then swayed all the way to Dostoyevsky but with much more intellectual streak and such a brilliant dark humour.
Later thoughts:
Somewhere in this novel a character asks another one carrying a thick book: “Have you been reading this?” “No I am just reviewing it.” - that was the answer. And that is what I really do not want to do. I’ve read this novel and I felt amazed and challenged by it. To write about it is somehow to diminish the wholeness of that experience. Anyway, I try…
… and so in the painting every detail reflects… Do you get the perspective in this? … There isn’t any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism , there… I take five or six or ten… the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he had wished, and even in a small painting you can’t include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it degenerates and becomes conscious of being looked at.
I think this paragraph serves as an excellent metaphor for this novel as well as for any masterpiece. It is like a fragile castle - it contains so many perspectives that trying to separate one would dismantle the edifice. And I was starting to write this review a few times. But then gave up and just wrote what you find below. I stopped trying to analyse how this book is constructed and why it worked for me; how to reduce it to a scheme and explain it. I want to keep it alive in my memory.
There is a Faustian fable in it, however incomplete as it is unclear what is the bargain at the end unlike in other Faust tales. The main character if he can be called that way is missing from the page quite often. Somewhere in the first few hundreds pages, after his fateful deal, he stopped being called by his name, or any name for that matter. He becomes just a nameless presence until very late in the novel when he was “named” again by a crook. And I wondered why. Maybe it is because the talent he possesses goes far beyond language and cannot be simply defined… Maybe it is a reference to Odyssesus and Polyphemus’s story… There could be a dozen other potential answers to this question. But it is striking how it works; how it defies all preconceptions one might have about how a main character in a novel should be. Or maybe this is the answer:
“He began looking wildly round the room where shapes refused to identify themselves, and endured only in terms of the others, each a presence made possible only by what everything else was not, each suffering the space it filled to bear it only as a part of a whole which, with a part standing forth to identify itself, would perish.”
This paragraph is like a dance. I could read it again and again without being tired of repetition. Maybe that is how you can define the objects and the characters without naming them…
I want to talk about the female heroine, Esme. I’ve heard somewhere that Gaddis was very ungenerous in creating female characters. I protest! She is an absolutely ethereal unique creation. She is a poetess who struggles to write her poems. And here, Gaddis manages to show how an inspiration reveals itself:
“It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.”
“the poem she knew, but could not write”… is it the most tragic matter any gifted person person faces one day, the limitations of a gift. It reminded me the famous story by Cortazar The Pursuer when the main character, another gifted person improvises on a sax not even remembering about the time and space, and later not being able to come back to that music and suffering because of this. Esme as well feels this constant incompleteness. And then she sits downs and copies poems of someone else. It was Rilke’s “Ellegies” on that occasion.
She also caught by us while reading:
“Only occasional groupings of words held her, and she entered to inhabit them a little while, until they became submerged, finding sanctuary in that part of herself which she looked upon distal and afraid, a residence as separate and alien, real or unreal, as those which shocked her with such deep remorse when the features of others betrayed them. An infinite regret, simply that she had seen, might rise in her then, having seen too much unseen; and it brought her eyes down quick.”
It is a fashionable way to put it, but I can “identify” with her in this respect, especially about “infinite regret of having seen too much unseen”. I think after reading certain books which reveal some of this “unseen” it is getting progressively harder to appreciate something that just “tells the story”. But Esme is much less preoccupied with her reading habits. She is more like a mirror, so natural and not at all self-cautious. And she is crazy and she uses drugs. But her life is like a dream. She just feels.
“The love I have from others is not love of me, but where they try to find themselves, loving me. I dream and I wake up, and then at that moment you are somewhere ring real to other people; and they are part of your reality; and I am not.. But you are the only person I am real with..”
There is this aura of eternity in her character. And she seem to feel that she is only guest here though she has been here many times before. “Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes.” She reads in the story by Olalla.
And, again, she does not take that much space in this novel either. Maybe a dozen of pages spread though the thousand. Gaddis create this people with such an economy but their presence is so powerful, it lingers long when they disappear from the page and the novel moves on to something else. Much better than any “realism”.
He is the kind of writer who can effortlessly bring about a totally new character in the last 100 pages of the book and not be afraid of it. And the character would be as tangible and irreplaceable as any other in the novel. He also shows how you can be original without bothering about originality…
And talking about originality, any single blurb about this book mentions forgery and the debate about the authenticity of art and life. So I would not waste your time on that. I presume there are many pages written about it. But there is one aspect I’ve briefly touched upon in discussions with the one of my friends here on GR. What would survive the test of imitation? I think Gaddis gives the perfect answer:
“Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure.”
And that is why Rembrandt or Gaddis for that matter will always be fresh and imitated by many. That is why Esme copies her poems from Rilke. And that is why Borges writes about Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.
PS
1.
I also want to mention how funny this novel is by parts, I had quite a few proper "laugh out loud" moments. The satirical element is brilliantly sharp. He satirises everything from religion and the dumbness of mass culture to the Bohemians of the 50s. Below is just an example how a distinguished, well published and well known writer, the character from the novel writes:
“ I felt throbbing within my breast the thrill of a deep emotion which I was powerless to describe, as I approached the soaring walls after an exhausting climb, and reached up to pull the cord on the centuries old bell. Its gentle voice sounding distantly just as it must have on that sunny day (snowy might be) when Saint x (to fill in) appeared at this same door…”
It gave me the one moment of “recognition” that I would be happy to avoid. I’ve read, sometimes even finished many contemporary novels written that way stuffed with meaningless adjectives and unnecessary pathos.
And here how Gaddis writes himself:
“the sea which has lots the glare of sunrise. The sea, romantic in books, or dreams or conversation, symbol in poetry, the mother, the last lover, and here it was, none of those things before him. Romantic? This heaving senseless actuality? alive? evil? symbolic? shifting its surfaces, of blind life and death. Boundlessly neither yes or no, good nor evil, hope nor fear, pretending to all these things in the eyes that first beheld it, but unchanged since then, still its colour, heaving with the indifferent hunger of all actuality.”
2. I've just discovered to my surprise, that Esme was modelled on a real person, "the modernist muse" Sheri Martinelli. She by herself was a painter, a poet, a model and she has inspired many in her days:
http://stevenmoore.info/martinelli/sm...
3. Many people say it is a difficult novel. I did not feel that way. I sincerely enjoyed it. As any great book one can read it on many levels. And you do not need to be an expert on literature to enjoy it. I loved working on the sentences. But even if you do not enjoy such stuff, you would still find a lot to like. There is a lot of intertextuality. If this is the problem, here is brilliant and detailed guide which is famous by itself:
https://williamgaddis.org/recognition...
But in the words of the one of the characters:
“A man having, or about to have, or at the very least valiantly fighting off, a religious experience”
That is how i feel. “Religious” not in the sense of a certain system of beliefs, but in the sense of a mixture of exultation and awe:-).
Any comparisons are always reductive, but just for the sake of impression: it has started as a Moby Dick, but then swayed all the way to Dostoyevsky but with much more intellectual streak and such a brilliant dark humour.
Later thoughts:
Somewhere in this novel a character asks another one carrying a thick book: “Have you been reading this?” “No I am just reviewing it.” - that was the answer. And that is what I really do not want to do. I’ve read this novel and I felt amazed and challenged by it. To write about it is somehow to diminish the wholeness of that experience. Anyway, I try…
… and so in the painting every detail reflects… Do you get the perspective in this? … There isn’t any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism , there… I take five or six or ten… the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he had wished, and even in a small painting you can’t include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it degenerates and becomes conscious of being looked at.
I think this paragraph serves as an excellent metaphor for this novel as well as for any masterpiece. It is like a fragile castle - it contains so many perspectives that trying to separate one would dismantle the edifice. And I was starting to write this review a few times. But then gave up and just wrote what you find below. I stopped trying to analyse how this book is constructed and why it worked for me; how to reduce it to a scheme and explain it. I want to keep it alive in my memory.
There is a Faustian fable in it, however incomplete as it is unclear what is the bargain at the end unlike in other Faust tales. The main character if he can be called that way is missing from the page quite often. Somewhere in the first few hundreds pages, after his fateful deal, he stopped being called by his name, or any name for that matter. He becomes just a nameless presence until very late in the novel when he was “named” again by a crook. And I wondered why. Maybe it is because the talent he possesses goes far beyond language and cannot be simply defined… Maybe it is a reference to Odyssesus and Polyphemus’s story… There could be a dozen other potential answers to this question. But it is striking how it works; how it defies all preconceptions one might have about how a main character in a novel should be. Or maybe this is the answer:
“He began looking wildly round the room where shapes refused to identify themselves, and endured only in terms of the others, each a presence made possible only by what everything else was not, each suffering the space it filled to bear it only as a part of a whole which, with a part standing forth to identify itself, would perish.”
This paragraph is like a dance. I could read it again and again without being tired of repetition. Maybe that is how you can define the objects and the characters without naming them…
I want to talk about the female heroine, Esme. I’ve heard somewhere that Gaddis was very ungenerous in creating female characters. I protest! She is an absolutely ethereal unique creation. She is a poetess who struggles to write her poems. And here, Gaddis manages to show how an inspiration reveals itself:
“It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.”
“the poem she knew, but could not write”… is it the most tragic matter any gifted person person faces one day, the limitations of a gift. It reminded me the famous story by Cortazar The Pursuer when the main character, another gifted person improvises on a sax not even remembering about the time and space, and later not being able to come back to that music and suffering because of this. Esme as well feels this constant incompleteness. And then she sits downs and copies poems of someone else. It was Rilke’s “Ellegies” on that occasion.
She also caught by us while reading:
“Only occasional groupings of words held her, and she entered to inhabit them a little while, until they became submerged, finding sanctuary in that part of herself which she looked upon distal and afraid, a residence as separate and alien, real or unreal, as those which shocked her with such deep remorse when the features of others betrayed them. An infinite regret, simply that she had seen, might rise in her then, having seen too much unseen; and it brought her eyes down quick.”
It is a fashionable way to put it, but I can “identify” with her in this respect, especially about “infinite regret of having seen too much unseen”. I think after reading certain books which reveal some of this “unseen” it is getting progressively harder to appreciate something that just “tells the story”. But Esme is much less preoccupied with her reading habits. She is more like a mirror, so natural and not at all self-cautious. And she is crazy and she uses drugs. But her life is like a dream. She just feels.
“The love I have from others is not love of me, but where they try to find themselves, loving me. I dream and I wake up, and then at that moment you are somewhere ring real to other people; and they are part of your reality; and I am not.. But you are the only person I am real with..”
There is this aura of eternity in her character. And she seem to feel that she is only guest here though she has been here many times before. “Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes.” She reads in the story by Olalla.
And, again, she does not take that much space in this novel either. Maybe a dozen of pages spread though the thousand. Gaddis create this people with such an economy but their presence is so powerful, it lingers long when they disappear from the page and the novel moves on to something else. Much better than any “realism”.
He is the kind of writer who can effortlessly bring about a totally new character in the last 100 pages of the book and not be afraid of it. And the character would be as tangible and irreplaceable as any other in the novel. He also shows how you can be original without bothering about originality…
And talking about originality, any single blurb about this book mentions forgery and the debate about the authenticity of art and life. So I would not waste your time on that. I presume there are many pages written about it. But there is one aspect I’ve briefly touched upon in discussions with the one of my friends here on GR. What would survive the test of imitation? I think Gaddis gives the perfect answer:
“Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure.”
And that is why Rembrandt or Gaddis for that matter will always be fresh and imitated by many. That is why Esme copies her poems from Rilke. And that is why Borges writes about Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.
PS
1.
I also want to mention how funny this novel is by parts, I had quite a few proper "laugh out loud" moments. The satirical element is brilliantly sharp. He satirises everything from religion and the dumbness of mass culture to the Bohemians of the 50s. Below is just an example how a distinguished, well published and well known writer, the character from the novel writes:
“ I felt throbbing within my breast the thrill of a deep emotion which I was powerless to describe, as I approached the soaring walls after an exhausting climb, and reached up to pull the cord on the centuries old bell. Its gentle voice sounding distantly just as it must have on that sunny day (snowy might be) when Saint x (to fill in) appeared at this same door…”
It gave me the one moment of “recognition” that I would be happy to avoid. I’ve read, sometimes even finished many contemporary novels written that way stuffed with meaningless adjectives and unnecessary pathos.
And here how Gaddis writes himself:
“the sea which has lots the glare of sunrise. The sea, romantic in books, or dreams or conversation, symbol in poetry, the mother, the last lover, and here it was, none of those things before him. Romantic? This heaving senseless actuality? alive? evil? symbolic? shifting its surfaces, of blind life and death. Boundlessly neither yes or no, good nor evil, hope nor fear, pretending to all these things in the eyes that first beheld it, but unchanged since then, still its colour, heaving with the indifferent hunger of all actuality.”
2. I've just discovered to my surprise, that Esme was modelled on a real person, "the modernist muse" Sheri Martinelli. She by herself was a painter, a poet, a model and she has inspired many in her days:
http://stevenmoore.info/martinelli/sm...
3. Many people say it is a difficult novel. I did not feel that way. I sincerely enjoyed it. As any great book one can read it on many levels. And you do not need to be an expert on literature to enjoy it. I loved working on the sentences. But even if you do not enjoy such stuff, you would still find a lot to like. There is a lot of intertextuality. If this is the problem, here is brilliant and detailed guide which is famous by itself:
https://williamgaddis.org/recognition...
January 9, 2024
Sé que no puedo y sé que no debo hacer una reseña de estas 1.400 páginas, que me han dejado exhausta y que no me atrevería a recomendar a nadie. ¿Me ha gustado conocer a Gaddis? Sí. ¿Tengo ganas de leer más del autor? Pues de momento no. En cualquier caso, la lectura de este tótem de la literatura posmoderna, escrito en 1955, es una experiencia única que encuentro imposible resumir. Así que me voy a limitar a escribir unos cuantos comentarios random, cualidad que de hecho es parte fundamental en este libro: los diálogos sin sentido, las situaciones surrealistas, los personajes que aparecen, desaparecen y mutan sin seguir una lógica... Pues allá van mis apostillas desordenadas a esta obra de Gaddis:
1. No se entiende nada. No está escrito para que lo entiendas. En muchas páginas he tenido la impresión de estar descifrando un acertijo o un jeroglífico más que leyendo. He sido salvada por la monumental Reader's Guide de Steven Moore. Si leía la sinopsis después del capítulo, me quedaba asombrada de las cosas que habían pasado sin enterarme: 'Así que aquel ha matado a aquel otro? Vaya!' Eso sí, si la lees antes es espoiler total. Difícil elección.
2. Una de las técnicas que emplea Gaddis para despistar es no llamar a los personajes por su nombre. De repente empieza a decir 'él' o 'ella' y tienes que averiguar por pequeñas pistas de quién se trata. Introduce un auténtico montón de personajes y cuando empiezas a familiarizarte con alguno y dices 'Este es el protagonista', pues desaparece, aunque puede reaparecer 500 páginas después como si tal cosa. Es complicado. Muchos personajes no tienen nombre, directamente, como 'la mujer alta', o 'el hombre de la corbata verde' y no se sabe bien quién son, pero van apareciendo aquí y allá, cuando menos lo esperas.
3. Es un universo líquido. Desde las fiestas de Greewich Village, a las calles de Roma, París y Nueva York, los pueblos de España de la posguerra, países de Sudamérica, todo se mezcla y los mismos personajes circulan enloquecidos por los diferentes escenarios, siempre sin un propósito muy claro. Marea.
4. Todos estos escenarios - que resumen los periplos vitales del autor - están regados con una erudición abrumadora, como yo no pensaba que pudiera existir. La Guía va desmigando todas las alusiones a la historia, la religión, el arte, la literatura, la mitología, etc. etc. etc. que están contenidas en las líneas de la novela y que un cerebro humano no puede de ninguna manera procesar. Al principio me imprimía las paginas correspondientes de la Guía y las iba leyendo en paralelo. Pero a partir de un cierto punto lo dejé, sorry pero no.
5. Los diálogos son lo peor. Están llenos de puntos suspensivos, de cosas no dichas, de aire... y de ruido ambiente, porque se intercalan frases oídas al azar de otras conversaciones, por ejemplo en las fiestas o en los bares. Reflejan una incomunicación total y son difíciles de leer. Parece que en vez de dar más información sobre los personajes nos los alejan con cada palabra.
6. El tema principal es la falsificación, la falsedad en todas sus variantes y su relación con el arte y la creatividad. Desde la típica falsificación de monedas u obras de arte (incluso momias), Gaddis abre el foco y ve la misma civilización como una falsificación a gran escala. La religión, el arte, el turismo, la publicidad... todo está visto desde el punto de vista de la impostura, todo es vender humo a personas que están deseando comprarlo. Eso es la vida y la sociedad según Gaddis. No deja nada en pie.
7. El arcano, lo oculto, los restos de antiguas creencias como el culto a Mitra y la adoración al sol, impregnan todo el texto. España se presenta como un lugar especial donde lo mágico aún no ha sido erradicado, en contraste con un París tomado por los turistas americanos y donde ya nada es auténtico.
8. Gaddis escribe muy pero que muy bien. Es un placer leer sus descripciones en los trozos en que se centra y escribe 'en serio'. Un mago y un maestro que te hechiza con unos párrafos que parecen música . A veces. Ah, y cuando quiere puede ser muy, muy divertido, con un humor retorcido y original.
9. La traducción de Juan Antonio Santos es - en mi humilde opinión porque no la he contrastado con el original - excelente. Me parece increíble que en 1.400 páginas de difíciles equilibrios y virtuosismos de todo tipo no me haya chirriado nada. Milagro.
10. Casi 5 meses me ha costado leerlo (gracias a mis compañeros de lectura por estar ahí), pero creo que ha merecido la pena. En la reseña del GR Paul Bryant he descubierto un artículo estupendo de Mark O'Connell sobre la lectura de este tipo de obras, en que las compara con una especie de Síndrome de Estocolmo o subida al Everest. Me quedo con este párrafo sobre Los reconocimientos, que resume bastante bien mi experiencia:
I don’t think William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, for instance, is nearly as fantastic a novel as people often claim it is. But it is one of the most memorable and monumental experiences of my reading life. And these are the reasons why: because the thing was just so long; because I had such a hard time with it; and because I eventually finished it.
1. No se entiende nada. No está escrito para que lo entiendas. En muchas páginas he tenido la impresión de estar descifrando un acertijo o un jeroglífico más que leyendo. He sido salvada por la monumental Reader's Guide de Steven Moore. Si leía la sinopsis después del capítulo, me quedaba asombrada de las cosas que habían pasado sin enterarme: 'Así que aquel ha matado a aquel otro? Vaya!' Eso sí, si la lees antes es espoiler total. Difícil elección.
2. Una de las técnicas que emplea Gaddis para despistar es no llamar a los personajes por su nombre. De repente empieza a decir 'él' o 'ella' y tienes que averiguar por pequeñas pistas de quién se trata. Introduce un auténtico montón de personajes y cuando empiezas a familiarizarte con alguno y dices 'Este es el protagonista', pues desaparece, aunque puede reaparecer 500 páginas después como si tal cosa. Es complicado. Muchos personajes no tienen nombre, directamente, como 'la mujer alta', o 'el hombre de la corbata verde' y no se sabe bien quién son, pero van apareciendo aquí y allá, cuando menos lo esperas.
3. Es un universo líquido. Desde las fiestas de Greewich Village, a las calles de Roma, París y Nueva York, los pueblos de España de la posguerra, países de Sudamérica, todo se mezcla y los mismos personajes circulan enloquecidos por los diferentes escenarios, siempre sin un propósito muy claro. Marea.
4. Todos estos escenarios - que resumen los periplos vitales del autor - están regados con una erudición abrumadora, como yo no pensaba que pudiera existir. La Guía va desmigando todas las alusiones a la historia, la religión, el arte, la literatura, la mitología, etc. etc. etc. que están contenidas en las líneas de la novela y que un cerebro humano no puede de ninguna manera procesar. Al principio me imprimía las paginas correspondientes de la Guía y las iba leyendo en paralelo. Pero a partir de un cierto punto lo dejé, sorry pero no.
5. Los diálogos son lo peor. Están llenos de puntos suspensivos, de cosas no dichas, de aire... y de ruido ambiente, porque se intercalan frases oídas al azar de otras conversaciones, por ejemplo en las fiestas o en los bares. Reflejan una incomunicación total y son difíciles de leer. Parece que en vez de dar más información sobre los personajes nos los alejan con cada palabra.
6. El tema principal es la falsificación, la falsedad en todas sus variantes y su relación con el arte y la creatividad. Desde la típica falsificación de monedas u obras de arte (incluso momias), Gaddis abre el foco y ve la misma civilización como una falsificación a gran escala. La religión, el arte, el turismo, la publicidad... todo está visto desde el punto de vista de la impostura, todo es vender humo a personas que están deseando comprarlo. Eso es la vida y la sociedad según Gaddis. No deja nada en pie.
7. El arcano, lo oculto, los restos de antiguas creencias como el culto a Mitra y la adoración al sol, impregnan todo el texto. España se presenta como un lugar especial donde lo mágico aún no ha sido erradicado, en contraste con un París tomado por los turistas americanos y donde ya nada es auténtico.
8. Gaddis escribe muy pero que muy bien. Es un placer leer sus descripciones en los trozos en que se centra y escribe 'en serio'. Un mago y un maestro que te hechiza con unos párrafos que parecen música . A veces. Ah, y cuando quiere puede ser muy, muy divertido, con un humor retorcido y original.
9. La traducción de Juan Antonio Santos es - en mi humilde opinión porque no la he contrastado con el original - excelente. Me parece increíble que en 1.400 páginas de difíciles equilibrios y virtuosismos de todo tipo no me haya chirriado nada. Milagro.
10. Casi 5 meses me ha costado leerlo (gracias a mis compañeros de lectura por estar ahí), pero creo que ha merecido la pena. En la reseña del GR Paul Bryant he descubierto un artículo estupendo de Mark O'Connell sobre la lectura de este tipo de obras, en que las compara con una especie de Síndrome de Estocolmo o subida al Everest. Me quedo con este párrafo sobre Los reconocimientos, que resume bastante bien mi experiencia:
I don’t think William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, for instance, is nearly as fantastic a novel as people often claim it is. But it is one of the most memorable and monumental experiences of my reading life. And these are the reasons why: because the thing was just so long; because I had such a hard time with it; and because I eventually finished it.
November 30, 2009
Probably the best part of the The Recognitions is the very beginning. The novel seems destined to unravel as an absolute masterpiece after the evocative opening in Spain and small town New England, followed by a quick stay in Paris before descending (in the Dantean sense) into New York City for the majority of the book. But then it begins to meander while taking on a new agenda, one less of allusion-heavy storytelling than of society satire sans commentary: Gaddis lets large swaths of the book unfold in dialogue, with varying results in story-telling clarity and appeal. This change in focus isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it outstays its welcome so that its initial power commences to slowly dissipate, over a few hundred pages in the days just before Christmas 1949, along with any claims to sardonic subtlety. Things pick back up when the major characters head out of New York to Europe and South America, but ultimately the book either needed to say more or stay shorter to achieve the level of impact and greatness to which its author aspired.
Regardless, there’s a lot to love: the discussions of art, of old masters of the 15th and 16th century Flemish variety, is particularly fascinating and nuanced. Big money art forgery/theft is one of those topics—like religion, sex, and pirates—that’s interesting just because...just because it is. And when Gaddis is on with his dark humor, he is on and is able to provoke plenty of wry smiles by cleverly deriding the religious, the faux-intellectual, and the materialistic. His writing style is cold but extravagant: flowery, but in a German sort of way. Many sentences, especially those at the beginning and the end of chapters, are quirky and knotted, requiring a few minutes to unwind and comprehend-something that I generally, masochistically enjoy.
Furthermore, I’m very sympathetic to Gaddis’ overarching point about falsity, about the counterfeit nature of the world from which it’s nearly impossible to escape into a life of integrity-fueled deliberateness, particularly given the excessive materialism/ advertising/ bullshitting that goes on. Very sympathetic to this. In fact, I love the theme. But it becomes repetitive and occasionally over-obvious: some of the absurd dialogue, which can be very funny, often devolves into a game of point-and-laugh at the idiot that eventually makes you and the author feel like the only genuine, intelligent, and well-meaning people in the world. I.e. you get your ego stroked, but well past the moment of climax until it becomes uncomfortable and even painful. You are conditioned to see fakers, forgers, and counterfeiters everywhere—and you will—but you begin to realize that the book doesn’t have much else to say. And though it does take us on an interesting journey to another time and other places, very little is suggested for avoiding the ever-present trappings of a bullshit life.
Most of the large cast of characters exist to be mocked by Gaddis via their own unsubtle dialogue, and while this provides a significant portion of the book's humor (which, unfortunately, can disappear for hundreds of pages at time), it gets tiresome. Gaddis was clearly influenced by Proust's aims to document and expose certain social classes of his time, and he attempts something similar to Proust’s handling of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with New York's post-war Village art scenesters. Multiple long parties pervade the book’s middle section, including one (short by Proust standards) that nears 100 pages, and they consist mostly of dialogue designed to bring scorn upon the pseudo-intellectual and the bourgeois. The ethical incuriousness, the intellectual vacancy, and the self-serving idiocy are soon fully apparent. And then remain apparent. Still. Over and over. Again. And while this kind of thing can work in the right hands (Proust’s), Gaddis' writing talents, while impressive, aren't able to arouse and maintain the same level of interest in the characters and their petty lives. We’re left with a scathing and prescient indictment of a social class and movement, but one that doesn't translate into the most compelling fiction. Thankfully some of the novel’s most memorable and inspiring characters come out of this quirky social group, including my personal favorites: Stanley, the painfully naïve and devout Catholic who’s working on an ambitious organ piece; and Anselm, the conflicted, crawling and acne-riddled wild card.
The criticisms mentioned so far have been relatively minor; the real problems exist with the protagonists. Recently I've run into the dilemma of reviewing books that impressed me while leaving little room to fall in love. Or, more accurately, too much room—a remoteness from the major characters and a lack of palpable humanity or believable human insight. After spending hundreds of pages with Hal Incandenza from Infinite Jest or Tyrone Slothrop from Gravity’s Rainbow, I can’t say that I got to know them or believe in them as real people with truly human concerns and motivations. I didn’t love, hate, like, dislike, or care much about them. I can now add Wyatt Gwyon and even the more recognizably human Otto from The Recognitions to this dubious list of protagonists from sprawling 20th century white man epics. Wyatt, like Slothrop after him, is an unpredictable semi-human, someone to marvel at rather than learn from, always maintaining a safe distance from the reader with his extraordinary talent and bizarrely antisocial behavior.
The failure to connect meaningfully with the protagonists in these novels is paradoxical given the time spent with them, page by page. A 200-page book with big type, wide margins, and healthy spacing can make me cry, but The Recognitions’s most prominent player feels as remote and inhuman as Keanu Reeves in (______). That doesn’t seem quite right. I’m not looking for visceral thrills here, but I’m also not reading fiction just to learn things about things. I’m trying to gain exposure to those with a gift for prying open humanity to look into some small part of its multifaceted and contradictory glory, those who can maybe lead me toward piecing things together-about me, others-that I’m too stupid, lazy, or unaware to figure out on my own. Unfortunately The Recognitions joins my growing shelf of impressive and impressively un-emotive books. Which isn't to say that this book or the two mentioned above don't have many rewarding or exciting aspects. It rarely felt like a chore to read, and I probably hold longer books to a higher standard, if for no other reason than that they require a greater investment.
The fact that this book is good in so many ways serves to increase my disappointment with the characterization. Wyatt, the protagonist, spends most of the book balancing on the edge of sanity while spewing hyper-erudite musings on ancient religions and painting details in a mostly disconnected, stuttering fashion. His stream of consciousness often feels so divorced from sanity that it’s complete gibberish to anyone without a serious background in ancient religions, alchemy, and other esoterica (i.e. pretty much everyone). Without the knowledge to contextualize Wyatt’s or his father's mutterings, these often read like foreign languages-which, I should point out, are used quite liberally throughout the text. Gaddis certainly doesn't wear his knowledge or sources lightly, and a cynical person could say this untethered recondite regurgitation may have been employed to mask laziness or limited understanding on the part of the author. Additionally, and I don’t say this lightly, Gaddis’ use of language often leans toward the pretentious. George Eliot (if I remember correctly, one of Gaddis’ literary heroes) could have been speaking about Gaddis himself when she writes teasingly in Middlemarch: "Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced." Without fail, Gaddis substitutes “commence” for “start” or “begin”, and it creates a somewhat strange, if memorable, reading experience.
One reason why some of the characters failed to work for me is that they seem to exist primarily to carry out the literary, medieval, magical, and religious allusions in strikingly literal terms (e.g. sex with a bull, self-castration, Mithraism church service, crucifixion, animal sacrifice to please/plead with God), which can feel overdone and distinctly inhuman. Sure, you could argue that these are the areas where the book bridges realism and modernism with postmodernism, part of what makes this novel so unique. I’m not sure that I’d characterize this book—mostly pre-modern in feel—as such a bridge, and regardless, this approach doesn’t work. While Gaddis derides a novelist overheard in Rome toward the end of the book who claims that his “novel is written, I just have to add the motivation,” I think that his own approach-the exact opposite-is equally problematic. He started out attempting to rewrite Faust within the modern age, and much of that story still exists in the text, but in addition, his characters frequently behave in ways that only make sense in the context of the sources that Gaddis weaves into the story. This is backwards. When Wyatt steals the gold bull from Valentine, this should have been in service of the plot of The Recognitions. It isn’t really, and confusion only subsides with a little allusive sleuthing: the gold bull is a “symbol of creative force, breaking the egg to give birth to the earth”, and you realize later that this theft coincides with the end of Wyatt’s amazing forgery work. So his creative force is taken out of the service of Brown and Valentine, perhaps to be recommenced elsewhere. Clever, but the action itself is simply bizarre and explained away as a sequela of Wyatt’s temporary insanity. This is the manner in which the plot often unfolds, with characters in service of the novel’s sources rather than the other way around. Gaddis began with “the motivation” and forgot that living, breathing characters were just as, if not more, important.
It just occurred to me that there's probably a reason why this book is little known and little read, even by cult epic standards. Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses are more difficult and Infinite Jest is certainly longer, but each of these books enjoys more popularity than The Recognitions. So while I think it’s a good book, its place (or lack thereof) in 20th century literature 55 years later is probably justified and unlikely to change significantly in the future. I wouldn’t try to talk anyone out of reading this, but I’d suggest you try many of the other books you’re “supposed to” read from this century first. As the The Recognitions itself suggests: if you think that you may have stumbled upon a rarefied, out-of-the-way masterpiece, a scenario that appears just too good to be true…well…yes.
Regardless, there’s a lot to love: the discussions of art, of old masters of the 15th and 16th century Flemish variety, is particularly fascinating and nuanced. Big money art forgery/theft is one of those topics—like religion, sex, and pirates—that’s interesting just because...just because it is. And when Gaddis is on with his dark humor, he is on and is able to provoke plenty of wry smiles by cleverly deriding the religious, the faux-intellectual, and the materialistic. His writing style is cold but extravagant: flowery, but in a German sort of way. Many sentences, especially those at the beginning and the end of chapters, are quirky and knotted, requiring a few minutes to unwind and comprehend-something that I generally, masochistically enjoy.
Furthermore, I’m very sympathetic to Gaddis’ overarching point about falsity, about the counterfeit nature of the world from which it’s nearly impossible to escape into a life of integrity-fueled deliberateness, particularly given the excessive materialism/ advertising/ bullshitting that goes on. Very sympathetic to this. In fact, I love the theme. But it becomes repetitive and occasionally over-obvious: some of the absurd dialogue, which can be very funny, often devolves into a game of point-and-laugh at the idiot that eventually makes you and the author feel like the only genuine, intelligent, and well-meaning people in the world. I.e. you get your ego stroked, but well past the moment of climax until it becomes uncomfortable and even painful. You are conditioned to see fakers, forgers, and counterfeiters everywhere—and you will—but you begin to realize that the book doesn’t have much else to say. And though it does take us on an interesting journey to another time and other places, very little is suggested for avoiding the ever-present trappings of a bullshit life.
Most of the large cast of characters exist to be mocked by Gaddis via their own unsubtle dialogue, and while this provides a significant portion of the book's humor (which, unfortunately, can disappear for hundreds of pages at time), it gets tiresome. Gaddis was clearly influenced by Proust's aims to document and expose certain social classes of his time, and he attempts something similar to Proust’s handling of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with New York's post-war Village art scenesters. Multiple long parties pervade the book’s middle section, including one (short by Proust standards) that nears 100 pages, and they consist mostly of dialogue designed to bring scorn upon the pseudo-intellectual and the bourgeois. The ethical incuriousness, the intellectual vacancy, and the self-serving idiocy are soon fully apparent. And then remain apparent. Still. Over and over. Again. And while this kind of thing can work in the right hands (Proust’s), Gaddis' writing talents, while impressive, aren't able to arouse and maintain the same level of interest in the characters and their petty lives. We’re left with a scathing and prescient indictment of a social class and movement, but one that doesn't translate into the most compelling fiction. Thankfully some of the novel’s most memorable and inspiring characters come out of this quirky social group, including my personal favorites: Stanley, the painfully naïve and devout Catholic who’s working on an ambitious organ piece; and Anselm, the conflicted, crawling and acne-riddled wild card.
The criticisms mentioned so far have been relatively minor; the real problems exist with the protagonists. Recently I've run into the dilemma of reviewing books that impressed me while leaving little room to fall in love. Or, more accurately, too much room—a remoteness from the major characters and a lack of palpable humanity or believable human insight. After spending hundreds of pages with Hal Incandenza from Infinite Jest or Tyrone Slothrop from Gravity’s Rainbow, I can’t say that I got to know them or believe in them as real people with truly human concerns and motivations. I didn’t love, hate, like, dislike, or care much about them. I can now add Wyatt Gwyon and even the more recognizably human Otto from The Recognitions to this dubious list of protagonists from sprawling 20th century white man epics. Wyatt, like Slothrop after him, is an unpredictable semi-human, someone to marvel at rather than learn from, always maintaining a safe distance from the reader with his extraordinary talent and bizarrely antisocial behavior.
The failure to connect meaningfully with the protagonists in these novels is paradoxical given the time spent with them, page by page. A 200-page book with big type, wide margins, and healthy spacing can make me cry, but The Recognitions’s most prominent player feels as remote and inhuman as Keanu Reeves in (______). That doesn’t seem quite right. I’m not looking for visceral thrills here, but I’m also not reading fiction just to learn things about things. I’m trying to gain exposure to those with a gift for prying open humanity to look into some small part of its multifaceted and contradictory glory, those who can maybe lead me toward piecing things together-about me, others-that I’m too stupid, lazy, or unaware to figure out on my own. Unfortunately The Recognitions joins my growing shelf of impressive and impressively un-emotive books. Which isn't to say that this book or the two mentioned above don't have many rewarding or exciting aspects. It rarely felt like a chore to read, and I probably hold longer books to a higher standard, if for no other reason than that they require a greater investment.
The fact that this book is good in so many ways serves to increase my disappointment with the characterization. Wyatt, the protagonist, spends most of the book balancing on the edge of sanity while spewing hyper-erudite musings on ancient religions and painting details in a mostly disconnected, stuttering fashion. His stream of consciousness often feels so divorced from sanity that it’s complete gibberish to anyone without a serious background in ancient religions, alchemy, and other esoterica (i.e. pretty much everyone). Without the knowledge to contextualize Wyatt’s or his father's mutterings, these often read like foreign languages-which, I should point out, are used quite liberally throughout the text. Gaddis certainly doesn't wear his knowledge or sources lightly, and a cynical person could say this untethered recondite regurgitation may have been employed to mask laziness or limited understanding on the part of the author. Additionally, and I don’t say this lightly, Gaddis’ use of language often leans toward the pretentious. George Eliot (if I remember correctly, one of Gaddis’ literary heroes) could have been speaking about Gaddis himself when she writes teasingly in Middlemarch: "Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced." Without fail, Gaddis substitutes “commence” for “start” or “begin”, and it creates a somewhat strange, if memorable, reading experience.
One reason why some of the characters failed to work for me is that they seem to exist primarily to carry out the literary, medieval, magical, and religious allusions in strikingly literal terms (e.g. sex with a bull, self-castration, Mithraism church service, crucifixion, animal sacrifice to please/plead with God), which can feel overdone and distinctly inhuman. Sure, you could argue that these are the areas where the book bridges realism and modernism with postmodernism, part of what makes this novel so unique. I’m not sure that I’d characterize this book—mostly pre-modern in feel—as such a bridge, and regardless, this approach doesn’t work. While Gaddis derides a novelist overheard in Rome toward the end of the book who claims that his “novel is written, I just have to add the motivation,” I think that his own approach-the exact opposite-is equally problematic. He started out attempting to rewrite Faust within the modern age, and much of that story still exists in the text, but in addition, his characters frequently behave in ways that only make sense in the context of the sources that Gaddis weaves into the story. This is backwards. When Wyatt steals the gold bull from Valentine, this should have been in service of the plot of The Recognitions. It isn’t really, and confusion only subsides with a little allusive sleuthing: the gold bull is a “symbol of creative force, breaking the egg to give birth to the earth”, and you realize later that this theft coincides with the end of Wyatt’s amazing forgery work. So his creative force is taken out of the service of Brown and Valentine, perhaps to be recommenced elsewhere. Clever, but the action itself is simply bizarre and explained away as a sequela of Wyatt’s temporary insanity. This is the manner in which the plot often unfolds, with characters in service of the novel’s sources rather than the other way around. Gaddis began with “the motivation” and forgot that living, breathing characters were just as, if not more, important.
It just occurred to me that there's probably a reason why this book is little known and little read, even by cult epic standards. Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses are more difficult and Infinite Jest is certainly longer, but each of these books enjoys more popularity than The Recognitions. So while I think it’s a good book, its place (or lack thereof) in 20th century literature 55 years later is probably justified and unlikely to change significantly in the future. I wouldn’t try to talk anyone out of reading this, but I’d suggest you try many of the other books you’re “supposed to” read from this century first. As the The Recognitions itself suggests: if you think that you may have stumbled upon a rarefied, out-of-the-way masterpiece, a scenario that appears just too good to be true…well…yes.
May 30, 2012
Overlong? Probably. Grandiose? Almost certainly. Brilliant? Most definitely. This swollen, acerbic cult classic bursts with such wild imagination, vivid characterization and profound eloquence that I couldn't help but love it. Its many characters swirl in and out of each other's lives throughout the nearly thousand-page text, their paths and conversations overlapping like a most rambunctious Altman ensemble film (though with Gaddis's relentless and sometimes hallucinatory skewering of organized religion and the bourgeoisie, it might seem closer to a Buñuel satire).
The novel is a literary triptych, divided into three distinct segments that focus on various forms of art and forgery, and the perpetually blurred line between reality and illusion (not to mention the poisonous relationship between art and capitalism). The art world is not the only subject to be impaled upon Gaddis's eviscerating pen: the realms of business, politics, and religion also get their fair share of (often well-deserved) scorn and cynicism. The book's second and largest segment, set mostly in a feverish, forbidding vision of New York City, hinges together the smaller outer segments which mirror each other in many ways. Within this framework the reader enters a social whirlwind containing sinister art dealers, eccentric writers, struggling musicians, corrupt clergymen, con artists, counterfeiters, advertising agents, hitmen, WASPs, bohemians, transvestites, desperate housewives, and so forth, as they talk, travel, eavesdrop, cheat, steal, murder and deceive their ways through their pointless days. Gaddis captures a culture of people too self-absorbed to perceive any sort of higher truth, and too emotionally atrophied to form meaningful connections with others. While the obsessive artists yearn to transcend modern humanity with their works, everyone else sinks deeper into a fog of fraud and miscommunication. The transatlantic voyage that many of the characters take in Part III dispels this fog for some, but thickens it for others, as the novel builds toward its tragic yet strangely triumphant conclusion.
The Recognitions is remarkably dense and erudite; Gaddis has a striking way of intertwining historical, artistic, literary, theological and mythological arcana and symbolism with his descriptions, crafting multilayered allusions that resonate throughout the text and across centuries of human thought and creation. When he succeeds at this, it is stunning. When it seems a little strained, well, it's still educational. Readers flustered by his range of esoteric knowledge can still find much to admire elsewhere; his sardonic sense of humor will appeal to a certain audience, and his often breathtaking writing skills will appeal to anyone who loves language. So, whether or not this fiery novel is truly the missing link between literary modernism and postmodernism, it simply must be experienced on its own terms — even when it threatens to collapse under the weight of its own obese ambitions.
December 13, 2013
Gaddis’s first novel is a big, ambitious thing, a juggernaut, overwhelming, a planetary body’s worth of kinetic energy packed into its 956 pages. “Planetary” is a descriptor I come back to again and again while thinking about this book- it not only reflects the geographic scope of the novel, which unfolds across oceans and continents (though for the greater part we do not leave the microcosmic nocturama of New York City), but also the attempt to put a world’s sum of knowledge and history into one work, to recreate the world of accumulated human experience within this massive triptych’s unity. “Unity” is another word appropriate for The Recognitions, for as multifaceted and hydra-headed and sprawling as the novel appears, the book is affixed to a structure as deliberate as a map of the stars for any particular season- warp The Recognitions back in on itself, make of it a mobius strip, and I believe one would find the beginning and ending of the novel conversing with each other, events unfolding in parallel, phrases and images resurfacing at precise moments, which of course adds depth and resonance to that all too perfect title. As you sail your way across the churning ocean of this book, you will have your moments of recognition, not only within the reflexive texture of the text, whose component parts speak to and among each other, but your own personal world, the world outside, will begin to engage a conversation with the novel. For there is something mysteriously breathing about this book, and descending into it or rising out of it is akin to what it must be like to penetrate the atmosphere of a planet and fall into the rich air of earth, for those who have spent a stint on a space station. Or, more apropos of the novel, like the emergence from the abyss of the sea into the fecund air and bright blue cloud-ripped sunlight sailors on submarines must experience when returning home- a world retrieved- brought from the depths into the air as if fished for. Going into or out of the novel, from its world into your own or vice versa. Ascent and descent. Emergence and recognition.
Of course, everything is achieved through language. Gaddis’s use of language in The Recognitions, the style of The Recognitions, its mythologizing and allusion-laden style, is where the “American heir to Joyce” comparison is validated. Gaddis appears especially like the Joyce of Ulysses in this context, but we must delimit and narrow this comparison, because the similarity in the appropriation and layering of mythical, historical, and religious language and imagery into the text, and a certain kind of “writing around scenes”, where important narrative points are told obliquely, is where the similarity ends. Gaddis is not playing the parodist of styles that Joyce is in Ulysses, Gaddis is not interested in interior dialogue, stream of consciousness, in fact he remains distinctly exterior to his characters, eliding dialogue with ellipses and fragmented sentences, leaving much to be completed by the reader, assumed, read into- there is no interior representation of Gaddis’s characters, only their actions are shown and their broken voices remade into mosaic. If one had to compare the Gaddis of The Recognitions with Joyce, it would be, I think, more the Joyce of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. There is the same obsessive infiltration and exploration of Catholic ritual, that ritual extended into the secular world, there is the same brooding over the spirit and the Ideal as represented in religious texts and contrasted with their representation and use in secular artworks, there is the exploration of the suffering caused by seeking perfection and coming into contact with beauty, the suffering of the artist and the conflict of attempting the spiritual within the material world. The allusion-heavy, mythologized language in The Recognitions serves to eliminate centuries, to collapse the intellectual history of humanity, so that into these moments in the months surrounding Christmas 1949 in New York City and the world at large, the eternal can flow through the gestures of these characters. It gives a seemingly limitless depth to the reading experience, as allusion and reference bloom into recognition, as image and word create resonance that echoes beyond the walls of the specific place of 1949 America. Gaddis, like Joyce, universalizes the mundane, very effectively, through precise reference. And while The Recognitions is most certainly a (postmodern?) comedy, a scathing satire and a polemical cultural critique of the shallow products of “The Age of Publicity”, it shares a great deal thematically, and in its tone, its prose-hues, with the Russian-Christian morality epics of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The spiritual struggle at the heart of the book, the manner of characterization, the moral dilemmas it presents, even the descriptions of New York City as a frozen winterscape, recall vividly moments out of Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, even to some extent the social satire of Anna Karenina. The same kind of weary, exhausted late-Christian conflict, searching representations of eternity for something to validate the finite, flawed nature of human life, and coming away empty-handed and with no answer wetting the lips, pervades.
And so The Recognitions is about art and art forgery, about authenticity and (the impossibility of) originality, about the crisis of the individual in a universe at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to dignified living. It is a brilliant, necessary cultural critique that emerged from mid-20th century America, dripping with that thick black blood (sangre negro de mi corazón) that courses coldly through the mechanized American heart, that seems now to ring more true than ever (especially in the party scenes composed of the overlapping babbling of voices ultimately testifying to nothing but the vanity of the speakers, a prophecy of the social media age if ever there was one), a satire of the narcissism and shallow preening of contemporary mores, which have since only progressed further into fragmentation and alienation, an excoriation of the money-driven society, of blind faith in technology, market forces, media, the myth of “progress” and the vulgarization and commodification of personality, religion, art, conversation, relationships, information. It is howlingly funny and at the same time bleakly pessimistic. It reaches to find meaning in the higher pursuits of man, but collides only with layer upon layer of fraud. It finds the reek of money at the heart of everything. It is an epic of a fallen, sunken world, a world submerged, where everyone is already drowned and trying to claw their way out of personal purgatories and into the light of a sham sun in the sky that might as well be the fires of hell in the underworld. It is two mirrors turned to each other and the retreat of the face reflected into the winnowing abyss, but all the reflections have something to sell, and are thus validated as real, here in this chimeric world. It pursues the pursuit of redemption and atonement. As much as it is about Art and Artifice it is about Death, as much as a painting (or a book) is dead as soon as it is completed, and feigns eternity, and feigns timelessness, as do all of our higher aspirations.
The dedication that opens the book, to Gaddis’s daughter Sarah, is from TS Eliot’s poem “Marina”. It is a thing of great beauty itself, and any reader of The Recognitions will find in it echoes of that text, those texts communicating, so why not, in the spirit of appropriation, reproduce it here in full, if for no other reason than to beautify my own work with someone else’s labor.
Marina
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shore what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger–
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
Of course, everything is achieved through language. Gaddis’s use of language in The Recognitions, the style of The Recognitions, its mythologizing and allusion-laden style, is where the “American heir to Joyce” comparison is validated. Gaddis appears especially like the Joyce of Ulysses in this context, but we must delimit and narrow this comparison, because the similarity in the appropriation and layering of mythical, historical, and religious language and imagery into the text, and a certain kind of “writing around scenes”, where important narrative points are told obliquely, is where the similarity ends. Gaddis is not playing the parodist of styles that Joyce is in Ulysses, Gaddis is not interested in interior dialogue, stream of consciousness, in fact he remains distinctly exterior to his characters, eliding dialogue with ellipses and fragmented sentences, leaving much to be completed by the reader, assumed, read into- there is no interior representation of Gaddis’s characters, only their actions are shown and their broken voices remade into mosaic. If one had to compare the Gaddis of The Recognitions with Joyce, it would be, I think, more the Joyce of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. There is the same obsessive infiltration and exploration of Catholic ritual, that ritual extended into the secular world, there is the same brooding over the spirit and the Ideal as represented in religious texts and contrasted with their representation and use in secular artworks, there is the exploration of the suffering caused by seeking perfection and coming into contact with beauty, the suffering of the artist and the conflict of attempting the spiritual within the material world. The allusion-heavy, mythologized language in The Recognitions serves to eliminate centuries, to collapse the intellectual history of humanity, so that into these moments in the months surrounding Christmas 1949 in New York City and the world at large, the eternal can flow through the gestures of these characters. It gives a seemingly limitless depth to the reading experience, as allusion and reference bloom into recognition, as image and word create resonance that echoes beyond the walls of the specific place of 1949 America. Gaddis, like Joyce, universalizes the mundane, very effectively, through precise reference. And while The Recognitions is most certainly a (postmodern?) comedy, a scathing satire and a polemical cultural critique of the shallow products of “The Age of Publicity”, it shares a great deal thematically, and in its tone, its prose-hues, with the Russian-Christian morality epics of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The spiritual struggle at the heart of the book, the manner of characterization, the moral dilemmas it presents, even the descriptions of New York City as a frozen winterscape, recall vividly moments out of Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, even to some extent the social satire of Anna Karenina. The same kind of weary, exhausted late-Christian conflict, searching representations of eternity for something to validate the finite, flawed nature of human life, and coming away empty-handed and with no answer wetting the lips, pervades.
And so The Recognitions is about art and art forgery, about authenticity and (the impossibility of) originality, about the crisis of the individual in a universe at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to dignified living. It is a brilliant, necessary cultural critique that emerged from mid-20th century America, dripping with that thick black blood (sangre negro de mi corazón) that courses coldly through the mechanized American heart, that seems now to ring more true than ever (especially in the party scenes composed of the overlapping babbling of voices ultimately testifying to nothing but the vanity of the speakers, a prophecy of the social media age if ever there was one), a satire of the narcissism and shallow preening of contemporary mores, which have since only progressed further into fragmentation and alienation, an excoriation of the money-driven society, of blind faith in technology, market forces, media, the myth of “progress” and the vulgarization and commodification of personality, religion, art, conversation, relationships, information. It is howlingly funny and at the same time bleakly pessimistic. It reaches to find meaning in the higher pursuits of man, but collides only with layer upon layer of fraud. It finds the reek of money at the heart of everything. It is an epic of a fallen, sunken world, a world submerged, where everyone is already drowned and trying to claw their way out of personal purgatories and into the light of a sham sun in the sky that might as well be the fires of hell in the underworld. It is two mirrors turned to each other and the retreat of the face reflected into the winnowing abyss, but all the reflections have something to sell, and are thus validated as real, here in this chimeric world. It pursues the pursuit of redemption and atonement. As much as it is about Art and Artifice it is about Death, as much as a painting (or a book) is dead as soon as it is completed, and feigns eternity, and feigns timelessness, as do all of our higher aspirations.
The dedication that opens the book, to Gaddis’s daughter Sarah, is from TS Eliot’s poem “Marina”. It is a thing of great beauty itself, and any reader of The Recognitions will find in it echoes of that text, those texts communicating, so why not, in the spirit of appropriation, reproduce it here in full, if for no other reason than to beautify my own work with someone else’s labor.
Marina
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shore what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger–
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
December 21, 2017
What I get a kick out of is serious writers who write a book where they say money gives a false significance to art, and then they raise hell when their book doesn’t make any money.
- William Gaddis, The Recognitions
I’ve never seen novel by William Gaddis available in any library or bookstore, and the fact that he is not more widely known is something of a crime. You could compare his prose against that of any of the great writers of the last century without exception, and it would more than hold its own. And a titanic novel like The Recognitions demonstrates his talent not only through its wonderful prose, but also in its astounding diversity and scope of ambition.
Take this description of Madrid’s Retiro Park, seen through the eyes of Reverend Gwyon, early in the novel:
In that undawned light the solid granite benches were commensurably sized and wrought to appear as the unburied caskets of children. Behind them the trees stood leafless, waiting for life, but as yet coldly exposed in their differences, waiting formally arranged, like the moment of silence when one enters a party of people abruptly turned, holding their glasses at attention, a party of people all the wrong size. There, balanced upon pedestals, thrusting their own weight against the weight of time never yielded to nor beaten off but absorbed in the chipped vacancies, the weathering, the negligent unbending of white stone, waited figures of the unlaid past.
What a tremendously vivid description, awash with desolation and meloncholy, which yet evokes a sense of the eternal and the mythic. There’s something about the syntax, the word choice and the mood created by these kinds of passages are reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s style. But that’s not to say that Gaddis writes like McCarthy (or more accurately, vice versa). What is striking is his ability to adopt changing styles; these vurtuosic shifts from poetry to realism, to dream-like surrealism; in one moment colloquial, in the next erudite, in a way that is masterful, surprising, and constantly challenges the reader. How about this account of Stanley’s frantic sexual desire, suppressed by religious proscriptions, and made manifest:
Directly he was alone, he was assailed by her simulacra, in all states of acute sorrow, or smiling, of complete abstraction or painful animation, of dress and undress, as he had seen her these last few days: directly he was alone, the images came to mock everything he had seen. Her sadness became shrieking grief, and her animation riotous, immodest in dress and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology assaulting the days he spent copying his work on clean scores, and the nights he passed alone in his chair where, instantly the lights went out, everything was transformed, and the body he had seen a moment before with no more surprise than its simple lines and modest unself-conscious movement permitted, rose up on him full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs indistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse.
Gaddis has blurred the line between reality and fantasy, and we are never really certain of precisely what is taking place. There is more going on here than is initially apparent to the reader, and this is a constant feature of Gaddis’s writing. If you happen to dislike Faulkner for his obfuscatory style, you will find Gaddis infuriating. Each new chapter is an exercise in reasoning and deduction: it is not unusual for main characters in a scene not to be named and for dialogue to be unattributed, with the expectation that the reader should be able to infer the necessary detail from clues in the context, and from the distinct personality and voice that Gaddis has imbued each character. This presupposes that the reader has been paying very close attention, and is able to fill in the gaps without exposition. Much of what occurs in this book, then, occurs between the lines. Take this wonderful description of Mr. Pivner, in a rush:
Over and under the ground he hurried toward the place where he lived. No fragment of time nor space anywhere was wasted, every instant and every cubic centimeter crowded crushing outward upon the next with the concentrated activity of a continent spending itself upon a rock island, made a world to itself where no present existed. Each minute and each cubic inch was hurled against that which would follow, measured in terms of it, dictating a future as inevitable as the past, coined upon eight million counterfeits who moved with the plumbing weight of lead coated with the frenzied hope of quicksilver, protecting at every pass the cherished falsity of their milled edges against the threat of hardness in their neighbors as they were rung together, fallen from the Hand they feared but could no longer name, upon the pitiless table stretching all about them, tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable, from the perfect alloy recast under weight to the thudding heaviness of lead, and the thinly coated brittle terror of glass.
This is a complex metaphor worthy of Pynchon. It’s mostly incomprehensible on initial reading, and the first clue comes several pages later when it is noted that the population of Manhattan is eight million people, and we have confirmation for the first time of the setting for this scene, and upon rereading the above passage can begin to unpack what it might be implying about these eight million inhabitants who spend themselves as counterfeit currency there. The metaphor roots itself in the core themes of the novel: counterfeit, forgery, plagiarism, imitation. The Recognitions explores imitation and originality as moral ambiguities within the overall context of art and life. It explores artistic ambition, genius and mediocrity, and the surprising consequences of each. There is Wyatt’s genius for imitation, which is accepted as original; Otto’s mediocre originality, which is seen as plagiarism (of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, of all things), and there is Stanley’s drive to create an original musical piece that encompasses everything: we see the disastrous effects of his ambition, and the paltry products of his success. All lives are revealed to be driven by counterfeit representations, counterfeit desires, counterfeit personalities, deteriorating to the final inevitable condition: the trading of counterfeit identities, and finally, counterfeit human bodies.
The Recognitions is dripping with postmodern self-awareness. There are recurring leitmotifs (a tale of an anchor dropped from the celestial sea, the song Return to Sorrento), as well as references to real-world books (The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood), and people (A Big Unshaven Man who may or may not be Ernest Hemingway): Gaddis infuses his novel with an awareness that he himself as an artist and his novel as an artistic work are subject to the same rules and criticisms as those of his characters. There is an acknowledgment that true originality is an impossibility, and that art by necessity must draw from its predecessors in order to be recognisable and accepted. Gaddis realised that comparisons to other writers (Joyce and Faulkner, for example) would be inevitable, and by including these references in the book and writing with such clear self-awareness he both anticipates these criticisms and expands the The Recognitions into a kind of metafiction: an exploration of art and the artist in a way that manages to transcend the natural boundaries of the novel form.
December 29, 2015
Is Bob Dylan Authentic?
Robert anglicised himself and veiled his roots. Zimmerman changed to Dylan...
What is Authenticity then?
The dictionary definition: true to one’s personality, spirit, or character.
The Recognitions is many things, but ultimately, it's an artist’s quest of for an authentic self, told stylistically through satire and the exploration of forgery on all levels.
Wyatt Gwyon is an artist, who after meeting a rather dubious character with a fabulously dubious name, Rektall Brown, makes a Faustian deal to forge the paintings of the Flemish artists. And so begins Wyatt’s psychological odyssey to define his sense of self as he wrangles with a sentiment inherited in his youth and religious upbringing, ‘to sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order’.
Although Wyatt’s quest for an authentic self is at the core, he is —like the Infinite Jest cartridge of its namesake novel— largely absent throughout the story; a phantom protagonist or as in a painting, a negative space to accent other areas. The remains of the story are narrated in several varying styles from several different points of view and characters.
Many of these characters undergo significant changes, including their names –like Mr. Robert Zimmerman— that can go unrecognised and it’s not until later on in the text that one recognises their voice, their tone and character. Their reappearance, in their different guises, pulls one's attention into focus, as you being to realise —like scrutinising a painting up close— you could be missing the wider effect and to pay greater attention to the these amorphous characters.
Echoes, motifs and repetition of statements, phrases and even dialog reinforce these multiple viewpoints and encourage one to scrutinise who is the originator of the thought and the theme and reiterates the question of authenticity. And several times I questioned my sanity... Did I read that already? Was this something I read elsewhere, both in the book or otherwise?
The book is structured in three parts and with many layers of interest such as multiple languages and cultural history; and like Gravity’s Rainbow, in it’s complexity of form, draws upon numerous esoteric forms of reference such as art history and religion, mythology, meta physics, astronomy, mummification and even witchcraft.
While the entire book is incredible the two opening chapters are especially captivating and I knew early on I was reading a writing style which is the DNA of so much of the writing I admire. It’s the prototype of Delillo, Gass, Pynchon and Salinger. Especially Delillo.
While Delillo has a more visual style, it’s Gaddis’s style of character dialog which unites them in tone and texture. In numerous party scenes speech is grammatically incorrect, colloquial and frequently truncated. Characters constantly interrupt each other, directly and in passing, as well as disruptions from external ambient invasions such as radio chatter, telephone calls, televisions, and nearby music. It’s a stimulating and heady cacophony of vernacular voice and measure and creates drama and momentum. And like Delillo, Gaddis draws out tremendously genuine and real subtleties, nuances and character traits which in turn depict the societal pressures that drive people to change their names, project their alter egos and wear their masks. Masks and alternates selves are a recurring theme throughout.
In a mythic novel nothing is inconsequential. And it becomes apparent through the repetitions, recursions and recognitions that Gaddis cross references myth, religion and world literature, but never does he compromises the sophistication of storytelling or the craft of his prose style - of which is compact and taut in description and poetic in form.
The Recognitions is funny, tragic and moving. It’s a fierce satire on authenticity in art and the act of creation; on fraudulence and fakery at all levels…
Since 1958 to 2013 Art and the art world has undergone significant change. Painting is no longer deemed as important, or as key an artistic medium as it once was; media, technology and the internet-of-things, apps, connectivity and social media are all impacting how we define and project ourselves. The masks we wear, consciously or subconsciously, are even more complex and multifarious.
William Gaddis was only 30 when this, his debut novel, was first published in 1958. Incredible.
Robert anglicised himself and veiled his roots. Zimmerman changed to Dylan...
What is Authenticity then?
The dictionary definition: true to one’s personality, spirit, or character.
The Recognitions is many things, but ultimately, it's an artist’s quest of for an authentic self, told stylistically through satire and the exploration of forgery on all levels.
Wyatt Gwyon is an artist, who after meeting a rather dubious character with a fabulously dubious name, Rektall Brown, makes a Faustian deal to forge the paintings of the Flemish artists. And so begins Wyatt’s psychological odyssey to define his sense of self as he wrangles with a sentiment inherited in his youth and religious upbringing, ‘to sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order’.
Although Wyatt’s quest for an authentic self is at the core, he is —like the Infinite Jest cartridge of its namesake novel— largely absent throughout the story; a phantom protagonist or as in a painting, a negative space to accent other areas. The remains of the story are narrated in several varying styles from several different points of view and characters.
Many of these characters undergo significant changes, including their names –like Mr. Robert Zimmerman— that can go unrecognised and it’s not until later on in the text that one recognises their voice, their tone and character. Their reappearance, in their different guises, pulls one's attention into focus, as you being to realise —like scrutinising a painting up close— you could be missing the wider effect and to pay greater attention to the these amorphous characters.
Echoes, motifs and repetition of statements, phrases and even dialog reinforce these multiple viewpoints and encourage one to scrutinise who is the originator of the thought and the theme and reiterates the question of authenticity. And several times I questioned my sanity... Did I read that already? Was this something I read elsewhere, both in the book or otherwise?
The book is structured in three parts and with many layers of interest such as multiple languages and cultural history; and like Gravity’s Rainbow, in it’s complexity of form, draws upon numerous esoteric forms of reference such as art history and religion, mythology, meta physics, astronomy, mummification and even witchcraft.
While the entire book is incredible the two opening chapters are especially captivating and I knew early on I was reading a writing style which is the DNA of so much of the writing I admire. It’s the prototype of Delillo, Gass, Pynchon and Salinger. Especially Delillo.
While Delillo has a more visual style, it’s Gaddis’s style of character dialog which unites them in tone and texture. In numerous party scenes speech is grammatically incorrect, colloquial and frequently truncated. Characters constantly interrupt each other, directly and in passing, as well as disruptions from external ambient invasions such as radio chatter, telephone calls, televisions, and nearby music. It’s a stimulating and heady cacophony of vernacular voice and measure and creates drama and momentum. And like Delillo, Gaddis draws out tremendously genuine and real subtleties, nuances and character traits which in turn depict the societal pressures that drive people to change their names, project their alter egos and wear their masks. Masks and alternates selves are a recurring theme throughout.
In a mythic novel nothing is inconsequential. And it becomes apparent through the repetitions, recursions and recognitions that Gaddis cross references myth, religion and world literature, but never does he compromises the sophistication of storytelling or the craft of his prose style - of which is compact and taut in description and poetic in form.
The Recognitions is funny, tragic and moving. It’s a fierce satire on authenticity in art and the act of creation; on fraudulence and fakery at all levels…
Since 1958 to 2013 Art and the art world has undergone significant change. Painting is no longer deemed as important, or as key an artistic medium as it once was; media, technology and the internet-of-things, apps, connectivity and social media are all impacting how we define and project ourselves. The masks we wear, consciously or subconsciously, are even more complex and multifarious.
William Gaddis was only 30 when this, his debut novel, was first published in 1958. Incredible.
'The sky was perfectly clear. It was a rare, explicit clarity, to sanction revelation. People looked up; finding nothing, they rescued their senses from exile, and looked down again'
August 20, 2012
I've been meaning to read one of Gaddis' big novels for years now, ten or so actually. I'd always been drawn more to trying my hand with JR, but after reading Franzen's essay a few years ago on Gaddis I sort of changed my mind, and decided that if the day ever came when I'd read Gaddis I'd start at the beginning of his work. Then of course at some point I realized that being the type of person I am I had to read this book because it fills out the lower rung of the trinity of difficult post-1950 American novels. A lot of good things can be said of this book, and for the first about six hundred pages it's really fucking good and then Gaddis decided to get a little weird. Is this a spoiler coming up? I don't know. Around the page of the beast he starts killing off characters, and about the same time he decides that it's best to kill them off sometimes with it being very difficult for the reader to follow who is dying, and even in the non-death parts, and who exactly is taking part in scenes. At the book's worst it turns into the awful dialog parts of the Left Behind novels, where the only way to tell which character is speaking is to count back the paragraphs, in the Lahaye books though the characters and the form of the writing don't have silences to mess up the count. So at a certain point I got a little lost, I started to feel like I felt when reading the first chapter of Ulysses when I had no idea what was going on, or even a point of reference to place the text in, unlike in Joyce though, when everything feels like it is all coming together in this book it begins to move towards entropy from about 2/3's of the book till the end.
Reading the book at the time it came out must have been something though. A few years later the Beats would supposedly smash up American Literature with their little revolution, but seeing what Gaddis did in this book was much more defining of American serious literature than the half-assed autobiographical masturbatory 'look how cool me and my friends are' books that would categorize the high points of Beat literature. There is something in this book that is aspiring to the high Modernism of the works of Joyce and Proust, but then there is something leaning towards the meta-fiction to come on the scene in the next decade. It is this position the book straddles that makes for a particular unease and I think, in historical retrospect, a kind of failing. Gaddis is on the path to something new, but he doesn't quite pull it off. This doesn't make any sense probably. I guess what I'm meaning to say is that he is paving the way for some of my favorite books to be written, and he's obviously an influence of some kind on Pynchon and DFW and their ilk, but in his own masterpiece he falls short of achieving what they would be able to, but at the same time he is out of touch just enough with what came before him that this novel sits uncomfortably between two difficult styles.
(nov 6, 08)
Reading the book at the time it came out must have been something though. A few years later the Beats would supposedly smash up American Literature with their little revolution, but seeing what Gaddis did in this book was much more defining of American serious literature than the half-assed autobiographical masturbatory 'look how cool me and my friends are' books that would categorize the high points of Beat literature. There is something in this book that is aspiring to the high Modernism of the works of Joyce and Proust, but then there is something leaning towards the meta-fiction to come on the scene in the next decade. It is this position the book straddles that makes for a particular unease and I think, in historical retrospect, a kind of failing. Gaddis is on the path to something new, but he doesn't quite pull it off. This doesn't make any sense probably. I guess what I'm meaning to say is that he is paving the way for some of my favorite books to be written, and he's obviously an influence of some kind on Pynchon and DFW and their ilk, but in his own masterpiece he falls short of achieving what they would be able to, but at the same time he is out of touch just enough with what came before him that this novel sits uncomfortably between two difficult styles.
(nov 6, 08)
Read
April 8, 2023Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhA7P...
Written Review: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2020/1...
- Group reading on Instagram with @therecognitionsbookclub this November-December.
- Group reading on #BookTwitter with #Gaddis2020 this November-December (thanks, @ReemK10).
READ THIS BOOK!
Written Review: https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2020/1...
- Group reading on Instagram with @therecognitionsbookclub this November-December.
- Group reading on #BookTwitter with #Gaddis2020 this November-December (thanks, @ReemK10).
READ THIS BOOK!
Read
October 19, 2020“The romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original…Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.”
The first few chapters in this bogged-down book were medievally dark and delectably eldritch, as stimulating as the electricity within the Frankenstein monster’s grave brain, but then the chryselephantine allusions and celestial diction descend in New York. Here we eavesdrop on the Eve’s droppings of Wyatt and Esther’s quotidian conversations, and it’s true, Gaddis does know how to mimic the subtleties of realistic dialogue, the veritas of tête-à-têtes, and I was still on board the HMS Recognitions, appreciating the talent and acknowledging that a book of this magnitude must alternate between various registers to be a successful reading experience, to be an accomplished novel no less.
As Gaddis himself writes: “Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition.”
There's a masterpiece wanting to come out of this chunk of marble, but it's strangle-entangled by veins of puddle-deep chitchat that fluctuates between interesting and dull, indeed, we are more than “merely” assailed by only “chattering” until the prose is as Ann as the nose on Plain's face, if you’ll allow me, sometimes showing distant and divided glimmers of the unfulfilled promise of the opening chapters (see Laura Warholic for examples of chattering that is digressive yet wholly entertaining). So what we have here is a book both bloated and choked by its own blather (we’re talking hundreds of pages here), yet more than this, because seemingly engaging and stimulating scenes are rendered with yawning ennui, infected disinterest, almost bunglingly biblical in their lack of a climax and understanding of literary execution, such as the ‘scene’, if you can call it that, when Anselm performs autocastration or when there’s a freeloader who clings to the wing of an airplane. Even the ending, which I had heard about ahead of time (then forgotten with time), sounds amazing when described but is symphony-deaf when read. In a word, bathetic with a ‘b’.
This was advertised by readers and critics as a maximalist novel but it didn't have everything I love in such a genre, only two modes: poetic prose, which is a lost love that never returns except for emotionless and condom-constrained flings afterward, and the party banter, which I was interested in then tolerated then was fully dulled by, and but there was a brief couple of fun moments of radio advertisements that I wish had been, well, maximized (I’m told by a friend that I’ll get my wish in Gaddis’ second novel). And what it did have in the way of maximalist tics it didn't have enough of for such a long book: vast vocabulary, epiphanic allusions, topsy turns of phrase, etc. One more thing: Gaddis, through one of his characters, does excoriate the expectations of m(ass) readers, yet his praise of “long sentences” is nearly the service of lips considering the absence of sentences approaching, say, the breathless likes of Joseph McElroy. Fine, another thing: the comparisons to Joyce’s Ulysses aren’t nearly as Polyphemus-blind as comparisons of other books to that Irish masterpiece, but The Recognitions is still lightyears behind it even though there’s the age of Christ between their release dates (1922 – 1955), “a whole Odyssey without Ulysses” indeed.
“…this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour…what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.”
As it stands, this debut novel is certainly more ambitious than most of the literary debutantes that have shown their skirts since this one was published (and remaindered) over half a century ago, yet ambition alone can’t save a novel, especially when the ambition is abandoned for the bland and never redeemed (despite the claim that “a work of art redeems time”), neither linguistically nor structurally. Of course, the themes of this novel, such as whether any piece of art is truly original, the artistry or lack thereof behind forgeries, the unfulfillment of fulfillment, the mental darkness of religion, all these are worthy and important themes, but they are not explored in a satisfying way (even if they were done Gaddis’ way), only hinted at when compared to what takes up most of the page count. And but so the first several instances of the word ‘recognition’ appearing were sufficient, yet it gets repeated ad nauseam, as heavy-handed as the book in the reader’s hand. According to Douglas Lannark, there are over 80 instances of the word in one form or another (though nowhere near as sinful as the 19,396 instances of "the fact that" which appear in the hyper-bloated piece of non-literature titled Ducks, Newburyport).
I can recognize (pun not intended; I’ve heard enough of that word) the fact that (and that phrase!) this novel influenced and anticipated great fiction written by Pynchon, DeLillo, and even DFW, but in comparison, this novel is dated and failed to amaze and stimulate this 21st-century reader beyond the promise of its opening chapters, resulting in diminishing and diminishing returns, unfortunately....
“There is always an immense congregation of people unable to create anything themselves, who look for comfort to the critics to disparage, belittle, and explain away those who do.”
I take no pleasure in writing negative reviews, which is often why I would prefer not to review books I don’t love, and sometimes I opt out of Goodreads star ratings too. As for creating anything, be on the lookout for my second, maximammoth novel, Morphological Echoes.
The first few chapters in this bogged-down book were medievally dark and delectably eldritch, as stimulating as the electricity within the Frankenstein monster’s grave brain, but then the chryselephantine allusions and celestial diction descend in New York. Here we eavesdrop on the Eve’s droppings of Wyatt and Esther’s quotidian conversations, and it’s true, Gaddis does know how to mimic the subtleties of realistic dialogue, the veritas of tête-à-têtes, and I was still on board the HMS Recognitions, appreciating the talent and acknowledging that a book of this magnitude must alternate between various registers to be a successful reading experience, to be an accomplished novel no less.
As Gaddis himself writes: “Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition.”
There's a masterpiece wanting to come out of this chunk of marble, but it's strangle-entangled by veins of puddle-deep chitchat that fluctuates between interesting and dull, indeed, we are more than “merely” assailed by only “chattering” until the prose is as Ann as the nose on Plain's face, if you’ll allow me, sometimes showing distant and divided glimmers of the unfulfilled promise of the opening chapters (see Laura Warholic for examples of chattering that is digressive yet wholly entertaining). So what we have here is a book both bloated and choked by its own blather (we’re talking hundreds of pages here), yet more than this, because seemingly engaging and stimulating scenes are rendered with yawning ennui, infected disinterest, almost bunglingly biblical in their lack of a climax and understanding of literary execution, such as the ‘scene’, if you can call it that, when Anselm performs autocastration or when there’s a freeloader who clings to the wing of an airplane. Even the ending, which I had heard about ahead of time (then forgotten with time), sounds amazing when described but is symphony-deaf when read. In a word, bathetic with a ‘b’.
This was advertised by readers and critics as a maximalist novel but it didn't have everything I love in such a genre, only two modes: poetic prose, which is a lost love that never returns except for emotionless and condom-constrained flings afterward, and the party banter, which I was interested in then tolerated then was fully dulled by, and but there was a brief couple of fun moments of radio advertisements that I wish had been, well, maximized (I’m told by a friend that I’ll get my wish in Gaddis’ second novel). And what it did have in the way of maximalist tics it didn't have enough of for such a long book: vast vocabulary, epiphanic allusions, topsy turns of phrase, etc. One more thing: Gaddis, through one of his characters, does excoriate the expectations of m(ass) readers, yet his praise of “long sentences” is nearly the service of lips considering the absence of sentences approaching, say, the breathless likes of Joseph McElroy. Fine, another thing: the comparisons to Joyce’s Ulysses aren’t nearly as Polyphemus-blind as comparisons of other books to that Irish masterpiece, but The Recognitions is still lightyears behind it even though there’s the age of Christ between their release dates (1922 – 1955), “a whole Odyssey without Ulysses” indeed.
“…this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour…what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.”
As it stands, this debut novel is certainly more ambitious than most of the literary debutantes that have shown their skirts since this one was published (and remaindered) over half a century ago, yet ambition alone can’t save a novel, especially when the ambition is abandoned for the bland and never redeemed (despite the claim that “a work of art redeems time”), neither linguistically nor structurally. Of course, the themes of this novel, such as whether any piece of art is truly original, the artistry or lack thereof behind forgeries, the unfulfillment of fulfillment, the mental darkness of religion, all these are worthy and important themes, but they are not explored in a satisfying way (even if they were done Gaddis’ way), only hinted at when compared to what takes up most of the page count. And but so the first several instances of the word ‘recognition’ appearing were sufficient, yet it gets repeated ad nauseam, as heavy-handed as the book in the reader’s hand. According to Douglas Lannark, there are over 80 instances of the word in one form or another (though nowhere near as sinful as the 19,396 instances of "the fact that" which appear in the hyper-bloated piece of non-literature titled Ducks, Newburyport).
I can recognize (pun not intended; I’ve heard enough of that word) the fact that (and that phrase!) this novel influenced and anticipated great fiction written by Pynchon, DeLillo, and even DFW, but in comparison, this novel is dated and failed to amaze and stimulate this 21st-century reader beyond the promise of its opening chapters, resulting in diminishing and diminishing returns, unfortunately....
“There is always an immense congregation of people unable to create anything themselves, who look for comfort to the critics to disparage, belittle, and explain away those who do.”
I take no pleasure in writing negative reviews, which is often why I would prefer not to review books I don’t love, and sometimes I opt out of Goodreads star ratings too. As for creating anything, be on the lookout for my second, maximammoth novel, Morphological Echoes.
July 21, 2017
Gaddis, en su última obra antes de morir, Ágape se paga: "... a fin de cuentas de eso se trata, de eso trata mi obra, del derrumbe absoluto de todo, del sentido, del lenguaje, de los valores, del arte, del desorden y de la dislocación que se ve en donde sea que mires, la entropía engullendo todo a su alrededor". Y eso mismo es lo que encierra entre sus páginas Los reconocimientos, el colapso de los ideales, del ser, de la búsqueda verdadera de sentido, todo aquello con una narrativa que junta múltiples estilos dispares para contar la historia del mundo, mezclando humor absurdo y una prosa que ha logrado más de una vez ponerme la piel de gallina. Una historia que explora un universo de temas: la fraudulencia, el suicidio, la religión, el arte, el dinero, el amor, la soledad, el espionaje, pero principalmente la incesante y arrolladora necesidad humana de encontrarle respuesta a la pregunta: ¿por qué seguimos viviendo?
No voy a decir mucho más. No puedo. No estoy a la altura. Solo voy a decir que, cuando hace unos meses me preguntaron: "Si tuvieses que vivir solo en una isla, ¿qué libro te llevarías?", estaba completamente seguro de cuál libro me traería conmigo. Hoy ya no. Tendría que ver la manera de llevarme este también.
No voy a decir mucho más. No puedo. No estoy a la altura. Solo voy a decir que, cuando hace unos meses me preguntaron: "Si tuvieses que vivir solo en una isla, ¿qué libro te llevarías?", estaba completamente seguro de cuál libro me traería conmigo. Hoy ya no. Tendría que ver la manera de llevarme este también.
August 19, 2015
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEe24q...
"It rained; then it snowed, and the snow stayed on the paved ground for long enough to become evenly blacked with soot and smoke-fall, evenly but for islands of yellow left by uptown dogs. Then it rained again, and the whole creation was transformed into cold slop, which made walking adventuresome. Then it froze; and every corner presented opportunity for entertainment, the vastly amusing spectacle of well-dressed people suspended in the indecorous positions which precede skull fractures.”
Humour/beauty/sadness/rage.
Look at that technique: the alliteration, the bounce of buried n's, the repetition of "evenly", the choice of "smoke-fall" and "adventuresome" and "indecorous" and "cold slop". This is how one makes a cliché come alive – for how can the snow/slop/yellow-dog-piss/slipping be anything but a cliché? –and make it funny (it is the use of "indecorous" which does it, I think).
Gaddis, with his ruinous Cassandra complex, places pins precisely and most exquisitely painfully in the torso of our society, as it was then, is now, and shall be forevermore. We are facile, self-absorbed, cruel creatures, wilfully gullible, deafened by the monotony of our own voices. We are to be pitied and to be laughed at. And yet, any attempt to judge from the side-lines must always already be a failure, and only by straining towards the authentic can we even approach that which lies outside our-Selves, though we must be prepared to drown in the process.
This story was about some people coming out of church, and they saw an anchor dangling by a rope from the sky. The anchor caught in the tombstones, and then they watched and saw a man coming down the rope, to unhook it. But when he reached the earth they went over to him and he was dead…He looked up at both of them from the glass. – Dead as though he'd been drowned.
Gaddis says in an interview somewhere that he re-read this novel after its publication and was embarrassed by its youthful arrogance, its narcissism, its desire to demonstrate great learning. He is correct, I think. But I love it for that. I love that he just goes all out, strips himself naked and streaks across the pitch. And when what is being put on display is so damn beautiful, and so damn interesting, who can care that the rules of decorum are breached, that the police (with Mr Franzen in their midst, his hipster-dark glasses slightly askew) are hot on his heels with blankets to cover and smother and bury him deep. I shall stick out my legs to trip them. I shall eternally cheer him on from the side-lines.
But how, as an atheist, can I feel so strongly these struggles with Christ? It is because there is something wonderfully, and devastatingly, human in these lacerations of the heart. How must it be to live in a universe rich with God? How must it be to truly feel all this, as Marlow did: "See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament. / One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!". The pain is real, and the suffering runs deep, the fact that I may see only man fighting Fight-Club-style with himself is entirely beside the point.
One more thing. I kept regular "updates" here to disprove the theory that 'big' and 'difficult' (big compared to what? difficult compared to what?) books are loved solely in hindsight, that the euphoria felt at Everest's summit blinds us to the struggle of the climb. This is simply not true. There was not a single damn page of this book that was not pleasurable, interesting, engaging and heartfelt. I knew from less than 20 pages in that I was in the presence of a Master, and one whom I could trust with the long journey ahead. Not once did this trust seem misplaced, and not once did I notice the blisters. Of course it is not perfect, nothing is, and of course one could point to paragraphs where the cogs can be seen, but this does not matter in the least, and does nothing to diminish the Work.
I have my personal Pantheon, those few books I place above all the others: The Death of Virgil; The Waves; Doctor Faustus; Poems of Paul Celan. This novel joins them. I intend, before the year is through, to read all of his novels and the letters. Thy Will be done, on My shelf as it is on Yours.
Or, to put it another way, this novel is chavenet, totally chavenet.
Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not
Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,
Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly
Indestructible. That I can believe.
Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith,
Expediency of assent, if I dared,
What I dare not is a waste history
Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen,
If only you had been right, if Intellect
Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace,
Our lives could be a myth of captivity
Which we might enter: an unpeopled region
Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing
With perpetual silence as with torches.
Geoffrey Hill
List! for no more the presage of my soul,
Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil;
But as the morning wind blows clear the east,
More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,
And as against the low bright line of dawn
Heaves high and higher yet the rolling wave,
So in the clearing skies of prescience
Dawns on my soul a further, deadlier woe,
And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.
Bear witness, ye, and follow at my side—
I scent the trail of blood, shed long ago.
Within this house a choir abidingly
Chants in harsh unison the chant of ill;
Yea, and they drink, for more enhardened joy,
Man’s blood for wine, and revel in the halls,
Departing never, Furies of the home.
They sit within, they chant the primal curse,
Each spitting hatred on that crime of old,
The brother’s couch, the love incestuous
That brought forth hatred to the ravisher.
Say, is my speech or wild and erring now,
Or doth its arrow cleave the mark indeed?
They called me once, The prophetess of lies,
The wandering hag, the pest of every door—
Attest ye now, She knows in very sooth
The house’s curse, the storied infamy.
- Cassandra (Agamemnon)
"It rained; then it snowed, and the snow stayed on the paved ground for long enough to become evenly blacked with soot and smoke-fall, evenly but for islands of yellow left by uptown dogs. Then it rained again, and the whole creation was transformed into cold slop, which made walking adventuresome. Then it froze; and every corner presented opportunity for entertainment, the vastly amusing spectacle of well-dressed people suspended in the indecorous positions which precede skull fractures.”
Humour/beauty/sadness/rage.
Look at that technique: the alliteration, the bounce of buried n's, the repetition of "evenly", the choice of "smoke-fall" and "adventuresome" and "indecorous" and "cold slop". This is how one makes a cliché come alive – for how can the snow/slop/yellow-dog-piss/slipping be anything but a cliché? –and make it funny (it is the use of "indecorous" which does it, I think).
Gaddis, with his ruinous Cassandra complex, places pins precisely and most exquisitely painfully in the torso of our society, as it was then, is now, and shall be forevermore. We are facile, self-absorbed, cruel creatures, wilfully gullible, deafened by the monotony of our own voices. We are to be pitied and to be laughed at. And yet, any attempt to judge from the side-lines must always already be a failure, and only by straining towards the authentic can we even approach that which lies outside our-Selves, though we must be prepared to drown in the process.
This story was about some people coming out of church, and they saw an anchor dangling by a rope from the sky. The anchor caught in the tombstones, and then they watched and saw a man coming down the rope, to unhook it. But when he reached the earth they went over to him and he was dead…He looked up at both of them from the glass. – Dead as though he'd been drowned.
Gaddis says in an interview somewhere that he re-read this novel after its publication and was embarrassed by its youthful arrogance, its narcissism, its desire to demonstrate great learning. He is correct, I think. But I love it for that. I love that he just goes all out, strips himself naked and streaks across the pitch. And when what is being put on display is so damn beautiful, and so damn interesting, who can care that the rules of decorum are breached, that the police (with Mr Franzen in their midst, his hipster-dark glasses slightly askew) are hot on his heels with blankets to cover and smother and bury him deep. I shall stick out my legs to trip them. I shall eternally cheer him on from the side-lines.
But how, as an atheist, can I feel so strongly these struggles with Christ? It is because there is something wonderfully, and devastatingly, human in these lacerations of the heart. How must it be to live in a universe rich with God? How must it be to truly feel all this, as Marlow did: "See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament. / One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!". The pain is real, and the suffering runs deep, the fact that I may see only man fighting Fight-Club-style with himself is entirely beside the point.
One more thing. I kept regular "updates" here to disprove the theory that 'big' and 'difficult' (big compared to what? difficult compared to what?) books are loved solely in hindsight, that the euphoria felt at Everest's summit blinds us to the struggle of the climb. This is simply not true. There was not a single damn page of this book that was not pleasurable, interesting, engaging and heartfelt. I knew from less than 20 pages in that I was in the presence of a Master, and one whom I could trust with the long journey ahead. Not once did this trust seem misplaced, and not once did I notice the blisters. Of course it is not perfect, nothing is, and of course one could point to paragraphs where the cogs can be seen, but this does not matter in the least, and does nothing to diminish the Work.
I have my personal Pantheon, those few books I place above all the others: The Death of Virgil; The Waves; Doctor Faustus; Poems of Paul Celan. This novel joins them. I intend, before the year is through, to read all of his novels and the letters. Thy Will be done, on My shelf as it is on Yours.
Or, to put it another way, this novel is chavenet, totally chavenet.
Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not
Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,
Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly
Indestructible. That I can believe.
Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith,
Expediency of assent, if I dared,
What I dare not is a waste history
Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen,
If only you had been right, if Intellect
Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace,
Our lives could be a myth of captivity
Which we might enter: an unpeopled region
Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing
With perpetual silence as with torches.
Geoffrey Hill
List! for no more the presage of my soul,
Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil;
But as the morning wind blows clear the east,
More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,
And as against the low bright line of dawn
Heaves high and higher yet the rolling wave,
So in the clearing skies of prescience
Dawns on my soul a further, deadlier woe,
And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.
Bear witness, ye, and follow at my side—
I scent the trail of blood, shed long ago.
Within this house a choir abidingly
Chants in harsh unison the chant of ill;
Yea, and they drink, for more enhardened joy,
Man’s blood for wine, and revel in the halls,
Departing never, Furies of the home.
They sit within, they chant the primal curse,
Each spitting hatred on that crime of old,
The brother’s couch, the love incestuous
That brought forth hatred to the ravisher.
Say, is my speech or wild and erring now,
Or doth its arrow cleave the mark indeed?
They called me once, The prophetess of lies,
The wandering hag, the pest of every door—
Attest ye now, She knows in very sooth
The house’s curse, the storied infamy.
- Cassandra (Agamemnon)
December 26, 2021
I started reading this book the same way I assume many others did: after a yearlong staring contest. I'd be wondering, hmmm, what should I read now, and there it'd be, the biggest book on the shelf. And I'd say....nah. Until finally I decided to stop avoiding it and actually read it.
And you know what? It's pretty good. Definitely a work of genius, extremely well put together, chock-full of symbolism and flattish characters and all sorts of other pomo English-majory stuff. Endless riffs on fraudulence and forgery in all their incarnations. There are counterfeiters, quack doctors, plagiarists, and admen. And all that stuff is good, even if a certain distance concerning the characters makes it a little difficult to really like any of them. But what I can't figure out (and this is also the reason it's not one of my favorite books) is why The Recognitions has to be so fucking hostile.
Wait, no. First, a few examples of what passes for the "dazzling wit" for which The Recognitions is (un)known. And it's not that these aren't funny; they are. But they are so stubbornly academic that it becomes a turnoff after a while.
"--Scatological? --Eschatological, the doctrine of last things... --Good Lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you're writing for a very small audience. --So...? how many people were there in Plato's Republic?"
"She offered salad; but they were out of whisky."
"If it is Meniere's syndrome, we'll have you up staggering around in no time. Of course I don't know where you'll stagger to, with no papers. What's your name? We can't name a disease after you if you don't have a name."
"...the Virgin stark in an icon looking like a playing-card queen, the Infant with a hand out as though hailing a passing cab." (nothing is safe from Gaddis)
"The separate words were in capital letters, and included: FAITH HOPE CHARITY CONSCIENCE FAIR PLAY COURAGE and HUMBLE." (this being, apparently, a joke about less educated folks not using parallel structure on their signage)
And yeah, all that stuff is funny, but it's usually buried in mountains of obscure art and literary references and painful line-by-line descriptions of insufferable party-goers and parties. It's really easy to miss stuff. I don't mind a book that demands a second reading, but it should deliver at least some of the proverbial goods the first time around.
But Gaddis is also profoundly and obviously misanthropic, and that makes it difficult to get involved with the story, since the story is basically at the expense of all the main characters. And they're all so goddamn pathetic. Wyatt is more or less insane for large parts of the book, Esther is a succubus, Otto is basically the same character as Keating from The Fountainhead, and most of the other characters are either neurotic or criminal. And pretty much none of their arcs conform to the basic plot arcs with which we're so familiar. How clever on Gaddis's part. Too bad no amount of cleverness can replace empathy.
But there's no denying that The Recognitions now has a presence for me in a way that only Big Ambitious books can. It was memorable, and carrying it around for 3 months was memorable too, although not in as good of a way. And it both demands and deserves rereading.
And you know what? It's pretty good. Definitely a work of genius, extremely well put together, chock-full of symbolism and flattish characters and all sorts of other pomo English-majory stuff. Endless riffs on fraudulence and forgery in all their incarnations. There are counterfeiters, quack doctors, plagiarists, and admen. And all that stuff is good, even if a certain distance concerning the characters makes it a little difficult to really like any of them. But what I can't figure out (and this is also the reason it's not one of my favorite books) is why The Recognitions has to be so fucking hostile.
Wait, no. First, a few examples of what passes for the "dazzling wit" for which The Recognitions is (un)known. And it's not that these aren't funny; they are. But they are so stubbornly academic that it becomes a turnoff after a while.
"--Scatological? --Eschatological, the doctrine of last things... --Good Lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you're writing for a very small audience. --So...? how many people were there in Plato's Republic?"
"She offered salad; but they were out of whisky."
"If it is Meniere's syndrome, we'll have you up staggering around in no time. Of course I don't know where you'll stagger to, with no papers. What's your name? We can't name a disease after you if you don't have a name."
"...the Virgin stark in an icon looking like a playing-card queen, the Infant with a hand out as though hailing a passing cab." (nothing is safe from Gaddis)
"The separate words were in capital letters, and included: FAITH HOPE CHARITY CONSCIENCE FAIR PLAY COURAGE and HUMBLE." (this being, apparently, a joke about less educated folks not using parallel structure on their signage)
And yeah, all that stuff is funny, but it's usually buried in mountains of obscure art and literary references and painful line-by-line descriptions of insufferable party-goers and parties. It's really easy to miss stuff. I don't mind a book that demands a second reading, but it should deliver at least some of the proverbial goods the first time around.
But Gaddis is also profoundly and obviously misanthropic, and that makes it difficult to get involved with the story, since the story is basically at the expense of all the main characters. And they're all so goddamn pathetic. Wyatt is more or less insane for large parts of the book, Esther is a succubus, Otto is basically the same character as Keating from The Fountainhead, and most of the other characters are either neurotic or criminal. And pretty much none of their arcs conform to the basic plot arcs with which we're so familiar. How clever on Gaddis's part. Too bad no amount of cleverness can replace empathy.
But there's no denying that The Recognitions now has a presence for me in a way that only Big Ambitious books can. It was memorable, and carrying it around for 3 months was memorable too, although not in as good of a way. And it both demands and deserves rereading.
November 16, 2009
The Recognitions—my favourite Gaddis, although he wrote several wonderful books—delves deeply into the theme amongst the most intriguing to me in a novel: exploration of the dichotomy between the increase in both man's material well-being and his spiritual anguish in this, the modern age of consumer capitalism and progressive democracy; an age in which even the sacred and the beautiful are debauched by being made to sell themselves in the ubiquitous marketplace.
The principal characters in Gaddis' world are continually forced to make the choice between embracing searing, difficult truths or being seduced by the painless blandishments of an endless parade of fraudulence and forgeries—the latter aptly represented by the constant references to people enthusiastically endorsing Dale Carnegie's seminal mask-making handbook How to Win Friends and Influence People. What is art in the modern age? Is it determined by mass appeal, by those who care less for the inspiration and universality and beauty of a particular piece, and more about whether the in crowd has embraced it, whether it is popular? In such a world, what separates the forger from the creator? Does such a distinction actually matter? Indeed, since even the greatest of artists have stolen from the past, does forgery exist any more as a crime? What is authenticity? Does it become great art if it is born from suffering? Can a world seeking anodyne similarity acknowledge the blood-price and soul-rendering required to capture moments of subcutaneous truth? Do we require God for art to truly exist? It is into this hazy world that we are plunged.
And what a terrific stock of characters Gaddis has created for us, too: Wyatt Gwyon, the master forger and tortured soul, sweating blood to make money for himself and others; his father Reverend Gwyon, who, not finding the answers and solace he seeks in Christianity, turns to the worship of the sun-god Mithras; Otto, a plagiarist and dilettante would-be writer and naïf-reedemer, a self-portrait of the author brilliantly realized; the book-ending forger and event-initiator Sinisterra; pious musician Stanely, a spiritual-seeker and creator of a requiem-mass (spoken of highly, though seldom-played); Esme, painter, poet, beauty, the perfect manifestation of the desired virgin-whore; and this just scratches the tip of the rich palette of personalities we are given.
The text itself alternates from labyrinthine paragraphs of rich and complex prose, to page-after-page of rapid-fire dialogue—ringing absolutely true, at times disorienting and difficult to follow—the latter a style that would comprise almost the entirety of Gaddis' two-decades-later followup JR. There are many works which tackle this subject, but few which succeed so masterfully, are written in such dense, probing, magnificent language, and are so capable of being both riotously funny and intensely moving as The Recognitions.
The principal characters in Gaddis' world are continually forced to make the choice between embracing searing, difficult truths or being seduced by the painless blandishments of an endless parade of fraudulence and forgeries—the latter aptly represented by the constant references to people enthusiastically endorsing Dale Carnegie's seminal mask-making handbook How to Win Friends and Influence People. What is art in the modern age? Is it determined by mass appeal, by those who care less for the inspiration and universality and beauty of a particular piece, and more about whether the in crowd has embraced it, whether it is popular? In such a world, what separates the forger from the creator? Does such a distinction actually matter? Indeed, since even the greatest of artists have stolen from the past, does forgery exist any more as a crime? What is authenticity? Does it become great art if it is born from suffering? Can a world seeking anodyne similarity acknowledge the blood-price and soul-rendering required to capture moments of subcutaneous truth? Do we require God for art to truly exist? It is into this hazy world that we are plunged.
And what a terrific stock of characters Gaddis has created for us, too: Wyatt Gwyon, the master forger and tortured soul, sweating blood to make money for himself and others; his father Reverend Gwyon, who, not finding the answers and solace he seeks in Christianity, turns to the worship of the sun-god Mithras; Otto, a plagiarist and dilettante would-be writer and naïf-reedemer, a self-portrait of the author brilliantly realized; the book-ending forger and event-initiator Sinisterra; pious musician Stanely, a spiritual-seeker and creator of a requiem-mass (spoken of highly, though seldom-played); Esme, painter, poet, beauty, the perfect manifestation of the desired virgin-whore; and this just scratches the tip of the rich palette of personalities we are given.
The text itself alternates from labyrinthine paragraphs of rich and complex prose, to page-after-page of rapid-fire dialogue—ringing absolutely true, at times disorienting and difficult to follow—the latter a style that would comprise almost the entirety of Gaddis' two-decades-later followup JR. There are many works which tackle this subject, but few which succeed so masterfully, are written in such dense, probing, magnificent language, and are so capable of being both riotously funny and intensely moving as The Recognitions.
March 7, 2022
Lo había leído en algunos sitios, pero no me lo terminaba de creer. Me refiero al supuesto Síndrome de Estocolmo Literario, un trastorno que se manifiesta en lectores que, tras enfrentarse a una obra mastodóntica y de gran complejidad, la consideran una obra maestra por el simple hecho de que han conseguido terminarla.
Hasta hoy no había prestado crédito al dichoso síndrome, me parecía improbable que tuviera una base sólida y, en todo caso, sería algo que les sucedería a otros, más impresionables y menos leídos, pero en ningún caso a mí.
Sin embargo, he de confesar que recientemente he sido víctima de un secuestro libresco a manos de uno de los criminales más perseguidos del mundo literario, el mismísimo William Gaddis, y su banda. Y supongo que tengo que admitir que desde entonces me encuentro bajo la influencia del dichoso síndrome sueco, porque, lejos de culpar a mis captores, estoy fascinado por ellos.
Yo me creía invulnerable y al principio nada me hizo sospechar del peligro que corría: las primeras páginas, en las que el entrañable reverendo Gwyon comienza a hacer de las suyas, daban la sensación de ser algo bastante inocuo. Las aventuras de este estrafalario sacerdote durante su viaje a la España de entreguerras y sus extravagantes sermones no podían ser sino una especie de farsa o broma.
Sí, ahora me resulta evidente que este simpático reverendo calvinista y su pintoresca parroquia rural eran un gancho y ese primer capítulo tan asequible y divertido no es más que el cebo de la trampa; una vez que lo pruebas estás perdido.
Pronto las cosas empezaron a tornarse más siniestras. Wyatt, el hijo del reverendo, se reveló como el cabecilla de la banda (con permiso de Gaddis, el cerebro del golpe) y empezó a quedar claro que, además del secuestro, estos rufianes andaban metidos en muchos otros asuntos turbios, como la falsificación de obras de arte. El propio Wyatt, que resultó tener un inusual talento para la pintura, era capaz de pintar nuevas tablas de maestros flamencos, combinando elementos de pinturas auténticas, con una perfección y una rapidez increíbles.
Si yo, a causa de mi síndrome, tengo suficientes excusas con las que exculpar a mis captores, ellos tienen muchas más. Y mejores. Por ejemplo, aunque todos, de una forma u otra, se dedicaran a estafar a incautos con sus burdas copias, en realidad estaban creando arte (incluso cuando el pobre diablo de Sinisterra imprime sus personales billetes de 20 dólares) o, mejor aún, demostrando que la creación y autenticidad son imposibles y que todo es copia de algo anterior.
¿Qué valor tiene la autenticidad, la originalidad, si es que tal cosa existió alguna vez? La falsedad es una epidemia de la que nadie escapa, tampoco en este nutrido grupo de facinerosos, donde aquellos que pueden parecer más auténticos, como Stanley —un músico obsesionado con la religión— o Esme —artista y modelo adicta a las sustancias y los hombres nocivos— lo son más por confusión que por convicción. La fijación por la mentira de los chicos de Gaddis llega hasta el punto de que las principales víctimas de su engaño son ellos mismos: se creen miembros de una élite bohemia e intelectual, artistas rebeldes e incomprendidos, y no son más que un grupo de patéticos actores interpretando una obra mil veces puesta en escena anteriormente.
A poco que se les echa un vistazo a sus creaciones —la obra de teatro de Otto, los poemas de Esme, incluso las casi perfectas pinturas flamencas de Wyatt— se hace evidente de que todo es copia, pose, repetición… pero es que ¿no lo es también la propia The Recognitions? Prácticamente cada frase de la novela es una referencia o incluso una cita textual (la mayoría de las veces sin atribuir) a algún texto anterior. ¿Hace eso que sea una novela peor?
Mejor o peor, lo que es indudable es que se trata de una novela única: una obra maestra de la literatura posmoderna que ataca con rabia las propias bases del género, como la apropiación de otros textos, la mezcla de estilos o la fragmentación narrativa. Gaddis parece querer demostrar que si la originalidad existe no es, como solemos pensar, la capacidad de crear algo nunca visto hasta ahora sino la habilidad de combinar con acierto elementos ya existentes en las obras de los que nos precedieron —absorbidas lentamente por osmosis cultural y sedimentadas en nuestra alma hasta que formar parte de nuestra misma esencia— de una manera que represente el espíritu de nuestra época. Algo parecido a lo que escribió Borges sobre Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, o a las reflexiones de Proust sobre la esencia del arte en En busca del tiempo perdido .
La idea sería, por tanto, desechar de una vez por todas esa visión del arte como una sucesión de genios destruyendo todo lo anterior y creando el mundo de nuevo, desde cero, y sustituirla por un proceso evolutivo, por una cadena en la que cada eslabón, en cierto modo, contiene a todos los anteriores.
Este particular eslabón de la cadena, The Recognitions, además de conectar con toda la literatura que le precede, está fuertemente anclado en el tiempo y el lugar que describe, extendiendo sus ramificaciones por todo el Greenwich Village neoyorquino, que el propio Gaddis frecuentó en los cincuenta. Cualquiera que fuese alguien en la escena intelectual del Village, o pretendiera serlo, o simplemente se conformara con revolotear alrededor de alguno de sus bohemios miembros, aparece retratado —todos, curiosamente, con un libro o revista bajo el brazo a todas horas— en las páginas de The Recognitions.
Hablar de los personajes de The Recognitions es algo que hay que pensarse dos veces. Como si de una novela fractal se tratase, la historia de personaje daría para escribir una novela independiente. Sin embargo, si tengo que escoger a uno, en lugar de decidirme por alguno de los miembros más conspicuos de la banda, me quedo con Esme. Es difícil imaginar qué hace una persona tan poco terrenal mezclada con semejante pandilla de hampones, pero lo hemos visto en mil películas: a los mafiosos les gusta que su chica sea parte de la banda, y Gaddis no iba a ser menos —aunque tuviera que conformarse con hacerlo solo en la ficción.
Para hablar de Esme hay que hacer un poco de investigación y remontarse al tiempo en que Gaddis daba sus primeros pasos en su carrera delictiva. Gaddis tenía veinticinco años y acababa de dejar Harvard sin graduarse cuando conoció a Sheri Martinelli. Ambos vivían en el Village y frecuentaban las mismas amistades y los mismos locales. Inevitablemente el joven e inexperto Gaddis quedó prendado de aquella chica, artista y musa, amiga de Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound o Charlie Parker; una mujer fuerte e independiente mucho más experimentada que él en todo y que “se parecía más a una obra de arte,” dijo de ella el periodista Anatole Broyard, “que a una mujer bonita.” Martinelli, por su parte, no debió quedar muy impresionada por el joven escritor, un niño de mamá que no era rival para los muchos pretendientes de la musa.
Probablemente Gaddis nunca llegó a nada con Martinelli, pero la inmortalizó como Esme en The Recognitions, al tiempo que aprovechaba para darle un repaso a sus competidores —Max o Chabby Sinisterra estarían también inspirados en personajes reales— y se caricaturizaba a sí mismo como Otto, un ridículo e inseguro aspirante a escritor… como en la película Sospechosos habituales, el pobre diablo es el cerebro de la banda, disfrazado.
Esme, a pesar de sus muchos pretendientes, de quien está enamorada —a su particular manera, eso sí— es de Wyatt, para quien posa como modelo de madonas flamencas (“pero que no se vean las marcas de aguja en el brazo,” le advierten a Wyatt al encargarle una Anunciación de Hubert van Eyck). Así que poco puede hacer el pobre Otto que, como Gaddis en la vida real, persigue sin éxito a Esme.
Otto es también un personaje muy interesante. No sé si es debido a su retorcido sentido del humor o a un grave problema de autoestima, pero el (auto)retrato que Gaddis dibuja de Otto y de su obra es realmente patético. Otto, siempre corto de inspiración, ha ido anotando cada frase, cada idea de sus conocidos que le parecía ingeniosa y original y, sin darse cuenta de que todo el mundo se limita a repetir lo que a su vez han oído o leído en otra parte, las ha incluido en su manuscrito. El resultado es una simple concatenación de plagios y lugares comunes que lleva al absurdo la idea de la creación como cadena ininterrumpida, anteriormente expuesta.
Con semejantes miembros, es comprensible que al principio la banda de Gaddis me pareciera muy original, por no decir extravagante, y pensé que se debía a sus vínculos con la bohemia del Village. Luego he aprendido que esta trama criminal venía de mucho más lejos y que, más que un grupo mafioso, se trataba de una especie de secta, lo que explicaría lo obsesionados que la mayoría de los personajes estaban con la religión, desde los más morbosos traumas con los dogmas católicos hasta una peculiar fijación por antiguas herejías.
De hecho, el origen de The Recognitions se puede trazar hasta Clemente de Roma, que escribió sus Reconocimientos en el siglo I después de Cristo; un texto filosófico-religioso escrito en forma de relato que se puede considerar un antepasado directo de la novela moderna. Pero los Reconocimientos clementinos ni están escritos por Clemente ni datan del siglo I; es otra falsificación más, un refrito de quién sabe qué obras anteriores, como las tablas de Wyatt o la obra de Otto. Además de su dudosa originalidad y su carácter sincrético, por ambas obras desfila un buen número de personajes de lo más extravagante y pintoresco.
Entre los personajes más memorables de los Reconocimiento clementinos está Faustus, que inspiró, siglos después, el mito de Fausto; una figura muy presente en The Recognitions, a veces de una manera evidente, como el inquietante caniche negro de Recktall Brown, un diabólico coleccionista de arte y marchante de falsificaciones que ha firmado un intrigante pacto con Wyatt, otras veces de formas más sutiles.
Pero al margen de las implicaciones más oscuras de la trama, los numerosos guiños fáusticos y referencias a mitos y religiones de la antigüedad se podrían entender como una extensión de la teoría del arte como cadena de copias a todas las esferas del pensamiento humano: incluso las religiones y los mitos se copian unos a otros para adaptarse a los tiempos.
Volviendo a mi historia, por mucho que estuviera disfrutando de tan malas compañías, llegó un momento en que la cosa se puso peliaguda de verdad. Ya no se trataba de secuestros librescos, falsificaciones y suplantaciones de identidad; la situación, como en cualquier buen noir, comenzó a estar fuera de control: violencia excesiva y gratuita, asesinatos, mutilaciones, suicidios. Entonces, cuando parecía que ya no había esperanza y mi secuestro iba a terminar en tragedia, los chicos de Gaddis se desbandaron y huyeron a Europa… y me soltaron.
Ahora, de nuevo en libertad, no consigo culpar a mis captores. ¿Síndrome de Estocolmo? Puede que haya algo de eso. Uno no puede dejar de sentirse orgulloso de haber dominado semejante bestia salvaje. Algo parecido me sucedió tras mi primera lectura de La broma infinita , por ejemplo, pero lo cierto es que después de la segunda lectura pude comprobar que la imponente novela de Wallace era, indudablemente, una obra maestra. Sí, a veces es difícil separar la genialidad de la complejidad.
No se puede negar que The Recognitions es un libro endiabladamente complicado. La literatura norteamericana experimental de posguerra ha dado un puñado de brillantes mentes criminales (Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon), pero Gaddis puede que sea el más salvaje de todos. Quizá no sea el más denso en referencias, el que utiliza una prosa más radical, o una estructura más deconstruida, ni siquiera el más filosófico, pero en The Recognitions hay buenas dosis de todo eso y más.
Con decenas de personajes y líneas argumentales, y llena de oscuras referencias culturales, la dificultad de la novela se ve acentuada por complicados recursos narrativos. como personajes que cambian de nombre o lo pierden, saltos temporales o de narrador, voces que se superponen… Abundan, por ejemplo, caóticas fiestas y reuniones en las que el diálogo salta de una conversación a otra sin aviso, sin identificar quién o de qué hablan; una especie de magma primigenio en ebullición que contiene los principios activos de todo, pero donde nada está completamente definido. Aunque no nos engañemos, en una fiesta de verdad tampoco es fácil enterarse de qué está pasando.
Curiosamente, en contraposición a esas escenas mundanas descritas con tanto detalle, los acontecimientos cruciales de la trama, los más dramáticos y transcendentales, quedan todos sobreentendidos y, a veces, es fácil pasarlos por alto si uno no está atento.
En mi opinión, una de las claves para sobrevivir al cautiverio fue prestar la atención justa al baile de personajes y a las referencias literarias, históricas, sociales y religiosas que plagan el texto. La única forma de controlar la ansiedad es renunciar a querer entenderlo todo, algo que seguramente Gaddis no quería que sus lectores hicieran; su objetivo debía ser más bien que el lector fuera en todo momento consciente de que nada es nuevo y que todo lo escrito, pintado o dicho no es sino un eco de una voz anterior.
Cuando uno consigue quitarse de encima la presión de entenderlo todo The Recognitions resulta ser, ante todo, una novela realmente divertida —siempre que uno le encuentre la gracia a un humor tan negro, claro está. Es una sátira salvaje que no deja títere con cabeza, desde la religión a la televisión, desde el mundillo intelectual alternativo del Village a la élite de coleccionistas de arte y críticos consagrados.
Y no todo es fino sarcasmo; para ser una novela tan densa, tan supuestamente intelectual, por momentos se convierte en una comedia de situación en la que abundan confusiones de identidad, enredos con dinero falso o meteduras de pata intentando conquistar a la chica. De la misma manera que en algún momento de la novela se descubre, al restaurar una pintura, que debajo de una obra maestra se esconde otra, y debajo otra más, The Recognitions también oculta múltiples capas.
Así que, aunque debería estar contento por ser libre de nuevo, no dejo de preguntarme: ¿por qué me soltaron al final del libro? No pagué más rescate que el tiempo dedicado a la lectura… o quizá sí; con tantas referencias fáusticas… ¿habré pagado mi libertad con mi alma? Mal negocio, porque por una parte yo me encontraba tan a gusto con Gaddis y sus chicos que me hubiera quedado en la banda para siempre y por otra ellos no se llevan ninguna ganga, mi alma lectora hace ya tiempo que estaba condenada.
Puede que todo lo anterior no sea sino mi síndrome escandinavo tratando de justificar al autor que me ha torturado sin piedad durante semanas. O puede que, traumas aparte, The Recognitions sea una auténtica obra maestra que compila el esfuerzo creativo de infinidad de textos que la precedieron y les da nueva vigencia. Sea como sea, quien piense que solo estoy satisfecho conmigo mismo por haber terminado la novela, se nota que no la ha leído… ¿Quién, después de meterse en el mundo de Gaddis, podría desear que este libro termine?
Hasta hoy no había prestado crédito al dichoso síndrome, me parecía improbable que tuviera una base sólida y, en todo caso, sería algo que les sucedería a otros, más impresionables y menos leídos, pero en ningún caso a mí.
Sin embargo, he de confesar que recientemente he sido víctima de un secuestro libresco a manos de uno de los criminales más perseguidos del mundo literario, el mismísimo William Gaddis, y su banda. Y supongo que tengo que admitir que desde entonces me encuentro bajo la influencia del dichoso síndrome sueco, porque, lejos de culpar a mis captores, estoy fascinado por ellos.
Yo me creía invulnerable y al principio nada me hizo sospechar del peligro que corría: las primeras páginas, en las que el entrañable reverendo Gwyon comienza a hacer de las suyas, daban la sensación de ser algo bastante inocuo. Las aventuras de este estrafalario sacerdote durante su viaje a la España de entreguerras y sus extravagantes sermones no podían ser sino una especie de farsa o broma.
Sí, ahora me resulta evidente que este simpático reverendo calvinista y su pintoresca parroquia rural eran un gancho y ese primer capítulo tan asequible y divertido no es más que el cebo de la trampa; una vez que lo pruebas estás perdido.
Pronto las cosas empezaron a tornarse más siniestras. Wyatt, el hijo del reverendo, se reveló como el cabecilla de la banda (con permiso de Gaddis, el cerebro del golpe) y empezó a quedar claro que, además del secuestro, estos rufianes andaban metidos en muchos otros asuntos turbios, como la falsificación de obras de arte. El propio Wyatt, que resultó tener un inusual talento para la pintura, era capaz de pintar nuevas tablas de maestros flamencos, combinando elementos de pinturas auténticas, con una perfección y una rapidez increíbles.
Si yo, a causa de mi síndrome, tengo suficientes excusas con las que exculpar a mis captores, ellos tienen muchas más. Y mejores. Por ejemplo, aunque todos, de una forma u otra, se dedicaran a estafar a incautos con sus burdas copias, en realidad estaban creando arte (incluso cuando el pobre diablo de Sinisterra imprime sus personales billetes de 20 dólares) o, mejor aún, demostrando que la creación y autenticidad son imposibles y que todo es copia de algo anterior.
That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates . . . you do not invent shapes, you know them.
¿Qué valor tiene la autenticidad, la originalidad, si es que tal cosa existió alguna vez? La falsedad es una epidemia de la que nadie escapa, tampoco en este nutrido grupo de facinerosos, donde aquellos que pueden parecer más auténticos, como Stanley —un músico obsesionado con la religión— o Esme —artista y modelo adicta a las sustancias y los hombres nocivos— lo son más por confusión que por convicción. La fijación por la mentira de los chicos de Gaddis llega hasta el punto de que las principales víctimas de su engaño son ellos mismos: se creen miembros de una élite bohemia e intelectual, artistas rebeldes e incomprendidos, y no son más que un grupo de patéticos actores interpretando una obra mil veces puesta en escena anteriormente.
A poco que se les echa un vistazo a sus creaciones —la obra de teatro de Otto, los poemas de Esme, incluso las casi perfectas pinturas flamencas de Wyatt— se hace evidente de que todo es copia, pose, repetición… pero es que ¿no lo es también la propia The Recognitions? Prácticamente cada frase de la novela es una referencia o incluso una cita textual (la mayoría de las veces sin atribuir) a algún texto anterior. ¿Hace eso que sea una novela peor?
Mejor o peor, lo que es indudable es que se trata de una novela única: una obra maestra de la literatura posmoderna que ataca con rabia las propias bases del género, como la apropiación de otros textos, la mezcla de estilos o la fragmentación narrativa. Gaddis parece querer demostrar que si la originalidad existe no es, como solemos pensar, la capacidad de crear algo nunca visto hasta ahora sino la habilidad de combinar con acierto elementos ya existentes en las obras de los que nos precedieron —absorbidas lentamente por osmosis cultural y sedimentadas en nuestra alma hasta que formar parte de nuestra misma esencia— de una manera que represente el espíritu de nuestra época. Algo parecido a lo que escribió Borges sobre Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, o a las reflexiones de Proust sobre la esencia del arte en En busca del tiempo perdido .
La idea sería, por tanto, desechar de una vez por todas esa visión del arte como una sucesión de genios destruyendo todo lo anterior y creando el mundo de nuevo, desde cero, y sustituirla por un proceso evolutivo, por una cadena en la que cada eslabón, en cierto modo, contiene a todos los anteriores.
—His work is so good it has almost been taken for forgery.
—What do you mean by that?
—By the lesser authorities, of course. The ones who look at paintings with twentieth-century eyes. Styles change, he mused, (…) most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure.
Este particular eslabón de la cadena, The Recognitions, además de conectar con toda la literatura que le precede, está fuertemente anclado en el tiempo y el lugar que describe, extendiendo sus ramificaciones por todo el Greenwich Village neoyorquino, que el propio Gaddis frecuentó en los cincuenta. Cualquiera que fuese alguien en la escena intelectual del Village, o pretendiera serlo, o simplemente se conformara con revolotear alrededor de alguno de sus bohemios miembros, aparece retratado —todos, curiosamente, con un libro o revista bajo el brazo a todas horas— en las páginas de The Recognitions.
Hablar de los personajes de The Recognitions es algo que hay que pensarse dos veces. Como si de una novela fractal se tratase, la historia de personaje daría para escribir una novela independiente. Sin embargo, si tengo que escoger a uno, en lugar de decidirme por alguno de los miembros más conspicuos de la banda, me quedo con Esme. Es difícil imaginar qué hace una persona tan poco terrenal mezclada con semejante pandilla de hampones, pero lo hemos visto en mil películas: a los mafiosos les gusta que su chica sea parte de la banda, y Gaddis no iba a ser menos —aunque tuviera que conformarse con hacerlo solo en la ficción.
Para hablar de Esme hay que hacer un poco de investigación y remontarse al tiempo en que Gaddis daba sus primeros pasos en su carrera delictiva. Gaddis tenía veinticinco años y acababa de dejar Harvard sin graduarse cuando conoció a Sheri Martinelli. Ambos vivían en el Village y frecuentaban las mismas amistades y los mismos locales. Inevitablemente el joven e inexperto Gaddis quedó prendado de aquella chica, artista y musa, amiga de Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound o Charlie Parker; una mujer fuerte e independiente mucho más experimentada que él en todo y que “se parecía más a una obra de arte,” dijo de ella el periodista Anatole Broyard, “que a una mujer bonita.” Martinelli, por su parte, no debió quedar muy impresionada por el joven escritor, un niño de mamá que no era rival para los muchos pretendientes de la musa.
Probablemente Gaddis nunca llegó a nada con Martinelli, pero la inmortalizó como Esme en The Recognitions, al tiempo que aprovechaba para darle un repaso a sus competidores —Max o Chabby Sinisterra estarían también inspirados en personajes reales— y se caricaturizaba a sí mismo como Otto, un ridículo e inseguro aspirante a escritor… como en la película Sospechosos habituales, el pobre diablo es el cerebro de la banda, disfrazado.
Esme, a pesar de sus muchos pretendientes, de quien está enamorada —a su particular manera, eso sí— es de Wyatt, para quien posa como modelo de madonas flamencas (“pero que no se vean las marcas de aguja en el brazo,” le advierten a Wyatt al encargarle una Anunciación de Hubert van Eyck). Así que poco puede hacer el pobre Otto que, como Gaddis en la vida real, persigue sin éxito a Esme.
Otto es también un personaje muy interesante. No sé si es debido a su retorcido sentido del humor o a un grave problema de autoestima, pero el (auto)retrato que Gaddis dibuja de Otto y de su obra es realmente patético. Otto, siempre corto de inspiración, ha ido anotando cada frase, cada idea de sus conocidos que le parecía ingeniosa y original y, sin darse cuenta de que todo el mundo se limita a repetir lo que a su vez han oído o leído en otra parte, las ha incluido en su manuscrito. El resultado es una simple concatenación de plagios y lugares comunes que lleva al absurdo la idea de la creación como cadena ininterrumpida, anteriormente expuesta.
Con semejantes miembros, es comprensible que al principio la banda de Gaddis me pareciera muy original, por no decir extravagante, y pensé que se debía a sus vínculos con la bohemia del Village. Luego he aprendido que esta trama criminal venía de mucho más lejos y que, más que un grupo mafioso, se trataba de una especie de secta, lo que explicaría lo obsesionados que la mayoría de los personajes estaban con la religión, desde los más morbosos traumas con los dogmas católicos hasta una peculiar fijación por antiguas herejías.
De hecho, el origen de The Recognitions se puede trazar hasta Clemente de Roma, que escribió sus Reconocimientos en el siglo I después de Cristo; un texto filosófico-religioso escrito en forma de relato que se puede considerar un antepasado directo de la novela moderna. Pero los Reconocimientos clementinos ni están escritos por Clemente ni datan del siglo I; es otra falsificación más, un refrito de quién sabe qué obras anteriores, como las tablas de Wyatt o la obra de Otto. Además de su dudosa originalidad y su carácter sincrético, por ambas obras desfila un buen número de personajes de lo más extravagante y pintoresco.
Entre los personajes más memorables de los Reconocimiento clementinos está Faustus, que inspiró, siglos después, el mito de Fausto; una figura muy presente en The Recognitions, a veces de una manera evidente, como el inquietante caniche negro de Recktall Brown, un diabólico coleccionista de arte y marchante de falsificaciones que ha firmado un intrigante pacto con Wyatt, otras veces de formas más sutiles.
You know, Brown, if by any stretch of imagination I could accuse you of being literary, I might accuse you of sponsoring this illusion that one comes to grips with reality only through the commission of evil.
Pero al margen de las implicaciones más oscuras de la trama, los numerosos guiños fáusticos y referencias a mitos y religiones de la antigüedad se podrían entender como una extensión de la teoría del arte como cadena de copias a todas las esferas del pensamiento humano: incluso las religiones y los mitos se copian unos a otros para adaptarse a los tiempos.
—He even said once, that the saints were counterfeits of Christ, and that Christ was a counterfeit of God.
Volviendo a mi historia, por mucho que estuviera disfrutando de tan malas compañías, llegó un momento en que la cosa se puso peliaguda de verdad. Ya no se trataba de secuestros librescos, falsificaciones y suplantaciones de identidad; la situación, como en cualquier buen noir, comenzó a estar fuera de control: violencia excesiva y gratuita, asesinatos, mutilaciones, suicidios. Entonces, cuando parecía que ya no había esperanza y mi secuestro iba a terminar en tragedia, los chicos de Gaddis se desbandaron y huyeron a Europa… y me soltaron.
Ahora, de nuevo en libertad, no consigo culpar a mis captores. ¿Síndrome de Estocolmo? Puede que haya algo de eso. Uno no puede dejar de sentirse orgulloso de haber dominado semejante bestia salvaje. Algo parecido me sucedió tras mi primera lectura de La broma infinita , por ejemplo, pero lo cierto es que después de la segunda lectura pude comprobar que la imponente novela de Wallace era, indudablemente, una obra maestra. Sí, a veces es difícil separar la genialidad de la complejidad.
—Damn it, it isn’t, it isn’t. It’s a question of . . . it’s being surrounded by people who don’t have any sense of . . . no sense that what they’re doing means anything. Don’t you understand that? That there’s any sense of necessity about their work, that it has to be done, that it’s theirs. And if they feel that way how can they see anything necessary in anyone else’s? And it . . . every work of art is a work of perfect necessity.
No se puede negar que The Recognitions es un libro endiabladamente complicado. La literatura norteamericana experimental de posguerra ha dado un puñado de brillantes mentes criminales (Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon), pero Gaddis puede que sea el más salvaje de todos. Quizá no sea el más denso en referencias, el que utiliza una prosa más radical, o una estructura más deconstruida, ni siquiera el más filosófico, pero en The Recognitions hay buenas dosis de todo eso y más.
Con decenas de personajes y líneas argumentales, y llena de oscuras referencias culturales, la dificultad de la novela se ve acentuada por complicados recursos narrativos. como personajes que cambian de nombre o lo pierden, saltos temporales o de narrador, voces que se superponen… Abundan, por ejemplo, caóticas fiestas y reuniones en las que el diálogo salta de una conversación a otra sin aviso, sin identificar quién o de qué hablan; una especie de magma primigenio en ebullición que contiene los principios activos de todo, pero donde nada está completamente definido. Aunque no nos engañemos, en una fiesta de verdad tampoco es fácil enterarse de qué está pasando.
Curiosamente, en contraposición a esas escenas mundanas descritas con tanto detalle, los acontecimientos cruciales de la trama, los más dramáticos y transcendentales, quedan todos sobreentendidos y, a veces, es fácil pasarlos por alto si uno no está atento.
En mi opinión, una de las claves para sobrevivir al cautiverio fue prestar la atención justa al baile de personajes y a las referencias literarias, históricas, sociales y religiosas que plagan el texto. La única forma de controlar la ansiedad es renunciar a querer entenderlo todo, algo que seguramente Gaddis no quería que sus lectores hicieran; su objetivo debía ser más bien que el lector fuera en todo momento consciente de que nada es nuevo y que todo lo escrito, pintado o dicho no es sino un eco de una voz anterior.
Cuando uno consigue quitarse de encima la presión de entenderlo todo The Recognitions resulta ser, ante todo, una novela realmente divertida —siempre que uno le encuentre la gracia a un humor tan negro, claro está. Es una sátira salvaje que no deja títere con cabeza, desde la religión a la televisión, desde el mundillo intelectual alternativo del Village a la élite de coleccionistas de arte y críticos consagrados.
Y no todo es fino sarcasmo; para ser una novela tan densa, tan supuestamente intelectual, por momentos se convierte en una comedia de situación en la que abundan confusiones de identidad, enredos con dinero falso o meteduras de pata intentando conquistar a la chica. De la misma manera que en algún momento de la novela se descubre, al restaurar una pintura, que debajo de una obra maestra se esconde otra, y debajo otra más, The Recognitions también oculta múltiples capas.
There was Arthur, with a beard, who was writing a new life of Christ, to be published under another name, the same name he had used when he reviewed his first book, published under his own name, a satire on the Bible so badly received that he joined the chorus of its detractors.
Así que, aunque debería estar contento por ser libre de nuevo, no dejo de preguntarme: ¿por qué me soltaron al final del libro? No pagué más rescate que el tiempo dedicado a la lectura… o quizá sí; con tantas referencias fáusticas… ¿habré pagado mi libertad con mi alma? Mal negocio, porque por una parte yo me encontraba tan a gusto con Gaddis y sus chicos que me hubiera quedado en la banda para siempre y por otra ellos no se llevan ninguna ganga, mi alma lectora hace ya tiempo que estaba condenada.
Puede que todo lo anterior no sea sino mi síndrome escandinavo tratando de justificar al autor que me ha torturado sin piedad durante semanas. O puede que, traumas aparte, The Recognitions sea una auténtica obra maestra que compila el esfuerzo creativo de infinidad de textos que la precedieron y les da nueva vigencia. Sea como sea, quien piense que solo estoy satisfecho conmigo mismo por haber terminado la novela, se nota que no la ha leído… ¿Quién, después de meterse en el mundo de Gaddis, podría desear que este libro termine?
April 1, 2016
No, I cannot review this. Yes, it took some work. No, your library doesn't have it. Yes, you should read it. Have I answered all your questions? This book has impacted me in ways which I've only provisionally understood.
February 29, 2020
I can’t add anything with my review that hasn’t already been said better elsewhere by much sharper readers. But reading The Recognitions was life-changing. One of the more incredible reading experiences of my life thus far. Here are an assortment of reasons why.
- THE HUMOR. This book doesn’t get enough credit for being funny, and Gaddis doesn’t get enough credit for writing brilliant comedy, but Gaddis wrote BRILLIANT comedy and The Recognitions is no exception. It’s also dramatic, deeply sad, cynical, pessimistic, wordy and dense, but there’s A LOT of humor to reward you for the occasionally quite challenging reading experience. I laughed out loud so often while reading that I lost count, and I can say that about all of Gaddis’s novels, really. But even here, in his first novel, his humor was readily apparent.
- THE DIALOGUE. Those party scenes where everyone is talking over each other, drunkenly milling about and careening from conversation to conversation are some of the greatest feats of dialogue writing I’ve ever encountered. Gaddis is the master of realistic dialogue, and his second novel JR (quite understandably) gets most of the praise on this front, but the dialogue here in The Recognitions is of a similarly high caliber (as is the dialogue in his other novels, Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own).
- OTTO. Otto is one of the funniest (and ultimately pathetic) characters in all of American literature. Constantly pursuing literary greatness but seemingly unwilling to do much actual writing, faking an arm injury and wearing a sling in order to have a conversation piece, every scene with Otto was pure gold, and often had me laughing aloud.
- STANLEY. I loved the Stanley character as well. A deeply religious composer, terrified (ironically, given his eventual fate, particularly of buildings collapsing while he is inside of them), guilt-ridden, sexually repressed and striving for musical greatness while ACTUALLY putting in the work, Stanley makes a great counterpoint to Otto’s constant bullshitting and half-assery. Although ultimately, his ambition and obsession get the better of him and he is ultimately killed in the process of performing his magnum opus on an organ in a centuries old cathedral when said cathedral collapses on him as a result of him playing it too loudly. What a character, that Stanley. Unforgettable.
- WYATT’S STORY ARC. Leaves the priesthood, disappointing his father in the process, for a career in painting, which he excels at. Moves to NYC to launch his art career, but is undermined by unscrupulous reviewers and lives the life of a starving artist until the odious Recktall Brown comes around and offers him a Faustian bargain: paint new works in the style of the Dutch/Flemish masters, which Brown will sell as newly discovered original works to unsuspecting wealthy buyers. Naturally, his time spent on the forgeries gradually takes up more and more of the time he ought to be spend on making his own art, and at this point things start to go quite badly for poor Wyatt. Most notably, he undergoes a massive identity crisis. What follows is one of the greatest stories ever told, not to mention perhaps the greatest satire of the art world written during the 20th century.
And lastly, but probably most importantly:
- HOW SHOCKINGLY READABLE IT ACTUALLY WAS! Everyone told me this would be the most difficult read ever, basically. And in some ways, they weren’t wrong to caution me: the writing is indeed dense; the page count massive; the characters talk a lot about art that I had superficial knowledge of (at best) before reading; there’s a lot of religion/theology and a good amount of untranslated non-English (French, Hungarian, German, etc.), not to mention technical musical language galore. But even so, it wasn’t particularly difficult to follow and it wasn’t a chore to read. You don’t need to get every little reference or allusion to appreciate this novel. If you do, it will undoubtedly enrich the experienced, but in no way is it absolutely necessary. Seriously, it’s challenging but not truly difficult. It actually tells a story (LOTS of them), has a plot, has engaging characters that do interesting things. It has all the elements of an eminently readable novel, it just has them in abundance to the point where reading it seems a daunting undertaking. But it really isn’t, or at the very least isn’t as difficult as most would have you believe.
Anyway, read this novel. And then read all of Gaddis. Then tell other people to read Gaddis. And then reread him. He was a one of a kind writer, and The Recognitions is truly a one of a kind novel. Masterpiece.
- THE HUMOR. This book doesn’t get enough credit for being funny, and Gaddis doesn’t get enough credit for writing brilliant comedy, but Gaddis wrote BRILLIANT comedy and The Recognitions is no exception. It’s also dramatic, deeply sad, cynical, pessimistic, wordy and dense, but there’s A LOT of humor to reward you for the occasionally quite challenging reading experience. I laughed out loud so often while reading that I lost count, and I can say that about all of Gaddis’s novels, really. But even here, in his first novel, his humor was readily apparent.
- THE DIALOGUE. Those party scenes where everyone is talking over each other, drunkenly milling about and careening from conversation to conversation are some of the greatest feats of dialogue writing I’ve ever encountered. Gaddis is the master of realistic dialogue, and his second novel JR (quite understandably) gets most of the praise on this front, but the dialogue here in The Recognitions is of a similarly high caliber (as is the dialogue in his other novels, Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own).
- OTTO. Otto is one of the funniest (and ultimately pathetic) characters in all of American literature. Constantly pursuing literary greatness but seemingly unwilling to do much actual writing, faking an arm injury and wearing a sling in order to have a conversation piece, every scene with Otto was pure gold, and often had me laughing aloud.
- STANLEY. I loved the Stanley character as well. A deeply religious composer, terrified (ironically, given his eventual fate, particularly of buildings collapsing while he is inside of them), guilt-ridden, sexually repressed and striving for musical greatness while ACTUALLY putting in the work, Stanley makes a great counterpoint to Otto’s constant bullshitting and half-assery. Although ultimately, his ambition and obsession get the better of him and he is ultimately killed in the process of performing his magnum opus on an organ in a centuries old cathedral when said cathedral collapses on him as a result of him playing it too loudly. What a character, that Stanley. Unforgettable.
- WYATT’S STORY ARC. Leaves the priesthood, disappointing his father in the process, for a career in painting, which he excels at. Moves to NYC to launch his art career, but is undermined by unscrupulous reviewers and lives the life of a starving artist until the odious Recktall Brown comes around and offers him a Faustian bargain: paint new works in the style of the Dutch/Flemish masters, which Brown will sell as newly discovered original works to unsuspecting wealthy buyers. Naturally, his time spent on the forgeries gradually takes up more and more of the time he ought to be spend on making his own art, and at this point things start to go quite badly for poor Wyatt. Most notably, he undergoes a massive identity crisis. What follows is one of the greatest stories ever told, not to mention perhaps the greatest satire of the art world written during the 20th century.
And lastly, but probably most importantly:
- HOW SHOCKINGLY READABLE IT ACTUALLY WAS! Everyone told me this would be the most difficult read ever, basically. And in some ways, they weren’t wrong to caution me: the writing is indeed dense; the page count massive; the characters talk a lot about art that I had superficial knowledge of (at best) before reading; there’s a lot of religion/theology and a good amount of untranslated non-English (French, Hungarian, German, etc.), not to mention technical musical language galore. But even so, it wasn’t particularly difficult to follow and it wasn’t a chore to read. You don’t need to get every little reference or allusion to appreciate this novel. If you do, it will undoubtedly enrich the experienced, but in no way is it absolutely necessary. Seriously, it’s challenging but not truly difficult. It actually tells a story (LOTS of them), has a plot, has engaging characters that do interesting things. It has all the elements of an eminently readable novel, it just has them in abundance to the point where reading it seems a daunting undertaking. But it really isn’t, or at the very least isn’t as difficult as most would have you believe.
Anyway, read this novel. And then read all of Gaddis. Then tell other people to read Gaddis. And then reread him. He was a one of a kind writer, and The Recognitions is truly a one of a kind novel. Masterpiece.
November 2, 2013
We live in Rome, he says, turning his face to the room again,
-Caligula's Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says, bringing all his weight to his feet.-How can they even suspect a self who can do more, when they live under absolutely no obligation. There are so few beautiful things in the world.
Such higher machinations proved beyond me. So much was required. Too often I was found wanting. The Recognitions is an uncharted continent. My cap is tipped to those unlacing the Incognito. I made my way through it but am left baffled, perhaps awaiting some Stanley whom will search for me and yield elucidation.
Color me knackered. I am weary and dehydrated and manipulating my favorite images from The Recognitions like some layman chancing upon talismans. It is unjust to compare, though I transgress: I liked Ulysses far more, found such poetic, whereas -- despite the marvel Gaddis engenders -- I feel dirty and bleak. There is a thread of thought which finds that conclusion one of design.
-Caligula's Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says, bringing all his weight to his feet.-How can they even suspect a self who can do more, when they live under absolutely no obligation. There are so few beautiful things in the world.
Such higher machinations proved beyond me. So much was required. Too often I was found wanting. The Recognitions is an uncharted continent. My cap is tipped to those unlacing the Incognito. I made my way through it but am left baffled, perhaps awaiting some Stanley whom will search for me and yield elucidation.
Color me knackered. I am weary and dehydrated and manipulating my favorite images from The Recognitions like some layman chancing upon talismans. It is unjust to compare, though I transgress: I liked Ulysses far more, found such poetic, whereas -- despite the marvel Gaddis engenders -- I feel dirty and bleak. There is a thread of thought which finds that conclusion one of design.
December 9, 2012
Is that how he meant it? Before Otto could answer she went on, lowering her eye again, - No, how did he know what he meant. When people tell a truth they do not understand what they mean, they say it by accident, it goes through them and they do not recognize it until someone accuses them of telling the truth, then they try to recover it as their own and it escapes.
I want to tell what I mean, what my truth is, without fearing what came out is not what I meant, without hoping what came out sounded smarter than what I really meant, without pretending that was what I meant if someone else puts what I said in wider words than my chasm could fit. I can't finish reading my reviews the whole way through to even spell check them. I want to write what I mean and be understood. Is there a way to tell the truth as a bell? I want faces, lives, stories, truths, people being real, other people, places. Touching, not owned, not my life. It is my not alone. I know the world is fake, cold, spent. It doesn't have to be that way. That's what I want. The enough part when I know it doesn't have to be that way. It's not always that way.
“-This … these … the art historians and the critics talking about every objects and … everything having its own form and density and … its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this … and so in the painting every detail reflects … God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. -There isn’t any.”
I want to tell you that I want this. I think about this all of the time. I write about this all of the time. It's my running into my fire even though I'm going to be wrong, it's going to get me no where. I just want stories to be real. Stories are real. They are everywhere. Some people see the perspective in everything and they can tell that truth.
It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: “Love’s dart” that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; “sweet cautery”, the “stolen heart,” the “ravished understanding,” the “rape of love”: in Provencal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, “dying of not being able to die”.
I'll tell you that I don't believe anyone wants to be a painting, a muse, the rowboat or the book of love/heaven/Santa's list.
He wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who's been kind to him, is that lying? It isn't as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?
This is all I have ever wanted.
Tell them, as the composer predicted, there's nothing left but knowledge and evidence, and art's become a sort of tailbone surviving in us from that good prehensile tail we held on with then.
No, people die. There will be another eye, another feeling and God is not dead.
I wanted mirrors. I wanted to see something. When they become real to me and people who are real become more real to me because it is all together in me of things that happened. I would want to read How to Make Friends and Influence People to make friends too. The burned sun spots on the retinas when your dream is allowed like when Stanley is alone on the ship to see hard and arms and fire. When you are alone with the god dreams art and you are painting it yourself. It's when you dream your life away instead of what really happens like romantic encounters that never actually happened. You want this, you expect this. Maybe they don't really want the world. Maybe people don't actually want to pry into anyone's life. It doesn't have to mean that. I want the enough part that's not suspicion. I guess they say that this is a girl thing to do to analyze encounters to death until they don't resemble what transpired. It's playing a song in your head until you can get home to listen to it on repeat for hours. One way is painfully better and the other is not enough and it is the best you've got. It's making your own life. Maybe it's wrong or maybe it's trying to live on separate planes. One isn't always as hard as the other. I liked reading about the people interactions and seeing the two sides, like different places to live that's not always as hard as the real one. Who am I kidding? I never want to get married.
I love art. I never gave a shit about what anyone expected to happen once they made the art. I'm copying and copying and not living and living for what could be good enough. I want to tell you that is what art is to me. It's a way to not be suspicious. To capture a lost moment, without being suspicious. I want to recognize and make art so that everything can always be like that. I would copy and not even know I was doing it. I'd repeat their faces and try to find everyone. I don't blame anyone.
“Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.”
I'm awfully tired of me going on about what I wanted to say, what I couldn't say, what I meant to say. Can someone say it for me so I could sing along? There can be another The Recognitions review. I know about trying to live life and trying to find ways that makes it not so hard.
I want to tell what I mean, what my truth is, without fearing what came out is not what I meant, without hoping what came out sounded smarter than what I really meant, without pretending that was what I meant if someone else puts what I said in wider words than my chasm could fit. I can't finish reading my reviews the whole way through to even spell check them. I want to write what I mean and be understood. Is there a way to tell the truth as a bell? I want faces, lives, stories, truths, people being real, other people, places. Touching, not owned, not my life. It is my not alone. I know the world is fake, cold, spent. It doesn't have to be that way. That's what I want. The enough part when I know it doesn't have to be that way. It's not always that way.
“-This … these … the art historians and the critics talking about every objects and … everything having its own form and density and … its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this … and so in the painting every detail reflects … God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. -There isn’t any.”
I want to tell you that I want this. I think about this all of the time. I write about this all of the time. It's my running into my fire even though I'm going to be wrong, it's going to get me no where. I just want stories to be real. Stories are real. They are everywhere. Some people see the perspective in everything and they can tell that truth.
It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: “Love’s dart” that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; “sweet cautery”, the “stolen heart,” the “ravished understanding,” the “rape of love”: in Provencal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, “dying of not being able to die”.
I'll tell you that I don't believe anyone wants to be a painting, a muse, the rowboat or the book of love/heaven/Santa's list.
He wants to be Ibsen for just that moment, and dedicate his play to someone who's been kind to him, is that lying? It isn't as bad as people doing work they have no respect for at all. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?
This is all I have ever wanted.
Tell them, as the composer predicted, there's nothing left but knowledge and evidence, and art's become a sort of tailbone surviving in us from that good prehensile tail we held on with then.
No, people die. There will be another eye, another feeling and God is not dead.
I wanted mirrors. I wanted to see something. When they become real to me and people who are real become more real to me because it is all together in me of things that happened. I would want to read How to Make Friends and Influence People to make friends too. The burned sun spots on the retinas when your dream is allowed like when Stanley is alone on the ship to see hard and arms and fire. When you are alone with the god dreams art and you are painting it yourself. It's when you dream your life away instead of what really happens like romantic encounters that never actually happened. You want this, you expect this. Maybe they don't really want the world. Maybe people don't actually want to pry into anyone's life. It doesn't have to mean that. I want the enough part that's not suspicion. I guess they say that this is a girl thing to do to analyze encounters to death until they don't resemble what transpired. It's playing a song in your head until you can get home to listen to it on repeat for hours. One way is painfully better and the other is not enough and it is the best you've got. It's making your own life. Maybe it's wrong or maybe it's trying to live on separate planes. One isn't always as hard as the other. I liked reading about the people interactions and seeing the two sides, like different places to live that's not always as hard as the real one. Who am I kidding? I never want to get married.
I love art. I never gave a shit about what anyone expected to happen once they made the art. I'm copying and copying and not living and living for what could be good enough. I want to tell you that is what art is to me. It's a way to not be suspicious. To capture a lost moment, without being suspicious. I want to recognize and make art so that everything can always be like that. I would copy and not even know I was doing it. I'd repeat their faces and try to find everyone. I don't blame anyone.
“Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.”
I'm awfully tired of me going on about what I wanted to say, what I couldn't say, what I meant to say. Can someone say it for me so I could sing along? There can be another The Recognitions review. I know about trying to live life and trying to find ways that makes it not so hard.
March 28, 2012
My first impulse was to just copy some old, obscure review of 'the Recognitions' and claim it as my own. Alas, even the reviewers, academics, and cult worshipers of the God of PoMo all seem at once thunderstruck AND intimidated by Gaddis' opus.
What I understood was brilliant, what I didn't understand is most likely obscene. This is not a novel for the casual beach read, although as I write this, I am on a beach...washing sand out of my ebbs and salt off my flow, so never mind.
What I understood was brilliant, what I didn't understand is most likely obscene. This is not a novel for the casual beach read, although as I write this, I am on a beach...washing sand out of my ebbs and salt off my flow, so never mind.
August 31, 2023
“Most original people are forced to devote all their time to plagiarizing.”
Boy it took several attempts over as many years to get this one over and done with. I was in the right place and met the book at the right time on this occasion. Oh and, incidentally, before we start:
12th book from my reading challenge with Ted.
#13 - Read a book longer than 900 pages.
Let’s remove the responsibility of saying anything of worth by starting with some links to others who did it much better than I can ever hope to.
Here is Chris’s (Leaf by Leaf) amazing video on the book.
Here is Nick’s (Read | Read) amazing video on the book.
I was also stressing about what to say – doing research and writing something up about a mammoth can be stressful. Then I realized that I am not being graded on anything I say (otherwise I would be writing this with a few hours left until the submission deadline), nor am I being paid (otherwise I would be complaining about it to someone over text). And, indeed, as William Gass writes in his introduction to the Penguin edition of this book:
Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. “Okay, I get it,” we say, dusting our hands, “and that takes care of that.” “At last I understand Kafka” is a foolish and conceited remark.
So, with the knowledge of the fact that I will come back to this book again and that no review can ever hope to be all-encompassing, here are some of my thoughts. As always with these thoughts, I don’t see myself as being the one that can give you a synopsis or even a taste of what the book is about. I will respect your right to be enthusiastic about it and pick it up should you choose to, and I will even relinquish the service of providing some blurbs about the book, leaving it instead to the back cover; a horrible idea, but an idea nevertheless.
If you want an only slightly spoiler-filled review, here is a great video as well.
Earlier this month, I was feeling jaded about the contemporary book industry and its reception among critics and reviewers. I wrote an entire review ranting, being unable to keep rancor out of my voice. I felt as though I had been had, and that I was unwillingly participating in an infinite carousel ride in hell. Of course, I did not for one second assume that this experience was exclusive to me or to the time period in which I find myself. It also wasn’t entirely difficult to find similar rants to soothe me on YouTube or in articles here and there. But… I don’t know. These didn’t feel malleable enough to allow me to form them to my own opinions. They also did not allow me to agree or disagree with them over a long period of time, as they built up short, quick theses and defended them on a relatively surface level. Now, I had been chipping at The Recognitions for a while, but it was suddenly as though my frame of reference was different. I was right there with the characters who were giving it to the art industry and ranting about the critics and the reviewers. It felt like a spiritual experience, reading this at a time where I needed it.
It is quite difficult to have the level of bitterness that Gaddis may have harbored toward these crowds. After all, though I retain a fantasy to write some fiction and potentially be recognized for it (thank you Mr. Gaddis for the distinction between wanting to write versus wanting to be a writer), I am nowhere close to where Gaddis would have been when he wrote this book, expecting the world. The world was not given. And, the world did not recognize The Recognitions. And, I am led to believe, the magnitude of his bitter apathy toward the world of art (as opposed to art in and of itself) grew. Steadily.
The moments where I was most in sync with this book were the moments where hypocrisy and the seemingly circus-like processions of it all were being called out by various characters. There would sometimes be passages in which this was occurring, but the undertones of intellectual elitism (in essence, pitting your IQ against another’s and celebrating when you come out victorious) would turn me off. g and the IQ bell curve are facts of life, but we could be more productive in assuring that the processes with which we approach life are all in sync and relatively healthy, free of anger, violence, social posturing, and, like I said, hypocrisy. Now, you may then think that g is implicated in the selection of life approaches, and if you want to have that particular conversation, shoot me a message. My point: I felt the calling out of inauthenticity to be cathartic, and being an outright dick to not be so cathartic. I drew some lines in the sand to delineate between those two. I feel pretty happy with my system. Sometimes I had trouble deciding where Gaddis saw himself. Lots of times in Otto. Sometimes in Wyatt. Sometimes in Stanley. Outside of that, I don’t think the point is for me to identify him anywhere.
A good scene of the calling out of implicit hypocrisy: there is a moment very early on in the book where Aunt May is saying that it is a shame that stocks and pillory have gone out of fashion, to which Reverend Gwyon responds:
“A shame to deprive us all of that satisfaction.”
What do you mean? Aunt May asks.
“The great satisfaction of seeing someone else punished for a deed of which we know ourselves capable.”
Boom. Nuggets like these are found with effort and excavation, and they are absolutely worth it. There is a sense of difficulty in reading the book of course, which comes about because I don’t have as much of a grasp on lots of the references. If I have not had enough sleep, following the interplay of the dialogues can be tortuous. The main character of the book is no longer referred to by name from an early point on, so you have to triangulate his presence in most of the book. The book is heavy and my wrists are small. There are too many foreign languages, “drunk Manhattan speak” being one of them. Despite it all, there are nuggets. And it’s just fun to do it. It is so much fun to read this. I feel so good doing it, and I enjoy myself quite a lot. I feel in contact with some good art, greater than myself and achieving something that means a lot to me. I am pretentious for sure. I have the makings of a lit-bro, as much as I don’t want to admit it (I swear to you, I am a McCarthy and Krasznahorkai shrine on the bookshelf away from being a full-blown lit-bro).
I bring these things up because… wait, do you hear that? Can you hear that? It’s a nauseating, almost screeching voice. Is that… fuck. RUN. RUN! It’s JONATHAN FRANZEN!!
I have previously ripped on Jonathan Franzen before, and I have even specifically linked to his article “Mr. Difficult”, which points out a host of things he finds wrong with William Gaddis and his books. I was typing up this review and looked up in the midst of a typing frenzy. There was a bag of peanut M&M's to my side, right next to a Happy Cola bag of Haribo. I am including that detail so if, on the off chance, Franzen reads this, he can find a few calming details and not feel excluded from my masturbatory piece. Either way, I realized that I had written up something like two pages on his points. I had brought in counter-arguments and had also quoted multiple authors and interviews to put in my point of view. Then I realized… wait a second. If I give Franzen his time here in a Gaddis review, he has won. So you know what? We are going to wait until I read The Corrections (a title which Franzen admitted was a direct homage to The Recognitions), and I will not only take up most of the review talking about his issues with “difficult” literature, but I will also scrutinize every single page with the same scrutiny that he hands out willy-nilly based on his whims and fancies. Let’s stick to the book here.
It occurred to me, while reading specific passages, that you could see this book as a vicious machine, a lie-detector, a test of some kind. What certain parties at Esther’s or Recktall Brown’s sounded like to the outsider sailing through them would come to be replicated in any review of this book (and after having typed this whole thing up, I find out about Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, which shat on the reviews of Gaddis’s book) . Perhaps this is why I am being careful to put down what I believe authentically - experiences and thoughts about the book while reading it and passages that were particularly poignant. I don’t find this a pain. That’s an important takeaway for me, something I have understood in the slow process of reading The Recognitions: allow art to elevate you (and you alone) as much as it is worth it, as much as it will benefit you and allow you to mature and expand your boundaries. Do not create a system where you are tempted to let it become a rat race. Do not use it for social prestige. It’s all well and good, being able to say that you have read a book that has the reputation that this one does. But so what? After a few likes and comments on a review on Goodreads, does anyone care? Lord help you if you are bringing this up at a party (I have had enough party scenes - please baby, no more parties). All that is left after is what the art leaves with you. That’s the serum that drips ever so slowly into your being, and you need it. Be authentic with it.
Alongside the main text, I have read quite a few companions. I have chipped away at the Gaddis letters (recently republished by NYRB and edited by Steven Moore), and I have gone through the Paris Review interview as well. Both fascinating portraits of the author, and I hope to be able to explore it more in a future review. There is a letter in there from Gaddis to Oppenheimer! Dope. For now, here are some passages from the novel that I liked a lot – until we meet again.
1) Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.
2) Grdn: We hate thngs only becse in thm we see elemnts whch we secrtly hate in rslves, Gordon's creator wrote, at the foot of a page almost covered with notations (one of which covered half the page, and only two of which were not Gordon). He paused for a moment, tapping his lip with the pencil; then, Grdn: Orignlty not inventn bt snse of recall, recgntion, pttrns alrdy thr, q.
3) Damn it, am I the only one who feels this way? Have I made this all up alone? If you can do something other people can't do, they think you ought to want to do it just because they can't.
4) For those nomads who sold the time of their lives, time was either money being made or money being spent, and life a cycle of living and unliving, as the sailor's life loses the beginning, middle, and end of the voyage from port to destination and becomes repetition of sea and ashore, of slumber and violence.
5) We are, I suppose, basically in agreement . . . , affirming the fact that most argument is no more than agreement reached at different moments.
6) Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you're thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.
7) Science assures us that "If man were wiped out, it is extremely improbable that anything very similar would ever again evolve." Threat and comfort: we need only turn the particle of the earth's crust read with such eager pride to make one of the other. Here in the foremost shambles of time Mr. Pivner stood, heir to that colossus of self-justification, Reason, one of whose first accomplishments was to effectively sever itself from the absurd, irrational, contaminating chaos of the past. Obtruding over centuries of gestation appeared this triumphal abortion: Reason supplied means, and eliminated ends.
What followed was entirely reasonable: the means, so abruptly brought within reach, became ends in themselves. And to substitute the growth of one's bank account for the growth of one's self worked out very well. It had worked out almost until it reached Mr. Pivner, for so long as the means had remained possible of endless expansion, those ends of other ages (which had never shown themselves very stable) were shelved as abstractions to justify the means, and the confidently rational notion that peace, harmony, virtue, and other tattered constituents of the Golden Rule would come along of themselves was taken, quite reasonably, for granted.
8) I live surrounded by people who've no idea what a hero is. And do you know why? Why, because they've no idea of what they're doing themselves. None! Not an idea in this world or the next of what they're doing on God's green earth. Oh, it's a strange land you've come visiting to see me here. With no idea of a hero, you see, but they need them so badly that they make up special games, hitting a ball with a stick and all kinds of nonsense, and the men who win the games are their heroes. And then, he went on, warming to what was apparently a severe preoccupation of his, —when that gets stale, they arrange whole wars which have no more reason for existing than the people who fight in them, and a boy may become a hero fighting for a life that's worth something for the first time, threatened with loss of it, that or dying to save the lives of people who've no idea what to do with them. Fortunately, he went on, and inclined his head nearer, –there's a way out for most of them. They make money, the Town Carpenter whispered hoarsely.
There is seriously far too many for me to list all of them. Perhaps I will end with the one where Anselm is complaining at a gathering, talking about a “half-ass critic” who is “a three time psychoanaloser”, when someone trying to appear clever walks by and we overhear this snippet of conversation for all of one second:
“Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience...”
Boy it took several attempts over as many years to get this one over and done with. I was in the right place and met the book at the right time on this occasion. Oh and, incidentally, before we start:
12th book from my reading challenge with Ted.
#13 - Read a book longer than 900 pages.
Let’s remove the responsibility of saying anything of worth by starting with some links to others who did it much better than I can ever hope to.
Here is Chris’s (Leaf by Leaf) amazing video on the book.
Here is Nick’s (Read | Read) amazing video on the book.
I was also stressing about what to say – doing research and writing something up about a mammoth can be stressful. Then I realized that I am not being graded on anything I say (otherwise I would be writing this with a few hours left until the submission deadline), nor am I being paid (otherwise I would be complaining about it to someone over text). And, indeed, as William Gass writes in his introduction to the Penguin edition of this book:
Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. “Okay, I get it,” we say, dusting our hands, “and that takes care of that.” “At last I understand Kafka” is a foolish and conceited remark.
So, with the knowledge of the fact that I will come back to this book again and that no review can ever hope to be all-encompassing, here are some of my thoughts. As always with these thoughts, I don’t see myself as being the one that can give you a synopsis or even a taste of what the book is about. I will respect your right to be enthusiastic about it and pick it up should you choose to, and I will even relinquish the service of providing some blurbs about the book, leaving it instead to the back cover; a horrible idea, but an idea nevertheless.
If you want an only slightly spoiler-filled review, here is a great video as well.
Earlier this month, I was feeling jaded about the contemporary book industry and its reception among critics and reviewers. I wrote an entire review ranting, being unable to keep rancor out of my voice. I felt as though I had been had, and that I was unwillingly participating in an infinite carousel ride in hell. Of course, I did not for one second assume that this experience was exclusive to me or to the time period in which I find myself. It also wasn’t entirely difficult to find similar rants to soothe me on YouTube or in articles here and there. But… I don’t know. These didn’t feel malleable enough to allow me to form them to my own opinions. They also did not allow me to agree or disagree with them over a long period of time, as they built up short, quick theses and defended them on a relatively surface level. Now, I had been chipping at The Recognitions for a while, but it was suddenly as though my frame of reference was different. I was right there with the characters who were giving it to the art industry and ranting about the critics and the reviewers. It felt like a spiritual experience, reading this at a time where I needed it.
It is quite difficult to have the level of bitterness that Gaddis may have harbored toward these crowds. After all, though I retain a fantasy to write some fiction and potentially be recognized for it (thank you Mr. Gaddis for the distinction between wanting to write versus wanting to be a writer), I am nowhere close to where Gaddis would have been when he wrote this book, expecting the world. The world was not given. And, the world did not recognize The Recognitions. And, I am led to believe, the magnitude of his bitter apathy toward the world of art (as opposed to art in and of itself) grew. Steadily.
The moments where I was most in sync with this book were the moments where hypocrisy and the seemingly circus-like processions of it all were being called out by various characters. There would sometimes be passages in which this was occurring, but the undertones of intellectual elitism (in essence, pitting your IQ against another’s and celebrating when you come out victorious) would turn me off. g and the IQ bell curve are facts of life, but we could be more productive in assuring that the processes with which we approach life are all in sync and relatively healthy, free of anger, violence, social posturing, and, like I said, hypocrisy. Now, you may then think that g is implicated in the selection of life approaches, and if you want to have that particular conversation, shoot me a message. My point: I felt the calling out of inauthenticity to be cathartic, and being an outright dick to not be so cathartic. I drew some lines in the sand to delineate between those two. I feel pretty happy with my system. Sometimes I had trouble deciding where Gaddis saw himself. Lots of times in Otto. Sometimes in Wyatt. Sometimes in Stanley. Outside of that, I don’t think the point is for me to identify him anywhere.
A good scene of the calling out of implicit hypocrisy: there is a moment very early on in the book where Aunt May is saying that it is a shame that stocks and pillory have gone out of fashion, to which Reverend Gwyon responds:
“A shame to deprive us all of that satisfaction.”
What do you mean? Aunt May asks.
“The great satisfaction of seeing someone else punished for a deed of which we know ourselves capable.”
Boom. Nuggets like these are found with effort and excavation, and they are absolutely worth it. There is a sense of difficulty in reading the book of course, which comes about because I don’t have as much of a grasp on lots of the references. If I have not had enough sleep, following the interplay of the dialogues can be tortuous. The main character of the book is no longer referred to by name from an early point on, so you have to triangulate his presence in most of the book. The book is heavy and my wrists are small. There are too many foreign languages, “drunk Manhattan speak” being one of them. Despite it all, there are nuggets. And it’s just fun to do it. It is so much fun to read this. I feel so good doing it, and I enjoy myself quite a lot. I feel in contact with some good art, greater than myself and achieving something that means a lot to me. I am pretentious for sure. I have the makings of a lit-bro, as much as I don’t want to admit it (I swear to you, I am a McCarthy and Krasznahorkai shrine on the bookshelf away from being a full-blown lit-bro).
I bring these things up because… wait, do you hear that? Can you hear that? It’s a nauseating, almost screeching voice. Is that… fuck. RUN. RUN! It’s JONATHAN FRANZEN!!
I have previously ripped on Jonathan Franzen before, and I have even specifically linked to his article “Mr. Difficult”, which points out a host of things he finds wrong with William Gaddis and his books. I was typing up this review and looked up in the midst of a typing frenzy. There was a bag of peanut M&M's to my side, right next to a Happy Cola bag of Haribo. I am including that detail so if, on the off chance, Franzen reads this, he can find a few calming details and not feel excluded from my masturbatory piece. Either way, I realized that I had written up something like two pages on his points. I had brought in counter-arguments and had also quoted multiple authors and interviews to put in my point of view. Then I realized… wait a second. If I give Franzen his time here in a Gaddis review, he has won. So you know what? We are going to wait until I read The Corrections (a title which Franzen admitted was a direct homage to The Recognitions), and I will not only take up most of the review talking about his issues with “difficult” literature, but I will also scrutinize every single page with the same scrutiny that he hands out willy-nilly based on his whims and fancies. Let’s stick to the book here.
It occurred to me, while reading specific passages, that you could see this book as a vicious machine, a lie-detector, a test of some kind. What certain parties at Esther’s or Recktall Brown’s sounded like to the outsider sailing through them would come to be replicated in any review of this book (and after having typed this whole thing up, I find out about Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, which shat on the reviews of Gaddis’s book) . Perhaps this is why I am being careful to put down what I believe authentically - experiences and thoughts about the book while reading it and passages that were particularly poignant. I don’t find this a pain. That’s an important takeaway for me, something I have understood in the slow process of reading The Recognitions: allow art to elevate you (and you alone) as much as it is worth it, as much as it will benefit you and allow you to mature and expand your boundaries. Do not create a system where you are tempted to let it become a rat race. Do not use it for social prestige. It’s all well and good, being able to say that you have read a book that has the reputation that this one does. But so what? After a few likes and comments on a review on Goodreads, does anyone care? Lord help you if you are bringing this up at a party (I have had enough party scenes - please baby, no more parties). All that is left after is what the art leaves with you. That’s the serum that drips ever so slowly into your being, and you need it. Be authentic with it.
Alongside the main text, I have read quite a few companions. I have chipped away at the Gaddis letters (recently republished by NYRB and edited by Steven Moore), and I have gone through the Paris Review interview as well. Both fascinating portraits of the author, and I hope to be able to explore it more in a future review. There is a letter in there from Gaddis to Oppenheimer! Dope. For now, here are some passages from the novel that I liked a lot – until we meet again.
1) Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.
2) Grdn: We hate thngs only becse in thm we see elemnts whch we secrtly hate in rslves, Gordon's creator wrote, at the foot of a page almost covered with notations (one of which covered half the page, and only two of which were not Gordon). He paused for a moment, tapping his lip with the pencil; then, Grdn: Orignlty not inventn bt snse of recall, recgntion, pttrns alrdy thr, q.
3) Damn it, am I the only one who feels this way? Have I made this all up alone? If you can do something other people can't do, they think you ought to want to do it just because they can't.
4) For those nomads who sold the time of their lives, time was either money being made or money being spent, and life a cycle of living and unliving, as the sailor's life loses the beginning, middle, and end of the voyage from port to destination and becomes repetition of sea and ashore, of slumber and violence.
5) We are, I suppose, basically in agreement . . . , affirming the fact that most argument is no more than agreement reached at different moments.
6) Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you're thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.
7) Science assures us that "If man were wiped out, it is extremely improbable that anything very similar would ever again evolve." Threat and comfort: we need only turn the particle of the earth's crust read with such eager pride to make one of the other. Here in the foremost shambles of time Mr. Pivner stood, heir to that colossus of self-justification, Reason, one of whose first accomplishments was to effectively sever itself from the absurd, irrational, contaminating chaos of the past. Obtruding over centuries of gestation appeared this triumphal abortion: Reason supplied means, and eliminated ends.
What followed was entirely reasonable: the means, so abruptly brought within reach, became ends in themselves. And to substitute the growth of one's bank account for the growth of one's self worked out very well. It had worked out almost until it reached Mr. Pivner, for so long as the means had remained possible of endless expansion, those ends of other ages (which had never shown themselves very stable) were shelved as abstractions to justify the means, and the confidently rational notion that peace, harmony, virtue, and other tattered constituents of the Golden Rule would come along of themselves was taken, quite reasonably, for granted.
8) I live surrounded by people who've no idea what a hero is. And do you know why? Why, because they've no idea of what they're doing themselves. None! Not an idea in this world or the next of what they're doing on God's green earth. Oh, it's a strange land you've come visiting to see me here. With no idea of a hero, you see, but they need them so badly that they make up special games, hitting a ball with a stick and all kinds of nonsense, and the men who win the games are their heroes. And then, he went on, warming to what was apparently a severe preoccupation of his, —when that gets stale, they arrange whole wars which have no more reason for existing than the people who fight in them, and a boy may become a hero fighting for a life that's worth something for the first time, threatened with loss of it, that or dying to save the lives of people who've no idea what to do with them. Fortunately, he went on, and inclined his head nearer, –there's a way out for most of them. They make money, the Town Carpenter whispered hoarsely.
There is seriously far too many for me to list all of them. Perhaps I will end with the one where Anselm is complaining at a gathering, talking about a “half-ass critic” who is “a three time psychoanaloser”, when someone trying to appear clever walks by and we overhear this snippet of conversation for all of one second:
“Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience...”
June 21, 2011
In a habit I sustained in college I make it a practice to underline the most quotable lines of novels I read: The Recognitions has underlines on every page. Gaddis is a major literary talent who hasn't yet even begun to receive the following of which he is worthy. This novel concerns the discoveries, both major and minor, of what is authentic in life: The Recognitions is enlightening, almost beatific, in the way in which it focuses upon the shortcomings and moral lapses of humans in pursuit of true art. From the starving painter whose unappreciated genius leads him to forge Flemish masters to a musician whose copied work played upon a great pipe organ brings down a chapel to counterfeitors of money and plagiarists of drama, this of work of Gaddis is the real thing. It is brilliant, witty, original and his command of the language is breathtakingly stunning in its execution. One can see the influence of James Joyce throughout the writing in an experimental style that is breakthrough. It is incredibly inventive and funny and astonishingly intelligent. It's no wonder that The Recognitions went unrecognized for so tragically long -- Gaddis is, without doubt, one of the top half-dozen of American literary novelists of the 20th century ranking with Bellow, Barth, Vonnegut, Hemingway and Faulkner. The writing is work by a fellow of verifiable genius: I strongly recommend that you to discover Gaddis -- he will enrich your life and help you better understand the nature of the personal epiphanies that give meaning to life.
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