William Gaddis

William H. Gass

Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.

The Recognitions

Anthony Sabourin

2019:
This book is even better the second time around: a masterpiece, a container big enough for life, with the last 3rd remaining some of the bleakest shit I've ever read. 

2012:
“Any city that calls herself modern anticipates all her children’s needs, even to erecting something high for them to jump from: the Eiffel Tower went up more than half a century ago; but everywhere the rural population must make shift to civilize itself with what it has.”
—	
William Gaddis, The Recognitions (p. 946)

OK, so The Recognitions is like a 956 page version of that Frank Grimes episode of The Simpsons, but with way more references to religion and art and authenticity. Right near the end, Gaddis can no longer restrict his contempt to just these topics, and decides that, you know what, fuck everyone. He does this eloquently, but I've always had a soft spot for Homer.

Donald

What to say? It took me more than a year to read this. I'm puzzled about what Gaddis is doing in the last ~100 pages and welcome all suggestions for helpful essays and papers on the ending and the book in general.

Is it worth the time and effort? Yes!




Chapter 1 notes:

"It was in the Depot Tavern that he received condolences, accepted funerary offers of drink, and, when the these recognitions were exhausted, he sank into a habit of talking familiarly about persons and places unknown to his cronies, so that several of them suspected him of reading."

"At such an age, the blood of the lamb provoked no pleasant prospect for bathing; and resurrection a dispensable preoccupation for one who had not yet lived."

Chapter 2 notes:

The verbal fireworks begin with the Munich/Paris business. Need to compare Wyatt's teacher in Munich with Aunt May re: hatred of originality.

Chapter 3 notes:

Gaddis is the master of mid-century marriage trouble dialogue. This reminded me a lot of Carpenter Gothic.

Chapter 4-5 notes:

Poor Otto. (Also, Wyatt is to Otto what Rev. Gwyon was to Wyatt, except Otto isn't a genius.)

From chapter 6:

"Meanwhile, the winter sky had darkened. The blazing eye of the sun was gone, and the sky lowered upon the city with the weight of a featureless being smothering it against the earth. The peaks of its buildings reared against the sky seemed to hold that portentous weight at bay, in the great conspiracy of mother and son, the earth and the city, against the father threatening overhead; for it was Cronus the mother conspired with, to free the children suffocated between the intimately united bodies of their parents, where they could not see light.

Years had passed over the Titanic capital, as it grew to its full stature, and over the continent spread at its feet where a year’s relief from love cost eighty-five million dollars in headache remedies; and for faith: 15,670,944,200 aspirin tablets, carried like phylacteries. The state, this Titan’s namesake, breathed the smoke of forty billion cigarettes that year. Descending into the lungs of this reinforced concrete incarnation, the smoke circulated through steel lobules cushioned in pleural cavities of granite (though unlike the lungs of a good giant no concave inner surface was necessary for the heart), and from there it was exhaled through “diffuse into the spew of grime with which the ungrateful child affronted his father above. Fly-ash, cinders and sand, tar, soot, and sulfuric acid: six tons a day settled on this neighborhood where Otto stepped forth, his faculties so highly civilized that he seemed not to notice the billions of particles swirling round him, seemed not to notice the flashing of lights, the clangor of steel in conflict, the shouts, and the words spoken, timorous, temerarious, eructations of slate-colored lungs, seemed to acknowledge nothing but his own purpose, which led him east."

Chapter 7:

Esme!

Wyatt Gwyon forges art not from larceny but from love. He produces uncannily accurate "originals", faithful to the spirit and the letter of the Flemish masters. In an age when the real and the fake have become indistinguishable, Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot even recognize.

Daryl Houston

I first read The Recognitions around a decade ago, and when I added it to GoodReads some years later, I had this to say: "A great book (if at times a slow-going one), but inferior in my opinion to Gaddis's JR."

I've just finished a reread, and I suppose I agree with the assessment still, though I found the book more annoying than great this time through. It is surely ambitious. During this read, I felt like the ratio of content I found pleasurable or valuable to content that didn't make sense to me or seemed extraneous was a bit high. So there's greatness afoot here, but I think maybe it's not consistent or rewarding enough to see me through a third read of the book down the line. Compare to J R, which I've read several times already and which I'll continue to read every few years because it is full of humor, satire, anguish, bitterness, ambition, and music.

The Recognitions

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