The Recognitions
William Gaddis' way out of the machine
Literary types, in turning their gaze to the topic of American post-modern fiction, will inevitably conjure up a few names. Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo will usually get a mention. Likewise, in the part of the piece that looks at the historical roots of the form, we will likely find mentioned James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. These writers fall pretty neatly into two chronological periods - the 1920s and the 1970s and 80s. Yet, perched between these two, rests an American writer who really hasn’t gone down in history, who only a few select critics admire and then only likely because of the sense of elitism that worshiping at the feet of an ignored genius affords. That man is William Gaddis and his novel is The Recognitions.
Gaddis was apparently unimpressed by the utter lack of attention, let alone acclaim, that his novel received when it was published in the mid-1950s. To the extent that he didn’t pick up his typewriter again for another two decades. His later works, which I’ve yet to read, became progressively shorter - The Recognitions weighs in at nearly 1000 pages - and apparently more angry.
Yet I am not sure that Gaddis needed to be quite so forlorn or pissed off at the world, for ignoring his creation. Perhaps, in words he himself quotes mid-novel, it’s time had not yet come.
Postmodern writers traditionally utilise a couple of techniques that mark their leanings. We will oft see a somewhat poetic focus on the minutia of ordinary people’s lives - a defining feature of Joyce’s Ulysses. We will also see tendencies - latent in the consumerist culture of the time - taken to absurd extremes - as in Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Gaddis does these things too. But actually both his vision and intention are way grander than that of both his forbears and those who came in his wake. In fact Gaddis, like eighteenth century social theorist, Jeremy Bentham, does not merely wish to comment on the craziness of modern times. He wants to correct it.
The Recognitions is actually Gaddis’ attempt to correct the course of Western civilisation, away from the degeneration, already evident in his time, and back to uprightness and depth.
The Recognitions is actually not so much a novel but a Correctional Institute.
But how could a novel possibly be such a thing? Because, to get anything from it, you will have to be willing to learn anew how to read.
The Recognitions is notoriously difficult to read. Glance through some of the reviews on goodreads.com and this will be evident. People know it’s meant to be a neglected masterpiece and so they really try. But the frustration is nevertheless visible.
Classically, there are many ways of writing that make a novel hard to get into. There could perhaps be lengthy pages of descriptive prose, such as Hardy’s evocations of the Dorset countryside. There might be long meanders into tangential material, such as in Melville’s Moby Dick.
But the thing that marks Gaddis’ style is that he simply doesn’t do descriptive prose, not in the traditional sense. His writing is constantly leading away from surface appearance, off into the depths. He never stops pointing. Everything, for Gaddis, is a symbol.
Instead of traditional descriptive prose, Gaddis hurls blobs of paint at a canvas and allows your mind to fill in the gaps. Such a technique is of course nothing new. Part of the allure of reading novels, as distinct from watching movies, is that our own minds conjure up the characters according to our experiences of life.
But Gaddis does it differently. He only gives you the bare minimum of information needed to make sense of what is happening. And then only if you give the book your utterly undivided attention. You have to really stay present and focus, for nearly a thousand pages. Think you could perhaps listen to a bit of music in the background or quickly check the chat on X? No chance. You will be lost. Gaddis, like a prophet of old, will only allow you to follow him if you focus on his words utterly and let go of anything else you might wish to do with your attention.
For example, the novel is heaped full of dialogue. But not for Gaddis such traditional phrases as “Wyatt said” or “Esme answered.” Strands of dialogue are not given separate sentences and are merely preceded by an m-dash. You are left to work out from the context and the style of speaking who is saying what. No easy feat in many of the bar room scenes populated by a heap of diverse characters.
Gaddis also likes to open chapters with evocations of an archetypal or pre-modern world. But, as you begin to read each section, you will be left mystified as to which particular strand of the story is being picked up, at least for a page or two. And you will need to carry that opening thread live within you until you can finally place it in its correct location.
To get Gaddis, you must be willing to let him work on your cognitive facilities, much as a fitness coach works your body down the gym.
You may be beginning to see why I maintain that this novel’s time has yet to come.
We still haven’t descended quite deeply enough into the collapsed attention-span cesspool of modernity, such that we might permit Gaddis to pull us out. We are still clinging to the mantra of a bright new future, constantly playing in our ears, even though we now know that it’s being recited by an AI drone that can’t feel. We all suspect that, on sensing that we might have cancer, we will inevitably put off getting that lump checked out until it’s likely too late.
But Gaddis, whilst no longer with us in the flesh, has left us his antidote to modernity, and I find something redemptive in this.
So what is The Recognitions actually about?
Wyatt is the son of an American preacher, who’s mother died whilst sojourning with his father in Spain. He travels to Paris, as young artists eternally do, yet becomes disenchanted with the art world when a critic tries to engender funds from him to give his exhibition a good review.
Returning to the US, his marriage to Esther collapses as he refuses to give her his feelings, preferring to remain possessed by art and drawing energy and inspiration from the place that intensifies when men keep everything held inside. He becomes entangled with a muse and two very rich American con-men, who persuade him to create forgeries of traditional Dutch and Belgian masters, which they sell for fortunes on the market.
Myriad other characters and intertwined plots abound, all drawn apparently from Gaddis’ own experience of post-war America. Situations are often laced subtly with humour, and allusions to the plots of classic works are the norm rather than the exception.
Like Joyce before him, Gaddis projects archetypal significances into ordinary lives. But he also has his central character, Wyatt, wrestle deeply with the central questions of how to create meaning and how to have an authentic life.
His dismay at the crass commercialism of society is eternally evident and indeed constantly rubbed into the face of the reader. In this aspect, Gaddis is like a drunken Irish preacher, unable to communicate his horror of society in any other way but via castigatory sermonising, repeated endlessly. It is easy to see his hero as Gaddis’ own soul, stalking the empty crowded streets of New York - filled with persons but bereft of meaning.
Most commentators pick up on the Joycean aspect. But for me, the style and themes of Gaddis’ novel constantly bring up The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot’s evocation of a primal cite fourmillante that constantly steals the souls of its inhabitants through myriad devices, many calibrated to our past as mammals.
And, like Eliot, Gaddis recognises that the pathway out of the grasp of this soul-stealing machine of modernity cannot usefully be described with words. For words are the lifeblood of the machine. Rather it can only be pointed at. And those pointings are personal and need to be directed inward.
Thank you for reading.