Book Discussion: The Recognitions (Week One)

Reading: pp. 3-77

We can test this theory out as the weeks play out, but I think that the reader of The Recognitions knows pretty quickly if it is his or her type of book.  You may not know if you’ll finish it, but if you’ve made through the first two chapters, you know what you’re in for. The characters and narratives will accumulate, but really everything will hinge on what is what is laid out in these first two chapters.

Gaddis is  many things, but it would be difficult to say that he disguises his themes. If anything, he goes out of his way immediately to accost you with his themes in all their apparent simplicity. Just as JR begins with with a rustling voice that asks, “Money . . . ?”; and A Frolic Of His Own begins similarly mid-conversation with a single-word query, “Justice?”; the opening line of The Recognitions gets down to business quickly, “Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.”

I first read The Recognitions in Scotland, during a self-imposed break from my doctoral studies. I’d just spent two years not simply studying Herman Melville — people make a career out of that sort of thing — but positively immersed in his enigmatic novel The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. I had a sense that Gaddis’ novel would speak the same language of con-men and masks, but I wasn’t expecting the parallel to be so immediately apparent. Maybe there is a structural necessity to a book about duplicity and authenticity coming right out and identifying itself as such — a kind of open, Epimenidean confession.

What distinguishes The Recognitions from Melville’s final (i.e., non-posthumous) novel is the place of irony in their respective novels. This is to say that Gaddis is concerned with a non-naive telling of authenticity — “non-naive” in the sense that it is not wholly removed from duplicity — in a non-ironic register. With Melville, in my reading anyway, you’re just never quite sure where the Masquerade ends, and indeed, that is the point. Gaddis, however, would seem to insist that the mask does occasionally fall; but that (unlike the masquerades Rev. Gwyon’s wife prefers) they do so when you least expect or desire — i.e., the revelation may come too early or too late, and that which is revealed should never be assumed to be better or worse, or even altogether different, than the disguise. This, I would argue, is not altogether distinct from irony, but it is certainly irony of a different sort.

Autobiographically, I resonate with the opening chapter’s juxtaposition of the deeply religious (chapter one, set in New England) and the deeply secular (chapter two, set in France). Gaddis tells us up front that neither “side” has as tight a grip on authenticity or self-awareness as it thinks. The following passage from chapter one is especially striking:

When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers. If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries. Gwyon appreciated the extended hands of his people less and less as the months passed. The doctors refused him information of any direct nature, guarding the frail secrets of their failing magic as carefully as Zuni priests planting prayer sticks. And then were was that hallowed tribal agreement among them never to admit one another’s mistake, which they called Ethics.

On the other, the spiritual, hand, the congregation breathed out stale prayers for the boy’s recovery. But in the end they always gave their God full leave to do as He wished, to remove the lad if such were His sacred whim, loading the fever stricken boy with the guilt it had taken them generations to accumulate. They called this Humility. (p. 45)

This, alongside the blisteringly funny comments about France in chapter two — my favorite being the paragraph on page 75 that begins memorably, “Paris simmered stickily under the shadowed erection of the Eiffel Tower” — reminds us of a certain pretentiousness that accompanies not merely ambition, but more importantly one’s self-certainty about that ambition. (One wonders, in fact, whether the review of Wyatt’s exhibition on p. 74, which we will will see again, is not telling us something more than Wyatt at this point wants to believe.)

These are my take-away thoughts about the first couple of chapters anyway. What about you? Any favorite lines so far? Gags? (My personal favorite is the name of the German art magazine Wyatt reads, Die Fleischflaute? — ha!)  Fire away — we’re in this together.