On page 625 of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), we find “undisciplined lights . . . instructed by the tireless precision of the traffic lights turning green to red, red to green." Five pages later: “Undisciplined lights shone through the night instructed by the tireless precision of the squads of traffic lights, turning red to green, green to red.” The reader who has wearied of Gaddis’s notoriously challenging 933-page novel, the size and heft of a patio paver in this new NYRB edition, will gloat: There it is. The proof. This guy needed a damn editor.
But the reader attentive to the novel’s central tension—between sacred and profane, between real and ersatz, between genuine artistic creation and forgery, counterfeiting, and plagiarism, between the old and enduring and the new, shoddily constructed, and mass-produced—will allow that this repetition and many less obvious ones exist by design. They elicit a sensation of deja vu or of having been slipped a duplicate, a knockoff, a cheap imitation. Say, where have I seen this before? Is this the real thing? There is scarcely a stone out of place, after all, anywhere else in Gaddis’s cathedrallike edifice.
Gaddis wrote The Recognitions when he was just 32, and this is worth keeping in mind for two reasons. One is that it may soften the reader toward the novel’s excesses, which are also its strengths: its intricate, implausible, globe-trotting plot, its frequently overwrought prose, its ostentatiously erudite tangents, its gothic elements, which shade at times into Scooby-Doo territory. The other is that it demonstrates how sincerely devoted Gaddis remained, over a lifetime, to his exploration of authenticity. His final, posthumously published work, Agape Agape (2002), is an old man’s rambling monologue about that noxious symptom of a demystified, mechanized culture, a culture in decline: the player piano.
Gaddis himself (“Willie”) appears in The Recognitions, briefly, talking player pianos at a party, but notwithstanding this metagag, the novel is only superficially similar to the postmodern masterpieces with which it tends to be uneasily grouped. Truly, it is sui generis, as maniacally obsessed with what it seeks to preserve—craftsmanship, devotion, truth—as it is preoccupied with attacking fraudulence and flim-flam. Deeply conservative, in the strictest sense, it is also radically antagonistic toward a culture losing sight of what makes the authentic and the sacred more valuable than the new, the convenient, the reproducible, and the disposable.
The plot’s primary thread belongs to Wyatt Gwyon, a Calvinist minister’s son who elects to pursue painting rather than follow in his father’s footsteps. The minister himself, we later learn, is busily dabbling in the Mithraic mysteries and possibly going mad in the process. Gwyon fils has a preternatural gift for painting in the style of the Dutch and Flemish masters—his father owns an ill-gotten Hieronymus Bosch—and because nothing in America may exist and flourish without being made to serve Mammon, this ability is soon co-opted by a mercenary art critic, Basil Valentine, and a Mephistophelian trafficker in forgeries, Recktall Brown. (These evocative but silly names do belong to postmodernism.)
To air out the sepulchral atmosphere of this myth-inflected tale, we have a madcap parallel story about the comings and goings of a Greenwich Village bohemian coterie to which Wyatt is connected by his wife, Esther. She’s had an affair with Otto Pivner, the consummate poseur, a failing playwright whose dialogue is so banal that people suspect he’s stolen it from somewhere. He wears his arm in a sling to corroborate a lie about having been injured in a Central American revolution, malingering and posturing being preferred varieties of fraud among these “artists” who drink, smoke, and pontificate but produce little. (Even their erections are counterfeit: Half these guys are popping methyltestosterone, the period’s version of BlueChew.) The literary agent Agnes Deigh, the musician Stanley, the poet Anselm, and the all-purpose muse Esme round out this vicious little circle.
A case of mistaken identity (of course) leads a counterfeiter, Frank Sinisterra, to unload five grand in counterfeit twenties on Otto. Otto, like many of the book’s characters, ends up fleeing America for the anonymity and, presumably, authenticity of abroad. Wyatt, now going by the name Stephen (he goes by no name at all for the middle third of the book), winds up at the Spanish monastery where his mother is buried, working on a counterfeit mummy with Sinisterra, now disguised and going by the name Mr. Yak. The ending, suffice to say, brings the house down.
The book’s reputation for impenetrability—Gaddis was affectionately dubbed “Mr. Difficult” by Jonathan Franzen—isn’t undeserved, but neither should it scare anyone off. The book is like a foreign country; one must accept its customs and peculiarities if he or she plans on having any fun. So, it must be said that when it comes to scholastic learning, Gaddis is a Robert Burton-class showboat. Only the Vatican Apostolic Archive could hope to compete with The Recognitions for religious, artistic, scientific, and historical arcana. (“What did the devil teach Gerbet, Archbishop of Ravenna, in exchange for his soul?” The answer may surprise you!) The stuff is troweled on so thick that even minor characters have lines such as, “And there goes that awful boy who told me about Thomas a Becket. No, or was it a Kempis? . . . But imagine plagiarizing the imi-tation of Christ.”
But what might seem in a postmodern novel like information and performance for their own sake is closer to an armature or buttress in this one. All of the allusions and tangents encourage our contemplation of the crucial questions: What is real? What is authentically meaningful? The reader’s protracted encounter with a body of knowledge as obscure as it is rich and varied, encompassing theological disputation, art history, and minutely detailed forgery techniques, is a reminder of how much there is to know, of how deep runs the bedrock of the real compared to the shallow simulacrum we call an education.
The only thing Gaddis loves more than allusion and technical minutiae is dialogue, lots of it, and he uses it in a fashion that sorely but rewardingly taxes the reader’s concentration. His gift for ventriloquism is such that he’s as comfortable speaking for a refined criminal as a beatnik-adjacent artiste as a drunken bum in a Santa Claus suit. He writes dialogue not only in different registers but also in several languages. Party dialogue is his specialty—his many, lengthy scenes of Greenwich Village social life may be difficult to visualize, but there is a distinct musicality to his cross-talk, a powerful suggestion of eavesdropping. These scenes constitute a devastating satire of art-world pretensions, as relevant now as ever, and yet, they’re only a small part of the novel’s subtle humor.
Gaddis attempts something like an exhaustive catalog of the flimsy, phony, rigged, or otherwise fraudulent, from medieval splinters of the True Cross to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to paint-by-numbers kits. One result of this impastolike accumulation of detail is that the world of The Recognitions feels realer, more substantial, almost than life itself. (“If you’re going to make loaded dice, you have to make them perfect first,” a character notes.) A throwaway passage in which Sinisterra explains how his good-for-nothing son fixes dog races (“The chewing gum he puts between their pads to slow them up”) evokes the squalor of a track more vividly than a lesser novelist would bother to render his hero’s bedroom.
The connection the reader feels to a book this difficult is a bit like Stockholm syndrome. As one asymptotically nears the ending, he feels more charitable toward The Recognitions, more secure in the sense that he’s in the presence of the real thing. Once done, he feels ready to begin again, perhaps this time with a magnifying glass and a tower of reference works. The first critics were unkind to this book, perhaps resentful of their ratio of labor to remuneration. Would that they could look again now. “Everybody has that feeling,” a character says, “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.” This leading out that comes of engagement with authentic artistry is the meaning, etymologically, of education, and as an education, The Recognitions is second to none.