Gaddis Drinking Club

Leaving the labyrinth

2005-03-19T17:31:00.001-05:00

Apologies for those five reprints in the comments to the last post! and thanks, Bud, for agreeing to twin up on farewell postings, thanks for your more carefully constructed piece which actually considers the text! I've taken the cheap way out and ride here on the backs of others...I found a terrific if tangential article about the connection between Gaddis and Thoreau while browsing in the university databases lately – I am waiting to be disconnected from these when the census date for paying for the semester comes and goes, as I’m not studying this semester.
I really liked this one from the New England Review - the author, J. M. Tyree, muses over the connection via an exchange Thoreau had with Emerson about family and creative work, and draws a long if tantalising bow over the fact that Thoreau, like Gaddis, was miserable in the city when he worked there, though probably for different reasons.

"...There may be another biographical dimension to Gaddis's connection with Thoreau. It is a curious and lesser-known fact that Thoreau spent a dismal period in New York, tutoring in Staten Island and attempting to sell his writing to city magazines during 1843. Thoreau quickly recoiled from an urban scene he did not wish to understand. In a June 8 letter to Emerson, he remarked:

'I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. It will be something to hate,-that's the advantage it will be to me-, and even the best people in it are a part of it and talk coolly about it.'

During the twenty-year hiatus between the publication of his first and second novels, Gaddis chose to remain in New York, manacled to jobs in corporate PR, working on campaigns for IBM and Pfizer, among other companies. How much he detested that world is obvious from the autobiographical character Eigen in JR, the author of a cult classic very much like The Recognitions.
As it had done for Thoreau, New York gave Gaddis "something to hate," and, like Thoreau, Gaddis was determined to use that hate to his advantage. JR, among other things, is perhaps the most devastating assessment of the shabbiness and slapdash cons of corporate America ever written.

One is tempted to say: it is as if an author with some of the temperament of Thoreau had decided to stay in the desperate city and document the things he hated, rather than withdrawing into the woods to speak of what he loved. Any such analogy is bound to be inadequate, but the idea does give direction to Gaddis's enduring interest in Thoreau, despite his super-saturation in an urban milieu. In a sense, Thoreau was trying to convince his fellow citizens to abandon their fruitless searches for transitory happiness and instead invest their time in a more authentic "economy."

Gaddis stayed on in the city and remained mostly content to describe the foolishness of those same fruitless searches, rather than trying to save people from themselves. Thus Gaddis became a comic novelist, a satirist at heart, rather than the saint, prophet, or ascetic that is made of Thoreau in the woods. He was modern, perhaps, because he disbelieved in an idealized bucolic withdrawal from the fragmentation of urban life. Authenticity-the impossible notion of remaining "inviolable," as one character in JR puts it-might be out of reach. The horror of the new had to be faced head-on, the abyss laughed at, or into.

I was interested too in this article by Christopher Knight, who seems to have written a bit on art and Gaddis, and who comments on Wyatt’s problems with abstract art before discussing recognition as an unfashionable theory for art criticism:

"...Of course, to speak this way--about a "recognition" that affords a glimpse of "the real essence of the thing"--is, in today's climate, to invite a quarrel, if not outright dismissal. One sails in safer critical waters if one takes note of the desire and then shows how misguided it is, how there is no escaping the labyrinth of the simulacrum.

For postmodern critics of Gaddis's The Recognitions, this has been easy enough, because Wyatt, turning his back on his own painting, pursues a desire for the real in the empire of the false--the forger's studio--a point that the novel's Basil Valentine makes with some pungency:
"--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" (690).

Still, if we stop here, with the satisfaction that necessity--so at the heart of Wyatt's purposes--finds itself trumped not only by the seduction of the false but by contingency itself, we make, I believe, a mistake. This is not to deny that in forging Flemish master-works Wyatt puts himself not much nearer the heart of necessity than those contemporaries who deny its reality. But it is to say that the artist who really demands watching here is not Wyatt, however talented, but Gaddis himself. And what we find is an artist enthralled by the notion of necessity, by the notion that this, rather than that, is what he must do. This conviction is not changed by the readily available instances of artists who seem to work without such a notion.

In After the End of Art, Danto is fond of pointing out these instances, as if they constituted a proof of necessity's demise. Gaddis, by contrast, seems to offer another sort of instance, not only of the artist who should "like to think of it all, what's eventually completed and what isn't, in terms of Samuel Butler's books 'coming to him wanting to be written,' but also of the artist who, even as he acknowledges the place which the failed artist has in his fiction, cautions readers not to confuse the purposes of the novels with "their own appetite for destruction."

So I leave this labyrinth of a book, with its serpentine coils turning on each other, content to revisit at another date, and curious as to why Gaddis found it necessary to attempt to force the modernist novel to carry these unfashionable concerns right through to Wyatt’s eventual decision to ‘live deliberately’ ( Thoreau again). And of course to finish the novel in a demonic cacophony of the voices which plague us throughout, and evidently plagued him as he lived and worked among them. The answer lies, I think, in his conscious emulation of Eliot – Knight goes on to discuss how Eliot and Pound had greater confidence, however, in what they were doing, than what we see in Gaddis’ first novel:

“…the suggestion is that the contemporary artist's response to the real is dramatically unlike that of the earlier modernists who, in the words of Frank Kermode, sought "to produce encyclopedias for the fallen modern world," sought "to get a world into a book, not a world or a book like Dante's, to be bound up in one volume of exactly one hundred cantos, but a world of heresies and exile, as seen by a privileged and tormented minority and got into books of strange fragmentary shapes, dreams of an order hardly to be apprehended."

The confidence of a Pound or an Eliot has, it would seem, left us, and our experience of things is more reflective of Geoffrey Hartman's contention that "the growth of historical consciousness, its multiplying of disparate models all of which press their claim, amounts to a peculiarly modern burden," to the point that we feel ourselves "surrounded by abstract potentialities, imperatives that cannot all be heeded, options exhausting the power of choice."

The sense that our choices now overwhelm us--to the point that whatever necessity any one imperative (religious, political, aesthetic, and so on) might entail soon gets lost in the wider world's shuffle--has, for Danto, become something like an abiding faith: "everything is possible, nothing is historically mandated: one thing is, so to say, as good as another. And that in my view is the objective condition for post-historical art" …”

With this in mind I'll leave the very last word to Mr. G,
“ He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”(956)

Refs:
Knight, C.J. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.
CLIO, Fall 1997, 27:1, p129.
Tyree, J.M. Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph. New England Review: Middlebury. 2004, 25:4, pp.148-162.

In Gaddis We Trust

2005-03-18T14:31:00.000-05:00

Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief,” which he characterized as “poetic faith” and has since come to mean the way we give our selves over to a play, book or film despite merely sitting in front of a stage or screen or reading mere words on a page.

But “poetic faith” seems to capture for me the way I felt when following William Gaddis through 956 pages of “The Recognitions” as nearly the entire slew of characters shows up in Rome or others in Paris, other characters who are linked by incidents thirty years in the past meet coincidentally as do several others who are intimately linked through one-degree of separation of another character, like Esme and Basil Valentine or Fuller and Otto, and so on, and so on.

I say poetic because I loved Gaddis's writing, both the realistic and figurative. I can't think of another writer that does dialogue better than Mr. Gaddis, flitting from one character to another without ever losing us (okay maybe sometimes losing us) by capturing dialect and character traits that serve as signals to always let us know who is doing the talking. He also managed to create images of scenes that would capture them perfectly, such as this at Brown's party:

“Like undersea flora, figures stood weaving, rooted to the floor, here and there one drifting as though caught in a cold current...”

This is not only a good simile for a party, but the words “cold current” and “drifting” are perfect metaphors for the entire scene and really for the book as a whole. Indeed, the party scenes drew out, like the final scene in the film “La Dolce Vita,” the emptiness of the book's population. The mutual complicity that the characters shared in their debased lives served as a fitting backdrop for the Wyatt story line and grounded his quest with purpose.

[spoiler alert!] When we see Wyatt eating bread that, soon after, we find was made in part with the ashes of his father, we know that this is the inevitable conclusion of the Oedipal story that Gass talks about in the introduction. The absurdity of the coincidence would never have worked if it weren't for some of the shallow characters doing the same thing out of sheer simplicity and the dumb luck of how they, the ashes, got there in the first place, simultaneously fulfilling Wyatt's destiny and shining a light on why he had to be the one.

If I had any real complaint about “T. Recs.” it would be that at times I felt like I was reading “The Onion” (a satirical newspaper). That is not entirely a bad thing, but Gaddis's satire works better at a higher plane than:

“...the quiz program, where a Mr. Crotcher had just answered a question concerning a fable with an ant for its hero, and won a completely furnished house in a popular suburban community called Arsole Acres.”

But when Maud bathes her newly adopted(?) baby while washing dishes...

“ - The most popular hostess of the week...! she said in a faint tone as she washed, first a dish, then a tiny foot, then a cup.... The eyes did not move from her. The baby's head was not conical nor, looking at it, did one have that impression; but immediately upon looking away such an image formed in the mind, and no amount of looking back, of studying it from strategic angles, served to temper the placid image which remained. When most of the dishes were done she had reached the neck, and suddenly she applied both thumbs at the base of the baby's head. - It should go in more here, she whispered, then applied the heel of a hand there, and finally stepped back and turned away from the fixed gaze as breaking fetters. She left the baby there in the sink with what dishes remained and went into the living room...”

With that, Gaddis's satire is at its stinging best, particularly since I have known of stories in real life (like a middle-class woman locking herself and her five year old in the bathroom while she overdoses on heroin) that tell me that what he is saying is not so foolish and that every bit of cynicism he must have felt while writing this book is just as valid, if not more so, today than it was then.

The world Gaddis created is ours, a look in the mirror, certainly, the way a good comedian can be so funny because they make fun of some little quirk that we identify with because we thought that idiosyncrasy was ours alone. I even said in an earlier post that I had the feeling while reading “The Recognitions” that if I could write as well as Gaddis, this would be the book I would write; a recognition if you will, and that, it seems, is the point in the title. The multi-layered theme of forgery appears to be primer-coating or structure for the book rather than its purpose.

So we forgive Mr. Gaddis for stretching our “willing suspension of disbeleif” as we near the end of the damn(!) book and the last third folds itself, if not neatly, then wholly over its early chapters and we are surprised and shocked and left wanting to understand, looking for meaning the way Stanley and others haplessly do.

We can also forgive Mr. Gaddis because he includes himself in his cynicism, poking fun at his long book. One character, alluding to the very novel we hold in our hands, says:

“- Reading it? Christ no, what do you think I am? I just been having trouble sleeping, so my analyst told me to get a book and count the letters, so I just went in and asked them for the thickest book in the place and they sold me this damned thing, he muttered looking at the book with intimate dislike, -I'm up to a hundred and thirty-six thousand three hundred and something and I haven't even made fifty pages yet.”

Even Mr. Gaddis recognized his book for what it was, a densely packed wild tale that only the faithful will give themselves over too. And, like a basketball game that is so close it seems you only need to watch its final seconds, “The Recognitions” is perfectly encapsulated in its final three paragraphs; yet it would not be nearly as fun without the journey of getting there.

a popular book

2005-02-22T08:48:00.000-05:00

'I lie on the white wicker swing, Foxx's Book of Martyrs before me, reading aloud about the pesky papists piling huge jagged rocks on the faithful French Huguenots and crushing them, while listening to the Minneapolis Millers on the radio lost to Toledo thanks to atrocious umpiring that killed a rally in the third inning....Tucked inside my Martyrs book is a magazine called High School Orgies, lent to me by Leonard, opened to an ad for a cologne made from 'love chemicals' that will turn any girl to putty in your hands.'

The Minnesota reference is a dead giveaway as to the identity of this reader (he's a little better known than Mr. Gaddis). Has anyone laid eyes on Foxx's Martyrs themselves - I am unfamiliar with this interesting treatise.

I have had to return my copy of T.Recs a la bibliotheque and am feeling a bit like a Lake Wobegon denizen with no copies to be bought in Melbourne today...will have to get back to the library and snatch it back again. Someone has bought the last copy at the bookshop most likely, I wonder if some poor undergrads are about to study it.
Anyone ruminating on the text out there...?

II.v Of money and drink

2005-02-14T21:19:00.000-05:00

A.M.D.G.,
Aunty Mary's dirty grin,
A.M.D.G.,
Aunty Mary drinks gin.

I can't offer a decent reference to this translation of the Jesuits' motto (Ad Majorem De Gloriam) as it appeared many years ago in a Jesuit "family" magazine. I do remember it as part of an anecdote about writing the abbreviated maxim every day above one's schoolwork, as many Catholic children did in the thirties and forties. The rest is lost, along with the family beachhouse where I picked up the old mag...it's sad about the beachhouse actually. And I am right out of gin...

The other translation is of course, 'for the greater glory of God'.

Sinisterra in lots of ways is a mirror image of Wyatt, is he not? A real forger - what the hell is that? Like Wyatt and hell ( according to the Annotations anyway), his house reeks of lavender oil and is referred to as Sheol, the Jewish afterlife zone, of which my Jerusalem Bible has much to say ( more anon, when I get around to getting it out).
Frank reminds one of Shakespeare's 'low life' characters, and certainly provides a welcome break in the story from the seriousness and obscurity of earlier chapters. I think the novel turns upon this chapter, and begins to move forward again. I felt it breathing again at this point first time round ( this time I'm feeling disjointed and can't remember what happened in the previous chapters...)

A funny little aside one page in - 'what's the matter with it? St. Paul was an epileptic'. Is Gaddis suggesting that the light on the road to Damascus, resulting in Paul's conversion from Judaism ( like Mrs. Sinisterra), was no more than an epileptic aura presaging a fall and an attack ( remember Paul falls from his horse)? Just a thought.

I wish this reference was covered in the Annotations - anyone like to take a guess:
'…that secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln, who made the five hands down without even getting a haircut.' p. 490

Gaddis draws a direct relationship between monetary systems and religious systems on p.495 l.6 (and of course in the epigram to the chapter) :
'like so many of the mystic contrivances devised by priesthoods which slip, slide and perish in lay hands, this [i.e. the establishing of currencies] too became a cottage industry...'

An acidic description of Mr. Pivner's spiritual yearnings and his Carnegie bible of the marketplace follows, Pivner being described as seeking '…the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having'.
I like the way both episodes are rounded off with the price of Christ's betrayal.

Poor Mr. Pivner, rushing to meet his 'son' Otto, doesn't take the time to take his insulin and is mistaken for a drunk when he falls down in the hotel lobby. Then follows the comic setpiece of the novel, as Otto picks up a girl and Sinisterra's forged money ( 'queer') after mistaking Frank's leg for a table leg and rubbing his own against it all the way through their hilarious interview.

When he runs into his friends later he pretends he has sold his play and starts to throw the money around, in a savagely comic scene with an Ernest Hemingway lookalike in the background. Things get a bit heavy when an undergraduate discussion of SS. Anselm and Augustine's ideas about creativity degenerates into a glib dismissal by Max of religion, and a violent, hysterical cri du coeur from Anselm ensues:
-And what did they do, they damned him, the lens-maker Spinoza. They excommunicated him, right into the darkness of reason.

I have read that Max is modelled on Anatole Broyard, who did not embrace his African- American heritage and was known to Gaddis and Martinelli. Gaddis doesn't set out to flatter Broyard, does he? We see Max’s meaner side in this episode as he talks down to an increasingly hysterical Anselm - perhaps he is narked because Otto has supposedly sold his play.
Sorry, I thought I knew this already - what does Anselm put in Stanley's coffee?

I rather like Sinisterra, going to confession and lighting his candle for Johnny the Gent. 'Be quiet. You think I'm a half-wit? I'm going to confess a sin.' A master of disguise and delicate distinction. You need a thug at times like this to leaven your narrative, and if he is comical so much the better. As Shakespeare well knew.

Recognitions 50th Conference

2005-02-07T09:07:00.000-05:00

Just noticed this on the annotations site...

William Gaddis: 50 Years The Recognitions

A 2 day conference at the University of Buffalo.

Back to the Comprehensible

2005-01-31T21:40:00.000-05:00

This chapter is a nice change of pace from the previous one. A few things from my reading:

1. "...he [Max] will survive." (449) While will Max survive? Because he is adept at stealing others work and passing it off as his own?

2.On 450-1 Otto retells a story he heard from Wyatt about a forged Titian being found over top of a real Titian (with another painting in between): "I mean he didn't know he knew it, but it knew, I mean something knew. I mean, do you see what I mean? That underneath that the original is there, that the real... thing is there, and on the surface you... if can only... see what I mean?"

It's almost as if Otto is trying to limn God or the soul or fate or something beyond us, something metaphysical. The kernel of truth beneath all the veneer.

3. Love Anselm's idea that "...God has become a sentimental theatrical figure in our literature, that God is a melodramatic device used to throw people in novels into a turmoil." (458) Don't we see that happening here in T.Recs. But can we consider it sentimental or melodramatic?

4. The description on 464 of the "new" Sherlock Holmes story provides a nice counterpoint to Wyatt's "new" paintings by Flemish masters. While the Holmes story is about numbers and surface, Wyatt recreates in a more spiritual way. He recreates not through analysis but through a kind of memory (see top of 461).

5. Anyone want to take a shot at Esme's letter?

Lines of Organization

2005-01-25T13:56:00.000-05:00

In a recent post, Bud writes about the bewildering array of literary allusions and influences compiled into Gaddis's The Recognitions. I can verify that Gaddis's book is every bit as complex and Bud indicates, and most definitely gives the impression that "Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything" (as quoted by Bud from Cynthia Ozick). I can also understand how the book's immense complexity makes it possible to find detailed allusions to books Gaddis never read (i.e. Ulysses).

So, perhaps it is a bit of a Sisyphean (or pointless . . .) task to try and find some themes around which we can cluster Gaddis's hurricane. Neverthesless, I'll start with one, which strikes me as central to any reading of The Recognitions. Page 373 features dialog discussing the historical book, Recognitions:

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.
. . . My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn't he?

Wow. The Recognitions is rarely as obviously self-referential as this. Just like the "young man" in the quote, Wyatt, our "young man," undertakes a trip (to France) to learn secrets (of art). Further, Gaddis's The Recognitions is, like the historical Recognitions discussed in the quote, a Faustian story: Recktall Brown is our devil and Wyatt is the Faustian character who is seduced and corrupted by the potential to do what he could not without the devil's help.

What's interesting are the differences: The original Faust featured a devil, Gaddis's an art dealer. The Devil gave Faust magical powers; Recktall Brown gives Wyatt the ability to forge art.

Most interesting, however, is the quote "the young man's deepest concern is for the immortality of his soul." In Faust, the young man's "concern for immortality" is that he has given up his eternal soul, that he will no longer have a place in Heaven. In The Recognitions, the "concern for immortality" is Wyatt's fear that he will amount to nothing as an artist, will have no fame, no recognition, will be forgotten.

Getting back to the hurricane of references that Bud so elegantly described, I believe that much of them cluster around these twin ideas of immortality. The Recognitions is heavy on references to the modern material culture and to ancient, even obscure, Christian religion. It seems that these illusions are in service to developing the two ideas of how our soul can be immortal--the ancient one (Heaven) and the modern one (fame).

And Gaddis, perhaps, thought he was on to something big with The Recognitions. He calls Recognitions the "first Christian novel," which only leaves us to wonder if Gaddis, seeing The Recognitions as analagous to Recognitions in many ways, considered his work the first postmodern novel?

Gaddis's Library of Babel

2005-01-25T00:53:00.000-05:00

“When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbound joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure.”
- J.L. Borges, The Library of Babel

Gaddis's The Recognitions seems to be a vast repository of literary allusions and the best of modernist influence. But it ain't necessarily so, says Mr. Gaddis and Steven Moore. I recently picked up a copy of Steven Moore's “William Gaddis,” his 1989 collection of criticism. The introductory chapter reviews Gaddis's literary influences and discusses the perception that, as Moore quotes Cynthia Ozick, “Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything.”

But allusion is just that and can't be mistaken for erudition. That is not to say that Gaddis was not well-read, but that his books were well researched and he wears his erudition on his sleeve, at least in The Recognitions (to be clear, I think Gaddis is brilliant, which shows in his writing, writing that needs not allusiveness to prove itself).

For example, all of the religious references in the book can be traced, according to Moore, to “a half dozen rather mundane sources.” But Moore says that by the time Gaddis wrote J.R. more than two decades later, “he became his own man and 'influences' all but disappear into the vast machinery of his work.

It seems impossible to really know what influences an author when writing; looking at the 73 pages of footnotes to T.S. Eliot's (23 page) poem, The Waste Land, you notice an awful lot of conjecture based upon possible references pieced together with a combination of criticism and biography. Following the biographical path, Moore cites Gaddis's Harvard education, where Dryden, Chaucer and Elizabethan drama were part of the regimen, which Gaddis was ”glad of.“ And logically, Moore uses Gaddis's own statements and paper trail to develop a sense of his influences. The most important of those is Dostoyevski and the 19th century Russians:

”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.“

Moore also quotes Edward Wasiolek as saying that Gaddis pursues ”perhaps the most distinctive trait of Russian fiction, to trace out the extreme, but logically possible, reaches of human characteristic.“ I agree, except that, in my opinion, the ”reaches of human characteristic“ are at different extremes for 19th century Russians and the 20th century Americans that Gaddis wrote about.

Another major influence was T.S. Eliot. I mentioned in an earlier post that Gaddis had at one point intended to incorporate every line from Four Quartets into the novel. While there are many lines peppered throughout, the entire poem is not there as far as I understand - I gave up on my efforts to spot them after a while. Also in an earlier post, I quoted from Four Quartets, a passage that I thought was particularly apt. But Moore says that another poem is really at the heart of this novel: ”The Recognitions can be read as an epic sermon with The Waste Land as its text.“ I've gone back and re-read these since beginning the book, and may, if I can come up with anything interesting to say, comment on them later.

Without going into specifics, Moore cites as ”relevant,“ Sade's Justine, Goethe's Faust, Rilke's Duino Elegies, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, Broch's Sleepwalkers, Hesse's Steppenwolf, Silone's And he Hid Himself, some Ibsen, and Dante. Moore also quotes Gaddis as admitting ”that when he first read Kafka in his early twenties he was so stunned by what Kafka could do that he 'sat down and wrote some very bad Kafka, though I thought of it as good Kafka then'.“ Being stunned by Kafka is a sentiment that I am sure many writers share, myself included, and I recall Gabriel Garcia Marquez making a similar statement.

On the English front, relevant writers include C. Brontë, Conrad, Forster, Waugh, Shakespeare, Langland, Kipling, T.E. Lawrence (as an aside, I tried to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom, being a fan of Lawrence of Arabia, but found it dull. I always feel like I'm missing something when I don't like something as important as that), Huxley, Graves, and more.

Among the Americans, Moore cite's Gaddis's Bard College (where he taught for a short while) reading list, including Dreiser, Bellamy, Sinclair, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Salinger and even Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Also, Hawthorne, Melville, ”some“ Emerson, Thoreau's Waldon, West, Cummings (especially 1 x 1), Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and naturally Hemingway.

[I would go into more detail, but this is feeling much too like an eighth grader's book report and I know I'm capable of something in the ninth to tenth grade level.]

The names above sound like a good reading list for someone who wants to be a writer, perhaps only missing Stendhal, Proust (who Gaddis claims to have only read about 50 pages), the King James Bible, and...Joyce.

Gaddis & Joyce

In 1923, T.S. Eliot said of James Joyce's Ulysses, ”a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.“ No one knew the latter part of that statement better than William Gaddis, who joked that one academic essay went into so much ”minute detail“ on The Recognitions debt to Ulysses that ”I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.“

Gaddis, in a letter that Moore reprints to Joyce scholar, Grace Eckley, catalogs fairly precisely what he did (the Molly chapter of Ulysses, Exiles and some of Dubliners) and did not read of Joyce's and goes on to say after listing some other authors he did read, ”why bother to go on, anyone seeking Joyce finds Joyce even if both Joyce & the victim found the item in Shakespeare, read right past whole lines lifted bodily from Eliot &c, all of which will probably go on so long as Joyce remains an academic cottage industry.“

I confess thinking myself that there must be a Joyce influence in here, and I find it amazing that someone of Gaddis's writerly disposition would have not read Joyce, and even more stunning that he didn't like Joyce's writing (Gaddis claims to not have finished Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man). T.S. Eliot was influenced, by his own admission, by Joyce and I often find that I feel compelled to read those who influenced those who are influencing me; that's the literary conversation into which I, like the kid who desperately wants to eat at the adult's table, can't resist trying to insinuate myself.

Jack Green says in his vociferous response to Gaddis's critics, Fire the Bastards!:

”ulysses & the recognitions are very “20thcentury” & have a number of technical resemblances: both are long & closely organized; sharp contrast between humorous & nonhumorous passages; lots of blasphemy; modeling/parodies on classics & extensive crossreferences (ulysses having much more of former, recognitions of latter); “timegrowth” in rereading; many nonfictional references (miscalled “erudition”) to give desired tones to the fiction; passion for other books; importance of ideas of major characters (dedalus, wyatt); delight in carrying humorous situations to extremes; restraint as basic technique of style but the worlds of the 2 books arent alike, nor are the characters the 2 have little resemblance in the essential ie artistic sense.“

At least acknowledging the similarities, Green's beef on this point is the critics' use of Joyce as an easy way out of thinking critically about the book. Indeed, it is too easy, considering that Moore gives us someone else to hang on to here. Ronald Firbank. Who? Described as a writer of ”high camp comedy of manners and part fairy tail,“Firbank, an English writer who died in 1926, seems to wax and wane in popularity. The Center for Book Culture (Dalkey Archive Press) has some of his books as well a few quotes and biographical details.

Moore claims Firbank, whose popularity was rising around the time Gaddis wrote The Recognitions, may have been a source for ”elliptical dialogue - especially for effects usually achieved only in traditional exposition - and perhaps to have campy fun at Catholicism's expense.“

Just like Joyce's influence from the then out-of-print Dujardin, not all of the books in Gaddis's ”Library of Babel“ are part of the Western Canon that we all take for granted.

The Obscure Chapter: 2.3

2005-01-19T22:07:00.000-05:00

I still find a great part of this chapter very confusing and hard to get through (thankfully, it isn't too long, and the next chapter is much clearer).

Wyatt is returning home (again, never referred to by name), thinking he will leave his city life behind and go back to becoming a clergyman. His father, Gwyon has become as abstract as Wyatt and has become a Mithraist, to which he wants to initiate his son (he worships in a way the sun). The Town Carpenter, as I understand it, thinks Wyatt is a returned religious hero, Prester John. And your guess is as good as mine with regards to Janet (the mating with the bull thing escapes sense to me).

The weather is quite important in this chapter and Gaddis does wonderfully with making it seem quite ominous even though by all accounts its just a snowstorm.

I love the paragraph at the top of 399: "...the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside [etc.]..."

I just don't know what else to say here. It's a strange, dark, and often completely obscure chapter.

ReScheduling

2005-01-13T13:14:00.000-05:00

Okay, here are the page ranges for the rest of the chapters. They aren't all equal but it's hard to combine them in anyway without making them too long. So, I'd suggest we just do a chapter a week. The shorter chapters will provide catch up time (well okay I combined some in section three, 12 pages in a week is a little absurd).

2.3 390-445 (1/16)
2.4 446-486 (1/23)
2.5 487-541 (1/30)
2.6 542-567 (2/6)
2.7 568-646 (2/13)
2.8 647-699 (2/20)
2.9 700-720 (2/27)

3.1 723-732 + 3.2 733-768 (3/6)
3.3 769-823 (3/13)
3.4 824-855 (3/20)
3.5 856-900 (3/27)
Epilogue 901-956 (4/3)

How's that look to those of you still following along? I just reached 390 last night. Should we push it back one more week for section 2.3?

A Real Forgery

2005-01-11T13:43:00.000-05:00

Hey there Gaddis-bloggers. I though the group might find some interest in this news story.

In 1997 the Art Newspaper ran a major investigative story headlined "At
least forty-five van Goghs may well be fakes."

The book that occasioned the story, by eminent van Gogh scholar Jan
Hulsker, questioned the authenticity of numerous paintings and drawings, some of
the Dutch master's most famous images among them. Since then, experts around the world, especially in the Netherlands, have striven to sort out van Gogh's oeuvre
definitively, a process that continues.

The article details information on some Van Gogh paintings that may be fakes and how researchers are trying to determine the real from the forged.

Thursday Palaver

2005-01-06T19:34:00.000-05:00

Time to get back on the horse, club monkeys.

“the static sane side outside to another outside saneside” or Where is Everybody?

2005-01-05T10:36:00.000-05:00

Hey, where is everybody? I wasn't going to do any of these cross-posts from my site anymore, but it seems that there's no life here. I'm probably way behind everyone else on my reading (had to read some of those Christmas books), but here are some thoughts on what I've read recently:

I read from The Recognitions out loud last night. I'm not sure why I even started to, because doing so usually annoys my wife. There's something about vocalizing that's revealing, particularly rhythm and the sounds of the words. I vividly recall reading Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, which demands, absolutely commands its reader to mimic the voices in the book and read it as if it were a play and you are an actor (but then again, all the world's a stage). I did this compulsively, reading out-loud to my wife as I sat in the passenger seat on our trip that year to Chicago. The cadence and the emotion of the novel became clear and I don't think it would have been the same otherwise.

But I wouldn't have expected the same with The Recognitions. It's dense, there are a lot of big words and only occasionally a segue, switching from scene to scene like in a film. But as luck would have it, I decided to read aloud just as Wyatt is returning home to his father and we are hearing his thoughts, like a deranged man (that he may be).

Try this paragraph on for size [399]:

Above, another blue day, (upstairs) the room papered with green capped pink-faced dogs, and the button drawer, only apparitions move to perfection, there! Pray the Lord to keep you from lying, there, O spectral stabat mater may I go out and play the violin outside to the town wearing its sinside inside and not a soul in sight. Church bells inspissated the air, dropping it in sharp fragments. He sat down in his place at table, excused by the falling weights of the bells, and motionless when they had done. There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insanside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game, and gone down Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee.

This is a lot more alliterative than most passages in the book, but I think I happened on something here and it will inform the rest of my reading.

I am a very fast typist, but the above was a difficult paragraph to type out. But fun to read. It's cheating unless you read it out loud. It seems to be the only way to appreciate it.

In the Club

2004-12-30T21:19:00.000-05:00

Hey, I actually made it in time for the Thursday discussion. I'm "in the club" as OPTR would say. Anyone around for Gaddisy goodness?

Happy Birthday W.G.!

2004-12-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

Today is ol' William Gaddis' birthday (though he died back in 1998). Raise a glass to his memory. (And it's my birthday too, so raise one for me.)

“...that streak of cacodaemonic extravagance sundering the very dome of heaven.” Thoughts on Part II, Ch. I

2004-12-27T23:26:00.000-05:00

These are just some of my thoughts on part II, chapter I. I posted this on my site, but I think these comments are relevant enough to post here as well. I apologize for the redundancy.

***

Coming from St. Marks Bookstore a few days before x-mas, I'm on the uptown 6 subway, a local, sitting on the edge of my seat (because my backpack is too heavy with books to carry it anywhere but on my back) and delicately balancing a cup of coffee from Mud in one hand, a willfully uncooperative umbrella in the other, and between my thumb and forearm I'm balancing my stocky copy of The Recognitions.

Despite this precarious situation and being overdressed for the warm, rainy and muggy (in the subway) day, I'm able to read until I'm stopped by astonishment by the following passage, which in my view is a literary hole-in-one:

This is Stanley thinking [321-22]:

“He shuddered at Esme, seduced by an apprehension in a world real enough to her: appalled one day when an airplane moving with the speed of sound had disemboweled the heaven above them and eviscerated its fragments in nausea from their bodies walking below. Alone, he might have thought nothing of it, but shut it out as he did all the frenzied traffic of the world. But her terror shook him; and she was right. And if on the other hand, they'd met that early Jesuit Father Anchieta in the street on a sunny day, sheltered under the parasol of birds he summoned to hover over him and keep pace, she would have appreciated such resourcefulness without profane curiosity, probably not have repeated what she'd seen to a soul. But the airplane! Had she met Saint Peter of Alcantara, Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Peter Gonzalez, walking, as they did, upon the waves of the sea, why, there was more reason in those excursions than that streak of cacodaemonic extravagance sundering the very dome of heaven.”

Not only is it beautiful for its imagery and damning (sorry FSF) of Stanley's frame of mind, but it says a lot about Esme's power over Stanley (and perhaps men in general) too.

Arriving at Grand Central Terminal (where the S train will take me to Times Square to the 2 train uptown) I pass Fulan Gong pamphleteers, Colombian flute players, and a group of Hubbardites selling faith-based stress relief. It hits me how little things have changed since Gaddis so stingingly portrayed New York City.

***

In the next major passage with Valentine and Wyatt [332 - 39], Valentine makes an interesting comment “...he murmured as he might have talking to himself. - The simplicity ... it's the way I would paint ...” [334], which reflects in some ways my own feeling about this novel. That is, If I could write (and think) like W.G. this is the novel that I would write.

That idea brings me to...

Rake's comments on Borges' Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote (I didn't want to say anything until I went back and read it again).

I think it's an interesting parallel. It is not so much the question of authenticity, which has been a focus of many GDC discussions, but the question of creation and originality. Both Menard and Wyatt seek to recreate the works of past masters not so much through creation but through being the one that did the original. Valentine suggests this when he arrives at Wyatt's door and mentions Rouge Cloître, the “convent that took van der Goes in.” Tellingly though, Wyatt seems to be unaware of this, perhaps indicating that those details are not necessary (where I believe, Menard would be). Both Menard, whose work would appear to be trifling compared to the task of writing the Quixote, and Wyatt are not very accomplished as artists on their own.

I think the originality question comes up elsewhere too. One instance is when Fuller mimics Valentine's hand movements [346 & 352]. But more significantly, Otto's manuscript is authentic, but Max (who stole passages from Rilke) and others think the manuscript is plagierized because Otto writes down what everyone around him says. So when they read the manuscript they see something familiar without quite recognizing it because it's their own words. Otto's manuscript is therefore authentic, but not original.

Incidentally, there are no Borges books in Gaddis' library.

***

After running into the word recognition so many times, I began to wonder how many instances there were. Fortunately, the annotations are thorough enough, and they tell us there are 81 "recognitions" in the book. I think that it's presence in context of art and personal relationships shows the book's layers of meaning, or perhaps it's meaning, whatever that really is, as it applies in these different contexts of authenticity originality the falsehood of societal (and religious) norms, etc. Okay, I'm groping with that a bit, as you can see.

***

Now that I am well into the novel, I've been browsing around some of the web-based exegesis of T. Recs. Here are a couple things of interest (these have been mentioned earlier on the GDC site, but are worth repeating:

I think the roman à clef aspect of the novel is little more than a gossipy distraction, but it can be fun, nonetheless. A story on Sheri Martinelli (Esme in the novel) reprinted on the Gaddis annotations site is pretty interesting because she seems to have been an enchanting fly-on-the-wall in the '40s Greenwhich Village set. Written by the author of The Recognitions's Annotation, the article has some interesting things to say about Sheri/Esme in context of the novel as well:

“Gretchen to Wyatt’s Faust, Esme has been sent to him by the novel’s Mephistopheles, Recktall Brown. A promiscuous manic-depressive schizophrenic junkie, she nevertheless models as the Virgin Mary in Wyatt’s religious forgeries (”No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now,“ Brown reminds him [259]). Although Esme is associated with a wide variety of other female figures of salvation in addition to Mary and Faust’s Gretchen, Dante’s Beatrice, Saint Rose of Lima, the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Flying Dutchman’s Senta, Peer Gynt’s Solveig (like other modernist masterpieces, The Recognitions is thickly allusive to other texts), she is elsewhere associated with succubae and sirens, and when Wyatt deigns to think of her at all, it is unfortunately in her role as temptress. ”

“Fire the Bastards,” by Jack Green is a short book, now available entirely on the web, that criticizes the many negative and indifferent reviews that kept T. Recs from achieving success early on. Some of the early reviews compared Gaddis to Joyce, or in the way that Green phrases it, they insinuated plagiarism. Countering that charge, he says that Gaddis had not read very much (40 pp.) of Ulysses before he wrote The Recognitions. I thought of Joyce too when I began reading T. Recs. and thought that Joyce must have been an influence on Gaddis. There are two copies of Ulysses on the list of Gaddis' library, but that doesn't necessarily indicate that he read them before writing his first novel, even though the editions he had were from '34 and '42. It seems to me (casually) that Green was in a bit of frenzy here, overblowing some reviewers statements.

In my eyes, the comparison to Joyce is positive as it seems to me that Gaddis brought Joyce's techniques into the mainstream; nearly.

I'm still looking for a cheap used copy of the book of critical essays on Gaddis, so for now, I guess I will have to try and think for myself.

Holiday Hiatus

2004-12-27T20:23:00.000-05:00

I hope you guys are still out there reading. I'll have something to post about the next section sometime later in the week. Hopefully we can pick this up post holidays.

William Gaddis and David Markson

2004-12-18T05:09:00.000-05:00

Beyond the references in Markson's book, David Markson's relationship with Gaddis extends beyond mere passion and correspondence. This 1989 interview suggests that Markson was directly responsible for the first reissue of The Recognitions. It's also worth noting that Markson kept in touch with Gaddis up until his death in 1998, much of which is housed at the Washington University Libraries.

Pre-Friday Hi-Jinx

2004-12-16T19:26:00.000-05:00

Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Feel free to talk about anything you like (CAAF, this means you). And perhaps later I'll reveal my Borges Theory.

Religion and Art

2004-12-16T01:28:00.000-05:00

Now that it has become clear that Gaddis is definitely looking at some of the connections between religion and art, I think it is time for this survey, conducted in 1969. Again, i am turning to John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

Of the places listed below, which does a museum remind you of most?

Manual Workers White Collar Professional/Management
Church 66% 45% 30.5%
Library 09% 34% 28%

In the words of Berger, this "indicates what the idea of an art gallery suggests to each social class."

Attribution and Signatures

2004-12-15T11:58:00.000-05:00

Dan posted something in response to a Terry Teachout post that brings up issues related to T.R. such as the importance of "attribution" and signatures to works of art.

Life Imitating Art in Story About Man Imitating Art ?

2004-12-14T22:10:00.000-05:00

Thought GDC readers might enjoy this from the NY Times:

Art Gallery Owner Pleads Guilty in Forgery Found by Coincidence
December 14th, 2004

The demise of a lucrative 15-year business in forgeries of paintings by modern masters came when both Sotheby's and Christie's offered the same painting of a vase of lilacs by Gauguin for their auctions in May 2000.

Federal agents discovered that Sotheby's had the real one, and Christie's had a remarkable, but not perfect, fake.

Ely Sakhai, the owner of a Lower Manhattan gallery, Exclusive Art, pleaded guilty yesterday in Federal District Court in Manhattan to fraud charges in the forgery operation. The government charged that Mr. Sakhai had purchased genuine but lesser-known works of Gauguin, like the lilacs, and other Impressionist and modern artists, then ordered copies made by skilled forgers working from the originals...

Under instructions from the two men, prosecutors said, forgers copied in close detail the markings on the back of the canvases, and made the frames appear to be decades old. The art dealers also issued fake "certificates of authenticity" for the forgeries...

The Priest is the guardian of mysteries. The artist is driven to expose them: Synopsis Ch. VI/VII

2004-12-13T13:27:00.000-05:00

This is Bud, filling in for CAAF. I hope I do you justice here.

Chapter VI

Chapter six begins the morning after the party with Otto, having slept with Esme in the wee hours, waking up at her apartment to a fly on his cheek and the sounds of the opera Aida. (although the Gaddis Annotations synopsis says that he was at Esme's, it seems to me he was at home and then went to Esme's).

On his way to Esme's, Otto encounters someone from the party in the park, heading in the opposite direction. Otto knocks on Esme's door and she hardly recognizes his voice, and doesn't open the door, but telling him to return in an hour. He goes to a coffee shop and returns, encountering yet another friend as he approaches her apartment. (Three times Otto encounters someone from the party on his way to Esme's and each time there is no acknowledgment "Stanley said nothing; but hung his head without recognition as they passed in Washington Square."

When he arrives at Esme's, Otto is frustrated by her lack of remembrance of their encounter and is then interrupted by Chaby Sinisterra, Frank Sinisterra's son (!), who monopolizes her attention (and it appears to be easily monopolized). We also find out in this scene that Esme knows Rektall Brown, and the Lavender smell that Chaby notices first establishes Esme's connection with Wyatt.

Otto's attempt to get Esme in private is foiled when Esme invites Chaby to breakfast with them. The three are then joined by Stanley at the coffee shop and Otto finally leaves in frustration.

Otto spends time around the city; in a bar he tries to call Max, who said the night before he would look at Otto's play. Not reaching Max, he tries Esther with no luck and then reaches Maud Munk who yet again did not go to adopt a child because of her hangover. Otto returns to Esme's after stopping at Max's where he tried but failed to leave his manuscript. He now passes Hannah and she fails to notice him. He arrives just after Esme has given Chaby his scarf, which he had left on his earlier visit.

Otto and Esme sleep together, waking up happily in one another's arms. The talk about their dreams and they both have dreamt of Wyatt, although neither realizes that the other knows him. Both of their comments are significant:

Esme:
- I dreamt about someone.
- Who?
-Someone you don't know, she said. The she said to herself, -He was in a mirror, caught there.
(This comes back to us at the end of the next chapter.)

Otto:
- Now I remember who it was I saw in the park (mentioned in the dream earlier), Otto said.
- Who?
- Someone I used to know, someone you don't know, he said, and saw that pale thin man standing in the park vividly silent, watching him without recognition as he approached, blind, with the stick and its retracting point. - A friend, I used to...it's funny, that I miss him.

But we found out later that Esme knows Wyatt too and he is the person she leaves Otto to meet.

Chapter VII

(I defer quite a bit here to the Gaddis site's synopsis)

Chapter seven opens on the same day as the previous chapter with the hapless Fuller, Rektall Brown's servant, and Brown's black poodle who we encountered earlier and ostensibly brought Rektall and Wyatt together. After establishing Fuller's superstitious ignorance and dominance by Brown (which probably says more about Brown than anything) we land in Brown's study where he is waiting for Wyatt with a business associate, the art critic Basil Valentine.

An aside: If I were casting this as a film, Valentine would be played by Claude Rains (Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca) and Orson Welles would play a hilariously dark Rektall Brown.

Fuller has bought a train ticket to escape from Brown, but has given himself away ("Do they use United States of America money in a place called Utica" [226]) and Brown sends him to his room to sit in the dark.

A bulk of the chapter establishes the relationship between Brown and Valentine and tells much about both characters and their illicit business together. Valentine works with Brown by first doubting (in print), then authenticating his commissioned forgeries. (Brown has just picked up Wyatt's old Memling imitation, thinking it original.)

Valentine has come to meet Wyatt and to propose his next forgery. When Wyatt does arrive he soon finds in Valentine someone more sensitive to the implications of forgery than Brown; Valentine is likewise intrigued by Wyatt, and between the two a cautious rapport develops. In the course of the conversation Valentine questions the authenticity of the Bosch table in Brown's possession, knowing that Brown will have it checked out, after which Valentine will replace it with a copy and send the original "back to Europe where it belongs" (688-89) - apparently this has been his practice with others of Brown's works. (This is the genuine Bosch painting Wyatt stole from his father and sold to Brown years before. - The revelation of which has haunted me since I read this because I find it inexplicable that Wyatt would do this. Wondering out loud, is that meant to show Wyatt's lack of regard for the originals? )

Valentine's plan is for Wyatt to forge a work by Hubert van Eyck, Jan van Eyck's shadowy older brother - an Annunciation that Wyatt never does actually paint.

We also get further insights into Wyatt and perhaps the entire novel in this passage on p. 251:

- 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.

Rektall Brown stood beside him, the heavy naked hand on his shoulder.

-And so when you're working, it's your own work, Basil Valentine said. -And when you attach the signature?

- Leave him alone, God damn it Valentine, he...

- Yes, when I attach the signature, he said dropping his head again, - that changes everthing, when I attach the signature and...lose it.

- Then corruption enters, is that it, me dear fellow? Basil Valentine stood up smiling...

After their meeting, Valentine and Wyatt share a cab. They overhear passers by talking about Somerset Maugham, which in a minor way continues the theme of society's attitude toward homosexuality (S.M. was gay). They then nearly run into a man who the synopsis tells us is Mr. Pivner, Otto's father, who will be introduced in the next chapter, and that causes a misunderstanding between Valentine and the cab driver and the cab ride is abruptly ended. Wyatt declines Valentines invitation to dinner and the idea of Valentine coming to his place at another time (despite their rapport, Wyatt doesn't seem to want to continue the relationship).

The number seven shows up quite a bit in this chapter, first with a mention of the seven deadly sins on page 227 and 238, the seven heavens of the Arabs on page 257 and later, seven lillies and others later. This annotation is worth noting:

265.36] Seven days, seven seals [...] Abednego: biblical instances of the magicality of the number seven: "Seven days" refers to the days of Creation, the Holy Week, etc.; "seven seals" from Rev. 5:1; "seven bullocks" (Num. 29:32); "seven times Jacob bowed before Esau" (Gen. 33:3); "seven stars [...] in his right hand" (Rev. 1:20; 4:5; 2:1); "seven years in Eden" (apocryphal?); "seven times seven years to the jubilee trumpet" (Lev. 25:8-9); "seven years of plenty [...] famine" (Gen. 41:29-30); "Nebuchadnezzar heated the furnace seven times" (Dan. 3:19); "the golden image" is described in Dan. 3:1, and the quotation " - Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego" (the three in the furnace) is from Dan. 3:28. (It might be noted this passage occurs in the novel's seventh chapter.)

Wyatt unexpectedly runs into John, a fellow divinity student (he meets him for the second time; the first was on p. 115, almost two years earlier). Both duck into a bar, where John tells Wyatt about his father, still regaling his congregation with pagan parallels to Christianity.

Back at his Horatio Street studio, Esme has come to model for Wyatt, only to find she is not needed. After she reads aloud from the Brothers Grimm (in German), however, Wyatt sees in her the lines of completion needed for the portrait of his mother he began fifteen years earlier, and he plans to use the face in his next painting (which Valentine calls a Stabat Mater). A moment of intimacy is suggested: Esme puts her arms around Wyatt's shoulders, but he suddenly straightens up and dismisses her. Esme goes home, injects herself with heroin, and tries to write some poetry.

Failing to come up with anything of her own, she begins writing the opening lines of Rilke's first Duino Elegy, only to be interrupted by an unidentified knock at the door. In the annotations we find that in regards to the Rilke poem, [277.34] the interrupted seventh line ends: "Each single angel is terrible." Later Max will steal this piece of paper (299.11-13) and, not recognizing it as Rilke's, publish the poem as his own (622.16 ff.).

Y'all Better Recognize

2004-12-09T19:33:00.000-05:00

If anyone's around, please post away. And, if you're the last to leave, be sure to shut off the lights.

Section 3: Plantations, Parties, and Passing of Time.

2004-12-09T13:23:00.000-05:00

Gaddis Shorts in Missouri Review

2004-12-07T17:30:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of The Missouri Review, called “Experiment” (Vol. 27, No. 2), includes three previously unpublished short stories from William Gaddis.

Of the Gaddis stories, TMR editor Speer Morgan writes, “He wrote the three stories . . . during the '40s and '50s, when he was living a bohemian life in New York trying to learn his craft and find his voice. Writers become innovators by a combination of trial and error, accident, temperament, disappointment and discovery. These journeyman pieces demonstrate how naturally Gaddis experimented as he attempted different types of stories and voices. One of them reflects the New Yorker style of the 1940s; another is reminiscent of Beckett and the third is a sincere, moving story about underdogs, with echoes of proletarian fiction.”

This may be of interest to those that are looking for any little insights into our dour, enigmatic storyteller. I haven't read this issue yet and it doesn't appear that any of the Gaddis content is online, but I will post further if I get a chance to pick it up.

Notes From a Banana Plantation

2004-12-07T02:00:00.000-05:00

OK, to get us started, here's the synopsis of this week's section (reaching back into the last section a bit, mind), courtesy williamgaddis.org:

Some seven or eight years after leaving Paris, Wyatt is living in New York City and employed as a draftsman. He occasionally designs bridges to which his supervisor, Benny, signs his name, and he also restores a few paintings on the side, but he has done no original work since Paris. He has married (at her suggestion) a woman named Esther, an aspiring writer with a promiscuous "Village past." Their relationship is a study in futility, and the tension is compounded when they meet Otto Pivner, an aspiring playwright who recently left Harvard (whether he graduated with a degree is unsaid). Frustrated, finally, with both his job and his wife (and surely guessing of her adultery with Otto), Wyatt leaves both to forge paintings for Recktall Brown, whom he meets as a result of (or at least following) an infernal conjuration. Otto moves in with Esther; Benny fails to persuade Wyatt to return to his job. After a year or so, Otto too leaves Esther, and his place is quickly taken by a crass adman named Ellery. From the middle of this chapter onward, Wyatt is nameless.

Otto is in Central America working on a banana plantation (in the office rather than the fields), and working after-hours on his play, The Vanity of Time. Enduring the unwanted company of the tattooed Jesse Franks, Otto looks forward to returning to New York City tanned, his play completed, and sporting a black sling with which he plans to win sympathy and admiration.

Upon returning to New York in early December, Otto is invited to a Greenwich Village party for the unveiling of a new painting (actually a mounted workman's shirt) by an artist/critic named Max. Though some of the characters at the party have already appeared briefly - Agnes Deigh on page 100, Anselm on 103 - it is here that most of the novel's cast is introduced: Arny and Maude Munk, a childless couple always failing in their attempts to adopt; Herschel, a clever homosexual and ghostwriter for politicians and army generals; Agnes Deigh, a literary agent, lapsed Catholic, most comfortable in the company of homosexuals; Hannah, a dumpy Village artist, amateur psychologist, living by charity and her wits, fond both of beer and Stanley, a devout Catholic, composer of organ music, concerned for the souls both of Agnes and Anselm (real name: Arthur), an acne-ridden poet, obsessed with the spirit (but contemptuous of the common practice) of religion; assorted Village people (the suicidal Charles Dickens, guilt-ridden for being in a plane that dropped an atomic bomb in "the late hate"; the onanistic critic in the green wool shirt; Buster Brown; Sonny Byron; Adeline Thing); Ed Feasley, a practical joker who attended Harvard with Otto without learning an occupation; Big Anna the Swede, a flamboyant homosexual and cross-dresser; Mr. Feddle, a befuddled old man who writes poetry and pays to have it published; and Esme, "manic depressive, schizoid tendencies" (196.24) as well as a heroin addict and model, who also writes poetry. The party ends viciously with Herschel hitting Hannah and Anselm maligning everyone else. Otto accompanies Esme home.

So.

Personally, I'm enjoying Otto's antics very much. He represents a big of source of relief--comic and otherwise--for me in this book, functioning as he does as a sort of silly, slapstick-y figure (and Gaddis manque. Is Ellery the "adman" also meant to be one?)

We have at least one suggested topic in the mirroring/reflecting going on with Otto, particularly on the banana plantation, where he preens in the mirror endlessly. Is it just a comment on Otto's vanity, his delusions of grandeur? A joke made by Gaddis at his own expense? Just another recognition? What say you? (Even his name is a mirroring of sorts, isn't it? Ot|to.)

Also, I haven't dug through the annotations for this part yet, or in other sources, but I assume there's some major roman à clef going on in this party scene at the end of our section. Anyone have the skinny?

Go wild, you drunkards.

(Additional Fun Fact: According to the annotations, Gaddis, who seems to have read most everything, said he hadn't read Proust's In Search of Lost Time past its "overture," meaning past the first fifty or so pages, I'm guessing. Perhaps he was busy reading Bright Lights, Big City--as J. Franz suggests.)

all roads lead to...

2004-12-06T21:23:00.000-05:00

So, the relevant snippet from the Samuel Delany interview in Issue No. 1 of Black Clock:

Delany: Do you mean I love the city? I do! Yes, and reasons to love it, to seek it out, to leave the provinces and refashion your life among its squares and courtyards include the fact that sex in particular and satisfying relationships in general are more generously available there than among the forests, in the deserts, and on the plains--not to mention in the suburbs. Cities are the site of theater and art, which challenge God in their representations of complex worlds. That's why (Plato suspected and William Gaddis knew) they are fundamentally evil and godless--thank God!

This makes me wonder -- this being the sudden omnipresence of Wm. Gaddis -- if this is just like when your good friends move to a new town and everything suddenly seems to reference said town, etc. Or if it is far more sinister.

(dum dum dum)

I shall start reading again immediately.

Gaddis Live

2004-12-02T19:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a new thread for this week's live drinking and reading experience. Feel free to hop in. (We can keep going tomorrow night and beyond, if you like.) Onward!

Week Two, the Second Time

2004-11-29T23:29:00.000-05:00

Okay, a little late, but here goes on week the second:

I have to admit that this was a less interesting part for me, but I can also see it building towards something.

The French sections are very abstract and disconnected. I love that Gaddis just uses the original language rather than translating everything, and that he plays with the tourist pronounciations of words.

I want to find some significance to the fact that Wyatt is confused about it being dawn (it is really dusk) when the art critic Cremer visits him. Just another illusion example? Wyatt is fooled because he has no reason to think otherwise?

I put this in the comments elsewhere, but, the discovered Memling painting Wyatt reads about on p.74 is the painting he did while in Munich, which he later refers to as lost to Esther. Wyatt is implicated in forgery without even trying.

It is interesting to note that at the end of Part I Chapter 2 we have: "And the shadow he cast behind him as he turned away fell back seven centuries..." (77) echoing the end of Part 1 Chapter 1 where Gwyon "stumbles back by years" (62). What's with the falling back in time?

When Esther is first introduced I felt she was described by the narrator very harshly, but when we actually see her portrayed, acting, speaking, I felt more sympathetic to her. The passage on p.80 about Esther and her analyst is odd. It seems her analyst loved her and then killed herself when she married Wyatt.

Page 83, 15 years from when he started it and the Camilla portrait is still undone.

I love this quote:
"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 way." (89)

Wyatt on page 91-2 talking about his viewing of the Picasso painting (Night Fishing in Antibes) is an important passage which I won't type out, except for: "When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it." (92) That has also confused me a bit, "freed into one recognition". What does that mean?

That passage (and further down on 92 about the Mona Lisa) brings up the idea of familiarisation, the automatization of perception (see me elsewhere on Shklovsky, etc.) and "a thousand off-center reproductions between you and it" (again with copies).

A passage on 112: "it's the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don't have, don't dare have, that's what makes it arrogant." Brought Guy Maddin's "Saddest Music in the World" (a film) to mind. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it (out on DVD). The idea of public suffering, fakery, and the casting around for hope of future sympathy/pity is important there.

Esther quoting Wyatt: "I should have to believe that I am the man for whom Christ died." (127) Is something we will be seeing again, and another thing that I need to puzzle out as I read.

We see a number of flashes of future fleshed out characters in the New York chapter. Otto being the one we start to see the most of, obviously showing him in relatin to Wyatt whom he (Otto) relentless copies.

pp. 63 - 131. Summary and Thoughts

2004-11-21T13:47:00.000-05:00

To recap the decision made in the comments field: Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and the general laziness caused thereby, we're pushing everything back a week. So 63-131 is now the reading for the week of 11/29. Now get blogging people.

Summary and thoughts for this week's reading.

Summary

Part II is more or less a description of France at length, with a few important interludes into Wyatt's life. Gaddis described everyday life in France, what he refers to as the "spectacle of culture fully realized." (64) Gaddis describes a collection of forged notes/autographs from historical entities, Cleopatra up through Newton (even though they were all written, improbably, in French). Gaddis describes the Sacre Coeur at length, calling it a monument to the "Jesuit victory over France." (66)

Wyatt has lived in Paris for three years, painting and restoring old paintings for money. Wyatt remains ignorant of the various art movements that swept post-War france, prefering his own style, which he works on long into the night.

An art critic named Cremer offers to give Wyatt's exhibition a good review (guaranteeing sales) in exchange for a cut of the profits. (70) Disgusted, Wyatt refuses; in consequence, his paintings get a bad review and don't sell.

This part closes with some more description of France. Napoleon's aspirations to equal Rome in culture and import are mentioned, and Gaddis notes France's spirit of art collecting.

At the opening of Part III, Wyatt and Esther, now in New York, haphazardly decide to get married. (78) There is aquick cut to a year later, where Wyatt and Esther are listening to the radio and Esther asks what Wyatt thinks of her fiction. Wyatt replies somewhat dismissively. (82) Esther tells Wyatt he is going to waste as a copier of blueprints. Wyatt has grown listless and does not work on painting much any longer.

Wyatt is still working on the portrait of his mother and it is a source of tension between him and Esther. Esther believes it is an impediment to his progress as an artist. She also feels that Wyatt's art cuts him off from her. (88) Wyatt and Esther's relationship continues to deteroiate and Esther continues to exhort Wyatt toward some ambition for himself. (96)

In the middle of Part III, Gaddis presents a mosiac of New York, as he did earlier for Paris. After this description Esther turns down an invitation fo a New Year's party for Wyatt's sake. Wyatt's antisocial tendencies are a source of further tension. Otto the playwrite is introduced. (106)

Wyatt and Ester get drunk in a Spanish restaurant. Esther watches Wyatt from afar and sees him acting decisively. He looks manly and arrogant, the way she wishes he was more often, and the waitress compares him to a Flemish soldier (Flamenco). (111)

Later, Otto and Wyatt go on a walk together and Otto finds Wyatt very strange and difficult to talk to. Esther and Otto confide in each other regarding Wyatt's increasing disaffection from the world, and the two of them contemplate an affair. (131)

Quotes

pg. 71 -- The critic Cremer notes that Degas said "the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed."

pg. 74 -- at the bottom of this page Gaddis describes several paintings that have been transformed by being painted over. He describes one in which a man being tortured on a rack is turned to a peaceful interior of a man in bed.

pg. 91 -- Rilke "refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius."

pg. 103 -- Regarding Christmas: "under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender."

pg. 109 -- "They swayed a little, standing in the doorway, still holding each other together in a way of holding each other back . . . until both, unrealized, come in to shatter coincidentally upon the shore."

pg. 113 -- There is a lengthy paragraph on writing worth re-reading.

pg. 131 -- "Gd crs as mch fr mmnt as fr hr--wht mean?"

Thoughts

* Gaddis goes on at length about France and the role it has played in arts and culture. These descriptions are some of the least accessible thus far, but he seems to be making some worthwhile points.

* Gaddis has a wonderful ability to build the feeling of a character through dialog. The exchange between Esther and Wyatt on pp. 94-97 is particularly good.

* Otto will be a character worth watching. It is as though Otto and Wyatt are both halves of the complete artist. Otto has the ambition but executes his play cluelessly, and ambitionless Wyatt lets his innate ability languish.

* This lament of Esther's cuts deeply: "You . . . even when we make love you don't share it, you do it as though . . . so you can do something sinful . . . Why aren't you a priest? You are a priest! Why aren't you one then, instead of . . . me . . . they don't share anything." (116)

Scopes Link

2004-11-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

I first thought the mention of the Scopes trial on page 36 "...the consternation which descended upon the questioner was only equaled in that household by her reception of the news of the Scopes trial in distant Tennessee." was merely a contextual marker to tell us that it was now 1925.

Interestingly though, the Scopes trial was a bit of a farce (I knew about Scopes in name only "Clarence Darrow for the defense.")

From the Wikipedia article on the Scopes Trial:

At issue was the Butler Act, which had been passed a few months earlier. In its preface, it described itself as "An act prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof."

The American Civil Liberties Union had offered to defend anyone accused of teaching evolution in defiance of the law. The leaders of Dayton, Tennessee, then a town of less than 3,000, thought that the controversy of such a trial would put Dayton on the map. They asked a 24-year-old science teacher and athletic coach named John T. Scopes, who agreed. The original prosecutors were his friends Grant and Sue Hicks.

I don't mean to say this is significant in terms of the overall novel, but just one more fun layer of allusions that WG has dropped in to keep us busy (reading other things than his novel). :)

p.s. I am now kicking myself, because I recently boxed up my copy of Berger's "Way of Seeing."

Weekend Reading

2004-11-19T17:41:00.000-05:00

Going into our second week of the Gaddis-travaganza, I'd like to point everyone to a moldy but still great classic, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." This essay was originally written in 1935 by Walter Benjamin, and can now be found in the collection Illuminations. You can also find many of the same ideas, and a modern twist, in the opening essay of John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

So what is this all about and why should you, as a reader of TR, care? First off, TR is all about art and originality, and reproducing great works of art. Now in Gaddis's (and our) time, people could have reproductions of great works of art for a fraction of the price, yet the original was what everyone wanted. Why? Why pay millions for the original if you could just have a copy on the cheap? I'll quote John Berger for the answer:

The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducable.

Note the use of religiosity. In effect, Berger is saying that if anyone could have a reproduction of Van Gogh's work, then there's on need to own the original. In order to keep the original from losing its specialness, people established this cult of the original, this religious fervor. Not only that, but this new creation supplanted the mysterious seductive capacity that paintings originally carried when there were no reproductions.

Berger also says the ability to reproduce paintings has consequences for what they mean:

In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort.

In other words, paintings can be put into advertisements and used to indicate how tasty a cigarette is. Just like any other sign, paintings can be strewn around and used as language. This could not be done when there was only one copy of each work, and this too has had consequences for the way art is seen and interpreted.

Now, since our protagonist, good old Wyatt, is an artist who we know will make forgeries, and who struggles with the concepts of the value of art (monetary and otherwise) and art's menaing, I hasten to guess that Gaddis read Benjamin and incorporated some of his thoughts into TR.

These two quotes from Berger are good starting points, and they get across the general thrust of what he and Benjamin are talking about, but you should go back to the source and have a read for yourself. I promise you will see TR in a new light.

Tossing in Some More Early Thoughts

2004-11-18T23:15:00.000-05:00

I don't have much to add to the preceding conversation, so I thought I would add something of my own. I have not finished the entire first section, but I am soaking it up, re-reading passages and enjoying the tangents that thoughts or notes take me.

I am really taken by the event on page 25 when Gwyon buys the Bosch table:

A large low table appeared under the window in the dining room. It was the prize of this incipient collection, priceless, although a price had been settled which Gwyon paid without question to the old Italian grandee who offered it sadly and in secret. This table top was the original (though some fainaiguing had been necessary at Italian customs, confirming it a fake to get it out of the country), a painting by Hieronymus Bosch portraying the Seven Deadly Sins in medieval (meddy-evil, the Reverend pronounced it, an unholy light in his eyes) indulgence. Under the glass which covered it, Christ stood with one maimed hand upraised, beneath him in rubrics, Cave, Cave, D⁸ videt...

Cave, Cave, D⁸ videt..., Beware, Beware, the Lord Sees.

Wyatt is found on page 30, eating at that table “Unlike children who are encouraged to down their food by the familiar spoon-scraped prize of happy animals cartooned on the bottom of the dish, Wyatt hurried through every drab meal to meet a Deadly Sin...”

and repeating the words “After he had been told the meaning of the rubric, he could be heard muttering in those dark hallways, -Cave, cave, Dominus videt.”

From the Zeidler essay, linked to in the annotations, we know that,

even though “It is very unlikely that the Madrid tabletop has been used as a table: it would have been too easily damaged.”

Wyatt, a child is allowed, perhaps made, to eat at it. It’s by the window, so he can’t walk around it, but the table was:

...not only meant to be looked at but also meant to be walked around: walking around the table enables viewers to take in each of the seven scenes, but at the same time he or she loses sight of the four Last Things in the four corners of the painting, as well as the two inscriptions on the banderoles ("They are a nation void of sense; there is no understanding in them. If they were wise, they would understand this; they would discern what the end would be" [Deuteronomy 32:28-29], and: "I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be" [32:20]) and the "Cave, Cave, Dominus Vide" (Beware, beware, the Lord sees) beneath Christ as the man of sorrows in the center. Standing in front of the painting one faces God, one faces eternity, walking around it one enters the world of transience.

I think the table passage on 25 is important. First, “Bosch's work was very popular in the 16th century, was widely copied, imitated, and forged.” Knowing in advance that forgery is a theme and we’ve encountered “Dr. Sinisterra” already, the fact that the table, which according to the annotations will have been found to not be a fake later in the book, represents the idea that it is sometimes the fakes (and perhaps the fakers) that are real and they are only fake in response to an unreasonable (subjectively) society.

I’m not sure what to make of Wyatt’s behavior in regard to the table, but all of his behavior seems to be a response to the unreasonable world he is forced to deal with. Aunt May accuses him already of telling lies, but it is she that is the true faker (do I have to prove that statement?).

From the annotations I found that Gaddis was a T.S. Eliot fan and planned to incorporate every line from “Four Quartets” into the book. That in itself is interesting, but I went back and re-read FQ and found this passage from “East Coker” lines, 75 - 90:

And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,

Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,

The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

Useless in the darkness into which they peered

Or from which they turned their eyes, There is, it seems to

us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm...

Sounds like an outline for this novel (at least, so far). There seems to be a theme of elders competing for the right version of the world to hand to Wyatt, between the Town Carpenter (in a book such as this, shouldn’t we suspect a Carpenter [sic on the uppercase] to be The Carpenter?), Gwyon and Aunt May. I imagine he makes up his own.

So these are thoughts or points of departure rather than statements or conclusion, the sort of thing that, if weren’t for the Gaddis-Drinking-Club, would probably remain in my head, churning around, or scribbled in the margins of the book or a notebook.

Stuff to Ponder

2004-11-18T18:51:00.000-05:00

I won't be able to check in on the mayhem till later, so drink and chat you East Coasters. And while you do so, ponder these:

pg. 16: What's the deal with Spain being Hercules holding the U.S. (Antaeus) in the air? "Spain is still on the earth and we, in our country, we are being crushed in the air."

pg. 23: Referring to Rev G. after he has returned to America and resumed his pulpit: "He strayed far from his continent, and spent late hours of the night participating in dark practices from Borneo to Assam." Why does Rev G. turn to other religions? A loss of faith after the death of his wife? A disgust with the rigidity of Christianity, as it is practiced in his parish?

pg. 33: Aunt May presents creativity as the work of God and God alone. Any humans who would be creative are presumptuous and sinful. "Among provinces where He retained sway was that of creativity; and mortal creative work was definitely one of His damnedest things."

Further, on page 34, Lucifer is characterized as "falsify[ing] something in the divine order" and "steal[ing] the power of Our Lord . . . to bring his own light to man."
Also, even among its enthusiasts, creativity in TR is portrayed as a double-bladed sword.

pg. 45: Speaking of Wyatt: "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 . . . loading the fever-stricken boy with the guilt it had taken them generations to accumulate." Wyatt is made the congregation's scapegoat, but then Rev G. makes his monkey, Heracles (the Greek name of the Latin Hercules), the scapegoat for Wyatt's illness.

pg. 60: What about Camilla and the portrait Wyatt is painting? Rev G says: "You must finish it, you must try to finish it . . . finish it, or she will be with you . . . She will be with you always." In what ways can Camilla be with Wyatt (she died before he even knew her)? What do we even know of her?

Talk Here (Part 1 Chapter 1)

2004-11-18T16:19:00.000-05:00

I'm finding it hard to come up with any general discussion point at this time. This first chapter feels so much like a prologue, a lot of set-up for the future, the ideas that aren't yet developed.

So, let's just have a free-for-all. Perhaps we can address an questions, share opinions, and any other commentary anyone has.

I think as the we progress through the novel there will be more room for discussion.

the Spell of the Spurious

2004-11-18T11:39:00.000-05:00

Thoroughly enjoying the postings but my progress, per drinking (none) and reading (very little Chapter II) have been hampered by a headcold. I recall an interview with Eco in Bookforum which coincided with the publication of Serendipities, it was also a thrust at first world uniltaeralism by They-Which-Won't-Be-Named. Baulodino was thoroughly enjoyed, at least the first half, and the Rake's depiction of the essays is equally charming. ciao - jon

Bookkeeping: Thoughts on tonight

2004-11-18T09:06:00.000-05:00

Do y'all still want to have a discussion night? My thinking was that Derik, as this week's chapter leader, would post a conversation starter and we would all get down in the comments beneath his question, which would corral the conversation some and allow readers who aren't also posters to take part in the discussion. In the meantime, GDC posters who have other drunken inspiration that's off the proposed topic would, of course, be free to post whatever pleases them on the wall and we can wander into those comments boxes as well.

Thoughts? I think we were suggesting a start time later in the evening, to allow the other time zones to join in.

And now for something completely different...

2004-11-18T02:47:00.000-05:00

Ah, good to see so many here with their critical apparatuses functioning. I hope to be able to say something insightful as we proceed, but for right now, I'm just enjoying stuff like this way too much:

So came the money in Gwyon's family: since he disapproved of table delicacies, an earlier Gwyon had set up an oatmeal factory and done quite well. Since his descendents disapproved of almost everything else except compound interest, the fortune had grown near immodest proportions, only now being whittled down to size. (p. 14)

Pardon me while I laugh like an idiot (which could also be the fault of the bourbon, Van Winkle Special Reserve 12-Year Lot B, in case you're wondering).

But bear with me: after reading about the Town Carpenter telling young Wyatt stories of "figures like Kublai Khan, Tamerlane, and Prester John" (p. 31), I remembered a nifty little book called Serendipities, by Umberto Eco, which might be an interesting adjunct to TR, given that (as the jacket copy sez) it examines "layers of mistakes that have shaped human history."

Specifically, I'm thinking of the first essay in the book, titled "The Force of Falsity." Eco sez:

At this point, it can be said that, over the course of history, beliefs and affirmations that today's encyclopedia categorically denies have been given credence and indeed believed so completely as to subjugate the learned, generate and destroy empires, inspire poets (not always witnesses to the truth), and drive human beings to heroic sacrifices, intolerance, massacre, the quest for knowledge. If this is true, how can we not assert that a Force of the False exists?

(I'm just going to whistle past the graveyard on how this applies to current affairs.)

Anyway, here's part of the Prester John section of the essay, upon which my tenuous connection-making exists:

In the second half of the twelfth century a letter arrived in the West, telling how in the far-off East, beyond the regions occupied by the Mussulmen, beyond those lands the crusaders had tried to wrest from the dominion of the infidel only to see them returned to that same rule, there was a flourishing Christian region governed by a legendary priest John, or Presbyter Johannes, or Prester John....

[...Eco quotes letter at length, here's a site with a different but similar version]

In the course of the following centuries--until the seventeenth--translated and paraphrased many times into various languages and versions, the letter had a decisive importance in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient. The idea that beyond the Moslem territories there could be a Christian kingdom justified all ventures of expansion and exploration.

[...]

Where did Prester John's letter come from? What was its purpose? Perhaps it was a document of anti-Byzantine propaganda, produced in the scriptoria of Frederick I. But the problem is not so much its origin (fakes of every description were abundant at that time) as its reception. The geographical fantasy gradually generated a political project. In other words, the phantom called up by some scribe with a knack for counterfeiting documents (a highly respected literary activity of the period) served as an alibi for the expansion of the Christian world toward Africa and Asia, a welcome argument favoring the white man's burden.

Interesting, no? I'm not sure how much resonance this has (or might have, going forward in the book), but I find Eco's essay mighty intriguing, especially now that we have the topics of copies and forgeries (the Force of the False) in the forefront.

My Take -- A Continuation of Derik's Notes

2004-11-16T13:01:00.000-05:00

A few thoughts and ideas to churn up some talk. Thanks to Derik's post for getting me started on some of these:

* Camilla has only played the tiniest role thus far, but I feel certain that she has large symbolic importance. Especially since she is the subject of Wyatt's unfinished painting, one of the few things he takes with him to France. I'm curious as to what Camilla, her odd death at sea, and her burial in Spain (and the controversey surrounding it) can mean to this book.

* Another in conjunction with Camilla. Her painting seems likely to remain unfinished for some time (perhaps the entire book?). In this light, this quote from Derik's post is interesting: "There's something about a. . . an unfinished piece of work, a . . . a thing like this where . . . do you see? Where perfection is still possible?"

* On page 13, Gaddis talk about "lives conceived in guilt and perpetuated in refusal." This sounds like a terribly portentuous quote, but I'll admit I don't have much idea what it means, or the context in which we should think about it. It this a stab at the Church? The father-son relationship? An artist's burden?

Calling all readers...

2004-11-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

Surely, some of you must have finished the chapter?

Are you finding it tough going? Don't worry too much about trying to get everything. The annotations are a great help, but you can get a lot out of the novel without them. It may be tough, but it's still a fun book (Well, I think so). Part of the utility of discussing is that you don't have to completely get it all right away.

Rah rah. Go team!

Unswerving Punctuality of Chance

2004-11-16T08:23:00.000-05:00

"Opening one of Nietzsche's books at random, you have the almost novel experience of not continuing on by way of interiority." -- Deleuze

Being the novice, I will stab at brevity. D's post was elucidating, as is the annotated guide thereto. It is only espresso fuelling this post, but it was the apt-named Avery Reverend barleywine which so helpful last evening. Detritus from such aside, I see hints of a continium between counterfeiters and the mounds of Gwyon's textual authority, not the monolith that compells May in her quotidian trials, but a bulge of possibility. That said, the circumstances of Wyatt's infirmity and recovery were quite dense and I thought the text at large appeared to flow untethered once May passed on. Thanks again for the opportunity to participate. Sorry, everytime Harold Bloom surfaces in the ether the spectre of Naomi Wolf is not far away. ciao - jon

Part I Chapter I, p. 3-62

2004-11-15T11:23:00.000-05:00

(Though I'm going first, I don't want people to take my attempt here as a model for future discussion. I'm a rather haphazard thinker, so I tend to throw things out as I come upon them or as they occur to me. I didn't want to spend too much time on summary, as I think the Annotations do a fine job with that. Mostly I just want to point out things that interested me, that seem important, or amusing, etc.

Since I've read the book before and have read a good bit of the critical apparatus, I'm going to end up pointing out things that might not be relevant until later in the book. Repetitions that I am noticing, clues to future happenings and such. I hope that is okay for everything. I'd rather not work under the "spoiler" stricture, but I'll also try to refrain from being too explicit about future plot.

As for how the actual discussion will go, I guess we figure that out as we go along.)

Summary:

Sometime after WWI, Reverend Gwyon (a protestant/calvinist)'s wife, Camilla, dies on a trip to Spain aboard ship. Frank Sinisterra, a counterfeiter who disguised himself as ship's surgeon, is forced to operate on Camilla when she is struck with appendicitis and causes her death. In Spain, Gwyon has his wife's body interned in a walled space with a Catholic burial. After some time in Europe in a less than lucid state, Gwyon returns to his parish where his sister, Aunt May, and his son, Wyatt, await him.

May is strict in her religious observance and dismayed both by Wyatt's lack of religiosity (it is planned he will follow the family tradition and become a reverend) and Gwyon's straying from orthodoxy in his study of other religions, mythology, etc. Wyatt begins to draw and paint, mostly copying works (such as the table his father brought back from Italy, Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins), and leaving original works uncompleted (such as a portrait of his mother).

Wyatt gets sick and after much time the doctor's send him home, unable to help. Desperate to help his son, Gwyon uses a ritual found in one of his book to put the sickness into a scape goat, in this case Heracles the Barbary ape he brought back from his trip.

Wyatt gets better, goes off to seminary, but eventually runs off to Germany to pursue his art. (His father discovers this only after receiving a letter from that other country.)

Gwyon continues his reading and his sermons are ever more wrapped in the varieties of religions and myths in the world (he states that Mithraism failed because it was too good).

Comments:

I consider this chapter a bit of a prologue. The chapter sets up our main character (Wyatt), his background, and some of the main themes of the novel. Not for the first time we see a number of years pass over the course of a few pages.

Right from the start we have the idea of a masquerade, disguise, dissimulation, all quite important to the novel. In a masquerade there is the opportunity for getting behind the disguise, a recognition of what is hidden.

On the first page Wyatt is obliquely referred to: "Aunt May was his father's sister..." (3, emphasis mine) but not specifically named (or really mentioned again) until page 18. This type of appearance will be rather typical of Wyatt in later parts of the book.

Early in we are also introduced to two preoccupations: forgery and art. Sinisterra in his forgery of bank notes used "Rembrandt's formula for the wax ground on his copper plate" (5).

A dark humour is evident often in this chapter (and throughout). A favorite of mine being the ship insured against all but "acts of god" and then "God boarded the Purdue Victory and acted" (4).

Gaddis's interest in religion and myth is prominent throughout the chapter (I love Fr. Eulalio who had "unchristian pride" for having all five vowels in his name), as well as his rather negative view of the religiose and the church. Much of the humor is reserved for religion and the religious.

I noticed a number of references to "chance" (pages 3 ("had finally given chance the field necessary to its operation"), 5 ("Chance had played against him"), and 9 ("unswerving punctuality of chance") for starters).

Camilla is often referenced in connection to goddesses, white, and the moon (obvious connections to Graves' "The White Goddess"), such as at the bottom of page 14 into 15 ("remontant goddess"). At the bottom of page 11, Gwyon is "wakened suddenly by the hand of his wife," he goes to the window, and then "There was the moon, reaching a still arm behind him to the bed where he had lain." This gets echoed in Wyatt's vision of his mother and the etheral unfinished painting.

A use of the word "recognitions" that is also quite amusing. Regarding the "Town Carpenter" Wyatt's grandfather (Camilla's father): "It was in the Depot Tavern that he received condolences, accepted funerary offers of drink, and, when these recognitions were exhausted, he sank into the habit of talking familliarly about persons and places unknown to his cronies, so that several of them suspected him of reading." (22)

The idea of the scape goat comes up a few times, most notably with the sacrifice of the ape Heracles, but Gwyon also mentions it in relation to Christianity ("The great satisfaction of seeing someone else punished for a deed of which we know ourselves capable." (24))

"To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order..." (34)

Wyatt: "There's something about a. . . an unfinished piece of work, a . . . a thing like this where . . . do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it's there, it's there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it." (57)

A few things with future recurrence in the novel: the crossed-eyed girl in the white stockings, the story about the sky as a sea and the anchor stuck on a tombstone, and the Bosch table.

Bud's self-censoring (which Gaddis might aver is better than self-censering); CAAF in violent need of the OED

2004-11-14T16:06:00.000-05:00

Over at Chekhov’s Mistress, Bud shares some preliminary thoughts on this first section of T.R. (or as I’m thinking of it, T. Recs.). In a parenthetical he wonders about any allusions packed into Doctor Sinisterra’s name: “(Sinister? No land?)”

I’m wondering too, and guessing Bud’s nailed it. OurWebster’s Third glosses “sinister” as “left, on the left side, awkward, injurious, evil, unlucky, inauspicious." The shift from “ter” to “terra”, or “[no] land,” for a fraudulent shipboard doctor adds a nice second layer.

This website page looks at the etymology of “sinister” in terms of the “basis these terms have in materialism, pre-religious fear and the dogma that resulted from prehistorical sun worship.” Any other thoughts from the etymologists among us obvs. welcome.

Gaddis and Religion

2004-11-14T11:54:00.000-05:00

I'm through two-thirds of the opening chapter, and I'm reminded of a short book I picked up a couple of years ago called The Writer and Religion. Published in 2000, it collects the proceedings of a conference by the same name held in 1994 at Washington University in St. Louis, William H. Gass' home turf. The book is edited by Gass and Lorin Cuoco and consists of seven main presentations related to the topic (by Gass, Eavan Boland, Gaddis, A. G. Mojtabai, Amitav Ghosh, Hanan al-Shaykh, and J.M. Coetzee), each followed by a panel discussion and audience questions. I found it to be an interesting collection, though my memory of the whole thing is not incredibly clear. I re-read the Gaddis and Coetzee essays this morning. Gaddis' is titled "Old Foes with New Faces" and is also included in his posthumous non-fiction collection, The Rush For Second Place. His hostility towards religion, Christianity in particular, is, as usual, unmistakable, even (especially?) under the cover of an olive branch:

Considering the enormity of this enterprise, I will narrow the focus of my remarks to my own pursuits. By writers, I assume we mean writers of fiction. By religion, I’m referring to the one I have barked my shin against over half a century in one or another of its avatars, to borrow an epithet, as Christianity itself has never hesitated to do when it has served its purposes.

Rather than initiate our undertaking with a confrontation, however—I am sure there will be plenty of those—I propose to extend a hand of fellowship from the criterion central to both: that which constitutes poetic faith for the writer in Coleridge’s familiar “willing suspension of disbelief” and, for the religionist, the leap of faith enshrined in the misquoted words of Tertullian via St. Augustine, “Credo quia absurdum.”

In other words, we are all in the same line of business: that of concocting, arranging, and peddling fictions to get us safely through the night.

Then, he touches briefly on drinking, a subject near and dear to a certain club:

Certainly an enhanced capacity for self-delusion is a valuable attribute for the writer, both in nurturing his fictional characters and often enough his own. Thus, it is hardly surprising to find this capacity to be fueled frequently by an equally large appetite for strong drink, with the majority of America’s native-born Nobel Prize winners in literature being confirmed alcoholics as testimony.

Before drawing further (no doubt unwelcome) comparison to aspects of the Christian faith...

We may even go so far as to find a parallel in Alfred North Whitehead’s reference to “the use of wine in the Communion service,” which is “a relic of the religious awe at intoxication,” itself, at all odds, a relic of the drunken license turned loose at pagan saturnalias of a still earlier time where, habit breeding expectation, promiscuous intercourse provided plentiful material for the marvels of virgin birth that followed.

Later, after recounting some familiar statistics concerning Americans and religious belief, he gets in another zinger:

Outnumbering supporters of reincarnation by three to one, almost three quarters opt for a heaven where good lives on earth will be eternally rewarded, with more than half basking in the company of God and Jesus, but fewer than half with that of friends, relatives, and spouses. Oddly enough under these circumstances, only 5 percent expect eternity to be boring.

Also, here are a couple of non-Gaddis passages that struck me as relevant to the character of Aunt May and the humorless and harsh Protestant Christianity practiced (and imposed) by her. First, from Coetzee's essay (which is quite good, and itself was reprinted in the collection Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship.):

…it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue, as virtue, must be innocent and therefore vulnerable to the wiles of vice unless protected.

Second, moving away from the book, I don't know if anyone else here is into old-time folk music, or, say, the Carter Family, but, as I was reading about Aunt May, I couldn't help but be reminded of John Fahey's liner notes to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four:

While there is nothing new in the variety and type of songs by the Carter Family on Volume 4, there is nevertheless a new element: old age, decline and death. The group sounds old; indeed on “No Depression In Heaven” they sound like they have several feet in the grave. There had always been a morbid element in the singing of the Carter Family. A good example is “The Wild Western Hobo,” who, we are told, is “going to have lots of fun.” Yet the Carters sound as if their idea of fun is having teeth pulled. The Carter Family refused throughout their career to sound happy—they even refused to sound neutral. No, in accordance with the religious zeitgeist, The Code of the Hills, as Al Kapp called it, one must have: 1) a deprecatory view of life on Earth, i.e., that it is a veil of tears. Indeed, their big hit, “Keep On The Sunny Side,” sounds like a cry for help from some very unhappy folks who are sliding down the slippery slope of Protestant unworldliness and predestined gloom; and 2) an insistence on adhering to the amusing local practice of refusing to refer to a body part—or even to pronounce any syllable which named a body part. This was widespread practice in the South. Even in Washington DC where I was brought up, I was taught that the correct pronunciation of “chimney” was “chimley,” but I was never told why. Shortly before my time, places like Assategue and Assawoman were called “Rumpategue” and “Rumpawoman.”

Others may have more immediate or personal experience with this, but it is completely alien to me, not to mention fascinating.

First person to accost Harold Bloom and say "Boo!" wins

2004-11-13T19:51:00.000-05:00

In what is surely a sign of something (cue ominous strings), at the annual BWI warehouse sale this morning (mob scene, but all hardcovers $2, everything else $1) I snagged a copy of Bloom's Modern Critical Views: William Gaddis. It features an introduction by Harold Bloom and essays by Joseph Salemi, Susan Streble Klemtner, Miriam Fuchs, Jonathan Raban and several others. The opening paragraph (and change) of Bloom's introduction is priceless and I post it here for your edification:

My one personal memory of William Gaddis goes back to a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, sometime in the later 1990's. We had been introduced perhaps a year before, and he approached me, expressing gratification that I had included The Recognitions in a canonical catalog published in 1994. Not knowing him, yet apprehending that his grave and courteous manner did not seem ironic, I stammered that I had admired the novel since 1955, when it was first published, and had reread it several times since, always with a sense of gratitude. Gaddis graciously nodded his head, and walked away. Returning to New Haven that night, I rather weirdly found a copy of the Penguin paperback of The Recognitions in my briefcase, where I had not placed it.

This oddity (and I still do not know how the book got there) reflects for me the uncanniness of The Recognitions, where the inexplicable is marvelously omnipresent, in an almost Dickensian way.

Spooky, huh? Or did Gaddis "punk" Bloom?

In any event, it seems we really are reading the preferred edition.

On Being Lost, and Sheri Martinelli

2004-11-12T18:32:00.000-05:00

Like Matthew, I too am newly enclubbed. My first exposure to Gaddis was about six or seven years ago via A Frolic of His Own (my brother had read it in connection with a legal ethics class; I had his copy), which I thoroughly enjoyed. Other than the book I had in my hands, I had no idea who Gaddis was, and I undertook to find out. In the course of doing so (which was not so easy at the time, only a few years back, as it would be today), I came across what seemed to be hushed mentions here and there of The Recognitions--as if it were some sort of Holy Grail. It soon became clear to me that this was a book I needed to read, and it was just as clear that when I did so I would be in way over my head. In the event, a couple years later I did indeed read The Recognitions (by the way, Gass' introduction has my vote for Best Introduction Ever--I've read it alone five or six times, and consider it almost worth the price of admission by itself). And I was indeed in over my head. If I recall correctly, I hit a wall around page 400 or so, put it aside, returned a couple of months later--by which point I had completely lost track of the characters and much else besides. I plowed on to the end, enjoying the local texture as I went, but knowing full well I was not giving the book a reading it deserved. I fully intended to read it again anyway, but I always have to kind of steel myself for the commitment a massive novel requires, so I couldn't say when, otherwise, that would have happened. So I'm thrilled to be reading it again in this context. I'm a better reader now, I think, and looking forward to both the re-reading itself and the attendant discussion. I picked the novel up the other day and read some passages. Yes, this is going to be fun.

But, why did I know I'd be in over my head? I have this thing about books that are "thickly allusive"--I am drawn to them, but often feel ill-equipped to appreciate the allusiveness, so that sometimes, even if I've otherwise enjoyed a book, I wonder if I've gotten it, quite. In part this is irrational anxiety about the chunks of literature I fear may be required (or unknown) antecedents if I hope to appreciate this or that attractive novel... At the time I read The Recognitions, I was a young reader, not necessarily chronologically, but in terms of what I'd read. From what I gather, I started late for a serious reader. Anyway, despite this, I've mostly read the books anyway.

Which brings me to David Markson and the reason Sheri Martinelli is part of my post title. When Markson first came to my attention, I loved the idea of what he was doing, but I knew that part of the fun of a work like This Is Not A Novel was identifying what the narrator was referring to. So as I read it, I made notes in a spiral notebook of things that I didn't pick up right away (the number of pages filled being proprietary information; too many, let's say) and then I looked 'em up. It was humbling and discursive and actually kind of fun. And somehow, in the course of this internet learnin', I came across this page from the Gaddis Annotations. I don't know exactly what brought me there, since you'll be able to see that it is, in fact, Reader's Block that is mentioned, not This Is Not A Novel, but nevertheless, there I was.

All of this being an incredibly roundabout way to point out, somewhat trivially, that The Recognitions is a roman à clef. This probably doesn't really matter, or affect our enjoyment, but some may find it amusing (I find it amusing in the same way that I like knowing that the guy who played John Turturro's brother in Do the Right Thing was once the--original, I think--drummer in Sonic Youth). Anyway, as Steve Moore points out in the article, the character of Esme is based on this Sheri Martinelli (and Otto on Gaddis himself). Perhaps interesting to know. And there's some neat stuff in Moore's piece, besides the bits specifically about this novel (those bits may actually reveal too much, depending on your taste, if you haven't read it before). The people she was associated with--Anaïs Nin, Charlie Parker, Marlon Brando, Ezra Pound--well... Some good stuff in there.

Ok. I'm ready.

Textually Corrupt

2004-11-12T17:12:00.000-05:00

Now that I have joined the club, I have to admit that the edition of The Recognitions that I read six or seven years ago, when I first read the book, was the old Bard/Avon mass market paperback. There is still a price written in pencil on the first page: $3. I bought the book at the best used bookstore in New Hampshire, and one of the best in New England, The Old #6 Book Depot in Henniker. I had read parts of JR and parts of Carpenter's Gothic at that point, and liked what I'd read, but felt for one reason or another that I needed to begin at the beginning. And so I did.

Little did I know that the paperback I read was, as Steven Moore notes, "a textually corrupt edition that should be shunned by Gaddis scholars". I wasn't then, and am not now, a Gaddis scholar, or a scholar of any sort, really. I enjoyed much of The Recognitions on that first reading, but also knew that I was missing a lot, perhaps even 80% of what the book was up to. For one reason or another, I didn't mind being lost in the book, though. I was both lost in the book in the traditional sense -- engrossed, enchanted, beguiled -- and lost in the pedestrian sense: I kept forgetting which character was which and how they related, had no idea for many pages what was going on, and sometimes wondered if English were even a language Gaddis and I shared. Consequently, my memories of The Recognitions are impressionistic, imagistic, and not tied at all to narrative or meaning.

I've been meaning to return to the book and study it more closely. Part of me is afraid of ruining the remembered joy of the first reading. But I have extracted that joy and saved it in amber and set it on the bookshelf beside me here, right next to the innocent heart I keep in a jar of formaldehyde. I've also just ordered the Penguin paperback of the novel, so for this reading I won't be textually corrupt. As for other forms of corruption ... well, we'll just wait and see...

FURLing Relevant Pages

2004-11-11T13:16:00.000-05:00

Since I have a FURL account set-up already, I'm gonna be FURLing any relevant reading pages that come up in our discussions.

For those of us using RSS, there is a feed of just the relevant topic at: http://www.furl.net/members/dbadman/rss.xml?topic=Gaddis_Reading&count=10

Web access is to the my whole FURL archive, but can be filtered to the topic "Gaddis_Reading": http://www.furl.net/members/dbadman

FURL can't handle whole sites, only single pages, but beyond it's saving capabilities it also works as a bookmark repositiory.

On Faust, Gass (and Wikipedia)

2004-11-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

This was originally a comment on Derik's post about Faust, but it became too long so I thought I would put it here.

Goethe's Faust Part One is actually pretty short (particularly for anyone who has read Recognitions twice already) at 148 pages (Luke translation, Oxford World Classics pbk.). It is the essential Faust story. Part Two is only "loosely connected with Part One and the German legend of Faust."

Gounod's opera synopsis will provide a real bare-bones summary, but that will probably not suffice.

The quote from the beginning of The Recognitions is from Faust Part Two, lines 6834-35.

Since there are various translations, I'll give it here:

Mephistopheles [sotto voce]:
What great work's that?

Wagner [in a whisper]:
A man is being made.

The rest of the passage is worth reading (I'm, guessing, but since WG left the passage in its original German, he was invoking the entire work instead of just those words).

Mephistopheles:
A man? So you have locked an amorous pair
Up in your chimney-stack somehow?

Wagner:
Why, God forbid! That method's out of fashion now:
Procreation's sheer nonsense, we declare!
That tender point where life used to begin
That gentle power springing from within,
Taking and giving, programmed to portray
Itself, to assimilate what came its way
From near or far - all that's now null and void;
By animals, no doubt, it's still enjoyed,
But man henceforth, being so highly gifted,
Must have an origin more uplifted...

This is a bit of a stretch, but I think that passage is telling, particularly considering Gass' comments on the novel's journey aspect (aren't all journeys a metaphor for man's progress or [in later works] an attempt to recover from The Fall) and the Oedipal aspect that Gass points out too would make this passage seem particularly ironic (a Gaddis focal point?). I won't elaborate because it would seem shallow to do so until I've actually read some of the frickin book.

p.s. For anyone who hasn't read the Gass introduction, it's very good.

p.p.s. I was thinking that this might be a good opportunity for some of us to contribute to the Gaddis page on Wikipedia. There isn't very much information there now and that seems a shame. Any thoughts?

Firstly... comedy.

2004-11-11T08:49:00.000-05:00

Something to keep in mind when you start reading, Gaddis considered this a comic novel. Don't forget to laugh amidst all that erudition and fancy language.

And a call for assistance: Anyone know of a good summary or Goethe's Faust? I've never read it, but it has some connections to The Recognitions that I'd like to be a little more aware of. And since I don't have the time to read the whole thing...

Thirdly, if anyone else out there wants to join the club (you need an invitation to post entries but anyone is welcome in the comments), send an email to me or Rake or CAAF, and we can invite you.

The Working Library

2004-11-11T04:26:00.000-05:00

Apparently Washington University in St. Louis holds the William Gaddis Papers. While this doesn't do me any good, the WU people have posted a list of contents of Gaddis's "working library." But don't take my word for it:

...the William Gaddis Papers include his working library, which consists of approximately 1250 volumes that were housed in his study, the "west library," and his bedroom. The bibliography available here is a initial draft of the working library's holdings listed in alphabetical order by author. Nearly every entry is followed by a parenthetical statement, which describes from where each text was taken. This information is based upon descriptions written on packing boxes, which did not specify the exact physical order of the texts on the shelves. Also, some bibliographic entries include notes about marginalia and other distinctive characteristics of the book; these are initial, incomplete notes, which will be completed once the collection is fully processed.

This list goes from "AAA Florida Tourbook. Buffalo, NY: Qubecor, 1996. (Day Room)" to "Zamiatin, Eugene W.E. Trans. Gregory Zilboorg. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1952. (3rd from top Shoe)." Somewhere near the middle is a copy of Les Reconocimientos, trans. Juan Antonio Santos.

(I love this sort of thing. I imagine these scenes:

--Honey, where's the Florida book?
--Florida book?
--The book, the Florida book. The AAA thing?
--I think it's in the dayroom, darling.

But maybe it's just me.)

A Shocking Confession.

2004-11-11T02:23:00.000-05:00

I am a Gaddis virgin.

(I'm abandoning the TEV-favored royal "We" for the purposes of GDC.)

We're talking nothing. Zippity-doo-dah. Total cherry. I admit that only among friends.

Oh, I can talk a good game at cocktail parties. "Ah, yes, of course. JR. Sure, The Recognitions. Big books. Not for everyone." (If you're ever caught not wanting to admit you haven't read a book, nod and say "Not for everyone." It fosters an odd sense of camaraderie that usually discourages further probing, like you're in some secret club of Smart People together.)

So I am boning up, reading my primary, secondary and tertiary sources - even bought the last five dollar used copy of Fire the Bastards from Amazon. Doin' my homework. And with a fresh bottle of Bushmills and a series of color-coordinated shotglasses courtesy of my friends at Swink at the ready, I'm going to dive in this weekend. (I plan to visit the newly opened Duttons Beverly Hills to obtain my copy.)

Should be very interesting, as it usually is when I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I'll try to stay out of the way of the experts.

Further Scheduling

2004-11-10T13:15:00.000-05:00

Trying to break down a few more sections. We'll need volunteers for leading the discussion for the week, which, as it's been planned so far, means posting (on Monday) a summary of the section with commentary, questions, whatever to keep the discussion rolling along.

Where the reading does not end with a chapter (hard to do with the really short chapters and the really long chapters) , the page in question contains a line/paragraph break that should be obvious.

[Start]: [pages] ([section]) ([leader])

11.22.04: 63-131 (I.II-III) (Scott)

11.29.04: 131-201 (I.III-V) (Rake)

12.6.04: 202-277 (I.VI-VII) (CAAF)

12.13.04: 281-342 (II.I) (SoT)

12.20.04: 343-389 (II.II) (Gwenda)

That takes us up to the holidays (is a break needed there?).

If we could have a few volunteers...

"...by that definition, mine is frigid."

2004-11-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

Knight, Christopher J., Ed. "The New York State Writers Tapes: William Gaddis." Contemporary Literature 42.4 (2001): 667-693.

I offer a few excerpts from this article (let me know if you want a pdf of it) which transcribes from a lectures and Q&As Gaddis made in 1990, 1993, and 1994:

"I generally think of experimental work as work which can fail and probably does, but shows good intentions. Whereas when I finish my work, I think it's the way I want it, and it's not an experiment. It's a complete, completed… scientific enterprise." (669)

"I don't know if Marshall McLuhan is a name that is much heard anymore… a hot medium like television has high definition… the viewer needs to bring little to his participation… a cool medium, such as a book… has a low definition. It provides less information, leaving much of the experience to be filled in by the reader. Cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. So by that definition, mine is frigid." (670)

He speaks highly of Dostoyevsky and Twain, and recounts his amusement at a three-man con job to rob him of his money on a bus.

Most of it is on JR and A Frolic of His Own.

Also, a downloadable interview with Malcolm Bradbury (32 minutes).

Popping open my first bottle of pear juice

2004-11-10T12:05:00.000-05:00

While I track my copy of The Recognitions across the vast red space of Jesusland, I feel I need to give a little to the ongoing discussion. In what will probably become known as the SoT formula--one that readers of my site know all too well--I scoop the bottom of the Internet barrel to give you something that matters little but could help untie some of your drunken tongues as you read the pages aloud to your pet or significant other(s). A confused reader asked Google Answers, I am reading "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis. What is the correct pronunciation of the name Gwyon?

For $5, this is the answer that Confused Reader received:

Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to answer your interesting question.

Interestingly enough is this, purportedly from Gaddis himself, as quoted by A READER'S GUIDE TO WILLIAM GADDIS'S ‘THE RECOGNITIONS’:

“Asked once how to pronounce “Gwyon”, Gaddis said he didn't know; he had never said it aloud. It probably should be pronounced as one syllable, like "Gwynne," its modern form.”

A READER'S GUIDE TO WILLIAM GADDIS'S ‘THE RECOGNITIONS’ http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/I1anno1.shtml

This appears to be confirmed by numerous mentions about the original name GWION, which sounds very similar to Gwynne and could very well have become Gwynne over the years.

The name Gwyon is a very, very old name and appears in THE MERIONETH LAY SUBSIDY ROLL for the years 1292-1293, many centuries before Gaddis was born. This was a tax roll of Welsh people living in northwestern Wales. A SIMPLE GUIDE TO CONSTRUCTING 13TH CENTURY WELSH NAMES, relying on the information in this historical tax role, indicates that the name GWYON is a variation of the original name GWION, both of which appear to be pronounced: “GWEE-ON” (in the Welsh languages of the time “GWI-” and “GWY-” were typically pronounced “GWEE-“)

So as you can see, the name GWION/GWYON in it’s early form would have been ‘GWEE-ON’, but the assumption made by A READER'S GUIDE TO WILLIAM GADDIS'S ‘THE RECOGNITIONS’ that the pronunciation of the name is ‘GWEN’ (similar to the way the name ‘GWYNNE’ sounds) as Gaddis surmised is logically correct.

Below you will find that I have carefully defined my search strategy for you in the event that you need to search for more information. By following the same type of searches that I did you may be able to enhance the research I have provided even further....

Best regards;
Tutuzdad – Google Answers Researcher

INFORMATION SOURCES

SHIRE OF WINTERMIST
http://www.sca-caid.org/herald/minutes/2002/min0209.html

A SIMPLE GUIDE TO CONSTRUCTING 13TH CENTURY WELSH NAMES
http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/welsh13.html

YULE RITUAL
http://www.muinmound.org/Rituals/Yule_Ritual.htm
(see item #10 on this page)

Of course, now it would be nice to know how to pronounce Tutuzdad.

feeling smarter already

2004-11-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

So, I must confess that my main knowledge of William Gaddis (prior to this week) and The Recognitions was simply an entry under the "Gigantor Books I Will Probably Never Read" column in my brain. (I know and love Dawn Powell though, which has to count for something.) The prejudice I seem to have developed against large books troubles me, and so I'm hoping that being part of a company of readers (and challenging, tipsy readers at that) will help me hang in and get past it. Because, based on what I've been reading, it's worth it.

Tim Conley has a moving obituary for Gaddis over at The Modern Word, which provokes guilt at not knowing more about this writer to begin with and especially at not having had any idea that he died (and so recently). If I didn't believe more in Houdini than the afterlife, we could try to call for his spirit using bourbon. Anyway, Conley has it:

Like the best satirists, Gaddis wrote (by his own admission) from a sense of indignation. His novels’ world, for all its sound and fury (as a character in JR accuses: “Noise, you’ll hide in noise any chance you get”), cannot conceal or altogether stifle the short cries of hope. The corruptions of art, thought, and language are part of the dreadful pomp and carnival heralding stupidity and greed as not only respectable values but cause for injustice. “We’re comic,” the character Benny admits in The Recognitions. “We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.” To recognize how very funny Gaddis is thus entails a further, less palatable acknowledgement about ourselves. What is most distressing about the death of William Gaddis is the general lack of notice of it and, more importantly, of his work: America has, for the most part, again managed to neglect one of its major artists. Herman Melville, in the winding path of whose encyclopaedic efforts and investigations of iniquity Gaddis’s writings walk, endured critical ignorance, scorn, and indifference when and after he produced Moby Dick. If people will read thoughtfully in the next century, William Gaddis and only perhaps we ourselves will be redeemed with wiser laughter.

I am all about wiser laughter.

Russell Banks' appreciation from Conjunctions is also fantastic and anyone who could merit the conclusion is worthy of a toast:

Gaddis looms larger, casting a longer shadow of his own, than all the others of his ilk and kin, Barthelme, Hawkes, etc., in that term mainly, ambition, but it was an important one, and he helped keep it alive. His ilk and kin, more wise than he, or shrewd, may have backed away from it--too transparently oedipal, perhaps, or simply too risky to put so many eggs in one enormous basket. But when Gaddis went to market, he brought home the whole pig, and I love him for that.

Did you guys know this year's George T. Stagg (i.e. The World's Best Whisky -- if you don't believe me, ask Jim Murray) has been released? Picked up the honorary Gaddis bottle last night.

To the top of 5

2004-11-10T02:00:00.000-05:00

After a few bottles of Pilsner Urquell leftover from NaDrWriNi, at the behest of our generous host (who kindly offered an invite), I've excavated my 1993 Penguin edition of The Recognitions from the postmodernist perch on my bookpile and dug in again to the mammoth novel that first enchanted me at 25. What immediately strikes me is the grand degree of contradictions on the first page alone.

I'm going to take this a few pages at a time. And if my esteemed peers would like to run with the ball, then we should be in solid shape before Nov. 15.

Loosely translated using my lousy pidgin German skills, the opening Faust passage reads: "What gives it?" "Humans are made."

Indeed, it is with this that we are given our first depiction of humanity, and what a dupicitous affair it is! We are introduced to Reverend Gwyon, who is remembering his recently departed wife Camilla at a Spanish funeral. Camilla, barely discernible even as a stiff, was fond of masquerades, but those that, in Gaddis's inimitable phrase, "of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality." It is the "presumes" part which sticks. From the very first sentence, Gaddis is suggesting that the presumption aspect (which shares a commonality with the Dale Carnegie books referenced later on) is more odious than the pretending itself. A half century before the Central Park West socialites and the grand pretenders that inhabit nearly every social niche from Peoria to the White House, Gaddis promises a fierce battle that involves sticking a dull knife into the backs of America's worst betrayers.

What's interesting is that Gwyon has to actually step outside of the United States to mourn, or to feel. But even on the open waters, the American obsession with duplicity remains. The ship that takes him to Spain is the Purdue Victory, as if a Midwestern college football team's weekend win was the only palpable symbol that Gwyon (or any of us) could relate to within America. The ship itself leaves the Boston harbor, a port intertwined with America's roots. The ship is insured against "acts of God," which suggests a duplicitious association with religion, later to be revealed by the ship's surgeon. The surgeon is dressed in artificial garb, and this sartorial sham contributes (in part) to his incorrect diagnosis. The surgeon himself is forced to shave (or clean up) when confronted with Camilla's actual pain, and it's worth noting that Gaddis has the surgeon caught in a quandary of crosses, thus tying his indolence and dual identity into religion.

The cruel upshot seems to be: You can't go home again, but your national identity will follow you by way of its hideous influence. It's a grim and hilarious question that's certainly pertinent today.

53 stupid reviews on the wall. take one down and pass it around. 52 stupid reviews on the wall.

2004-11-09T19:01:00.000-05:00

In his 2002 New Yorker essay about Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” Jonathan Franzen notes:

"The Recognitions" was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1955, with a marketing strategy of "Everyone is talking about this controversial book!" It received fifty-five reviews, an impressive number by today's standards, and, as William Gass notes in his introduction to the Penguin edition, "Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid." The New Yorker gave the book a brief, smirking dismissal ("words, words, words"); Dawn Powell, in the Post, offered up an error-riddled sneer. Sales were about five thousand in hardcover, not bad for a challenging first novel by an unknown writer. But the only prize the book won was for its design, and it quickly disappeared from public sight.

Dawn Powell’s diaries make no mention of the review or of Gaddis, but in his fine biography of Powell, Tim Page writes:

Like many readers since, Powell was both fascinated and perplexed by The Recognitions, the gigantic, almost impossibly erudite first novel by William Gaddis. “Mr. Gaddis has wit and a vast fund of information, assets that tend to cancel each other out,” she wrote. “The reader scampering to catch the ever-defaulting hero in his many guises through bordellos and monasteries is exasperated by Author Gaddis as Ancient Mariner, waylaying him with lectures on the Church Fathers, the Antichrist Descartes or the Book of the Dead.

It is no surprising that the agnostic Powell, who gave hardly a thought to religion of any kind, should have become frustrated by Gaddis’s obsessive and often mocking allusions to saints, relics, and church history; his irreverence horrified believers and delighted “fallen” Catholics, but it had little relevance to Powell’s concerns. She must have been at least intrigued by the publication of another major book about artists making their living through forgery; the hustlers and poseurs in The Recognitions are not so dissimilar from those in The Wicked Pavilion. Reading both books back to back, one gets the distinct impression that Gaddis and Powell attended the same parties and merely reported them differently.

I would assay “perplexed” as perhaps a biographer’s gentling of his subject; it’s hard for me to imagine Powell as “perplexed” and I suspect Page of using a filter on that lens. Nevermind. It’s not surprising that Powell and Gaddis would report Manhattan differently. At the time Powell was 60ish and had weathered her own fair share of stinging reviews. Gaddis was in his young 30s, The Recognitions his first published novel.

For a more fiery take on Powell’s review, here’s an excerpt from Jack Green’s clearly-going-to-be-indispensable Fire The Bastards!(italics and some formatting supplied). Incidentally, I may be starting a rock band called Dirty Wisecracks at Random:

—a typical snotty ny post headline & typical of that liberal newspaper's smoldering hate for anyone who excels

Seven-fifty for a book without art, maps, recipes or even telephone numbers? Why? And how was a young, unarmed writer able to slug a publisher into even reading such a vast tome, let alone publishing it? To claim they give you 956 pages of novel in return for your money is like offering you a giant headache in return for
your aspirin.

And some place else someone asks, "What are you supposed to be, an honest man just because you don't have a necktie?"

* * *

Is "The Recognitions" supposed to be an honest novel because it has no quotation marks?

powells just having goodnatured innocent fun her last innuendo is false analogy: in the recognitions, the man in the green wool shirt (who the question is asked to) does think not having a necktie makes him honest powell anyway likes to throw in dirty wisecracks at random, just for the hell of it or because she cant think of anything else to say

Fire the Bastards!

2004-11-09T12:03:00.000-05:00

Rake linked to Jack Green's "Fire the Bastards!" at the bottom of his last post. I'd just like to add a little annotation. The short book (now copyright free online) is a kind of meta-review, a review of the reviews of The Recognitions. If you think the reviews of Bakers's Checkpoint were appalling, check out some of these.

Sure, Green is highly biased, but if you can take the annoying formatting, it is worth at least a good skim.

Gaddis Interview

2004-11-09T11:30:00.000-05:00

The Center for Book Culture has what they claim to be the only interview of Gaddis published in the United States. Gaddis would only consent to be interviewed by mail, and it's a pretty short interview. Here's one of the better passages vis a vis Recognitions:

WG: The story that "The Recognitions" was edited down to its present size from a much longer manuscript must have gained currency from a hasty review of my papers by someone who came across fragments there that I'd rejected myself. In a work of that length and time in the writing some of it was rewritten repeatedly, some scarcely at all, some cut, tossed out, recovered and placed elsewhere, some later inserted, some sequences worried at and tossed out entire.

Some announcements while we hunt up the cocktail mixer...

2004-11-09T10:08:00.000-05:00

The Gaddis Drinking Club will officially begin next week, Nov. 15th. If you'd like to join in, we encourage you to use this week to locate a copy of The Recognitions, preferably the one with the William Gass introduction, and begin reading. The first week we'll be reading Part 1 Chapter 1, pages 3-62.

We're still working out the kinks but here's the general plan: We will be attempting to down a modest amount of Gaddis per week, with thoughtful commentary provided throughout the week on this site, led by one of your hosts. Thursday nights will be drinking & discussion night (first one Nov. 18), with a free for all between time zones. Less thoughtful. Even more opinionated.

Everyone is very welcome. Please comment. Please read. Please give careful consideration to what you will be drinking.

The Usual Suspects

2004-11-09T03:57:00.000-05:00

Moody and Franzen on Gaddis:

At the end of my drinking, when I was living in Hoboken, I started writing my first novel, Garden State. Later, through a chain of kindnesses, someone managed to slip a copy of it to William Gaddis, the writer I most admired, then and now. Much later, long after all of this, I got to know Gaddis's son Matthew a little bit, and he said that the book had probably gotten covered up with papers, because that's the way his dad's desk is. But maybe there was one afternoon when it was on top of a stack. (Moody, "Primary Sources")

***

People love to rank the top novelists, but what about the most difficult? Is Gaddis the best example of an author whose degree of difficulty forcibly ejects readers from his works? Who else comes close? Hawkes?

Hawkes at least wrote shorter books. But the problem with ranking novelists by difficulty is that there are a lot of incredibly hard avant-garde novels out there, much harder than Gaddis, which most of us have never heard of. The thing to keep in mind about Gaddis is that he wasn't just hard; he was also brilliant and, in many places, fun to read. If he was only difficult, we wouldn't be talking about him. The same goes for Joyce. (Franzen, Online interview, New Yorker)

I mean to track down that issue of the Yawker with the Franzen-on-Gaddis, Status-Authors-vs.-Contract-Authors article, but it might take some doing. In the meantime, the Complete Review Recognitions page is, naturally, a good resource if you're in need of one. I've found the remembrances over at Conjunctions pretty interesting, as well. (And don't sleep on Fire the Bastards! either.)

Scheduling

2004-11-08T15:20:00.000-05:00

Rake suggested 50-100 pages a week... It will have to be arbitrary as the chapters are very long.

Starting next week? Is that too soon?

Weekly leaders to summarize, ask questions, or just lead things? Or do we just go for a free-for-all posting and commenting? Probably some structure is better for purposes of keeping things going.

Introduction

2004-11-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

Just taking it for a quick spin, while we mix the drinks.

Still no plan, but get a copy of The Recognitions, first of all (I recommend the one with William Gass's excellent introduction (Penguin, 1993)).

I added a self-portrait Gaddis did, a propos, with a drink. Also links to the Gaddis Annotation site (lots and lots of annotations to The Recognitions).

Are polka dots okay for a background?

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