You have watched the espoused and extolled movies in Western Culture. You find yourself wanting something different – therefore, you may head to Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, or Fellini to see what the fuss is about and enjoy the films. Hopefully. Ran? Yes, within the contextualised narratives and visual stimuli: adapted King Lear in feudal Japan? Mass horseback-rider scenes with, reportedly, some 200 horses of cavalry charging the line. To battle itself with enlivened pace – the arrows’ rapidity, pleat, pleat, nestling metal tips into struck, flecking wood. After a conflict, discuss, hold onto folding hand fans, and thus fan themselves to quell the call to a further fight.
We want something to oil the recondite, mental gears—if they are gears. A harmonium, then, maybe? Percussion through the filaments helps us feel something.
This is the same with novels and novelists.
‘There are A and B novelists.’ As Martin Amis states in his collection of essays, The War Against Cliché.
William Thomas Gaddis Jr. was an A novelist, say the literati—the people who have read. And have read well, broad and far. The literati who work in the corridors of power where others can only look on and muse. I think he was an A novelist, too. From the erudition, I am investing in his novels, this one and JR and learning about the man, too. The writer. The Artiste. The man of letters. One who can construct a simulacrum from the literary will and the vocabulary they have in hand to deliver it towards its end – a published literary work of considerable intellectual weight and heft. His mastery in creating complex narratives, as evident in The Recognitions, is awe-inspiring and will make you appreciate the novel’s depth and complexity even more.
The Recognitions is not merely a novel about painting reproductions as a form of fraud. It’s a profound question posed by Gaddis: Who is the true Artist? Is it the real or the contemporary one? Whose hand on the smoking glum…? The repleted still life of an oil work from the 17th century depicting a silver dish of persimmons or peaches on a sable-coloured cloth. The novel’s art, identity, and deception themes, which are not just thought-provoking but intellectually stimulating, are intricately woven into the plot, inviting the reader to delve into the nature of art and its relationship with identity.
I may scratch the accepted vinyl record here – yet I believe The Recognitions, with its intricate layers and profound themes, demands a discerning reader to truly appreciate its journey from a remarkable novel to an absolute masterpiece.
However, hold the brief. I believe it did require culling—sections. Away, heathen! They may say from the capstan. Cease your diatribe!
What is original = what is real? Authenticity, baby. Auth-en–fuckin’-ti–city. Says the agnostic. Touch the desk – hardwood—authentic experience in the now.
Kick the shins of relevance—cogitate in the low-brow ambience? Feel insipid?
We opened with the Reverend Gwyon and his wife Camilla onboard a ship, and then the counterfeiter Sinisterra carried out a blundering act; I did not find this enticing for my literary interest(s). I did wonder about this action so early…
I found the initial opening sections rather languorous in part but stern in its content yet sluggish. You see, I know religiosity well, having grown up in Northern Ireland, where a similar oppressive, pious atmosphere permeated for generations. Sundays, for example, when I was a boy, were a chore. Nothing happened. There was no action. It was righteousness and a ticking silence the whole way along. Only upended by Top Gear, homework at the table, a bath and the school uniform laid out for Monday morning and a new week. So it goes.
Fundamentalist, Presbyterian ministry and then a conversion to Mithraism.
*
I did not care for the barbary ape in the barn. I did not see it as relevant or missed the literary allusion, but why?
Now I know—Gibraltar. Gaddis had visited there. The ape in the book’s opening pages is his Gary Larson cartoon.
Let me add my two cents about the difficulty of literary works like The Recognitions. Take the works of Art Wyatt is consumed by and wants to emulate but takes on to recreate. In falsehood, works of Art stand alone because they were created by masters of Art—people who studied, strained, and committed. They were not interested in the fripperies of power and elevated status. They wanted to represent and paint; man, did they do that.
A couple of years ago, whilst living in Dublin, I was fortunate to see work by Caravaggio, Canaletto, Bosch and others. I peered up and close at the brush strokes of Canaletto’s Venice scenes and the wispy clouds in his light-blue skies. I looked upon Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ and how the reflected light is depicted upon one of the Roman soldier’s pauldron – the metal-clad shoulder amour, the one in the foreground – the polished metal is fantastic. Caravaggio is texture, fabric, human features, and interplay between the dark background and light. Amazing.
Could you do that? I know, sitting here now, I couldn’t.
Wood buff and horsehair brushes?
*
Brown’s dark-panelled room, his inner sanctum – mahogany, possibly?
Classic, black, Japanese, lacquered furniture. Mutable musk(s) in the oppressive dark. Heavy. No windows. Like a cloakroom in a sombre hotel. A hotel with sad, dissociated, possibly malevolent patrons. Shifting behind the ceiling-to-floor drapes.
Recktall Brown – the Satan-infused presence of greed, the parallel drawn toward evil, an incisor glinting in the darkness—is Roth if Roth had practised the Dark Arts. (But it is not Roth. It is beyond the Rothian sphere. This is William T. Gaddis. Goddamit.)
Basil Valentine is ice to Brown’s capitalistic fire. Hoo-AHHHH. Brown reminds me of Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate.
Then there is Bosch’s tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins. Talk of the Van Eyck brothers, Jan and Hubert. Flemish masters of Art. Of painting. (The Ghent Altarpiece, 1432.) I was there for that. For me, when there was talk between Brown, Valentine, and Watt about these masters and Art, the print lifted off the page. It is fascinating when Wyatt tells his wife, like a Sophist, how tempera can age a painting’s gloss/sheen. Wiki informs,
Tempera – ‘Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium, usually glutinous material such as egg yolk.’ [1]
Wyatt Gwyon was a Renaissance man. I see that now.
*
The West Village in Manhattan is cheery with alcoholism and garrulous crowds in bars chatting. Like folk do in bars. Later, they flow to parties, with young children in the scenes mingling amongst the adults. Maybe the whispered use of heroin.
Otto—there is something disparate about him. He has a sense of delusion that he cannot bring himself to accept. It permeates his scenes, jittery, desperate cadences, and turned-out askew reality.
I was not too fond of Agnes Deighy, who seemed like a caricature that we had seen before. Nothing new here.
The banana plantation. The boat. The civil disruption.
Gaddis’s phenomenological experience of that brought through Otto.
Otto going to meet his father was a good scene, a significant section. I laughed at that.
Wyatt Gwyon’s developing slide toward insanity – his well of ingenuity that he drains, blaming society for all ills.
I realise that Stanley Kubrick could have brought this novel to the big screen.
This will seem like blasphemy, but I believe the manuscript of this book was overwritten. I mean, NO, scratch that; the manuscript was NOT overwritten.
There was a bit too much oppressiveness at the beginning. Pray, forgive me; rather, it required to be turned out in a slimmed-down edition for the mass-reading audiences. It required a rational and well-read editor to advise William, which does not diminish Gaddis’s great literary prowess. It only serves to enhance it.
Reading William T. Gaddis is a literary experience – rather than reading a book.
As an artistic feat, The Recognitions is up there.
N
[1] Tempera – Wiki
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