You Should Read William Gaddis's The Recognitions. Right Now.

How has no one recommended this book to me before?!  How have I gone all these years with no one shoving this book in my hands and making me read the first 10 pages?  That is all it would have taken to get me hooked.  I would have read, for example, this:

 The Real Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de la Otra Vez had been finished in the fourteenth century by an order since extinguished.  Its sense of guilt was so great, and measures of atonement so stringent, that those who came through alive were a source of embarrassment to lax groups of religious who coddled themselves with occasional food and sleep.  When the great monastery was finished, with turreted walls, parapets, crenelations, machicolations, bartizans, a harrowing variety of domes and spires in staggering Romanesque, Byzantine effulgence, and Gothic run riot in mullioned windows, window tracings, and an immense rose window whose foliations were so elaborate that it was never furnished with glass, the brothers were brought forth and tried for heresy.  Homoiousian, or Homoousian, that was the question.  It had been settled one thousand years before when, at Nicaea, the fate of the Christian church hung on a diphthong: Homoousian, meaning of one substance.  The brothers in faraway Estremadura had missed the Nicaean Creed, busy out of doors as they were, or up to their eyes in cold water, and they had never heard of Arius.  They chose Homoiousian, of like substance, as a happier word than its tubular alternative (no one gave them a chance at Heteroousian), and were forthwith put into quiet dungeons which proved such havens of self-indulgence, unfurnished with any means of vexing the natural processes, that they died of very shame, unable even to summon such pornographic phantasms as had kept Saint Anthony rattling in the desert.

 Right?!  I cannot count the ways in which I love that passage—and that’s just one passage!  If that little sampler does nothing for you, you can walk away right now, because this is not the book for you.  But if the wit and the tone and the craft at all appeal to you, go now and procure a copy for thineself!

Why You Most Likely Won’t Actually Read The Recognitions

If you get yourself a copy from the library or ordered off the internet, there are some things you should know:

1)      The book is HUGE

This book is about as long as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, falling just shy of 1,000 pages.  And this is no tale of adventure and battles between good and evil.  It is an ambitious piece of literature; as Peter Dempsey accurately says in his biographical essay on William Gaddis, “It has now come to be seen as a Janus-faced text that looks back in its complexity to the great Modernists of the inter-war years such as Joyce and Faulkner and forward to the post-war American writers such as Barth, Coover, Pynchon, De Lillo and Gass in its taste for black humor, literary play and absurdity.”  Yeah, you’re scared now; aren’t you?

2)      There is not a wasted sentence in the book

I know that sounds like a good thing, and it is.  But the fact is your brain can’t go on auto-pilot when each and every sentence is thoughtfully constructed.  Passages of description, of introduction, reflection between bits of dialogue—it’s all rich, subtle, packed with meaning, and often relevant to maintaining your grasp of the plot down the road.  I have never read even a short story that didn’t feel like it had a fair amount of padding, of fat marbled in the meat.  But here, in one of the longest works of fiction I’ve read, Gaddis never puts his guard down.  He never writes without thinking, so you can never read without thinking—at least not without paying the price in comprehension.

3)      Gaddis assumes you are paying attention

Who is Eddie? Should I know Eddie? What? He appeared 300 pages ago in a subordinate clause that gave me no reason to think that Eddie might be important some day?  That there was a common line of thought for me while reading The Recognitions.  And in a book with over 50 characters, it’s easy to get lost.  I ended up keeping a number of 4x6 cards as a collective bookmark and writing the names of characters and a brief description as I came across them, even if they seemed insignificant.  Moreover, Gaddis enjoys subtleties and will sometimes have a character move through a scene who is unknown to the other characters, so the only thing that the others notice about him is his tie, his ring, or some characteristic tic, and if you’ve been paying attention you will remember that tie or ring or tic from a previous description of the character when he had a major scene 100 pages ago.  It is a lot to keep in your head—no, it is too much to keep in your head.  Actions and interchanges between characters are equally subtle and I often found myself saying, “Did he really just do that with a pen knife?!” “Was she really about to do that with the bull?!” “Did they really put that in the bread?!”

4)      There are a bazillion references in the novel

I remember characterizing Under the Volcano as the most international and referential book I had ever read.  I think Gaddis has Lowry beat.  There are a ton of languages without translation: German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and a few Middle East languages as well.  If you don’t speak 16 languages, you will need to do your best to understand what’s being said and move on.  The edition has no footnotes—but there is an awesome website that does: www.williamgaddis.org.  The site footnotes poetic references, art references, and as many of Gaddis’s allusions as it can find.  Many times I assumed that Gaddis had to be making up artists, poets, and historical facts only to discover later that he was dealing with real history.  You need to have either the patience to look things up or the temperament to roll with your ignorance.  I sometimes had the former but more often than not made do with the latter.

5)      Some entire scenes are befuddling

Gaddis’s subtle exchanges between characters cause you to read at high levels of alertness just to follow the suggestions and gentle curves of the plots, but some scenes are intentionally confusing.  There are recurring parties in which dozens of characters are all talking at once, and you are forced to rely solely on verbal cues as to who is saying what to whom.  There is line after line of dialogue as the hipsters of 1940s New York try to impress each other with their cleverness and reveal the inhumanity in their modern existence.  In other scenes, the characters are not in their right mind, and Gaddis communicates their confusion, incomplete thoughts, and failed comprehension directly to the reader. 

6)      The Recognitions is not the feel-good novel of 1955

The novel is a thorough study of our attempts to create something genuine or passably genuine from the mounds and mounds of bullshit that are piled high around us and that we keep shoveling onto our neighbors.  There is no triumph of the human spirit here.  There is instead an impressive number dead and injured bodies and souls by the end of the novel.

In short, you will work your ass off to follow and understand the sometimes labyrinthine plot and pinball-crazy encounters of dozens of characters only to watch those characters meet humiliating defeats.  You will not be allowed to fall back on auto-pilot and think about your to-do list while you read, and even with all that attention and devotion, you will be scratching your head occasionally.  But here’s the thing:  You will be so glad that you did, because the novel is brilliant and hilarious and profound and stunning.  Having just finished it, I cannot wait to re-read the novel.

Why, in Spite of All the Obstacles Described above, You Should Read The Recogntions

1)      Every one of those 956 pages is gold

The book is concerned with the line between imitation and originality, the counterfeit and the real, the genuine and the fools-gold-plated.  Gaddis mines this vein until every nugget of precious metal is stripped from the earth.  The main plot (to the extent that there is a main plot) revolves around a painter who creates original works in the style of the Flemish masters for a business man who then sells them as recovered lost masterpieces.  Gaddis covers poetry, playwriting, composing—through which he explores the question is anything original, or is everything borrowed, stolen, rewritten, repackaged, resold, and then stolen again?  Beyond the arts, he looks at counterfeit money, designer knock-offs, and all the ways we settle for an imitation of the real thing.  Is there any inherent value in “realness” or “originality”?  The market thrives on the circulation of fakes.

Gaddis looks at religious relics, historic sites, monuments, and the collective lies we tell ourselves about these objects and locations.  Behind it all is his real (fake?) focus on the lies we tell to each other and ourselves in presenting ourselves to the world.  We pass thoughts off as our own, vie with each other to appear knowledgeable without possessing any real knowledge.  The true burden of modernity is to live at a time when nothing is real and everything is propped up on permitted illusions.

Looking through this single lens, Gaddis makes sense of the entire modern world.  What shocks me is that he had three more novels left in him once he completed this one.  How could he have any knowledge or thoughts or even words left to say?

2)      The writing is GORGEOUS

Some passages are striking for their poetry, some for their insight, some for their wry humor and ironic punch, but they are all striking.  Your brain has an embarrassment of riches to revel in.  Sentences look forward and glance back, and you will be torn between mining the content and appreciating the form, all while you try to round up the various threads and see the patterns and meanings.  At its best, it stimulates every cognitive center in your brain.  I kept wanting to post passages on Facebook, but I couldn’t do so without wanting to explain the context and the richness and the references.  By the time I had made the entry I had an unreadable mess that I deleted in favor of getting back to reading. 

You may not be able to let the auto-pilot take over, but the rewards of active reading, unpredictable plot, and unconventional insights are irreplaceable.

3)      The writing is INTELLIGENT

Yes, it is work to look up the references, even if you only look up every 20^th one.  The main two foci in the book are Christianity and art, and to read the book is to get a course on comparative religion and art history.  The meeting of the imitative and the original, the fake and the genuine becomes a paradigm by which Gaddis makes sense of the entirety of modern existence.  It affects every description, every encounter, every exchange, and every action.  You can chase each lead and marvel to see the curving paths double back on themselves and connect up before parting and merging with the other paths.  It is positively dizzying in its intellectualism.  Far from making the material dry and academic, Gaddis uses black humor and dry wit give every observation simultaneous weight and levity.  It’s quite an artful trick to discuss art, religion, and history without slipping into pretentious and self-satisfied obnoxiousness.  It is simultaneously high-minded and visceral.

4)      The writing is HILARIOUS

No, the book does not make you want to reach out and hug your fellow man and woman.  No, you won’t get tears in your eyes as the characters struggle against their own limitations. You will, however, be laughing to yourself throughout every page.  You will laugh because the observations are so astute.  You will laugh because the understatements are cutting and artfully made.  You will laugh because the plots are so cleverly made to overlap, come in and run out again, and tie up in entirely unexpected ways.  You will laugh at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, and the whole.

I realize that it’s a book with a very particular taste.  It won’t be for everyone.  But for those of you to whom it does appeal, you will fall in love with this book and wonder why you haven’t read it earlier.  It is a novel that never had a huge following but which has been kept alive by a handful of devout readers who refuse to let the book fall into obscurity and out of print.  Most of you won’t even try it.  Of those of you who pick it up and begin, I suspect the majority will abandon ship without getting far into the story.  But the rest of you, the ones who get it and get it, as it were—it is a pleasure to be in your company!