I recently finished The Recognitions by William Gaddis. More than it being a book I wanted to read, it was always a book that I felt I just had to read. Every time this book was brought up in any book or video, it was brought up because it was the first of its kind. Which is a pretty ironic thing to consider about a book whose literal theme centers around forgery, imitation. But I guess the first step to combatting any problem is admitting you have one.
Wyatt was a cool main character. He’s got the revenge plot of his mother dying in the hands of a false doctor. His father is a reverend and cannot give up his anger towards the mitigatable death of his wife. He is taught that art is all created in the name of honoring the beauty God has put on Earth; exercising individual creativity is therefore sinful. He studies at the monestary for a bit, but I think he drops out, to be a painter? Met with the harsh reality that art is as capitalistic an ordeal as could ever be.
So then you wonder, how does a deeply pious man, with an unwavering sense of duty to keep art pure and meaningful, manage in a world that thinks otherwise? But then that plotline disappears for a really long time. You get a glimpse of social life amongst up-and-coming artists in New York City, you get borderline pathetic artists who go places and say things with the goal only to have more clever things to say on paper, which almost felt like it was Gaddis’ self-apparitions, symbols of his self-conscious side. Is their art good? Who even defines good?
God has and always will, says Wyatt, shut up and paint this thing that someone really famous supposedly painted centuries ago and it was inexplicably found tomorrow. I still don’t understand why Wyatt went into forgery, I probably missed that detail somewhere in the inner monologue that stretches.
But so with all these characters coming into the story, I found myself forming a judgement matrix on two axes: piety and materialism. If Wyatt is highly pious and not materialistic, his patron(?) Brown is on the exact other side. But the book is not solely about two parties fighting, because Basil Valentine is revealed to be highly pious (he did some schooling at the monestary, if I’m correct), and yet he is in the business of making money off forgeries.
And so you can imagine how intense the intellectual duels were between Wyatt and Valentine, which I wish I could have understood. If there’s anything I want to reread from the book, it would be those conversations, with cliff notes. Then Wyatt escapes his burning house (an attempt to remove any evidence of Wyatt being the original author of the forgeries) in knight’s armor, stabs Valentine in the heart, goes undercover to kill a prostitute in Spain, and mummify her body to sell to a museum…? The whole book reads like a fever dream and I’m never sure of anything, but this is surely too crazy to make up.
After reading this book, I was struck with an urge to read the classics. That maybe if I read Dante and Homer, I’d be able to get to the root of this imitation chain, people just trying to capture beauty they once saw.
It’s usually pretty cringe to use the title of your book, or movie, or TV show, whatever, in your actual content, I think that’s conventional wisdom, and one that The Recognitions breaks a lot. But I think Gaddis’ obsession with the word made sense, because the word “recognition” has two distinct meanings, I think. One is to notice something familiar - I recognized her voice. The other is to celebrate something or someone remarkable - we recognized the army members for their service and sacrifice. And it’s interesting that maybe those two meanings are starting to mean the same thing. The book mentions modern marketing, and sardonic frequent remarks that people recognize the artist’s name more than the art you see, as symptoms of this. But it makes you think, if this is true, then how different is religion, and the pursuit of beauty it fuels?
I don’t know the answer to that. Nor do I even know if that was the question Gaddis wanted to ask in the first place. The pursuit of beauty really could just be a Russian doll chain of people admiring people before them.