Too often we bring to literature the bias for “realism” we were normally brought up with, and consequently we find a work like The Recognitions too fanciful, obscure, and riddling; but is reality always clear and unambiguous? is reality simple and not complex? does it unfold like the pages of a newspaper, or is the unfolding more like that of a road map—difficult to get spread out, difficult to read, difficult to redo? and is everything remembered precisely, and nothing repeated, and are people we know inexplicably lost from sight for long periods, only to pop up when we least expect them? Of course; the traditional realist’s well-scrubbed world where motives are known and actions are unambiguous, where you can believe what you are told and where the paths of good and evil are as clearly marked as highways, that world is as contrived as a can opener; for all their frequent brilliance, and all the fondness we have for these artificial figures, their clever conversations and fancy parties, the plots they circle in like carousel’d horses, to call them and the world they decorate “real” is to embrace a beloved illusion. The pages of The Recognitions are more nearly the real right thing than any of Zola’s or Balzac’s.
There’s no need for haste, the pages which lie ahead of you will lie ahead of you for as long as you like them to; it is perfectly all right if some things are at first unclear, and if there are references you don’t recognize; just go happily on; we don’t stay in bed all day, do we? just because we’ve mislaid our appointment calendar. No, we need to understand this book—enjoy its charm, its wit, its irony, its erudition, its sensuous embodiment—the way we understand a spouse we have lived with and listened to and loved for many years through all their nights. Persons deserving such devotion and instinctual appreciation are rare; rarer still are the works which are worth it.
It may be helpful, however, to place The Recognitions in the center of all stories where it belongs, in order to get a grip on the novel’s basic strategy. First, a model archetypal plot:
A baby boy is born. In former times, before equalization was achieved, the parents in our history would have been important—they were gods and goddesses, heroes and their consorts, kings and queens—because what happened to them had to be significant not just for themselves but for the whole of their society. So this child will be an heir, and, as Joseph Campbell has pointed out, he will have a thousand faces. Signs of several sorts—omens, portents, the prognostications of soothsayers—warn the father (the King) that the birth of this son endangers him, so the King has his child taken away and exposed to the harshness of the wilderness where he will surely perish, but perish at Nature’s hand and not at the hand of his father (a sophistry our signers of death warrants still practice). However, if the father in question is as forthright as Chronos (or Saturn, if you like), he simply swallows his rival. The first recognition belongs to the parents, and it is that the new generation will one day assume the position and powers now possessed by their elders. Although passing away is as important as coming to be for the health of the species, it is rarely welcomed, and is usually postponed as long as possible.
At the time the infant is borne off (if it does not already possess a mark of identity) it is inadvertently given one. Oedipus, you recall, had his feet pinned as though he were being trussed like a bird for the spit. Whether left on a doorstep, set adrift in a basket, or abandoned on a hillside, the child is found by a totem animal and raised as one (Romulus and Remus are brought up by wolves), or he is rescued by a shepherd or a fisherman who becomes his foster parent. It is in this period of exile, during which the boy grows up in a foreign land, that the second recognition occurs, either through a slowly increasing inner conviction that he is “other” and important and has a destiny, or because, at some point, his foster parents tell him something of his history. This is our “hero’s” first recognition, and it is primarily negative; put crudely, he says: I am not a wolf; I am not a bear; I am not of peasant stock. “What am I doing in Akron, Ohio,” Hart Crane wonders; “Utah,” Ezra Pound insists, “is not my middle-name.”
Soon he sets out in search of his true homeland and his real identity. This part of the tale is in the form of an odyssey: a lengthy journey during which the young man overcomes a series of obstacles which test his character, certify his skills, and establish his stardom, as do the labors of Hercules, or any Wanderjahr. His final trial, it turns out, is usually the solution to some sort of conundrum, and is a spiritual or intellectual trial rather than a physical one (Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx).
Much later, after Oedipus has been rescued from his fate by his foster parents, and has wandered through the world in search of his true home (his Odyssey), he arrives in a place he has no memory of, and by chance (that is, by Fate) encounters the King, his father. His maimed feet determine his identity, the King is appropriately alarmed, and in a kind of contest (the agon) the son defeats him, and receives his reward, the hand of the Queen. This recognition could be mutual, and the contest, consequently, clear-eyed, but the recognition is often put off, as in Sophocles’s version of the Oedipus story, until many years have passed. The first arc of our narrative is now complete. It begins with a boy’s birth and ends with his marriage, or comus; hence it is called a comedy.
The second part of the story repeats the first but from the father’s point of view, for marriage means a new rival will soon appear upon the scene. If we stay with our original protagonist, there follows for him a period of peace during which time he establishes his rule and prospers along with his people. Meanwhile, in another country, his banished child grows restless and continues his searches. It is important to realize that from one point of view our “hero” is precisely that, from another point of view he is an unredeemable villain, and that the crimes of banishment and usurpation are repeated one generation after another without remission. The story’s second arc ends, then, with the death of the hero at the hands of the son he has wronged, and it is called, of course, a tragedy.
However, a hero who is overthrown and dies is hardly a hero, especially when, as so often happens, he is torn to pieces or sacrificed or eaten. Clearly, he would not have lost the contest, the battle, the election, the war, the woman, unless he was betrayed, as Germany was by the Treaty of Versailles, as the South was in the Civil War, as every loser always is: by bad officiating, rotten luck, corporate scheming, political cabals, racial plots. We may have dropped the ball, but we did so because we were stabbed in the back. So there is usually a Judas or two hanging around, waiting to do some dirty deed, an Iago with a hankie up his sleeve. We can disloyally switch our allegiance to the new ruler: the king is dead, after all, so long live the king; but if we remain with our original character, what have we left but scattered bits of a disgraced corpse or a sealed tomb to pass a lifetime’s vigil by? Well, the bits get put back together one way or another; the hero rolls away the stone which stoppers his grave; the followers of the betrayed and crucified king recognize him as restored and alive; whereupon, like Dionysius (his history now complete), he is pulled from the plot like the first gray hair, his name is given to a constellation, and he goes to dwell in the company of the gods.
And we—you and I—insofar as we are able to identify with the nature and life of this heroic figure, will overcome death and be redeemed as he was; for he, and the ups and downs of his career, merely embody the uncertain cycle of the seasons. “In the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger.”
There is another section of this tale which might be mentioned, although it tends to be heretical in its content, popular rather than ensconced in any canon. While the hero of one cycle is enjoying his Queen and ruling his kingdom, you remember, the son (the hero in another version) was in exile and on his odyssey. Similarly, when the king is slain, and a new king assumes command, the dead lord can be imagined as living in exile in the country of death—in the underworld—and there he will undertake another trip, and face other trials, while awaiting his resurrection. The Christian tradition describes a “harrowing of Hell”: a struggl
e between the crucified Christ and the Lord of Hell—there, like two cocks, in the pit itself. And this phase will possess its own set of recognitions.
Poets, novelists, mythmakers, rarely try to narrate the entire tale but usually will decide to focus on one element of the story, and elaborate it (odysseys provide many such opportunities), or they will alter the ontology of the enterprise, as Sophocles does, making not action but understanding the central theme of the cycle. Because Oedipus’s deeds have been so heedlessly performed, he blinds himself, once his eyes have been opened to what he’s done, with a brooch taken from his lover-mother’s garments. This physical blindness is, of course, a prerequisite to his now powerful inner sight.
Suppose, now, I reenact this tale, furnishing it with details which will suit my place and time and special interests, as if none of its features had ever been seen before, as if none of its acts had ever been performed, as if none of its aims had, in any previous place or period, been realized. My rituals would be make-believe; they would be counterfeits; and their effects would depend upon the suppression of the original “once upon a time,” and its replacement by my later sly reenactment. My story would be a usurper unless it recognized its kinship with all earlier versions, and it would risk overthrow the moment acknowledgment of that kinship were forced upon it. The long and unique quotation from Sir James Frazier’s seminal book The Golden Bough, which Gaddis inserts in The Recognitions, permits us to recognize (although we have now known it for some time) that the practice of scapegoating is ancient and happens often and has seasonal motives. If crucifying a monkey or a rat has an air of superstitious desperation, what quality are we to assign its Christian counterpart?
There are suppressions and recognitions, then, which are inherent in the traditional myths and tales which anthropologists turn up, and which constantly occur as a part of the mechanism of their unfolding (among the suitors surrounding Penelope, it is only Ulysses’s dog who recognizes him in his beggar’s rags); and there are recognitions which the characters in this novel experience, too; as well as those which we readers will have, as we pursue its complicated course, a course whose origins it constantly alludes to in the manner of “The Wasteland”—references which make for much of its richness. Among these “epiphanies” is that special one of which I have already spoken, namely of what it is to be a genuine work of art, and what, being genuine, “touches the origins of design with recognition.”
We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. For the temple of our pretenses shall come down at the end in a murderous fall of its stones (just as it does at the conclusion of this novel), not from the brute blind strength of a Samson shoving great pillars out of plumb, but from an art, a music, realized in the determined performance of an organ whose stops have been pulled out to play, at last, with a reckless disregard for the risks its reverberations run it, till every stone in the vicinity trembles.
The reviews which struck William Gaddis and his book were indeed stones from an old order, but, as The Recognitions concludes, such genuine work “is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”
So turn the page . . . and change that unfortunate frequency.
—William H. Gass
Washington University, St. Louis
for Sarah
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships
THE RECOGNITIONS
Nihil cavum neque sine signo apud Deum.
—Irenaeus, Adversus haereses
PART I
I
THE FIRST TURN OF THE SCREW
MEPHISTOPHELES (leiser): Was gibt es denn?
WAGNER (leiser): Es wird ein Mensch gemacht.
—Goethe, Faust II
Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality. But the procession up the foreign hill, bounded by cypress trees, impelled by the monotone chanting of the priest and retarded by hesitations at the fourteen stations of the Cross (not to speak of the funeral carriage in which she was riding, a white horse-drawn vehicle which resembled a baroque confectionery stand), might have ruffled the shy countenance of her soul, if it had been discernible.
The Spanish affair was the way Reverend Gwyon referred to it afterwards: not casually, but with an air of reserved preoccupation. He had had a fondness for traveling, earlier in his life; and it was this impulse to extend his boundaries which had finally given chance the field necessary to its operation (in this case, a boat bound out for Spain), and cost the life of the woman he had married six years before.
—Buried over there with a lot of dead Catholics, was Aunt May’s imprecation. Aunt May was his father’s sister, a barren steadfast woman, Calvinistically faithful to the man who had been Reverend Gwyon before him. She saw her duty in any opportunity at true Christian umbrage. For the two families had more to resent than the widower’s seemingly whimsical acceptance of his wife’s death. They refused to forgive his not bringing Camilla’s body home, for deposit in the clean Protestant soil of New England. It was their Cross, and they bore it away toward a bleak exclusive Calvary with admirable Puritan indignance.
This is what had happened.
In the early fall, the couple had sailed for Spain.
—Heaven only knows what they want to do over there, among all those . . . those foreigners, was one comment.
—A whole country full of them, too.
—And Catholic, growled Aunt May, refusing even to repeat the name of the ship they sailed on, as though she could sense the immediate disaster it portended, and the strife that would litter the seas with broken victories everywhere, which it anticipated by twenty years.
Nevertheless, they boarded the Purdue Victory and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.
On All Saints’ Day, seven days out and half the journey accomplished, God boarded the Purdue Victory and acted: Camilla was stricken with acute appendicitis.
The ship’s surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string. The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally been made, with all of false economy’s ingenious drear deception, of coated cardboard. After many launderings they persisted as a row of gray stumps posted along the gaping portals of his fly. Though a boutonnière sometimes appeared through some vacancy in his shirt-front, its petals, too, proved to be of paper, and he looked like the kind of man who scrapes foam from the top of a glass of beer with the spine of a dirty pocket comb, and cleans his nails at table with the tines of his salad fork, which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla’s difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin. That was the morning.
In the afternoon the Captain came to fetch him, and was greeted by a scream so drawn with terror that even his doughty blood stopped. Leaving the surgeon in what was apparently an epileptic seizure, the Captain decided to attend the chore of Camilla himself; but as he strode toward the smoking saloon with the ship’s operating kit under his arm, he glanced in again at the surgeon’s porthole. There he saw the surgeon cross himself, and raise a glass of spirits in a cool and steady hand.
That settled it.
The eve of All Souls’ lowered upon that sea in desolate disregard for sunset, and the surgeon appeared prodded from behind down the rolling parti-lit deck. Newly shaven, in a clean mess-boy’s apron, he poised himself above the still woman to describe a phantasmagoria of crosses over his own chest, mouth, and forehead; conjured, kissed, and dismissed a cross at his calloused fingertips, and set to work. Before the
mass supplications for souls in Purgatory had done rising from the lands now equidistant before and behind, he had managed to put an end to Camilla’s suffering and to her life.
The subsequent inquiry discovered that the wretch (who had spent the rest of the voyage curled in a coil of rope reading alternatively the Book of Job and the Siamese National Railway’s Guide to Bangkok) was no surgeon at all. Mr. Sinisterra was a fugitive, traveling under what, at the time of his departure, had seemed the most logical of desperate expedients: a set of false papers he had printed himself. (He had done this work with the same artistic attention to detail that he gave to banknotes, even to using Rembrandt’s formula for the wax ground on his copper plate.) He was as distressed about the whole thing as anyone. Chance had played against him, cheated him of the unobtrusive retirement he had planned from his chronic profession, into the historical asylum of Iberia.
—The first turn of the screw pays all debts, he had muttered (crossing himself) in the stern of the Purdue Victory, where the deck shuddered underfoot as the blades of the single screw churned Boston’s water beneath him; and the harbor itself, loath to let them depart, retained the sound of the ship’s whistle after it had blown, to yield it only in reluctant particles after them until they moved in silence.
Now he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in the faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world (Dante’s eye-witness account of the dropsical torments being suffered even now in Male-bolge by that pioneer Adamo da Brescia, who falsified the florin, notwithstanding), bent on seeing that he pay in this one. In the United States of America Mr. Sinisterra had been a counterfeiter. During the investigation, he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisectionist in Tampa, Florida; and when this failed, he settled down to sullen grumbling about the Jews, earthly vanity, and quoted bits from Ecclesiastes, Alfonso Liguori, and Pope Pius IX, in answer to any accusatory question. Since it was not true that he had, as a distant tabloid reported, been trapped by alert Federal agents who found him substituting his own likeness for the gross features of Andrew Jackson on the American twenty-dollar note, Mr. Sinisterra paid this gratuitous slander little attention. But, like any sensitive artist caught in the toils of unsympathetic critics, he still smarted severely from the review given his work on page one of The National Counterfeit Detector Monthly (“Nose in Jackson portrait appears bulbous due to heavy line from bridge . . .”); and soon enough thereafter, his passion for anonymity feeding upon his innate modesty amid walls of Malebolgian acclivity, he resolved upon a standard of such future excellence for his work, that jealous critics should never dare attack him as its author again. His contrition for the death which had occurred under his hand was genuine, and his penances sincere; still, he made no connection between that accident in the hands of God, and the career which lay in his own. He was soon at work on a hand-engraved steel plate, in the prison shop where license number tags were turned out.