The Recognitions (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) [Paperback]

William Gaddis (Author), William H. Gass (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2012 | Series: American Literature (Dalkey Archive)

A great masterpiece by William Gaddis, with a new introduction by William H. Gass.

The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the “ur-text of postwar fiction” and the “first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn’t read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William Gaddis (1922-98) stands among the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. The winner of two National Book Awards (for J R [1976] and A Frolic of His Own [1995]), he wrote five novels during his lifetime, including Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), Agapē Agape (published posthumously in 2002), and his early masterpiece The Recognitions (1955). He is loved and admired for his stylistic innovations, his unforgettable characters, his pervasive humor, and the breadth of his intellect and vision.

William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critic Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in St. Louis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 976 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (February 7, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564786919
• ISBN-13: 978-1564786913
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #414,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

100 of 109 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Bitter May 30, 2000

By Scott Snyder

Format:Paperback

The Recognitions is the extreme terminus of "The Catcher in the Rye." Both are concerned with exposing the phony, the counterfeit. Gaddis' work is far more mature, wide ranging and dispairing. His erudition is breathtaking. The work attacks the fake and counterfeit in society, art, Christianity, personal morality and business. My favorite bits are Gaddis' thrashing of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and the weird flashes into the pagan underpinning of Christianity. Many questions are raised and left unresolved, indeed are unresolvable. The narrative is left in fragments that bleed in all directions, blurring the line between narrative and non-narrative, the conscious and the unconscious. It is a beautiful if bitter book.

PS In my opinion The Recognitions and Gravity's Rainbow are very different and not derivative one from the other. The Recognitions is about fakes, its style jagged fragmentation, highly realistic. GR is paranoid, fragmented like an opium dream or acid trip, and it comes off like a big practical joke or comic book. Read both! Don't think if you've read one, you've got the other.

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars not for the impatient August 22, 2001

By "dgillz"

Format:Paperback

Gaddis' Recognitions is a stunningly huge book, and if you have any appreciation at all for the likes of Thomas Pychon (ditto David Wallace and Kurt Vonnegut), you definitely should check this one out. It kicked off the whole mess. It's a postmodern headscratcher supreme.

The main character of the book, Wyatt Gwyon, drops out of the priesthood and eventually becomes an art forger, a practice that seems at odds with the pious life. But by the time the book is done, using the forgery of art as a symbol for all the world's forgeries and half-truths, the concepts of authorship, originality, faith, and reality itself all come into question.

The second plot, concerning a playwright named Otto, focuses on the act of artistic creation, the corruption of the publishing world, the parties and thoughts of so-called "intellectuals," and the basic moral poverty in America today.

In still another plot line, Stanley, the organ player, religious as any saint in the Bible (a slightly shorter book) is used to challenge notions of faith in every context - political, social, and religious.

Weaving these far-flung plots together is a difficult job, but Gaddis pulls it off with an effort that threatens to break through the pages. At times labored and over-dense, the book still comes off as a success. While balancing such a full plate research finds its way in, research on our collective past: Flemish art, Mithraism, early Catholicism, philosophy, protestantism, myth and folklore, stigmatics, ad absurdum, but it's also absolutely mind-boggling to behold.

This book is difficult, as complicated as any I've ever read, but the effort, though it requires an extraordinary one sometimes, pays off. If you read to rest your eyes don't let the sun set on you here; if not, challenge yourself!

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Epiphanies on Every Page June 28, 2004

By Wordsworth VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

In a habit I sustained in college I make it a practice to underline the most quotable lines of novels I read: The Recognitions has underlines on every page. Gaddis is a major literary talent who hasn't yet even begun to receive the following of which he is worthy. This novel concerns the discoveries, both major and minor, of what is authentic in life: The Recognitions is enlightening, almost beatific, in the way in which it focuses upon the shortcomings and moral lapses of humans in pursuit of true art. From the starving painter whose unappreciated genius leads him to forge Flemish masters to a musician whose copied work played upon a great pipe organ brings down a chapel to counterfeitors of money and plagiarists of drama, this of work of Gaddis is the real thing. It is brilliant, witty, original and his command of the language is breathtakingly stunning in its execution. One can see the influence of James Joyce throughout the writing in an experimental style that is breakthrough. It is incredibly inventive and funny and astonishingly intelligent. It's no wonder that The Recognitions went unrecognized for so tragically long -- Gaddis is, without doubt, one of the top half-dozen of American literary novelists of the 20th century ranking with Bellow, Barth, Vonnegut, Hemingway and Faulkner. The writing is work by a fellow of verifiable genius: I strongly recommend that you to discover Gaddis -- he will enrich your life and help you better understand the nature of the personal epiphanies that give meaning to life.