Customer Reviews

The Recognitions

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

This is an incredible novel for a thirty-year old; the problem is that Gaddis, as a first-timer, tries too hard in spots. The characters are too articulately inarticulate, the mythological references too ostentatiously used, and the mood is sometimes lost when the prose is piled on it. However, it has the subtlest humor and the harshest satire of any American book. Many passages are perfectly pitched, (the scene with Wyatt's breakdown is funny!), and the characters are a bunch of lost souls desperately seeking...something.

I read Gaddis's masterpiece about 5 years ago. Like any formidable task, I had to persist to finish it. But The Recognitions has influenced me as much as the Holy Bible.

The book is difficult. It entwines a variety of themes, characters, and vignettes. But the pervasive theme is forgery. With great entertainment, Gaddis suggests that most lives are forgeries, as are most works of art and texts -- in one sense or another. Recognitions, whereby one tastes a sense of something real, occur rarely in a lifetime , if at all. (For me, reading this book was a recognition.)

Gaddis's favorite and most resonant metaphor is the church, in particular the Roman Catholic church. Many of his characters are named for the saints, who, along with bishops of all sects, wore and wear gowns, while hiding a thousand yards of material up their sleeves. No only do their gowns, or robes (feminine by custom) deceive us politically,socially, and economically -- not to mention religiously, they are sexually alluring, suggesting easy entre' both homosexually and heterosexually. The former is better disguised in the book -- as befits its theme, but it makes the greater imprint (especially since homosexuality is still proscribed by the Church as unnatural and spiritually and physically injurious)...

Gaddis is after more than our personal forgeries and those of our art, he is out to "expose" the most sacred of our cows: our beliefs and our faith.

This book is long, really long, clocking in at about 950 pages, not including a worthy introduction by William Gass. And dense. Oh my is it dense. The first hundred pages in particular, with references to thousand year old religions/gods/spirits/rituals just thrown about as descriptive terms, which is obviously nice and easy to understand.

Gaddis writes amazing dialogue. His party scenes are the most memorable of all. Using the '-' to show new speakers could be confusing for some, I suppose, but for me it helped pull me further into the pages. For some reason, dialogue just seemed more natural. And it allowed him to have random comments from people in the periphery (Which he used a lot). I loved how a main character would mention something in passing, or discuss something with another character, and then, three hundred pages later, a random string of dialogue would mention/discuss it. Just brilliant. It'd be even more fun to go back through it and pick up the ones I undoubtedly missed.

I didn't get a lot of closure on anyone except Stanley, which was unexpected because I considered him a very minor character. Towards the end, however, Gaddis must have decided that using names was a bad idea, so who knows, I might have found out what happened to Otto, Wyatt, Esther, Esme, etc (Though I think I know what happened to Esme). Definitely need another read, but I'll put that off for at least a year or two - This book sucks you in, and well, I feel sad for leaving the highly educated world of the characters, but it also feels like a weight has been taken from my shoulders.

When asked to explain The Recognitions, to cover all its unforgettable characters, exceptional dialogue, or breathtaking prose, you find yourself at a loss for words... Why this novel so unread is beyond me. Its big, yes, but goes by quickly; it has loads of references, yes, but who cares: if you get them, fine, if you don't, don't sweat it--they're not integral to the story. I think the biggest misconception is that the book is difficult. It is not. Not like Ulysses, or Gravity's Rainbow (must reads, too!)... it's simply a beautiful book full of characters you'll never forget. And it's hilarious to boot. Do yourself a favour and read it!

Shall I sing the love song of Otto & Esme?

Until recognizing The Recognitions, I batted back and forth between Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, not because I loved them, but because I recognized them as great. This, on the other hand was a revalation. The most staggeringly brilliant, engaging, funniest, loveable work of genius ever committed to the page.

I read The Recognitions in the 1990s. The gist of the book emerges here and there, just like "recognitions," not all at once, in sequence, or in bulk, but every now and then, not well-formed or even coherent. That we live in a miasma of forgery is clear to few. Most of us are so imbedded in myth and its rote that we cannot percieve, much less understand, our lot. Gaddis pokes at our fraudulent lives.

The book is a satire on a mythological scale. The bishops wear skirts to appear feminine and demure, but with a "thousand yards of material up their sleeves in South America." Aunt May is done in by technology in a single beautiful sentence. Homosexuality threads throughout the book and is as fundamental to religion as it is to art. (One would benefit by reading "The Lives of the Saints" along-side this work.)

Gaddis exposes the inauthentic on every page, and there are a thousand of them. His skill with words is exceptional: alliterations, allusions, metaphor, rhythms, melody, all music.

In Gaddis, the consequences of forgery are revealed over generations. They are cataclysmic. But forgery is the inevitable side effect of eating of the tree of knowledge and building the tower of Babel, as mankind, in its terror, is driven to know, speak -- continually giving new names to old values -- and dissemble; anything to avoid the ultimate recognition. Thus, the birth and renewal of religion.

I advocate, in the name of Gaddis, who would certainly appreciate it, that sweatshirts, hats, bumber stickers, tatoos, and other paraphernalia, be printed up and marketed commemorating this book. We live in the world of marketing as surely as we believe we understand ourselves. Read the book and live it out!

Reviewers seem to still be harping upon the 47 year old label of 'difficult' for Gaddis' masterpiece. I've gone through it four times now, and 'difficult' has never sprung to mind when reading. Gaddis certainly stretches the reader, but his prose flows easily enough, and as a cacophony of voices plows through the various subplots, his greater subject at hand becomes a bit more obvious: Gaddis is attacking not just the hypocrisy behind the art world, but fraudulence in general---piousness in the pulpit down to insincere handshakes amongst acquaintances. Providing many anti-heroes (and a couple of great villians in Basil Valentine and Rectall Brown), Gaddis writes the Great American novel, finally, and the general public doesn't even recognize it as such. Shame.