As our jury-rigged calendar grinds its artificial way toward the
declaimed new century, even the most rational friends are being touched by millennium mania. (The western calendar - there are many
others - is only a rude, segmented tool, like bathroom tissue or
Kleenex.) In recent days this has caused some friends to talk about
the greatest authors of this century.
Specifically, as December 16 approached, several were prompted to
correspond by letter, e-mail and telephone about the anniversary of
the death, in 1998, of William Gaddis.
Who???
That is often the reaction to the mention of the author of one of this
century's great novels, "The Recognitions." Published in1955 to
considerable acclaim among intellectuals of insubordinate and
independent nature, it was generally dismissed by establishment
reviewers, intimidated by its erudition, its vast cultural reach, its
encompassing indictment (it impeached fashionable producers of banal
reviews, corporations whose vested interest was in subverting all Hard
Questions), and never got a hint of his lethal dark humor. Its 956-
page length also tended to cow them.
This reaction was strange because "Recognitions" appeared just as an
aesthetic revolution was shaking the social structure from San
Francisco to New York, from London to Paris to Bonn. But the somnolent
critical establishment had missed the meaning of that explosion: Allen
Ginsberg's poem "Howl," Kerouac's early samples of "On the Road," the
poetry of Michael McClure, Philip Lamentia, Gary Snyder, plus the
prophetic novels "Go," by John Clellon Holmes, "The Bold Saboteaurs,"
by Chandler Bossard, William Burroughs' "Junkie," etcetera.
But Gaddis clearly was not a member of any group. Born in New York,
president of the Harvard Lampoon, tossed out of college before he
could graduate, employed briefly as a fact-checker at the New Yorker
magazine, worked on it while traveling in Mexico and becoming involved
in murkey Central American adventures.
Erudite and sophisticated
A lot of talented people with itchy feet were coming to Latin American
then. What separated Gaddis from such peers was his exceptional
sophistication (for someone in his 20s) and awesome scholarship. It
seemed there wasn't anything he didn't know - and it wasn't college-
course gleaning, but detailed knowledge of anthropology, ancient and
modern literature, world political history, psychology, and a
comprehensive familiarity with the history of art, religion and
architecture.
What was truly intimidating was the brilliant way this erudition
constituted the core of a remarkably adventurous novel. "Recognitions"
is the examination of civilization's forgeries of all kinds -
religious, aesthetic, academic, philosophic, corporate, political,
psychological - and the ripples of ambiguity that issue from that.
Later called "a massive act of integration," the novel charts the
disintegration of the modern world.
Guilt trip
"Recognitions" begins in the 1900s on board a ship bound for Spain and
with a woman, Camille Gwyon, who dies at the hands of a phony ship's
doctor (he is a counterfeit doctor on the run). She leaves a husband,
a Protestant reverend who seeks solace in Spanish Catholic
monasteries, and a son, Wyatt, who at three is put in the hands of a
ruthlessly puritanical aunt. She makes Wyatt feel so guilty about his
extraordinary artistic talent that he represses his natural instincts
for originality and becomes capable only of copying others.
The bulk of the novel takes place in the 1940s as Wyatt encounters a
populous above-ground and underground world of conscious and
unconscious forgers. His talent, which he at first employs as an act
of selfless reverence, attracts the attention of mercenary folk unable
to see art as anything but a commercial commodity.
Primarily among these is Recktall Brown, who employs the unworldly
Wyatt (who has given up the idea of priesthood to become an artist) to
create art forgeries which he, Brown, plants in old houses, and
subsequently purchases at auctions. Brown feigns shock as art critic
(and his secret associate), Basil Valentine, declares the paintings
false, then publicly becomes convinced they are authentic. The
resulting publicity attracts droves of purchasers eager to possess
something genuine and meaningful from the past, even at exhorbitant
proces. This public, Brown tells Wyatt, wishes to be fooled.
The fact that the immensely talented Wyatt, who quits trying to "patch
up the past," and continues to seek "redemption" elsewhere but really
never finds it, caused many critics to accuse Gaddis of nihilism.
(How many of us have known brilliant people who had no genius at
finding their own salvation? Salvation of course is not limited to
purely religious experience.)
The confusion of copying as a sacred act of recognition with the
fabrication of forgeries for manipulative and fraudulent purposes is
Gaddis' central concern. This flaw of perception prompts not only
forgeries of money, art, plagiarized prose and ideas, but also, as one
insightful critic put it, "counterfeit emotions (the Clintonian social
fashion of serial sincerity comes to mind), pseudo beliefs, imitated
speech, synthesized selves."
Though written a half century ago, "Recognitions" is as contemporary
as the problem of authenticity which swarms about us in more forms
than most people care to count.
From the book's inscription, Irenaeus' "Nihil cavum neque signo apud
Deum" (Nothing empty nor without significance with God") to the
collapsing cathedral of the final page, this is a slashingly religious
book, but not in an orthodox sense. Mithraism confronts New England
Puritanism, Catholicism is a constant target. Gaddis follows Irenaeus'
quote with the book-long question: And without God? How well do we
manage then in telling the real from the false? Gaddis brings up Simon
Magus, among the first to hustle religious relics. In Gaddis'
assessment, a discerning critic noted "simoniacal traffic" afflicts
all aspects of modern life, threatening the very "ontological status
of the individual human."
How can one grab hold of authenticity in a world where, as someone
said, an increasing number of things proliferate that possess no
meaning "outside the realm of consumerism, publicity and the mutual
exploitation that produces them. Life becomes an ongoing carnival of
clutter, filling up with stuff at the same time as it seems to be
falling to bits."
Besides being a probing debate concerning art, faith, reality and
illusion, "Recognitions" is a writerly triumph. It is a "Ulysses"
(Joyce, not Homer) for our time.
(Allyn Hunt, former editor and publisher of The Guadalajara Colony
Reporter, has written for several newspapers and magazines in the
United States. His fiction has appeared in "Best American Short
Stories " and other anthologies. Since 1985 he has written an opinion
column for the Mexico City News. He has lived in Mexico since 1963.)
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