SECOND ASCENT

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

"Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of ...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it and or listen to it and, it shouldn't be sinful to want to have created beauty?"

By this point in our climb to the top, we are comfortably able to read closely, to discern plot, character, theme, and allusion, to identify and discuss genre elements, and to have formed ideas of taste, both ours and that of the world at large. Here, as the slope grows ever steeper, we are invested in our quest and nearing the point of no return. To complete this phase, we look to a well-known, but seldom-read writer.

William Gaddis described his first novel, "The Recognitions," as “not reader-friendly.” Like Wallace, he went on to say that he believes “the reader gets satisfaction out of … collaborating with the author.”

Drawing on Faust for his master plot, Gaddis brings much of early Christian thought onto the pages of a novel set in early-mid 20th C. New York City. Condensed from the 480,000 word original manuscript, the printed book nears 1000 pages, with dozens of characters, each of whom has a story independent of the central plot.

Themes of the search for identity, creating an authentic life, and finding meaning in a world of such vast, differing, and shifting values play out in the life of the central character, Wyatt Gwyon, progeny of a Calvinist minister from the backwoods of New England.

In addition to Faust, Gaddis attributed much of his inspiration for the novel, and indeed the source of the title, to Sir James Frazer’s masterwork on mythology, “The Golden Bough,” a work that we will take with us as a guide to the difficulties of collaborating with our author at this stage of our climb.

This course is the third in a series we call The Himalayas of Literature.