The Recognitions (New York Review Books Classics)

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The what? The Recognitions ? No, it's Clement of Rome. Mostly talk, talk, talk. The young man's deepest concern is for the immortality of his soul, he goes to Egypt to find the magicians and learn their secrets. It's been referred to as the first Christian novel. What? Yes, it's really the beginning of the whole Faust legend…What can drive anyone to write novel...? I confess I did not have heart to finish our business so immediately, I spent a few minutes congratulating him. He became very angry when I appeared to question the… authenticity? of this thing, but he was very proud. I saw in his eyes, he was very proud, when we finished our business together.

Wyatt, of all the pretenders, changes to become a truth seeker. Most of the other characters loiter at the right bars, attend fashionable parties, and go sightseeing at the correct places. They gossip, drink, develop their images, and, whenever they can, because they have nothing better to do, antagonize and distract the moral characters. Hannah tells Anselm to “shut up,” “go home,” and “take a nap” when he and Stanley discuss religion. Don Bildow asks Stanley for methyltestosterone (“I’m with this girl, see”) and later “the Italian word for contraceptive” when Stanley frantically pursues Esme. I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street. I stood in the narrow aisle reading the first paragraph of The Recognitions. It was a revelation, a piece of writing with the beauty and texture of a Shakespearean monologue—or, maybe more apt, a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words. And they were the words of a contemporary American. This, to me, was the wonder of it. The dedication that opens the book, to Gaddis’s daughter Sarah, is from TS Eliot’s poem “Marina”. It is a thing of great beauty itself, and any reader of The Recognitions will find in it echoes of that text, those texts communicating, so why not, in the spirit of appropriation, reproduce it here in full, if for no other reason than to beautify my own work with someone else’s labor.

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Reading the book at the time it came out must have been something though. A few years later the Beats would supposedly smash up American Literature with their little revolution, but seeing what Gaddis did in this book was much more defining of American serious literature than the half-assed autobiographical masturbatory 'look how cool me and my friends are' books that would categorize the high points of Beat literature. There is something in this book that is aspiring to the high Modernism of the works of Joyce and Proust, but then there is something leaning towards the meta-fiction to come on the scene in the next decade. It is this position the book straddles that makes for a particular unease and I think, in historical retrospect, a kind of failing. Gaddis is on the path to something new, but he doesn't quite pull it off. This doesn't make any sense probably. I guess what I'm meaning to say is that he is paving the way for some of my favorite books to be written, and he's obviously an influence of some kind on Pynchon and DFW and their ilk, but in his own masterpiece he falls short of achieving what they would be able to, but at the same time he is out of touch just enough with what came before him that this novel sits uncomfortably between two difficult styles. Many of these characters undergo significant changes, including their names –like Mr. Robert Zimmerman— that can go unrecognised and it’s not until later on in the text that one recognises their voice, their tone and character. Their reappearance, in their different guises, pulls one's attention into focus, as you being to realise —like scrutinising a painting up close— you could be missing the wider effect and to pay greater attention to the these amorphous characters. We begin our recognitions...at the beginning. The title. It's a reference to a text mistakenly attributed to Pope Clement I. One of the characters, Basil Valentine, later explains, Moore, Steven (1998). "Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse". Archived from the original on June 10, 2011 . Retrieved February 2, 2011. by Mark O'Connell which uses The Recognitions as its main example - here is the bit I liked, but the whole article is worth a read ( http://www.themillions.com/2011/05/th...)

Recognitions' has always meant the realization of painful truths for me," adds Palladino. "I thought releasing the record was the only way to let it all go—the final act, the last thing we made together. This album captures that change, the lapse of time in leaving one life to the next, which is what Exitmusic always represented."Another thing that I read was that the book was not well received at first, but then it started getting accolades later on because of its complexity and difficulty to read. I am not sure why that is a good thing, but it was enough for it to become a staple on many "must read before you die" lists. That feeling makes itself known right from the very beginning of The Recognitions, as "Crawl" abruptly shifts from a sinister-but-subdued intro—think: Beach House re-scoring Suspiria—to a full-on exorcism, a fearless, fang-baring fight for one's life that leaves a trail of blood, sweat, and tears behind. Things slow down slightly amid the quivering strings, bold shuffleboard beats, and minor-key melodies of "Iowa," but there's no denying what a wildly expressive diary entry this album is by its end. That goes for everything from the bittersweet piano balladry of "The Distance" to the queasy rhythms and delirious hooks of "Criminal." There's a long cast of characters that drift in and out and we lose sight of Wyatt for long stretches. Names are changed! Identities are mistaken! Life and art are so entangled that their boundaries are not clear. We constantly overhear fragments of conversations, catch glimpses of the characters as they hurry by. The word 'recognition' has a lot of associations for me," says Church. "I remember when I first came to New York City and fell in love with Aleksa; I told her I felt like I 'recognized' her. Then of course there was the recognitions implied by the breakup, and the unravelling of a story we've been telling each other for 12 years. And I'm also really interested in Gnostic-type mystical practice, which centers on a kind of 'amanuensis’ or unforgetting of true reality."

Copying masterpieces is now an industry in Southern China, "the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year — most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day."In a mythic novel nothing is inconsequential. And it becomes apparent through the repetitions, recursions and recognitions that Gaddis cross references myth, religion and world literature, but never does he compromises the sophistication of storytelling or the craft of his prose style - of which is compact and taut in description and poetic in form.