Consider this facsimilation.
Because originality – well, originality is a romantic disease. All we see around us is the originality of incompetent idiots. Even three hundred years ago, who wanted to be original? To be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you only did it your own way. When you paint, do not try to be original, only think about how to make your work better, so only copy masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates.
With each copy of a copy the form degenerates. Wyatt, the hero of The Recognitions, receives this advice from his painting teacher: Do not try to be original. And he is not; like the other characters, Wyatt is a copycat, forging paintings by Dutch masters. Meanwhile, Mr. Sinisterra counterfeits currency (taking himself as seriously as an artist as Wyatt does, which is a laugh); scenester Otto mimics the identities of the most charismatic people around him; and mad muse Esme submits a Rilke poem to a book review under the name of another character, Max.
The facsimilation isn’t only for the players; our omnipresent narrator liberally repurposes, recontextualises, and steals quotations from the canon, drawing from sources as diverse as late Platonist Porphyry, The Clementine Recognitions, T. S. Eliot, the alchemist Paracelsus, How to Win Friends and Influence People, etc. Some purported quotations are, in fact, frauds, like the entirely fictional – but heart-pumping – words allegedly spoken by William Rufus to Bishop Gundulf of Rochester: By the Holy Face of Lucca, God shall never have me good for all the evil that He hath wrought upon me! Although while we all have felt like that, of a time, God still gets us good.
With each copy of a copy the form degenerates. The Recognitions is deeply concerned with what life in a declining civilisation is like for those with conscious awareness of it. Many of our favourite players are alienated from the flow of contemporary life; they are disturbed by the sound of aeroplanes flying overhead, the growl of the subway or the rampant promiscuity around them. They struggle with contemporaneity’s pace, the bombardment of stimulation and sensation, the progression of time, and, consequently, their own desires.
Their response to this discomfort is to refuse to engage as much as possible, and instead plumb the depths of obscure niches which uniquely appeal to their psychology. Consequently, they craft internal worlds so rich and populated that communication with others becomes undesirable. When thoughts are expressed, they are borderline indecipherable. This, of course, is madness fuelled by longing for an idealised past.
There’s always the snarl of fascism within the reactionary impulse. If we take it as a given that with each copy of a copy the form degenerates, we tacitly accept the eugenicist concept that genetic information is degenerating, and undesirable mutations are rising. So not all life is worth living. But why would Wyatt’s painting teacher advise him against originality and embed within that advice a critique of reproduction? This presents a paradox – which means we are dealing with Reality. All binaries implicate a third – the two which is not one.
The Recognitions is concerned with how an original two, held in binary opposition, continue to particularise into the infinite, their relation increasing in complexity as it goes. Oppositions are established between secularism and faith, Christianity and paganism, solar worship and lunar worship, the real work and the fake, the great artist and the fraud, man and woman, virgin and whore, but as the narrative progresses, all fail to persevere as distinct categories. Everything is full of everything.
But maybe I have over-interpreted, and his teacher’s advice is not so deep, because Wyatt is simply not that good a painter. Although great artists can create works that are both illuminating and original, sticking to the chosen ways might be best for those less gifted. But Wyatt did have something – even our most cynical character, Basil Valentine, feels the presence of the spirit in the Madonnas of Wyatt’s forged Van der Goeses. The paintings live in a way contemporary works seldom do; they speak to the heart. The same Valentine acerbically critiques Wyatt’s romantic idealism, when other players try to protect his vision – even as it destroys his life – like they are shielding the eyes of a child.
Is all that you see around you, vulgarity, cupidity and power, and you think it was different then? Just because we have a few masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces? The pictures we’ve never seen and never will see are as bad as anything that’s ever been done. Do you think your precious Van Eyck didn’t live up to his neck in a loud vulgar court? In a world where’s everything was done for the same reasons everything’s done now? for vanity, avarice and lust? and the boundless egotism of Chancellor Rollins?
And like a child with a fragile world view, Wyatt lashes out when challenged.
At this downtown art scene party, the hostess’ crazy sister is playing Handel on the vinyl and it’s so loud at points you shouldn’t talk, just listen. Still, everyone has a special interest they are trying to share at volume, except the Argentine ambassador who somehow ended up at the wrong joint after he met a guy attempting to sell battleships at a bar. He’s having a good time. Everybody’s drinking but they’re just having ‘a drink’ or ‘another drink’. Never anything in particular. That’s distinct from here, because when we drink it’s always something; this summer it’s Vermuttino, last summer a Biciclette or Crémant, and always Bière Spéciale. Benny is in advertising but he doesn’t have a split personality about it so much. It’s not like he only does that during the day and then tries/fails to write a novel at night, like a presence that looms large here but who probably can’t be named for ego reasons.
A fucking bum tells Benny he’s a sell out and he just loses it.
I’ve taken a lot from people like you. Just like you. That’s tough, isn’t it, just like you, this town is loaded with people just like you, the world is loaded with people just like you. The honest men who are too good to fit in anywhere. You’re one of the people, aren’t you. Look at your hands, have you ever had a callus? You don’t get them lifting glasses. Who are you, to be so bitter? Have you ever done one day of work?
Gaddis worked in advertising as a copywriter in the twenty years following the publication of The Recognitions, before his next novel, J R, was released. I haven’t read J R, but The Recognitions is a masterpiece. Imagine, writing a masterpiece only for it to be slated by critics who hadn’t even finished reading the book, condemning your career before it started. Gaddis was describing the counterculture milieu that existed around him in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, but what’s incredible in his characters is how much their semi-conscious criticisms of contemporaneity are shared by us today. One white guy complains that you must be queer or black or a woman to be listened to these days. Both their narcissism and their use of hedonism as a pressure release speaks to our own age. Gaddis’ analysis of where we were and where we’re going was probably a bit too real for the literary establishment in the ‘50s, as I think it might still be now. Plus, Gaddis writes for people who know things or those who are willing to learn. Either you have a good knowledge of the European tradition before you start reading or you want to acquire one, so he writes for intellectuals, rather than nerds. As a result, you don’t really hear Gaddis’ name much in universities.
Benny goes on. He doesn’t speak loudly or fast, still the cold but vehement and level tone of his voice draws several people to turn around, and listen and watch.
I offered you work, and you were too good for it. We buy stuff from guys like you all the time, writing under pen names to protect names that are never going to published anywhere else, but they keep thinking they’ll make it, what they want to do, but never quite manage, and they keep on doing what they’re too good for. It’s a joke. It’s a joke. I know you, I know you. You’re the only serious person in the room, aren’t you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you’ve never finished a single thing in your life. You’re the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that’s real. What is real, then? Nothing’s real to you that isn’t part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal... spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don’t know what real life is, you’ve never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! Your poor bastard.
No one else has a clue what’s going on. I’ve thought that many times. Someone asked me at my advertising job if I felt better after a day off and I began to give a sincere answer, about my health and approach to healing, why I felt I needed some time although not super sick, how this was the best choice for me considering my determination to overcome some previously unaddressed complexes around health, and they cut me off to discuss the project. Our meeting was only a fifteen minute one. I had crucially misunderstood. I remember Zizek recounting how he realised he’d foolishly misinterpreted the social code by giving a sincere answer to a waiter in New York who asked, How are you today?, only to be disgusted when Zizek’s sighed and spluttered over his description of his pitiful morning. Should I have just said, Much better, thank you? If people do not care to hear a sincere answer, does it mean they don’t care? What happens to empathy when it’s faced with a systemic approach to time that demands more speed year on year? Well, if it’s extraneous to the profit motive, it’s got to go. Realism or cynicism? I would always rather someone be real about their journey – but perhaps my reality is not real at all. It could simply be the case that my answer was boring – but I don’t know. How can you change consciousness for the better if you don’t listen when consciousness is expressed? But perhaps assuming everyone shares this desire – to move things forward – is idealism. And in the ideal world, the idealist is dead.
Basil Valentine, the novel’s premier art critic and my favourite character, says to Wyatt that the most dangerous people are the intelligent and the stupid. The stupid more so than the intelligent because they have a tendency of waking up halfway through the operation and disrupting the normal course of things. In the context, it reads like Valentine purposefully conflates stupidity with idealism, and intelligence with the ability to understand that ‘it’ is a game and play it to your own advantage.
I spent some time grasping at ‘the real’ Valentine. Icy social conduct was contrasted against a colossal breadth of literary, artistic and historic knowledge, refined sensibility and excellent taste in everything, from paintings and sculptures to suits and cigarette cases. The question as to whether a sympathetic figure hid behind the blank and rinsing gaze was resolved in Central Park Zoo, when Valentine kicked a small child out of the way with his boot. As I should know by now, he was as cold as he seemed.
I try to hold my palms flat on the top of my thighs when I feel anger, fear or guilt rise and call for strength to accept the world as it is and to create better circumstances where I can. Maharishikaa, non-denomination mystic, says that fear and guilt are the top-down mechanisms of technocratic control in Western societies. We must find ways to live in this culture without becoming this culture’s victims. If you’re interested in creating positive change, as an individual or socially, you cannot let that happen to you – you cannot let the fear calcify into resentment or become habitual. Clarity in perception is required to perceive the world as is, and then to create what we are supposed to create.
At one point in the novel, a character during a party scene advises another: If you’re doing something you hate, quit it while you still hate it… Because you were right the first time.
Advertising contributes to a state of false consciousness which inhibits people from the ability to determine their real desires and aspirations. But perhaps this condemnable effect does not work on those doing the creating, the ad men themselves. I wrote a good portion of this at work. Alongside Gaddis, Don Dellilo, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller and Salmon Rushdie all worked as copywriters. And each has their own acerbic critique of capitalism.
Benny can’t stop laughing.
How you would have done it. That’s the way everything is, isn’t it. How you would have done it. Not how it should have been done, but how you would have done it. How long is it since you’ve seen the sunrise?
Last month. In some central Italian piazza with a fountain, holding hands and smoking cigarettes, half very serious and half taking the piss. That night we both dreamt that the conversation kept on going, and although we were too cut to confirm the next day that we’d shared exactly the same dream, we were confident we had indeed discussed everything.
Last night I couldn’t sleep and was awake as grey light seeped in through the blinds, in what sometimes passes for sunlight during an English summer. I’d stayed up late talking to Harry the playwright about the division between the public and the private. There’s no such thing as a public life anymore, he told me. Public figures share things which were once reserved for intimate relationships, to become sympathetic to us. In Prince Harry’s book, Spare, he wrote how the smell of Elizabeth Arden cream, when applied to his cock, reminded him of his mother. Rishi Sunak wanted us to know that he loves his cat and he played with it on Christmas day. The destruction of the public facing persona from figures who represent our institutions is nothing short of the destruction of social responsibility, the idea of community. And if there is no public, then there is no private life, either. Because intimacy becomes currency, and we are all atomised, sharing our secrets without connection, and so what do we keep for ourselves or those we love? I don’t know. I do not share his concern, although I appreciate his passion. I am a determined oversharer, inclined to make my business everyone else’s. Plus, I am confident that someone can have all the facts but still not know you, and we all must accept that a human being is as complex as anything that is, fundamentally shifting territory.
Ease, manners, success, any success, God, Christ, thousand-dollar bills, Christmas, by God, happiness. Any kind of happiness.
Reading Gaddis, I consider when resentment began to motivate great writing. Too easy and incorrect to say the 20th century, although probably becomes ubiquitous then and is sometimes deployed to best effect (THE LOSER BY THOMAS BERNARD). We shouldn’t forget Swift encouraged the Irish to eat their children, or Quincey defended murder as one the fine arts, or the entire oeuvre of Aristophanes, as he often picks a particular idiot who was literally sat in the crowd at the Dionysia and pins the fault of the current conduct of the Athenian state upon them. Writing, more than painting, is the medium par excellence for twisted little freaks. What redeems Gaddis – springing from the same font of redemption for all literary haters – is that old Florentine deathconsciousness, a love of God that persists above and beyond all awareness of human imperfection, the determined recourse to a higher ideal.
Science assures us that it is getting nearer to the solution of life, what life is, that “ultimate mystery” in eager substantiation. But no one has begun to explain what happened at that dirt track in Langhorne, Pennsylvania about twenty-five years ago, when Jimmy Concannon’s car threw a wheel, and in a crowd of eleven thousand it kills his mother.
In The Recognitions, certain characters’ fates are woven together as in tapestry. A step of the dance may initiate a reaction elsewhere, off screen, to someone who will be deeply impacted yet is ignorant of the cause. The binds are obsessional, familial, generational. Most of us with some spiritual awareness are aware of this movement in real life, how the breath of God creates ripples on the still water of consciousness, creating personality, refashioning destinies. Sometimes these threads pull us toward another at one time and expel us at another, seemingly without warning. We feel the tug of these golden binds, and some of us recognise it as karma.
The characters of The Recognitions are painfully aware that institutional religion is dead to the west. Some respond with determined cleaving to increasingly irrelevant ancient rites and others with madness. Others still let the dance erase them – submerge themselves in contemporaneity, mere conduits for its narcissism, commercialism, indulgence. These are the obvious survivors, but aren’t they dull for it? The believers seek God but struggle to find him expressed through the people, atomised as they are. Their community provides little respite; everyone talks determinedly about their own pet project or interest, but they don’t hear each other. Everyone is making, no one is collaborating. Most finished works remain uncommented on by the surrounding milieu until they achieve commercial success; at that point, they are immediately slated. Competition is ever-present, while unspoken.
Wyatt succeeds in creating sublime artworks, true visions of beauty. But not under his own name – his original works are commercial and critical failures.
Stanley – the only artist in the novelist of the calibre to rival Wyatt, his sometimes foil, a composer for the organ and Bach enjoyer – discusses his failure to make in these terms: It’s as though this one thing must contain it all, all in one piece of work, because, well it’s as though finishing it strikes it dead, do you understand? And that’s frightening, it’s easy enough to understand why, killing the one thing you … love.
I recently met a psychoanalyst in a bar and she told me that if I still hadn’t made progress with my novel in ten years, then I should definitely see an analyst (although she strongly advised I see one now). If what you’re working on gets so epic that you can’t get a handle on it, if becomes so big that you fall into action paralysis, that’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t contain but which is struggling to come out.
Either that, or I am simply not a very good writer.
A good friend of mine counselled that I shouldn’t put all my ideas in my first work. Tarkovsky advises against it. He said it’s really common for young filmmakers to do that. They put all their ideas in the first work and as a result it lacks a clear direction, a focus.
For me, the ultimate triumph of symbolic painting is La Primavera; the ultimate novel War and Peace. Both have been described, by astute critics, as representing the entire cosmos, and further, serving as maps, intended to help us navigate the great mystery. But neither were their makers first work. My novel, the great fiction of my life, is supposed to achieve the same thing. Stanley likely has a similar aspiration for his hymn.
This self-sufficiency of fragments, that’s where the curse is, fragments that don’t belong to anything. Separately they don’t mean anything, but it’s almost impossible to pull them together into a whole. And now it’s impossible to accomplish a body of work without a continuous sense of time, so instead you try to get all the parts together into one work that will stand by itself and serve the same thing a lifetime of separate works does, something higher than itself, and I… this work of mine, three hundred years ago it would have been a Mass, because the Church… And it would be finished by now, because the Church…
Is everything separate for God to admire each thing individually, or is particularisation a kind of tragedy, a loss of some original conception of unity? Gather a group of mystics together (perhaps in a local bookshop, on a Thursday) and you’ll hear different things. For a Platonist, egosim may strongly express itself in the notion that one particular unit is entirely analogous with the cosmic soul, let alone the One. Whereas a Neo-Advaitan could find cleaving to individual identity – in any form, even as an immortal soul – a demonstration of egoism. I incline to the belief that surely both truths have real existence, but in truth, I currently know nothing.
Some transcendent judgement is necessary, because nothing is self-sufficient, even art, and when art isn’t an expression of something higher, when it isn’t invested you might even say, it breaks up into fragments that don’t have any meaning and don’t have any…
Characters represent my biggest hurdle. Character relies on cultures with value systems that underpin the development of virtue. A clear conscience provides the foundation for personality’s articulation, but that’s challenging to develop in epoch characterised by doubt. This likely explains autofiction as the 21st century medium par excellence – dialogue and monologue are more present in our environment than character; dry bones do not live, although they chirp.
Much of the excellence of Gaddis’ novel is in his dialogue. He understands the quick-fire exchange of information that characterises contemporary speech and represents it to comic effect in party scenes where voices, half-bragging, half-misunderstanding, whirl around the monologues of the desperately sincere, like Stanley.
I’m not trying to say I’m exempt from it, this modern disease… That’s what it is, a disease, you can’t live like we do without catching it. Because time is given to us in fragments, that’s the only way we know it. Finally we can’t even conceive of a continuum of time. Every fragment exists by itself, and that’s why we live among palimpsests, because finally all the work should fit into one whole, and express an entire perfect action, as Aristotle says, and it’s impossible now, it’s impossible, because of the breakage, there are pieces everywhere…
Despite the impossibility, the work goes. Wyatt paints, Stanley composes, and I write. But success or failure cannot be judged by the work’s reception. Artists have a tendency of believing that we are in Greece, and this is the forum. But this is Rome, and we are in the circus.
There’s perhaps nothing as condemnable as becoming the only one who understands without ever finishing anything, as evidence of this superior understanding. It demonstrates that one has not engaged with the matter at hand but rather never faced anything beyond oneself.
The Recognitions asks a lot of its readers. It demands that we know ourselves better – that we try and understand ourselves in relation to time (both time as the progression history and time as a force of God) and how we conceive our individual identity in relation to the whole. It also insists that we live deliberately.
An angel will come to us bearing lilies engulfed in flames and, although the lilies burn, they are a divine gift. The onus is on us to reconcile this and live with this consciousness. Like Dante, we must eat the burning heart. Here, everything is impure. But yet we cannot lock ourselves up in remorse for what we have done; we must live it through. We cannot lock ourselves up with our work, until it is a gessoed surface, prepared, clean and smooth and ivory. We must live it through.
There was a moment, in travel, when love and necessity become the same thing. And now, if the gods themselves cannot recall their gifts, we must live them through, and redeem them.
If the work is the only beloved, as it is for Stanley, what is vital hasn’t been recognised and the work itself is damned, to join the ranks of hollow tin men staggering in the dead land, the cactus land, sightless with dry voices. Perhaps Stanley has not yet arrived at the moment of the journey some of us, like Wyatt, have reached: the moment love and necessity are the same.
Dilige et quod vis fac. This is what a great work asks of us. Love, and do what thou wilt. That’s it, that’s the law, that’s the whole of the law.
Or, to put it another way: if you are in the body of a donkey, enjoy eating grass.
Detail from ‘The Portinari Triptych’ by Hugo van der Goes
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