Why in the world should anyone trouble to read so difficult a novel? A novel, for pete's sake, not even a work of non-fiction with useful information. Don't we read novels for entertaining? But it turns out that hard work has its rewards. If you are one of the lucky ones, the book is enthralling. For the unlucky majority it will be just boring.
Gaddis's obscurity does not come from an inability to write clearly: "it is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it least" (p. 26);
"She's still sick of trench mouth. She got it kissing the pope's ring" (p. 192); "90 percent of the advertisements he read had no possible application in his life" (p. 283); "Busy as those monks in the Middle Ages were keeping a-kindle the light of knowledge which they had helped to extinguish everywhere else" (p. 495); and so forth. So if Gaddis can be witty, entertaining, and clear at the same time, why is The Recognitions, and all of Gaddis's work for that matter, so hard to follow?
A central theme in all the works of Gaddis is about the gap between what we know (through recognition) and what we are told. A priest-confessor sums up the problem: "We live in a world where first-hand experience is daily more difficult to reach, and if yo reach it through your work, perhaps, you are not fortunate in the way most people would be fortunate. But these are things I shall not try to tell you. You will learn these things for yourself if you go on, and I may help you there" (p. 952). For a writer, this problem of learning by first-hand experience is doubly challenging for story-telling is a second-hand way of knowing. So how can a story teller honestly urge first-hand experience through a second-hand medium? Gaddis's method is to turn novel reading into a first hand experience. He tames the famous recommendation to young writers--show; don't tell--three steps further. He provides shadows which the readers, if they can, transform into shapes. ("Scarcely more steady than the shadows themselves, a figure took form and emerged," p. 920.)
A businessman who specializes in selling art forgeries says of most people, "They don't want to know. They want to be told" (p. 313), and he holds those people in contempt. The solution in art isto turn passive lookers into knowing creators: "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 while they look at it or listen to it" (p. 535)
Three hundred plus pages later we see the idea spelled out again: "He studied with Titian... Titian's paintings in the Escorial, he saw then when he went to paint for the king, and who whole style changed. He learned from Titian. That's the way we learn, you understand" (p. 870). And the reader learns by reading Gaddis.
The result of this kind of creative participation in the work is a kind of enchantment that moves readers more deeply, when it moves them at all. An old woman is described as the "nightmare of the girly she had been two generations ago" (p. 561). To understand that image the reader has to see the old woman's body and the young girl's thoughts simultaneously. They have to work, not just read. And in this book they have to such work, line by line, page by page, for a thousand pages.
Gaddis does not think this kind of active engagement is easy: "They were enjoying the discussion very much, each finding the other intelligent, witty, in all a good companion, for neither was listening to what the other was saying" (p. 696), but Gaddis does believe intent participation in the other is essential. The price of not being able to listen and know is death--metaphorically in the death of the sou, literally, in the story, I count two people in the last 15 pages killed by ignoring messages in languages they didn't understand.
Every reader will find a different book. The more they bring, the more they can get. The harder they are willing to work, the easier their story will be to follow.
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Originally Posted by The Comedian
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I started rereading this novel post-relocation, and I am still only in the opening 20 pages, but they remain distinct.
I nominate Elective Affinities by ....
