The Last Christian Novel: William Gaddis's The Recognitions

My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes.

Edward Casaubon, in George Eliot's Middlemarch

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Though first-edition copies of The Recognitions fetch a high price today, they unceremoniously hit the remainder tables rather quickly after the novel's publication in 1955. Indeed, the overwhelmingly poor critical reception of what is now considered something of a dark star in the American literary firmament has since achieved a notorious and near-mythical status. Foremost among the leitmotifs of the early reviews—which would frequently lament the book's length, hyperbolic erudition, fragmentary style, and general difficulty—was the unfavorable comparison drawn between The Recognitions and Ulysses and an expression of dismay at this young unknown's hubristic attempt to tread, with his first novel, where only the great Joyce should.¹ The comparison between The Recognitions and Ulysses is probably inevitable, and certainly there are many features of The Recognitions that one might describe as "Joycean," including the use of myth as a constant subtext, the interest in the history of heretical doctrines, and the use of pastiche and collage.² But perhaps the most distinctively Joycean gesture that Gaddis makes—and one that does seem to link The Recognitions directly with Ulysses (rather than with, say, a general modernist literary style or set of concerns)—is the way he adopts a much earlier literary text as the central archetype for his novel.

As everyone knows, Ulysses is "modeled on" the Odyssey, and Gaddis's novel, too, makes similar use of a literary model, one that—like Ulysses—gives the book its title, for "The Recognitions" is also the name of a second- or third-century Christian text attributed (incorrectly) to Saint Clement of Rome. The Greek original of the Clementine Recognitions is lost, and it comes down to us through a fourth- or fifth-century Latin translation.³ As the early critics rarely failed to note, in choosing such a text as namesake and central organizing archetype for his novel, Gaddis indeed adopts what appears to be a Joycean strategy. But on closer examination, this evident similarity points as well to a critical difference between the two novels: instead of choosing one of the most widely read and influential texts in the history of the West, Gaddis, in a gesture that resonates throughout the religio-aesthetic thematics and the generic-formal techniques of the novel, chose an obscure, forgotten—indeed, lost—text of uncertain authorship upon which to base his work.

From the moment of its title, then, The Recognitions presents itself not only as a repetition of an earlier original but as a repetition of an "original" whose own origins are lost to history—a strategy that has led many critics to read the novel in terms of the logic of the simulacrum and postmodern pastiche. But unless one is familiar with patristic literature, the first-time reader of Gaddis's novel would likely not notice any of the Clementine overtones until several hundred pages into the book, when a passage from the Clementine Recognitions is quoted as the epigraph to Part 2, chapter 2, the chapter in which we also find Basil Valentine (an art critic and collaborator in authenticating protagonist Wyatt Gwyon's forgeries of Old Master paintings) on the phone answering questions for the friend of a certain writer named "Willie." Halfway through this call, after some discussion of the precise rites performed during the Black Mass, Valentine asks into the phone:

—[B]ut what in heaven's name do you want to know this sort of thing for? A novel? But . . . yes, perhaps he can, if he thinks it will do any good. But you can tell your friend Willie that salvation is hardly the practical study it was then. What? . . . Why, simply because in the Middle Ages they were convinced that they had souls to save. Yes. The what? The Recognitions? No, it's Clement of Rome. Mostly talk, talk, talk...