LFINO: Issue #10 - Reading The Recognitions, Chapter 8: Everything Calculated To Wear Out

For now, the father might be anyone the son chose. The instant their eyes met in forced recognition, it would be over. (The Recognitions, II.i 298)

(Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930)

Note on the text: This reading of The Recognitions will be using the 2020 New York Review Classics (NYRB) edition of the text. All page number references will refer to this edition. The recommended way to approach this blog is to read the chapter yourself, first, and then come back and read this. Of course you may read it however you like, but I will be starting with a synopsis which will inevitably contain spoilers. This is not intended as a replacement for Steven Moore’s (brilliant) annotations, but as another tool to help unlock this difficult book, and to further add to the discussion of William Gaddis’s work. For specific references, please consult https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/I1anno1.shtml

Synopsis:

A chapter which twists and turns through the lives of a number of different characters. We see Mr. Pivner, Otto’s estranged father, after being nearly run down by Wyatt and Basil’s taxi at the end of the previous chapter. He is awaiting a call from Otto to arrange a meeting, a meeting which, unbeknownst to him, is destined to be derailed by a scarf no longer in Otto’s possession. Gaddis then guides us into the life of Agnes Leigh, her marital life in shambles, as she voyeuristically watches the lives of others through her office window like publishing’s own Rear Window. Otto arrives at Agnes’s office to pester her about his play which she admits to reading but offers her reservations that parts of it seem familiar. Otto goes to collect Esme and the pair go to an Italian restaurant in full swing with a number of familiar faces hanging around. Max reiterates the idea that Otto’s play seems familiar. Meeting up with Ed, the group decide to go to a drag party somewhere in the village. Ed and Otto, in an act of extreme drunken tomfoolery, leave the party and go for a drive. They decide to steal a leg from a hospital morgue and, after breaking into his apartment, leave it in Stanley’s bed. Stanley, however, isn’t there. He is visiting his dying mother (who the leg so happens to have belonged to) in hospital. At dawn the next day, Stanley is visited by Hannah who needs a place to stay. Stanley begrudgingly allows her to stay in his apartment while he goes to mass, where he bumps into Agnes. Ed and Otto find Stanley’s apartment and, seeing Hannah through the window, assume that the two have slept together, while, in reality, Stanley is fleeing the seductive ticks of Agnes. He leaves behind his glasses as he makes an escape.

Basil Valentine visits Wyatt, who has been working on his Death of the Virgin. Wyatt reveals that he has been hiding evidence of his previous forgeries at Esther’s apartment, but, he agrees to let Valentine look after them himself.

Stanley and Valentine cross paths in the subway, as Stanley makes his way home and collapses exhausted into his bed.

Characters:

• Mr. Pivner

• Otto

• Esme

• Agnes

• Stanley

• Basil Valentine

• Wyatt

• Hannah

• Max

• Ed Feasley

Analysis:

If you have been following this project since the beginning then you might be surprised by the length of the synopsis here. For the first time during this reread, I felt as though we had reached a point where the narrative complexity had ramped up significantly and that I may need to explain elements of it as clearly as possible for any new readers. Whilst other chapters may feel bewildering due to the content of the conversations taking place, and how they are structured on the page, this first chapter of the novel’s second volume shifts and changes in ways that might be difficult for a reader to grasp onto. As much as Gaddis claims no direct influence from James Joyce’s, Ulysses, one finds it impossible to ignore the similarities between the two increasing their difficulty drastically between the first and second sections of the novel. Needless to say there is a lot going on in this chapter, and much of it stretches across the whole tonal scale, and I will try my best to elucidate why this chapter is the way it is, how it establishes the direction of the rest of volume II, and what is at stake in its content.

The chapter opens with an in-depth introduction to the previously anonymous, Mr. Pivner, a few moments before his near miss with the taxi carrying Wyatt and Basil Valentine (as seen from their perspective in Chapter 7). Mr. Pivner, it is revealed, is the estranged father of Otto, whom he is waiting to hear from at some point in the day. In focusing so intently on Pivner for the early part of this chapter, Gaddis draws a direct parallel between this chapter and the one which opens the novel and, ultimately, the contrasts between Otto and Wyatt. What is immediately striking when the reader meets Pivner is just how similar he is to Otto, the actual Otto as he exists to the reader rather than the performed Otto that he presents to the other characters. Pivner is a character striving to create an enclave for himself that projects a sense of individuality, but which does not stray from the mass produced and insubstantial. This is exemplified within the two following extracts, the first detailing Pivner’s approach to his signature, and his approach to the furnishing of his apartment.

Mr. Pivner reached that critical point in his signature, the capital “P,” which he liked to make a figure of dashing individuality even on order forms. (277)

and

[…] the apartment’s claim to distinction were mass-produced flower-and-hunting-prints, filling a need they had manufactured themselves, heavy furniture with neither the seductive ugliness of functional pieces nor the isolate dumb beauty of something chosen for itself (281)

This is Gaddis as the scathing ironist that readers of, The Recognitions, will be familiar with by this point in the novel. Notice how, in the first extract, Gaddis ends the second clause with an absolutely scathing twist, one which foreshadows later work into the malleability of capitalist ideology to absorb and neutralise rebellious activity. Pivner’s attempt at individuality, through the act of a self-aggrandising signature, is a neutralised and impotent act. It is an act which can be imbued with a sense personal importance, but in the end it appears only on an order form to enter into a faceless economic chain. Pivner’s individuality is secondary to this whole order and ultimately worthless. Pivner goes back to his apartment which itself is the exact manifestation of this system, a mass produced false image of individual expression. Otto, it can be said, is someone very much wrestling against this but falling into the exact same trap. He is trying to build an individualist identity for himself throughout the novel, but all of his attempts to break out are defeated either through the recognition of their falsehood, or through their appeal to an individualism which is itself a market category - the bohemian artist.

It appears to me that Gaddis does explicitly draw a point of comparison between Mr. Pivner and Reverend Gwyon through their contrasting reading habits. We know that Gwyon is a serious reader of the most advanced of religious, historical, and philosophical esoterica, a trait which continues on in Wyatt. Pivner, on the other hand, is in a completely different reading bracket. As Gaddis reveals with scathing condescension:

[…] an assortment of books published by the hundred-thousand, treatises on the cultivation of the individual self, prescriptions of superficial alterations in vulgarity read with excruciating eagerness by men alone in big chairs, the three-way lamp turned to its wildest brilliance as they fingered those desperate blazons of individuality […] (281)

Self-help, especially of the Dale Carnegie sort (as some may recognise in the name of this project) will be a regular punching bag throughout Gaddis’s body of work. In condemning Mr. Pivner to this kind of literature, he is positioned as a regression from Gwyon. He has fallen in to a pursuit of knowledge which is not for the glory of a diety or of the human soul, but of the corrupted, selfish, tendencies of an individualist ideology. Notice how they are described as ‘treatises’, the term often reserved for theological or philosophical pieces of work. These are read through by the ‘desperate blazons of individuality’ with the same fervour that Gwyon reads through his religious texts. With that established, we can then see how, even despite his physical absence from their relationship, this has still trickled down into Otto. The cultivation of the individual self has been Otto’s course of operations for the entire novel so far. His sling, his play, the way he poses with his expensive cigarettes, the way his first response in order to swing the course of the conversation back towards him is to lie about travelling to South America in the next few days. It is the same clawing for individuality carried out by the father and the son, only the father embraces the way this is manufactured and sold to him for this vain purpose, whereas the son reaches it exactly because he is trying too hard to consciously achieve authenticity.

When the chapter switches perspective through to Otto later on we can again see how this same kind of individualist thought leads to his moving through the world in a state of poisoned isolation.

With his dispatch case, and an unkind thought for everyone he knew, Otto carried his head high. Affecting to despise loneliness, still he looked at the unholy assortment streaming past him as though hopefully to identify one, rescue some face from the anonymity of the crowd with instantly regretted recognition, and so rescue himself. (298)

It may feel as though I have been banging this drum for several issues now, perhaps to the detriment of things which could be said of other characters. I have worried about this too, but with each chapter in this reread I have only found that with each wrinkle Gaddis adds to this character, the more I feel that it cannot be understated. As the events of the novel unfold, Otto seems to morph and transform from a naive but somewhat excusable recent graduate, into an increasingly pathetic and disturbed man. Readers may find that the above passage would not feel out of place transformed into a piece of inner-monologue for Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan. Yet, because it cannot commit completely to malice, still invokes sympathy. It is a thought that, the more I read over it, strikes me as overwhelmingly sad. At this point, Otto has just been told that a number of friends suspect that passages from his play, the object so much of his self-identity and his belief in the actualisation of that identity hinges on, are plagiarised. Everyone who he has been trying to earn the approval of view him as a liar, despite none of them being able to pinpoint the original work he has supposedly stolen from. As the keen reader may have already suspected, hidden behind this accusation lies the much more uncomfortable secret that the work itself is derivative and without note. A pastiche without an original to copy. This traumatic rejection of the very thing propping up Otto’s personae, we see him pass through different emotional states over the four lines that make up the extract. He is aloof and malicious towards his social circle. He pretends to be gregarious and outgoing in the face of rejection. Ultimately, he is sad and in desperate need of a genuine human act of recognition, one which he knows he will recoil from immediately if it ever occurred. (Side note: this reminds me of a very similar scene in the 1996 film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s true masterpiece Mother Night. This isn’t too relevant to the discussion, but I think it evokes a general mood about the isolation incurred by a faceless metropolis such as New York.) It again puts Otto in contrast to Wyatt, who we saw experience the same desire for human contact, but which lead to him acting as an almost psychotic, grabbing the people of Paris and demand that they look him in the eye. Otto is incapable of doing this, as to do so would be to destroy the manufactured self image. Remember, though, that Otto only affects to despise his loneliness. All of the major characters within, The Recognitions, are reacting to states of loneliness, in one way or another. In fact, both Otto and Mr. Pivner seem to exist in a state of content with their loneliness, but only Otto feels as though he has to pretend otherwise. As we will see, neither will come into a genuine recognition of the other and perhaps solve this loneliness - all thanks to a green scarf and another son of an absent and strange father.

I am sorry to return with something much shorter on analysis with a chapter much more sprawling than many of the others which have come before it. Unfortunately, due to the constraints I like to keep in order to maintain readability, I wasn’t able to cover Stanley in this issue the way I would have liked. I will be continuing with my original plan of discussing Esme in the bonus issue, but I will also try to carve out some space to unpack what exactly is going on with Stanley here too. I don’t believe that there was much in this chapter between Wyatt and Basil to warrant too much discussion beyond just pointing out the plotting elements. If you have a different opinion on Wyatt and Basil, or you would like me to discuss Agnes and Hannah in this chapter, please send me a DM on here, or any of my socials, and we can discuss it there. For now, thank you for reading this, and I am happy to say that, after a short break, we are back and we are raring to go.

Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip / Insta: teawithzizek)

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