LFINO: Issue #11 - Reading The Recognitions, Chapter 9: The Drunken Prophet

'yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes' (Allen Ginsburg, Howl, 1956)

(Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich 1808)

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:

The chapter opens following Fuller, this time having a seemingly intense conversation with a slice of toast and Brown’s suit of armour. We find out that Fuller has been visiting a voodoo practitioner, Adeline, with whom he has been trying to curse Brown. We hear rumours throughout the chapter of the mysterious Reverend Gilbert Sullivan, who seems to be developing a serious following, including Fuller. Otto goes to see Brown at Brown’s office, he hasn’t got a copy of Otto’s play but insists that he shouldn’t worry about the allegations of plagiarism. As Otto leaves, he crosses paths with Basil Valentine. Valentine, there to blackmail Brown, tells of Wyatt’s secret stash of evidence and how he plans to use it before the end. Brown counters him with accusations of Valentine’s mysterious doings in Paris and his strange relationship with Hungary. Brown arrives home at his office to find a drunken Wyatt waiting for him. Wyatt, at perhaps the most energetic we have ever seen him, brings his new painting to Brown. Brown is furious at the damage Wyatt has inflicted on the painting. The two fight, and Wyatt considers killing Brown. His diatribes increase with his confidence before he storms out on Brown. We follow him as he wanders from place to place, first to Esther, who is living with a radio ad man Ellery and with Rose. After leaving almost as quickly as he arrived, he goes and visits Basil. They too get into a disorientating scrap, the confident Wyatt is almost more terrifying than the disheveled gnostic hermit we are more familiar with. Wyatt leaves and boards a train back to somewhere he hasn’t been in a long time.

Characters:

• Wyatt

• Recktall Brown

• Fuller

• Basil Valentine

• Esther

• Ellery

• Otto

• Rose

• John

• Adeline

• Reverend Gilbert Sullivan (by name)

Analysis:

This second chapter of the second volume of, The Recognitions, opens with an epigraph that sets the stage so perfectly that we cannot move forward without confronting it. As Gaddis often does, he takes us back to one of his major sources: the Recognitions of Clementine:

This is as if a drunk man should think himself to be sober, and should act indeed in all respects as a drunk man, and yet think himself to be sober, and should wish to be called so by others. Thus, therefore, are those also who do not know what is true, yet hold some appearance of knowledge, and do many evil things as if they were good, and hasten to destruction as if it were salvation. (The Clementine Recognitions, Book V)

The obvious line being drawn here is towards Wyatt, and the manner Wyatt moves through this chapter. If one remembers earlier in the novel, there is a scene where Wyatt describes to Esther the experience of having seen Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes. He does so in a kind of mania, completely detached from anything Esther says in response. This chapter, with Wyatt as the drunken orator, is like that scene expanded out for fifty pages. It is difficult, obscure, aggressive, and it pushes the novel into this arhythmic space where the tethers of logic we have been following so far start to get very thin. What exactly does this epigraph tell us about Wyatt in this chapter? The obvious - that this drunken state produces in him a sensation that he is of sober mind enough to start making the demands and proclamations that he has been stewing on but has never voiced. I’d like to draw attention to this small comment in the Clementine, ‘and should wish to be called so by others.’ Recognition, as always, remains at the heart of what this novel is teasing its characters with. Wyatt never outwardly says it, he’s lost in this endless monologue that occasionally reacts to what the other characters say but is mostly recklessly barrelling through the scenario. But, we can infer, from such a drastic shift in his tone and the way in which he specifically singles out significant individuals in his life to visit, that he is demanding something from them. A wish to be acknowledged by them as having some kind of presence. A need to be seen not as the wandering deranged hermit, but as the sober prophet, his drunkenness unacknowledged. The Clementine quotation does end with a warning however, and it is one which is well worth dwelling on: ‘and do many evil things as if they were good, and hasten to destruction as if it were salvation.’ Perhaps we are supposed to take from this that Wyatt’s lack of humility, his drunken claims of knowledge, is opening himself up for destruction. A claim to knowledge in the drunken mind is a misdirection that will lead one towards evil even if you intend on the good. Let’s not forget this is the very accusation which Wyatt makes of Basil Valentine and the Jesuits towards the end of the chapter. Of course, this can be expanded to include every character in the novel in one way or another, yet, it is Wyatt who must face this first reckoning for his vanity.

While the chapter feels like bombardment by Wyatt, there is still plenty of other noteworthy elements at play. The first is this recurring name that everyone seems to know, but which has never been mentioned before: Reverend Gilbert Sullivan. Yes, that is a reference to operetta giants, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. I’m unsure if this reference has a specific deeper purpose beyond giving Gaddis and the reader a little laugh. That Wyatt will take this name, and if Fuller is to be believed, his spiritual concerns, when he returns home to New England, seems to gesture towards a heightened comedic drama. Yet, if we wanted to tap into it a little further, using what we know about inertia and imitation throughout the novel we could read Gilbert and Sullivan as a devolved version of the classical opera which is so lauded elsewhere. In this reading the Reverend Gilbert Sullivan, as a lay preacher, is a devolved version of the classical religion we have seen elsewhere. The Reverend Gilbert Sullivan as an alias adopted by Wyatt is a devolved version of the Reverend Gwyon. Is the Reverend Gilbert Sullivan the man for whom Christ died? The question which we always hear and which seems to haunt Wyatt wherever he goes.

Elsewhere, we have moments which appear as though they foreshadow Gaddis’s 1975 novel, JR, in their form and content. The radio adverts, which have appeared sporadically throughout different sections of the novel, are revealed to be the product of Ellery - the man who now lives with Esther and Rose. These advertisements, airing during a religious programme on the lives of the saints aimed at children, which direct these children to tell their parents they need to purchase wafer-shaped sleeping pills and weight-loss supplements. Even Esther sees the vulgarity in the work. When she raises the question, however, she’s shut down: Vulgar? That’s what people like. That’s what vulgar means, people. (360) The etymology of vulgar, from the Latin Vulgaris, does refer to ‘the common people’ and enters the English language as a derogatory term to relating to the stupidity and coarseness of the tastes of the herd. Ellery is right, vulgar is what people like, the question is whether that gives it any kind of value. It certainly gives the situation a monetary value. Religion has found itself a medium by which it can be profitable in the market place and can be used to sell merchandise beyond the knowledge the theological class usually pedal. When one combines this with the way in which spiritual practice is portrayed as a gradual system of decay over time throughout the novel and in this chapter, we can see the capitalistic co-option as a new stage in that system of decay. If ‘religion is the despair of magic’ (Wyatt, 371) then has the mass media marketplace become the despair of religion? A reduction of the ancient knowledge known only to the priests of the temple - stemming from some primordial force from before death entered the world - presented to the vulgar masses in order to get them to purchase products which exploit their belief for petty cash. Why then does Ellery want to borrow Wyatt’s copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the prized possession of his Aunt May? Because why should the market only limit itself to a Catholic audience when there’s money to be made on all sides.

To cycle back around to Wyatt at our conclusion, I’d like to unpack something strange and obscure that Wyatt says. Something a reader may gloss over, as one cannot keep track of every reference, even with the annotations to hand. Wyatt tells Basil about his upbringing, and goes into this strange anecdote:

When still a boy I read Novalis, and there was a great appeal, you know. But after a few more years of study I understood the mistake I’d made, the romantic mistake I’d almost made, I saw eventually how Novalis had appealed to all the most dangerous parts of me, all the romantic and dangerous parts, so I settled down to extinguish them. After two or three years I emerged triumphant, to tell the truth quite pleased with myself, to be rid of those romantic threats which would have killed me if they had taken me unawares. Thus cleansed, I went on in the rational spirit, easily spotted romantic snares and stepped aside. One day I picked up the work of a man named Friedrich von Hardenberg, and my rational mind became quite inflamed, with the logical answers to just the things I’d been questioning…since I’d turned my back on Novalis and all he stood for. (372-3)

What most readers may not pick up on here is that Novalis and Friedrich von Hardenberg are the same person. Wyatt doesn’t seem to have picked up on this either. Novalis is a fascinating figure in the early German Romantic movement, and one I unfortunately don’t have time to do a full deep dive on, but I recommend that anyone interested does go and at least glance at his Wikipedia entry. His notion of love intermingling itself with death seems to precede and predict Freud’s notion of the death drive and the pleasure principle. Alongside his career as a poet and a novelist, Novalis was a philosopher, a civil engineer, a mineralogist, and a mystic. He crosses the rigid boundaries between the romantic and the rational that Wyatt imposes here. It’s interesting that Wyatt, as incredibly well read as he is, would make this mistake. It is perhaps the cleanest example of this idea from the Clementine quotation about the drunken man pretending to claim sober knowledge. It also feels as a complete rejection of the Wyatt that we have come to know throughout the novel. Our Wyatt is a romantic, he believes in the spiritual value of art and the spiritual value of religion and mysticism. He is driven by these passions. We never see him stridently sticking towards logic, so why make this claim? Because he wants to hold an appearance of knowledge, perhaps to gain some power over Valentine, or to gain some power over his own life. The comparisons between Wyatt and Novalis would be an interesting avenue for any intrepid explorer to delve into, and if anyone does find themselves researching this then I would love to hear what you come up with.

In conclusion, this chapter functions primarily as a means for Wyatt to take back the reigns as the protagonist of, The Recognitions. He is attempting to pull himself out from under the influence of Recktall Brown, and he has grown wary of the control that Valentine tries to exert over him. His madness, compounded by his intoxication, exaggerates all of his Wyatt-isms to a new level. It is exhilarating in its way, to see him this close to the edge of oblivion, to know that in his deepest heart that he desires nothing more than to kill Brown and free himself from his thrall. Steven Moore’s annotations highlight the way in which the parallel is drawn between Wyatt and the sun. He is passing through the night and will emerge in the east as the traditional image of Baal. He is going through this stage of drunken false knowledge, to emerge anew and find his sobriety. The next chapter is truly my favourite chapter in the whole novel, and one of my favourite chapters in the whole of 20th century literature. I can’t wait to share that with you all next time.

Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip/Insta: teawithzizek)

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