LFINO: Issue #12 - Reading The Recognitions, Chapter 10: The Prodigal Son

(Last Judgement, Hans Memling)

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:

Wyatt returns to his hometown and stumbles up the hill to the parsonage like Christ at Golgotha. Gwyon is there, exalting the sun, and his preaching intermingles with Wyatt’s own mangled interior monologue. Expecting to be greeted like the reappearing son, Wyatt is shocked to discover that no one recognises him and, perhaps more worryingly, he doesn’t even recognising himself beyond a self-appointed role as a reincarnated John Huss. Wyatt’s grandfather, the Town Carpenter, views Wyatt as Prester John, who has returned from Ethiopia and the Indies with arcane knowledge. Janet, Aunt May’s neophyte, believes that Wyatt is the second coming of Christ himself. Later, Janet recants, and concludes that Wyatt is a false-prophet, before throwing herself to the barnyard bull like the image of Pasiphaë. Gwyon, not recognising his son, takes Wyatt as a priest of Mithra and concludes he must be sacrificed in order to be resurrected and lead the people. As the storm enveloping the village increases in intensity, and the snow turns to lightning, Wyatt demands that Gwyon answer him: Am I the man for whom Christ died? Receiving no answer, Wyatt sets off back to New York. On his way, he purchases a coconut he mistakes for a Griphon Egg from a mysterious stranger in a bar. As the chapter closes, Wyatt arrives in New York. He goes in search for Recktall Brown - who appears to be away on his own trip. What he finds instead is Fuller performing some kind of voodoo death ritual and an ominous smell of evil.

Characters:

• Wyatt

• Reverend Gwyon

• The Town Carpenter

• Janet

• The barflies at the Depot Tavern

• Fuller

Analysis:

Throughout the history of western narrative fiction (a specification I make merely because I am unfamiliar with other traditions), the return is a motif we seem unable to wrench ourselves away from. Whether it be: the tale of Odysseus returning to Ithaca disguised as beggar, Moses re-emerging from self-imposed exile in Midian, Hamlet’s reappearance in the graveyard at Elsinore, or Heathcliff’s psychically violent homecoming in Wuthering Heights; there is something within the return that compels us to re-examine it from endless perspectives. In an unplanned coincidence, the night before writing this essay, I watched Frank Perry’s 1968 film, The Swimmer, in which Burt Lancaster’s character returns home only to find, in almost the direct inverse of Wyatt, everyone recognises him except for himself, and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself about how inescapable the return truly seems to be.

Gaddis’s claim, in this chapter, is that the return is significant because of how it alters with recognition, that is the recognition of the self by others, and the recognition of one’s own self. The familiar, the very location which Wyatt spent his whole childhood and we, the reader, spent much of chapter one, is recontextualised by time and by Wyatt’s actions whilst he has been away from it. We know that Wyatt lost his name when he made his deal with Recktall Brown, and that he has become this floating pronoun ‘he’ moving throughout the novel. He is not the Wyatt that left the parsonage. The body which bore that name exists, but it has lost its signifier, and the history attached to it. It is traumatic for Wyatt, but not only because the familial and social bonds, which we believe to be transcendental and eternal, are shattered. It is traumatic because it exposes something beyond the social bond, an incursion of the real which lends the chapter a brutality, that being the sense that without the signifier to acknowledge your personhood, you are a blank slate for others to impose their desires onto. Gwyon, the Town Carpenter, and Janet, all impose onto Wyatt whatever history or personhood they want. Their visions aren’t connected. They are all taking the blank slate of the stranger and projecting whatever, in that moment, will change their present reality, and there is nothing Wyatt can do about it so long as he is unable to respond with a concrete sense of self. If we look at Wyatt’s first re-encounter with Janet, we can see the intensity with which the promise of a stranger manifests as fantasy.

-Janet, he said getting by her, and smiling to her, to calm the great agitation which threatened, as she came after him close as could be without touching him, to break out in some more vehement expression of welcome, - yes I have come back. - Rabboni, they doubted, she said. I did not. (398)

-here, to feel myself again, here… - They will not know you. (398)

Within these short extracts, we see an exemplification of what I mean when I say that Wyatt’s lack of internal and external recognition fuels fantasy. Wyatt tells Janet that, ‘I have come back’ but Wyatt’s ‘I’ is no longer representative of anything. The Wyatt that Janet knows and remembers is not within this ‘I’. In place of this, Janet substitutes the most famous ‘I’ in world history, that great ‘I am that which I am’, the Christ. Naturally, this image is generated by a much larger mechanism, that being the long standing extremist Christian fantasy of Christ’s return being inevitable and will be followed by Christ revealing himself to the faithful. But, because Wyatt has no fixed identity, it allows this mechanism within Janet to operate in overdrive, especially as she sees him struggle up the hill in the manner of Christ, and the scar he bears on his hand which resembles this stigmata. The excess of this fantasy is even evident in her physical behaviour. The description leaves no doubt that there is a sexual component, and that this sexuality would explode outwards should the two make physical contact. Wyatt’s lack of clear identity allows Janet to transfer the excesses of her twin desires, that to encounter Christ, validating her faith and her chastity (since Aunt May took charge of her), and the underlying repressed sexuality, onto him. What neither party knows, however, is that the warning Janet gives to Wyatt is ultimately true. Wyatt will not be able to feel himself again here precisely because no one will know him.

We see this occur again with Gwyon and with the Town Carpenter, and it is this which provides the chapter with its propulsive engine. Around this engine, there are a number of other questions this dynamic gives rise to. The primary one that has concerned me since I recently re-read the chapter, is why it happens now. The reader is not even halfway through the novel yet. Anyone who knows the novel knows that Wyatt will not regain his name for another 400 pages or so. It seems strange to me that this earth shattering revelation for Wyatt should come relatively early in the novel. The more I dwell on it, I believe it presents a moment where Wyatt has become fully aware of what his path in life has actually done. We have seen Wyatt complain of sickness, and devolve into this manic wandering figure, in the past. That is not what is happening here, however. Wyatt does not give the impression of the same kind of madness in this chapter as he does elsewhere, fantasy of being the reincarnated John Huss aside. Yet, he still cannot breakthrough to his family. What I think Gaddis is communicating here is evident by the recurring image of the Gwyon’s hollowed out copy of The Dark Night of the Soul. Wyatt will not redeem himself spiritually by going backwards, that is, by retreating into the supposed safety of childhood. He must move forward if he is going to find his redemption. We are given an understanding of the true stakes of the novel in the moment of revelation that his old home has descended into debauchery, madness, and a crippling sense of stasis. Wyatt seeking the recognition of his past will not bring salvation for his future. Gaddis gives us clarity as to what the course of Wyatt’s storyline will be for the rest of the novel - will Wyatt discover if he is the man for whom Christ died?

Elsewhere, I think a word must be said about some of the more formally complex elements of the chapter, and how I think it is best approached by a first time reader. The section of the chapter, when Wyatt is climbing the hill upto the parsonage and Gwyon is exalting the sun, is one of the more difficult sections that have appeared in the novel so far. The reason for this is threefold. The most obvious reason for the difficulty is, obviously, the way in which Gaddis punctuates speech. If you have made it this far through the novel, then you already know and have gotten used to it by now. But, in this instance specifically, there is an increased demand on the reader to pay attention, as what is actually occurring is the blending of Gwyon’s speech with Wyatt’s free-indirect interior monologue. Both of which, when taken together, create a miasma of intertextual references and sudden emotional changes. The connection of two minds, both of whom are often positioned in a state of madness by the text, creates this schizophrenic leaping motion from thought to thought. It is hard to parse, even I, who has read it three times now, struggle to make meaningful headways as to what it might mean. However, I think it is sections such as this that make the advice that one should read the novel alongside the collected annotations can do more harm than is good. While the annotations are a wonderful resource, for which I am very grateful and which has helped this project immensely, a reader trying to use the annotations to decode every single reference here would find themselves falling over their own feet. What is the most important thing to take from this section, I think, is the way in which it positions Wyatt and Gwyon as having something of the same, interconnected mania. Based on the references to Eve, the borrowing of Mercutio’s line about Helen, Dido, Cleopatra, and Thisbe; and the invocation of the holy Mary (once again this phrase we’ve seen before appears: ‘there is no mysticism without Mary’), we can infer that they are both still haunted by the lack of the female element of their family unit. The absence of Camilla has grown into this mythical status, in the exact same way we have already discussed with Janet and the returning Christ. The excess has overflown and the tension it causes only increases the closer Wyatt gets to the familial home.

There are still many things about this chapter that are worth discussing, but which I do not have time to hear. So I would like point to a couple of extra points which I think it would be useful for any reader to think deeply on when they encounter this chapter.

• The identity of the mysterious man in the tavern, and is there a significance to him referencing a poodle?

• Why does Janet offer herself to the bull?

• What do we learn about San Zwingli in this chapter?

• What is the conflict between the countryside and the city in this chapter?

• Why does Wyatt take the name of the Reverend Gilbert Sullivan?

This is my favourite chapter in the novel, but writing on it has proven to be a great challenge. I hope I have gone someway to opening up what is a difficult and demanding part of, The Recognitions. I may perhaps return to this at a later date to expand it further. Thank you as always for reading and I will see you next time as we cross the novel’s halfway point.

Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip / insta: teawithzizek)

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