LFINO: Issue #6 - Reading The Recognitions - Chapter 4 BONUS ESSAY: The Vanity of Time

If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable (The Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot, 1943)

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

Of the two significant elements which are left to discuss in this fourth chapter of, The Recognitions, I have decided to tackle the appearance of time and the many forms it takes. This is not to say that the depiction of US financial colonisation in Central America is not important, but only that we have already touched upon the subject elsewhere and, in practice, what is said about time in the chapter does itself contain discussions of these colonial exploits.

Time, is woven into the chapter. It manifests itself most obviously in the title of Otto’s play, ‘The Vanity of Time’. This chapter is the first time the play is mentioned by name, having previously only being referred to as ‘my play’. What does this title reveal about the play itself? And, ultimately, what does the choosing of this title say about Otto and his immediate concerns and ambitions? The small snippets of dialogue we are made privy to in this chapter are static. As the listener, Jesse Franks asks Otto: ‘That’s all they do, talk?’ (155). The characters in the play, Gordon and Priscilla, discuss the nature of wit and love in grand but lifeless terms.

‘Gordon: Romantic love, my dear romantic love. The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive. Marriage demands of romantic love that it become a reality, and when an ideal becomes a reality it ceases to be an ideal. Someone has certainly on the seedy couple Dante and Beatrice would have made after twenty years of badly cooked meals. As for the Divine Comedy, it is safe to say that the Purgatorio would have been written, though perhaps a rather less poetic version. But Heaven and Hell rejuvenated, I think not my dear. There is a bit of verse somewhere on this topic concerning Petrarch and his Laura, but I cannot recall it. But even Virginia, you may remember, before the eyes of her lover to marrying him. Paul at least had the pleasure of seeing her drown nude, but she knew what she was doing. A wise girl, Virginia.’ (155)