LFINO: Issue #8 - Reading The Recognitions Chapter 6: The Night After The Night Before

What does it mean. It just is. (The Recognitions, I.vi 214)

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 morning after the night before, Otto awakes in his apartment and is resolved to visit Esme, either to confirm his conquest or out of a misplaced belief that his dalliance will lead to a new romantic adventure. After repeated passings with other party guests, all of which has one side ignoring the other, Otto meets with Esme. Their awkward conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Chabby Sinisterra, the seedy, drug addicted son of Chapter One’s favourite fraudster Frank Sinisterra. After the three of them leave for breakfast, they meet up with Stanley and Otto’s afternoon seems even more fruitless and childish. He is once again pushed back against by the people he wants to impress and the people he views himself as better then. Leaving frustrated, Otto returns to Esme later to find that Chabby has stolen his scarf. Otto and Esme have sex but, most importantly, both parties dream of Wyatt.

Characters:

• Otto

• Esme

• Chabby Sinisterra

• Stanley

• Anselm

• Hannah

• Rose

• RL Jones at Sun Style Films

Analysis:

Chapter Six of, The Recognitions, is another of those small and breezy chapters that appear to do little but use Otto as a punching bag. If you have already read the chapter, you do not need me to tell you that Otto moves through the events of this chapter as if he is the most castrated man to have ever lived. His sexual dalliance with Esme has not created an imagined grand elevation of Otto’s character or even his social standing. Otto spends the majority of this chapter in pursuit of Esme’s acknowledgement. He wants her to acknowledge that they have slept together, that they share a connection, that they are heading towards being a serious item. What he struggles with, and what makes Otto particularly insufferable in this chapter, is that Esme does not care, really, and Otto reacts childishly to this development. As the novel asks us:

‘What is a conquest which goes unacknowledged by the conquered?’ (205)

Otto being tedious and nebbish is nothing new for, The Recognitions. We have been following his misadventures for four chapters now and we have said much on the desperation with which Wyatt pursues acknowledgment of his intelligence and his self-appointed writer status, yet this chapter adds another development to this: anger. Or at least, a frustration which has bubbled over into surface annoyance. If we interrogate what is different about this situation than what has been depicted previously, it is the pursuit of, and ‘conquest' of, Esme. We’ve seen Otto in relationships with women before. His affair with Esther was definitely sexual, and, in this chapter, we learn about another woman, Edna, who broke his heart some years ago by rejecting his marriage proposal. Ignoring, for a moment, that Otto apparently has a type when it comes to naming conventions, we must understand what is different about his affair with Esther and his fling with Esme. The affair with Esther flattered Otto substantially. She was older, a socialite looking for arm candy, and it (possibly) allowed him to get one over on Wyatt. With Esther, people knew who he was, even if it wasn’t a distinct identity of his own. Esther gives something to Otto and it is a something which he believes he deserved. Esme either can’t do these things for Otto, or she doesn’t want to. She is both, as we’ve discussed elsewhere, this vaseline-coated lens ingenue, and the transgressive junkie. Her delicacy conflicts with her streetwise crassness. The former appearance of her personality is what gives Otto the impression that he can dominate her, at least socially. He feels that, by the nature of who he believes he is, she would have to give way and acknowledge that she has been. What he has not factored into his plans is the fact that Esme sees through Otto and that she is, in fact, a step ahead, and truly the one in control of the relationships. Gaddis makes this explicit when Esme tells Otto:

‘and you were standing there pretending to read that old book […] And you kept fooling around with that funny thing you wear around your neck.’ (205)

Prior to this, Esme had been teasing Otto. You get a sense that she understands exactly what Otto is probing her for and she is having fun not giving that to him. Here, however, it is clear that Esme knows exactly what is going on with Otto and that she finds it ridiculous. Because Esme is such a floating, hazy character, her comment has the surface appearance of being blasé, but, the use of pretending, fooling, and funny, are consciously cutting. What Gaddis is doing through Esme is taking apart the iconography Otto has constructed in order to outwardly present a serious personae, and showing how ridiculous they are in practice. They become, through Esme’s observation, like the gimmicks of a clown. He becomes, if not Chaplin-esque, then certainly in league with the Marx Brothers. Otto’s attempts to be recognised by others through these objects and behaviours he has chosen to apply to himself, through his presentation of what he imagines a ‘writer’ to be, has been flipped. He has been recognised, and he has been recognised by the woman he views as a ‘conquest’ but is the recognition that his facade is ridiculous. Of course, when confronted with this kind of acknowledgement, someone as self-conscious as Otto is, is going to enter an ego-crisis. Otto is getting absolutely nothing he wants out of his relationship with Esme beyond sex, and he’d never admit that the sex is a thing he really wants. His frustrations with this dynamic fuels how frustrated and flustered Otto becomes throughout the chapter. Yet, he maintains his pursuit of Esme throughout. How consciously Otto is aware that he is being played with is unclear at this juncture, especially given how he believes himself to be the one who plays social situations, but Esme has fully entrapped Otto into the web of men that trail at her tail.

Elsewhere in the chapter, Gaddis is taking pains to establish the groundwork on several future plot points. The most important, and the one most directly pointed to within the text, is the introduction of Chabby Sinisterra and his exiting the chapter with Otto’s scarf. Chabby, the pompadour sporting, drug dealing, tango dancing, suggested lover of Esme, is the son of the very Mr. Sinisterra who instigates the complete collapse of the Gwyon family in Chapter One. While Wyatt shall see the older Sinisterra again before the novel is out, it is Chabby that will prove to be a key player in the mishaps which lay ahead for Otto. The greatest of all literary tropes is, after all, coincidence. If one has ever read a Charles Dickens novel they understand the feeling that the world of the story is one in which there are only eight people in the world and they all swap hats. The Recognitions, feels like it is at play with this conceit. We have a second Sinisterra, the son of a man we last saw getting arrested on a different continent, who is moving in not only the same circles as those who know the son of the man who his father ruined the life of, but he is sleeping with the woman who loves him. What the taking of the scarf is setting up is an act of mistaken identity, the details of which I will not discuss here to save spoilers, but it is the humorous downward spiral of Otto’s life which begins in the very moment Esme wraps that scarf around Chabby. The Sinisterra family remain agents of chaos, brought into the world to throw the lives of our protagonists into disarray.

Haunting the chapter, just off the page, is Wyatt. There are notable instances of Otto and Chabby commenting on the smell of lavender emanating from Esme’s room. Lavender is the medium Wyatt uses for his forgeries, a story beat taken from the details of Van Meegeren’s real world Vermeer forgeries. This detail also ties the novel back to Goethe’s Faust and the smells which linger around Faust and Mephistopheles. Given that Recktall Brown is also off-page but very much present in the chapter, one gets the sense that their machinations are running along in the background, away from prying eyes, but the evil of the scheme lingers. Wyatt’s only literal appearance is as the ‘pale thin man’ (217) of Otto’s dream. Even then, this is a reference to Wyatt which is very easy to miss. I will even admit to having missed it on both of my read throughs of this chapter, and only making the collection after I was looking through Steven Moore’s annotations. The ‘pale thin man’ is a figure brought up in Chapter One, in that instance it’s referring to the Christian martyr, John Huss. References to John Huss appear throughout the novel, but the use of this description, which originates within a Gwyon chapter, for, ‘someone I used to know, someone you don’t know’ (217), point to it being Wyatt. The image itself is frightening, and it further paints a picture of Wyatt’s ongoing degradation. Esme also dreamed of Wyatt that evening, although Otto continually dismisses her. In her dream, Esme imagines someone, whom she assumes Otto doesn’t know, asking her to identify a piece of music. The music is from the opera, Tosca, which Wyatt is seen listening to earlier in the novel.

Although only a short chapter, and one which appears to make a kicking bag out of Otto, it is an essential panel in the triptych of these solo Otto chapters. The chapter ties Otto, unwillingly, into the Wyatt plot thread, but also sets up the event which will define his character in the novel’s second section: the case of mistaken identity with Chabby Sinisterra. We also get a much greater sense in this chapter of how all of the male characters orbit Esme, for whom they all have their own private intentions and uses. As we head towards the final chapter of this first section of, The Recognitions, we have been introduced to every character and dynamic we need in order to follow the events of the rest of the novel. While it can feel as though one has been spun around several times trying to follow all of these characters, references, and perspectives, I hope that we have done enough to allow for anyone approaching the novel to do so with confidence.

Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip/insta: teawithzizek)

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