LFINO: Issue #9 - Reading The Recognitions, Chapter 7: Kindred Spirits

He believed himself eternally damned, finally ran about telling everyone about it. (The Recognitions, I.vii 226)

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 to a man with golden teeth walking a dog. We know the dog but we do not know the man. We come to learn that this is Fuller, Recktall Brown’s black man servant. Fuller is always trying to escape Brown but either by premonition or by his own lack of guile, he is always caught. In Brown’s apartment, a meeting is taking place. Basil Valentine, an art critic and sometime trainee priest is here to discuss Brown’s latest scheme, but, more importantly, he wants to meet Wyatt. He has a proposition for Brown and Wyatt, a forgery scheme that he believes neither of them will be able to turn down. Valentine wants Wyatt to forge an Annunciation that they will attribute to the historically mysterious, Hubert van Eyck. Valentine and Wyatt strike up a strange accord with one another. Valentine being more sensitive to the implications of Wyatt’s work than Brown does leaves him intrigued and sympathetic to Wyatt. Later on, Wyatt runs into the pastor, John, from Chapter 3. John tells Wyatt that he has been out to see Gwyon, who is continuing to deliver sermons drawing on parallels between paganism and Christianity.

Back at Wyatt’s apartment, Esme has arrived to be painted but she isn’t needed. Wyatt explains that he sees in her face what is needed to complete the mysterious painting of his mother and his next painting for Valentine. Their tender moment is brought to a halt by Wyatt at the point of physical intimacy. Esme leaves, takes a dose of heroin and sits down to write poetry. As she writes an opening line cribbed from Rilke, a knock at the door brings the chapter to an end.

Characters:

• Wyatt

• Recktall Brown

• Basil Valentine

• Fuller

• Esme

• Pastor John

• The little mortician

Analysis:

As we reach the end of the first section of, The Recognitions, Gaddis deploys a structural methodology that we have seen a few times throughout our analysis. Gaddis starts this seventh chapter by introducing yet another new character before gradually expanding on their relationship with one of the main plot lines. In this instance, the reader is introduced to Fuller, a Caribbean man with golden and jewell encrusted teeth.

Fuller is out walking a familiar looking dog, a black poodle we last saw being chased around an apartment by Wyatt before the introduction of Recktall Brown. It is immediately clear that, not only is the relationship between Fuller and Brown an antagonistic one, but Fuller does believe that Brown has some strange magical power. That this poodle is a witch’s familiar of some sorts: ‘for he was certain that this poodle and their master communicated, that if he went to see his friend, the poodle would tell on him.’ (220) It is here that the racial politics of, The Recognitions, begin to become quite uncomfortable. I am not going to defend much about how Gaddis executes the Fuller thread-line, it is clearly not playing to his strong suit and he drifts into a lot of racial stereotypes that are not easy to read in 2025. The most uncomfortable being the insight Gaddis gives us into what it is Fuller wants from his relationship with Brown:

‘The promise of magic, which had appealed so to youth, never materialized, though Fuller did not doubt but what Mr. Brown could make his skin white if he wanted to,’ (220)

I do not, however, think this emerges into the text because the author is racist, Fuller is obviously a character for whom the text has a great deal of sympathy for, and the novel adds Brown’s racism to the list of reasons he is completely reprehensible. I believe that the issues with regards to race in, The Recognitions, are a byproduct of the over-simplified and romanticised depictions of indigenous peoples found in the a lot of the popular media of Gaddis’s early life. Especially when one considers how much of an influence Frazer’s, The Golden Bough, was on the production of, The Recognitions. That being a text which problematically reduces the spiritual and cultural life of various people’s down to magical or occult practices to inspire shock and awe in a white readership. So there is a sense, and this is not exclusive to Fuller but runs throughout the novel, that non-white cultures have a magical or exceptional quality which makes them an object of fascination that is almost a caricature. It is more a misguided consequence of the period Gaddis grew up in rather than any serious racist intent. Had there been a serious racist intent I doubt that Gaddis would have given Fuller the sense of serious interiority that the text offers him. On reflecting upon Fuller’s relationship to his own past since the corruption of his life by Brown, Gaddis writes:

‘That childhood was like a book read, forgotten, to be recalled when one sees another copy, the cheap edition in a railway newsstand, which is bought, thumbed through, and like as not left on the train when the station is called.’ (220)

I think that this observation really taps into a lot of what is going on underneath, The Recognitions. This idea that there is a lack within many of the characters which emerge from, or manifest as, a disconnection from their own childhoods. Most obviously, as we have discussed a lot, this is Wyatt and his absent mother. It is also, as we will see, Otto and his absent father. With Fuller, however, this is because he has been removed from his homeland, into a society which he does not really understand, and forced into servitude for a master who dehumanises and degrades him at every step. Gaddis makes it clear that Fuller’s subservience to Brown alienates him from the very facts of his own life, denying him personhood, and making him easier to control. Yet, instead of simply ending the story there, Gaddis tells us that Fuller’s past is still there in some regard, that it can be recognised when he encounters it, and that, even though its recognition manifests as a bittersweet nostalgia, its existence at all offers a glimmer of hope that there is a future that Fuller can strive for.

After following Fuller around for sometime, including his brief meeting with an undertaker who is desperate to prepare Recktall Brown’s funeral, he returns to Brown’s apartment. It is here we find Brown having a meeting with Basil Valentine, another character whose name seems familiar (I know your name. I’ve tried to think where. […] No. Longer ago. Further away than that. But I’ve lost it now. (257)), and who we will be keeping an eye on for the rest of the novel. Valentine, an art critic for Collector’s Quarterly, has a proposition for Brown and Wyatt, the latter of whom he is very keen to meet. Valentine is, perhaps surprisingly for a known associate of Brown’s, incredibly sympathetic towards Wyatt. This chapter explicitly draws parallels between the two. The parallel that Valentine clings to is the fact that the two of them live for art and its more esoteric history, although this isn’t true of Wyatt, who brushes through all of Valentine’s attempts to discuss the topic seriously. What draws Wyatt to Valentine, however, is the discover that Valentine had received training to be a Jesuit priest. Much like Wyatt, Valentine is a man of faith who has gone awry in the art world. It is clear that Wyatt, now aged thirty three (the age of Christ at his crucifixion), feels as if everything currently happening to him is a punishment for not following the family tradition and becoming the new Reverend Gwyon. In stepping out and pursuing his own desires over that of his spiritual calling, he has lost his soul. This is the subtext in much of their conversation, encouraging Valentine to tell Wyatt: ‘the priest is the guardian of mysteries. The artist is driven to expose them.’ (257) What Valentine does not pick up on is that the relationship between these two positions, the guardian of mystery and the revealer of mystery, is pulling Wyatt apart. This is why Wyatt deflects. In the next page he tells Valentine: ‘An artist does not exist except as a vehicle for his work.’ (258) Wyatt is actively trying to disengage himself from the work that he is doing. He is the empty vessel through which these flow from. This, to me, reads as a mea culpa. If Wyatt removes himself from the work, claims no fame or social status in the art world, and allows the money to pile up unspent, and if he undergoes the immense psychic and spiritual torment he is putting himself through, then perhaps there will be a spiritual reputation for him in the end.

I will discuss Wyatt and Valentine’s relationship further in a later bonus issue as I am not sure that I’ve cracked exactly what is going on there and this feels inconclusive.

The chapter ends with two significant incidents, Wyatt’s encounter with Pastor John (he is simply referred to as ‘John’ in the text, I have added the ‘Pastor’ title for clarity) wherein John reveals what has become of Wyatt’s father, Gwyon. The other is the final perspective change as the novel frames Wyatt through his interactions with Esme before the reader follows her home. Gwyon is Valentine’s claim, that the priest guards the mysteries, in action. He is descending further into a spiritual conception of the world that is so obscure and mysterious that Pastor John, the church’s special agent in charge of revitalising parishes with dwindling attendances, cannot make head nor tail of what Gwyon preaches. Gwyon is indifferent to John’s presence in his parish, however it must be noted that there is a spark of interest, although shrouded, when John mentions that he had bumped into Wyatt some years before. Wyatt reciprocates this intrigue, as though a reminder of a connection to his past is briefly able to shake him out of the malaise his life has become. This is reiterated later on when Wyatt discuses the unfinished painting of his mother with Esme.

Esme, in a moment of intimacy with Wyatt, tells him about a dream she had about him. One suspects that this is the dream she is referring to in the previous chapter with Otto. In the dream, Wyatt is chased by a series of mirrors which seek to swallow him whole. Esme’s expression when she describes the dream tells us that this was an incredibly frightening vision: ‘You were caught in the mirror. And I could not help you out. Could that happen? Could that happen?’ (268) As we have discussed before, and I am sure astute readers have already picked up on this, the idea of the mirror as an object which can trap souls is a recurring motif throughout the novel. They are often presented as being covered in times of illness out of the superstitious fear that one can lose their soul if they gaze into the mirror while sick (as in chapter one). In drawing a parallel between Gwyon’s fear for Wyatt in the section’s first chapter and Esme’s fear for him at the section’s end, Gaddis is inviting us to interrogate Wyatt’s role as a protagonist experiencing intense spiritual entrapment. What’s interesting, however, is that Gaddis is also asking us to consider where this spiritual entrapment actually began. Can it be traced to the moment he loses his name upon making his deal with Recktall Brown? Or, did it occur much earlier? The more I write about this novel, the more I become convinced that Wyatt’s downfall was already sown well before the obvious Faustian parallel is brought to the fore. He is fighting a battle for himself, and it is a battle Esme is not sure that she can help Wyatt out of. Wyatt is, ultimately, the hero who is, as of now, failing to appear, and we will have to continue reading to see if, The Recognitions, is his comedy, or his disaster.

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Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip / insta: teawitzizek)