LFINO: Issue #6 - Reading The Recognitions: Chapter 4 - The Vanity of Otto
'by now it had enclosed his image so often that it would seem that it could not accommodate anyone else' (The Recognitions I.iii)
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: Otto has found himself working for an American fruit company in an unidentified Central American state. While there, Otto works on his play, The Vanity of Time, and is repeatedly interrupted by his uncouth fellow American, Jesse Franks. Otto plans to return to New York, play in hand, and sporting a fictitious injury are picked up in a non-existent revolution.
Characters:
Otto
Jesse Franks
Analysis:
This short chapter, thirteen pages in all, does for Otto what the chapter in Paris does for Wyatt. In extricating Otto from the environment we usually find him, the New York of the preceding chapter, Gaddis is seeking to reveal elements of Otto’s character through the removal of the familiar. The change in locale allows us to see the Otto he wants strangers to see him as. It is this self-consciousness which is ultimately the difference between this chapter and the one dedicated to Wyatt. Elsewhere in the chapter we see discussions about the US foreign market policy and its impact on the standard of living in Latin America, and there are recurring references to time and the value of time monetarily and socially. Ultimately, each of these elements come together to form the third panel of a triptych surrounding Wyatt, Otto, and their relationship with Esme, which began in Chapter 2.
Otto is contrasted throughout the chapter with his fellow American compatriot, the sailor-tattooed hard ass, Jesse Franks. Franks appears to be a simple binary opposition to see how Otto compares with someone more proletarian than his usual bourgeois New York companions.
Jesse spat again, on the floor. […] I didn’t get any on me, did I? Jesse looked down at his chest, where a ship struggled through a mat of hair. Towards each brown nipple a bluebird dipped. On one shoulder, a peacock; on the other, a palm tree seascape. The arms wore anchors, a tombstone with MOTHER on a scroll, and a dagger. The gallery swelled as he watched it. (154)
While Jesse is presented as rude, uncouth, and an entity of chaotic disarray, he is seen through Otto’s perspective. In focusing on the tattoos, Gaddis gives Jesse a sense of the exotic. It is as though Otto is attempting to decode the life of this man through the art he wears on his body. It is no coincidence that the tattoos are described as a ‘gallery’. In a novel about painting and the space art takes up in our lives, it is significant that someone would take representational image, no matter how crude, and impress them onto their body. It implies that Jesse is someone who has lived life through action in contrast to Otto who has gone to Central America presumably in search of life but has mostly spent his time there in his room and working on his play, The Vanity of Time. This is precisely the criticism that Jesse offers of Otto’s play: ‘That’s all they do, talk?’ (155), ‘Why don’t you write about Jesse?’ (155), ‘This is what people like to read about, realism, real men doing something, not a lot of crap in fancy trimmings.’ (156). On one level this is a clear ideological conflict as to what the purpose of any work actually is. Do ‘fancy trimmings’ detract from what the true purpose of a work of art is, which is to be encountered and recognised by other people? But the question also raised, I suppose, is whether realism and stories about men doing something is the only way to go about creating something people want to read. All of this exposes an insufficiency in Otto’s work. Regardless of whether Otto’s play is about ‘real men doing something’, Jesse accurately assesses the play for what it is, it is a ‘lot of crap’ disguising pretending that it isn’t through the employment of ‘fancy trimmings’. It is not the content that Jesse fundamentally has a problem with, but it is the falsity of the scenario Otto offers to share that he sees immediately.
This is in stark contrast to how Otto sees the work himself:
‘The words were beautiful. The letters themselves were beautiful. His handwriting, in careful notes along occasional margins to give things a casual look, was beautiful. He read at familiar random, smiling to himself. Every page, beautiful, except one which would have to be retyped, he had killed a cockroach on it. Or perhaps, it had a style in itself, that dark smudge.’ (162)
Notice how there is nothing here about the content of the work. The beauty experienced by Otto is the pure aesthetic pleasure of the object itself. The words, not what they say, but their existence, their lettering, the handwriting, is all that is beautiful. Even the dark smudge of the killed cockroach is being considered as a potential aesthetic frill, one which has seemingly little to do with anything that we’ve heard from his play before. Yet he is happy, why? Because he has the accessories of being a writer. He has words on the page and this is enough for him to feel as though the work has a quality of beauty. This is where Otto and Wyatt differ so drastically. With Wyatt there are all these obsessive blocks in the way of his finishing the work he starts. Wyatt is never overawed by the beauty of the act of painting, he is oppressed by potentiality of beauty to the point where it renders him almost completely catatonic. I think it’s pretty apparent from the first few chapters of this novel that Wyatt does not care about being recognised as a painter or artist in our modern, celebrity centric, idea of that role. With Otto there is a definite sense of the writer as an archetype that one lives up to, a character to be performed that does not necessarily have anything to do with the actual quality of any writing and which manifests in this kind of object fetishism. Notice the choice of ‘appeared’ in the following sentence: ‘He had a French book, labeled Adolphe, in a side pocket which he carried when he travelled and appeared to read in public places.’ (164). Otto appears more as a man who wants to be seen as literary than the kind of obsessive devotees like Gwyon or Wyatt. This idea is explored most apparently in the conclusion of the chapter when it becomes apparent that Otto is going to fake an injury in order to garner sympathy or to impress those of his circles back home. Otto is self-mythologising. No one will be impressed if all Otto has to say of his time in Central America is that he wrote in his bedroom and took part in acts of neocolonialism. He’s taking Jesse’s advice but in a strange roundabout way. Instead of making his work about real men having adventures, he is faking a personal life of adventure whilst preserving the nature of his play. In some way he is constructing a dual image of himself, the daring adventurer and the sensitive young Wether, neither of which Otto convincingly is. Whether anyone believes him, we will see in due course, but in undergoing this act of self-creation, Otto is paralleling Wyatt’s descent into forgery, whereas Wyatt fakes paintings, Otto fakes his own life. Nothing good will come of this for either man. And yet it is Otto who is convinced it is Wyatt is the true maniac.
If the function of this chapter is, as I have suggested, to give the reader an opportunity to come to an understanding of who Otto is at this point in the novel, then it is not the most flattering portrait. It’s wrong to assume that Gaddis hates Otto, however, because there is so much of Gaddis in Otto: the absent father (as we learn later), the Harvard education, the time spent in the American zones of Central America, and the desire to write a something at all (as we know, Gaddis discarded his first project written under similar condition as pretentious waffle). Otto is young and we shouldn’t be too harsh on him. He has all of the pretentious and foibles of a young man trying to make his way in the world of high culture that he isn’t perhaps cut out for yet. Yet, Gaddis gives us an insight into the dangers of falling in love with the ideal image that you are aspiring towards. Otto gazes into mirrors throughout the chapter, mirrors that envelope him. He is in danger of becoming a Narcissus, lost in the image of the man he wants to be, the man he is constructing for himself. All of this is in the way of the simple and true fact: the role of the writer is not to present themselves as having lived an exciting life, respected more for the things they did than the things they wrote. The purpose of the writer is to sit down and write something of quality which will serve them in the same way the tattoos serve the proletarian man of the world. We write not to be seen as writers, but as a gallery that bears the truth of how we saw the world at the time we wrote it.
Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip/insta: teawithzizek)
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