THE ALLUSIVE MODE, THE ABSURD AND BLACK HUMOR IN WILLIAM GADDIS’S THE RECOGNITIONS

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions is similar to the black humor novels of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. These long narratives create their comic vision by developing ironic allusions to traditional sources.¹ In Giles Goat-Boy or The Revised New Syllabus, Barth builds and then collapses suggested references to the Bible and to Christ, creating a protagonist born of a virgin mother impregnated by a computer, a comic hero who strives to affirm order and meaning, but who eventually concludes: "Passage was Failure, and Failure Passage; yet Passage was Passage, Failure Failure! Equally true, none was the answer; . . . my eyes were opened: I was delivered."² In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon divides society into the elect and the preterite, thus juxtaposing explicit Puritan connections with the randomness in our contemporary world. The inter-textuality in these works is used to emphasize the lack of traditional meaning in the twentieth-century world.

Traditional writers use the allusive mode to enrich their work by means of evoking literature of the past. Repeated words, phrases, and scenes are employed to connect the later work to the earlier one and its context. By this method Virgil related The Aeneid to The Iliad and The Odyssey; Milton connected Paradise Lost to the epics of Homer and Virgil; and Cotton Mather related the Magnalia to Paradise Lost. Such inter-textuality evokes traditional moral and aesthetic values in the later piece. It carries forward an "ideal of culture" (using Reuben Brower’s phrase)³ from one epoch to the next. It underscores the "contemporaneity" of the past, what T. S. Eliot has described as the "simultaneous existence" and "simultaneous order" of the whole of literature.⁴

John Milton’s Paradise Lost can serve as a paradigm for discussing the traditional allusive mode. The poet opens the Puritan epic by indicating that he "intends to soar/Above th’ Aonian Mount" (PL, I, 14-15),⁵ sacred to the Muses to whom Homer and Virgil appealed for inspiration. "The meaning, not the Name I call" (PL, VII, 1-5) asserts the epic voice, as it connects the guidance inherent in the classical Muse to that of the Holy Spirit. The reader is expected to

make connections between earthly time and the eternal, between Man and a "greater Man," between Biblical history and Apocalypse.⁶ The Puritan epic has mystical levels of meaning that can be vertically linked to Divine Providence. It depends on a hierarchical mode of thought that has as its basis faith. Paradise Lost is characterized by a strategy of allusiveness, as well as a stress on inspiration, on unlocking visionary meanings of promise and fulfillment.

Twentieth-century black humor writers like William Gaddis use an ironic allusive mode. The Recognitions presents an ironic counterpart to the unity and meaning emphasized in prophetic works like Paradise Lost and the Bible. Instead of developing proleptic significance, Gaddis uses ironic allusiveness to portray a comic awareness of "the senselessness of the human condition."⁷ He underscores man’s "nostalgia for unity" and his disappointment in "this fragmented universe."⁸ Instead of connecting a past "ideal of culture" to the present, Gaddis shows the disparity between heroic ideals and an absurdist vision. He emphasizes man’s futile desire for meaning in a world "divested of illusions and lights" (Camus, p. 5).

Gaddis creates much of his nostalgia for unity and meaning by developing allusions to fifteenth-century Flemish art. He evokes a desire for a Golden Age that produced painters whose art "would bring tears to the eyes of the devout."⁹ He underscores a yearning for the Flemish Renaissance by making his protagonist in The Recognitions an artist who himself yearns for the piety and devotion he believes was part of the context of such fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters as Roger van der Weyden, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, Dirc Bouts, and Hans Memling. Wyatt wishes to be part of an age whose painters had an exquisite sense of pious sentiment, such as that which van der Weyden and Bouts conveyed in their Madonnas and in their depictions of the "Descent from the Cross." Gaddis has Wyatt copy the fifteenth-century Flemish masters. He uses tempera that approximates their substances and achieves a psychic affinity with their philosophical and emotional state of mind. He paints masterpieces that connoisseurs judge to be the work of the original Netherlandish painters. He seems to transport himself to their Golden Age and virtually presents his gift as an artist of the Guild in Flanders. He thinks of the guild oath, "to use pure materials, to work in the sight of God."¹⁰

Gaddis develops the ironic allusive mode by contrasting Wyatt Gwyon’s nostalgia for painterly beauty with the actual world where randomness and disconnections abound. Gaddis places the beauty that Wyatt desires in opposition to twentieth-century decadence. The

transforming power of Wyatt’s imagination, for a time, creates a sense of meaning and beauty for the reader. By shifting the focus from the sacred and serious to the profane and the ludicrous in the twentieth-century world, Gaddis jars the reader and develops an absurdist vision. The tone that emerges from the depiction of these incongruities exhibits the dual components of pain and humor, horror and farce. It is the dark comic tone of black humor.¹¹

The Recognitions contains references to Biblical, alchemical, and literary works. The novel’s title derives from the third-century Clementine Recognitions, in which Clement, seeking salvation, journeys to Palestine and becomes a follower of St. Peter. Basil Valentine, a central character in Gaddis ‘s Recognitions, holds the same name as the Renaissance author of the alchemical treatise, The Triumphant Chariot of Antimony.¹² Such references call to mind a correspondence between a physical journey in Palestine and the quest for a New Jerusalem, the correspondence between the redemption of matter and the redemption of the soul. These are the major subjects to which Gaddis develops an ironic counterpart.

To show how the novel’s absurdist vision and black humor tone develop, I wish to explore references to the third-century Recognitions, as well as legends about its protagonist, St. Clement of Rome, and allusions to treatises like those by Basilius Valentinus and Raymond Ludy, works that set up an alchemical paradigm that acts as a touchstone for Wyatt’s desire to ever strive for perfection.

Gaddis’s twentieth-century protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, from early childhood, is fascinated by the story of St. Clement, who, as his father Reverend Gwyon explains, "was martyred, yes . . . they tied an anchor to his neck and threw him into the Black Sea" (p. 50). According to theological tracts, Clement had argued for apostolic succession at a time when many early Christians were advocating Gnosticism and other mystical beliefs. Legend relates that when Clement was thrown overboard, the waters parted and a tomb appeared at the bottom of the sea, signifying the beatification of Clement.

Wyatt intertwines the story of St. Clement with a legend his father had told him about a celestial being who came down a rope into the atmosphere of this world and drowned (p. 50). Wyatt continually ponders the possibility that human beings are fished for by celestial beings who watched their actions: "Can’t you imagine that we’re fished for? Walking on the bottom of a great celestial sea, do you remember the man who came down the rope to undo the anchor caught on the tombstone?" (p. 126), he asks his wife years later. Wyatt yearns

for salvation, for signs of God’s Grace in a fallen world.

That the legend of St. Clement remains alive in Wyatt’s imagination calls attention to Gaddis’s concern that his twentieth-century protagonist be appreciated in relation to the hero of the third-century Clementine Recognitions. In the third-century treatise, Clement, seeking salvation, journeys to Palestine and becomes a follower of St. Peter. This long, episodic work describes the young adulthood of St. Clement of Rome (first century A.D.). The treatise affirms orthodox Christian doctrine by emphasizing the traditional connection between this world and a New Jerusalem, between the protagonist Clement and every man seeking eternal salvation.

In the twentieth-century Recognitions, Gaddis, however, has his character Basil Valentine explain to an acquaintance the following:

Tell you friend Willie that salvation is hardly the practical study it was then. What? . . . Why, simply because in the Middle Ages they were convinced that they had souls to save. Yes. The what? The Recognitions? No, it’s Clement of Rome. Mostly talk, talk, talk. The young man’s deepest concern is for the immortality of his soul, he goes to Egypt to find the magicians and learn their secrets. It’s been referred to as the first Christian novel. (p. 398; italics added)

Basil Valentine’s comment on the Clementine Recognitions has a significant error. He says that Clement goes to Egypt to find the magicians and learn their secrets. In the original, though Clement wishes to consult with magicians about immortality, he quickly turns from such actions because "transactions of this sort are hateful to the Divinity" (Clem. R., p. 78). Instead of traveling to Egypt, land of magic and the occult, Clement sails to Palestine where he meets St. Peter and becomes one of his disciples. Clement journeys with Peter, who instructs him on how to appreciate the greatness of prophetic virtue, how to progress toward salvation. Clement accompanies Peter on his missionary journeys to various cities. He sees him encourage people to abide by God’s law, do penance for former sins, and ask God for forgiveness. He watches Peter heal the sick and give peace to those in turmoil (Clem. R., p. 562). He hears Peter discourse on the consistency of Christ’s teaching and on the definition of basic truths. Clement also hears Peter debate with Simon the magician and appreciates how goodness and logical argumentation can convince people to believe the teacher of truth and abhor the devil and his followers. Peter reunites Clement with his lost father, mother, and brothers. He observes his father repent for having been seduced by Simon Magus, and he hears Peter explain: "As God has restored your sons to you, their father, so also your sons restore their father

to God" (Clem. R., p. 210). The journey with Peter through Palestine enables Clement to appreciate the ultimate significance of things, the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last" (Rev. 22:13).

The progression of the hero in the Clementine Recognitions provides a framework by which to compare Wyatt Gwyon’s ironic quest for salvation in Gaddis’ twentieth-century novel. Wyatt is estranged from his father. He has no guide, like St. Peter, to reconcile him with father or God. When he finds a souvenir from the basilica of St. Clement in Rome, Wyatt appeals to his father for information about the martyred saint. Reverend Gwyon gives the boy no religious affirmation. The father is preoccupied with the fact that under the basilica, geologists found a pagan temple for worshippers of the Persian god, Mithras. The "subterranean sanctuary . . . afloat with vapors from two thousand years before" (p. 51) is more vital to him than Wyatt’s concern about salvation.

This pattern of estrangement is evident throughout Gaddis’s Recognitions. As a young boy, Wyatt accidentally kills a wren and goes to his father’s study to confess. Instead of atoning and receiving help, Wyatt stands outside his father’s forbidding study door, while the Reverend remains silently facing him from inside the room. As an adult, Wyatt again wants to repent of his actions. He travels home to the New England parsonage and, similarly, gets no help from his father.

In the carriage barn of the New England parsonage, amidst peals of thunder and lightning, Wyatt finally blurts out: "Father. . . . Am I the man for whom Christ died?" (p. 469). "Louder than laughter," the narrator relates, "the crash raised and sundered them in a blinding agony of light in which nothing existed until it was done." "Then it seemed," the narrator continues, "full minutes before the cry, pursuing them with its lashing end, flailed through darkness and stung them to earth. Water fell between them from a hole in the roof. The smell of smoke reached them in the dark" (pp. 469–70). In the traditional allusive mode, lightning and thunder would signify prophetic meaning, a sense of God’s presence. Water might imply regeneration. In Gaddis’s ironic novel, however, lightning rivets a hole in the bottom of a metal wash-tub, physically enforcing the separation of the father and son, as water gushes out. There is no sign of salvation or that God is watching. There is no link that will connect Wyatt to God or to his father. There is only "that denseness and that strangeness of the world [which] is the absurd" (Camus, p. 11).

Wyatt’s eventual communication with Reverend Gwyon takes on the sharp edge of black humor. At age thirty-three,¹³ Wyatt lets his Puritan guilt lead him to a penitential act. He goes to the town of San Zwingli, near Madrid, and visits the grave of his mother Camilla, who died when he was three.¹⁴ Then he travels south to the Spanish monastery in Estremadura, where Reverend Gwyon had stayed after Camilla’s death. In these surroundings, Wyatt, now known as Stephen (name of the first Christian martyr), unwittingly eats his father’s ashes baked in the bread that the monks have served. The monks have mistaken the ashes (mailed to them in an oatmeal box) for wheat germ.

Before his death, Reverend Gwyon had requested that his ashes be sent to Spain to be near the grave of Camilla Gwyon. However, in Gaddis’s black humor novel, the new minister, "Dick" (the name itself is a deflation), places the urn of ashes in an empty cereal box, and mails it to the monastery in Estremadura, where Reverend Gwyon had been sending food packages for years (pp. 765–66). The monks use the ingredients in the cereal box to bake bread, which is served to Wyatt: "The bread crumbled because of its fine gray texture. He [Wyatt] crammed half of it into his mouth. . . . As he chewed, a thoughtful expression came to his face for the first time." "His eyes, we are told, were "directed at the painting [but] were focused far beyond it. He chewed on" (p. 928). By eating the ashes, Wyatt inadvertently carries out the form as well as the spirit of his penitential act. The ashes call to mind a wide range of associations: penitents wearing sackcloth and bearing ashes on their head, concepts of mortality, the brevity of life, mourning, and penance. Wyatt’s chewing of the bread made from Reverend Gwyon’ s ashes calls to mind the Last Supper, where Christ used bread to symbolize His body. Gaddis thus summons connections with the Eucharist: the Blessed Sacrament that conveys to the believer the Body as well as the Blood of Christ; the Sacrament that signifies Christ’s gift of eternal life to mankind through His death and resurrection. That Wyatt eats the bread made from his father’s ashes is Gaddis’s black humor response to the ultimate question of faith. The act, parodying Holy Communion, is the bizarre way Wyatt becomes one with the Father/father.

Adding to the distress and comedy of the situation is the outrageous punning on the protagonist’s newly acquired name, Stephan Asche: the name on the forged passport that Mr. Yák has prepared for him (p. 849). Black humor intensifies as apparently random happenings begin to coalesce. We recall that Stephen was Reverend Gwyon and his wife Camilla’s original choice of the name for their son (p. 33). Now, thirty-three years later, it is the counterfeiter Mr. Sinisterra

(known as Mr. Yák) who restores Stephen’s name by giving him a forged passport.¹⁵ Mr. Sinisterra, we recall, was responsible for Camilla Gwyon’s death thirty years before, when he posed as a ship’s surgeon and accidentally killed her during an operation for appendicitis. Recollection of these happenings increases the dual tone of seriousness and humor, the sharp-edged quality that accompanies the bizarre communion of father and son.

The absurdities surrounding Wyatt’s quest for communion with his father and its parodic connections with the Eucharist develop allusive irony in relation to the third-century Recognitions, whose hero, Clement, affirms his belief in God and is reunited with his father as well. The allusive irony also is developed by means of Wyatt’s futile quest for Camilla, as opposed to Clement’s successful meeting with his mother after years of separation. Wyatt’s longing for his mother also has obvious connections with a wish for help from Mary, the Blessed Virgin, in pursuit of grace.

The Virgin Mary’s divine motherhood, the belief that Mary intercedes in behalf of man and dispenses God’s grace with a mother’s love, provides a range of associations that connect to Wyatt’s sense of the mystical presence of his mother who died when he was three. As a child, he believes he sees a vision of his dead mother. As an adult, he notices that his paintings of the Madonna resemble Camilla. Wyatt seems to pursue intimations of Camilla as he would suggestions of divine motherhood. He seems to be appealing to Mary’s intercessory power, which is higher than that of other saints. Wyatt’s mystification of Camilla is ironically fulfilled when the Church mistakes her body for that of the eleven-year-old Spanish girl whom it has declared a saint, and accidentally canonizes Camilla in her place (pp. 844-45).

An absurdist vision and black humor tone merge as a nostalgia for order and meaning is disappointed in a twentieth-century world where randomness and lack of spiritual significance prevail. This sense of living in a strange world is sharpened by the narrator’s description of the violent killing of the little Spanish girl and the odd reaction that greets the announcement of her canonization, approximately forty years later. The girl is assaulted on her way home from her first communion by a man who believes intercourse with a virgin will cure his disease (p. 21), a rationale evidently used by others in history. The narrator also explains that New Yorkers, like Mr. Pivner, avidly read newspaper accounts of the Spanish girl’s beatification, not because she will be a saint, but because they are anxious to gather information about her rape and murder (p. 312).

Incongruities between the sacred and the profane reach farcical proportions in the cemetery near Camilla’s grave, as Wyatt, seeker of salvation, accidentally meets and befriends Mr. Yák the counterfeiter, who virtually becomes a guide and a father surrogate for him. Mr. Yak’s actions as guide are in direct contrast to those of Clement’s guide: St. Peter. Mr. Yák is a character continually trying to evade the dictates of the law. In San Zwingli, Spain, as in New York City, he is in disguise. Mr. Yák’s discomfort with his false mustache and toupee causes him to exhibit gestures that are rigid and automatic, the mechanical actions often connected with actors in slapstick: he keeps "tugging at his mustache . . . and then pressing it anxiously back in place" and, we are told, he "might have worn a hat, but for fear his hair [might] come off with it when it was removed" (pp. 830–31). The counterfeiter is a caricature of Bergsonian humor, of "something mechanical encrusted on the living,"¹⁶ a comic buffoon, the object of laughter.

Laughter, essentially, is a reaction to perceived contradictions or incongruities, and these reach an extreme in the interchanges between Wyatt and Mr. Yak. Wyatt, the idealist, feels burdened by the sinful accumulations in a fallen world, whereas Mr. Yák (the materialist) has always easily accommodated himself to sin, as when after accidentally killing Camilla, he later crosses himself and murmurs, "The first turn of the screw pays all debts" (p. 9), or when, thirty years later, he justifies his counterfeiting activities to Wyatt: "I’m not a bum. . . . I’m an artist like, a craftsman, see? . . . and they got jealous of my work" (p. 838). Mr. Yák is a caricature of twentieth-century decadence, in contrast to the devout young artist who searches for salvation. Theological, philosophical and historical frames or references inform Wyatt’s actions, whereas sheer literal-mindedness characterizes Mr. Yák’s. These contrasting figures generate laughter, but the laughter wavers, when we appreciate that Wyatt, who has yearned for communion with father and mother, virtually becomes adopted by the degenerate Mr. Yák, who names him Stephan Asche and gives him a forged passport.

Mr. Yák shows paternal interest in Wyatt, who, in contrast to Yák’s own son, Chaby Sinisterra, is intelligent and industrious. It is painfully ironic that the surrogate father keeps telling the sensitive aesthetician, Wyatt, a man of deep religious concerns: "I knew you weren’t a bum" (p. 839). It is equally strange that the surrogate father, essentially a father of lies, continually insists: "I’m an artist," when in reality he is a counterfeiter. Wyatt’s accidental meeting with his surrogate. father, Mr. Yák, and the incongruities that emerge, contribute

to a frenzied tone of black humor, as memories of death and distress mingle with details of farce. Parodic associations seem to be implied by the surroundings themselves, particularly the fact that villagers of San Zwingli seem unaware that their Catholic town is named after Huldreich Zwingli, Swiss Protestant reformer, whose treatises argued against the major tenets of Catholicism.

An ironic allusive mode emerges as events in Wyatt’s twentieth-century world are recognized as being in direct opposition to those in the third-century Clementine Recognitions. The inverse allusiveness emphasizes the difference between people in early Church history, who looked to scripture for guidance, and those in the twentieth century, like Mr. Pivner, who lack spiritual inclination and turn to newspaper accounts as a guide for living a meaningful life. Intertextuality emphasizes the contrast between early Christians who affirmed their faith when told of miracles, like the appearance of a tomb at the beatification of St. Clement, and those twentieth-century readers who are feverishly drawn to the story of the little girl’s canonization so as to find out the details of her original rape and violent death.

In Gaddis’s black humor novel, chance occurrences seem to coalesce in a bizarre design that is an ironic reversal of the sense of meaning found at the close of the quest of the hero in the first Christian novel: the third-century Clementine Recognitions. With Peter as guide, Clement learns about God’s goodness, affirms his faith, and is reunited with his parents. In direct opposition, Wyatt Gwyon seems to fulfill the bizarre role of absurdist hero that Basil Valentine had, by chance, predicted for him: "I suppose you . . . well, let’s say you eat your father, canonize your mother, and . . . what happens to people in novels? I don’t read them" (p. 282).

Gaddis’s second major inversion of the allusive mode is based on the Medieval experimentation with alchemy: the traditional alchemical pursuit of the redemption of matter and the redemption of the soul. The narrator in The Recognitions refers to famous masters like Raymond Lully, "a poet, a missionary, a mystic" (p. 86)—figures who spoke in religious terms and believed they could bring mankind back to the golden age before the Fall. Such men "had seen in gold the image of the sun, spun in the earth by its countless revolutions, then, when the sun might yet be taken for the image of God" (p. 144). In contrast, the narrator explains, "Once chemistry had established itself as true and legitimate son and heir, alchemy was turned out like a drunken parent." "The child," continues the narrator, "had

found what the old fool and his cronies were after all the time." They had found gold, in all its varieties of signet rings, cufflinks, cigarette lighters. The narrator deflates the present by means of juxtaposition with the past: "A cube capable, at the flick of a thumb, of producing a flame, not, perhaps the ignis noster of the alchemists, but a flame quite competent to light a cigarette" (p. 145).

One of the central figures in The Recognitions is Basil Valentine, a character far fallen from the Medieval alchemist Basilius Valentinus, who called himself a Benedictine monk.¹⁷ The early alchemist cautioned the readers of his tracts: "You must truly repent you of all your sins, confessing the same, and firmly resolve to lead a good and holy life. . . by opening your hand and your heart to the needy" (HM I, 316). In contrast, Gaddis’s Valentine is concerned with accumulating gold artifacts: a signet ring, cuff links, cigarette case, even a gold bull, symbol of ancient Egyptian worship. The art critic Valentine is concerned with acquiring wealth. He enters into a contractual arrangement with the dealer Recktall Brown and—for a fee— praises as originals, the forgeries (including Wyatt’s) that Brown places for sale.

The scheme Valentine and Brown work out goes something like this: Valentine arrives at the showing, engages in discussion with other art critics who have access to the latest scientific methods of detecting art forgery (e.g., x-ray pictures, infra-red and ultra-violet rays, different types of microscopes) (p. 269). Valentine states that he is satisfied that the paintings are original; his comments convince others; the forgeries command high prices from patrons of the arts looking for originals. And Valentines shares in the profit with Recktall Brown, whose graphic name denotes his greed.

Wyatt also enters into an agreement with Recktall Brown, creating paintings that the art dealer sells as originals. However, Wyatt, in contrast to Valentine, has no interest in material gain. When Valentine inquires of Wyatt, "Tell me, does Brown pay you well," Wyatt responds: "Pay me? I suppose. The money piles up there." "And the money," Valentine asks. Wyatt answers: "The money? You . . . can’t spend love" (p. 281). Painting, for Wyatt, is a religious act of devotion. It is an act of purification. By preparing his artist’s medium and his study as an alchemist would prepare his complex materials and laboratory, Wyatt sets up an alchemical paradigm that acts as a touchstone for the redemption of his soul.

A typical alchemical laboratory had furnaces, odorous vapors arising from boiling liquids, various vessels with matter in different stages

of change, emitting a variety of colors in the process. Usually sulphur, mercury, copper, lead, and, occasionally, antimony were dissolved, separated, and reunited. They often were combined with organic substances, such as eggs, blood, and excrement. Very important in the laboratory was a book of prayers, for the worker would appeal for Divine, help as he carried out his process.¹⁸ In Wyatt’s study pots of paint are always boiling and changing color; eggs are used to make tempera; and the oil of lavender, used in the base for Wyatt’s paints, emits a mysterious "odor of sanctity" (p. 290), akin to the fragrance of the holy water used by Egyptian alchemists in processing their color theory of alchemy (p. 267).¹⁹

Wyatt is engaged in a refining process. He employs an alchemical paradigm to pursue spiritual purification, a means of virtually leaving behind the sinful accumulations of a fallen world as he uses his imagination to create the world anew in art. The world he wishes to recreate is that of the Golden Age of Flemish art, when, he believes, painters worked "in the sight of God" (p. 269). His method of preparing tempera by hand, and of creating colors that approximate those of the fifteenth-century artists, calls to mind the experimentation of alchemists whose series of changes and renewals of matter were aimed at procuring a universal dissolvent, an "elixir" that would refine matter and cause it, and the alchemist as well, to return to a prelapsarian state: to heaven’s gold and the perfection of Adam and Eve. The alchemist Raymond Lully explains the process: "In our art, the thing that is unjustly defiled by the one will be absolved, cleansed and delivered from that foulness by another that is contrary to it" (p. 239). Like Lully and other alchemists, Wyatt, in his laboratory, seems to conjure up a sense of perfection. "Thank God there was the gold to forge" (p. 740), he exclaims as he contemplates his recreation of past beauty. However, no matter how much Wyatt purifies his materials and studies his art, he never is able to believe in his own salvation. He works feverishly, sleeps little, and always is dismayed by the daylight of a barren existence.

At the end of the book, Wyatt seems psychologically shattered by personal disasters: the loss of his paintings, the separation from Esme (the model who shares his nostalgia for the past), and his inability to be reconciled with Reverend Gwyon or with God. He, at age thirty-three, lives in the Spanish monastery in Estremadura, where he occupies himself by scraping off paint from original masters (e.g., a Valdes Leal and an El Greco). In an attempt to free the paintings of the accumulations of time that damage color and obscure beauty, Wyatt goes so far in his restoration as to razor blade the paintings

themselves and return the canvases to their original emptiness (pp. 928–33). Now, some may think that Wyatt (Stephen) "is pushing on to a more comprehensive idea of restoration—namely, the restoring of reality to itself," that he is "making a gesture of ‘recalling’ the ‘falsifications’ of even the greatest artists."²⁰ However, Gaddis may be indicating the absurdist conclusion that when one divests the world of all accumulations, one reaches not a purification but an empty whiteness! "But you can’t, they won’t let you just . . . take that painting and . . . and do what you’re doing" (p. 930), Ludy tells Wyatt. And the fat man in a brown suit exclaims: "Boy, that big picture was some mess wasn’t it, the Rubens" (p. 937).

It is ironic that Wyatt, who forever yearns to "soar in atonement," never meets the devout Stanley, the musician who appears to be Wyatt’s soul mate in the novel. Stanley, like Wyatt, dwells on the past, when people devoted themselves to God and to working for a Guild, which, in turn, would take care of all their needs. Stanley spends years creating a requiem mass to be played on an organ in the ancient Italian cathedral Fenestrula. He finally completes the work and plays the concerto in the church, without paying attention to the warning of the Italian priest: "Per favore non bassi . . . e non strane combinazioni di note, capisce" (p. 1021). ["Please, no bass . . . and no strange combination of notes, understand."] The resounding music causes the structure to collapse: "Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement."²¹ We are reminded of the Biblical Samson, who pulled the temple down upon himself and the Philistines, and who will rise from death to life through Christ. In contrast, Gaddis deflates the significance of Stanley’s act of atonement. His concerto, we are told, was recovered and "is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played" (p. 1021; italics added).

We react to Stanley’s death as we do to that of his mother, who believes in meeting God for the Last Judgment in as whole a body as possible. Doctors have removed her leg, her appendix, and her tonsils. Then, after watching her dentures dissolve in a solution a nurse incorrectly administered, she leaps to her death from the hospital window: "It was too much. She must get where she was going while there was still time" (p. 598).

The Recognitions is a book about false resurrections, like the mistaken canonization of Camilla Gwyon in place of the young girl chosen by the Church. It is a book about counterfeiters who tend to parody God’s creation. It is a book concerning the ironic desire to soar in atonement in a world where God is not watching, a world

in which God may never have been watching.

Wyatt, throughout his life, looks at the Bosch table-top of the Seven Deadly Sins (owned first by Reverend Gwyon and later by Recktall Brown). He always trembles as he observes the eye of Christ in the center of the table-top, and reads the inscription: "Cave, caveat emptor, Dominus videt" (pp. 740-4 1). ["Beware, let the purchaser beware, God is watching."] Toward the end of the book, however, Wyatt revises his view. Not only does he feel that God is not watching him, but he also concludes that the masters of the Golden Age of Flemish art created paintings that seemed to show a vain effort in handling the "fear there was no God" (p. 933).

The Recognitions presents a world which, for Wyatt, seems analogous to a hellish sea in which celestial people would be doomed to drown, just as St. Clement drowned in the Black Sea with an anchor around his neck. In such a suffocating medium there are continual parties and chance meetings; people seem to be "all afloat" in the dusky air of a Stygian flood. The narrator relates: "Like undersea flora, figures stood weaving, rooted to the floor, here and there one drifting as though caught in a cold current, sensing . . . something submarine, as he paddled the air before him, and went on" (p. 700). In these parties, people seem to glide past each other like fish of assorted color, each preoccupied with his own pursuits.

In this setting, the hero’s journey has been reduced to movement from one party to the next, where estranged people drift past each other: Cremer, the art critic who requires a percentage of a painter’s sale price as payment for a good review; Radcliffe graduates who misspell words and perversely place a "t" in "genial"; husband and wife who separate when they appreciate that each has published a novel with the spouse as protagonist, that apparent interest in the spouse was merely concern for biographical material that would sell a book; a man who, when asked if it is all right to kiss a nun, responds with the banal pun: "As long as you don’t get into the habit" (p. 114).

The Recognitions presents a world in which the artist Wyatt continually searches for meaning, a glimpse of a lost paradise, a sign that God is watching. Instead he sees randomness everywhere. People are recognized by surface details of trivia: a green scarf, a fedora hat, a gold signet ring or gold cigarette case, a large diamond ring, an unusual pronunciation like "Chr-ah-st," a propensity to make counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. Such a flattening of human beings is a reductio ad absurdum of the dignity of man.

In the world of William Gaddis’s novel, man has substituted Dale

Carnegie’s How To Make Friends and Influence People for the Bible (p. 531). Mr. Pivner, who often feels "a sense of something lost," turns to such a book for advice. He reads: "I am talking about a real smile . . . a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the market place" (pp. 531–32; italics added). Carnegie’s crass materialism replaces the beauty of the esoteric, mystical works in Reverend Gwyon’s parish library once the new preacher, "Dick," arrives. People interested in this new Bible range from the monks in the Spanish monastery in Estremadura to the inhabitants of crowded tenements in New York City. In Estremadura, a monk enthusiastically peruses the books of a visiting religious novelist with the hope of finding a copy of Como Ganar Amigos y Vencer Todos los Otros (p. 916). In Manhattan, Mr. Pivner avidly reads Dale Carnegie’s explanation "about a new way of life," an alchemical "elixir" (our narrator interjects) that purifies things. Carnegie emphasizes: "You owe it to yourself, to your happiness, to your future, and to your income!" (pp. 531–33).

We appreciate the black humor deflation of the protagonist Wyatt’s desire to progress toward salvation as we hear a minor and rather negative character—Benny—proclaim: "We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are" (p. 683). Thus does Gaddis use jest to spend his rage, as he recognizes the absurdist vision that emerges from the contrast between the ideal and its loss.

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

Notes

    ¹John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment," The Atlantic Monthly, 245, no. 1 (Jan., 1980), 71, explains how contemporary writers deploy traditional materials "against themselves to generate a new and lively work."
   ²Barth, Giles Goat-Boy (1966; rpt. New York: Fawcett, 1968). pp. 708–709.
   ³Reuben Arthur Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 14. On "the poetry of allusion," see also Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 125–206; Christopher Ricks, "Allusion: The Poet as Heir," Studies in the Eighteenth Century, III, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 209–40; Carmela Perri, "On Alluding," Poetics, 7 (1978), 289–307; Donald C. Mell, "Dryden and the Transformation of the Classical," Papers on Language and Literature, 17 (1981), 146–63.
   ⁴"Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 38.
   ⁵John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). Parenthetical references to Paradise Lost are to this edition.
   ⁶Edward W. Tayler, in Milton’s Poetry (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1979), elaborates on the prophetic strain in Paradise Lost; see also Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Visionary Poetics (San Marina, California: Huntington Library, 1979).
   ⁷Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969), p. 6, uses this phrase to describe the Theatre of the Absurd.
   ⁸Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 37. Parenthetical references are to this edition.
   ⁹Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), 2, refers to this alleged remark by Michelangelo.
   ¹⁰William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955; rpt. New York: Avon Books. l974), p. 269. Parenthetical references are to this edition.
   ¹¹For discussion on black humor, see Bruce Jay Friedman, ed., Foreword to Black Humor (New York: Bantam, l965), pp. vii–xi; Max F. Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 3–16; Brain weber, "The Mode of ‘Black Humor’," in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 361–71; Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 498–506; Elaine B. Safer, "The Allusive Mode and Black Humor in Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor," Studies in the Novel, 13 (1981), 424–38.
   ¹²Recognitions of Clement, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1903), vol. 8; this third-century work is actually a pseudo-Clementine tract. St. Clement lived in the first century A.D. See "Introductory Notice to the Recognitions of Clement," p. 73; Basilius Valentinus, The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (London: Vincent Stuart Ltd., 1962); see also Basilius Valentinus, "Practica," in The Hermetic Museum, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (London: John M. Watkins, 1953), I, hereafter referred to as HM I. Parenthetical references are to these editions.
   ¹³Wyatt indicates that he is thirty-three when he speculates on his life in relation to Christ’s: "Why, two thousand years ago, thirty-three was old, and time to die" (p. 935).
   ¹⁴That Camilla Gwyon died thirty years prior to Wyatt’s visit to San Zwingli indicates that Wyatt was three at her death. This squares with the fact that "Wyatt was four years old when his father returned alone from Spain" (p. 23), after traveling for several months following Camilla’s death.
   ¹⁵1n the early part of The Recognitions, the protagonist is referred to as Wyatt. In the middle,

he is not referred to by name, and toward the end he is called Stephen. On a literal level, we realize that the change to Stephen arises from Wyatt’s assuming the identity of Stephan Asche, from the Swiss passport that Mr. Sinisterra (Mr. Yák) forges for him. On a symbolic level, we appreciate that Wyatt finally has taken on the name of Stephen, first Christian martyr, the name his parents originally designated for him. Perhaps Gaddis wishes to call attention to the literal and symbolic levels by using the different spellings Stephan/Stephen. Bernard Benstock, "On William Gaddis: In Recognition of James Joyce," Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 181, observes that Stephen is "the name Gaddis goes on to use for him, returning him full circle to the Stephen he should have been."
   ¹⁶Henri Bergson, "Laughter," in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 84.
   ¹⁷John Read, Prelude to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy (1936; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), p. 183, points out that Basilius Valentinus’ name does not appear on the rolls of the Benedictine Order. Gaddis also must have been aware that many alchemists were indeed charlatans like the one in Chaucer’s "Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale."
   ¹⁸See Wayne Shumaker, "Alchemy," in The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 170–75.
   ¹⁹In regard to color changes, the alchemist Cremer observed: "When the mixture is black it is called the Black Raven. As it turns white, it is named the Virgin’s Milk, or the Bone of the Whale. In its red stage it is the Red Lion. When it is blue, it is called the Blue Lion. When it is all colours, the Sages name it Rainbow" (HM II, 77). Basilius Valentinus explained that the alchemist using antimony "can colour it red or yellow, white or black, according to the way in which he regulates the fire" (Tr. Char., p. 48). For a discussion of the "seasons" or "stages" of the alehemical process see also Martinus Rulandus, A Lexicon of Alchemy, trans. A. E. Waite (1612; trans. 1893; rpt. London: John M. Watkins, 1964), pp. 421–22. See also Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy, trans. William Stoddart (1960; rpt. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1974), pp. 182–95.
   ²⁰Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 398. See also David Madden, "William Gaddis’s The Recognitions," in Rediscoveries, ed. David Madden (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), p. 304: "The achievement of the orchestration of Gaddis’s technical devices is the creation . . . [of a] perhaps spiritual, state of recognition"; Grace Eckley, "Exorcising the Demon Forgery, or the Forging of Pure Gold in Gaddis’s Recognitions," Literature and the Occult, ed. Luanne Frank (Arlington, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 1977), pp. 125–36, states that the occult serves as the "unifying force" in the novel, developing the "proleptic" or anticipatory structure that points to Wyatt’s redemption. For Peter William Koenig, "Recognizing Gaddis’ Recognitions," Contemporary Literature, 16 (1975), 71, "The novel offers no final answers to the questions it raises, but . . . the very suggestiveness and structure of his questioning constitutes a partial answer.
   ²¹Joseph S. Salemi, "To Soar in Atonement: Art as Expiation in Gaddis’s The Recognitions," Novel, 10 (1977), 136, argues: "Stanley’s work expiates the falsity of Wyatt’s and that same work is the instrument of his martyrdom." "Art," he continues, "is the ultimate expiation, for through it not only suffering, but the falsehood which lies at the core of existence is transfigured beyond the pettiness and sordidness of its context and origins." It is the frustrated desire to affirm this view, I think, that develops the black humor of the absurd in The Recognitions.

*A shorter version of this essay was presented at the Tenth Annual Twentieth-Century Literature Conference (February. 1982).