Though the previous chapters have used mega-novels’ relationships to several nonfictional genres to examine how their detailed accumulation of the facts of real life can overload readers’ attention capacities and subsequently prompt them to modulate their methods of text processing, cruft is not limited to the small-scale cases of the incoherent word, the irrelevant datum, the passing moment of consciousness. The following three chapters will examine how mega-novels’ incorporation of elements from other literary genres produces more extensive but equally pointless cruft, inducing the same characteristic frustration and boredom to provoke a similar reorientation of attention. We will begin by looking at cruft’s place within a genre whose reputation for scale and heterogeneity has encouraged its application to several works in the mega-novel canon, the Menippean satire.1
Before we examine the genre’s particulars, however, we must start by justifying our investigation into cruft’s relationship with humor at all. To be sure, mega-novel humor is frequently described as excessive and overwhelming, but since we have defined cruft as objectively pointless text, to categorize mega-novel humor as cruft would imply it is somehow objectively not funny. Our basis for making such a judgment might seem questionable. The commonsense view of humor has long been that we should leave it to individuals’ subjective impressions, as expressed by E. B. White’s quip that “[h]umor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”2 Since mega-novels have undeniably amused a large number of readers with their outrageous gags and set pieces, why should we doubt that they are funny?
We may do so because there is a type of gratuitous text in mega-novels that, though apparently comic, resists even this latitudinarian principle. Consider this excerpt from part 2, chapter 7 of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, depicting a Christmas party held for New York’s artistic set by Esther Gwyon, estranged wife to protagonist Wyatt Gwyon:
—Who’s Esther?
—Why, my dear, she’s our hostess. There, talking with the tall fellow in the green necktie. She turned, as her husband approached with a martini.–What an interesting group of people, she said.–And what interesting music.
—It’s Handel, he said, handing her a glass.—The Triumph of Truth and Justice.
She looked around her, and raised the glass to her lips.–Do you think next year we might get to the Narcissus Festival in Hawaii?
Drinks were spilled, another brown line burnt on the mantel, people collided, excused themselves and greeted one another, and Ellery, tucking the green silk tie back in his jacket, said,–Just stop talking about it for a while. Who’s that? he added, nodding at a blond girl.
—I don’t know. She came with somebody. She’s going to Hollywood.
—I want another drink, Ellery said, and went toward the blonde.
—Ellery, please . . . But he was gone. She sat, holding her kitten.
—What does it mean, said a heavy voice near her.—The garbage cans in the street, the kids on the East Side playing in the gutters, swimming in that filthy river, see? What does that mean?
—Well she says Paris reminds her of a mouthful of decayed teeth, but I think Paris is just like going to the movies . . .
—A lovely little hotel near Saint Germain, I don’t think I crossed the river more than twice all the time I was there. I really lived on the left bank, it’s so much nicer, the architecture, the cloud formations over there . . .
—Of course if you like the Alps. I found them a fearfully pretentious bore myself . . . I mean, what can you do with an Alp . . .3
These inane, disconnected sputterings dominate the astonishing seventy-three additional pages of this scene. They might be of some interest if we had been following these characters throughout the novel, but they are as faceless in the larger work as they are in this excerpt, and their speech equally irrelevant to the novel’s main events. Consequently the scene is usually explicated as social satire, ridiculing the “[c]liques of dishonest critics, backbiting literati, the entire rout of cocktail-party intellectuals and pen-pushers” that constitute the chattering classes.4 But is this supposed mockery actually funny? Its only real joke, after all, appears to be the unnamed husband’s Superman-influenced corruption of Handel’s The Triumph of Time and Truth into The Triumph of Truth and Justice, which might provoke a chuckle from those readers with extensive enough knowledge of Handel’s second-tier oratorios not to need Steven Moore’s Reader’s Guide to explain the reference. If most of what is said in this passage is simply banal rather than humorous, doesn’t that propagate idiocy instead of satirizing it?
The few principles that have been established by systematic research in humor suggest that this may be the case. Though there is no generally accepted definition of humor, many believe that it can be broadly characterized as “nonserious social incongruity,” often based in “bisociation”: in other words we consider something funny when we are primed for certain cognitive processes by one social schema, but then suddenly see those expectations violated.5 This causes us, according to Reuven Tsur, to become disorientated and undergo a rapid “shift in mental sets.”6 The most important subclass of this social incongruity is the one articulated a century ago by Henri Bergson, who claimed we laugh when we see human behavior lacking the flexibility commensurate to the flux of consciousness, instead displaying a “rigidity” that “reminds us of a mere machine.”7 The primary sign of this mechanism, Bergson continues, is repetition, since “a really living life should never repeat itself.”8 However, repetitive behavior itself is not funny but merely mechanical, requiring a comedian’s inspired exaggeration or distortion to render the behavior obviously ridiculous.9
Looking back to Gaddis’s dialogue, we may see that while it has plenty of mechanical behavior, the repetitions are not actually made incongruous by comic exaggeration or schema switching. Instead it simply continues its parade of shallowness unimpeded over dozens of pages. Indeed this scene is characterized not merely by clichés but clichéd representations of clichés: there is no more ham-handed a remark, after all, for Gaddis to have put into the mouth of an upper-class bore than the one about how “interesting” she finds everything—except, perhaps, to have her call something else “such a pretentious bore” moments later. The text appears not merely about dullness or stupidity, then, but is dull and stupid itself. Given this point it is understandable that the novel’s initial critics, to quote the alphabetic pastiche made by Gaddis’s pseudonymous proselytizer Jack Green, considered The Recognitions “baffling, and a Bore [ . . . ] dull difficult dreary—&disgusting [ . . . ] repulsive or repelling.”10
This kind of excess occurs throughout not only The Recognitions but a number of mega-novels. To understand what it is doing, we will need to more rigorously analyze the nature of humor, as well as the satire as a genre and the specific Menippean subcategory, to see what function cruft might serve when incorporated into them.
Ever since Juvenal, satire has built its reputation on depicting the vicious, ugly, and stupid. Historically this has made it controversial among moralists, but it has consistently been defended on the grounds that its form censures the vices it depicts: as John Dryden wrote, “’Tis an Action of Virtue to make Examples of vicious Men.”11 Yet the constant tension between these two positions may suggest how tenuous is satire’s rhetoric. Its duality may be best appreciated through Edward Rosenheim’s famous definition of it as “an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars.”12 Satirists, in other words, always say two things at once: they must claim that their narratives are made up, but also that they depict the real social world; they must make their characters behave in deleterious ways, but only because they wish to criticize them. That is why comic incongruity is so crucial for establishing rhetorical distance. As suggested earlier satire’s traditional method for signaling this duality is to prompt one social script but then to derail that script by exaggerating and distorting it. As Tsur notes, this strategy is aimed to disorient and alter its audience’s cognitive patterns, because “[w]hen something suddenly seems to go wrong, one has to check the tuning of one’s own schemata.”13 Laughter, in other words, is the body’s way of discharging cognitive dissonance, which is why it is so useful in responding to social hypocrisy.
In producing this calibrated incongruity, however, satirists walk a fine line: should they make their material too incongruous, the satire might be dismissed as a perverse or even libelous fantasy, yet should they make it not incongruous enough, they might be charged with either heavy-handed dullness or, worse, insufficiently distinguishing themselves from that which they attack. The list of satires threatened with censorship resulting from overly fanciful exaggerations is considerable, including Robert Coover’s mega-novel phantasmagoria on the Rosenberg execution, The Public Burning. Conversely, dangerous confusions have been caused by satires that were not sufficiently incongruous to cause cognitive dissonance. This famously occurred when Daniel Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters mimicked the voice of a blowhard Anglican zealot so closely that many contemporary readers took its argument for the mass execution and banishment of dissenting congregations seriously.14 Kurt Vonnegut, introducing his Mother Night, about an American double agent working undercover as a Nazi radio propagandist, writes, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”15 It is apt, then, that Fredric Bogel should observe that satire’s closest aesthetic relative is the counterfeit, since the two genres share the ability to create “a space where distinctions are rendered problematic rather than reinforced,” making crucial the ability recognize what is similar between the real and the fake while still distinguishing them.16
Given how essential fictional incongruity is to satire, then, we must reject as fallacies two common critical justifications for satire’s drearier elements, both especially common when addressing mega-novel satire. The first is that a satire’s greatest enormities may be justified on the grounds that they “expose” society’s faults. That verb, echoing the muckraking “exposé,” is obviously ill suited to the novel. After all, the novelist is deprived of the journalistic social critic’s two most valuable tools, the ability to directly reference the real world and the authority to unequivocally present an argument in his own voice. As Bogel notes, a satirist does not “expose the satiric object in all its alien difference” but instead invents it as a fiction.17 As we saw in chapter 2, reading fiction can and should affect our overall information-processing apparatus, but we must be vigilant against our natural tendency to accept the facts presented by fiction as if they were true.
Yet critics often appear vulnerable to this inclination. For instance The Public Burning’s admirers like to bash conservative intellectual Norman Podhoretz for calling it “a lie [ . . . ] because it hides behind the immunities of artistic freedom to protect itself from being held to the normal standards of truthful discourse,” yet these critics, in trumpeting how the novel “exposes the American spirit that overlooks no opportunity to dominate, dehumanize, and humiliate the vulnerable” because it presents “a huge amount of verifiable historical information and multiple coiled patterns connecting the facts,” make the same mistake Podhoretz does.18 To debate the historical veracity of a book that sets the Rosenberg execution in Times Square—a Times Square connected by a magical swinging door to Sing Sing, no less, and one attended by a cavalcade of VIPs including the “Rat Pack” of Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy—is clearly ridiculous. The problem with Podhoretz’s conclusion is not his politics but the belief, apparently shared by Coover’s supporters, that a satire may be judged by how well it proves a “thesis.”19 Similarly, when Joseph Salemi claims that in The Recognitions’ party scene, “the world of shallow art and intellectual falsity [ . . . ] is parodied and attacked, mostly through the devastating technique of quoting its representatives verbatim [ . . . ]—all are mercilessly exposed,” he does not seem to realize that since these characters are Gaddis’s inventions, Gaddis’s dialogue does not “quot[e] verbatim” their stupidity from any preexisting reality but independently creates it.20
It is equally fallacious, however, to justify satire’s ugliest elements on the mimetic grounds that, in an effort to accurately represent contemporary experience, they must dissolve all stable distinctions between truth and falsity or between the moral and immoral, as is frequently argued by postmodernists. In its most basic form, this position often argues that there is a “fading line between fantasy and reality,” necessitating that fiction catch up in absurdity to an increasingly absurd world.21 Steven Weisenburger, for example, argues that postmodern satires like those by Gaddis and Coover render obsolete the traditional view, in which satire rhetorically corrects social vices by reference to universal norms, by instead deconstructing all social norms and presenting only “degenerative, subversive fantasy.”22 If a satire actually did this, however, it would necessarily render itself incapable of any kind of critique, even of the mainstream culture that partisans of this view wish it to excoriate. This is likely why, when faced with specific works, such critics turn out to be more committed to universal norms and clear rhetorical argument than their theory otherwise suggests: Weisenburger, in fact, characterizes The Public Burning as “[a]n outraged catalogue of American self-deceits and lies masking themselves as genii of progress [ . . . ] the single most unrestrained condemnation of American civic identity to appear in the postwar decades.”23
For all its limitations, however, the postmodern perspective does try to account for the excessiveness we find in mega-novel satires like The Recognitions. Historically satire has emphasized concision and targeted focus, as in Dryden’s insistence that satire is “only to treat of one Subject; to be confin’d to one particular Theme.”24 However, mega-novels bearing a satiric impulse tend to increase their breadth in an almost grotesquely uncontrolled manner—indeed to the point that Alastair Fowler goes so far as to call them “generically inept, as well as too long.”25 Only one traditional satiric subgenre, in fact, has typically expanded to any real length, namely the Menippean satire. Though named for a Greek Cynic who wrote three centuries before Christ, this term became absorbed into mainstream literary-critical discourse only after mid-twentieth-century reclamations by Mikhail Bakhtin and Northrop Frye, both of whom stretched the term to cover a wide range of prose narrative satires of substantial size and variety. Frye, for instance, identifies the genre as an exemplar of the “extroverted intellectual” prose fiction strain that he dubs “anatomy,” noting the genre’s “tendency to expand” its “single intellectual pattern” so as to “overwhelm [its] pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon.”26 Bakhtin, meanwhile, uses the term to group works that are “multi-styled and hetero-voiced,” addressing “current and topical issues” while creating a hybrid of “philosophical universalism” and “experimental fantasticality.”27 More recently Howard Weinbrot asserts that a Menippean satire targets no less than the whole of “a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy.”28
The lack of a consensus definition for the term, however, has created a certain ambiguity in how its satiric rhetoric is to be experienced. For Frye and Weinbrot, the Menippean is simply satire writ large, its subject not one vice but one society. For Bakhtin, though, Menippean satire derives less from classical satire than the medieval carnival:
Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival.
Let us enlarge upon the second important trait of the people’s festive laughter: that it is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the people’s festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it.29
In other words, unlike in classical satire, mocker and mocked are identical in the Menippean. No specific vice or ideology is attacked, but all humanity sprawls out into total ridiculousness. However, crucially for Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter is as rejuvenating as it is degrading. Were the affirmative principle removed, he argues, the work would lose its effect, as a “grotesque world in which only the inappropriate is exaggerated is only quantitatively large, but qualitatively it is extremely poor, colorless, and far from gay.”30 Gargantua’s drunkenness, for example, does not merely cause him to urinate all over Paris but inspires his characteristic merriment and love of companionship.
Yet this affirming principle often is absent from mega-novel satires, whose approach at times evinces both the carnivalesque’s omnivorous maw and the satire’s cool distance. For long stretches there is neither calibrated incongruity nor mirthful deprecation, only endless inanity and disgust. In this chapter, then, I will argue that the mega-novel Menippean satire, though it sometimes achieves conventional satiric or carnivalesque ends, often experiments with unbalancing the former’s calibrated distortions and the latter’s encompassing scope to create monstrosities either so fantastic as to be indecipherable or so dull as to be boring. In other words I will examine how they deploy cruft that challenges less society’s ills than its reader’s ability to attend a bloated representation of them. By creating a counterfeit world too expansive to process, what they satirize is the limits of their readers’ own minds. Their cruft places us into a state in which, no matter how hard we try, we are likely to lose focus on what we are reading, causing our attention to fluctuate and our processing to lose its depth. The incongruity might provoke laughter, but mostly an unfocused, disoriented kind, deriving more from the termination of processing than its continuation. Consequently we can easily lose track of what exactly we are laughing at, how we ought to process it, or what is even going on at all.
Some relatively straightforward examples might be seen in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a comic künstlerroman set in the 1690s about a naive and resolutely chaste poet named Ebenezer Cooke who is sent to manage his father’s Maryland plantation. Based on a colonial satiric poem by a self-proclaimed laureate of the same name, The Sot-Weed Factor is frequently a conventionally funny book: opening to a random page, I come across the scene in which a rum peddler who has intoxicated a justice, cheated him at cards, urinated onto him, and had sex with his wife takes the couple to court so that he may sue for the price of the rum and the recovery of coins that fell from his pockets.31 However, the book also presents some more unusual instances of humor, especially in the form of long lists. The list, of course, has an extensive history as a device within Menippean satire. Dustin Griffin notes how the genre often transforms the ugly into the pleasurable via a “great feast of words,” especially through list-like devices such as the contest and the catalogue.32 Though the list might tend toward repetition and thus encourage skimming, the lists of a great Menippean satirist, like Rabelais, are usually varied with invention to comic ends: for instance the list of surfaces with which Gargantua experiments wiping his ass has dozens of entries but is frequently broken by witty commentary (e.g., a cat’s fur does well, but the cat will claw you) and is divided into several briefer sublists, the use of each element of which as an ass-wipe is ridiculous in its own way.33
Mega-novel lists, however, are often longer as a whole and more predictable item by item. Hugh Kenner has dubbed this technique “the comedy of the Inventory,” which is a “comedy of exhaustion, comic precisely because exhaustive” in the way it aims to include the entirety of long, finite lists within the novel’s text, as with the ninety-four figures of speech scattered through one chapter of Ulysses.34 Kenner believes these are inherently funny, owing to their Bergsonian mechanism, but we must remember that while for Bergson the mechanical is worthy of mockery, it is not funny itself until it is exaggerated by a comedian. This raises the tricky question of when an extended list is funny and when it is simply boring—“the continuity,” in Bergson’s words, “having deadened [ . . . ] the comic quality.”35
The Sot-Weed Factor’s famous insult contest provides a good case study on this question, especially as it derives directly from a scene in the original poem, which will help us distinguish between the structures of traditional satire and those of mega-novel excess. In the original poem, the real Cook attempts to lambast the lawless colony of Maryland by stringing together several vignettes about a tobacco merchant’s misadventures among the colonial populace, including this encounter with some women playing cards:
I thought them first some Witches bent,
On Black Designs in dire Convent.
Till one who with affected air,
Had nicely learn’d to Curse and Swear;
Cry’d Dealing’s lost is but a Flam,
And vow’d by G—d she’d keep her Pam.
[ . . . ] D—m you, says one, tho’ now so brave,
I knew you late a Four-Years Slave;
What if for Planter’s Wife you go,
Nature designed you for the Hoe.
Rot you replies the other streight,
The Captain kiss’d you for his Freight;
And if the Truth was known aright,
And how you walk’d the Streets by night
You’d blush (if one cou’d blush) for shame,
Who from Bridewell or New gate came:
From Words they fairly fell to Blows,
And being loath to interpose,
Or meddle in the Wars of Punk,
Away to Bed in hast I slunk.36
This is a traditional, if not especially virtuosic, instance of satire, wherein the poor morals of a group of uneducated women is ridiculed and made incongruous by exploiting its similarities to both a brothel and witches’ coven. Though the gags regarding the women’s social class and sexual promiscuity have aged, their intended rhetorical goals should still remain clear.
Barth’s revision of this scene, however, creates its comic effect differently. It begins similarly, with Ebenezer coming across the women at cards while seeking out Susan Warren (whom he will later discover to be his beloved, Joan Toast) inside his father’s estate, Malden, which has been turned in his absence into an opium den and brothel. He proceeds to ask the women for assistance:
“I beg your pardon,” Ebenezer interrupted. “If you are servants of the house—”
“Non, certainement, I am no servant!”
“The truth is,” said the dealer, “Grace here’s a hooker.”
“A what?” asked the poet.
“A hooker,” the woman repeated with a wink. “A quail, don’t ye know.”
“A quail!” the woman named Grace shrieked. “You call me a quail, you—gaullefretière!”
“Whore!” shouted the first.
“Bas-cul!” retorted the other.
“Frisker!”
“Consoeur!”
“Trull!”
“Friquenelle!”
“Sow!”37
Though its comedy has more dirty-minded delight than the original’s moralizing stance, Barth’s version initially works similarly to Cook’s, exaggerating bad behavior to satiric lengths. However, this changes when readers turn to the next page and see—
“Usagère!”
“Bawd!”
“Viagère!”
“Séraune!”
“Tumbler!”
“Poupinette!”
“Mattressback!”
“Brimballeuse!”
“Nannygoat!”
“Chouette!”
“Windowgirl!”
“Wauve!”
“Lowgap!”
“Peaultre!”
“Galleywench!”
“Baque!”
“Drab!”
“Villotière!”
“Fastfanny!”38
—and another two hundred further insults, filling up the following six pages with an almost perfectly symmetrical, invective-laden layout.39
A half century of criticism confirms that many readers find this scene funny, but what are we actually laughing at? To an extent it is probably at the satire on a recognizable cultural obsession with generating insults based on female sexual promiscuity and appreciation of Barth’s playful linguistic facility. Mostly, though, I think we laugh at our own inability to read the text. After all it is only upon perceiving the multiple facing-page complements of arcane pejoratives as a whole, and our ensuing decision to stop reading each word, that most readers really begin to guffaw. As Charles B. Harris asks, “how many of us read carefully every item in these catalogs? And need we? Is it not, rather the idea that Barth has matched 114 English synonyms for whore with an equal number of French synonyms that interests and delights us?”40 Indeed that the passage’s humor derives from overloading readers’ processing abilities rather than simply exhausting the inventory of French and English epithets may be seen in the fact that one obvious synonym that not only would fit comfortably in this exchange, but is in the original “Sot-Weed Factor” scene, is notably absent, namely “punk.” Even William Gass, as indefatigable a reader as any, claims that within this scene, “invention flags, the name calling becomes mechanical, vocal exhaustion ensues, and it’s over.”41 What does it say about our cognitive abilities, though, that merely looking at these pages makes us chortle at our inability to read them? Laughing and skipping to the end might demonstrate healthy text processing, but it ought to remind us how easily our limited channel capacity can be overloaded.
In fact the ease with which the world’s abundance can overpower our abilities to process it troubles Ebenezer throughout the novel, as he is constantly forced to determine whether his mind is too rigidly narrow to understand the world or whether the world itself simply possesses far more possibilities than it ought to. Though the contest above is The Sot-Weed Factor’s most excessive list, the book features several similar catalogs, such as Ebenezer and his chameleon tutor Henry Burlingame III’s rhyming contest involving obscure words like “autoschediastic” and “catoptromancy”; Burlingame’s catalog of twins worshipped by foreign cultures; and the page-long menu of the fish, fowl, rodent, fruit, and vegetables consumed at an Ahatchwhoop tribal feast.42 They speak, more broadly, to the surfeit of options in the New World. If at his journey’s outset Ebenezer had been so exasperated by the shopkeeper Bragg’s elaboration of the sixteen types of notebook for sale that the poet attacked the wares with a sword, he is nearly driven mad in America by the much more various possibilities hidden within what appear to be simple matters.43 Just as the would-be poet attempts twice during the whores’ insult contest to cut them off and return to the question with which he had started, he often attempts to arrest others’ extended stories from elaborating any more monstrously, like during Burlingame’s account of Maryland’s history while in the guise of Lord Baltimore, the valet Bertrand’s story of the events that caused him to gamble away Malden, and Mary Mungummory’s tales of her mother’s sexual education.44 However, just as the card players “possessed with mirth [ . . . ] paid him no heed,” no one will stop for his sake, and his comic inability to keep up with the elaboration of possibilities proceeds unabated.45
We ought to sympathize with Ebenezer’s situation. He seeks to limit the range of his world’s possibilities not because he dislikes variety, but because he understands its implications all too well. During his student days, he writes to his sister, “it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling, had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Solider! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another [ . . . ]: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible!”46 As he shuttles about Maryland, perpetually forced to change identity and allegiance, he finds the matter of how to manage life’s overabundance no easier to negotiate. As Manfred Puetz has written, while some “human beings inevitably fall into despair when they lack possibility [ . . . ] Ebenezer Cooke has found out [ . . . ] that the reverse is valid too: human beings invariably fall into despair when confronted with too many possibilities.”47 His classical education encourages him to seek the Golden Mean, but to determine any mean would require him to comprehend the scale of his environment in the first place, and he finds it innumerable.48
Confronted with this same variety, many of the novel’s critics similarly suggest the whole book might be too overcomplicated to bother with. Gerhard Joseph, for instance, has written that in Barth’s “erudite catalogues of ideas, or in his name-calling contest between the prostitutes, Barth tries to convey the impression that sheer exhaustiveness for its own sake contributes to a meaningful comic order. The longer and more contrived the shaggy-dog fiction, the better. But [ . . . ] his characters frequently do not have much emotional depth.”49 Yet one can achieve sympathy with Ebenezer if one realizes that one can probably do no better in managing the cacophony of words that he must face. That the book is so wonderfully comic derives from how one cannot simply skip over all these expansive sections, since many passages that at first appear to be gratuitous larks end up being important. As David Morrell notes, when Barth’s editors, assuming the book’s episodic nature would make it easy to trim, suggested cutting out several chapters, they found none could be excised without damaging the narrative structure.50 For instance Ebenezer’s sensible impulse to ask Mary Mungummory to skip over the story she wishes to tell about her sister’s conception serves him poorly when it later causes her to withhold the tale of Charley Mattasin’s carnal secrets, which might’ve helped him learn sooner about the eggplant aphrodisiac required to avert Maryland’s war with the Ahatchwoops.51
For similar reasons, though, we cannot simply embrace the book’s profusion of language and ideas for their own sakes, either. While many critics describe the book as a satire enacting a “metaphysics of multiplicity” to criticize Ebenezer’s “remaining obstinately constant in a changing world,” this view ignores that, as with most satire, the book eventually does depend on establishing clear distinctions between the real and the counterfeit, the authentic identity and the mask, meaningful language and wasteful blabber.52 Constancy’s opposite, after all, is hypocrisy, and as much as critics valorize Burlingame’s “cosmophilist” shape-shifting, were he as multiplicitous in his affections toward Ebenezer as toward his own personae, he would receive less critical approval.53 The satire’s apparent rhetorical attitude toward the value of constant identity is actually quite complex. Despite perceiving their likenesses, for instance, Ebenezer frequently fails to recognize the three people dearest him (Burlingame, Joan, and his sister Anna) when they are in disguise, yet in the end the coherence of their identities not only does not remain in perpetual doubt but is necessary to the book’s affective resolution.54 Similarly it may be endlessly amusing to see yet another character revealed to be Burlingame incognito, but his identity finally does possess some essential qualities: through all he does, he is generally on the side of peace, justice, and love.
Facing our own inability to reliably manage these multiplying possibilities, there may be nothing to do except laugh. Perhaps the novel’s oddest feature is the way both its most mechanical and its most grotesque events—the violent deaths, the frauds and robberies, the countless attempted rapes—somehow all dissolve into the general comedy. The laughter is made possible, though, because the inability to manage life’s fecundity is so general among the characters, as are the subsequent humiliations to which they are subjected, that power relations are leveled as in Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, preventing anyone from laughing at others without laughing at themselves. The pirate Boabdil, for instance, may violently rape a prostitute, but he proceeds to contract her debilitating venereal disease and appears absurdly diminished whenever he later shows up; similarly Tom Tayloe, who makes his living swindling migrants into indentured servitude, gets hoodwinked into servitude by his own techniques.55 In the novel’s later stages, Ebenezer, having been taken captive by the Ahatchwoops and hearing his fellow captives admit the ways in which they have impersonated him in hopes of gain, remarks, “’Tis too late in the day for aught but general absolution.”56 The world’s variety—much valuable, most pointless—is too much for us, but after a certain point that goes equally for us all: since none of our brains is any more than a clunky machine liable to break down at any moment, we might at least share a laugh over it.
Like The Sot-Weed Factor, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning is an engagement with the nature and limits of comedy and satire. Not only do its two central characters—a fictionalized Richard Nixon and an embodied Uncle Sam—respectively derive from the traditions of classical clowning and American folk humor, but the novel’s central event is surrounded by a sequence of routines Coover has imagined for midcentury American comedians like Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and the Marx Brothers.57 Much of the book, granted, is conventional satire, targeted at the Eisenhower’s administration’s prosecution of the Rosenberg case. This is especially so in its early chapters, where, by setting historical documents to verse—for example, articles by the “national poet Laureate” Time magazine and the “Spirit of History” New York Times, as well as portions of Eisenhower’s speeches and the Rosenbergs’ letters—Coover makes incongruous the theatrical elements of public speech.58 Even the famously grotesque scene in which a cinemagoer fails to take off his 3-D glasses after seeing the film House of Wax and perceives Times Square as an extension of the grisly film creates a satiric duality via its use of altered perception.59
However, as with Barth’s book, The Public Burning’s catalogues and contests progressively spill beyond their traditional satiric use and generate cruft. Speaking for many initial reviewers, Robert Towers observed the ways in which the book seems to invoke satiric convention without really fulfilling it. On the one hand, the novel’s many historical particulars are often not especially incongruous, meaning “the documentary effects of The Public Burning degenerate into mere cataloguing or recitation”; on the other hand, the more overtly fictional elements are often so incongruous as to be merely bizarre fantasy, such that “Coover, relying upon the strategy of excess, puts the reader in the position of a jaded sadist who must devise more and more exquisite elaborations of his tortures in an effort to catch up with a fast receding gratification.”60 Even Tom LeClair, in celebrating the book, agrees that the novel’s panorama of American society at times presents “too much elaboration, too much information.”61 Collectively this excess engenders a grotesque stranger and more disturbing than that of the conventional satire, and as a result, in many passages toward the novel’s end, one’s cognition can become so disoriented that it becomes difficult to know where the book’s satire is directed and how to process it.
From the book’s beginning, its comic excessiveness is rooted in the voice of Uncle Sam. Towers compliments the “foulmouthed and amusing” pastiche of Americana that constitutes Uncle Sam’s dialogue but subsequently adds, “how tiresome and unrelenting that voice becomes in the long haul!”62 Take this characteristic monologue, uttered shortly after his introduction:
Time is money! No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, but the whole boundless continent is ours, it’s as much a law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea or that trade follers the flag! Fear is the fundament of most guvvamints, so let’s get the boot in, boys, and listen to ’em scream, let us anny-mate and encourage each other—whoo-PEE!—and show the whole world that a Freeman, contendin’ for Liberty on his own ground, can out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-lick any yaller, brown, red, black, or white thing in the shape of human that’s ever set his onfortunate kickers on Yankee soil! It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin’ millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow ripstavers, we cannot escape history!63
This amalgam of American quotation contains funny satire, drawing out the coarse exuberance latent within even the highest-minded American rhetoric (e.g., “manifest dust-in-yer-eye”). However, we should observe that not all are converted to “rich rhetoric.” At times the passage’s repetitiveness approaches cruft in its longer (hence harder-to-process) sequences, such as in “out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-finagle and out-lick.” As with Barth’s lists, one starts to laugh less because one has deeply processed its jokes than out of astonishment that it keeps going as long as it does.
What are we really laughing at in this passage? Do we mock Uncle Sam for how his official decorum descends into unsophisticated jingoism, or do we laugh with him for successfully fusing a wide swath of American culture and tradition into a single voice? Though many criticize Sam’s catchphrase-laden dialogue as the blabbering “rants” of a mere “cartoon figure,” John Ramage notes that “Sam also seems to contain some of the best of the American psyche—humor, spirit, resourcefulness.”64 There is something to be said for a sensibility that so effortlessly fuses a seamless national whole from many individual parts. That generates a problem for our understanding of the novel’s satire. As Richard Walsh notes, “if satire is to remain functional as a critical tool, a distinction between laughing at and laughing with must be retained. Uncle Sam problematizes this distinction.”65 Put another way, the overwhelming barrage confuses our ability to recognize to what extent Sam represents either our ideal or real conceptions of American identity and, as a result, how we should understand ourselves with respect to him (see also chapter 6).
The novel’s catalogues of historical data exacerbate this disorientation. Often invoking the “overabundant flow of events” in contemporary life, the narrator sometimes presents this flow directly, as shown by this account of the articles laid out around the New York Times’ daily Rosenberg coverage:
Circumscribing all these speculations: the picture of a man sweating behind bars in a B. Altman & Co. advertisement (“Are you facing a 90-day sentence?”), a movie review of Devil’s Plot, and a floor-level peek up the skirt of a woman strapped into the seat of a Colonial Airlines plane to Canada. Father’s Day ads for sizzling steaks. “The Mighty Atom” is dead. TONIGHT AT 8:30. “Something to fit every taste.”
[ . . . ] What compels the attention and taps the wellsprings of prophecy on these pilgrimages is not this announcement that little Arlene Riddett, 15, of Yonkers, won the girls’ championship in the 28th annual marbles tournament in Asbury Park, New Jersey, nor that picture of two East Berlin demonstrators throwing stones at Russian tanks on Leipzigerplatz, but the fact that these things touch each other. [ . . . ] The government of Argentina orders the price of theater tickets cut by 25% and the President of the United States is given a large toy model of Smokey Bear. The execution of an unemployed housepainter in Berlin takes shape beside the report that a new collection of wall coverings and shower curtains offers a variety of choices to homemakers who wish to decorate the bathroom: BATH WALLPAPERS / ARE EASY TO CLEAN. “Panorama” is one of the wallpaper designs, made up of impressionistic scenes of the country against a background of abstract motifs reminiscent of ancient calligraphy. [ . . . ]66
Even while acknowledging these stories’ inapplicability to the rest of the novel, however, the narrator suggests we should consider these passages part of the general humor of the event, calling them an expression of “Arbitrariness as a principle, allowing us to laugh at the tragic.”67 Why laugh at the tragic and arbitrary, though? Presumably for reasons similar to those that make us laugh in The Sot-Weed Factor: sorting through all the irrelevant juxtaposed information in the news to recognize the tragic events amid the ephemera is often more than we are able to manage. As Elisabeth Viereck writes regarding the novel, we are faced with “Uncertainty no longer springing from the lack of information but stemming from information itself.”68 Similarly a Sing Sing guard tells Nixon later in the novel, “It’s funny, isn’t it, Mr. Nixon? [ . . . ] How billions and billions of words get spoken every day, like all these we’ve been speaking on the way down here, for example, and for some reason—or for maybe no reason at all—a few of them stick, and they’re all we’ve got afterwards of everything that’s happened.”69 The surplus of words makes us conscious of the likelihood we will focus on the wrong ones.
However, the equalizing force of The Sot-Weed Factor’s carnivalesque cannot fully take hold in The Public Burning because of the presence of Uncle Sam. Barth’s characters, no matter their pretensions, are each at the mercy of plot strings beyond their control; Coover’s Uncle Sam, though, appears legitimately marvelous and will not be so readily leveled. His authority over American identity forces other characters to constantly fear being made the butt of everyone else’s mockery. In The Sot-Weed Factor, the ungovernable New World finally allows everyone some authenticity because no one can make a claim to total authenticity, but in the Cold War–era United States of The Public Burning, which fears the outside threat of communism—as Molly Hite reminds us, the Rosenbergs were often tarred as “inauthentic,” impostor Americans—the characters are unable to reach that resolution.70
This becomes most obvious in the novel’s final section, taking place at the ritual Times Square public execution, where the cruft produced by the excessive spectacle causes ceaseless laughing but confuses that laughter’s focus. As the execution approaches, readers are overloaded by excessive lists. In the scenes recounting the preparations in Times Square, beginning in earnest around chapter 20, the heretofore controlled back-and-forth between cruft and satiric commentary soon becomes unbalanced in the former’s direction. Chapter 20 names seventeen categories of VIPs in attendance, as well as fifteen human movie stars, several more cartoon ones, and dozens more popular singers, athletes, and other celebrities.71 This, however, is nothing in comparison to chapter 24’s list of the nicknames of thirty-four presidents reanimated to parade on the square, adjacent to a list of fifty-four American archetypes (e.g., “Roving Gamblers, Lumberjacks, Johnny Rebs and Damyankees, Sheepherders and Cattle Kings”), all marching while the crowd affirms an avalanche of the blandest Cold War slogans.72 And even chapter 24’s excesses appear concise next to chapter 26’s account of dozens of generic functionaries from dozens of generic institutions on hand (e.g., “all the auxiliary personnel who serve the three federal branches, all the agencies, bureaus, departments, commissions, institutes, foundations, boards, councils, societies, administrations, appeal and claims courts, funds, organizations, banks”), or to Betty Crocker’s roll call of forty-two congressional representatives and ninety-six senators.73
When this cruft is combined with a series of absurd, rapid-fire comic sketches, produced under the conceit of a contest among the nation’s celebrities to make entertainment out of the Rosenbergs’ letters, the scene becomes overwhelming to the point of being infectiously funny without it ever being clear what we are laughing at. Though many critics have claimed that these comedy routines suggest Hollywood’s ideological complicity with the government, Coover’s routines are too zany to either scapegoat the Rosenbergs or satirize American ideology. For the most part, the stars’ characteristic physical and linguistic creativity—for example, the Astaire-Rogers dance number incorporating a mesh visitation screen, an Abbott and Costello number about “who goes first” to the execution, a Hope-Crosby-Lamour “Road to Radiance” sketch—generates not hostile mockery or exaggerated self-parody but the slapstick, punning comedy of vaudeville, creating grotesque incongruities from the execution materials.74 This approach climaxes during the Marx Brothers routine, paced so quickly (in the brothers’ characteristic style) that the audience laughs mostly at the pure speed of schematic switches. Here is Groucho as Julius Rosenberg and Chico as the jail keeper:
GROUCHO: I’ll name anybody! My mother, my agent, even my mistress!
CHICO: Whatta you sayin’? You ain’t got a misteriss! You ain’ even got a cockyerbine!
GROUCHO: I’ll name her too!
CHICO: Whatta you gonna name her?
GROUCHO: (singing and rolling his eyes) I think I’ll name her “Jasmine” . . .
CHICO: Jas’yours?
GROUCHO: (continuing) . . . Cuz she’s mighty lak’ a rose!
CHICO: Oh, a Pinko, eh? We’re getting to da bottomma dis!
GROUCHO: You been there, too, hunh?
CHICO: She’sa da one what’s stole-a da bum’ eh?
GROUCHO: She didn’t steal it, she was born with it!
CHICO: And she gave it to da Russians?
GROUCHO: She gave it to everybody!75
These jokes less satirize the Rosenbergs than send up the usual targets of both the Marxes and the carnivalesque, the frailties of language and the human body.
Consequently citizens expecting to mock the Rosenbergs—and critics wishing to vindicate them—find laughter directed back from their intended targets toward human weakness generally. The former try to submerge themselves within the communal experience of laughter, but the conflicted aims of that laughter prevent them from realizing Bakhtinian rejuvenation: “Out front, a hundred million mouths open wide, a hundred million sets of teeth spring apart like dental exhibits, a hundred million bellies quake, and a hundred million throats constrict and spasm, gasp and wheeze, as America laughs. At much the same things everybody laughs at everywhere: sex, death, danger, the enemy, the inevitable, all the things that hurt about growing up, something that Americans especially, suddenly caught with the whole world in their hands, are loath to do. What makes them laugh hardest, though, are jokes about sexual inadequacy—a failure of power—and the cruder the better.”76 This is not really the “cold war public as a mindless, conformist mass,” as Paul Maltby would have it.77 The crowd does nothing stupid or immoral by laughing at dirty jokes: their laughter is explicitly universal rather than particular to a historical ideology. It is unclear, though, whether that universal impulse is to laugh at themselves communally or to target others and assert their own superiority. To do the former would require them to identify with the soon-to-be-executed Rosenbergs, which the political context forbids, even though some may recognize how closely their uncontrollable spasms resemble those shortly to be provoked by the Rosenbergs’ electrocution. Given the stakes, they would likely prefer their laughter to be more clearly oriented—just as most critics would prefer Coover’s scene make a clearer satire of the American establishment—but the question of who or what is being mocked here is not clearly resolved.
Likely for this reason, everyone is relieved when a bewildered Nixon stumbles onto stage—magically transported from his inept and messy seduction encounter with Ethel at Sing Sing—with his pants down, the words “I AM A SCAMP” written across his ass in Ethel’s lipstick, allowing him to become the joke’s new butt.78 Ever the clown, Nixon is unable to get his pants back up but manages to convince the crowd that, since the Rosenberg affair has demonstrated national vulnerability, they ought to recommit America to openness together with a communal gesture, and with the rhetorical flourish “I am asking everyone tonight to step forward—right now!—and drop his pants for America!” he successfully redirects the laughter away from himself.79 But where has the laughter now been turned? The crowd is uncertain: many appear enthusiastic about communal nudity, “staggering about in tight little circles to cheer the others on,” but there are also “scattered screeches of protest from the timid.”80 Meanwhile Nixon’s novel-long vacillation between identifying with the Rosenbergs as fellow Americans and demonizing them in hopes of political advancement makes his intentions similarly muddled.
Uncle Sam’s arrival onstage to refocus the event on the Rosenbergs finally settles the confusion. When Nixon and the crowd insist that Sam drop his pants too, he objects they are “going too far!”: Sam may be willing to let individual Americans degrade themselves by exposing their lower halves, but America itself will not do so.81 Though the crowd does badger him into exposure, the revelation of his penis causes a blackout, at which point the fiction shoots so far into the marvelous that any satiric recognition becomes impossible. Flying through the darkness and casting fireballs like a mad genie, Sam regains control of the situation and brings the event back to its original purpose of executing the Rosenbergs—though only after the first attempt to electrocute Ethel fails and the event’s VIPs rush to the stage to repull the switch, sending Ethel’s body, in a final opaquely grotesque image, “held only at head, groin, and one leg, [ . . . ] whipped like a sail in a high wind, flapping out at the people like one of those trick images in a 3-D movie.”82
What exactly are we to take from this bizarre conclusion, whose assault of comedy, cruft, and the fantastic prevents either crowd or readers from understanding their own laughter? Regarding this ambiguity Thomas Pughe notes that “there is nothing that is truly liberating, nothing that is ‘other’ about this episode [ . . . ]—it appears merely bizarre and ridiculous,” adding that readers “will laugh a halting, painful and lonely laugh, provoked by the crisis of his or her reading experience.”83 I think this conclusion is basically correct, though actual readers will often dodge this crisis by simply asserting clearer satiric motives. I would only add that the ambiguity of the novel’s comedy is propelled by its submergence within cruft. The general disorientation caused by the enormous lists and rapid-fire humor prevents readers from processing the scene as clearly as they otherwise might.
That may be why the final scene, in which Uncle Sam sodomizes Nixon so as to “incarnate” his spirit for a future presidency, feels more narratively pat, if more repulsive, than the rapes in The Sot-Weed Factor. Unlike Barth’s rapists, Uncle Sam does not share his victim’s weaknesses. When he concludes the book by quoting George M. Cohan’s “Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye”—a fast-paced patter song, incidentally, about a father who advises his son to keep people so amused with rapid-fire slapstick that he can avoid emotional ties with them—the laughter to which he refers appears less about communal acknowledgment of weakness than exercising power over others.84 Yet it returns the book to conventional satire by rooting the source of our presidents’ recognizably wearied mannerisms (“Hoover’s glazed stare, Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile”) in their penetration by the weight of American heritage.85 If the climactic spectacle is too overwhelming for us to recognize what relationship we hold to our nation, we can at least recognize that its power is incomparably beyond that of our individual minds, and if we try to mock it, the joke will very likely be turned back at our expense.
Still, this discussion of cruft and laughter will not help us explain the passage with which we began the chapter, the party scene in The Recognitions. Even Moore admits that “the ferocity of Gaddis’ satire, the contempt he heaps upon nearly everyone in the novel, betrays the stern moralist who doesn’t so much invite the reader to laugh at the human foibles of his characters as to recoil in horror.”86 The novel’s plot as a whole—nominally centered around a commercially unsuccessful mid-twentieth-century painter named Wyatt Gwyon, who is recruited to forge “newly discovered” pictures by fifteenth-century Flemish masters, but also featuring myriad subplots involving frauds and duplicities crafted by other aspiring criminals and artists—is simply too bleak and brutal to create much humor. It probably would have been impossible to sustain the leavening impulse of The Sot-Weed Factor’s carnivalesque, after all, through a thousand-page parade of (by my approximate count) four rapes, two castrations, eight characters institutionalized or otherwise gone insane, four attempted murders (three successful), four deaths by gruesome disease, five deaths by gruesome accident (including two in separate building collapses), and countless suicide attempts, not to mention many other fates so bizarre as to defy categorization.87
Given the caustic invective of the narrative voice, there might be an argument that the book’s satire is of the harsher, Juvenalian variety. There seems to be general consensus that the book’s goal is a caustic “exposure” of the fraudulence of a whole range of things, including contemporary mainstream society, New York’s upper-class and bohemian subculture, religious and scientific epistemology, and modernist concepts of authenticity, tradition, and originality.88 These views are perhaps best summed by John Johnston’s claim that the book is “an extended contemporary Menippean satire directed against everything sham, fake, and imitative—artworks, ideas, identities, products, even languages—in the nascently consumerist, mass-media-directed American society of the 1950s.”89 In this view the book’s rhetorical distance is generated primarily by Wyatt, praised for the “transformational power of [his] artistic imagination.”90
However, valorizing Wyatt in this way is problematic if we are to consider The Recognitions a satire on fraudulence. Wyatt’s most distinct characteristic, after all, is his ability to create forgeries indistinguishable from fifteenth-century paintings. According to Johnston, Wyatt’s virtuosity “goes so far as to throw into question even the existence of some founding first or authentic version,” erasing the distinction between original and reproduction via the poststructuralist notion of “simulacra.”91 As we noted earlier, however, that distinction between real and fake is necessary to any definition of fraudulence in the first place. In other words critics appear to justify Gaddis’s swaths of banal text on the grounds that they expose fraudulence but then apotheosize the book’s protagonist for deconstructing fraudulence as a coherent concept. Tony Tanner asks, “if the best artist is the best forger, what does ‘originality’ mean?,” and we may extend his question by asking why, if the character most skilled in falsehood is the one critics most admire, they are so confident in attacking inauthenticity.92
This paradox extends more generally toward the novel’s satiric status. To again invoke Bogel, the counterfeiter and satirist are analogous because they both possess the ability to make distinctions between false and true problematic. However, if that distinction vanishes, they cannot produce their desired effects: just as a forger’s work depends on vendors’ respect for authentic currency, a satirist needs readers to respect some kind of authentic values to find his or her targets worthy, on any grounds, of criticism. Postmodern critics may be wary of reifying a distinction between authentic and inauthentic, but if one deconstructs the distinction entirely, one does away with the difference between satire and satirized, too. Consequently one can no longer argue that the representation of doltish characters can critique superficiality, because the clear norm from which superficiality can be critiqued vanishes: banal text is simple banal text. One must consequently conclude, to recall Franco Moretti’s comment on Bouvard and Pécuchet, that a book like The Recognitions “abolish[es] the difference between a book on stupidity, and a stupid book.”93 Yet outside the hostile early reviews, no one argues The Recognitions has done this. It is among the book’s great achievements, in fact, that its readers can neither consistently rely on nor consistently reject its characters’ authenticity: instead we must constantly struggle to consider how seriously to consider their attitudes on art, morality, finance, and religion.
What should we do, though, about the long stretches of purely stupid dialogue? Johan Thielemans’s claim that the book’s party scenes are designed “to deal with chaos, by being chaotic” in themselves will not suffice, because western literature has spent centuries developing literary techniques by which satire may treat the dull without being dull.94 As I mentioned in chapter 2, for instance, Flaubert’s last novel, despite Moretti’s comment, is an example of how these tactics may be skillfully deployed. Consider the passage below, in which Bouvard and Pécuchet survey their new country estate:
Bouvard, passing near the arbor, discovered the plaster statue of a woman beneath its branches. She was pulling up her skirt with two fingers, her knees bent, looking over her shoulder as if afraid of being discovered.
“Oh, pardon me! Don’t mind us!”
And they found this joke so hilarious that, twenty times a day, for more than three weeks, they kept repeating it.95
The passage’s satiric craft is especially apparent in its final sentence, which exaggerates the number of repetitions but compresses the text representing them to minimize the joke’s dulling effect on readers. Similarly its free indirect style allows the passage to maintain enough proximity to the friends’ mindset so that it becomes easier to recognize our own tendency toward mechanism, while still keeping its distance from the pair’s attitudes. In Gaddis’s party scene, by contrast, no remark is treated as so dull or stupid that it warrants elision into narration: they read the way Flaubert’s vignette might have if he’d directly represented each of the four hundred utterances of Bouvard’s joke over dozens of pages.
This style is particularly striking because The Recognitions’ first chapter, a searing novella about Reverend Gwyon’s confrontation with the shadows of older traditions on his journey to Spain, brilliantly employs such Flaubertian nuance and concision. This approach, though, all but vanishes after the first chapter—indeed from Gaddis’s corpus entirely—with the remaining scenes featuring substantially more direct discourse. Here I must make an argument that will not be popular among The Recognitions’ admirers, but which is necessary to articulate the book’s weirdly brilliant innovations: as a result of this shift, much of the novel’s middle suffers and, in particular, fails as satire. This is not to say that there are not some good satiric moments, but the narrative voice does not manage these effects as masterfully as it does in the opening. At its worst it devolves into heavy-handed diatribes that are little more than the warmed-over clichés that postwar highbrows spouted about the pernicious effects of mass culture.96
However, this strategy allows Gaddis to experiment with cruft in the resulting lengthy dialogues. These passages first occur early in the second chapter, where, after following Wyatt to Paris, the narrator scans the city’s cafés and reports several patches of disconnected speech: “—Voici votre Perrier m’sieur.—Mais j’ai dit café au lait, pas d’eau Perrier . . . A small man in a sharkskin suit said,—Son putas, y nadas mas. Putas, putas, putas . . . Someone said,—Picasso . . . Someone else said,—Kafka . . . A girl said,—You deliberately misunderstand me. Of course I like art. Ask anybody.”97 Given that this chapter begins by proclaiming the city’s “infinite vulgarity,” it would seem this dialogue intends to satirize Parisian superficiality, yet upon inspection there is nothing blameworthy or even interesting about it: it reflects on no one poorly to have mentioned Picasso or Kafka, mistaken a drink order, or insisted on their own appreciation for art.98 Perhaps the narrator has so little regard for the Parisian intellectual climate that he assumes the mere mention of Picasso ought to suggest vacuity to his audience, but this would be an extremely complacent satiric effort.
What the passage even more notably lacks, though, is Wyatt, whom the narrative has not yet rediscovered in Europe. Given that none of these voices appears to develop into anything more than a line of dull speech on its own, we likely assume that our protagonist must be among them: why bother describing such dull café conversation otherwise? Only after unsuccessfully seeking some attribute of Wyatt’s voice in these bland exchanges over four and a half pages do we learn that, “With no idea of Paris when he arrived, [Wyatt] had been fortunate enough to find quarters in this neighborhood which maintained anonymity in the world of arts.”99 In other words, while prompting us to scan for a sign of recognition, the book has not only delayed providing one but has placed it somewhere unexpected, first heightening our attention but then discouraging it by making the text through which we comb so little worth attending. As Gregory Comnes notes, among The Recognitions’ odder stylistic moves is how it does “not distingui[sh] between meaningful and irrelevant background detail, as most traditional novels do.”100 The textual space taken up by the novel’s events is often far out of proportion to its importance, with unimportant passages given enormous space and important ones minimized.
As befits the novel’s title, then, when we return to New York, Gaddis constantly uses imbalances like these to impede readers’ ability to recognize the importance of what they read. That clutter’s cognitive impact is the real source of the novel’s famous difficulty. It is telling that while the majority of Recognitions criticism focuses on Wyatt, he appears in less than half of the book and his name goes unmentioned after the third chapter: the rest of the narrative both proliferates inconsequential exchanges among minor characters while consistently obscuring its most important plot thread, forcing us to look for telltale behavioral tics or speech patterns to register the protagonist’s presence. Many similar tactics may be observed elsewhere in the book. For instance, in one midnovel subplot, the would-be playwright Otto seeks a reunion with his father, who turns out to be the otherwise undistinguished company man Mr. Pivner, the subject of several brief scenes otherwise unrelated to the rest of the book. Though most criticism treats this relationship as self-evident, Gaddis delays making it explicit for three hundred pages after Pivner’s first appearance. In particular Otto’s last name is never stated. There are several hints about their relationship: the narrator mentions, for instance, that Pivner wears rimless glasses, and later Otto is reported as hearing his father describe those glasses over the phone; similarly Otto hears that he should wear his green scarf to the meeting to match his father, and Pivner is described as wearing a green scarf.101 These are very minor details, however, listed among the novel’s many other unimportant data (e.g., Pivner’s receding hairline, the color of his suit), and Gaddis deliberately obscures them by placing them in parenthetical asides and spacing them hundreds of pages apart. This seems designed so that readers will initially fail to recognize the connection, just as Otto misrecognizes counterfeiter Frank Sinisterra as his father when Pivner is delayed by a seizure just prior to their meeting.102
This tactic of disorientation via unimportant details is most evident in the extended party and bar scenes, featuring large casts of intermittently identified minor characters engaged in dull cross conversations over subjects of little importance, culminating in the one with whose opening exchanges we began this chapter. Again this scene’s dialogue is characterized not by clichés but clichéd representations of clichés, combined with context-free non sequiturs that are neither insightful nor satiric (e.g., “—Mendelssohn Schmendelssohn, someone else said.—I’m talking about music”).103 As I pointed out, it cannot succeed as satire because it does not generate incongruity between different schemas for social behavior, but simply plays out one tedious script to great length. What it does do, however, is make itself so stupid as to render the characters and readers so dull-witted that they have trouble recognizing more important things going on around them.
For instance, after appearing and disappearing several times in the scene’s first half, Esther’s beloved kitten gets lost.104 After going unmentioned for over thirty pages, the kitten finally reappears at the chapter’s end, when a fight breaks out between Anselm and Don Bildow. The partygoers’ response begins here with the Argentine trade commissioner, to whom Ed Feasley has been trying to sell a battleship:
—Yes I was told to expect this sort of thing in New York.
—Yes but I mean Chrast don’t go away, or we’ll both go, let’s both go to your hotel, I’ll stay there tonight.
—But in another room.
—Chrast yes.
—I was warned about that sort of thing in New York, his companion commented, adjusting his perfectly adjusted tie.
—Oh Rose, Esther said to where her sister sat on the floor in the dark with the records.—Aren’t you tired?
—Are you having a nice party?
Esther put her face in her hands, and felt her sister’s arm round her neck.—Oh Rose. Rose.
The hand under her became rigid, the paralysis ran up her arm, through her shoulders and neck, her face yellowing as the blood drained from behind its bronzed canvas.—Stanley . . . Agnes Deigh whispered, staring at him bent over Anselm, an arm around Anselm.
—You see, it’s all right now, Stanley said, gripping his shoulder but unable to raise it from the floor. Anselm opened his eyes.
In the hand she drew from under her, the white nails clutched a limp cinnamon-colored body.—I thought . . . it was something. Agnes Deigh said weakly to herself. Then she looked around quickly, opened her bag and pulled handfuls of things out which she stuffed in her coat pocket, to snap it closed a moment later upon the lifeless kitten. She summoned her voice in,—Stanley . . .
—And now, you don’t have to fight it any more, you . . . Anselm’s arm was flung around him, and Anselm’s unshaven face tore at Stanley’s face with the kiss.105
As with most speech throughout the scene, the dialogue communicates nothing to anyone: Feasley and the Argentine simply repeat phrases they have thrown at each other for the past forty pages, Esther murmurs meaningless words to her impaired sister, and Stanley mutters clichés to Anselm. However, though no one is saying anything of importance, their propagation of the party’s chatter prevents anyone from realizing what has happened to the cat, whom Agnes has sat on and killed. Even Agnes does not realize what she has done, apparently, given her worried reaction to her purse being stolen several pages later.106
Gaddis works hard to obscure this moment from his readers, too. The cat’s death is recounted in a prepositional phrase concluding an aside between speech tags, and the previous paragraphs’ anticipation of the event are misleadingly described: when Agnes reaches beneath her and suspects what she has done, the her (“The hand under her”) is placed so that its antecedent appears to be Esther, not Agnes, making the sentence about the former’s embarrassment rather than the latter’s horror. Similarly most of Agnes’s reaction to the kitten’s death is reported before what she has done has been revealed, prompting us to misattribute it toward one of the other things that has been disturbing her through the novel, like her relationship with Stanley. Even the phrase “cinnamon-colored body” does not express exactly what has happened, since the cat’s coloring has not been previously described. In other words the cat’s death is clearly reported to readers by only two words dissolved in an entire scene’s worth of cruft misdirection, to the extent that it becomes very easy to glaze over and miss the dead cat as entirely as the partygoers do.
This is not the only example in the chapter. None of the scene’s three most consequential plot threads—Agnes’s accidental crushing of the kitten, Maude Munk’s abduction of the unexplained baby crawling around the apartment, and Charley Dickens’s unsuccessful suicide attempts—take up more than a page of text, most of which is scattered several lines at a time across the scene’s four-score pages of jabber. The latter does include some passages popular with critics—including Stanley’s stuttering thoughts about fragmentation and tradition, Benny’s blather about how the intellectual class doesn’t understand “real life,” and Otto’s conveyance of Wyatt’s half-baked criticism of America’s youth-centered culture—but to take any of these passages as either serious philosophical statements or satires of their speakers’ self-importance would reflect poorly on the book’s craftsmanship.107 Better we see them as blending into the rest of the stupidity. As with the Brueghel that Wyatt forges, the scene’s suffering, in Auden’s famous lines, “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,” as unnoticed as Icarus’s leg in the bottom right corner of his most famous landscape.108
The Recognitions’ readers, then, must decide how to avoid getting bogged down in the constant hum of idiocy while also observing the important events that occur in that background. As the novel comes to its close, this process becomes exceedingly hard. On the one hand, some sections descend so purely into cruft that any concerted attempt to recognize anything within them would be wasted mental effort. Agnes’s five-page letter of apology to Dr. Weisgall, whom she’d accused of child abuse, contains barely a coherent sentence.109 Yet abandoning recalcitrant text is dangerous, too, as may be seen in two of the book’s final scenes, in which Arny Munk and Stanley each decide to ignore a brief, incomprehensible message they assume is too unimportant to be worth bothering about, respectively a warning in French encountered while the former is trying to put out a hotel-room fire and one in Italian while the latter is practicing an organ composition. We all ignore stimuli like this every day, of course, since we are constantly faced with a million sources of ambient information, almost all of which are of no consequence. Arny and Stanley are not so fortunate, however, because ignoring these messages causes each to have a building collapse on and kill him.110 This is illustrative of why The Recognitions is relatively humorless when compared to the other two novels we have discussed in this chapter. The penalties Gaddis administers on his characters for even the briefest slips in attention and memory are often sadistic and arbitrary. One hopes that Gaddis did not mistake the asymmetrical relation of author and audience for an exemption from human limitations: when the satirist returns to the real world, after all, his mind does not so easily encompass its unimaginable variety as it does that of his fictional one.