COUNTERFEITING COUNTERFEIT RELIGION
He even said once, that the saints were counterfeits of Christ, and that Christ was a counterfeit of God.
—William Gaddis
WILLIAM GADDIS’S The Recognitions is one of the most theologically sophisticated novels ever written. It is also one of the richest and most difficult works of fiction in any language. Gaddis’s ambition is as large as his book: his aim is nothing less than to write the last Christian novel. To read this prescient work is to gaze into a mirror and discover ourselves anew. The events recounted in The Recognitions take place in the time between belief and unbelief. While modernization and secularization make belief impossible for many erstwhile faithful, the memory of belief and the assurance it brings defer the advent of a thoroughly postmodern age of unbelief. Though never explicitly stated, Gaddis suspends his narrative between a series of polarities:
Devil/Christ
Catholic/Protestant
Europe/America
Completion/Incompletion
Original/Counterfeit
Transcendent/Immanent
Depth/Surface
Negation/Affirmation
Homoiousian/Homoousian
Unbelief/Belief
Fake/Real
Gaddis’s consistent purpose throughout The Recognitions is to subvert such simple oppositions by showing how each term folds into the other to create a nonsynthetic third that joins without precisely uniting differences.
Far from merely dismissing religion, Gaddis recognizes that the convolutions of contemporary society and culture cannot be understood apart from the ancient theological preoccupations from which they have emerged. The title and two prefatory epigrams frame the theological issues the novel explores. Gaddis borrows his title from the fourth-century work mistakenly attributed to Clement, the third bishop of Rome, who is best known for his letter to the church at Corinth (96–97 CE) that established the authority of Rome by formulating the doctrine of apostolic succession. The pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, some historians maintain, is the first Christian novel. Uncertainty surrounding the authorship of the original work poses the question of authenticity that preoccupies Gaddis. Quoting this little-known work in an epigram to one of his chapters, he indicates that The Recognitions is not only theologically allusive but also philosophically suggestive:
This is as if a drunk man should think himself to be sober, and should act indeed in all respects as a drunk man, and yet think himself to be sober, and should wish to be called so by others. Thus, therefore, are those who do not know what is true, yet hold some appearance of knowledge, and do many evil things as if they were good, and hasten to destruction as if it were salvation.1
In what he intends to be the last Christian novel, Gaddis returns to the central issues raised in the first Christian novel: the problem of the relation between truth and appearance and, by extension, the possibility or impossibility of salvation. The title of the novel is carefully chosen—the word recognition marks the intersection of epistemological and ontological questions. On the one hand, if, following Plato and his theological descendents, knowledge involves re-cognition, then truth exists prior to and independent of human knowledge. The transcendence of truth renders worldly appearances faint shadows of a reality that is never totally present. Salvation can be achieved, if at all, only through the flight from or negation of the material world. On the other hand, if, following Nietzsche and his a/theological descendents, knowledge is a human fabrication, then truth is a fiction, which might or might not be re-cognized as such. In the wake of the disappearance of transcendent truth, worldly appearances are the only “reality.” Salvation can be achieved, if at all, only through the involvement in and affirmation of the material world in all of its horror and glory.
Between the title and the first chapter, Gaddis inserts an epigram drawn from Irenaeus’s Against Heresies:
Nihil cavum neque sine signo apud Deum.
With God, nothing is empty of meaning.
Persuaded that Gnosticism posed a serious threat to the early Christian community, Irenaeus developed an extended polemic directed primarily against Valentinus, who had taught in Rome between 135 and 160. According to the conventional view, Valentinus, like other Gnostics, was a radical dualist for whom the world as we know it was created by a lower deity and remains an irredeemable realm of evil and corruption.2 The only hope for imprisoned humanity is to escape the material realm through secret knowledge (gnosis) imparted by an alien divine messenger from the realm of pure light. Since Valentinus denies that the highest god is the creator and does not believe that the redemptive messenger becomes incarnate, Irenaeus argues that Gnostic speculation drains all purpose from worldly existence. For Christians, he maintains, the interrelated doctrines of creation, incarnation, and redemption (i.e., bodily resurrection) confirm the abiding goodness of the created order and thereby render life in this world meaningful. The translation of the line Gaddis selects for his epigram is ambiguous: “With God, nothing is without meaning” means, first, that with God everything is filled with meaning and, second, that with God nothing or, more precisely, nothingness (Nihil, das Nichts) is without meaning, i.e., has no meaning. Efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, the affirmation of God cannot completely silence the echo of nothing and the nihilism it harbors. By opening The Recognitions with this line from Irenaeus, Gaddis implicitly suggests that without God everything is empty of meaning.
To fathom the depthless depths of his world, Gaddis returns to the figure who has come to embody modernity—Faust. Though the roots of the Faust legend can be traced to ancient Gnostic and alchemical myths and rituals, Gaddis identifies the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions as its origin.
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. What? Yes, it’s really the beginning of the whole Faust legend. But one can hardly… eh? My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn’t he?
(373)
To underscore his Faustian ambitions, Gaddis cites Goethe’s Faust in the epigram to the first chapter.
Mephistopheles (more softly): What’s going on?
Wagner (more softly): A man is being made.3
These seemingly simple lines signal two themes that are central in the novel: creativity and originality. What Gaddis gives with one hand, he takes away with the other. Layers of citations simultaneously frame his analysis and deliberately call into question its originality. As if to mock his own literary ambitions, Gaddis freely admits that his work is not original but is a copy of a work whose author is a fake. His novel, in other words, is a copy of a copy whose origin is unknown. Just as Faust sold his soul to the devil, so there is something devilish about the games Gaddis is playing in The Recognitions. Throughout the Western tradition, the devil is repeatedly associated with mimicry and, by extension, duplicity, deception, and deceit. What makes the conjuring tricks of the devil so disturbing to Christians is the way in which they simultaneously usurp and mock God’s creative power. What if the source of creative power were not divine light but darker powers, forces, and energies circulating through human beings? And what if something demonic lurks in God’s creative power?
In the romantic period, which effectively begins with Goethe’s poetry and Kant’s critical philosophy, the creative artist displaces the creator God as the source of transformational change. As the religious prophet gives way to the avant-garde artist, art becomes an elixir that holds the promise of salvation.4 The scene between Mephistopheles and Faust’s assistant, Wagner, which Gaddis cites, takes place in an alchemical laboratory where a homunculus is being produced.5 The dream of the alchemist is to become God by assuming his creative power. This ambition finds its most explicit expression in the effort to create a simulacrum of a human being. Alchemy, which began in ancient mining and metallurgical rituals intended to produce pure gold from base metals, eventually became what Mircea Eliade aptly describes as “a spiritual technique and soteriology.”6 In this esoteric tradition, gold is valued less for its material worth than for its power in the economy of redemption. By refining base metals into gold, the alchemist seeks to purify both self and world. The goal of alchemy is to become as good as gold—pure gold, which is the most rarefied form of the prima materia that forms the true substance of all things. As such, gold is, in effect, God, and to become as good as gold is, indeed, to become as good as God. Alchemists labeled the process by which base metals become gold sublimation. By the twentieth century, this esoteric tradition was transformed into a new psychic therapy. Freud, in effect, rereads alchemical rituals as psychological processes. Sublimation, he argues, transforms base instincts into the highest religious and artistic ideas, ideals, and images. For the psychologist, as for the alchemist, sublimation is therapeutic even if not always salvific. In the era between belief and unbelief, Gaddis asks whether art can redeem life any better than ancient myths and rituals.
By the latter half of the twentieth century, the restless striving of the Faustian subject had, for many artists and critics, led to a sense of exhaustion. Paris, the capital of modernism, which, according to Gaddis, was “synonymous with the word art,” “lay like a promise accomplished” (73, 63). This accomplishment, however, did not bring completion, satisfaction, or fulfillment. Stanley, the only character who continues to believe in the redemptive power of art, captures the tenor of the time between no longer and not yet: “And yet, well… you know I never read Nietzsche, but I did come across something he said somewhere, somewhere where he mentioned, ‘the melancholia of things completed’” (599). In the post-age of The Recognitions, originality and the new beginnings it brings are distant memories haunting the imagination of sojourners destined to err in a world of forgeries and counterfeits, where images are always recycled and signs are signs of other signs. In this recombinant culture, motions without emotions are symptoms of the indifference and emptiness that accompany the loss of purpose. Unlike the superficial personae of his later novel JR, Gaddis is not at home in the culture of fakes he finds around him and is deeply unsettled by something that slips away every time he approaches it or it approaches him. In a conversation with his wife, Wyatt, the main character in The Recognitions, confesses:
—There’s always the sense….—the sense of recalling something, of almost reaching it, and holding it… She leaned over to him, her hand caught his wrist and the coal of tobacco glowed, burning his fingers. In the darkness she did not notice.
—And then it’s… escaped again. It’s escaped again, and there’s only a sense of disappointment, of something irretrievably lost.
—A cigarette, she said.—Why do you always leave me so quickly afterward? Why do you always want a cigarette right afterward?
—Reality, he answered.
(119)
Wyatt’s response is as duplicitous as his world. Is reality what is lost forever, or is reality nothing more than a cigarette after a good fuck? In either case, reality remains elusive, and what once was recognized as the ground of being immediately turns to ash.
This sense of something “irretrievably lost” is what drives Gaddis on and on and on for almost a thousand pages, until his narrative becomes overwhelmingly excessive. It seems as though he cannot stop writing. As long as the end does not arrive, the irretrievably lost might be found. The urgency of the search transforms the nature of the work: the narrative repeatedly turns back on itself to create strange loops that never come full circle. Chapter upon chapter, association upon association, allusion upon allusion, the work unravels and becomes hypertextual—click on any name, word, term, idea, or image, and you are led to another node in a seemingly infinite textual web. The threads of this web intersect but are not united in the central character.
Wyatt is the son of a sixth-generation New England Congregational minister who, after the death of his wife, undergoes a crisis of faith. This character is, however, less a person than a persona whose name is a pseudonym or series of pseudonyms. After his parents named him Stephen, in memory of the first Christian martyr, his aunt changed his name to Wyatt, which had been a traditional family name. In the years following his crisis of faith, a sinister counterfeiter with whom he becomes involved gives him the fake name Stephan Asche, which Wyatt eventually transforms back into his “original” name Stephen. The multiplicity of names suggests the slippage of identity among many of the characters in the novel. As seemingly distinct personae fade into one another in a play of shifty masks, it is often difficult to be sure who is speaking; indeed, voices often seem to “come from nowhere” (652). In a rare interview given in 1986, Gaddis described all the characters as “reflecting facets of the central figure, who, for all practical purposes, disappears.”7 Expressing growing frustration with Wyatt’s insistent reserve, his wife reflects:
Moments like this (and they came more often) she had the sense that he did not exist; or, to re-examine him, sitting there looking in another direction, in terms of substance and accident, substance the imperceptible underlying reality, accident the properties inherent in the substance which are perceived by the senses: the substance transformed by consecration, but the accidents remain what they were.
(94)
Here, as elsewhere, theology becomes anthropology: the words of the Eucharist prefigure the transformation of the self. In the Christian ritual, God, as if by magic, becomes incarnate in flesh and blood. Hoc est meum corpus—hocus-pocus. Through ecclesiastical fiat, substance becomes accident, and, conversely, accident becomes substance. Distraught by her husband’s elusiveness, Esther does not realize that transubstantiation renders the accidental substantial, thereby reconciling appearance and reality. Gaddis’s artful rewriting of the word extends the incarnational process by revealing the heterodox implications of orthodox theology. If the divine is incarnate, the real can be found in space and time. Accordingly, natural and historical life is no longer tragic but now can be re-cognized as the divine comedy it has always been. Gaddis admits that while his work is “sometimes a heavy-handed satire,” he nonetheless “wanted it to be a large comic novel in the great tradition.”8 Indeed, The Recognitions can be the last Christian novel only if it is a comedy. One of the least important characters expresses one of the most important points: “What’s tragedy to you is an anecdote to everybody else. We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are” (640). Slipping and sliding between the sublime and the ridiculous, The Recognitions becomes a comedy of errors bordering on slapstick.
Yet this often unmanageable novel is also filled with death. Amid the overwhelming plethora of details and digressions, it is possible to discern a structure organized around three deaths: Camilla, Wyatt’s mother; Gwyon, Wyatt’s father; and Stanley, Wyatt’s friend.9 Each of these deaths is associated with a pagan festival that has been displaced by a Christian holiday: Samhain—All Saint’s Day, the Feast of Sol Invictus—Christmas, and Eostur—Easter. What unites these religious rituals is their common participation in the seasonal cycles of death and renewal. In a culture of seemingly endless counterfeits, Gaddis asks: are renewal and redemption any longer possible?
Originality is first and foremost a theological issue. In classical philosophy and orthodox theology, God is the creator who is the origin of the universe. In his influential formulation of what eventually became known as the cosmological argument for God’s existence, Aristotle argues from the effects of motion in the world to God as its origin. God is the Unmoved Mover, the first and final cause of all motion necessary for life. This argument rests upon Aristotle’s assumption that an infinite regress is impossible because time is not eternal. Since time is inseparable from motion and, therefore, from change, the temporal domain must originate with an unmoved mover that is unchanging and, thus, eternal. Christian theologians translate Aristotle’s unmoved mover into the Creator, who brings the world into being and sustains its existence. Though their reasons differ, Christians share Aristotle’s rejection of the eternity of creation. Unlike many cosmogonic myths in which the world emerges from the struggle between the timeless forces of chaos and order, which is often embodied in a battle between a goddess and a god, Christianity, in its traditional forms, is an ethical monotheism in which God alone is eternal. Theologians developed the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to express the uniqueness and omnipotence of God. As the fons et origo of everything, God inevitably creates out of nothing.
In the modern period, philosophers and artists translate this theology into anthropology to develop an understanding of human creativity that mimics the divine original. Like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and the Christian creator God, the romantic genius creates out of nothing other than himself. Kant formulates the modern notion of originality in his interpretation of genius, developed in The Critique of Judgment:
From this it may be seen that genius (1) is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given: and not an aptitude in the way of cleverness for what can be learned according to some rule; and that consequently originality must be its primary property. (2) Since there may also be original nonsense, its products must at the same time be models, i.e., be exemplary; and, consequently, though not themselves derived from imitation, they must serve that purpose for others, i.e., as a standard or rule of estimating.
This distinction between original and imitation becomes one of the norms by which fine or high art is distinguished from craft or low art, which eventually becomes known as kitsch. “Imitation,” Kant argues, “becomes aping when the pupil copies everything down to the deformities which the genius only of necessity suffered to remain, because they could hardly be removed without loss of force to the idea.”10 While the original is always new, the copy is already old. So understood, the notion of originality defines a foundational principle of both modernity and modernism. To be modern is to be of the present rather than the past (modernus, from modo, just now); the modern, therefore, is the new, and the new is original rather than derived. The mantra of the modern artist is: “Make it new!” The new, however, is always already old as soon as it appears and must, therefore, be repeatedly replaced. Far from preaching the gospel of modernism, Gaddis believes this obsession with the new is nothing less than a plague.
On the ceiling grew the graph of Stanley’s existence, his central concern: Expendability.
Everything wore out. What was more, he lived in a land where everything was calculated to wear out, made from design to substance with only its wearing out and replacement in view, and that replacement to be replaced…. Phonograph needles? Razor blades? Thrown away entire, when their edges and points were worn out. Automobile batteries? Someone had told him that batteries in European cars lasted for years, but here companies owned those life-long patents, and guarded them while they sold batteries to replace those they had sold a year before. But there was more to it than gross tyranny of business enterprise; and advertising, whose open chancres gaped everywhere, only a symptom of the great disease, this plague of newness.11
(319–320)
As Gaddis spins his complex tale, it becomes clear that America is the land of the new where both modernity and modernism come to devastating completion. Dedicated to the new, modernism can become itself only in and through its own self-negation. The doctrine of the new, however, eventually becomes old, and, when the new becomes old, the old can return anew. In different terms, modernism harbors postmodernism as a condition of its own becoming. The “originality” of postmodern writers and artists is their avowed unoriginality. Their duplicitous works are self-confessed counterfeits of counterfeits, which no longer mask originals. With nothing new to say, artists recycle the cultural debris left by their predecessors.
The Recognitions opens with masquerades, a burial, and the fourteen Stations of the Cross.
Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. But the procession up the foreign hill, bounded by cypress trees, impelled by the monotone chanting of the priest and retarded by hesitations at the fourteen Stations of the Cross (not to speak of the funeral carriage in which she was riding, a white horse-drawn vehicle which resembled a baroque confectionary stand), might have rebuffed the shy countenance of her soul, if it had been discernible.
(3)
Two weeks earlier, Gwyon and Camilla had left their infant son, Stephen, on the “clean Protestant soil of New England” (3) and set sail on the Purdue Victory for Catholic Spain.12 At the midpoint of their voyage, on All Saint’s Day, Camilla is stricken with appendicitis and dies at the hands of the ship’s incompetent surgeon. The date—All Saint’s Day—will prove significant because of the mistaken identity of an eleven-year-old cross-eyed saint, who plays a crucial role in the extended masquerade that follows.
To appreciate the broader implications of this drama, it is necessary to note that All Saint’s Day represents a Christian appropriation of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, known elsewhere as Allhallows Eve or Halloween. After harvesting the crops and securing the flocks, the Celts marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter with this celebration. They believed that at this time
a gathering of supernatural forces occurred as during no other period of the year. The eve and day of Samhain were characterized as a time when the barriers between human and supernatural worlds were weakened or even broken. Otherworldly entities, such as the souls of the dead, were able to visit earthly inhabitants, and humans could take the opportunity to penetrate the domains of the god and supernatural creatures. Fiery tributes and sacrifices of animals, crops, and possibly human beings were made to appease supernatural powers who controlled the fertility of the land.13
When the Celtic roots of Allhallows Eve faded, the custom of adults soliciting tributes of food and drink while dressed in disguises and masks and imitating the gods persisted well into the Christian era. Today’s Halloween obviously harbors traces of these ancient rituals. What makes Samhain so intriguing in this context is the way in which the masquerade confuses the identity of humans and the gods. For those with eyes to see on Allhallows Eve, the whole world becomes a Galilee where God roams in disguise.
The person responsible for Camilla’s death turns out not to be a surgeon but a confidence man named Frank Sinisterra.14
The subsequent inquiry discovered that the wretch (who had spent the rest of the voyage curled in a coil of rope reading alternatively the Book of Job and the Siamese National Railway’s Guide to Bangkok) was no surgeon at all. Mr. Sinisterra was a fugitive traveling under what, at the time of his departure, had seemed the most logical of desperate expedients: a set of false papers he had printed himself. (He had done this work with the same artistic attention to detail that he gave his banknotes, even to using Rembrandt’s formula for the wax ground on his copper plate.)
(5)
A fake who traffics in fakes, Sinisterra’s game is counterfeiting. He escaped federal agents pursuing him on charges of counterfeiting by assuming the guise of the ship’s surgeon. Having set the events of the novel in motion, Sinisterra withdraws until the end of the narrative.
Gwyon refuses to bury Camilla at sea and, much to the dismay of his family and congregation, decides not to return her body to New England but to lay her to rest in the “heathen soil” of Spain. After a prolonged search, he eventually finds a site next to a little girl destined for sainthood in the village of San Zwingli. Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) was not, of course, a Catholic saint but the reformer whose protest eventually led to the Congregationalism Gwyon was paid to preach in New England. Camilla’s death, however, shook his faith and delayed his return to the States. Needing time to reassess his mission in life, Gwyon withdraws to a monastery whose name suggests it is more a copy than an original: the Royal Monastery of Our Lady of a Second Time. This retreat had been founded by heretical Franciscans who, during the spirited Christological debates in the fourth century, had sided with supporters of the doctrine of Homoiousios, rather than what became the orthodox doctrine of Homoousios. The details of this obscure theological debate play a crucial role in the novel.
In 325, the Council of Nicea established the doctrine of Homoousios, which, after almost six decades of heated controversy, was reconfirmed at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Traces of ancient heresy hung over the monastery like a dark cloud hiding the son. In one of the many theological passages framing the narrative, Gaddis writes:
Homoiousian, or Homoousian, that was the question. It had been settled one thousand years before when, at Nicea, the fate of the Christian church hung on a diphthong. Homoousian, the meaning of one substance. The brothers in faraway Estremadura had missed the Nicean Creed, busy out of doors as they were, or up to their eyes in cold water, and they had never heard of Arius. They chose Homoiousian, of like substance, as a happier word than its tabular alternative (no one gave them a chance at Heterousian).15
(9)
Though turning on an apparently inconsequential iota, this controversy had far-reaching theological and political implications. In theological terms, the issue involves the person of Christ and the possibility of salvation. As Gaddis observes, the difference between Homoiousios and Homoousios is the difference between similarity and identity. While proponents of the notion of Homoiousios claimed that the Son, i.e., Christ, is like the Father, those who backed the doctrine of Homoousios insisted that the Son is identical to the Father. Since the Homoiousians believed that God is absolutely transcendent and perfectly immutable, they were convinced that it was impossible for Jesus, who was a temporal and, therefore, mutable human being, to be divine. The most one could claim for Christ is that he is like God. For Homoousians, by contrast, the belief that Christ is merely like God is a denial of the incarnation. Since Christ cannot redeem what he does not assume, salvation is impossible unless Christ is fully God and fully man. While not immediately obvious, this seemingly obscure theological doctrine has important implications for the way in which believers understand themselves and relate to the world. If Christ does not become fully incarnate in a human body, life in this world is ultimately irredeemable, and believers must withdraw or flee from it. If, however, Christ does become fully incarnate, nature and history can be redeemed, and believers are drawn ever more deeply into worldly existence.
Plagued by doubt and tempted by a world daring him to embrace it, Gwyon hesitates and finally retreats behind the walls of the Real Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez to immerse himself in esoteric traditions long deemed heretical. One afternoon, while gazing at “the motionless figures of monarchs” in a Madrid park, he discerns clues to the life he is struggling to leave behind. His devout puritanical relatives, he realizes, “had surrounded him in a cold disjointed disapproval of life. As the statues bore the currents of the seasons his family had lived with rock-like negligence for time’s passage, lives conceived in guilt and perpetuated in refusal. They had expected the same of him” (13). But he is no longer convinced that a life of denial is the best way to live. Though his doubts are not resolved by the time he leaves the monastery, he has a feeling of liberation, though “whether it was released from something, or into something, he could not tell” (15). Gwyon returns to New England with a head full of new ideas, a collection of “un-Protestant relics,” and, incongruously, a Barbary ape.16
When Gwyon arrives home, he discovers that his sister has renamed his four-year-old son Wyatt. An unyielding Calvinist, Aunt May had objected to the trip to Spain, protested Camilla’s burial in Catholic soil, and is horrified by the changes in Gwyon revealed in his sermons. In his absence, she had subjected the young Wyatt to a spiritual discipline more severe than anything his father had ever undergone. The childless Aunt May lives “a life bounded by negation, satisfied with its resistance to anything which might have borne fruit.” Resolutely devoted to a motto—“NO CROSS NO CROWN”—that underscores the irony of her name, she urges Wyatt to emulate her hero, John Hus (1369–1415), who was a Protestant reformer burned at the stake for his beliefs. Not always a willing student, Wyatt resists his aunt’s instruction. Their deepest conflict is provoked by the child’s passionate interest in art. A gifted artist from his earliest years, the intriguing images Wyatt discovers in the strange books his father has brought back from Europe enflame his imagination. Aunt May strenuously disapproves of both the father’s books and the son’s drawing. Accepting Protestantism’s deep suspicion of images, she regards art as nothing less than the work of the devil. While destroying one of Wyatt’s innocent drawings, she preaches to her errant nephew:
Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord. To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did. His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man. He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whole structure of damnation, repeating it, crumpling the drawing of the robin in her hand,—original, to steal Our Lord’s authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light.
(34)
The original sin, then, is originality; yielding to Satan’s temptation, the creative artist attempts to usurp God’s creative power. As the romantics had insisted, the original artist enacts the death of the transcendent God and the resurrection of divine power in human creative activity.
Aunt May and Wyatt eventually reach a compromise when she permits him not to draw originals but to copy images he finds in his father’s books. Though frustrated by this restriction, her hellfire-and-brimstone rants are sufficiently sobering to make him hesitant to pursue genuinely creative work. As long as Aunt May is around, Wyatt limits his artistic efforts to copying copies of what he believes are original paintings by others. After she dies, however, he begins doing work of his own but remains cautious; as the son of six generations of Calvinist ministers, he cannot help wondering if his aunt might have been right:
Every week or so he would begin something original. It would last for a few days, but before any lines of completion had been drawn he abandoned it. Still the copies continued to perfection, that perfection to which only counterfeit can attain, reproducing every aspect of inadequacy, every blemish on Perfection in the original. He found a panel of very old wood, nearly paper-thin in places but almost of exact size, and on this he started the Seven Deadly Sins: Superbia, Ira, Luxuria, Avaritia, Invidia… one by one they reached completion unbroken by any blemish of their originality. Secrecy was not difficult in that house, and he made his copy in secret.
(55)
Wyatt’s unwillingness to complete his original paintings not only is the result of Aunt May’s warnings but also represents his anxiety about his artistic abilities. He is not sure whether he can attain the level of mastery he sees in the works of others, and an unfinished painting, like an endless novel, keeps the possibility of perfection open.
One of the paintings Wyatt secretly copies becomes the central object around which questions about originality, forgery, and counterfeiting circulate. Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins forms the top of a table Gwyon had brought back from Europe:
A large low table appeared under the window in the dining room. It was the prize of this incipient collection, priceless, although a price had been settled which Gwyon paid without question to the old Italian grandee who offered it sadly and in secret. This tabletop was the original (though some finagling had been necessary at Italian customs, confirming it a fake to get it out of the country), a painting by Hieronymus Bosch portraying the Seven Deadly Sins in medieval (mededy-evil, the Reverend pronounced it, an unholy light in his eyes) indulgence. Under the glass which covered it, Christ stood with one maimed hand upraised, beneath him in rubrics, Cave, Cave, Ds videdet [Careful, Careful, God is watching].
(25)
Fascinated by the painting and what it represents, Wyatt presses his father about the originality of the work: “How were you certain it was the original? Suppose…” Aunt May interrupts the conversation and Wyatt’s question is not directly answered. But Gwyon gives a hint about how he had acquired the painting: “That took some… uum… conniving, getting it through customs. It’s prohibited, you know, taking works of art out of Italy” (39). Gwyon managed to get the work of art through Italian customs by convincing officials that the original was a fake. The question of the originality of Bosch’s painting and its significance for Wyatt runs throughout the novel. At a critical turning point, it appears that Gwyon himself might have been duped by another con man, who had actually substituted a forgery for Bosch’s original work. With copies and originals confused beyond recognition, it no longer is possible to be sure what is counterfeit and what is not. By lying to the Italian authorities, Gwyon might, in fact, have been telling the truth. This possibility, in turn, suggests a far more troubling prospect: perhaps truth itself is really a lie, and thus the only way to tell the truth might be to lie.
The resistance of his aunt and doubts about his talent do not prevent Wyatt from pursuing his artistic vocation. When he succumbs to a protracted illness, his interest in art becomes obsessive. As the weeks pass, his drawing and painting become more frantic until it seems as though he is seeking a cure through art. But his condition continues to worsen, until Gwyon begins to fear for his son’s life. Convinced that serious illness calls for a drastic cure, the pastor decides to sacrifice his beloved ape, whom he has named Hercules, in an effort to save his only son. In a scene bordering on the burlesque, Gwyon takes the ape to the barn, where he kills him in a parodic imitation of the crucifixion. Suffering delirium, Wyatt hears the screams of Hercules while imagining nails being driven into his own hands and feet. When consciousness eventually returns, he remains confused:
For he woke on the floor with his father beside him, holding him up by the shoulders, his father whom he did not recognize, wild-eyed in that dim light. Then he broke open sobbing at the memory of the pain which had just torn up through his body.—In my feet, he cried,—it was like nails being driven up through my feet, as he was laid back on the bed blood-spotted at the shoulders, by this shaking man who could hardly walk from the room.
A few days later, Wyatt began to recover. He regained the weight of his body by meticulous ounces. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.
(51)
This pivotal scene is fraught with ambiguity. Gwyon’s sacrifice of the ape is obviously a copy of Christ’s original sacrifice, and Wyatt’s suffering is clearly a copy of this copy. Since the son recovers, the father’s copy seems to be as effective as the original. But Gaddis chooses Gwyon’s sacrificial victim carefully. The ape is the figure of imitation, which, we have discovered, Kant contrasts with the originality of artistic genius. How is Gwyon’s aping of Christianity’s originary sacrifice to be understood? Does his mimetic cure demonstrate the abiding power of the original, or does the efficacy of the imitation displace the need for the original?
Haunted by the sacrifice to which he suspects he owes his life, Wyatt follows in the footsteps of his ancestors by deciding to attend divinity school. But he does not last long and soon succumbs to the siren call of Paris. For the rest of the book, Wyatt drifts between the United States and Europe like the Flying Dutchman, “sailing without a steersman around the North Sea condemned never to make port, while he and the Devil played dice for his soul” (816).
Wyatt is not in Paris long before he meets the Devil incarnate—Recktall Brown, whose name obviously suggests the anality with which Protestants, since Luther’s provocative scatological writings, have associated the Devil. Avoiding the Left Bank art world, Wyatt settles, significantly, on the Right Bank, near the stock exchange, where he gets a job restoring paintings. His reputation quickly spreads throughout the city and provokes the interest of Brown, whose business is counterfeiting and forgery. During their first encounter, Wyatt and Brown engage in a debate about the redemptive power of art. Though often doubtful, Wyatt nonetheless clings to the possibility that art can bring the salvation religion once promised; for Brown, by contrast, art, like everything else, is all about money.
—We’re talking business, Recktall Brown said calmly.
—But…
—People work for money, my boy.
—But I…
—Money gives significance to anything.
—Yes. People believe that, don’t they. People believe that.
Recktall Brown watched patiently, like someone waiting for a child to solve a simple problem to which there is only one answer….
—You know… Saint Paul tells us to redeem time.
—Does he? Recktall Brown’s tone was gentle, encouraging.
—A work of art redeems time.
—And buying it redeems money, Recktall Brown said.
(144)
A savvy businessman, Brown recognizes a profitable opportunity when he sees it. He urges Wyatt to cash in on his talents by forging paintings he can market for him. When Brown assures Wyatt that with his talent there is no limit to the money he can make, the bargain proves irresistible.17
Here as elsewhere, the issues Gaddis probes surpass the individual characters he creates: Brown is, in effect, Mephistopheles, and Wyatt is Faust. A telling exchange in the 1986 interview underscores the importance of the Faust legend for The Recognitions and suggests its far-reaching implications for Gaddis.
Interviewer: Disregarding now the immense symbolic-thematic complexity that the myth itself entails in the novel, I think that the logic of the Faust story lends itself particularly well to the message about the postmodern world, namely, manipulation and forgery. The Faustian pact with the devil is nothing but giving up originality, isn’t it? And vice versa, a painter, Wyatt, manipulated into selling his soul, giving up originality, is bound to be Faustian, besides being emblematic of the artist’s position in a corrupt, manipulative, counterfeit world. Is this a correct interpretation of Wyatt’s central function as a Faust figure?
Gaddis: It is, yes, originality also being Satan’s “original sin” if you like. I think also, further, I tried to make clear that Wyatt was the very height of a talent but not a genius—quite a different thing. Which is why he shrinks from going ahead in, say, works of originality. He shrinks from this and takes refuge in what is already there, which he can handle, manipulate. He can do quite perfect forgeries, because the parameters of perfection are already there.18
Original sin is the sin of originality. Though Recktall Brown proposes the deal, his associate, Basil Valentine, closes it. Once again, names prove to be decisive. Basil Valentine was the name of a leading alchemist, a Benedictine monk widely regarded as the “Father of Modern Chemistry.” Alchemy, as we have seen, is not merely a metallurgical technique but, more importantly, a strategy for salvation. Throughout The Recognitions, Gaddis repeatedly associates the artist with the alchemist, thereby suggesting the possibility of art’s redemptive power. The latter-day Valentine’s art, however, appears to be black magic because he deals in fakes rather than originals. But Valentine’s counterfeits are no ordinary fakes; indeed, some of them are highly original. In Wyatt, he sees a special talent with whom he hopes to pull off the perfect scam by creating an original fake.
Never abandoning religious concerns, Wyatt prefers to copy Flemish masters. What intrigues him about these works is their extraordinary attention to detail. He attributes this distinctive characteristic to the then widely held belief that God can be found everywhere and that, thus, nothing is insignificant. In an exchange with Recktall Brown, Wyatt explains that these works from the Age of Faith reveal contemporary realism to be an illusion.
—This… these… the art historians and the critics talking about every object and… everything having its own form and density and… its own character in Flemish painting, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this… and so in the painting every detail reflects… God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Did you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them.—There isn’t any. There isn’t any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism.
(251)
In the modern era, the I is inseparable from the eye; in other words, visual perspective and the centered subject are inseparable. But what if, as Wyatt suggests, perspective is an illusion? What if divine omnipresence decenters the subject? How would one paint the disappearance of the subject, which such omnipresence might imply? Perhaps Irenaeus’s criticism of Valentinian Gnosticism suggests an answer. If God is omnipresent and no detail is too insignificant for his attention, then “nothing is without meaning,” and if nothing is without meaning, then everything is significant. To capture this significance, it would be necessary to paint something like an endless surface on which nothing is more important than anything else. Far from superficial, such a surface would be infinitely profound. Wyatt does not yet grasp this possibility, but his fascination with the flatness of Flemish paintings anticipates it.
For Valentine, Wyatt’s preoccupation with medieval Flemish masters creates the opportunity for a scheme he believes is foolproof. He proposes that Wyatt forge a work by van Eyck—not the well-known Jan but his lesser-known brother, Hubert, whom some art critics and historians doubt ever lived. If Wyatt could create a counterfeit original, Brown predicted, “it might be the art discovery of the century, if it were absolutely perfect, signed and documented” (249). Wyatt’s past experience has prepared him for the challenge. While in New York, he works in a downtown studio resembling an alchemist’s secret laboratory, where he mixes chemicals and potions for his profitable forgery business. Brown and Valentine have such confidence in Wyatt’s ability that they propose taking their game to another level. By creating a copy that, paradoxically, is an original, they believe they are much less likely to be caught than when they create forgeries of known works. A fake original need not be perfect because there is nothing to which to compare it. Valentine predicts that art critics and historians, eager for the publicity, will unwittingly become coconspirators by authenticating Hubert van Eyck’s newly discovered work. Furthermore, their strategy creates the prospect of other profitable scams. With Hubert’s existence no longer in doubt, it would be reasonable to expect that other “originals” would be discovered and find their way to the market.
While obviously not adverse to forgery, Wyatt nevertheless continues to harbor misgivings about his trade. Anticipating the possibility of one day wanting to reveal the confidence game he is playing, he keeps a fragment of every painting he forges, which he can use to prove the works are fake. When Valentine discovers this secret plan, he dismisses it, insisting that Wyatt inevitably would fail because people actually want to be deceived. Art, he insists, has never been about truth and redemption—not even for Wyatt’s beloved Flemish masters. What moved medieval artists to create was not faith in the omnipresence of God but vanity, avarice, and, above all, fear. Then, as now, doubt, according to Valentine, rather than certainty produced great art:
Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence, its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that’s why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn’t watching. Maybe he doesn’t see.
(690)
While Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses is directed against Valentinian speculation, Valentinus’s speculation about the origin of art might be entitled Adversus Irenaeus: Without God everything is empty and without meaning.
The argument between Valentine and Wyatt eventually centers on the table Gwyon had brought back from Spain. Visiting the studio to pick up the latest forgery, Valentine plants the seed of doubt about the originality of the painting after which Wyatt had fashioned his work since he was a child. Once raised, doubt continues to fester.
—That damned table. God’s watching? Invidia, I was brought up eating my meals off envy, until today. And it was false all the time! He spoke with more effort than he had yet made to control his voice.—Copying a copy? Is that where I started? All my life I’ve sworn it was real, year after year, that damned table top floating in the bottom of the tank, I’ve sworn it was real, and today? A child could tell me it’s a copy, he broke off, wrenching the folds of flesh and veins on his hand, and he dared look up….
—Now, if there was no gold?… continuing an effort to assemble a pattern from breakage where the features had failed.
—And if what I’ve been forging, does not exist? And if I… if I, I…
(381)
Three hundred pages later, Valentine explains the mind games he has been playing with Wyatt. Intent on stealing Bosch’s painting and sending it “back to Europe where it belongs,” Valentine provokes Wyatt by making him defend the originality of the painting. Knowing that Wyatt’s spirited defense will reassure Recktall Brown about the work’s authenticity regardless of what others might say, Valentine is free to pursue his nefarious plot. But Valentine’s strategy depends upon an even more deceitful trick that Wyatt appears to have played on his father. When he was young, Wyatt copied the work his father had brought back from Spain and sold the original. Valentine, however, knew that what Wyatt believed to be the original was actually a copy, which the European owner had already substituted for Bosch’s painting. As the scene unfolds, the search for the original begins to resemble Abbot and Costello’s well-known comic routine “Who’s on first?” Valentine plays the self-assured Abbot and Wyatt the befuddled Costello.
—And you were the boy! Valentine said in a tone gone almost childish with recrimination.—The boy in our story? Whose father owned the original? The boy who copied it, stole the original, and sold it, for “almost nothing” to… him.
—To him! How did I know, I didn’t know who bought it, I just sold it. The original! I thought… do you know what it was like, coming in here years later with him, and seeing it here? Waiting, seeing it here waiting for me? Waiting to burn this brand of final commitment, as though, all of those years, as though it was what I thought, instead of… a child could tell, even in this light…
—Perhaps you were right all the time, Valentine said quietly, coming closer.
—But this is a copy!
—Of course it is. When the old count sold his collection in secret, this was one of the copies he had made.
—And, the original? All this time…?
—All this time, the original has been right where this one is now. Basil Valentine stood very near him by the table.—Of course it was the original here for so long, the one you sold him. And this, I picked this one up in Rome myself scarcely a year ago. Do you recall when we first met? Right here, across the table? Of course that was the original. I said it was a copy simply to hear you defend it. I knew Brown would trust your judgment. And I knew Brown would be troubled enough to have it gone over again, by “experts.” I brought the idea into his mind simply to let him kill it himself, so that once I’ve exchanged the two, no matter who called this a copy, he’d simply laugh at them. He’d just made absolutely certain, hadn’t he? And the original? It’s on its way back to Europe where it belongs. I exchanged them quite recently. Do you think he knew the difference? And Valentine laughed, a sound of disdain severed by a gasp of pain at the shock of his lip.
—Yes, thank God! The figure across the table stood up illumined at the edges with the steady glow of the fire.—Thank God there was gold to forge!
(688–689)
I have quoted this passage at length because its last line, according to Gaddis, is the key to the entire book. In making this point, Gaddis draws together the themes of alchemy, the currency of art, and the economy of salvation:
My early impression was that the alchemists were simply trying to turn base metals into gold. Later I came to the more involved reading and better understanding of it all—that it was something between religion and magic and that it did not necessarily mean literally lead and gold. So the gold in many of the symbolic senses in alchemy is the perfection, is the sun, is a kind of redemption. When at some despairing moment Wyatt says—when he realizes that the table of the Seven Deadly Sins is the original and not his copy—“Thank God there was gold to forge,” that is very much the key line to the whole book.19
But this explanation settles nothing. With copies proliferating and the original increasingly obscure, it is not clear how to read this line. Is Valentine telling the truth or playing a confidence game? Was gold ever really real? Is any painting truly original? In a world where counterfeits replicate faster than machines can print, is anything real? Is anything original? If art is latter-day alchemy, it might be nothing more than fool’s gold. With these questions racing through his mind, Wyatt stabs Basil Valentine with a knife, smashes the table, and burns the Seven Deadly Sins in a confused fit of rage. No longer sure what is real and what is fake, the doubts of the father are visited upon the son. Repeating—perhaps even copying—Gwyon’s journey, Wyatt flees to Europe, where he also ends up in the Royal Monastery of Our Lady of a Second Time.
FEAST OF SOL INVICTUS—CHRISTMAS
While The Recognitions begins with the death of Wyatt’s mother, Camilla, on All Saint’s Day, the second major division of Gaddis’s tangled narrative opens with the winter solstice in 1949, a few days before the death of Wyatt’s father, Gwyon.20 When Gwyon returns from Spain after his sojourn in the monastery, he is preoccupied with “primitive” myths and rituals. He develops an extensive library with rare books on paganism, Eastern and Western esoteric traditions, and beliefs and practices of heterodox Christian sects. Since it had long been rumored that Camilla’s father “had Indian blood,” Gwyon is particularly interested in Native American myths and rituals. As his studies progress, he becomes fascinated by the ancient cult of Mithra. Mithraism originated in Persia and, between the first and fourth centuries CE, gradually spread westward, where it became a powerful force in the military during the Roman Empire. At one point in its history, Mithraism posed a serious threat to the primacy of Christianity. Mithra is a solar deity who “shines with his own light and in the morning makes the many forms of the world visible.”21 As each dawn brings forth forms out of darkness, so the winter solstice marks the turning point of the year when the powers of light and order once again gain ascendancy over the powers of darkness and chaos. The cult of Mithra centers on the ritual slaughter of a bull, which is supposed to regenerate life. This ancient rite prefigures a ceremonial banquet, similar to the Christian Eucharist, in which devotees are renewed by eating the body and drinking the blood of the sacred bull. Archaeological evidence suggests that some early Christian basilicas were built above subterranean caverns where the followers of Mithra secretly met.
An early exchange between Gwyon and Aunt May establishes the relation between Christianity and Mithraism as the prototype for the tension between Protestantism and paganism running through the novel. Disgusted by an image in one of the books Gwyon has brought back from Spain, Aunt May leaves little doubt about her attitude toward what she regards as aberrant religious practices.
—A nice… place of worship! The illustration pinioned by her gaze was captioned Il Tempio di Mitra.—Look at it! a dirty little underground cave, no place to kneel or even sit down, unless you could call this broken stone bench a pew? She got her breath when he interposed,—But…—And the altar! look at it, look at the picture on it, a man… god? And it looks like a bull!
—Yes, a pagan temple, they’ve excavated and found the basilica of Saint Clement was built right over a temple where worshipers of…
(38)
For Gwyon, this discovery is of more than archaeological significance. What makes Mithraism so intriguing is that it establishes the possibility that Christianity is not truly original but is really a copy of an earlier pagan religion. Immersing himself in Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Gwyon’s doubts about the originality of Christianity become even more profound.22 Perhaps neither Mithraism nor Christianity is original but both are copies of the even more ancient myth of “the sacrifice of the king’s son,” which is found in many cultures throughout the world. Just as the alchemist detects the prima materia underlying the multiplicity of forms in the world, so Gwyon glimpses a religio perennis beneath the rich diversity of world religions. If his suspicion were proven correct, Christianity would be a copy of a copy or, even worse, a counterfeit of a counterfeit.
The relation between Christianity and paganism is not merely an academic matter for Gwyon because he sees in them different forms of life that present alternative existential possibilities. Gwyon increasingly regards the Calvinism he is paid to promote as a world-denying religion devoted to the veneration of needless suffering, and he finds paganism more and more attractive because he believes it is a world-affirming religion that dares to enjoy life. Having become disillusioned with the former, Gwyon turns his sermons into lessons about the latter:
Like Pliny, retiring to his Laurentine villa when Saturnalia approached, the Reverend Gwyon avoided the bleak festivities of his congregation whenever they occurred, by retiring to his study. But his disinterest was no longer a dark mantle of preoccupation. A sort of hazardous assurance had taken its place. He approached his Sunday sermons with complaisant audacity, introducing, for instance, druidical reverence for the oak tree as divinely favored because so often singled out to be struck by lightning…. No soberly tolerated feast day came round, but that Reverend Gwyon managed to herald its grim observation by allusion to some pagan ceremony which sounded uncomfortably like having a good time.
(55–56)
The seeds of pagan religion Gwyon spreads fail to take root in “the clean Protestant soil of New England,” and, as his sermons become more heretical, his congregation becomes more baffled.
On December 22, 1949, Wyatt, in a state of confusion and distress, boards a train to return home to confront his father with the question upon which he believes his life depends. The doubts Valentine planted about the originality of Seven Deadly Sins raise questions that drive Wyatt to the brink of madness: “Now, if there was no gold?… And if what I’ve been forging, does not exist?” The issue, of course, is not merely artistic but, more importantly, religious. Here, as elsewhere, uncertainty about chronology complicates the narrative. Throughout the book, Gaddis repeats episodes and sequences in ways that confuse the timeline of the work. Since some of the chapters are not in chronological order, it is often difficult or even impossible to detect causal sequences and narrative continuity. The last chapter of part 2 folds back on a pivotal chapter that forms the midpoint of the novel to create loops as strange as the events they narrate. Though separated by three hundred pages, these two chapters actually form a sequence whose temporal dispersion mirrors the fragmentation and disintegration of its characters. Seemingly delusional interior monologues, which might or might not be the thoughts of individual characters who roam across strange theological and philosophical landscapes in search of clarity in a world rapidly sinking in obscurity, proliferate to create a text as mad as the tale it spins.
With a golden bull he has stolen from Valentine under his arm, Wyatt approaches his father’s church at dawn just as the sun’s rays “caught the weathercock atop the church steeple” (700). The description of dawn’s first light might well have been lifted from a Mithraic myth:
In the daylight’s embrace, objects reared to assert their separate identities, as the rising sun rescued villagers from the throbbing harmony of night, and laid the world out where they could get their hands on it to assail it once more on reasonable terms. Shapes recovered their proper distance from one another, becoming distinct in color and extension, withdrawn and self-sufficient, each an entity because it was not, and with daylight could not be confused with, or be a part of anything else. Eyes were opened, things looked at, and, in short, propriety was restored.
(700)
But a spectacular snow- and thunderstorm worthy of ancient Druid mythology breaks out, and the sun fades behind forbidding clouds.
Wyatt’s reappearance sets off a comedy of errors: Gwyon mistakes him for a priest of Mithra; Camilla’s father thinks he is Presbyter John; Janet, Gwyon’s assistant, believes he is Christ returned to earth; and Wyatt himself seems to think he is John Hus. Amid the confusion, Wyatt finds the parsonage and church strangely transformed and the village rife with rumors about his father’s strange behavior.23 Gwyon has redesigned the sanctuary to resemble a subterranean retreat for devotees of Mithra. The pure white imageless walls of the Congregational church are gone, and in their place is a forbidding cavern filled with strange figures and forms. A single opening is positioned to capture the sun’s rays at the precise moment of the solstice. When Wyatt stops by the local watering hole, the town drunk reports having seen his father slay a large bull and, impossibly, carry it around a meadow on his shoulders.
The purpose of Wyatt’s journey home is to meet with his father in the hope of resolving his religious doubts once and for all. In an earlier conversation with his then wife, Esther, Wyatt explains why he dropped out of divinity school. The issue is redemption: if he were to become a minister, he would have to believe that Christ had really died for him. The question driving Wyatt on his endless quest for the truth he could never find turns on the apparently inconsequential iota of ancient Christological debates. Drifting in and out of delusions of being John Hus, Wyatt wonders how he should approach his father: “What was it? What am I supposed to ask? Am I the… Homoousian or Homoiousian? Am I the man that… What holds me back?… for whom… for whom… What was it?…” (420). When the decisive encounter between father and son occurs, Gwyon is preoccupied with the perennial myth of the slain king, and Wyatt is obsessed with the subtleties of Christology.
The wren had flown, as he turned from the window and approached with burning green eyes fixed on Gwyon.—King, yes, he repeated,—when the king was slain and eaten, there’s sacrament. There’s sacrament. Then at the side of the table he paused and lowered his head, a closed wrist couched in the back of his neck, mumbling,—Homo… homoi… what I mean, is, Did He really suffer? And… no, that’s not it, I mean…. He stopped; and clinging to the edge, sank into his chair.
(430)
Wyatt’s remarks about sacrifice prove disturbingly prophetic.
Unable or unwilling to answer his son, Gwyon’s ranting and raving make it clear that he has forsaken Christianity to become a follower of Sol Invictus. The latter part of this fragmented chapter bears an epigram purported to be the despairing words of the dying Roman emperor known as Julian the Apostate: “Thou hast prevailed, O man of Galilee.” Julian’s hope for reviving the empire had rested upon his faith in the solar deity Sol Invictus, who, when identified with Mithra, is known as Sol Invictus Mithra. In the cult devoted to the most powerful pagan god, the birthday of Sol Invictus Mithra is December 25. Just as Mithraic caves were hidden beneath Christian churches, so the birth of the sun lies behind the birth of the Son. Preaching the gospel of Mithraism with a passion that suggests Christianity is little more than a pale copy of a more vital original, Gwyon proclaims:
—No one can teach the Resurrection without first suffering death himself. No one can be reborn without dying. No one can be Mithras’ priest without being reborn… to teach them to observe Sunday, and keep sacred the twenty-fifth of December as the birthday of the sun. Natalis invicti, the Unconquered Sun, Gwyon finished, turning his face to the window.
—But I… you… to worship the sun?
—Nonsense, said Gwyon, brisk now.—We let them think so, he confided,—those outside the mysteries. But our own votaries know Mithras as the deity superior to it, in fact the power behind the sun. Here, his name you see… Gwyon revealed the marginal notes on the newspaper clipping.—Abraxas and Mithras have the same numerical value, the cycle of the year as the sun’s orbit describes it. Abraxas, you know, the resident of the highest Gnostic heaven.24
(432–433)
While the messenger has changed, Gwyon’s message remains much the same. Unable to accept paganism’s embrace of the world, he continues to preach a message of renunciation to his son. “—There must be priests strong enough and passionless, able to renounce the things of this world… Gwyon reached out and took his wrist, as though to pull him aboard.—To preach Him Who offers rest from sin and hope beyond the grave. Born of the Rock, He comes forth to offer Remission of sins, and Everlasting life” (431). At last Wyatt poses the question upon which he believes his life depends. With thunder booming and lightning striking the local tavern as if in a drudicial ritual, Wyatt confronts his father:
—Father… Am I the man for whom Christ died?
Louder than laughter, the crash raised and sundered them in a blinding agony of light in which nothing existed until it was done, and the tablets of darkness betrayed the vivid, motionless, extinct enduring image of the bull in his stall and Janet bent open beneath him.
Then it seemed 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.
(440)
The apocalyptic scene ends without resolution. Wrapped in veils of madness, the father drifts farther and farther into the fantastic world he imagines, while the son returns to the reality of a world he once thought his own. His question unanswered and his beliefs reduced to ash, Wyatt returns to New York more confused than when he had left. As if lightning could strike twice, he discovers his studio has burned to the ground. With nowhere left to turn, he flees to Europe.
In the wake of his encounter with his son, Gwyon completely unravels. Three days and three hundred pages later, he performs the Feast of Sol Invictus—Christmas. In the Mithraic cavern that had once been the Congregational sanctuary he arranges an altar on which he places the stolen golden bull Wyatt had brought him. The bull, of course, is reminiscent of the golden calf Moses discovered when he descended from Mount Sinai with the tablets bearing the prohibition of graven images. After positioning the golden bull to catch the fleeting rays of the rising solstice sun, Gwyon goes to the field where he keeps his sacred bull and slaughters the animal. When parishioners enter the church, they are not prepared for what they see and hear. Their once familiar pastor is completely transformed into a strange high priest of paganism.
—Natalis Inviciti Solis…
—The birth of the Unconquered Sun… We are gathered here in the world cave before him born of the Rock, the one Rock hewn without human hands, in the sight of the shepherds who witnessed his birth, whose name signifies friend, and mediator, who comes with rest from sin and hope beyond the grave… and offers the revival of the Sun in promise and pledge of his own…
(703)
For the baffled congregation, this is the last straw. They insist that Gwyon be institutionalized and arrange to have him confined to a nearby asylum named Happymount. An interim minister is called in to restore order and offer shaken believers reassurance about the reality of Christ and his resurrection. A few weeks later, a permanent replacement is appointed to help the congregation overcome its dark past. Well schooled in Christianity Lite, Pastor Dick is as superficial and lighthearted as Gwyon is serious and troubled. Instead of hefty tomes of mythology and theology, Dick restricts his intellectual inquiry to Reader’s Digest. Anticipating the new age Gaddis sees emerging around him, Dick is at ease in the world of televangelism and reality TV, where the erstwhile advertising executive, Ellery, produces shows like Lives of Saints and Let’s Get Married. The formula to Ellery’s success is staging fake events as if they were real.25 The more Dick learns about what Gwyon had done, the more troubled he becomes until he finally addresses the issue directly in a sermon about the mortal dangers of Mithraism. Though his criticisms are many, the most telling charge is that this pagan cult is a counterfeit designed to mislead true Christians. Contrary to his expectations, the sermon does more to disturb than reassure his wavering flock.
If “Dick’s” bonhomie was, as it appeared to be, exaggerated after the service, it was because with his penetrating insight he had sensed something wrong, about halfway through his sermon, a restlessness which commenced with his passage from I Corinthians, and seemed to rise especially among the older faces, as he went on into the contents of the “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,” doing his best to show Mithraism in its “true” light, and its most recent propagator, if not demented, certainly misled. Supported by the battery of purloined mercenaries, Justin Martyr and Tertullian, Origen, Arnobis, Firmicus Maternus, Augustine Bishop of Hippo, Paul of Nola… “Dick” could hardly fail in his unnecessary cause. Reading from the ex-Manichee Hippian bishop, he had reached this point when he noticed lips moving here and there, as though minds were already wandering:—“For evil spirits invent for themselves certain counterfeit representations of high degree, that by this means they can deceive the followers of Christ…”
(719)
Doubts once aroused cannot be easily dismissed, and evil spirits once conjured are slow to disappear. Wary parishioners suspect that “Dick’s” easy Christianity is not the real thing. Unable to escape the specter of doubt or flee ghosts of the past, Dick moves out of the parsonage to a bright and cheerful house. While tearing down Gwyon’s barn, he unearths the skeleton of the sacrificed ape. When the townspeople hear about this discovery, they leap to the dark conclusion that the skeleton is the remains of the prodigal son, Wyatt.
Happymount turns out to be an unhappy place for Gwyon. His roommate is the delusional Mr. Fairsy (i.e., Pharisee), who claims “to have been appointed by the Congregation of the Sacred Rites, at the Vatican, to investigate early methods of crucifixion” (712). A scientist by training, Fairsy is committed to the latest empirical methods and, in a fit of madness, carries out an experiment by crucifying Gwyon in their room. Gwyon’s death only compounds the mystery of his life. Among the papers required for admission to Happymount, officials find instructions Gwyon had left for his body to be cremated. But he had not indicated what to do with his ashes. Since his only remaining relative, Wyatt, is somewhere in Europe, the erstwhile pastor’s remains are sent to Reverend Dick, who has no idea what to do with them and puts the urn on a shelf in the study he rarely uses. One night while going through some of the books Gwyon left in the parsonage library, a piece of paper slips from a copy of St. John of the Cross’s The Dark Night of the Soul. On it Gwyon had written his last will and testament, in which he requested that his ashes be sent to San Zwingli and buried next to Camilla. Since Dick does not know where the cemetery is located, Gwyon’s instructions do not solve his dilemma. The befuddled pastor finally stumbles on a solution while preparing to send a care package to the Real Monasterio. Ever since Gwyon had returned from Spain, his New England congregation had regularly sent the monks ingredients for making bread from his family’s cereal factory. Displaying characteristic ignorance, Dick assumes Spain could not be all that big and decides that if he sends his predecessor’s remains to the Real Monasterio, the Franciscans can find San Zwingli and dispose of the ashes. Squeamish about death and eager to leave the dark chapter of his church’s history behind, Dick mails the parcel but not without a final comic twist.
Remembering the sturdy oatmeal boxes in the upstairs closet, he got one, transferred the ashes from the delicate urn in which they’d been delivered, and clamped the round top in tight, noting as he did that it carried the family name stamped on the tin. This he put into the parcel already bound for Spain, sent it off (by ordinary ship post, since he was paying the charges himself), and only when he sat down to write the covering letter did he realize that he’d forgot to take the name of the monastery where it was bound. In an almanac, he found a prominent monastery located at Montserrat, and so he addressed his letter, in cordial English (on a church letterhead) there, considering that if it were not quite the right one, things would be straightened up at the other end, where they were, after all, all Spanish, and after all, all Catholic.
(717–718)
Dick’s wager pays off: Reverend Gwyon’s ashes finally arrive at the Royal Monastery of Our Lady of a Second Time, where father and son are unexpectedly reconciled.
While Samhain–All Saint’s Day marks the end of the hot season and the beginning of the cold season and the Feast of Sol Invictus–Christmas commemorates the victory of the powers of light over the powers of darkness, Eoustur-Easter celebrates the renewal of fertility, which comes when winter turns to spring. As we have seen, Christian holidays displace but do not completely replace their pagan antecedents. Easter traces its roots not only to the Jewish Passover but also to ancient Scandinavian rituals. The word “Easter derives from Eoustur, the Norse word for the spring-season.” From the fourth century on, Easter, like the Saturnalia, was a nocturnal festival in which the symbolism of light was very important. “It was customary on the Saturday evening of the Easter vigil to illuminate not only churches but entire towns and villages with lamps and torches; thus the night was called the night of illumination…. In Northern European countries use of special lights at Easter coincided with the custom of lighting bonfires on hilltops to celebrate the coming of spring.”26
Like all proper Christian stories, The Recognitions has three parts. The third part begins with an enigmatic epigram whose importance does not become clear until the third chapter of the concluding section: “There are many Manii in Aricia” (723). As threes continue to proliferate, it becomes difficult to ignore Gaddis’s trinitarian numerology. In his notes to the novel, Stephen Moore explains that manii refers to sacramental loaves made in the shape of men, which the Romans called maniae. Mania
was also the name of the Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts, to whom woolen effigies of men and women were dedicated at the festival of the Compitalia. The tradition that the founder of the sacred grove of Aricia was a man named Manius, from whom many Manii were descended, would thus be an etymological myth invented to explain the name of maniae as applied to these sacramental loaves.27
Never one to play on merely two registers at once, Gaddis’s use of the term manii also suggests Mani (b. 527), who was a prophet and founder of Manichaeism, a radically dualistic religion that shared much with Gnosticism. Like Mithraism, Manichaeism envisions the life in terms of the struggle between good and evil enacted in the cosmic conflict between the powers of light and darkness. Earlier in the novel, there is an exchange between Max, a painter turned forger, and an associate of Wyatt named Anselm, who, following in the footsteps of the influential second-century theologian named Origen, took literally the admonition that one must make oneself a eunuch to enter the kingdom of God. Speaking with Max, Anselm anticipates the sinister tale these sacrificial loaves portend.
—As Frazer says, Max explained indulgently,—the whole history of religion is a continuous attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find sound theory for absurd practice…
—And what does Saint Augustine mean when he talks about the Devil perverting the truth and imitating the sacraments?
—This sacrament will go the way of all the rest of them, Max smiled.—It won’t be long before they’re sacrificing Christ to God as God’s immortal enemy.
—Hey Anselm, listen to this, Daddy-o-noster. Daddy-o, up in thy way-out pad. You are the coolest, and we dig you like too much…
—The god killed, eaten and resurrected, is the oldest fixture in religion, Max went on suavely.—Finally sacrificed in the form of some sacred animal which is the embodiment of the god. Finally everyone forgets, and the only sense they can make out of the sacrament is that they must be sacrificing the animal to the god because that particular animal is the god’s crucial enemy, responsible for the god’s death…
(536)
For those who know their history, Daddy-o-noster is not only Our Father but also Dionysus. One of the guises of Dionysus, god of wine, is, of course, the bull. When the bull becomes the sacred animal who embodies the death of God, the Antichrist and Christ finally become one, and the unhappy consciousness of Calvin becomes the gay wisdom of Nietzsche. But this “bacchanalian revel in which no member remains sober”28 is still hundreds of pages away.
The third chapter of the third part of the novel brings Gaddis’s endlessly complex tale full circle. What begins in “The First Turn of the Screw” with Camilla’s burial in San Zwingli ends in “The Last Turn of the Screw” with Wyatt’s visit to San Zwingli to find his mother’s grave. Upon his arrival, Wyatt discovers the village abuzz with excitement about the impending canonization of the little girl buried next to his mother. The Easter ceremony in Rome marks the culmination of a long and expensive campaign to publicize the canonization, which local officials hope will boost the tourist business and revive the economy. Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that Wyatt’s trip to Spain was not direct—he took a detour through Algeria, where he met his former homosexual lover, Han, who was serving in the French Foreign Legion. When Han realizes that Wyatt has no intention of reconciling, a fight breaks out, and Wyatt kills him. Having first stabbed Valentine and left him for dead and then killed his erstwhile lover, Wyatt panics and flees to the Real Monasterio “to rest, recuperate and start over.” Not merely a sinner but now a murderer, his real concern is more than ever redemption.
The epigram to the concluding chapter, which is not the end of the book, suggests that the masquerade Gaddis imagines in the first sentence finally becomes a reality: “To Love without Knowing Whom [to Love]” (769). Moore points out that this line, which is from a poem by Lope de Vega (1562–1635), “concerns Don Juan’s quest for a veiled lady, who turns out to be the sister of his friend Fernando.” As the chapter unfolds, veils continue to multiply in masks that mask other masks. In a twist contrived for comic effect, Frank Sinisterra also turns up in San Zwingli masquerading as Yak, a Romanian scholar that yet another disguised character has been paid to assassinate. Sinisterra has also returned to seek redemption of sorts—he is trying to redeem his reputation after one of his counterfeiting schemes has gone awry. This time, the currency of exchange is not money but a mummy (i.e., mommy). Sinisterra decides to cash in his chips by fabricating a fake. In search of a body small enough to have been an ancient Egyptian emperor, he develops a plan to steal the body of the little girl buried next to Camilla in the San Zwingli cemetery. While plotting his strategy, he meets Wyatt, who is visiting his mother’s grave. When Sinisterra realizes that this is the son of the woman he inadvertently killed many years ago, he becomes obsessed with reconciling with Wyatt without revealing his true identity—if, indeed, he has one. Wyatt, however, is more interested in losing himself in wine and women than in getting to know this sinister stranger. With Wyatt repeatedly resisting his advances, Sinisterra begins to suspect that Wyatt is fleeing someone or something and attempts to ingratiate himself by offering assistance. A master of deceit, the con man counterfeits for Wyatt a Swiss passport with the pseudonym Stephan Asche. Though Sinisterra does not realize it, the fake name he crafts is actually Wyatt’s real name—or almost his real name. As I have noted, Stephen (spelled with an “e” rather than an “a”) is the name of the first Christian martyr, and it is the name that Camilla and Gwyon had given their son. “Asche” is no less significant than Stephan. Asche is the German word for ash, which suggests both the past Wyatt is attempting to flee and the future toward which he is unknowingly moving. Whether in the form of the world ash tree of Nordic mythology (Yggdrasil), the ashes from which the phoenix rises, or the ash of Ash Wednesday, ashes are overdetermined in many religious symbols and myths. When Wyatt declines Sinisterra’s offer, the irrepressible con man explains the value of a counterfeit passport by parodying the rebirth of the Son of his victim has always been seeking. “What do you say now? This is no joke, I can fix you up with this passport. This is what you want to do, see? Like putting off the old man, you know what I mean, see?… like it says in the Bible, that’s it, see?… that’s what you want to do, put on the new man, like it says in the Bible. What do you say?… All right, listen. Shall I leave you here then?…” (785). Sinisterra reassures Wyatt that if he wears the mask long enough, it will become real: “All right, I’ll call you Stephan, all right? That will help you get used to it, see? See, Stephan? See?… you’re getting used to it already, see? See Stephan? After a while you think of yourself as Yak, as Mr. Yak, see?” (785–786). When the mask becomes real, it no longer can be dropped.
The question of identity, it seems, does not end with death. Persistent to the point of obsession, Sinisterra eventually draws Wyatt into his scheme to create a fake mummy. Town officials mistakenly exhume Camilla’s body instead of the little girl’s and send it to Rome for canonization. Though Wyatt does not realize it, his mother turns out almost literally to be a saint. While agreeing to accompany Sinisterra to San Zwingli in the dead of the night, Wyatt remains wary of the scam. When he hears rumors that police are searching for a team of body snatchers, Wyatt panics and splits from Sinisterra. A few weeks later, he reads an article in the newspaper reporting that authorities have found the body of someone named Yak, who apparently had committed suicide. The reality, of course, is different; Sinisterra had been mistaken for Yak and was assassinated. His advice to Wyatt proved prophetic: the mask does become reality.
More distraught than ever, Wyatt retreats behind the walls of the Real Monasterio. During the days he visits the Prado, where he studies his beloved Flemish masters and El Greco, for whom he has a growing appreciation. At night, he contributes to the monastery by using his painterly skill to restore their treasured El Grecos. The longer Wyatt studies El Greco, the more he comes to suspect that far from representing an ideal world, the works of the Flemish masters actually anticipate all that is wrong with modernity. The separation and isolation of people as well as things in the medieval paintings foreshadow the fragmentation plaguing life in what Gaddis dubs “the Age of Publicity.” “Separateness,” Wyatt muses, “that’s what went wrong, you’ll understand… or,—Everything withholding itself from everything else…” (874) Though a modern plague, the roots of this fragmentation are buried in puritanical Protestantism. Hundred of pages earlier and a continent away, one of Wyatt’s forlorn friends reflects:
“LONELY? 25¢ brings magazine containing pictures, descriptions of lonely sincere members everywhere, seeking friendship, companionship, marriage…”—What better reason is there to get out of this stupid white Protestant country, for Christ’s sake. At least Catholic countries take sin as part of human nature, they don’t blow their guts when they find you’ve gone to bed with a woman.
(526)
In the paintings by El Greco, Wyatt sees a creative alternative to Protestant individualism, separation, isolation, and fragmentation.
With a painter like El Greco, somebody called him a visceral painter, do you see what I mean? And when you get so much of his work hung together, it… the forms stifle each other, it’s too much. Down where they have the Flemish painters hung together, it’s different, because they’re all separate… the compositions are separate, and the… the Bosch and Breugel and Patinir and even Dürer, they don’t disturb each other because the… because every composition is made up of separations, or rather… I mean… do you see what I mean? But the harmony in one canvas of El Greco is all one… one…
(807)
For Wyatt, the vision of unity El Greco offers is nothing less than sacred. Since he had been raised to believe in a transcendent God and, correlatively, isolated subjectivity, the prospect of this all-encompassing unity is not only attractive but also terrifying. To become one with this reality would truly be to lose oneself in God.
Having lost faith in traditional religion, Wyatt realizes his only possibility of salvation lies in art. If he is to find redemption in art, however, he can no longer merely copy the works of others or even restore the paintings of past masters but must actually become El Greco. Paradoxically, by becoming an other, Wyatt becomes himself. But the other he becomes is not just any other—it is El Greco, an artist whose originality he deeply admires. When the mask of El Greco becomes Wyatt’s “own” face, his copies become original, and he becomes the artist he has always really been. This is the recognition toward which The Recognitions has been circuitously moving. At this critical moment, Wyatt becomes Stephen—not Sinisterra’s Stephan but his parents’ Stephen, the person he originally was. When Stephen leaves the old man behind and takes on the new, which is, of course, really old, his restorations become creative.
As he struggles to make himself anew, Wyatt discovers that it is not easy to leave the old behind. Not even the walls of the Real Monasterio can protect him from the world of fakes and counterfeiting in which he has lived so long. Strapped for cash, the Franciscan brothers earn a modest income by providing food and lodging for tourists. During Stephen’s stay, the quiet of the retreat is broken by an American family straight out of Chevy Chase’s European Vacation. The father has a business that manufactures and sells plastic religious relics, and the wife and kids would prefer being back in the ’burbs to roaming around Italy. The husband of another couple staying in the monastery had studied food chemistry at Yale and now works for a firm named Necrostyle. To escape the boisterous chatter of the tourists, Wyatt befriends a well-known novelist named Ludy (i.e., ludic), who has been commissioned to write an article on spiritual life for a popular magazine. Believing he had discovered a fellow artist, Wyatt is disappointed to learn that Ludy is a fake who fabricates experiences as well as interviews and then represents them as real. Ludy and Wyatt are actually inverse images of the other. Like Ludy, Wyatt’s career in forgery and counterfeiting involved passing off fakes as real. After his conversion, however, Stephen hides his work as a creative artist behind the mask of a master restorer. While Ludy passes off a fake as real, Wyatt disguises his original art as works of restoration. Watching Wyatt at work, Ludy suddenly realizes what he is really doing.
For almost a minute, there was nothing but the rapid scraping of the blade, and Ludy came forward further and further until he almost went off balance.—But… he finally broke out,—the foot here, it’s almost gone. You… why are you taking it away, it… this whole part of the picture here, it’s not damaged.
—Yes… Stephen whispered,—it’s very delicate work. Why you can change a line without touching it. Yes… “all art requires a closed space,” ha! remember Homunculus?
—But wait, stop! What are you doing? Ludy brought a hand up as though he were going to interpose.—You can’t… But you can’t… Ludy protested weakly.
—That El Greco up in the Capilla de los Tres…
—Yes…?
—I’m going to restore it next.
—But you… there’s nothing wrong with it at all, it’s… it’s in fine condition, that painting.
—Yes, he studied with Titian. That’s where El Greco learned, that’s where he learned to simply, Stephen went on, speaking more rapidly,—that’s where he learned not to be afraid of spaces, not to get lost in details and clutter, and separate everything.
(872)
Wyatt, of course, is not restoring but creating—by faking. For Wyatt to become El Greco, he must erase the line separating the copy and the original.
By transforming himself into El Greco, Wyatt becomes the artist his parents originally had named Stephen. Stephen, in turn, can become himself only through the reunion with his father, Gwyon. This reconciliation between father and son is brought about through a parodic repetition of the Eucharist. While restoring the paintings, Stephen, like all the other members of the monastic community, eats bread resembling the sacramental loafs called manii. One day the bread is unusually dry and specked with red. The puzzled monks ask the wife of the Necrostyle food chemist what she thinks might be wrong. She shows the bread to her husband and, while reporting what the monks had told her to other visitors, expresses her bewilderment:
—because it’s real hard to get flour over here, especially if you’re poor like monks, they have to get it off the black market. That isn’t exactly the way he put it, she amended when his silence unleashed her full confusion.—He says they even get food packages from America, like there was this Protestant minister who came here on a visit about thirty years ago and he always sends them these packages of food, they just got one lately. This is where I get sort of mixed up, she confessed, while the figure at the head of the table watched her querulously.—I think it’s something he wants me to explain to him, because in this last food package they just got there was some kind of powdery stuff in a tin box they mixed up with the flour when they made this bread, and it came out funny…. She sighed, looking almost wistfully at the scrap of bread by her husband’s hand on the table, hard crust, crumbled fine gray texture flecked with spots “like blood.”—Home, she repeated.—Now it’s almost Easter.
(884)
We do not need the expert from Necrostyle to tell us that the powder is the cremated body of Gwyon and that the red spots are traces of his blood. Wyatt finally becomes Stephen when he consumes Gwyon. By eating the sacred loaves, the son embodies the father in the ritual resurrection Eostur-Easter celebrates.
But is the renewal real? Is the death of the forger and counterfeiter named Wyatt the birth of the artist named Stephen? Or does Wyatt assume another counterfeit identity by becoming quite literally Stephan Asche? Rather than recovering his original identity, Stephen/Wyatt/Stephan/Stephen’s identities continue to proliferate. He now confesses that he is the father of a little girl in the village, and, with no further explanation, leaves the Royal Monastery of Our Lady of a Second Time to find her and, in the words of Thoreau, “live deliberately.” Precisely what this means remains a mystery.
The novel, however, does not end with the last chapter. Like the young Wyatt, Gaddis has trouble finishing what he starts. An unconcluding epilogue recounts the fates of most of the more or less minor characters who appear throughout the novel. With all of Wyatt’s New York friends heading to Europe, everything appears reversed—the anxiety of influence gives way to the fascination with simulacra. The land of the original—Europe—is now copying the land of the copy—the United States. Anticipating his upcoming trip, Stanley, who is the most important character in the epilogue, observes: “—And I mean Chrahst, everybody’s leaving, everybody’s going abroad. I haven’t been in Paris since I was seven years old, Chrahst to go there now! I mean to Saint Germain de Pres where they’re imitating Greenwich Village and here we are in Greenwich Village still imitating Montmartre” (746). From the beginning of the novel, Stanley has been working on a Requiem Mass that he simply cannot complete. After the death of his mother, he resolves to finish the work and travel to Europe to play it in Rome on Easter Sunday. This is the same day that Camilla’s body is going to Rome for her mistaken canonization. Upon his arrival, Stanley solicits the help of the wealthy mother of one of his New York friends, whose name, Agnes Deigh, suggests the term for the Lamb of God—Agnus Dei. When Mrs. Deigh was young, peasant children, seeing her swimming naked off the coast of Portugal, had mistaken her for the Virgin Mary. Through Agnes’s intervention, Stanley gets an audience with Father Martin. In pleading for permission to play in the church at Fenestrula, Stanley appeals to the abiding importance of original art, which, he insists, can provoke “authentic experience.” Though obviously unconvinced, Father Martin, eager to please his wealthy patron, nonetheless grants him permission in words that leave Stanley puzzled:
We live in a world where first-hand experience is daily more difficult to reach, and if you reach it through your work, perhaps you are not fortunate the way most people would be fortunate. But there are things I shall not try to tell you. You will learn them for yourself if you go on, and I may help you. He arranged things for Fenestrula immediately, and Stanley left with the assurance to steady the bewilderment of his heart at everything else, a bewilderment exactly doubled as Fenestrula became the only possible position left when Father Martin was shot and killed in broad daylight, later in the day.
(952)
It is impossible to be sure whether the murder is intentional, a case of random violence, or the result of mistaken identity.
Shaken yet undaunted, Stanley dons his best suit on Easter Sunday and heads to Fenestrula. He has finally finished the work but does not experience the elation he had expected because in a moment of sudden recognition, he realizes what his work had cost him as well as others. Like so many characters in the novel, Stanley suffers Nietzsche’s “melancholia of things completed.” To make matters worse, he now recognizes that his lifelong devotion to art had taken him away from those closest to him:
He looked at it [his work] with sudden malignity, as though in that moment it had come through at the expense of everything and everyone else, and most terribly, of each of those three souls: but there was this about him, standing, running a hand through his short hair, pulling up his belt, and staring at that work, which since it was done, he could no longer call his own: even now, it was the expense of those three he thought of, not his own.
(955)
As he enters the church, his Italian is not adequate to understand the instructions and warning the priest offers. Caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment, Stanley pulls out all the stops as he raises a joyful noise unto the Lord:
The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with the three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil’s interval29 from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate. Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement.
(956)
Everything, that is, but Stanley, who lies buried in the rubble of the fallen church. For the only character who clings to the belief in art’s redemptive power, art brings death and not life. The end, however, is comic rather than tragic. With references to Dante circulating through the final lines, the lingering question is whether the comedy staged in “the last Christian novel” is divine.
—Now, if there was no gold?… continuing an effort to assemble a pattern from breakage where the features had failed.—And if what I’ve been forging does not exist? And if I…. if I, I…
(381)
In the final analysis—if there can be a final analysis—art is about religion and religion is about art.30 Nietzsche haunts The Recognitions as the unspoken presence who sets everything in motion. In portraying Stanley trying to explain to Agnes why he cannot finish his work, Gaddis explicitly invokes Nietzsche for the only time in the novel:
—…And yet, well… you know I never read Nietzsche, but I did come across something he said somewhere, where he mentioned “the melancholia of things completed.” Do you know… well that’s what he meant. I don’t know, but somehow you get used to living among palimpsests. Somehow that’s what happens, double and triple palimpsests pile up and you keep erasing, and altering, and adding, always trying to account for this accumulation, to order it, to locate every particle in its place in the whole…
—But Stanley, couldn’t you just… I don’t know what a palimpsest is, but couldn’t you just finish off this thing you are working on now, and then go on and write another?…—No, that… you see, that’s the trouble, Agnes, he said.—It’s as though this one thing must contain it all, all in one piece of work, because, well it’s as though finishing it strikes it dead, do you understand? And that’s frightening, it’s easy enough to understand why, killing the one thing you… love. I understand it, and I’ll explain it to you but that, you see, that’s what’s frightening, and you anticipate that, you feel it all the time you’re working and that’s why the palimpsests pile up, because you can still make changes and the possibility of perfection is still there, but the first note that goes on the final score is… well that’s what Nietzsche…—All I know about Nietzsche is that he’s decadent, that’s what they say.
Stanley withdrew his hand, and it hung in the air for a moment, like an object suddenly unfamiliar, which he did not know how to dispose of.—He was, because of… well that’s the reason right there, because of negation. That is the work of Antichrist. That is the word of Satan. No, the Eternal No, Stanley said, and put his hand in his pocket.
(599)
Stanley’s understanding of Nietzsche is misleading because it is incomplete. The son of three generations of Protestant pastors, Nietzsche declared Christ to be the Antichrist and Christianity the work of Satan. Since the time of Saint Paul, Nietzsche argues, Christians have worshipped pain and suffering and preached a resentful gospel of world negation. For the Christian believer, God is transcendent and redemption otherworldly. To love this God is to hate the world.
The disease of Protestantism plagues not only Stanley but also Wyatt/Stephan/Stephen. Esther makes this point when she says to her husband: “you never will let yourself be happy…. There are things like joy in the world, there are, there are wonderful things, and there is goodness and kindness, and you shrug your shoulders” (590). Wyatt’s obsession with redemption creates his preoccupation with the person of Christ. If Christ were not truly God, he believes, redemption would be impossible. This issue is of more than Christological significance. If Christ were, as the monks of the Real Monasterio had believed, merely like God and not identical to God, the world would remain fallen and could never be redeemed. The only salvation, then, would be to retreat from or even escape the world. Though not immediately apparent, this pivotal theological doctrine also carries important implications for art. If the finite cannot hold the infinite, things in this world are penultimate and hence are signs pointing to a transcendent reality, which is never here but always elsewhere. If, however, the infinite can be embodied in the finite, signs implode because there is nothing beyond, and the finite, therefore, is in some sense infinite. Far from being the shadows of an otherworldly realm, the real is or can become immanent in space and time. Esme, a poet as well as Wyatt’s model and sometimes lover, seems to have found what Wyatt is searching for.31 Though she, like everyone else, “lives in fragments,” Esme recognizes that beyond chaos
lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in casual and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.
(299–300)
But Esme has trouble communicating her vision to Wyatt and finally decides to write what she cannot say directly. She leaves her lover a letter.
To recognize, not to establish but to intervene. A remarkable illusion?
Painting, a sign whose reality is actuality, I, never to be abandoned, a painting is myself, ever attentive to me, mimicking what I never changed, modified, or compromised. Whether I, myself, am object or image, they at once, are both, real or fancied, they are both, concrete or abstract, they are both, exactly and in proportion to this disproportionate I, being knowingly or unknowingly neither one nor the other, yet to be capable of creating it, welded as one, perhaps not even welded but actually from the beginning one, am also both and what I must, without changing, modifying, or compromising, be.
(472)
Recognitions. To become oneself, Esme incongruously insists, one must become a painting. A painting is the unity of object and image, the concrete and the abstract, the actual and the fancied, and, most important, sign and reality. If sign and the real are one, the sign is not the shadow of a reality that lies elsewhere but is reality itself. To become a painting is to transform life into a work of art; far from an illusion with no future, such an artful life is the only reality there is.
The obscurities of ancient theological debates turn out to be surprisingly relevant for life in postmodern worlds. The truth of the incarnation is Homoousios, identity, rather than Homoiousios, likeness. If Jesus is God, appearance is reality. The imago, then, is not merely a pale reflection of a transcendent reality but is nothing less than Deus ipse. The good news that the real is present here and now marks the end of the regime of representation. In the words of the contemporary painter Frank Stella, “What you see is what you see.” Though the Christology is orthodox, the message is not; to the contrary, this is the gospel of the Antichrist. But this Antichrist turns out not to be Satan but Jesus, who, as Nietzsche maintains, denies “everything that today is called Christian.”32 In his manifesto entitled The Antichrist, Nietzsche proclaims: “Jesus had abolished the very concept of ‘guilt’—he had denied any cleavage between God and man; he lived this unity of God and man as his ‘glad tidings.’ And not as a prerogative!”33 From the time of Saint Paul, Christians have reversed Jesus’ glad tidings by changing his Yes to a No. As the Antichrist, Jesus says “Yes” by saying “No” to No—the Eternal No that Aunt May imposes and Wyatt struggles to escape. The other name of this Antichrist is Dionysus, who becomes incarnate in the bull.34 This is the bull Mithra slays, the bull Gwyon sacrifices, the bull whose body and blood Stephan/Stephen eats in the sacrificial loaves. When the father and son become one, salvation is no longer deferred but now is at hand. This salvation, which is the work of man and not the gift of the gods, is the end toward which Stephen’s voyage has been circuitously moving: “I told you, there was, a moment in travel when love and necessity become the same thing. And now, if the gods themselves cannot recall their gifts, we must live them through, and redeem them” (898). Nietzsche calls this love amor fati, which embraces and affirms the world in all its complex richness and horror. To say “Yes” to this reality is to confess that nothing lies beyond—absolutely nothing. Yet, Gaddis insists, hope is still possible.
Many reviewers and critics draw attention to all my books as being hopeless, that no good is going to come of anything, that everything is winding down in the entire entropic concept. But Wyatt’s line, I think late in the book, says that one must simply live through the corruption, even become part of it. As Esme, the model, is a quite corrupted person but still innocent in some way. Well, Wyatt has been part of the corruption, but at the end he says we must simply live it through and make a fresh start. I mean you could almost say—though the way the phrase is used now is not what I mean—that it is a notion of being born again in this life, with no reference to our “born again” Christians, and the next one.35
This is the deliberate life Stephen begins when he leaves the cloister of the heretical Franciscans.
To follow Stephen into this life is to leave behind not only the Age of Faith but also the world of modernity and to dare to enter a thoroughly postmodern world where sign and reality, copy and original are one. The Recognitions begins with a safe masquerade “where the mask may be dropped at the crucial moment it presumes itself as reality” (3). By the end of the novel, a very different masquerade emerges, in which masks, when dropped, reveal not the face but other masks.
…real no longer opposed to factitious nor, as in law, opposed to personal, nor as in philosophy distinguished from ideal, nor the real number of mathematics having no imaginary part, but real filled out to embrace those opponents which made its definition possible and so, once defined, capable of resolving the paradox in the moment when the mask and the face become one, the eternal moment of the Cartesian God, Who can will a circle to be square.
(561)
When the real fills out to embrace the opponents that made its definition possible, the real itself disappears by emptying itself into appearance. In theological terms, through the process of kenosis, God (i.e., the real) empties himself by becoming thoroughly incarnate in Jesus (i.e., image or appearance). The death of the real is the disappearance of the origin and, thus, the end of originality. In the absence of the original, the copy is always a copy of a copy. But the simulacrum is no longer second best. If, as Gaddis suggests, the saints were counterfeits of Christ and Christ a counterfeit of God, then to imitate Christ would be to counterfeit a counterfeit. A counterfeit counterfeit, however, is not simply a fake. In a world where the real turns out to be fake, fakes can be recognized as real. To accept this reality is to be born again in this life for the first time.