version

Well-known member
Gaddis.

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action--revealed in Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialoge--is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad--and Armageddon comes rapidly closer.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I foolishly tried to initiate a discussion on The Recognitions on facebook, at first it was like pulling teeth but I did manage to get a few comments, including this one

I read Carpenter's Gothic around the early 90s and thought it was a load of rubbish, frankly. But I trust your judgement, and I'll make a point of revisiting Gaddis soon.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I've heard of him, but nothing more. That bit you talked about from the recognitions sounded good. Would you recommend him then?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I only know The Recognitions, I enjoyed it a lot (with some caveats). It's big and sprawling and messy and as an inevitable result some bits are better than others. As a whole I found the contrast it makes between the truly artistic 'forgeries' of one character vs the original but artistically bankrupt work of many others pretty interesting. I suppose it argues that originality is not one of the qualities that is necessary in great art. An idea I've seen here (dissensus) often enough and agree with up to a point. The whole book is concerned with forged paintings, forged money, a forged mummy, forged experience and so on... although by the very end this kinda falls by the wayside a little. I very much liked the parties and bits made up of pages and pages of random snatches of (mainly moronic and pretentious) conversations (though some reviews I've read suggested he didn't need to have so many similar parties in there) and the scale of the whole thing. I liked the learning it seems to show off, the quotes from all kinds of places and in all kinds of fields and languages... I was less keen on the way it seemed to look down on certain less aesthetically aware characters and some of it seemed just dated unfortunately. So yeah I both found it interesting and enjoyed it but I wouldn't insist that anyone read it as a life changing necessity right now this minute.
 

version

Well-known member
I've got Carpenter's Gothic, A Frolic of His Own and The Rush for Second Place. The latter's a book of essays and I haven't finished the former two yet. I like what I've read though. His approach to dialogue is brilliant. Very fast and loud. Probably the most realistic I've ever read.

- Where's the whisky.
- In the refrigerator, you...
- What the hell is it doing in the refrigerator.
- You put it there last night.
- Well why didn't you take it out... The refrigerator door banged against the counter. - He's crazy Liz. That God damn brother of yours, he's crazy.
- Paul please he, I know sometimes he...
- Sometimes! You know what he just did out there?
- I thought he fixed the car, you said...
- He ought to be locked up Liz. He's dangerous. Is this glass clean? He ought to be in Payne Whitney with your uncle strutting around in a cutaway, Uncle William strutting around Payne Whitney with no pants on.
- Like the night you folded up all your clothes and put them in the refrig...
- Liz that never happened! It never happened, it's something you read someplace.
- I thought it was funny.
- Nothing's funny.
 

jenks

thread death
Just finished Animalia from Fitzcarraldo - fucking savage story of a French pig farm over a century.
Also reading a whole bunch of other stuff like Brookner on the painter David. Apartments on Uranus - a great selection of essays on identity, fluidity and all sorts. An early Perec novella. As always too much on the go in some kind of maniacal frenzy.
I really like what Sheils said over on the dematerialisation thread - it’s all kind of connected I think.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah agreed about the conversations Version - in The Recognitions it's quite common for there to be pages and pages of that without the usual speech marks or attribution and it makes it very hard at times to tell who is saying what and which line they are replying to and so on... which I have to admit is a very good way to reproduce the effect of a busy and chaotic party. Arguably it doesn't matter who is saying what to whom a lot of time cos it's mainly bollocks... but of course that's the point.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah agreed about the conversations Version - in The Recognitions it's quite common for there to be pages and pages of that without the usual speech marks or attribution and it makes it very hard at times to tell who is saying what and which line they are replying to and so on... which I have to admit is a very good way to reproduce the effect of a busy and chaotic party. Arguably it doesn't matter who is saying what to whom a lot of time cos it's mainly bollocks... but of course that's the point.

Carpenter's Gothic's basically all like that thus far. There've been a couple of expository paragraphs, but it's almost entirely dialogue. This is what he said when someone asked him about it:

"It’s alive, it’s alive, whereas expository writing is the writer writing."
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Recs has plenty of both... and weird bits where he totally goes off on one and it's really hard to figure out what is haappening.
 

version

Well-known member
On alchemy in The Recognitions:

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 the gold to forge,” that is very much the key line to the whole book.

(November 1986 interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy)

On the genesis of The Recognitions:

[The Recognitions was born in 1945 as a short story about a collapsing marriage, which eventually became Chapter 3 of the novel. By 1947, Gaddis was expanding the piece, in part by incorporating elements of the Faust story.—AW]

It began with the Otto-Wyatt-Esther triangle, and progressed openly as it does here, in the first part; though the original intention, closely following the FAUST, was Wyatt-Esme as Faust-Gretchen, and Esme’s damnation through Wyatt’s negation of her (as a model in forgeries; and his refusal to love her)

When I started this thing [ . . . ] it was to be a good deal shorter, and quite explicitly a parody on the FAUST story, except the artist taking the place of the learned doctor.

(unpublished notes for The Recognitions, 1945-51)


[In 1948 Gaddis traveled to Spain, and around this time he began incorporating elements from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, and the third-century Recognitions, falsely attributed to the martyred Pope St. Clement. The novel’s size and scope grew; the version submitted to the publisher was substantially longer than the published version and even included footnotes.—AW]

We come back to the Faust story and to the original Clementine Recognitions, which has been called the first Christian novel (I remember thinking mine was going to be the last one), about his search for salvation, redemption and so forth. And I had these notions of basing The Recognitions on the constant presence of the past and and of its imposition of myth in different forms which eventually come down to the same stories in any culture.

(November 1986 interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy)

[Robert Graves] was such a fine and generous man that we had numerous talks and, in fact, he was to become somewhat the physical model for Rev Gwyon.

(July 1982 letter to Steven Moore)

Once one gets a theme in one’s mind it becomes obsessive. If it happens to be forgery, then everywhere you look all you see is forgery, falsification—of religious values, of art—plagiarism, stealing. Gradually this panorama emerged. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get it all in here.’

(June 1985 interview with Miriam Berkley)
 

version

Well-known member
On sacrilege:

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.

(unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions)
 

catalog

Well-known member
Interesting with the robert graves connection, ive got the second volume of the greek myths out at the moment, leafed through but find him quite boring as a writer, but then i suppose what hes trying to do with that is quite a tough one. Heard a lot about the white goddess, might give it a go sometime
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Nice one Version, interesting stuff - I thnk there is a lot to be said about the book cos there is a lot to it.
I have one of those RG books of myths, I think I found in on my Grandma's shelves when she died a few years back and have been meaning to get round to it ever since.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There is a sense that the book became different things as he wrote it - I think it had like seven years gestation - it grew outwards from Wyatt's marriage and a Faust thing and then became about forgery and then he put some random bits on the end. With some books there are different sections and it feels as though it's all been planned out and is under control but here I really think that over seven years you become a different person (obviously less so than from when 17 to 24 or whatever but still) and so the book you want to write changes. That could be seen as a weakness, certainly a failing on the part of the author as one way of judging the success of an artwork is surely by measuring how well it did what the author wanted it to do. I reckon that The Recognitions arguably fails on its own terms but somehow succeeds despite that. I dunno what I mean by that though, maybe I'm talking bollocks.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
If I was gonna try and be clever I might argue that the musings on art and how it can be good by doing the things we might assume to be unimportant well and ignoring the supposedly important ones is some kind of justification of the above... how the book succeeds by failing. Honestly I don't think that's true though.
We went to the modern art museum here in Lisbon the other day and I couldn't help thinking about the reaction Wyatt would have had to everything there...
 

catalog

Well-known member
Maybe a second read would help clarify a few points? :)

I tend to prefer things that have been written quick, just cos there's more energy in the writing somehow, but maybe it's just a hipstery thing dunno
 

catalog

Well-known member
Gaddis does sound pretty good tho, I can definitely see myself getting into him. will wait to hear versions verdict on the other one.
 

version

Well-known member
@Rich - The Gaddis annotations are helpful. Here's the reader's guide to The Recognitions -- http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml

I had a look at the annotations for chapter one of Carpenter's Gothic and that bit I posted re: someone putting clothes in the fridge is apparently a reference to The Recognitions too.

- Where's the whisky.
- In the refrigerator, you...
- What the hell is it doing in the refrigerator.
- You put it there last night.
- Well why didn't you take it out... The refrigerator door banged against the counter. - He's crazy Liz. That God damn brother of yours, he's crazy.
- Paul please he, I know sometimes he...
- Sometimes! You know what he just did out there?
- I thought he fixed the car, you said...
- He ought to be locked up Liz. He's dangerous. Is this glass clean? He ought to be in Payne Whitney with your uncle strutting around in a cutaway, Uncle William strutting around Payne Whitney with no pants on.
- Like the night you folded up all your clothes and put them in the refrig...
- Liz that never happened! It never happened, it's something you read someplace.

- I thought it was funny.
- Nothing's funny.


"13.13] folded up all your clothes and put them in the refrig... [...] something you read someplace: Liz read this in The Recognitions, where Arnie Munk is described as having once done this (175)."
 
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