Horror of Intimacy/Intimacy of Horror - William Gaddis, The Recognitions 725/919 Counterfeit, Simulation, and the Uncanny in William Gaddis' The Recognitions
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2013
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitions concerns a young painter, Wyatt Gwyon, and his involvement in a forgery ring in New York City. The characters of Gaddis’ New York, alongside Wyatt’s forged artworks, are observed to be bound to a perpetual cycle of misrecognition; they miss each other and are missed in return; thus the universe of The Recognitions, alongside Gaddis' text, is plagued by a persistent but untraceable sense of loss and anxiety. This untraceable sense of loss is underscored and multiplied by the motif of the counterfeit. Through the work of counterfeiting, Gaddis brokers a reality wherein recognition becomes a work of violence that serves to render the strange familiar, and the familiar, infinitely strange. Insofar as the familiar is made foreign and vice versa, the universe of the novel becomes a site of Freudian uncanny encounters with an ungraspable past that at once lords over and abandons the reality of Gaddis' characters, initiating a palindromic oscillation between the "horror of intimacy" (Gaddis 725) and the "intimacy of horror" (Gaddis 919). Wyatt’s attempts to come to terms with this shifting reality of misrecognition, displacement, and loss and his implication in its foundational work results in the corruption of his identity and of Gaddis’ text at large. Through the narrative and textual incorporation of simulation, Gaddis’ novel prefigures many of the concerns of postmodern literature, namely the death of the author, the infinite shift of the meaning of the text, and the subsequent birth of the reader. These concerns engender a new literature.