The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts

[Erik T. Burns]

first off, it's Wyatt, not Gwyon, who is the artist.
but that was a Freudian slip, I'm sure, like mine about the Town Carpenter

more importantly, I think the question of WHY Wyatt paints forgeries is the
real point of The Recognitions -- or at least of Wyatt's story therein. It
is not a question that is resolved in any satisfying way, to my mind. Which
is OK, too. It's ambiguous.

But here's a shot: Wyatt has lost so much throughout his life that he has
become empty, a vehicle; he honestly believes he is a kind of antenna for
the original artists to produce "their" work today. "...I am lived." (p262).
This confuses Recktall Brown because he thinks people only do things for
money; it confuses Basil Valentine too, because he thinks a person with the
talents of Wyatt should be producing his own "real" art. But Wyatt has lost
that too -- the only originals we know of are the Paris paintings, rejected
by the critic he failed to bribe, and burned in a warehouse fire. The only
surviving original is of Camilla; thematically his first, and most crucial,
loss. Her earrings make it into other forgeries, as does Esme's face.

It's important to stress that what Wyatt does is not copying; he creates new
paintings that are taken as new discoveries of work by established artists.
He _is_ Hubert van Eyck, a person who may not have existed, and may not have
painted anything.

Arguably, Wyatt's true art is the damage. (see the exchange with Valentine
on p333 - "But the damage? It isn't as though I'd done that. ... The damage,
you know, is ... happens."

a counterweight to all this? Wyatt keeps evidence that he is the creator of
the work, a way to prove provenance and denounce the forgeries. to me, this
just proves he's not entirely insane; indeed, just a man.

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> And furthermore.......in the decade after this novel is published, Andy
> Warhol
> is going to
> go down in cultural history by copying, enlarged and silk-screen heightened
> Reality
> (of soup cans, etc.)
> (and we can be assured andy never read---or had read to him---the
> Recognitons)
>
> Everything was so fake in America then that this was the only way art could
> see
> us out
> (of fakery)?
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc: pov at ix.netcom.com
> Sent: Thu, April 7, 2011 6:05:35 PM
> Subject: The WreckIgnitions Read. Stray strugglingly playful thoughts
>
> 2 parter here:
> OK. Yesterday I wrote some stuff linking that self-confirming ad hominem
> "joke"
> to
>
> the kind of self-confirming joke that we know as Catch-22 (as well as the
> Ontological
>
> Argument, which no one called me a genius for...)....
>
> Anyway, help me out here as Columbo is always saying. Gwyon, after giving
> up
> attempting
> any 'original' art, now does loving, exact copies of the Flemish masters
> for a
> living...
>
> Now, isn't that akin to a Catch--22 joke? To an ad hominem
> "argument"?......
> Art in America then, anytime, is only seen as art when it was confirmed by
> history
> as Art...and real Art is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest
> with no
> one to hear it?.......
>
>
> Part 2....writers/artists have to a) have something to say b) find their
> voice/style....and
> they are One in the best..............
>
> So, Gaddis wants to write serious fiction. Knowing, say, melville's
> American
> career and others,
> he tries writing.......Let's say: HE feels it falls in the forest in
> silence.......So, he has this brilliant
> self-whatever idea..........All that I could write and make a living at
> would be
>
> ....................
> dead realism..........................................
>
> So, I'll push realism to Gothic excess, to over-the-top irrealism with
> overwhelming copies (allusions) from the world
> of reality....I'll do a novel about, at one level, the faked reality of
> unoriginal writers. My originality......
>
>
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