The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[Richard Ryan]

Only a hundred pages in... but my thought is that The Recognitions
continually sets forth a set of binary oppositions (fake-real;
Catholic-Protestant; Christian-Pagan; Old World-New World;.....) which
give the book its conceptual structure.  The plot is advanced - and
the characters are draw into the progress of the plot - by a series of
stop-time moments and incomplete encounters in which they experience
some echo of the "higher reality" that encompasses them. So the book's
over-arching framework is a complex of dialectical antagonisms, while
the more localized and limited reality of the characters' psyches are
exposed to us, the readers, in epiphanic bursts that the narrator
allows us to share with his dramatis personae.

What we share, on the other hand, with the narrator (and presumably
with Gaddis) is the wider, more self-conscious registry of the social
or aesthetic tensions that make up the characters' fictive world. We
are both inside and outside the matrix that the characters experience
as a series of disquieting, symbolically charged tableaux.  These are
the Recognitions of the title (which would allow for any number of the
Repetitions you rightly detect, Mark....)

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Chap 1 introduces many key characters and also provides a
> kind of stakes-raising very ambitious metaphor as backstory, as history: America
> is/was
> a guilt-ridden Puritanical House of Seven Gables kind of country.
>
> Which Rev Gwyon sees anthropologically and the narrator sees in the whole
> revelatory tradition of such that The Golden Bough intorduced.
>
> It all goes way back is repeated.
>
> Young Wyatt almost dies but becomes an artist; an artist who gives up doing
> original
> works in order to make a living doing near-perfect forgeries--imitations of
> earlier great artists.
>
>
> America is a country that lives fraudulently, perhaps the metaphor goes?
>
> Time, living in real time, is a positive herein, perhaps echoing Eliot's
> returning "recognizing
> the place for the first time".......
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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