The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[Paul Mackin]

On 4/19/2011 6:39 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> it will be interesting to see, as we read, what binary oppositions
> continue to hold....

We don't want to forget the biggest binary opposition of them all. 
Namely, is counterfeiting in the sense of copying, imitating, reusing 
necessarily a good thing or a bad thing?

Discussions of Gaddis always involves Frazer's points  about the newer 
religion's having some basis in the older ones and how this insight 
influenced the novel.  This didn't particularly upset Frazer.  Did it in 
some way Gaddis.  I'm sure in the novel there are instances of both good 
and bad "counterfeiting."  I'm totally rusty on where they occur but . . 
.  something to watch out for.

Put another way, I can't imaging Gaddis' view of Christianity being 
radically altered by discovering that Attis and Jesus died and were 
resurrected the same time of year.


> I might argue that Catholic/Protestant are horses of a barely different color,
> despite appearances so far,
>
> And plumbing this 'higher reality'...this narrator's pov that might ground the
> savage
> satire in its moral vision against which the satire is set...............
>
> will be very interesting too................
>
>
>   
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Richard Ryan<himself at richardryan.com>
> To: Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Cc: pynchon -l<pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Mon, April 18, 2011 5:58:10 PM
> Subject: Re: The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary
>
> 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".......
>>
>>
>
>