TT 1.3 - "The Recognitions"

[Richard Ryan]

A post in which we again ask, "Why is this book called 'The Recognitions"?

>From the online Readers guide::

"The Recognitions: the title of a third-century "theological romance"
attributed to Clement of Rome (see 373.1 ff.). In his working notes
for the novel Gaddis wrote: "The Recognitions as title I like
perfectly because it implies the impossibility of escape from a (the)
pattern"; and elsewhere: "THE RECOGNITIONS is I think in the first
place a simple lable [sic], deceptively simple perhaps, and all the
better" (quoted in Koenig's "'Splinters from the Yew Tree,'" 13, 85).
"

I find both of these apparently off-the-cuff authorial remarks
completely opaque.  In any case, one form or another of the word
"recognition" appears at the following locations in Chapter 3
[page.line]: 78.epigraph, 84.24, 88.15, 91.42, 92.6, 98.6, 107.36,
123.9, 139.37, 152.12.  This is the densest concentration of the word
so far; whatever "deceptively simple" significance it may have, that
meaning begins to resonate more deeply in Chapter 3.