TT 1.3 - "The Recognitions"

[alice wellintown]

Recognition: to perceive or see clearly, to conceive or apprehend with
reason or imagination. To acknowledge.

In the first chapter of TR we meet a character coming of age (as noted
Wyatt can be read as a Huck, Ishmael, or Jamesian Innocent Abroad, and
as a Dedalus) who does not agree to what others, he must recognize,
perceive or see clearly, or conceive with reason or imagination.

To ackowledge, but disagree with. A good example of this is Wyatt's
perception or conception or acknowledgement of the good and the
beautiful. While Wyatt disagrees with his Father's perception,
conception, acknowledgement of goodness and beauty, he does not,
however, repudiate goodness or beauty.

Same goes for Aunt May.

Likewise, TR recognizes the Romantic (Hawthorne, Melville ...) the
Realist Satire (Twain...), the Modern (H.James, Joyce), does not
repudiate these, but does not agree with them either.

Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com> wrote:
> 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.
>