TT 1.3 - "The Recognitions"

[David Morris]

I think Alice has a good take on the title.  It is akin to the
following definition:
To Recognize:  to acknowledge or treat as valid: to recognize a claim.

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 7:16 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>