Wrecking the Recognitions...Chap 4 banana republic

[Michael Bailey]

 Paul Mackin  wrote:

> True, there may be some swipes taken at the banana company. But the chapter
> to me seems less about the lack of nobility on the part of big business than
> it is about the lack of nobility in Otto.  Otto is such a role player. His
> suit, his lighting of a cigarette in front of the mirror, and finally the
> bandaged hand arranged as to still allow his tapered fingers to show.  And
> the people he meets along the way are quick to point out his pretensions.
>

it's funny, when I was about 12 a young lady in my peer group gave me
a "gender test" including a demand to "look at your fingernails" and
when I extended the digits the better to peer straight at them, she
said that was the guy way to do it, and the girl way was to curl them
in and look -- she had some reasoning behind it too, different from
that in TR of course but equally plausible at the time...

Is there really a guy way to do that, or to feel about the Judge?  I doubt it.

that response is really to a different thread, I guess...

what I was actually thinking on this topic was how in Paris Gaddis
used features of the landscape to broaden out into a commentary on the
state of art and the prevalence of fraud and I don't know, the
gracefulness of that one particular dog scavenging and the guy picking
his nose and kissing his girlfriend

and how Wyatt in a cheerful Pollyanna tale might have reached an
agreement with Cremer - critics have to eat too and opera stars have
clacqueurs and paid mourners were a feature of funerals at various
times and these things aren't that terrible and somebody is paying the
critic in any case, unless the critic has a porridge patrimony of some
kind - and the two of them might have co-operated to differentiate his
new work from the old acknowledged classics and the plethora of
forgeries instead of Cremer panning Wyatt and Wyatt falling back to
New York and anonymous work for his architect buddy and eventually to
fraud himself

In other words it seems to me he ignored a unique opportunity because
he's wrapped up in himself to a similar degree to Otto, who spent his
time away writing about New York (and even in New York, seemingly
ignored much there in order to concentrate on neat things for his
character to say),

but Gaddis is able to back away from both characters enough to at
least hint at the stories going on in Paris and Latin America and
maybe emblematize the insensitivity of both Wyatt and Otto in so doing