More TRTR from Tanner using Cave's Recognitions

[Mark Kohut]

"But Cave points to a potentially more complicated and disturbing aspect of 'recognition'. He calls 
recognition a 'scandal', not only because recogntion plots are often about a scandal ( incest, murder, adultery),
but also because they represent 'a shift into the implausible.'" 
"What emerges is 'a sense of a means of knowing which is different from rational cognition. [Cf. same in 
The Recognitions]. It operates surreptitiously, randomly [unswerving punctuality of chance?], elliptically and 
often perversely, seizing on precisiely those details that from a rational point of view seem trivial"....
 
From Aristotle on there has been an atempt to differentiate a 'low' sort of recognition plot, involving birthmarks
and scars and rings and what-not, and a 'high' kind, registering the discovery of order, causality, harmony, truth.
As Cave brilliantly shows, it can't be done.......[But] the distinction will not hold and the higher is always infected
with traces or hints of the lower."..

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: "gaddis-l at yahoogroups.com" <gaddis-l at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 7:53 AM
Subject: More TRTR from Tanner using Cave's Recognitions


"Early recognition scenes invariably involved the revelation of true identity and the re-establsihment of
kin".....Ur figures, Oedipus and Odysseus"

"in New Comedy---The Recognitions is a comedy, yes?---the recognition is a disclosure to all of 'what has been
done' "....

"Clearly the notion of 'recognition' may be extended, or attenuated, so that the object recognized may be a relation, a state
of affairs, a fact, a higher order, a hidden law, a truth about Being, a truth about self, or something so elusive that you
lose it in the act of trying to find and speak it."....

I had wanted to look up in the OED and put down the prismatic meanings of 'recognitions'...now it is done better...
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