The fake of the world

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The novel The Fake of the World by the American author William Gaddis first appeared in 1955 under the original title The Recognitions by Harcourt Verlag in New York . The work initially went unnoticed by the public after it was unanimously dismissed by literary criticism.

Thanks to a small group of enthusiastic readers, interest in the extraordinarily complex novel remained awake. In 1976 Gaddis received the National Book Award for his follow-up novel JR , after which public interest in his monumental first work also grew.

The renowned Time Magazine ranked The Recognitions among the 100 best English-language novels since 1923 in January 2010.

The novel explores the subject of counterfeiting on a broad level: counterfeit banknotes, counterfeit paintings and feigned feelings determine both the world of the Calvinist puritans and the New York scene.

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The hero of the novel is Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a priest who developed a talent for painting. The devout Aunt May, who initially took care of the boy's upbringing, pursues every sign of this talent with bitter severity in the sense of an archaic ban on images , which is reminiscent of corresponding formulations in conservative Islam: Those who create images compete with the Creator God and become severely punished for it. So the boy paints in secret, secretly buries the finished pictures in the garden. The detailed description of the bitterness and sadism with which the strictly religious aunt brings up the boy becomes an accusation against the rigid Calvinist Protestantism in the USA.

With Wyatt's father, religiosity leads into increasingly absurd regions of mysticism , alchemy and natural religion . When the son becomes seriously ill and the father sees that the doctors are only using him as a guinea pig, he rescues him in a shamanic ceremony by sacrificing a monkey that he brought back from a trip to Gibraltar. After the death of Aunt May, the father and the largely self-sufficient son live with a confused housekeeper in the rectory. But the son gives up all plans to take over the pastoral office that has been handed down from generation to generation. At the end of the 1930s, he first studied painting in the Nazi-ruled Munich and then moved to Paris, where he got married.

Out of necessity and failure, Wyatt developed into a brilliant forger who did not copy concrete paintings by old masters, but created new ones in their style so perfectly that they were accepted by the art world as long-lost originals. In Wyatt's environment, Gaddis develops impressive and critical images of the American scene in Paris, the freaky world of artists and petty criminals in New York and, time and again, the bigoted small-town world of the Puritans in the USA.

At the same time, Wyatt's father developed increasingly absurd ideas, was impressed by the Catholic belief in miracles in Spain, and was interested in Mithraism and other remote religious currents. His wife Camilla, who died early on a trip to Europe, is buried in Spain. After his death, Wyatt's father retired to a monastery as a guest. The path to reality is increasingly blocked for the father until he ends up in psychiatry.

An important minor figure is Otto, an admirer of Wyatt, who constructs an unreal existence for himself from quoted quotations from Wyatt in particular. The failure of this concept of life sometimes produces absurd flowers, for example when Otto fakes a broken arm, the alleged result of participating in a revolution in Latin America, and this faked injury becomes a hindrance to his plans. Nonetheless, he becomes a lover of Wyatt's wife, Esther, who, frustrated by Wyatt's inability to communicate, seeks a comforter who really cares about her. Another character is the drug-addicted poet Esme, who after an affair with Otto Wyatt models and falls in love with him and ends up as a nun in Europe after a series of absurd entanglements.

Wyatt experiences his forgeries as artistic achievements, he has no financial interests. Rather, he wants to distance himself from the art business of his time, which exclusively values ​​originality, no matter how senseless their products are. He has been fascinated by the technology and style of the old masters since his youth. Through Recktall Brown, an unscrupulous art dealer, he is still more and more involved in criminal business until there is no way out.

Interpretative approach

At the center of the novel is a group of people who live in Manhattan , especially in Greenwich Village , and who have traveled to those countries that Gaddis himself had visited, such as Central America, France, Spain, Italy and to some extent also North Africa. The common concern of all characters involved in the novel is art: literature, painting, film and also the art of forgery. This artistic concern is always in connection with religious search or offers a substitute for it.

With the clergyman Reverend Gwyon and his son Wyatt, religious and artistic interests appear in the succession of generations; the novel, with Gwyon Senior, goes back to the time around or after the First World War. The most important external event in the plot about the clergyman is the death of his wife on the crossing to Spain, where Gwyon has her buried according to a Catholic rite in order to then visit the holy places of the Old World and delve into the study of the history of religion, which he had already started in New England with a course on the Mithraic cult . After returning to his New England Protestant congregation, his sermons are increasingly permeated with ideas of non-Protestant Christianity as well as pagan religions and myths . Gwyon's story reaches its climax when he - meanwhile insane - performs a Mithras cult instead of a Christmas service on Christmas, which is also significant for the other characters in the novel. Gwyon's life eventually ends in an asylum.

The Puritan religion handed down to Gwyon corresponds to the Protestant ethics in the sense of Max Weber (cf. The Recognitions , pp. 13f.); for Gwyon, however, this understanding of religion is insufficient; in other religions as well as in myths he seeks that mystery which he saw lost in his denominational Christian faith. A pre-Christmas scene description ( The Recognitions , p. 102) in the cinematic narrative perspective of the camera view ( Camera Eye ) by John Dos Passos with one of the rare authorial comments on this topic shows that for Gwyon religions are the secret and magic of the divine , hide what gives the world its meaning; in search of this divine meaning, he finally goes mad.

Like his father, Gwyon's son Wyatt was initially destined for the office of clergyman, but soon devoted himself to painting. For him as an artist, too, it is about preoccupation with the mysteries. As Basil Valentine, the art critic of the ring of counterfeiters, for which Wyatt works, puts it, the priest is the guardian of the mysteries, while the painter reveals their secret by giving him artistic form: "The priest is the guardian of mysteries [.. .] The artist is driven to expose them " ( The Recognitions , p. 261). Wyatt learned his art in Germany and Paris; his German master teaches him that it is not about originality that breaks with tradition, but about imitation that creates new things ( The Recognitions , p. 89). Wyatt's role model is Hans Memling and the old Flemish masters ; his teacher later sells a Memling-inspired picture of Wyatt as a real newly discovered Memling. Since Wyatt's own paintings in the style of the Flemish masters cannot be sold, he is forced to earn his living as a draftsman in a bridge building company and by restoring old paintings. Recktall Brown, the art dealer, can finally win him over to paint pictures in the style of the old masters and sign them with their names in order to then sell them for expensive money as a new discovery of allegedly lost works. Basil Valentine provides the necessary art expertise .

Wyatt tries to express his artistic concern with all devotion in his paintings. When he finally reveals himself to be the painter of the forged old masters and wants to terminate his alliance with the art dealer Brown at his Christmas party, the unscrupulous art dealer falls down the stairs in a knight's armor that he has put on and dies grotesquely . The guests flee the house; only Wyatt remains with Valentine with the art dealer's corpse. Desperate over the failure of his revelation, he tries to stab Valentine and then flees to Europe, mistakenly believing that he has murdered him. He looks in vain for his mother's grave there, since her remains had been mistaken for those of a girl who is about to be canonized in Rome while Wyatt's visit to the cemetery . Wyatt then retreats to the Franciscan monastery that his father had already visited and again restores paintings. During this activity he eats bread, which - another of the numerous grotesque elements of the novel - was baked with his father's ashes, which were sent to the monastery and mistakenly mistaken for the flour that Wyatt's father used to send to the monastery. Like his father before, Wyatt cannot stay in the monastery and is sent on by the porter. When the bells ring, Wyatt believes he can hear his late father in it and decides to live more consciously from now on: “The bells, the old man ringing me on. Now at last, to live deliberately ” ( The Recognitions , p. 900).

The story of Wyatt's grotesque in many respects is also the story of a person who seeks to find himself as an artist in his own work. Numerous allusions allow Wyatt to appear in analogy to different literary and mythological figures: for example, like Clemens , Peter's youthful pupil, he goes in search of the truth in the early Christian Recognitiones and is just as tempted by the art dealer Brown as Clemens by the magician Simon .

The art dealer Brown also turns out to be Mephistopheles to Wyatt , to whom he sells his soul, although Wyatt, unlike Faust , ultimately manages to break away from Mephisto. When Wyatt goes on a journey at the end, he appears as the Eternal Jew , but also as the Flying Dutchman , whom the novel alludes to several times.

Throughout the novel, diverse allusions equally elsewhere on the theme of redemption ( redemption ). Like TS Eliot in his Four Quartets, Wyatt is concerned with the redemption of time and its transience, which he tries to achieve through his art: "A work of art redeems time" ( The Recognitions , P. 144).

Esme, his model - or metaphorically speaking his Senta from Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman or his Helena from Greek mythology - sacrifices herself for him; nevertheless he by no means succeeds in finding his redemption through her in the end. The same applies to Otto Pivner who speak parodic plays the Wagner to Wyatt's fist and quotes Eliot, where he simultaneously to the Apostle Paul calls: "Saint Paul would have us redeem time; but if present and past are both present in time future; and that future contained in time past, there is no redemption but one " ( The Recognitions , p. 160).

In many places in Gaddis' novel, however, there are allusions that are not further specified. For example, Wyatt is now drawn to Spain under the name Stephen, which his parents originally wanted to give him, like a second Stephen Dedalus on his self-discovery search, which, however, appears to him above all as a great emptiness: “It's not a land you travel in, it's a land you flee across, from one place to another [...] It's like drowning, this despair, this ... being engulfed in emptiness ” ( The Recognitions , p. 816).

Spain is the country where Wyatt's mother Camilla is driven to the cemetery like a virgin in a white carriage. Due to the mistake of her corpse for that of a girl, she is falsely canonized, despite the rape that girl endured. Once again, such signs of regaining lost innocence turn out to be deceptive, as it becomes clear that the canonization is solely for commercial reasons: the congregation needs its saint in order to encourage pilgrims to visit the tomb and to provide additional income .

The attempt to regain innocence runs parallel to Wyatt's attempt at self-discovery in his art. However, his early attempts at painting are described as copies ( The Recognitions , p. 52); what he originally sees in front of him he cannot bring into an artistic form; he is not yet able to reveal what he actually thinks he is seeing in front of him ( “to expose [it]” , p. 261).

This description of the existence of a (still) purely imaginary, realiter not visible and shapeable artistic model or concept distinguishes Gaddi's novel from other works of the purely experimental narrative form , which do not recognize anything as existing, which is not formulated linguistically or expressed as a work of art can.

A passage in which Wyatt's endeavors to create a picture of his mother based on a photographic model that shows her before her wedding is typical is significant. But he doesn't finish the picture: “There is something about a ... an unfinished piece of work, a ... a thing like this where ... do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it's there, it's there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it ” ( The Recognitions , p. 57). However , he does not even succeed in realizing and revealing, “uncovering” or “exposing” with regard to the image of his mother.

Another hint can be found in a passage in the text in which Otto has the protagonist Gordon imitate the society play Wyatt composed by him ( The Recognitions , p. 123). As a result, in each painting, one layer covers the other in an attempt to achieve greater perfection. Underneath, the “pattern” remains , thus a kind of archetype or idea in the Platonic sense . Otto also tells a story that he allegedly claims to have heard from a friend - presumably Wyatt: When a fake Titian was scratched off the canvas, an insignificant work came to light, but under which there was actually a genuine Titian . In the end, Wyatt also scratches off an insignificant picture of a real Titian in the monastery.

Accordingly, behind all these attempts at artistic representation or design is the idea of ​​an ultimately valid reality. Wyatt has the rare experience of seeing this reality after completing a painting and viewing Picasso's Night Fishing in Antibes . So he tells Esther, his wife, how everything on the street seemed unreal to him after the completion of his picture and the subsequent exhaustion, until he came across Picasso's picture. He sums up his experience at this moment in the following words: “When I saw it [Picasso's picture] all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it. You don'nt see it in paintings because most of the time you can't see beyond a painting " ( The Recognitions , p. 123). Wyatt's experience of recognition thus becomes a kind of highlight-like revelation or illumination similar to epiphany in Joyce's sense.

What is revealed in the work of art, however, gains its own strength. When Esme visited Wyatt for the last time in his studio, she felt that she had become part of his reality. In the letter she wants to leave behind after her planned but unsuccessful suicide, it says: “It does not seem unreasonable that we invent colors, line, shapes, capable of being, representative of existence, therefore it is not unreasonable that they , in turn, later invent us, our ideas, directions, motivations [...] They by conversion into an idea of ​​the person, do, instantaneously destroy him " ( The Recognitions , p. 473). As another passage shows, for Wyatt painting means proof of his own existence (cf. The Recognitions , p. 96); In the creative process, however, this being becomes that of the work, as the reality of the picture gains destructive power over it. Innumerable attempts are required to make this reality appear in the picture; thus there are also the most varied of possibilities for their appearance.

In relation to the Flemish masters, Wyatt states that the multitude of perspectives contained in the paintings not only constitutes their “force” , but also their flaws ( “flaw” ), as they are only separate partial views of that holistic reality grant, which as such for Wyatt, according to Esther's statement, is a great, empty nothing ( "a great, empty, nothing" ) that is only filled in perception and artistic design ( The Recognitions , p. 119).

In Gaddis' novel, this understanding of reality is the starting point for an interpretation as metafiction . This is also effective in The Recognitions by the fact that a majority of the characters involved in the event are denied " recognition " as a coherent knowledge of the whole and they have to live with the restricted partial view, the "separateess" that Wyatt describes when he was in Kloster exposes the real Titian: "That's what went wrong, you'll understand ... or, - Everything withholding itself from everything else" ( The Recognitions , p. 874).

For Brown, the representative of this group of figures, everything can be done with the same words ( “You can do anything with the same words” , p. 350). Hence everything is possible, but only possible: possibility has become the only reality.

Developmental background

The Recognitions emerged over a long period of around seven years, during which William Gaddis was constantly working on his first novel. Originally, according to Gaddis' own statements, the work was to be considerably shorter and less complex and was intended as an express parody of Goethe's Faust, in which an artist was supposed to take on the role of the scholar Doctor Faustus.

When the novel was being written, Gaddis traveled to Mexico, Central America and Europe. During his stay in Spain in 1948, he read the extensive comparative study on mythology and religion The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer , in which the latter tries to show the origin of religions from earlier myths.

Frazer's explanation of the origin of religions from myths significantly influenced Gaddi's point of view and probably also inspired his idea of ​​the modern world as a great fake. The reading of The Goldden Bough led Gaddis particular to the realization that the central motif of Goethe's Faust on from the early Christianity goes back traditional account of the life of St. Clement and his search for redemption in the so-called Clementine literature, later than Recognitiones into Latin have been translated. Against the background of this context, Gaddis fundamentally changed and expanded the original direction of his novel, which was in the making; As the title of his work, in the American original, he now chose a direct reference to the Clementine Recognitiones . With this expansion of the conception of his novel to include the story of the journey of a temporarily misled hero and his search for redemption, Gaddis also linked the intention to literarily shape the diverse mythical and pictorial borrowings as well as falsifications in modern culture. The novel, initially conceived by its author as a limited Faust paody, thus acquired a theoretically unlimited epic breadth as a comprehensive pilgrimage of knowledge, based on a parody of the Clementine Recognitiones .

In 1949 Gaddis completed a first draft of his work, which - as can be seen from his collected letters - he continuously revised and expanded in the following years until he finally gave his publisher Harcourt a complete manuscript of around 480,000 words as the final version of the Romans submitted. Gaddis previously published part of the second chapter of his oeuvre in a slightly modified version in the magazine New World Writing 1952.

reception

Immediately after its publication, The Recognitions was unanimously panned by contemporary literary criticism of the Hemingway era . The book was despised by numerous critics of the time, some of whom even boasted that they had not even read the novel to the end, as disgusting, repulsive and disgusting work (" disgusting, evil, foul-mouthed "). In a first more serious review in the New York Times on March 13, 1955, the novel was viewed as a daring attempt to challenge James Joyce ’s work of the century Ulysses due to its form and length, as well as its richness in images and content (“ In form, content, length , and richness of imagery, as well as in syntax, punctuation, and even typography, this novel challenges the reader to compare it with Joyce's "Ulysses. ") - an attempt which, however, was doomed to failure from the start.

The novel also met with little approval from the general public; Even in the American book trade, the first edition was lost for a long time. Only a small radical community of readers ensured that the work achieved the reputation of an “underground classic” in certain literary circles, despite being publicly forgotten .

The reasons for the largely lacking public response are, in addition to the initially very negative reviews, probably also in the extreme length of the work with almost 1000 pages and in the countless allusions, which often cannot be resolved or can only be resolved with difficulty, as well as the almost unmanageable number of characters and the labyrinthine entanglement of the plot.

The literary significance of this impressive novel was only gradually recognized in recent literary studies and criticism. For example, the renowned English literary scholar and critic Paul Antony (Tony) Tanner saw the introduction of a new era in American literature in Gaddi's novel, which anticipated the works of such outstanding authors as Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon , Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace significantly influenced.

In another detailed book review in the New York Times on July 7, 1985, the writer Cynthia Ozick also praised the novel as an original modernist masterpiece that was ahead of its time and, not least for this reason, was wrongly forgotten. The work is one of the most significant overlooked works of several literary generations; In doing so, however, it in no way imitates the previous literature by authors James Joyce, Thomas Mann , Henry James , Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust , but rather continues and leaves them behind.

In his review of December 5, 1998 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the occasion of the first edition of the “impressive” German translation by Marcus Ingendaay, Joachim Kalka described the great joy that “the renewed look at this sacred monster of contemporary American literature” gives. The book is great and irritating; even where the reader is disappointed, he has to admit that it is a disappointment at the highest level. “The Fake of the World” is “an encyclopedic-baroque novel (about 1250 pages) with a very ambitious philosophical-aesthetic program, an ironic-passionate confusion with the final questions of art and religion, a myriad of characters in cleverly linked relationships and a monstrous set of props. ”The changing locations - especially the painfully tightly described narrowness of Greenwich Village with its mercilessly failing artistic existences - and the multitude of books, pictures, everyday details, quotes are with Gaddis“ not part of a traditional attempt to mimetic reality to simulate and to give the reader 'the' world in a large, realistic grip ”. The novel is already "definitely one of those undertakings that construct a world of literature of their own with a great deal of reflected linguistic effort."

German translation

Ingendaay was asked about his translation and replied:

“I think the book in German is more readable and much funnier and brighter than the original. The original is ... really, absolutely dark. Dark in a way that I personally can't stand. And that's why I raised the mood of the novel a bit. ... (32:17) When you work on a book for so long, you do something for the author and say: "I'll make sure that you are better off here in the German version than in the original." (32:26) "

- Ingendaay, 2013

Such an intentional change in the tone of a work is controversial among translators .

expenditure

  • William Gaddis: The Recognitions . American first edition. Harcourt, Brace & World Verlag, New York 1955.
  • William Gaddis: The Recognitions . Current new edition. Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign (Illinois) 2012, ISBN 978-1564786913 .
  • William Gaddis: The Forgery of the World . First German translation from the American by Marcus Ingendaay . Zweausendeins Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1998, 2nd revised edition 1999, ISBN 3-4424-4878-6 .

literature

  • Steven Moore: A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's RECOGNITIONS , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NB, 1982, rev. New edition 1995.
  • John Johnston: Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis's RECOGNITIONS and Postmodern Theory , University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1990, ISBN 9780812281798 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the detailed reviews of the first 55 reviews of the novel by Jack Green: Fire the Bastards! . Retrieved May 30, 2017
  2. ↑ See All-Time 100 Novels: The Recognitions . Retrieved May 30, 2017.
  3. ↑ See Franz Link: William Gaddis, born 1922 - The Recognitions, 1955 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 307f.
  4. ↑ See Franz Link: William Gaddis, born 1922 - The Recognitions, 1955 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 308f.
  5. ↑ See Franz Link: William Gaddis, born 1922 - The Recognitions, 1955 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 309f.
  6. ↑ See Franz Link: William Gaddis, born 1922 - The Recognitions, 1955 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 310f.
  7. ↑ See Peter William Koenig: Recognizing Gaddis' "Recognitions" . In: Contemporary Literature . Volume 16, No. 1 (Winter 1975), pp. 61–72, here pp. 64f., Available online at JSTOR under Jstor , accessed on June 1, 2017.
  8. ↑ See the information in the new edition by William Gaddis: The Recognitions . Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign, Dublin, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-564-78-691-3 . See also the Introduction by William H. Gass to this edition, p. VII.
  9. ↑ See the cited reviews by Jack Green: Fire the Bastards! . Retrieved May 30, 2017. See also the introduction by William H. Gass to the new edition of William Gaddis: The Recognitions. Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign, Dublin, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-564-78-691-3 , Introduction, p. VIff.
  10. ↑ Cf. Joachim Kalka: The man who burns. William Gaddis fakes the world . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 5, 1998. Retrieved May 30, 2017.
  11. ↑ See Franz Link: William Gaddis, born 1922 - The Recognitions, 1955 . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 307.
  12. ↑ See William Gaddis: A Portfolio , Conjunctions 41 (2003), 373-415, online on Project Gutenberg at [1] . Retrieved May 30, 2017.
  13. ↑ See Cynthia Ozick: Fakery and Stony Truths . In: The New York Times , July 7, 1985. Retrieved May 30, 2017.
  14. ↑ Cf. Joachim Kalka: The man who burns. William Gaddis fakes the world . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 5, 1998. Retrieved May 30, 2017.
  15. ↑ Ingendaay , Deutschlandfunk Kultur , April 9, 2013, interview with Sieglinde Geisel
  16. ↑ Dirk van Gunsteren : A servant is not a slave. In: TraLaLit, November 4, 2018