William Gaddis

Perhaps one of the most neglected masterpieces in American literature, William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions matches Moby Dick in terms of ambition and Joyce’s Ulysses in terms of innovative style and intellectual import. It is a vast (956 pages), sprawling, deeply American work which draws on the European literary traditions of Balzac’s Comédie humaine and Proust’s Recherche.

The Recognitions is the story of aspiring artist Wyatt Gwyon, who grows up in an oppressive New England Calvinist family and whose artistic and spiritual ambitions carry him from Paris to New York to Spain. It is a story of artists and conmen, alcoholics and addicts, ad execs and drag queens, high society parties and secret society plots and intrigues. Above all, it is a profound meditation on the nature of authenticity and the difference between true creativity and the hypocrisy, imitation, and lack of originality which characterize so many products of consumer culture in today’s world. It is a challenging, difficult book—beautifully written with some of the most striking sentences found in any English-language novel written in the second half of the 20^th century, but full of arcane philosophical and religious references from Mithraism to Christian mysticism. Given its length, difficulty, and the range of its ambitions as a work of aesthetic and spiritual inquiry, is a novel ideally suited to reading slowly and discussing carefully with others.

Participation in this symposium is by invitation only. For more information, please contact the Academic Director at dcarl.ici@protonmail.com