Jack Williams, after noting how the "depiction of U.S. imperialism in The Recognitions has received scant critical attention," gathers a selection of concrete descriptions in Gaddis's first novel of the "built environments" in the New York City and Paris sections, then demonstrates how these settings reflect and expand on the novel’s multi-pronged critique of postwar consumer culture.
The centrality of spiritual and aesthetic themes in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), combined with its encyclopedic style, has resulted in a general tendency to filter the rest of the novel’s themes through the lens of either religion or art. Thus, critical discussions of Gaddis’s satirical portrayal of “a society too wholly reliant upon exchange value as a definitional principle” (Leise 40) have largely focused on capitalism’s degrading effect on art and religion. This is certainly an essential theme in The Recognitions, but it is only one facet of a broader, multi-levelled critique that anticipates Gaddis’s later works, particularly J R (1975) and Carpenter’s Gothic (1985). When writing about J R’s reception in particular, David Sugarman observes that “[r]eadings of J R as a novel of entropy and chaos contribute to a view of postrealist American fiction in the late twentieth century as abstracted from material and economic developments occurring within late capitalism” (266). This reading, he argues, overlooks Gaddis’s attention to the impacts of privatization and financialization on once-public spaces. Although its massive confusion of voices can make it seem like a “depthless” text primarily preoccupied with language games, “[t]he setting for the novel’s cross talk, miscommunications, and confusions is a city suffering from divestment and a suburb in the throes of redevelopment and sprawl. Characters ride defunded trains and drive along poorly planned roads; schools are filled with new information technologies while students go on class trips to Wall Street” (267). Attention to how the built environment shapes the actions and interactions of the characters embedded in it reveals that J R’s form does not represent a departure from engagement with material issues, but a novel way of representing them. While this approach has gained acceptance in the interpretation of J R, readings of The Recognitions continue to overlook that novel’s material dimensions. This paper will argue that closer attention to The Recognitions’ depictions of place help us more effectively map Gaddis’s career-long examination of how the imperatives of capital accumulation impact the structure of lived space, both in the U.S. and in the Global South.
While the majority of Gaddis’s works are set in the U.S. and are primarily conversant with North American and European literature, culture, and history, they also display an acute awareness of the U.S.’s hegemonic role in global politics. Gaddis’s attentiveness to the structural conditions that enable capital to circulate around the globe with unprecedented scope and rapidity forms central plot points in J R and Carpenter’s Gothic. Both novels concern the devastating impacts of U.S. financial interests on the social, economic, and political fabric of Africa. Carpenter’s Gothic centres on a movement to gain control of African mining resources conducted under the guise of Evangelical missionary work, while one of J R’s sub-plots describes American businessmen backing a counter-revolutionary government in the fictional African nation of Gandia in order to protect their investments. However, the directly represented events of both novels happen within extremely limited settings (Long Island and Manhattan in J R, and a single New England home in Gothic), creating a sense of profound insularity that is reinforced by their narrative form, which is composed mainly of dialogue rather than traditional description. Non-U.S. spaces are deliberately erased in these narratives, reduced to words and scraps of distant news reports that U.S. media outlets and corporate leaders cynically manipulate for profit. Through these acts of erasure, the novels underscore how capital and language combine to flatten and obscure the destructive consequences of imperial expansion.
Although the depiction of U.S. imperialism in The Recognitions has received scant critical attention in comparison to these later novels, it is ripe for such an analysis, as it is the only one of Gaddis’s works that features scenes directly set in non-U.S. spaces. While its depictions of New York as an alienating urban hell and Paris as a haven for consumers of cultural capital (rather than enjoyers of culture itself) present a vision of empire in decline, the sections set in Central America register ongoing destruction and exploitation in the Global South. I will begin by examining the descriptions of the built environments in the New York City and Paris sections, demonstrating how these settings reflect and expand upon the novel’s multi-pronged critique of postwar consumer culture. Having established this general context, I will offer an in-depth analysis of the brief sections set in Central America, linking Gaddis’s critiques of Euro-American capitalism to an awareness of the destructive impacts of unchecked accumulation and expansion on environments and communities in the Global South. I conclude by arguing that this analysis of built environments in The Recognitions, both real and fictionalized, enriches our understanding of the novel’s engagement with its historical and material context while demonstrating its underexamined continuity with Gaddis’s later works.
Alienation in New York City
The bulk of Part II of The Recognitions is set in New York City, but little critical attention has been paid to Gaddis’s descriptions of the city itself, a lack which reflects their relative scarcity amidst the dialogue-driven scenes that make up much of Part II. The few critics who have engaged with these descriptions have typically concentrated on Gaddis’s heavy usage of mythological tropes and symbols, reading these passages as exemplifying Gaddis’s “encyclopedic” narrative style (see Johnston 114 and Burn 165) or, in Moore’s case, as a modernized backdrop for Wyatt’s “symbolic voyage from spiritual darkness to enlightenment” (Moore 21). For Moore, Gaddis’s extensive references to Dante throughout the New York City sections (especially those in Part II, chapter 8) “build[] upon the poetic tradition linking the modern city with hell (Milton, Blake, Francis Thompson, Eliot, Hart Crane, and later Ginsberg)” (34) to establish Wyatt’s time in New York as the “infernal descent” during which he “confront[s] the dark contents of his unconscious” (33). While the allusions to hell are numerous, the New York City scenes do not solely function as a backdrop to Wyatt’s dark night of the soul, but also provide a material basis for the novel’s critique of postwar America. Amidst the many extended metaphors are concrete descriptions of urban spaces and structures which ground the sense of isolation and alienation that characterize Gaddis’s vision of mid-century American life.
The New York scenes feature several passages in which characters experience a throughgoing sense of alienation from themselves, others, and the space they inhabit. The description of Otto’s progress through the streets following his disappointing visit to Esme after the first party scene reveals his detachment from his own sensory experience:
Fly-ash, cinders and sand, tar, soot, and sulfuric acid: six tons a day settled on the neighborhood where Otto stepped forth, his faculties so highly civilized he seemed not to notice the billions of particles swirling round him, seemed not to notice the flashing of lights, the clangor of steel in conflict, the shouts, and the words spoken, timorous, temerarious, eructations [sic] of slate-coloured lungs, seemed to acknowledge nothing but his own purpose, which led him east. (Gaddis 210)
The passage mimics the sensory bombardment it describes, beginning with a series of six nouns before inserting another extended list of all that Otto “seem[s] not to notice”. The references to staggering numeric values (“six tons a day”, “billions of particles”), combined with the passage’s excessive verbiage, emphasize the city’s sheer enormity, demonstrating the extent to which habituation and apathy have deadened Otto’s senses. By referring to Otto’s faculties as “civilized”, the narrator ironically equates the quality of being “civilized” with the ability to ignore the sensory experience of living in civilization, marked as it is by the omnipresence of both noise pollution and real pollution. In addition to ironically portraying “civilized faculties” as the possession of a cultivated indifference to one’s surroundings (both human and non-human), the passage also connects this indifference to a kind of possessive individualism that both encourages and is encouraged by the character of the built environment. As the end of the passage indicates, Otto’s lack of awareness of his surroundings enables his exclusive focus on his “own purpose”, and vice versa.
The passages describing different forms of public transit, specifically New York’s bus and train systems, provide further insight into the social alienation encouraged by the built environment. These scenes illustrate a form of proximity without community tied to a vision of urban space as flattened by intense commercialization and an overabundance of visual images—what Lefebvre calls “abstract space” (Lefebvre 38; see also Sugarman 276). While riding the bus, Otto “attempt[s] to appear as vacant as the faces before him while he stare[s] straight forward at [an advertisement]” (Gaddis 202). Similarly, when Mr. Pivner’s subway train is delayed without explanation, other passengers discuss possible reasons for the delay before they abruptly “sto[p] speaking, embarrassed at the sounds of their own voices” (279). In the ensuing silence, Mr. Pivner stares at an advertisement, while a woman (whom the passengers later, “at dinner tables,” claim looked “foreign”) has an anxious meltdown that leads her to thrust her own face into others passengers’ faces, who all “withdr[a]w, abashed at this articulation of their own terror” (279). According to Lefebvre, abstract space “valorizes certain relationships between people in particular places … generat[ing] consensuses or conventions according to which, for example, such and such a place is supposed to be trouble-free, a quiet area where people go peacefully to have a good time, [etc.]” (Lefebvre 56). The two passages above demonstrate how the conventions associated with such spaces are internalized, becoming enforced without force. Otto works to assume a demeanour that makes him indistinguishable from those around him while the subway passengers fall silent of their own accord, experiencing a shame that is not explicitly validated by other passengers’ reactions but is tacitly assumed by virtue of the conventions associated with the space of the subway. It is important to note that the woman in the subway who violates the unwritten code against public expression of emotion (even when these emotions are shared) is seen as “foreign”. By failing to obey the unwritten codes of citizenship—a citizenship that ironically consists in remaining aloof from other citizens—she is viewed as an outsider to the space.
Stagnation In Paris
Whereas Gaddis’s portrayal of New York focuses on capturing the congestion, pollution, and lack of community that mark it out as a commercial capital, his sardonic portrayal of Parisian tourism presents the city as a (decayed) cultural capital. The two Paris sections are replete with references to shallowness and inauthenticity that foreground the premium placed on “iconic” visual scenes as opposed to immersion in the environment itself, highlighting the “ocularity or visual dominance of tourist travel” (Russell 28). The narrator uses the language of spectatorship to describe the transatlantic travellers’ general impressions of Paris, stating that the city presents them with “the spectacle of culture fully realized” (Recognitions 67), a phrase suggesting a collapse of “culture” into “spectacle” that is borne out in the ensuing passages.
Significantly, the “spectacle” that the narrator describes consists in a kind of bastardized high culture rather than the omnipresent mass media of the New York scenes. The narrator remarks that “Paris had withdrawn from any legitimate connection with works of art, and directly increased her entourage of those living for Art’s sake” (76), showing how the Parisian tourism industry is able to capitalize on an image of a cultured, “artistic” lifestyle centered on consumption rather than production. This ideal is animated by a fetishization of high art masterpieces, evidenced by the fact that sales of expensive forgeries are routinely made to “English and Americans[,] ‘to whom you can sell anything’… here, in France, where everything [is] for sale” (76). This commodification of French culture creates a proliferating market for images that undermines tourists’ capacity to engage with Paris as a dynamic social space.
Painting, in particular, is reduced to servicing this culture of mere looking. Gaddis’s critique of Parisian tourism is thus two-pronged, demonstrating how the profit incentives behind catering to tourists cheapen not only the tourists’ experience of French culture but French cultural production itself. In the first Paris section, Gaddis’s narrator describes “alleys infested with [painters] painting the same picture from different angles, the same painting varying from easel to easel as different versions of a misunderstood truth, but the progeny of each single easel identical reproduction” (70). This observation is recapitulated during the second Paris section near the end of the book, using repetition to mimic the mechanization of cultural production: “where by day picturesque painters infested picturesque alleys painting the same picturesque painting painted so many times before” (915). In both passages, these painters are described as “infesting” Paris, figuring them as unwelcome intruders to the city, crowding up its actual space in order to create two-dimensional representations of it. At the same time, the painters are described as themselves “picturesque”, reducing them to yet more scenery for individuals who seek “sights [which] are prepackaged events” (Russell 28) rather than authentic experiences. Thus, the art and artists of the Parisian alleys become a part of the city’s cultural capital rather than its cultural heritage, resulting in “Paris, the place itself, [being] less real to the tourist than the reproductions of it, the snapshots and paintings” (Russell 29).
The flattening and commodification of Parisian culture ultimately causes Paris to become a site of inertia in which nothing new can be created. The narrator frequently reuses sentences from the first Paris section (Part I, chap. II) in the final section (Epilogue) to create this sense of stagnation. Though set nearly two decades apart, both sections open by referring to a person who resembles (first the young, then the old) George Washington drinking and reading on a terrace (66, 915), suggesting that Paris has remained almost entirely the same over the course of the novel, with time’s passage marked only by superficial changes in appearance. This visual echo is complimented by a verbal one in which the narrator refers to Paris as “accomplished” (66, 915), ironically invoking the language of achievement to critique the complacency that has nullified the authentic development of culture. He writes that “[visitors] regarded it as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building to be torn down” (67). Just as the people and conversations in the streets (and the language the narrator uses to describe them) remain essentially unchanged, the physical space of the city stays the same, permitting neither growth nor reconstruction. The narrator portrays this situation as the ironic terminus of a culture famed for its lineage of radical thought, describing “this neatly parceled definition of civilization” as “the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute” (68). This co-optation of challenges to the status quo results in dissident elements becoming yet another aspect of the spectacle which the tourists come to see, further inhibiting genuine growth.
Exploitation In Central America
Though short, the two sections describing Otto’s experiences in Central America provide a crucial variation on the motif of capitalism’s commodification and destruction of public space by situating it within an imperialist context. Allison Russell briefly touches on the theme of imperial exploitation in The Recognitions, arguing that the Central America scenes depict the exploitation of Global South economies as the outcome of an expansionist drive that refuses to recognize any boundaries, whether moral, metaphysical, or spatial (Russell 42). While her insights are suggestive, they do not contain an extended analysis of the actual descriptions of these spaces. A close reading of these scenes, however, reveals a concern with the relationship between capital accumulation and lived space that resonates with Gaddis’s larger project in The Recognitions. Attending to Gaddis’s descriptions of Central American spaces helps establish continuities with the critiques expressed in the New York and Paris sections (as well as those in J R and Carpenter’s Gothic) while also expanding on them, revealing connections between the commodification of space in the Global North and the processes of expropriation and dispossession that allow for these economies to continue expanding indefinitely.
The Central American scene is set on a banana planation which, consciously or not, evokes the infamous United Fruit Company, an American multinational corporation that monopolized the world banana trade and initiated coups d’etat, supported puppet regimes, and engaged in violent, exploitative labor practices in the “banana republics” of Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic from 1899 until the mid 1970’s (see Chapman 3, 49). The narrator’s description of the plantation abounds with images of growth and virility, contrasting the motifs of stagnation and collapse that characterize the New York and Paris scenes. Twice, the narrator describes the bananas using phallic imagery. He first characterizes the environment surrounding the town as “[a] jungle held at distance by thousands of pert green erections rearing on the stalks of the banana plants” (157). Later, when describing the growing and harvesting of the crop, he observes how “[r]ed flowers drooped at the end of long stalks, then dropped revealing the fruit in infant impotence. Week by week the fruit grew larger, pointed outward, then upward, and was cut in the full erect vigor of youth” (159). Although both of these descriptions figure the environment as a vital, generative space, the latter passage’s reference to the bananas being cut down in their prime registers an awareness that this vitality is curtailed by single-crop plantation agriculture.
These images of fecundity and growth gain significance when read alongside the descriptions of atrophy and decay in Paris and New York. In his initial description of Paris, the narrator sardonically remarks that “no bud of possibility [remained] which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility” (67). This language of artificiality and inertia is strikingly similar to Benny’s description of life in New York during the party scene in Part II, Chapter VII:
I haven’t seen anything grow for eleven years. You forget that things grow. The vegetables you get in restaurants, you can’t believe that they ever really grew anywhere, and the flowers, you never think of flowers growing, you see them one way, cut, and you can’t think of them any other way except posing, dead. The trees here don’t grow, they’re ready-made like furniture, that puts on new slip-covers in the spring (594).
Benny’s comments reflect how the U.S.’s exploitation of Global South economies turns its citizens into pure consumers, rendering them so alienated from the places and processes that supply their goods that they cannot imagine anything but products. The comparison of trees to “ready-made” furniture—which gains a layer of irony from the fact that trees are cut down and processed into the very furniture to which Benny is referring—completely abstracts them from any ecological context. By showing how the U.S. removes its citizens from the actual process of growth by exploiting growth elsewhere (and then leaving said spaces to “settle down to a long and uninterrupted decline” (163)), Gaddis presents U.S. economic growth as inextricable from destruction and decay elsewhere.
The scenes on the banana plantation also emphasize the process by which the American banana company imposes its own economic imperatives on the land’s Indigenous populations and, in so doing, overwrites pre-existing economic, social, and spatial arrangements. In a paragraph describing the plantation’s origins, the narrator calls attention to the interdependence of spatial and economic arrangements and their combined role in exerting dominance over the local population. Prior to the company’s arrival, the locals subsist on their land while also “selling a consistently inferior grade of sisal, hands of green bananas, and occasional loads of hardwood to ships which came in leisurely to trade” (157). The fruit company, “tired of buying thousands of hands of bananas, [then] set on hundreds of thousands of stems” (157). This shift from “hands” to “stems” implies that the company’s purchases effectively erase the locals’ labour and agency, as the term “hand,” which refers to a bunch of bananas, also serves as a metonym for the hands of those who harvest and sell them. Having gained control of the means of production, “[t]he Company replace[s] the shaky wharf in the port with two firm piers, [then] clear[s] and plant[s] a tremendous plantation” (157), reshaping the environment to accommodate the imposition of the new agricultural arrangements, much as the actual United Fruit Company had done (Chapman 19). This juxtaposition of the “shaky wharf” and the “firm piers” conceals an ironic disparity between the actual stability of the pre-existing economic arrangements and the social and environmental chaos wrought by the Company’s exploitative, ecologically destructive tactics.
The fundamental reconfiguration of the town’s infrastructure to accommodate the Company’s needs also highlights the profoundly unequal nature of the relationship between the Company and the people from whose land it benefits. The Company’s imposition of the piers results in the de facto takeover of the town: “[t]he Company ships were the only ones to call, since the company owned the two new piers which the people had been so proud of at first. The local banana market disappeared. It simply ceased to exist” (157). The clipped, short statements relaying the disappearance of the local banana market emphasize the suddenness and irrevocability of the changes imposed by the Company. Although the plantation succeeds in monopolizing the banana market, and so accruing a large economic gain, the narrator emphasizes the operation’s transitory nature, showing how its sheer wastefulness and destructiveness nullifies the possibility of any shared or lasting benefit. After describing the Company’s rapid takeover of the local banana market, the narrator hints at its equally rapid demise: “[s]hips passing the coast sailed through the smell of the fruit rotting on the trees miles out to sea” (157). This image of immense, widespread rot (which immediately follows the sentence “[the local market] simply ceased to exist”) contrasts with the motif of growth and fertility that the narrator uses when describing the plants themselves, suggesting that this growth, taken beyond natural parameters by the imperatives of the plantation, eventually ends in overproduction, rot, and wastefulness. Thus, the Company’s profit-driven imposition of an entirely new relationship with the land not only harms the local populace, but fails to deliver any lasting benefit to the Company itself.
Rather than treating this deterioration as an end-point, however, U.S. business interests treat it as an opportunity for further profiteering. In a bracketed aside reflecting the Company’s treatment of the local population as an afterthought, the narrator claims that “([i]t was now said that a plywood company in West Virginia was planning new and similar benefits for these fortunate people, so recently pushed to the vanguard of progress, their standard of living raised so marvellously high that none of them could reach it)” (157). Although the company’s plans are left deliberately opaque, their dealing in plywood suggests that their operations will cause further deforestation, capitalizing on the banana company’s initial disruption of the local economy to render it increasingly dependent on American interests. This aside calls attention to how the imperative for economic growth causes companies to treat space as “abstract,” malleable, and infinitely adaptable to their changing economic needs, foreshadowing the world of seamlessly fluid, mobile capital in which J R takes place (see Sugarman 276). Moreover, the sardonic invocation of the rhetoric of “progress” and “benefits” shows how this imposition of spatial and economic arrangements also imposes certain values onto the local populace. The population’s inability to “reach” the benefits supposedly conferred on them reflects an abstract, universalized conception of well-being that ignores—and, in fact, undermines—forms of well-being particular to that place and its communities. The statement that “the small town might have had but one place in this world of time, and that to make itself presentable for Otto’s departure” (163), though primarily reflective of Otto’s Romantic delusions and tendency to treat his experiences as mere fodder for the self-indulgent play script he is working on, perfectly encapsulates the American companies’ ethos. Rather than treating the land as a lived space with inherent value for those who occupy it, the various U.S. interests treat it as a mere backdrop to their own grand economic ambitions.
Trouble In Tibieza de Dios
Gaddis takes up this critique of U.S. imperialism again, in slightly modified form, when describing Otto’s emergency landing in the fictional port town of Tibieza de Dios following his flight out of New York. Whereas the previous sections describe the overwriting of an existing spatial and socio-economic arrangement, the Tibieza sections show how imperial powers are able to create entirely new spatial arrangements to suit their economic goals. The narrator describes the makeup of the town’s population as being heterogeneous, but calls attention to the concentration of power in external investors rather than in the local populace: “[t]he population is largely black. It is governed by descendants of Spain who live on the central plateau [and] given work by an American fruit company whose white employees live between ten strands of barbed wire and the sea,” (705) with exchange being facilitated by the Tibieza Trading Company, which is run by a Chinese family. These different forms of economic power are reflected in the various groups’ differing relationships to the space itself. The governors, who possess the most political power over the space, are the most physically distant from it, while the owners of the economically powerful Trading Company keep to themselves in a large mansion. Meanwhile, the company’s white workers are kept segregated from the local populace, who primarily live in “houses of broken bannisters” (705) in the town. This lack of integration between the various groups that inhabit (or remain outside of) Tibieza reflects this hierarchy of economic power, exemplifying the mutually reinforcing character of Tibieza’s economic, social, and spatial arrangements.
Gaddis’s narrator extends the motif of fragmentation to include the town’s shoddy infrastructure and even the bodies of its inhabitants, illustrating the lasting social consequences of its profit-driven spatial arrangements. The descriptions of the town’s infrastructure continually refer to its decay and disintegration, characterizing the town as a temporary outpost constructed in the interests of capital rather than as a genuine living space. In a suggestive metaphor, the narrator describes the town as having “the transient air of a ragged carnival never dismantled” (705). This description links the slapdash manner of Tibieza’s construction to the singleness of its purpose, figuring the town as having been built to service the port rather than vice versa. Moreover, the invocation of the carnival imbues the description of the town with an air of frivolity that ironically underscores its actual immiseration. The combination of transience, decay, and social fragmentation that characterizes the narrator’s descriptions of the town’s and the port’s infrastructure also manifests in the bodies of its impoverished local population, who “appear in such states of disintegration that a bit of knotted string round the wrist or neck seems to indicate that even these parts would be lost unless tied on” (705). The image of body parts held together by knotted strings recalls the image of the “ankle-thin” steel braces of the pier (705), creating a visual link between socio-economic precarity and the loss of bodily integrity. By including this visceral image of the human cost of economic exploitation, Gaddis’s narrator provides a concrete illustration of how large-scale, abstract economic systems work to shape the intimate, small-scale realm of the individual body.
Having created this complexly layered description of the reciprocal relationship between space, capital, and the human body, the narrator then describes how this haphazard and uneven spatial arrangement begets political fragmentation and instability. During Otto’s stay in Tibieza, he watches a revolutionary uprising take place in the town square. The scene describing the onset of this conflict begins with a simple declaration: “[t]here was trouble at Tibieza. No one there wanted it” (708). The fact that “no one there” wanted the conflict highlights the extent to which the major decisions affecting Tibieza’s fate are made without the consent, or even knowledge, of its local population. Instead, the “trouble” comes from conflicts based in the central plateau, where the Spanish descendants who govern Tibieza live, and is fought using stocks of weapons made and distributed by Europeans and Americans (708) (which is suggestive of the real-life arming of insurgents by groups affiliated with the United Fruit Company: see Chapman 6). When describing the lead-up to the conflict, the narrator remarks that “Tibieza de Dios, in fact the only reason for its existence, was a port, and one of few. Therefore it must be taken” (708). These short statements reveal a crucial connection between economically-motivated spatial arrangements and the political consequences that follow from them. For one, the reduction of the town’s raison d’etre to its function as a port reinforces the link between its decrepit infrastructure and its temporary, limited utility to capital, while also showing how this utility enables outside actors to ignore and supplant the local population’s interests. Moreover, the second sentence, with its decisive “therefore” and “must”, establishes an intrinsic relationship between its economic function and its political significance that frames the ensuing violence as inevitable. This logic of inevitability further deprives the area’s inhabitants of agency, underscoring the process by which the discourse of economic and political reason overwrites the capacities, needs, and interests of a given space’s inhabitants.
Here, the thematic significance of the town’s fictionality comes into focus. Although Gaddis actually visited Costa Rica and participated in its 44-day civil war in 1948 (as discussed in Alberts, 14), these sections are set in a fictional town in an unnamed country. By contrast, Gaddis’s descriptions of the Spanish countryside are, as Crystal Alberts notes, transcribed almost word-for-word from his personal journals (see Alberts 22-23). For Alberts, Gaddis’s use of personal notes in the Spain sections and the numerous recurring descriptions of the Spanish monastery in Book I and Book III provide a glimpse of an “underlying, stable structure” (25) within a novel otherwise preoccupied with disintegration and decay. With this in mind, the fictionalization of the Central American setting could be said to have the opposite effect, emphasizing the way that capitalist and imperialist forces are able to swiftly dismantle lasting structures in the interest of short-term profits. The fact that Tibieza is Gaddis’s own fictional construction mirrors, on a metafictional level, how the town is constructed by U.S. powers as a means of securing access to the port. This fictionalising gesture can be read both as a critique of an imperial gaze that views lands in the Global South as undifferentiated spaces, relevant only insofar as they help advance American interests, and as a reflection of this very gaze on the part of the author. The effectiveness of this critique is thus limited, as it re-enacts the deliberate erasure of agency and specificity that the novel is attempting to critique, leaving it unable to foster a sense of solidarity for the real victims of the atrocities it depicts. This section both deepens and complicates the novel’s depiction of American imperialism, as it brings attention to the ideological biases that enable ongoing exploitation of the Global South to occur while simultaneously reproducing these attitudes.
Conclusion
This paper has explored The Recognitions’ critiques of capitalism and American imperialism by comparing Gaddis’s descriptions of American, European, and Central American settings. I began by analyzing the depictions of urban alienation in the New York City scenes, attending to how the character of the built environment and the preponderance of mass media combine to reduce or distort social cohesion among the city’s denizens. I then turned to the Paris scenes, observing how the commodification of French high culture is depicted as emptying the city of both social and historical significance, reducing its heritage to fodder for tourists and others “living for Art’s sake” (Gaddis 76). Finally, I examined the scenes describing Otto’s brief sojourns in Central America, observing how the havoc wreaked by U.S. corporate interests on the local economies and ways of life reinforces and expands the scope of the novel’s critique by situating it within the context of U.S. imperialism.
By attending more faithfully to the nuances of The Recognitions’ material dimensions, we can begin to see fruitful continuities between Gaddis’s early-career critiques of capitalism and imperialism and those presented in J R and Carpenter’s Gothic. In the latter two novels, the characters’ distance from the horrific events taking place and the reduction of real lives and environments to mere spoken, written, or recorded words is essential to the force of the novels’ critiques. The Recognitions, by contrast, relies on description rather than omission, providing a generative counterweight to this purposeful erasure of lived spaces and natural environments by directly portraying the impacts that profit-driven spatial arrangements have on the lives and experiences of those situated within them. Attending to its depiction of these spatial arrangements allows us to see The Recognitions as not just as a high-modernist treatise on the decline of art or an attempt at modern myth-making, but a sweeping inquiry into the rapid transformations affecting all areas of life in the postwar period. In doing so, the links between Gaddis’s critical project in The Recognitions and in his mid-career novels become clearer, demonstrating an ongoing critical engagement with the effects of unfettered economic growth that undergirds Gaddis’s wide-ranging engagement with the social, economic, and political realities of his time.
Works Cited
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