Cole Fishman argues that Gaddis should be recognized for his contributions to philosophy, no matter what the "disciplinary gatekeepers" think.
dear Mother…here are some books I shd appreciate you getting…The Golden Bough by Frazer…The Vocation of Man by Johann Gottlieb Fichte… —Letter from Gaddis to his mother in 1947.1A letter Gaddis wrote in 1947 to his mother asking for several books. Others include Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse and Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster (Letters 76-7).
what remains today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel? For us, here, now: that’s what will not, henceforth, have been thinkable without him. For us, here, now: these words are quotations, already, always, we will have learned that from him. —Jacques Derrida (Clang! 7).
Deep into the second half of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, we see the writer-character who bears his name, Willie, “carrying two books, one titled, The Destruction of the Philosophers, the other, The Destruction of the Destruction” (716). Gaddis’s critics have not made much of this image, but I’ll propose that it emphasizes one of the novel’s own major projects. To put my claim simply, Gaddis uses style to do philosophy, and this aligns him with other philosophers who turned to stylistic innovation to move past what they saw as philosophy’s culmination. Yet while initial dismissals of their projects have been overcome and they have been recognized as philosophers, Gaddis has, so far, not been. Today’s philosophers, therefore, should both recognize Gaddis as a philosopher, and draw on his example as they philosophize.
Analytic philosophy appeals to an ideal of communicative transparency that implies a binary distinction between form and content. However, Gaddis’s novels, much in the same mode as so-called “Continental” thinkers of the 20th century, are philosophical in a way that undermines this very distinction. The flair, style, and fun of Gaddis’s novels are not merely the way philosophical questions are communicated but are themselves properly philosophical. Gaddis’s writings contribute to philosophy—no matter the protestations of disciplinary gatekeepers.
William Gaddis may not be your favorite author, but he is probably your favorite author’s favorite author. Gaddis’s influence on the American novel and literary studies is becoming increasingly documented. Less documented are his philosophical interventions. Just as much as The Recognitions’s (1955) long-scrutinized place straddling the intra-literary border of modernism and postmodernism, that novel can trouble the boundaries of art and literality, form and content, philosophy and literature. Gaddis’s philosophy collapses form into content to allow a deeper expression of its message. In other words, Gaddis writes philosophy with (and through) style. Gaddis’s text sees the limits of content in expression and finds that, to be even more authentic in its message, it is best to transgress into form. The divide between modernism and postmodernism, we might see, embodies a genealogical model of the same divisions Gaddis’s work overcomes.
For his own philosophical genealogy, he is especially illuminatingly read alongside the writings of philosophers that continued to find new ways to articulate ideas past the culmination of metaphysics in German Idealism, specifically those who sought to push beyond the work of G.W.F. Hegel. Gaddis’s artistic techniques, even more specifically, parallel Søren Kierkegaard’s performative responses to that moment in philosophy, which I will discuss more fully later. There is more to say than I will attempt here about the plentiful similarities between Kierkegaard’s and Gaddis’s philosophical ideas: my focus will rather be on demonstrating how their relationship at the level of style should contribute to a breaking down of barriers between departments. The future I envision for Gaddis is to have The Recognitions read as carefully as texts on authenticity from the full cast of fellow 20th-century philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The question that haunts this essay is: why are Gaddis’s philosophical insights not yet included in philosophical debates? Gaddis does not sprinkle philosophy over a fictitious narrative; instead, his texts perform his philosophy in a manner which deepens the message. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Recognitions, a compelling intervention into philosophical debates on authenticity. Philosophy has lost its way, and William Gaddis may be the one to help it.
The Recognitions is attempting to define authenticity, appearance, and essence. In a world where nothing seems to be new, but everything is somehow still newer, the question of the privilege of the origin and the historical degradation of repetition is asked with incredulity. The first line of the novel sets the tone for the next 900 pages: “Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality” (9). Every subsequent plot point elaborates on this convergence of masquerades and authenticity. In the text’s New York City corporate landscape, the questions of modernity and novelty flow through as we are made to ask whether newness is novelty set into being, or simple repeated action where enough time has passed for one to forget the past.
In the title, too, we find this theme brought out fully. Around the year 300-400 AD, though the exact timing is debated, Pope Clement I, one of the earliest recognized saints, wrote the first Christian novel, also titled The Recognitions. However, as religious historians have proven, the author is thought not to be the real Clement himself, but an anonymous figure pretending, masquerading, assuming his identity. Logically this makes sense, as Clement died around 99 C.E. and the text was not circulated until two centuries later. Pseudo-Clement, as this author is now called, was operating in the fashion common for authorship at the time: of adopting the first-person narrative of whomever you wished to speak about and pretending you lived in their contemporary setting.2The embodying of pseudonyms to speak from the authors’ standpoint is widely accepted as a common literary tactic for the ancient world. For more information on this point, see Stang, whose discussion of pseudonyms and their complex nature throughout Christian history is important to understanding these rhetorical tactics of ancient authors. Prior critics have not examined how clearly this titular intertext foregrounds the style and purpose of masking and voicing in the novel.
This opening description of masking sets the stage for the rest of the novel: paganism becomes masked as Christianity, which, in turn, is masked as secularism. Whereas Sir James Frazer believes in a teleology from magic to religious belief to science, Gaddis sets up as the same relationship, but as different masks. The fundamental concept of The Recognitions is the relationship between appearance and essence. Gaddis asks: Is there an essence shared between the modern, archaic, and ancient that maintains itself regardless of all representation?
As the 19th century Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard begins in his first published book, Either/Or (1843), “It may at times have occurred to you, dear reader, to doubt somewhat the accuracy of that familiar philosophical thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer?” (3). Kierkegaard’s entire career follows from this line to the rest of his works, as he continues to ask what is the relationship between the inner and outer, form and content, and appearance and essence? When the mask drops is there anything to reveal?
The question I hope to pose by bringing these two thinkers together is: why do we read one in philosophy departments and the other in literature? Colleagues in philosophy would be wise to remember that there was a time when Kierkegaard was read as an anti-philosopher and fiction writer.33 For a larger discussion on Kierkegaard’s writing techniques, see Taylor. As time has moved on, though, this description has fallen away, and Kierkegaard been subsumed as properly philosophical. This subsummation is the same masking Gaddis writes about in The Recognitions.
We should appreciate the literary style of Gaddis, with its networked wordplay and performance of his philosophical discussions. This style, though, is not merely a literary achievement, but a philosophical one. It parallels the same stylistic approach deployed by critical philosophers following the death of metaphysics after German Idealism. Particularly, Gaddis embodies the same techniques that Kierkegaard used against German Idealism’s—primarily Hegel’s—theories on the end of thinking. At the end of his writing career, in the posthumously published Agapē Agape (2002), Gaddis mentions Kierkegaard by name for the first time:4At least the first time in his published work. In their guide to Gaddis’s unpublished stories elsewhere in this journal issue, Ali Chetwynd and Joel Minor discuss “Gorland at Large”: a story from almost sixty years before Agapē was published, in which a copy of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love plays an important part. “…anarchy the clock without the clockmaker and the desperate comedy of Kierkegaard’s insane Knight of Belief…” (2). Long before he references him by name, though, Gaddis has been mimicking Kierkegaard’s philosophical style. I will speak of Hegel’s legacy briefly. Hegel’s complex system of logic was purported as the closure of philosophy. Everything that needed to be thought, supposedly, had now been thought. Hegel was the last philosopher. This claim may seem hard to process for those who see philosophy as the ongoing creative spirit of critical thought; but, specifically, this tradition believed that Hegel had put an end to metaphysics.5For a more in-depth discussion of how Hegel came to embody this “end of metaphysics,” see Henrich, and Förster.
Kierkegaard’s entire body of work is a counter-reaction to this closure. Using pseudonyms, creative titles, and fictious literary works, Kierkegaard brought the questions of the possible end of metaphysics to an embodied performance that is not quite fiction, but philosophy with a rarely seen style. Specifically, one that cared about form as much as content. Kierkegaard’s writings against German Idealism’s negligence of form took on an artistic aspect as instead of writing straightforwardly against these philosophical manuscripts he performed their negligence to them.
Most of Kierkegaard’s books, including the one Agapē Agape cites—Fear and Trembling, published in 1843—are written under pseudonyms, with complex characters and narratives that stylistically perform his metaphysical critiques. Fear and Trembling, which Kierkegaard published under the pseudonym Johannes di Silentio, takes place on the periphery of the religious realm, where the pseudonymous author has trouble understanding how Abraham could sacrifice Isaac on the basis only of hearing God. Scholars unfamiliar with Kierkegaard’s playful strategies read this argument incorrectly as attributable to Kierkegaard himself, whereas his author-figure “Johannes di Silentio” is intended to represent the silence of unknowing. The text’s position within Kierkegaard’s canon is later usurped by the pseudonym of the religious realm, “Johannes Climacus”: Fear and Trembling’s argument is “di Silentio’s” argument, existing as the characterization of a worldview to be provisionalized and superseded by that of a different character. The difference between di Silentio and Climacus, for those who know Latin and Greek, would be that Climacus is a ladder towards higher things, and Silentio is one stuck in the silence of not hearing God.6Here it is also important to note that none of these comedic undertones undermine any of Kierkegaard’s philosophies, but it is precisely through them we can grasp an even deeper connection of his intentions. Kierkegaard writes that it is through irony that we become human, but it is through humor that we become God-like.
“Anti-Climacus,” the further pseudonym behind Kierkegaard’s 1849 work The Sickness unto Death, then acts as a foil to the ascending potential of Johannes Climacus, creating a sort of closed circuit of logic—mirroring the way Kierkegaard views Hegel’s work: not as a solution to thinking, but as an articulation of being stuck in a philosophical system that permits no climax.
Within the ecosystem of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, each character, so to speak, can be matched with a responding counterpart. Just as Anti-Climacus and Johannes Climacus go together, Johannes Di Silentio finds his match in “Constantin Constantius,” the pseudonym behind the earlier 1843 Repetition— a text intending to disrupt Hegelian philosophy by purporting that there is no possibility of repetition in a closed teleological system. Even at the end of the teleology, in which the endpoint mimics a return home, nothing is as it once was.
Each book of Kierkegaard’s is like this. The one intended to be his final, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, published in 1846, is where he lifts the veil on this complex web of pseudonyms, revealing himself to be behind them all. The joke here is multi-faceted: despite Hegel’s The Science of Logic supposedly being a fully encompassing logical system, Kierkegaard’s work being titled an “unscientific postscript” challenges this notion, implying that science did leave something out, and thus that something—a postscript—remains unsaid.
The other joke is that the foundational book, Philosophical Fragments (1844), is around 80 pages. The postscript, which should be one or two lines, is instead 600 pages. So, in this framework, we find that Kierkegaard is saying that where one thinks there is only a little left to say, there is more to say than what had been said previously.
If Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms were all brought together into one book it would read like it was written by Gaddis. Gaddis, like Kierkegaard, uses these clever, form-driven techniques to propose his thesis on masking. Just as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms pair off to create a networked philosophy so, too, do Gaddis’s characters. Gaddis almost never clearly articulates who is speaking in The Recognitions. The characters often blur together, the boundaries between them permeable and porous as they morph to fit whatever new purpose presents itself—much like Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Gaddis’s non-traditional grammar becomes a sort of blanketing noise felt by the reader as they attempt to make sense of the text, mimicking the confusion of the modern atmosphere and giving them no choice but to actively experience Gaddis’s style. Overall, the lack of clear dialogue not only disrupts traditional literary rules, but commits a transgression against normalcy, allowing form to become a vehicle to speak that which has been silent in content.
“Confusion” becomes not a descriptor in the text but a performative feeling. The difference, then, between Gaddis and other non-philosophical authors is not that he simply articulates the postmodern philosophical incredulity towards meta narratives, but that he creates an embodied philosophy of style. While most literary texts work with philosophical notions, Gaddis’s texts are unique in their performative measures that incorporate the form itself as opposed to the simple content in it. Gaddis is unique in this respect past the philosophical contemplations of other past authors and acknowledged influences, even those as insightful as Herman Melville and others who discuss deeply rich philosophical topics.
An instance in which we find Gaddis toying with form occurs when Wyatt accidentally eats his father’s ashes in Spain:
—Tell me, she whispered to the woman next to her,
—What are these perfectly weird little things we are supposed to be eating.
—Lentils. Have you ever eaten them?
—I’ve read about them, the tall woman said and put down her fork (860).
The Eucharist is an obvious framework for this scene of father-eating, but juxtaposed in this moment by the fact that Gwyon, Wyatt’s dad, died not for Christianity or Christ, but for the Mithraism he converted to to leave Christianity behind. Likewise, Frazer, in The Golden Bough, maintained that when the Aztecs were colonized by Spain the Christian eucharist would have found a parallel in the Aztec banquet which served similar functions.7As most historians recognize, Mithraism had a eucharist-like banquet. Frazer’s The Golden Bough refers to the ritual of sacrament being a cross-cultural event which is done by many civilizations. This set of parallels and masking is all background content, though. The form is where we are focused. Rather than crafting an explicit description of transubstantiation—the Christian doctrine which says that bread and body, wine and water, become one another without changing natural form—Gaddis instead ushers the reader into the experience itself, performing it for his unsuspecting audience which cannot get a grasp on the essence of the text past the level of appearance. Just as the Cult of Mithra and the Aztecs did and the Christians do—so Wyatt now does and so do we as the reader: the confusion of the relationship between appearance and essence is felt. Wyatt’s father died preaching paganism, leading to his internment in a cereal box, which then led to Wyatt eating his father’s body, simultaneously acting out the Eucharist while exposing the pagan roots of Christian beliefs. Yet, the appearances in the text remain the same. Somehow, without a narrator or guiding force beyond faith, we are expected to know that the essence is different than what is known. This model is best expressed by no one at the table knowing what the lentil/ashes/eucharistic-bread is, but trying to decipher it only through appearance. The brevity of the dialogue and Gaddis’s quick grammar perform the lack of knowledge, inflicting it onto the reader who, despite having more perspective than the characters, cannot easily decipher the essence of the ashes and is left wondering: what would be so strange about lentils?
To fully manifest their argument, Gaddis and Kierkegaard realize that to forgo form is to conform to the same arguments they hope to repudiate. How can one completely disagree with a system if they articulate their dissidence through that system’s language and logic? Gaddis and Kierkegaard are two who realize that the language of those in power cannot be disrupted through a simple faith in the power of language. Rather, there must be a new form to be created that will be able to articulate that which the previous forms could not. To think past the end of philosophy requires the participant to find a way to reveal that which philosophy left unthought.
If one were to ask the difference between philosophy with style and philosophy without style, one needs to look no further than what we’d see if Gaddis and Bertrand Russell were read together. Both are articulating the functions of appearance and essence, but only Gaddis’s translation of the concepts embodied those concepts into the text. Yet the term “a philosopher” in today’s disciplines refers mainly to Russell and not Gaddis.
Kierkegaard, in his magister dissertation The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates and in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, describes the function of communication when indirect and playful. Indirect communication, simply put, is the displacing of the smug complacency between the reader and their conceived perceptions, which forces philosophical introspection through parables and other fictitious literary devices. The Recognitions too does exactly this, hence Willie’s books on “The Destruction” both of conventional approaches, and of earlier attempts to destroy convention.
As I’ve said, if we want to be more specific about where Gaddis comes in this sequence of destructions and advances, then he like Kierkegaard should be posited as a response to German Idealism. The name “Hegel” took on a signifying question of whether there was anything left to know in 20th-century continental thought, especially in the years just after Gaddis himself wrote The Recognitions. Jean Hyppolite (the mentor of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others), in his last lecture before his death in 1968—titled “The Structure of Philosophic Language According to the “Preface” to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind”—asks the question of how one can continue thinking past Hegel: “Is there still a place for what many generations have called philosophic thought?” (157). Martin Heidegger, in his last lecture, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” writes that the task of thinking at the end of philosophy is to think that which philosophy has somehow not been able to think, “The task of thinking would then be the surrender of previous thinking to the determination of the matter of thinking” (73).
The literary approach of Gaddis does (had already done, a decade earlier) exactly what these philosophers were requesting in their late careers. In other words, Kierkegaard, Hyppolite and Heidegger all see that philosophical content had expressed itself fully. Philosophical form, they realize, may be the only way to continue thinking. Rather than reading Gaddis through a Derridean lens, I would like to encourage my colleagues to approach Gaddis in the same rigorous manner that philosophy has handled Jacques Derrida and his own stylistic departures. I am proposing we read Gaddis no longer as symptom of a larger force, but as cause for a better way of thinking. Gaddis follows the same path of questioning that Kierkegaard attempted: In a world that has attempted to know all, he has proposed to do something more complicated, which is to know thyself past the levels of prediction of the player piano.
As Gaddis said in his 1987 interview with The Paris Review, “I cannot really work unless I set a problem for myself to solve.” In this way, perhaps it is time to spread Gaddis to where we can not only praise him as prescient but ask him how he would solve our problems. When attempting to critique Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Gilles Deleuze, in his 1969 The Logic of Sense, writes that Lewis Carroll’s Alice explains paradoxes better than Russell and could act as the guide toward understanding nonsense. Here we can say the same of Gaddis on appearance.
The Recognitions ends like an epic, with Wyatt becoming Stephen, reassuming his original name, and thus returning to his home. Perhaps our return home can only happen once we address the issue outlined in the opening of this article where I wrote that philosophy has lost its way. How could philosophy lose its way when philosophy is precisely the critical thinking which propels us forward?
By adding form to content we have the possibility of thinking beyond thinking. The Recognitions does just this: It thinks beyond the end of thinking. Gaddis is here attempting to solve the same crisis of the end of philosophy that Kierkegaard was, knowing perhaps that philosophy has been written too straightforwardly and needs to perform stylistically. Far from being abstract or unrelated to the bettering of this world—far from the cries of those who think Gaddis’s novels could be summed up by a quick discussion of fraudulent essence—The Recognitions stylistically recreates the philosophical discussion on a new plane. Calling Gaddis a philosopher is not to undermine his place in the literary realm, but to revive the connection between the two that has since been lost to the rigorous scientific methods and sociological data that philosophy has favored in lieu of critical thought.
One might ask what the uniqueness of Gaddis is when compared to similar authors, such as Thomas Pynchon? What is the difference between Gaddis and other contemporary authors who write in an innovative, many-voiced, grammatically fluid style? Other authors may share Gaddis’s abolishing of traditional grammar, but almost none contain his particular philosophical message or his profound thesis about the Christian basis of the contemporary corporate capitalist landscapes. I call to read Gaddis as philosopher precisely because, for him, our age is a precedented time. We must acknowledge that Gaddis sets the stage for these other stylistically disruptive American authors to come. The question itself must incorporate Gaddis before it can be asked, as without him, I argue, we would not have had the others to follow.
I would like to conclude on an anecdote. In 1973, among the sporadic letters Gaddis received from admirers was one from a Thomas J.J. Altizer, writing to express his love of The Recognitions (Letters 115-116). It is hard to say whether Gaddis knew of him before he wrote, but Altizer was a religious philosopher and tenured academic theologian, already infamous for the controversy over his mid-1960s publication of articles about the death of God in Time magazine. Altizer, much influenced by Hegel, had continued his work on properly philosophical religious responses to that death, and found in The Recognitions what he was looking for: the language of the new philosophy that could extend past the death of metaphysics marked by Hegel.8Altizer’s philosophy is complex, and if one is interested in the way art and language plays into his theory on the death of God it is best to read his Total Presence. In the years following, Altizer would more clearly articulate his intent to find someone who could speak about God’s presence—and absence—in a contemporary post-Hegelian world. Altizer’s search was for that which could make the ineffable known and that which could make the silence speak. It seems that Altizer saw in Gaddis the form he had believed modern thought was searching for.9Altizer briefly explains his interest in Gaddis in his late memoir Living the Death of God (77). He was, as I suggest more of us should be, a philosopher reading Gaddis as a philosopher. What Altizer saw in Gaddis is what we can now, fifty years later, draw out more explicitly for the first time: the new medium for critical thinking, and the lighthouse through which philosophy can return home.
Works Cited:
Abadi-Nagi, Zoltan. “William Gaddis, The Art of Fiction No. 101.” The Paris Review 105 (Nov 1986).
Altizer, Thomas JJ. Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today. Seabury Press, 1980.
—. Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir. SUNY University Press, 2006.
Chetwynd, Ali and Joel Minor. “William Gaddis’s Unpublished Stories and Novel-Prototypes: An Archival Guide.” Electronic Book Review (June 2024). https://doi.org/10.7273/ebr-gadcen5-1.
Derrida, Jacques. Clang! [1974], trans. Geoff Bennington and David Wills. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Förster, Eckart. The Twenty-five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Gaddis, William. Agapē Agape. Viking, 2022.
—. The Letters of William Gaddis, ed.S teven Moore. New York Review Books, 2023.
—. The Recognitions. New York Review Books, 2020.
Heidegger, Martin. “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Harper & Row, 1972: 55–73.
Henrich, Dieter. Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism. Harvard university Press, 2003.
Hyppolite, Jean. “The Structure of Philosophic Language According to the ‘Preface’ to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind.” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of An, edited by Eugenio Donato and Richard Macksey, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972: 157–168.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: Part 1. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987.
Stang, Charles M. Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: "No Longer I." Oxford University Press, 2012.
Taylor, Mark C. Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and Self. Princeton University Press, 1975.