William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955), is considered a masterpiece of postwar American literature that helped to establish, along with Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963), the genre of the long postmodern system novel that reached its apex with Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). Cutting through the complex, near-Joycean style and volumes of interconnected characters and interrelated stories that put off initial critics reveals The Recognitions to be a prescient postwar critique of the inauthenticity, unoriginality, and falsity of art and image that will eventually characterize ironic postmodern literature and hyperreal postmodern culture. The characters fall prey to the pernicious culture in action as well as existential psyche: they not only forge art and plagiarize music and literature but also mistake their own identities and descend into madness. On the other side of the literary history and continuum of the postmodern novel is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013). Compared to Gaddis’s labyrinthine difficulties, Tartt’s prose is simple and direct (some critics called it childish). An epic bildungsroman, the young protagonist survives a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum of Art that killed his mother and, reeling from maternal loss, paternal exploitation, familial displacement, and PTSD, deteriorates into a fragmented identity distinguished by abject emotions self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. While he deals fake antiquities similar to characters in The Recognitions, art constitutes not a sentimental and vulgar falsehood that flails minds and culture but rather a secret and sacred source of existential sustenance as well as a catalyst for his psychological recovery. In the early postwar postmodern novel then, art was ironic and exhausted; in the post-postmodern novel now, art is sincere and necessary.
About the presenterAlex Blazer
Alex Blazer is an Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University. He has published a book on the relationship between contemporary American poetry and critical theory as well as articles on popular fiction writers Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Chuck Palahniuk.