The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Gaddis · a novel in three parts · Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955 · scored on Gaddis’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Encyclopedic novel of satire and learning; novel of the artist, novel of ideas and religious fiction in one book
Mythos
The Recognitions attributed to Clement of Rome, a scattered family sought and found, built as a plot of recognitions that fail; Faust, a gift sold to a dealer with a critic as the tempter; alchemy and the sun cult in a minister’s family
Phase
Three generations of a New England family, from a mother’s death on a voyage to her son’s search for her grave in Spain, with the long middle of the book in New York
Presentation
Fiction; three parts, each divided into numbered chapters, nearly a thousand pages in the first edition; quotation and allusion entered unmarked; parties given as overlapping and often unattributed talk
Register
Long, learned, ironic narrative sentences that pass from New England theology to Flemish technique to Manhattan squalor, against the cant of the art critic, the analyst, the poet and the publicist
Scale
One family across three generations, a city of copies, and the old towns of Spain and Italy
Governing Proposition
A minister’s son from New England, whose mother died at sea under the care of a counterfeit surgeon, turns from the ministry to painting and makes new Flemish pictures in the manner of the old masters, sold by a dealer and authenticated by a critic, while around him a city of copies talks, plagiarises and passes false money. The wager of the novel is that where faith in the original has been lost, devotion survives as counterfeit and the forger may be its last believer, and that a book made openly of other books can make its reader tell the borrowed from the made.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades.” The book opens on a voyage, and on a woman who will not survive it. Camilla, the wife of the Reverend Gwyon, dies at sea, in the care of a surgeon who is himself a counterfeit, and she is buried in a town in Spain. The opening passes from comedy to this death without changing its manner, and the grief it leaves is carried by her son through the whole of the book. The first false thing in the novel is a man passing as a healer, and the first thing it costs is a mother.
The son, Wyatt, is raised in New England by a Calvinist aunt, and he is meant for the ministry. His father goes the other way. The Reverend Gwyon drifts from the faith of his church toward the sun, and comes at last to preach to a Calvinist congregation a sermon that belongs to Mithras. Wyatt turns from the ministry to painting. The father leaves his faith for an older one; the son leaves the pulpit for the studio, and takes with him what the pulpit was for: the wish to make a thing in which the sacred still binds the maker.
The title names an early Christian romance, the Recognitions attributed to Clement of Rome, in which a family scattered by misfortune is sought and found again. Gaddis’s first novel, published in New York in 1955, takes that pattern for its plot and turns it. It runs in three parts, each divided into numbered chapters, to nearly a thousand pages, and in it the recognitions almost all fail: a son seeks a mother’s grave and a father’s faith, another son has never met his father, and people cross in the same rooms without knowing one another.
Movement II
Wyatt does not copy. He paints new pictures in the manner of the Flemish masters, pictures those masters never painted, and he paints them as the guild painters worked, grinding his own pigments and keeping to their methods. The book returns to him at work through the night on a picture in the manner of a dead master, and the labour is given its full seriousness. Only in another man’s name can he paint as though painting still answered to something higher than the painter. The forgery is his devotion.
The pictures are made for Recktall Brown, a dealer, and authenticated by Basil Valentine, a critic. The arrangement is Faust’s. Wyatt sells his gift to a devil of commerce, and Valentine is the tempter who argues: in his long exchanges with Wyatt the book speaks its question outright, what an original is worth to a culture that cannot tell it from a copy, and what a painter owes to the dead in whose names he paints. The pact does not end in damnation. It ends in a flight whose meaning the book leaves uncertain.
Around the pictures stands a market that prices authenticity and cannot see it. The forger’s devotion may be the truest thing in the book, and the market cannot tell it from fraud. The old figure of alchemy is built into the son’s labour, a purifying work on base matter, as the sun cult is built into the father’s apostasy. Between them the Gwyon family carries the book’s argument in two generations: a faith counterfeited in the pulpit, and a devotion that can survive only as counterfeit.
Movement III
The middle of the book belongs to the parties of Greenwich Village. They are rendered as talk, dozens of voices, often unattributed, overlapping like noise, with no voice set over them to say who speaks or what it means. The art critic, the analyst, the poet and the publicist are each known by a phrase of their cant. At one party a stranger passes off another’s opinion as his own, and no one notices, because every opinion in the room is borrowed. The parties are a society of copies talking past one another, and they go on for a very long time.
Otto writes a play, and lifts its lines from Wyatt’s talk. Plagiarism is the forgery of the word, and Otto is to the word what Wyatt is to the picture. In the Village every self is a performance, and the performance is assembled from what others have said. Wyatt’s marriage to Esther runs through these years, and the women of the book, Esther and Esme above all, are seen less fully than the men.
The novel does to its reader what the Village does to its talk. Quotation and allusion enter the text unmarked, from theology, from art history, from the saints, from Frazer and from the cult of Mithras, and the reader is made a connoisseur who must tell the borrowed from the made. A book about forgery is built, openly, of other books. Its own originality is the question it sets beside Wyatt’s, and it does not answer it for him or for itself.
Movement IV
The counterfeit reaches money. Sinisterra makes false banknotes, and the book carries his trade beside Recktall Brown’s, the forged note beside the forged picture, so that the whole economy of value, in art and in cash, is shown to rest on an authority no one can verify. The banknote and the painting are the same object in two markets: each is worth what it is believed to be, and each is believed because it resembles what was once trusted.
Mr. Pivner is the father Otto has never met. He carries the counterfeit into the ordinary life of the age, into its money and into its self-help, where a man may be improved as a picture is improved, by resemblance to a model. He is the book’s plainest citizen, far from studios and parties, and the counterfeit reaches him all the same. He and Otto belong to the book’s pattern of the scattered family, a father and a son kept apart, and the book does not let the pattern close.
The failed recognition is the shape of the book. Characters cross in the same rooms without recognising one another, and go on. What in Clement’s romance is the joy of a family found is here a series of near-meetings, each of them a misreading. The plot of coincidence is huge and exact, and every coincidence is a recognition withheld: the book’s people are surrounded by what they are looking for and cannot tell it from its copies.
Movement V
The third part turns to Spain. Wyatt has fled the pact and the city, and he goes in search of his mother’s grave, in the country where she was buried after the voyage of the first pages. The search carries him among the old towns and monasteries of Spain, and the telling changes with it: quieter, plainer, more conventional than the parties and the arguments that came before. The book that began with a mother lost at sea returns, near its end, to look for where she lies.
Against Wyatt’s quiet the book sets the farce of the last parties in New York, which go on as before, as though nothing had been found or lost. The two registers do not meet. One man in Spain is looking for a grave; the city he left is still making copies, and the book gives both to the end without saying which of them it believes.
It does not say what Wyatt’s last resolution is worth. It may be redemption, the forger come at last to an original life; it may be another counterfeit, a man performing a new life as he once performed a Flemish master. It does not say whether the forgeries were a sin or a sacrament. The romance it is named for ends in a family found. This book leaves its reader, who has been asked on every page to tell the true from the borrowed, with that task still open.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it bites hardest in the second part. The spine is required: Camilla’s death at sea and the son raised by a Calvinist aunt; Wyatt’s turn from the ministry to painting; the forgeries made for Recktall Brown and authenticated by Basil Valentine; the flight to Spain and the search for the mother’s grave. Otto, who lifts Wyatt’s talk for a play, is required, since plagiarism is the forgery of the word; so is Mr. Pivner, the father Otto has never met, who carries the counterfeit into money and into the self-help of the age. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the bulk of the Greenwich Village parties. Their sameness is part of their argument, a society of copies talking past one another, but the argument is made long before they end. A tenth or more of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a culture that has lost faith in the original, devotion survives as counterfeit, and the forger may be its last believer. Wyatt does not copy. He paints new Flemish pictures in the old manner, grinding his pigments and working as the guild painters worked, because only in another man’s name can he paint as though the sacred still bound the painter. Around him the counterfeit spreads by its own law: Sinisterra’s banknotes, Otto’s borrowed lines, the Reverend Gwyon’s slide into the worship of Mithras, a Village where every self is a performance, and an art market that prices an authenticity it cannot see. The book uncovered in 1955 the condition later criticism named the age of the copy, and uncovered it as a moral and religious question, not as a theory. Held off the top because much of the meaning is spoken, in Valentine’s and Wyatt’s long arguments, rather than found in action.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation comes, and often cold. The opening voyage, which begins “Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades”, passes from comedy to a death at sea under a counterfeit surgeon and a burial in a Spanish town, a grief the son carries through the whole book. The Reverend Gwyon’s turn to the sun has a strange grandeur: a minister of a Calvinist church in New England led out of his faith by an older one. Wyatt at work through the night on a picture in the manner of a dead master is the book’s recurrent height, the sacred labour carried on in bad faith. Held in the low eights because the satire of the parties is long and deliberately flat, and the heights are spaced across a very long book.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is built, not draped. The title names the Recognitions attributed to Clement of Rome, an early Christian romance of a family scattered and found again, and the book runs on recognitions, almost all of them failed. Otto has never met his father, Mr. Pivner; Wyatt seeks his mother’s grave and his father’s faith and finds a counterfeit at each. Faust is load-bearing: Wyatt sells his gift to Recktall Brown, a devil of commerce, with Basil Valentine as the tempter who argues, and the pact ends not in damnation but in an uncertain flight. Alchemy and the sun cult are built into the Gwyon family, as the son’s purifying labour and the father’s apostasy. The recognition plot and the pact drive the story, and they carry the axis above the bar. Held below the top because the allusive web is denser than the built structure: much of the mythology, the saints, Frazer, Mithras, is learned atmosphere rather than frame.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Joyce’s encyclopedic novel and Eliot’s allusive collage, set against an American novel of the early 1950s that had largely turned from high modernist ambition to realism and the first person. The turn: an American novel of nearly a thousand pages, learned and satirical, about authenticity itself, built of borrowings it does not mark, its party scenes rendered as unattributed talk overlapping like noise. It turned modernist means on the question of the copy, and so anticipated the self-conscious novel of the next two decades. The stake was real: a first novel of this length and difficulty, set against the grain of its decade, and no second novel followed for twenty years. Held below the top because the instrument is largely Joyce’s and Eliot’s, and the swerve lies in the subject and the American setting more than in the means.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. A novel about forgery is made, openly, of other books: quotation and allusion enter unmarked, so that the reader is made a connoisseur who must tell the borrowed from the made. The parties are rendered as overlapping fragments of talk with no governing voice, which is what a society of copies sounds like. The plot is built of near-meetings, characters crossing in the same rooms without recognising one another, so that the failed recognition is the shape of the book and not only its theme. Held off the top because the form is not equally instrumental throughout: many of the satirical episodes inside the frame are containers rather than instruments, and the third part’s movement to Spain is told more conventionally than what precedes it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and seventy years supply it. The book has been kept open by its readers through decades of annotation and criticism, and the questions it plants are still argued: whether Wyatt’s forgeries are a sin or a sacrament; whether his last resolution in Spain is redemption or another counterfeit; what a novel made of borrowings claims for its own originality. The allusive layer alone is unexhausted after decades of annotation. Held below the top because the re-examination has been the work of a small community more than of the whole literary culture, and part of it is the tracing of sources, which is erudition before it is depth.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the novel of the 1950s. The force is high: the book is the first full American attempt after the war at the encyclopedic, allusive, satirical novel about systems of value, and it holds in 1955 much of what the American novel of the 1960s and after would do: the counterfeit culture, the paranoid web of coincidence, the polyphonic party, the novel aware of its own status as a made thing. The force carries the axis over the bar; what holds it near the bar is reach. The reach came late and ran underground; which of its successors drew on it directly is argued rather than shown; and in a decade that also holds Lolita, its redirection of the field is narrower than its force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands as an acknowledged ancestor of the encyclopedic American novel; Gaddis is named among the inheritance of the encyclopedic novels that followed, Infinite Jest among them; and that reach came through writers and devoted readers, long after the years in which the book could first have redirected the field.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed over seventy-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Gaddis published it. Fabric: nothing to charge. Presence is where the charge falls. The book’s presence came late and has stayed narrow: it has been kept in print, but it is read by a devoted minority rather than continuously across the culture, and taught chiefly in courses on postwar and postmodern fiction. That presence holds the figure below what seven decades at a usual presence would show. A survival of seven decades does not stand with one of millennia.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The command is of two instruments. The first is the dialogue: the parties carry dozens of voices, often unattributed, and the ear for cant, the art critic’s, the analyst’s, the poet’s, the publicist’s, is exact enough that a speaker is known by a phrase. The second is the narrative prose: long, learned, ironic sentences that move between New England theology, Flemish technique and Manhattan squalor without losing register. The control of a very large cast and a plot of coincidence over nearly a thousand pages is a feat. Three charges hold it below the top: the prose is at moments overwrought, the learning laid on as display; the satire of the Village is sometimes broad and repeats its targets; and the women, Esther and Esme above all, are seen less fully than the men.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Reverend Gwyon’s Mithraic sermon in a Calvinist church in New England, and a cocktail party in a Village apartment where a stranger passes off another’s opinion as his own. They obey one law: where the original is lost, the copy multiplies, and every copy is a misdirected longing for what it imitates. The father’s sun cult is a counterfeit faith, the party a counterfeit society, Wyatt’s paintings a counterfeit devotion that may be the truest thing in the book. The law runs through money, love, art, literature and religion without exception, and the range is very wide, from slapstick to theology. Charged: the third part’s tonal turn, Wyatt’s quiet in Spain set against the farce of the last parties, strains the law at its edge, and some satirical figures obey a looser physics of caricature than Wyatt’s story.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders, and one question holds them: what is genuine. Consciousness, in Wyatt’s long crisis and in his father’s. The family: the Gwyons across three generations, and the Pivners, father and son. Religion, in Calvinism, Catholicism, the monasteries of Spain and the sun cult. Art, as craft, as market and as criticism. Money, in Sinisterra’s counterfeiting and Recktall Brown’s trade. The city, New York in its bohemia and its commerce, against the old towns of Spain and Italy. Literature, in Otto’s play and the novel’s own borrowings. Love and marriage, in Wyatt and Esther. They are integrated: every order is a field of counterfeit and longing. Held below the top because the state and politics are nearly absent, the natural order is thin, labour appears chiefly as the painter’s craft, and history enters as art history and church history more than as the history of a people.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 9.1, then The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 9.0. An encyclopedic American novel turned on the question of the copy, against the grain of its decade, by a first novel of this length and difficulty; seventy years of return that have not settled whether the forgeries are sin or sacrament; a disclosure that holds, that where faith in the original is lost devotion survives as counterfeit and the forger may be its last believer, carried by Wyatt’s method as much as by the arguments; and one law, that where the original is lost the copy multiplies, holding from a Mithraic sermon in New England to a party in the Village.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9, held by the bulk of the Greenwich Village parties, whose sameness is their argument but which run long past the point made, a tenth or more of the book. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.2: heights that are real, the death at sea, the father’s turn to the sun, the son at work through the night, but spaced across a very long book with long stretches of deliberately flat satire. Then Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.7: a reach that came late and runs through successors argued rather than shown; a presence late and narrow, among a devoted minority; and a prose at moments overwrought, with the women seen less fully than the men.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5, by four tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.9. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, his first novel, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, in 1955. It is scored as one work, the novel in its three parts as Gaddis published it; later editions are the same work and bear only on survival. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence. The title is that of the Recognitions attributed to Clement of Rome. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count of the first edition, the chapter counts of the parts, the book’s first reception and sales, the later editions and translations, the particular studies and guides of its later readers, and the manner of several deaths in the book, are not given.