Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo

REWIRING THE REAL

Religion, Culture, and Public Life

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC LIFE

Series Editors: Alfred Stepan and Mark C. Taylor

The resurgence of religion calls for careful analysis and constructive criticism of new forms of intolerance, as well as new approaches to tolerance, respect, mutual understanding, and accommodation. In order to promote serious scholarship and informed debate, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and Columbia University Press are sponsoring a book series devoted to the investigation of the role of religion in society and culture today. This series includes works by scholars in religious studies, political science, history, cultural anthropology, economics, social psychology, and other allied fields whose work sustains multidisciplinary and comparative as well as transnational analyses of historical and contemporary issues. The series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity, and practice within local, national, and international contexts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence, and intolerance and also support human rights, ecumenical values, and mutual understanding. By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social, and cultural traditions, books published in this series will open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis.

After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen

Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder

Religion in America: A Political History, Denis Lacorne

Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan

Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor

Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal, edited by Mamadou Diouf

MARK C. TAYLOR

REWIRING THE REAL

IN CONVERSATION WITH

WILLIAM GADDIS, RICHARD POWERS, MARK DANIELEWSKI, AND DON DELILLO

Columbia

University

Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53164-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Mark C., 1945–

Rewiring the real : in conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Power, Mark Danielwski, and Don DeLillo / Mark C. Taylor.

p. cm.—(Religion, culture, and public life)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16040-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53164-1 (e-book)

1. Technology in literature. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 4. Gaddis, William, 1922–1998. Recognitions. 5. Powers, Richard, 1957– Plowing the dark. 6. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of leaves. 7. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. 8. Technological innovations—Religious aspects. 9. Theology in literature. 10. Spirituality in literature. I. Title.

PS228. T42T39  2012

810.9’356—dc23

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover image: © 2012 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licenced by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.

—Wallace Stevens

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

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1. COUNTERFEITING COUNTERFEIT RELIGION: WILLIAM GADDIS, THE RECOGNITIONS

Between Belief and Unbelief

Samhain—All Saints Day

Feast of Sol Invictus—Christmas

Eoustur—Easter

Counterfeiting Counterfeits

2. MOSAICS: RICHARD POWERS, PLOWING THE DARK

Misrecognitions

Recovery

Science Fiction

Caves

Killing Time

Marking Time

After Byzantium

3. FIGURING NOTHING: MARK DANIELEWSKI, HOUSE OF LEAVES

Wired

Blindness and Insight

Entrances Without Exits

Life Online

Father’s House

4. HOLY SHIT!: DON DELILLO, UNDERWORLD

Prologue

Waste

Part 1

Andy 1

Part 2

Part 3

Andy 2

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Andy 3

Epilogue to Epilogue

Das Kapital III

After Thought

Earth Works

5. CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT: TWO STYLES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Theological Foundations

Art and Science

Religion Within the Limits of Style Alone

Questions of Style

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

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REWIRING THE REAL: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo complements and completes Refiguring the Spiritual. In the previous book, I examine four artists, one dead and three living (Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy); in this book, I explore four writers, one dead and three living. I consider these artists and writers to be among the most important cultural figures of our era.

Like everything else in my life, this book and the interests it represents began at the knees of my parents. Thelma Kathryn Cooper (1910–1988) taught literature and was an amateur painter; Noel Alexander Taylor (1907–1992) taught biology and physics and was a semiprofessional photographer. When I was very young, my mother asked a friend to teach me how to paint, and my father taught me how to take, develop, and print photographs. They both instilled in me the conviction that teaching, writing, and art are neither careers nor jobs but vocations. Though I was raised in a churchgoing family, it was always clear to me that the most important scripture was literature and that the most sacred icons were artistic. I did not realize it at the time, but I was also learning that religion is most interesting where it is least obvious. Over the years, I have continued to take photographs, returned to painting from time to time, created sculptures, and undertaken big projects that fall somewhere between gardens and earthworks. I have written books about art and published elaborately designed works that border on art. I have even been fortunate to have had an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.¹

My professional life took me in what I thought was a different direction. Having become interested in religion and philosophy while an undergraduate, I eventually completed an American doctorate in religion and a Danish doctorate in philosophy. For reasons I still find mysterious, I was initially drawn to philosophy and theology by reading the works of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard borrows lines from Lichtenberg for the epigram to his book Stages on Life’s Way. Such works are mirrors: when an ape looks in, no apostle can look out.² When I first read Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings as an undergraduate, it was, indeed, like looking in a mirror—in his writings I saw my own life reflected. Only gradually did I begin to understand how unusual a philosopher Kierkegaard is; indeed, I discovered that many who fashion themselves philosophers refuse to admit him to their club. This made his work even more interesting to me. In the first course I took on Kierkegaard, I learned that he described his most important works as his aesthetic authorship. Ever since that time I have been convinced that no clear line separates art, religion, and theology. Rewiring the Real would not have been possible without the lessons his writings taught me.

Over the years I have come to realize that Kierkegaard is not only the greatest writer Denmark has ever produced but also one of the greatest stylists in the history of philosophy and theology. Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with aesthetics and, by extension, style was, in large measure, a reaction to Hegel’s insistence that philosophy is scientific—wissenschaftlich. For Hegel, art is, in his infamous words, a thing of the past. He did not, of course, mean that art is no longer produced but rather that philosophical conceptions have replaced religious representations and artistic images as the locus of truth. The task of philosophy in Hegel’s scientific system is to translate religious and artistic Vorstellungen (representations) into philosophical Begriffe (concepts). Though the meaning of scientific has changed over the years, Kierkegaard and Hegel still pose very different alternatives for philosophical and theological reflection: on the one hand, art, and, on the other, science. I have always been torn between Hegel and Kierkegaard but have never doubted that on this crucial question, Kierkegaard is right—far from being a thing of the past, art creates the opening through which the future approaches.

As I studied the background and context for Kierkegaard’s and Hegel’s thought, my conviction about the importance of art for philosophy and theology deepened. The decisive period for the emergence of modernism and postmodernism was the decade of the 1790s, and the most important place was the small duchy of Jena, in what is now Germany. The nineteenth century effectively begins in 1790, with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In this work, Kant frames most of the philosophical, theological, and artistic issues that continue to be important today.³ In the course of his analysis of aesthetic judgment, he develops the distinction between fine art and craft, or high art and low art, that became normative for modernists and the target of attack for postmodernists. Artists and writers found new possibilities for creative production in Kant’s work.

At the same time, important changes were occurring in theology and religion. Throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers had attempted to defend religious belief on rational grounds by developing arguments to prove the existence of God. While the approaches on the continent and in the United Kingdom differed, over the course of the century, deists borrowed empirical methods from the natural sciences to argue for the existence of God. Far from being a vestige of primitive mentality or lingering superstition, religious faith, many argued, can be rationally justified on the basis of empirical evidence. Basing their arguments on the principle of causality, defenders of the cosmological argument argued from the existence of the world the creator God, who is its necessary cause, and proponents of the teleological argument argued from the design and purpose of the world to God as the ground of order. This line of argument finally collapsed when Hume carried empirical epistemology to its logical conclusion. Since all knowledge is based upon sense experience, he argued, causality must be understood as a subjective habit rather than as an objective fact. If belief were to be considered rational, another justification for it would have to be found.

Kant tried to salvage the sinking ship of rational theism by shifting the basis for religious belief from theory to practice. Moral activity, he argues in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), presupposes belief in a moral God, human freedom, and immortality. Acting morally makes no sense if a moral god does not govern the world, and human beings do not have the freedom to accept or reject the moral law. For many of the artists, writers, poets, and philosophers who gathered in Jena in the 1790s, Kant’s ethical defense of religion exacerbated the personal fragmentation and social alienation they sought to overcome. Schleiermacher, Schiller, the Schleger brothers, Hölderlin, Novalis, and others turned away from the stern dictates of the moral conscience and turned toward art as the source of religious and spiritual insight and inspiration. Friedrich Schlegel spoke for many of his fellow artists and writers when he wrote, Whoever has religion will speak in poetry. But to seek and find religion, you need the instrument of philosophy.⁴ The vision of the interplay of art, philosophy, and religion developed by the Jena romantics eventually spread to England by way of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth and then to the United States, where American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau fell under its sway. A century later, this trajectory led to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work realizes Schiller’s dream of the aesthetic education of man. God and the imagination, Stevens insists, are one, and the world is, in effect, a work of art. In these writers, poets, and artists, the transcendent creator dies and is reborn as creative activity immanent in human life and the natural world.

There is, however, another romanticism that casts the lingering shadow of a different God. Within religious traditions West and East, God, the gods, and the sacred do not always bring light, certainty, and security; all too often they disrupt, disturb, and dislocate human life in ways that are profoundly unsettling. In the modern and postmodern West, the heirs of these gods are, inter alia, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud, Poe, Melville, Blanchot, Jabès, and Derrida. For these philosophers and writers, the real, however it is conceived, is other, wholly other, or, in Kierkegaard’s words that continue to echo, infinitely and qualitatively different. If the real is radically other, it remains irreducibly obscure and cannot be rationally comprehended, scientifically analyzed, or directly communicated; rather, it must be approached indirectly in works that artfully figure what eludes precise language, clear concepts, and transparent images. Through a long and circuitous course, Kierkegaardian aestheticism eventually reappears in Derridean ècriture to form what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe aptly label the literary absolute.⁵

Rewiring the Real explores the complex interrelation of religion, literature, and philosophy by focusing on single works by four American writers. With one exception, these writers are not concerned with or directly influenced by European philosophy. However, just as religion is most interesting where it is least obvious, so philosophy often is important even when it is not recognized or acknowledged. The work of Gaddis, Powers, Danielewski, and DeLillo would have been impossible without the issues Kant framed and his followers elaborated. The point of this study is not to trace historical influences but to explore pressing contemporary issues that the neχus of religion, literature, and technology illuminates. In a world plagued by the literalism of both belief and unbelief, these four authors present writerly counterparts to the figurative inquiries of Beuys, Barney, Turrell, and Goldsworthy. They solicit a return of the repressed underside of our cultural unconscious in works designed to enable people to see, think, and perhaps even live otherwise.

While Gaddis, Powers, Danielewski, and DeLillo are different writers, they all share a recognition of the ways in which new media, communications, and information technologies transformed life during the latter half of the twentieth century and continue to shape our world in predictable and unpredictable ways. Neither simply utopian nor dystopian, they acknowledge that these developments both change the conditions of cultural production and pose unprecedented artistic challenges. Paradoxically, these new technologies provoke some to reject traditional orthodoxies and others to return to fundamental beliefs that have long seemed passé. At the same time, though rarely recognized, technological innovation expresses desires and aspirations once deemed religious. In the lingering twilight between belief and unbelief, technologies designed to redeem life and renew the world often turn destructive. By recasting ancient questions in new language, Gaddis, Powers, Danielewski, and DeLillo reveal new gods and demons we ignore at our own peril.

William Gaddis is arguably the most underappreciated major twentieth-century novelist. One of the reasons for this is that his most important works—The Recognitions and JR—are long and difficult. While The Recognitions was almost completely ignored when it was published in 1955, JR (1975) received the National Book Award but remains little read and rarely discussed. Gaddis is a writer’s writer who asks big questions and tackles tough problems; his works are as complicated as the issues they probe. Always ahead of the times, he saw things coming long before others even suspected important changes were on the horizon. The Recognitions is, in my judgment, one of the two most important theological novels ever written (the other is Moby-Dick). This work bridges past and future by showing the relationship between traditional religious beliefs and practices and contemporary social, economic, and technological developments. Gaddis draws on ancient christological controversies and discussions of both the Christian Eucharist and Mithraic rites to illuminate psychological and social conflicts inherent in modern skepticism and secularism created by rapid technological change. This trenchant analysis anticipates what Guy Debord later labeled the society of the spectacle and Baudrillard described as the culture of simulacra.

Having had a day job in an advertising agency in the 1950s, Gaddis foresaw the contemporary world of global media, where images become real and reality become imaginary. Just as the transcendent God empties (kenosis) himself into the figure of Jesus to render the profane sacred and the sacred profane, so the real (i.e., the signified) empties itself into the image or representation (i.e., signifier) to create a world in which signs are always signs of other signs. In the society of the spectacle and the culture of simulacra, it is impossible to be sure what is real and what is fake—everything appears to be counterfeit or, even worse, a counterfeit of a counterfeit. The primary concern of The Recognitions is postwar American consumer culture, where advertising keeps the economy running by creating desire where there is no need. In JR, the focus shifts from consumer to financial capitalism. As I have argued in Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption, JR is an astonishing anticipation of the global financial capitalism that emerged at the end of the twentieth century and continues to dominate the world today. Just as signs become signs of other signs in postmodern art, architecture, and literature, so money becomes nothing more than figures of other figures coded in algorithms that govern the global flow of currencies. The world Gaddis foresees in these two novels is the world Powers, Danielewski, and DeLillo know as their own. Each of these writers asks in a different way whether art has any role to play in a world where change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it.

All of Richard Powers’s novels take as their point of departure a scientific theory or technological innovation. Powers immerses himself in scientific literature and keeps himself informed about the current state of technology: he is the rare novelist who actually understands the science and technology about which he writes. Plowing the Dark presents a provocative exploration of the unexpected interplay of art and religion through an account of virtual reality technology. The narrative weaves together two stories that unfold on opposite sides of the world—a VR lab in Seattle and a terrorist cell in Lebanon. West and East meet in Hagia Sophia, where Byzantine mosaics are transformed by the Web browser Mosaic. Powers sees connections where others see oppositions. Religion, art, and technology, he suggests, all express the human longing for some kind of transcendence. The question that lingers after the end of the book is whether technology has displaced art, which previously had displaced religion, as the most telling manifestation of contemporary spiritual aspiration. If so, what are the tenets and practical implications of this belief?

Mark Danielewski’s style is always indirect—in the world his work portrays nothing is ever certain, and everything is subject to endless revision. Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective might well have been describing House of Leaves when he repeats again and again, All clues, no solutions. Danielewski leaves clues—countless clues—and as his tale unfolds the canny detective begins to suspect that the labyrinthian House of Leaves is, incongruously, the World Wide Web, which, in turn, is nothing less than the current house of God. While all four novels considered in Rewiring the Real erase any clear distinction between style and substance by devising stylistic innovations to convey elusive ideas, House of Leaves is an ingenious performative work that is graphically designed to resemble the networks it explores. The central trope of the novel is a haunted house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside. House of Leaves is, among other things, a book that cannot be contained between its covers—the work exceeds the bounds of the traditional novel. It begins before the beginning and continues after the end, on the World Wide Web. Far from style for style’s sake, this carefully designed work communicates by doing rather than merely describing; Danielewski is as savvy about literary theory as Powers is about scientific theory. More than any other novelist now writing, he recognizes the inseparable relation of poststructural theory and postmodern art to what I have described elsewhere as network culture.⁶ Furthermore, he realizes that the intersection of art, literary theory, and technology has something to do with religion. If The Recognitions is the most important theological novel to have been written in the twentieth century, House of Leaves might be described as the most suggestive a/theological novel that has yet appeared.

DeLillo picks up where Gaddis leaves off. By the last decade of the twentieth century, counterfeits of counterfeits have become the currency of the realm, and JR has grown up to become a confidence man trading virtual securities that are anything but secure. In the course of telling the story of life in America from the beginning of the Cold War to the end of the Soviet Union, Underworld presents a sustained analysis and critique of both consumer and financial capitalism. I begin my discussion of the novel by writing a postscript to DeLillo’s Point Omega, which forms a bridge between the conclusion of Underworld, Das Kapital, and his account of hypercapitalism in Cosmopolis.

The interplay of technology, literature, art, and, less obvious but no less important, religion lies at the heart of all these works. DeLillo has always been suspicious of technology but realizes that the tape of history cannot be rewound. For a generation raised with air-raid drills and bomb shelters, the collapse of the Berlin Wall represented the failure of communism and the triumph of capitalism. However, where others saw triumph and opportunity, DeLillo sees failure and danger. The world of global capitalism, he insists, is considerably less stable and secure than the world of the Cold War. Power no longer is divided between two superpowers that can be identified and whose boundaries can be clearly defined. Decentralization and deregulation have created a world of flows in which maintaining a semblance of order has become increasingly difficult, if not completely impossible. One of the most important factors contributing to global instability is the accelerating rate of technological change. The most important line in the novel identifies the necessary condition for so-called creative destruction in network culture: Everything is connected. As connectivity expands, volatility increases and creates economic, social, political, and psychological instability. The danger, according to DeLillo, is not that capitalism will fail but that it will succeed all too well. Constantly searching for new markets and greater market share, capitalism is driven to excesses that prove to be its own undoing. From the nuclear bomb and environmental disaster to political upheaval and financial collapse, an apocalyptic tone runs throughout Underworld.⁷ What this end portends is not at all clear.

I conclude with an essay that explains the philosophical, theological, and artistic presuppositions that lie behind both Rewiring the Real and Refiguring the Spiritual—Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Two Styles of the Philosophy of Religion. Ever since my undergraduate days, I have returned again and again to Paul Tillich’s seminal essay, Two Types of Philosophy of Religion, in which he contrasts Augustinian and Thomistic approaches to philosophy and theology.⁸ In the former, labeled the ontological type, the relation to God (or the real) is implicit though unrecognized; in the latter, labeled the cosmological type, the relation to God (or the real) is external and must be established from without.⁹ While the terms of debate have changed over the years, the current distinction between continental and analytic philosophy corresponds to Tillich’s distinction between the ontological and cosmological types. It is important to stress that the continental/analytic distinction is a twentieth-century invention. With the revival of Hegelianism in the early 1900s, British philosophy established its identity by creating its own other, over against which it defined itself. Though rarely noted, the ghost of religion haunts the machine of analytic, linguistic, and positivistic philosophy. Each of these trajectories can be traced to the late medieval nominalism of William of Ockham, who, it is important to note, spent his most productive years at Oxford. Continental philosophy, by contrast, has no single source or origin—it is more rhizomatic than arboreal. Far from a coherent tradition, continental philosophy is a loose aggregation of movements as different as idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and, more recently, deconstruction and poststructuralism. The contrast between continental and analytic philosophy has been useful, but its ceaseless repetition has led to a familiarity that obscures more than it clarifies. It is time to recast the distinction in a way that opens new possibilities for creative reflection. It is more fruitful, I suggest, to think of two contrasting philosophical styles: one that models itself on art and one that models itself on an interpretation of science that is deliberately contrasted to art. This way of posing the issue is intentionally provocative because it suggests that there is nothing outside or beyond style. Furthermore, art and style are inseparable—there is no art without style and no style without art. The choice is not between style and nonstyle but between a style that represses its artistic and aesthetic facets and a style that expresses them stylistically. In order to explore the difference, in the final essay-chapter of this book, I consider alternative philosophical and theological styles through a consideration of the work of Martin Heidegger and Rudolph Carnap.

No philosopher since Kierkegaard has insisted on a closer interrelation of art, philosophy, and religion than Heidegger. His turn toward art is a decisive turn away from science. Modern science and technology, Heidegger argues, bring to closure the Western philosophical-theological tradition by enacting Nietzsche’s will to power in a will to mastery that knows no bounds. Instrumental reason has created weapons of mass destruction that threaten planetary survival. Writing in the shadow of the atomic bomb and what he presciently describes as the cybernetic revolution, Heidegger’s response is as unexpected as it is suggestive. He turns to religion by way of art by citing Rilke: Only a God can save us now.¹⁰

For Carnap and his many followers, Heidegger’s vision of philosophy is not only wrong but actually dangerous. Rather than harboring destruction, modern science and its extension in technology offer our only hope for survival. If philosophy has a role to play in the world today, its language must be as precise and its analyses as rigorous as the scientific method it emulates. Needless obscurantism, Carnap argues, creates confusion and deception that history teaches can be exploited for pernicious purposes. In the years since Carnap and his colleagues issued their manifesto, philosophy has become more and more resistant to philosophy that fashions itself aesthetic and increasingly committed to its version of the scientific method: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, neurophysiology, machine intelligence, robotics, experimental philosophy… For more than a century, mainstream Anglo-American philosophy has become increasingly allergic to any writing or thinking that does not conform to its misguided criteria of rigor. The opposition between science and art is, like all such oppositions, specious and must be undone.

I began Refiguring the Spiritual by writing, Art has lost its way; I might have begun Rewiring the Real by writing, Philosophy has lost its way. Over the course of the twentieth century, philosophy became more and more about less and less—and less and less about the issues and questions that really matter. This trajectory is neither necessary nor desirable. What if philosophy were to become more artful and art more philosophical? And what if, in so doing, philosophy and art were to create a new opening for the religious imagination? To explore this opening would require stylistic experiments that begin on, migrate from, and return to the page as we have known it in the past.

1

COUNTERFEITING COUNTERFEIT RELIGION

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

He even said once, that the saints were counterfeits of Christ, and that Christ was a counterfeit of God.

—William Gaddis

BETWEEN BELIEF AND UNBELIEF

WILLIAM GADDIS’S The Recognitions is one of the most theologically sophisticated novels ever written. It is also one of the richest and most difficult works of fiction in any language. Gaddis’s ambition is as large as his book: his aim is nothing less than to write the last Christian novel. To read this prescient work is to gaze into a mirror and discover ourselves anew. The events recounted in The Recognitions take place in the time between belief and unbelief. While modernization and secularization make belief impossible for many erstwhile faithful, the memory of belief and the assurance it brings defer the advent of a thoroughly postmodern age of unbelief. Though never explicitly stated, Gaddis suspends his narrative between a series of polarities:

Pagan/Christian

Devil/Christ

Catholic/Protestant

Europe/America

Completion/Incompletion

Original/Counterfeit

Transcendent/Immanent

Depth/Surface

Negation/Affirmation

Homoiousian/Homoousian

Unbelief/Belief

Fake/Real

Gaddis’s consistent purpose throughout The Recognitions is to subvert such simple oppositions by showing how each term folds into the other to create a nonsynthetic third that joins without precisely uniting differences.

Far from merely dismissing religion, Gaddis recognizes that the convolutions of contemporary society and culture cannot be understood apart from the ancient theological preoccupations from which they have emerged. The title and two prefatory epigrams frame the theological issues the novel explores. Gaddis borrows his title from the fourth-century work mistakenly attributed to Clement, the third bishop of Rome, who is best known for his letter to the church at Corinth (96–97 CE) that established the authority of Rome by formulating the doctrine of apostolic succession. The pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, some historians maintain, is the first Christian novel. Uncertainty surrounding the authorship of the original work poses the question of authenticity that preoccupies Gaddis. Quoting this little-known work in an epigram to one of his chapters, he indicates that The Recognitions is not only theologically allusive but also philosophically suggestive:

This is as if a drunk man should think himself to be sober, and should act indeed in all respects as a drunk man, and yet think himself to be sober, and should wish to be called so by others. Thus, therefore, are those who do not know what is true, yet hold some appearance of knowledge, and do many evil things as if they were good, and hasten to destruction as if it were salvation.¹

In what he intends to be the last Christian novel, Gaddis returns to the central issues raised in the first Christian novel: the problem of the relation between truth and appearance and, by extension, the possibility or impossibility of salvation. The title of the novel is carefully chosen—the word recognition marks the intersection of epistemological and ontological questions. On the one hand, if, following Plato and his theological descendents, knowledge involves re-cognition, then truth exists prior to and independent of human knowledge. The transcendence of truth renders worldly appearances faint shadows of a reality that is never totally present. Salvation can be achieved, if at all, only through the flight from or negation of the material world. On the other hand, if, following Nietzsche and his a/theological descendents, knowledge is a human fabrication, then truth is a fiction, which might or might not be re-cognized as such. In the wake of the disappearance of transcendent truth, worldly appearances are the only reality. Salvation can be achieved, if at all, only through the involvement in and affirmation of the material world in all of its horror and glory.

Between the title and the first chapter, Gaddis inserts an epigram drawn from Irenaeus’s Against Heresies:

Nihil cavum neque sine signo apud Deum.

With God, nothing is empty of meaning.

Persuaded that Gnosticism posed a serious threat to the early Christian community, Irenaeus developed an extended polemic directed primarily against Valentinus, who had taught in Rome between 135 and 160. According to the conventional view, Valentinus, like other Gnostics, was a radical dualist for whom the world as we know it was created by a lower deity and remains an irredeemable realm of