UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL VALÉRIA BRISOLARA SALOMON WILLIAM GADDIS’S AESTHETICS OF RECOGNITIONS PORTO ALEGRE 2005 1 VALÉRIA BRISOLARA SALOMON WILLIAM GADDIS’S AESTHETICS OF RECOGNITIONS Tese de Doutorado em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa Para obtenção do Título de Doutor em Letras Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras Instituto de Letras Literaturas de Língua Inglesa Orientadora:Eloína Prati dos Santos Porto Alegre 2005 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all of those who somehow made this dissertation possible. - My family, especially my grandmother who gave me my first book when I was 8, to everyone’s surprise and my astonishment; - My husband, Fernando, for his encouragement and my son, Caio, who was conceived when I was halfway through writing my thesis, for his patience; - My friend and brother Paulo Roberto Ramos for the discussions and continuous support; - My adviser Profª. Dr.ª Eloína Prati dos Santos for having introduced me to postmodern literature and a whole new world of uncertainties; - The wonderful Sandra Maggio for having sold me the idea of the importance of graduate studies when I was not sure about what I wanted to do after college; - My friend and colleague Gregory Comnes for sympathizing with my condition of Brazilian scholar in need of material and graciously providing me with books, transcripts, interviews and even personal letters from William Gaddis to him; - And finally, my fellow travelers Isabella Vieira de Bem and Jane T. Brodbeck, for making the journey more pleasurable. 3 Bad Poets imitate. Real poets steal. T.S. Eliot Bad artists copy. Great Artists steal. Picasso 4 RESUMO O romance The Recognitions (Os Reconhecimentos) do escritor norte-americano William Gaddis é um texto auto—reflexivo que retrata a trajetória de Wyatt Gwyon da infância à maturidade, na medida em que ele rejeita e busca a originalidade. O presente trabalho analisa The Recognitions enfocando a problematização dos conceitos de originalidade e autoria propostos pelo romance através de debates sobre a falsificação e o plágio, que remetem a duas noções maiores e mais importantes: autoria e originalidade. O romance questiona a presente demanda por originalidade e discute a possibilidade de ser original. Ele formula uma estética baseada em reconhecimentos que é defendida no romance e usada pelo autor na tessitura do texto. A fim de atingir seus objetivos, este trabalho apresenta os diferentes conceitos associados aos termos originalidade e original, assim como alguns das principais violações relacionadas a eles na sociedade contemporânea. Também oferece um histórico do desenvolvimento dos conceitos de originalidade e autoria na sociedade ocidental, mostrando a crescente importância da figura do autor e o desenvolvimento paralelo dos conceitos de plágio e direito autoral. Os capítulos seguintes dedicam-se a tentar fornecer um relato do romance enfocando os principais personagens, todos artistas, e também uma análise do romance à luz do background histórico e teórico apresentado nos dois primeiros capítulos. O primeiro desses capítulos de análise enfoca a trajetória de Wyatt e suas concepções artísticas. O segundo os reflexos de Wyatt na narrativa, que reforçam a estrutura auto-reflexiva do romance. E o terceiro exemplifica e analisa a estética de Wyatt baseada na noção de reconhecimento, que nada mais é do que a própria estética usada por Gaddis na composição de sua ficção. Palavras-chave: romance - originalidade – autoria – falsificação – plágio 5 ABSTRACT William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) is a self- reflexive novel that portrays Wyatt Gwyon’s trajectory from childhood to maturity, as he rejects and searches for originality. The present work bestows an analysis of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions focusing on the problematization of originality and authorship proposed by the novel by means of the central issues of forgery and plagiarism, which bring with them two larger and more important sister-notions: authorship and originality. The novel questions the prevailing demand for originality and discusses the possibility of being original. It formulates an aesthetics of recognitions defended in the novel and used by the author in the making of this text. In order to do that, this work provides a view on the different concepts associated with the terms originality and original, as well as some of the main infringements related to them in contemporary society. It also offers an account of the development of the concepts of originality and authorship in Western society, showing the growing importance of the figure of the author and the parallel development of the concepts of plagiarism and copyright. The next three chapters are dedicated to attempt to provide an account of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions focusing on the main artist characters and an analysis of the novel in the light of the theoretical and historical background provided. The first of these chapters focuses on Wyatt’s trajectory and his visions of art. The second identifies and analyses Wyatt’s mirrors in the narrative, which reinforce the self-reflective structure of the novel. And the third chapter exemplifies and analyses Wyatt’s aesthetics of recognitions, which turns out to be Gaddis’s own aesthetics in the making of his fiction. Key-words: novel – originality – authorship - forgery - plagiarism 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................ 9 1 THE RISE AND FALL OF ORIGINALITY ......................... 23 1.1 The Concepts of Originality and their Implications ..... 24 1.2 Originality in the History of Art....................... 38 1.3.1 The Rise of Originality............................... 38 1.3.2 The Apex of Originality............................... 52 1.3.3 The Fall of Originality............................... 63 2 THE CHANGING ROLE OF AUTHORSHIP: FROM AUCTOR TO FORGER.... 73 2.1 Concept and Status of Authorship in Contemporary Society 75 2.2 History of the Author: from Auctor to Author............ 79 2.2.1 The Platonic Conception of Authorship................. 82 2.2.2 Medieval Theories of Authorship....................... 86 2.2.3 The Emergence and Apotheosis of the Author ........... 92 2.2.4 Contemporary Theories of Authorship: The Dead Author. 102 2.3 The Writer as Forger................................... 116 3 FROM WYATT TO STEPHEN.................................... 130 3.1 The Making of a Forger................................. 132 3.2 The Vanity of Time..................................... 153 3.3 Stephen’s Redemption................................... 174 4 MIRRORS OF WYATT......................................... 183 4.1 Otto Pivner............................................ 187 4.2 Stanley................................................ 202 4.3 Esme................................................... 208 4.4 Smaller Mirrors........................................ 211 4.5 The parties............................................ 218 7 5 WYATT’S AESTHETICS OF RECOGNITIONS....................... 224 6 FINAL REMARKS ........................................... 256 WORKS CITED................................................ 274 APPENDIXES................................................. 285 8 Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. Mary Shelley 9 INTRODUCTION William Gaddis is one of the most highly regarded novelists of North American literature, even though he only published four novels when he was alive and a sole posthumous one came out. His fifth novel was to be published when he passed away in 1998 and was published, even incomplete, in 2002. As surprising as the fact that he wrote only five novels over a 50-year career is the publication interval between them. The Recognitions was published in 1955, JR was to come 20 years later in 1975, Carpenter’s Gothic in 1984, A Frolic of his Own in 1994, and the unfinished Agape Agapé in 2002. These novels share many characteristics, but, indubitably, the most striking one is the fact that in all of them the major characters are artists or want-to-be artists, and most minor characters are somewhat related to art. This clearly demonstrates Gaddis’s interest in the role the artist plays in 10 contemporary society. His artists do not seem to be successful, for they have to come to terms with accusations of plagiarism, forgery and counterfeiting, and are often threatened with the impossibility of creating their works. Nevertheless, Gaddis’s characters do not repeat their preoccupations from novel to novel, for as the twentieth century advances, his artist characters change their concerns, reflecting transformations later dealt with by literary and art criticism. However, it is already in his first novel, The Recognitions, that Gaddis explores issues related to the status of art and artistic creation in contemporary society that were just starting to be thought of in the mid-fifties, when the novel was published. One of the movements Gaddis engages into is the use of self-conscious or self-reflexive elements, for The Recognitions is a self-conscious novel, that is, it is an extended prose narrative that draws attention to its status as fiction (STONEHILL, 1988, p. 3). According to Stonehill, the self- conscious text dramatizes and encapsulates its own context (1988, p. 5), that is, it mirrors itself. As Ruland and Bradbury call it, Gaddis is part of a movement toward a “fictionality of fiction” (1991, p. 383), or metafiction, generating a self-