The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  Across the court from Agnes Deigh’s office there were two windows she could look directly into. One, she was certain, was a psychoanalyst. The Venetian blinds were usually drawn, but she had seen the couch, and the sight of its familiar length upset her. Her own analysis had taken three years, under one of the best analysts (he had made a name for himself with a paper he had published on one of his patients, a nun, who became a bear trainer when he had done with her). But there were still moments, when she thought of her husband, or when she looked at the picture in the oval frame, when Agnes Deigh was unsure whether she had correctly reassembled the parts he had spread out before her, as when a novice dismantles a machine, and putting it back together finds a number of parts left over, each curiously shaped to some definite purpose.

  The other window was a dentist. Late every afternoon he appeared there in an undershirt, to shave before the mirror hung in the window frame. For some reason she always thought of her husband, Harry, when she looked across at him. But he never noticed her, he never glanced across the court, never anywhere but the mirror, not even when, one day, exasperated at his sloven obduracy, she had stood at her window with her blouse undone, pretending, as a breast slipped into conspicuous sight while she watched him from her eye’s corner, to be adjusting an undergarment. He’d neither looked over nor seemed consciously to keep from doing so, but went on to shave, the flesh of his arms hanging loosely, suspenders dangling to his knees. Every time she looked up he was there, absorbed in some activity of the body, his own or someone else’s, now washing his hands, now drying them, talking to someone unseen.

  She returned to her desk to put down the glass of water, took a macadamia nut from the jar there, and sat exposing a face where time weighed out unconscious of exposure, a face even she herself had never seen in her mirror. Then her telephone rang.

  —Yes? she whispered, and then, getting her voice, —Send him in.

  Otto had left a copy of his play for her to look at (one of four made at alarming expense by a public stenographer, which he carried in a proportionately expensive pigskin dispatch case). When he arrived late that afternoon, he could hear her voice from an office or two away, ringing from the dark green walls, ricocheting off the white plaster approximations to tropical plants which were the indirect lighting fixtures, glancing from one unsympathetic modern surface to another, skipping across the edges of other sounds to attempt escape through the jalousies of the Venetian blinds, caroming off the absurd angles of the hats on other women who infested the place and who, themselves, rebounded among telephones. The whole scene, on the long-piled dark green carpet bore grotesque parody to those earlier caricatures of Nature sponsored by shades of the Sun King, where women of exhausted French sophistication dressed as shepherdesses to toil weary sins in new silks across carpets of false grass.

  —Simpotico, came that voice, —I say they’re so simpótico . . . what? Harry? Oh God no, not for months, he’s still in Hollywood where they’re filming his novel . . . yes, it was changed a little. What? . . . yes, the homosexual boy to a Negro and the Jew to a cripple. Sensitive minorities . . . Of course I’m interested in politics . . . Don’t be tiresome, I couldn’t care less about Harry using me in his ghastly book, but giving me a name like Seraphina . . . No, of course I don’t need the money, I’m just suing him because money is the only language he understands . . .

  —She’s frightfully busy, said one of the hats to Otto. —She’s on the phone, and she has someone in there now. Have you an appointment?

  Some minutes later, during which Otto almost set fire to his sling trying to light a cigarette, Agnes Deigh appeared with an immaculate boy before her, saying to him, —But you will hurry with it? Buster Brown’s third book will be out in the spring, and he’s only twenty-three.

  —Buster twenty-three! Agnes, he’s twenty-eight if he’s a day. And really, how can he pretend to write about depravity, why I told him myself about Leda and the swan, do you know what he said? Human beins cain’t copulate wif bihds, silly . . . Really, he’s a very wicked boy. You’re coming to the party tonight? I’ll tell you who I’m going to be or you’ll never know me, Cleopatra! . . .

  Otto followed her into her office, after her incurious smile and a glance, not at him but his fading suntan. Hers glistened richly. —Now . . . she paused behind her desk, —what was it? You are . . .

  —The Vanity of Time, my play, my name . . .

  —Oh yes. Sit down? She found it, under things, and sat a long silence staring at it. When he cleared his throat to speak, she said, —Well I liked it a great deal, you know . . . as though to indicate that no one else had. —But we’ve talked about it . . . Apparently no one else had. —It’s not really that it isn’t a good play, you do have an admirable eye for dramatic situation, and some very sensitive perceptions. But . . . possibly the theme is a little ambitious for someone your age? When you’ve really lived these things . . . as they happen . . . it isn’t really topical, you see. If you look carefully at the plays and novels that are successful now . . . The white telephone rang. —Yes, Monday? sixish? Just drinks, yes, I want to talk to you about it. He left a moment ago, he said he’d have a copy for you in two or three weeks, and frankly I think it’s worth ten thousand simply in pre-publication advertising, after all he is just the sort of thing we’ve made popular. I? . . . no, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet myself.

  As she spoke she twisted forward, looking past him, lips distorted to accept the cigarette he offered round the Strelitzia ambush. But before he could manage to light it, she’d hung up and held a flaming silver machine across to him. —There is something else I should mention, she went on-as he sank back. —All of us had the feeling that parts of it were familiar, I hardly know how to say . . . She coughed, looked at the cigarette, and put it out. —No, I didn’t mean to say you’d stolen it, not at all, but there was the feeling . . . some of the lines were familiar . . . The telephone rang. —Thank you for letting us look at it, she said lifting the telephone, and then lowering her eyes to vacancy as he stood. —Of course I have your key darling, the one to your box? . . . but you told me I wasn’t to let you have it . . . She smiled down at space. —Oh, for the party tonight? . . . She looked up, and spoke around the telephone mouthpiece, —But you’ll show us anything else you do, won’t you . . . ? her voice followed him, out the gate, across the greensward among those shepherdesses gesticulating their telephone crooks, up the garden path.

  One of them passed him, carrying a letter to the office he’d just left, a letter which quivered, open, in Agnes Deigh’s hand a few moments later. It was from the War Department, to inform her that the body of her brother had been recovered and identified. Did she want it? Please check yes or no.

  —Darling, is something the matter?

  —Please . . . just . . .

  —What . . . ?

  —Leave me alone . . . for a minute. Then the slight sound of the letter quivering in her hand roused her from the numbness which had diffused itself through every sensible part of her body. —Not so cruel, she murmured, —but . . . how can they be so stupid? . . . Then she let go the paper and swung her chair away abruptly to face the window, to deny the familiar room, and the picture on her desk, seeing her wipe her eyes. She did that; and sat staring through the glass.

  Check yes or no

  Although she could not hear across the court, it was evident that the dentist was shouting. She could make out a girl of about twenty. Then Agnes Deigh leaned forward. She got up and went to the window and stared. He had hit her. He had hit the girl and he hit her again. He had the razor strop in his hand, and he brought it down against the arms protecting her bosom. Agnes Deigh’s hand shook with excitement as she turned and lifted the white telephone, opening the directory with her other hand, to say, —Get me Spring seven three one hundred . . . Hello? Yes, I want to report a case of malicious cruelty. Or sadism. Yes, sadism. What? Of course, my name is Agnes Deigh . . .

  As she spoke she stared at the Str
elitzia; and as she spoke the words of an earlier conversation rehearsed in her mind. —Your flowers are lovely, are they for Christmas?

  (—Yes Agnes but I sent

  them because I knew they’d amuse you, aren’t they sweet, they’re so obscene, but Agnes darling you know I’m mercenary, really quite venial, and I want someone to pray for something for me, darling are you in a state of Grace . . . ?)

  Immediately

  she had hung up she stood, put on her hat slowly, her coat quickly, and went through the door. Check yes or no In how many years? she thought, no one has sent me flowers for love.

  She’d gone direct to the bank of elevators, but turned suddenly to the figure behind a near desk, and brought out, breathless, confused, not the words she expected, not, Are you Catholic? but, —Do you believe in God?

  —Why yes, darling . . . in a way . . .

  —Will you go to Saint Vincent Ferrer? . . . and have them say . . . you, you can go tomorrow, yes, go on your lunch hour? . . . The elevator doors opened behind her, and she said more clearly over her shoulder as she turned, —And put it on your expense account.

  In the street she walked briskly, not a stitch or line out of place, her make-up set in a mask. An unshaven cripple, who’d come forth with an open hand, to be charitably avoided by a turn of her hips, retired saying to a passer-by, —You couldn’t take her out in the rain.

  She went into a bar, and ordered a martini.

  —With pumpkin seeds in it?

  She just stared at him. The girl next to her had one beside her book. She was reading The Compleat Angler.

  “What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform features and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of the grave . . .”

  The dead lilies stood beside her in a fruit jar, where she read, slowly as though bringing these words into concert for the first time herself.

  The sign pinned to her door said, Do Not Disturb Me I Am Working Esme: and she had closed that door and bolted it, delighted to be alone. But as the afternoon passed, she moved less excitedly and less often. For a few minutes she sewed at a dress she was making, singing one of her own songs. Then she got up, with a cigarette, and walked about the double room, replacing things. Then she sewed again, sitting like a child of five sewing, and like a five-year-old girl singing unheard. But before that sewing was done she was up, rearranging her books with no concern but for size. There was, really, little else their small ranks held in common (except color of the bindings, and so they had been arranged, and so too the reason often enough she’d bought them). Their compass was as casual as books left behind in a rooming house; and this book of stories by Stevenson, with no idea where she’d got it, she hadn’t looked into it for years, now could not put it down, and to her now it was the only book she owned. Even so she had never read for the reasons that most people give themselves for reading. Facts mattered little, ideas propounded, exploited, shattered, even less, and narrative nothing. Only occasional groupings of words held her, and she entered to inhabit them a little while, until they became submerged, finding sanctuary in that part of herself which she looked upon distal and afraid, a residence as separate and alien, real or unreal, as those which shocked her with such deep remorse when the features of others betrayed them. An infinite regret, simply that she had seen, might rise in her then, having seen too much unseen; and it brought her eyes down quick. It was Otto’s expression, when his cigarette had burnt a cleft on her table, and he recovered it and looked up sharply to see if she’d noticed. It was Max’s expression, when he’d taken a paper with her writing on it, whatever it was, she didn’t know, but taken it from the table and slipped it into a pocket away from her, looking up with his smile to see if she’d seen him, his smile fixed and barely breaking as he started to talk hurriedly, looking at her with eyes which sent hers to the floor lest she weep for the lie in his.

  The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.

  So for instance she stole comatulid, and her larceny went unnoticed by science which chose it to mean “a free-swimming stalkless crinoid . . .” and crinoid: lily-shaped (though this word belonged to the scientists too, Crinoidea, a large class of echinoderms). And the phylum Echinodermata she left far behind, left the starfishes, the sea urchins, and their allies to grope in peace in the dark water of the sea. Comatulid lay on the paper under her pen; while she struggled to reach it through the rubble amassed by her memory.

  It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savoring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one’s self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronized, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.

  The pen quivered over the paper, added inae to comatulid, and then carefully crossed out that free suffix; and then brought comatulid into the tangle of black ink, as she moved toward that world not world where the needle took her. It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest:
“Love’s dart” that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; “sweet cautery,” the “stolen heart,” the “ravished understanding,” the “rape of love”: in Provençal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, “dying of not being able to die.”

  What did the devil teach Gerbert, Archbishop of Ravenna, in exchange for his soul which Gerbert bartered to learn all, and become Pope? The devil taught him algebra and clock-making, for a world where there is no space, only distances; no time, only minutes and hours; where things are numbered, and even Christ bowed with finite care when he gave SS Elizabeth Matilda Bridget a written account of the kicks, blows, and wounds he had received, numbered the skull fractures 100, the drops of blood 38,430 (though another girl was later to receive a letter through her guardian angel numbering those drops of blood 3,000,800). The world in which the Virgin’s titles number 305; and Sir Arthur Eddington decides that the electron is not subject to scientific law. The cosmos of Sir James Jeans, reigned over by a deity whose symbol is the square root of minus one, where in closed rooms they argue the weight of the crucified man sufficient to cause strangulation, and the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton calculates that Jesus in assumption, being drawn up through space at a moderate rate, would not yet have reached the nearest of the fixed stars.