The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  The gold figure of the bull lay on its side among some papers on his desk. Beyond, through the windows, the wind whipped the branches of yew with snow. But Reverend Gwyon’s was not an empty stare, arrested by that blank surface. He looked as though he saw straight through the door, and was fully aware of the two eyes which, at that instant, were looking square on a line with his own from the dark hallway, where the clear mirrors of the cruz-conespejos on the wall behind had seized, and held, dim fragments of the arm raised to knock.

  Gwyon waited for a moment; then he opened the book in his lap, and thrust his hand into the cavity cut ruthlessly out of The Dark Night of the Soul.

  —Drink, drink! Drain, drain!

  Another link for the Devil’s Chain,

  sang the Town

  Carpenter into the white teeth of violation. He left off, for an anxious moment, as he approached the Civil War monument, which he never passed in bad weather without a look of uneasy solicitude, though near half a century had passed since his mother’s last obstinate bivouac there.

  The wind was pursuing its career with extravagant glee, now it had one. The snow was driven to places which only this paranoid force could care to oppress so; though, to be striding forth in it was to assume the delusions of the storm itself, becoming the object of its hostility, and thus abruptly render a validifying dimension to this manic phase of a reality which would, left to itself, blow itself out in senselessness. Therefore, to redeem these absurd extravaganzas, which is after all the way of a hero, requires a worthy goal; then the gratuitous violence threatens only that path, and as the wind rises, the more worthy the goal then, and the more heroic the journey.

  The Depot Tavern was presided over by the head of a twelve-point buck, whose look of resignation implied understanding of the fact that his antlers would never again be shed and renewed, a fate tempered by a festoon of Christmas tree bulbs which were, momentarily, seasonal, though he wore them with great forbearance whatever the solstice. Otium cum dignitate, the chipped lips posed up there, and with great dignity, considering his circumstances, the buck gazed down through dust-filmed eyeballs upon the present.

  Just now this present was being cajoled toward a disfigurated future by a man with a woman tattooed on his left arm. She reposed there so long as he talked or listened; but when he interrupted to raise his glass, she was strangled. Though she had been suffering this treatment for many years, she bore it with the same surprise contorting her blue face whenever it was repeated; and when it was done, she returned to the same pose of unsuspecting tranquillity. (True, she was not entirely innocent: turned at another angle, and a portion of her covered up, she was capable of a pose which none who did not know her might have suspected from her placid countenance.) —The Resurrectionists! said he; and she was strangled.

  —The Resurrectionists? What would it have to do with grave-robbers? It was the sermon on medicine made from mummies. Mummies ground up in a powder for medicine, said a man as far from the weather as possible, at the far end of the bar.

  —Not that any of you have ever heard one of his sermons, said a small man in the middle. —Relying on what your wives repeat to you.

  —And you was there, I suppose, imperson?

  —I was. It was the sermon in which the Swiss rooster is condemned to burn to death for laying an egg.

  —Fourteen seventy-four. I know that one myself.

  There was an air of grudging conspiracy over all this; and if voices rose in argument the overtones were slightly quelled, suggesting, as in any totalitarian society, walls with ears, the ubiquitous dictator long in residence hic, et ubique, disputing no passage, for He was going nowhere. —But that little man selling brushes . . .

  —A manic . . .

  —Manichee . . .

  —He was sent here, but Reverend saved us from that. If good and evil was absolutes, we would all of us be Manichean heretics, says the Reverend. I was there, you see. If it wasn’t for evil being a depraved qualification of good, says the Reverend, we should all be Manicheans like the little brush salesman.

  —Selling unchristian brushes to honest people . . .

  —Ha! there you’re wrong, for Manichees was Christian. For them, says the Reverend, the sun itself was the visible symbol of Christ.

  —They was not.

  —It was so. How could you have the sun . . .

  —They was not, and what’s more . . .

  —Here is the sexton coming now, he was there.

  —They was not, and what if he was, he goes to church and makes up his own sermon, and afterward he’ll tell you such and such was the Reverend’s sermon which nobody heard but himself. Like the sermon on the American Legion . . . him, he’s as deaf as that coconut.

  Every head but the buck turned to see the door thrown open, shaking the plate of glass and the configuration between the men and the storm. The Town Carpenter entered, pursued by a distant peal of thunder. —That damned racket, he said, shutting it out.

  —It’s rare, that you have thunder with snow, said the small man in the middle, appeasing.

  —May it roll away and take my curse with it, the Town Carpenter growled, arrived at the bar. He squared his shoulders, reared his head, and looked round him. —Now do you know, after the Great Deluge there was no God? Well, there was not. With the world wet for a hundred years, there was no thunder, and men went around with their heads up, alone and unafraid they went, like heroes should, you know. Then it all dried off and the atmosphere up there recovered. He paused to kick the snow from his feet against the bar; and the dog waited till that was done to lie at his feet. —And then that damned thunder started, and scared them all so much, looking up to see nothing, that they took the images of terror right out of their own minds and hung them up there in the empty space above their empty heads. He drank down his glass. —There now, he said, putting it empty on the bar, and he reared his head, as though the buck’s were the only face he would countenance. —I have a very important visitor, finally he brought out.

  —Tom Swift, it must be, the strangler muttered, watching the Town Carpenter narrowly.

  —To see him, you might not guess at the hero he is. Of course I recognized him immediately.

  —A strange fellow got off the morning train, said the man in the middle. —Neither hat nor coat. Oh, you never know, you never know. Drunk perhaps. You never know.

  Stealthily, the Town Carpenter looked at these two, his expression one of cunning. It was a look with which they were all familiar; and for its astute divining quality (that and the subsequent logical parallel of his conversation) he was often accused of perfect hearing. —There now, he said, pulling a filled glass to him, —you’d be surprised to see him perhaps, a man waited on by seven kings at a time, sixty dukes and a count for every day in the year, so modest and quiet as him.

  —That train come in from the city, said the small man with beer.

  —I’ve seen them, city people in the country, said the strangler. —I know them, terrified when they see things move without ticking or smoking.

  —A man who sits with twelve archbishops on his right hand and twenty bishops on his left.

  —They live in cities where nothing grows. Did you know that? Nothing grows in the city. Even their minds they keep steam-heated. Their horizons are dirty windowsills.

  —Drunk, perhaps. You never know.

  —Whose chamberlain is a bishop and king, and his chief cook a king and an abbot, he couldn’t stoop to taking such titles as those.

  —Do you know what happens to people in cities? I’ll tell you what happens to people in cities. They lose the seasons, that’s what happens. They lose the extremes, the winter and summer. They lose the means, the spring and the fall. They lose the beginning and end of the day, and nothing grows but their bank accounts. Life in the city is just all middle, nothing is born and nothing dies. Things appear, and things are killed, but nothing begins and nothing ends.

  —His domains lay from the three Indies to the ruin
s of Babylon, from Farther India to the tower of Babel. That’s the voyage we’re going to make. Waited on hand and foot by kings, from his humble looks you wouldn’t believe it, from his quiet ways you’d never know. Of course I knew him immediately.

  —You don’t get heroes out of the cities. A city man is spread out too much.

  —If you’ve ever watched the ground for a mole, tried to follow the silent movement of the course of his burrow and nothing moves, nothing but separate blades of grass, each of them moving for no good reason, and then the ground moves, and moves again, why that’s the kind of a face he has.

  —A simple man who is up against it, a man who knows what he’s up against. You have to go to the country to find him. Out to the country or out to sea.

  —In his dominions there are no poor, no thieves or robbers, and no dissension. Where he has come from there are no vices, no misers or flatterers, and no lies.

  Snow whirled against the glass. The blue woman was held contorted for full half a minute. The Town Carpenter licked his lips, and gazed up at the movement on the cracked lips of the twelve-point buck who remained, unperturbed by the fly, looking down through glazed convexities of dust.

  Streaks of sound pierced the woodwork, from the cavetto molding to stab through the stained ribs strained tongue-in-groove wainscoting the hallway, as though there were movement there.

  —So, he burnt the throne of the sun with fire, did he? The throne of the sun! . . . nine . . . six, Reverend Gwyon muttered, standing over his littered desk, flinging over the pages of Job with the flat of three fingers. —Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble. Tremble, do they? Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealed up the stars. Riseth not, does it? Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, Pleiades, and the chambers of the south, does he! Gwyon looked up impatiently, no more than to take his eyes from the book laid open on top of the Letters of the Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus. His clear eyes struck the door, and held there a moment, waiting. Then he returned to the pages before him. —Nineteen . . . four . . . In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof . . . that’s better, now, he muttered, turning pages. —Seven . . . eleven . . . and by it there is profit to them that see the sun . . . uhm . . . eleven . . . seven . . . Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun . . . yes . . . hmmmm . . . Truly the light is sweet, he repeated, raising his eyes now straight before him to the window, and the encumbered sky.

  That impregnable meter of silence enveloped him directly he stopped speaking, and stood there erect and alone. There was nothing in his face to betray, or even suggest doubt; but his hands were not, as they might at first appear, resting their own weight and no more on the pages before him. As he stood unmoving so, the faint carnation under his nails became evenly fainter, draining away from the rims until they were, all together, blanched with the strain they sustained, streaked with the life that sustained them.

  —One more day’s dying, Gwyon murmured looking out at the sky. Would there be time? His fingertips regained their color. Even as they did, the lower part of his face drained of its fullness, as though the two were connected, or as though it were not two but one process, a continuous seepage down, and he caught his lower lip with concern. Would there be time? to make full proof of his ministry; and he searched the sky as though for answer. —One more day’s dying, he repeated, searching the sky for the sun.

  The parsonage was near a century old, and it was not strange that the wind should set it creaking so. Inside, however, and well in, beyond other evidences, the wind provided an arbitrary explanation and no more: as well say that the sharp angles of wall and wainscot, molding and baseboard complained so at the relentless obtrusion of one another’s extremities where they were forced to meet; or that they creaked with effort, supporting the cross, and with vigilance for its prey, suspended there in the near darkness before the small mirrors which looked shined with work as though, leaving Sor Patrocinio stigmatized, they had begun again here. How John Huss would have vilipended the thing! as Aunt May had ruefully noted; but she had not prevailed against it, and inclined to avoid it. Gwyon, passing it many times a day, shocked it and banged the study door in its face before a fragment of his motion could be isolated and fixed. (True, more than once he had surprised Janet there; and often, when he thought of it, attempted stealthy glances at her ungloved palms, but in vain.) The creaking continued; still nothing moved in the dark hallway until the thin lips cracked apart, but still silent, —What was it? What am I supposed to ask? Am I the . . . Homoousian or Homoiousian? Am I the man that . . . What holds me back? . . . for whom . . . for whom . . . What was it? . . .

  Reverend Gwyon gripped the lapels of his coat and peered at the inside of the door. —Damnation, he muttered, —what holds me back? And he commenced to rummage among the books and papers before him. The Old Testament and the Letters of Julian the Apostate were thrust aside, Origen’s Contra Celsum, one after another he pushed the books back until they mounted in an unsteady pile about the gold bull figure. —Volume eighteen, he muttered, —PLANTS to RAYM . . . where . . . He paused, holding Tertullian’s De Coronâ. Then he started through the discarded pile, muttering —Cathemerinon, but when he found it, and stood with it open, he spoke without looking at the page.

  —Kindly Guide, Reverend Gwyon said to the sky without, —creator of the radiant light, who controllest the seasons in their fixed courses, if thy sun is hidden, grim chaos encompasses us, restore thy light O Christ to thy faithful followers . . . Gwyon paused, as though he had heard a sound. The sky before him darkened as he watched it; and as he watched, the book in his hand closed slowly, and the nails of his hand went white against the covers.

  The knocks on the door were faint. Reverend Gwyon planted Prudentius firmly on the desk and turned; but when he reached the door he paused with a hand to the knob and stood that way, listening, the more intently, for something he had not heard.

  On either side of the door they stood, a hand raised and a hand held forth, their extended arms abscissa and ordinate for the point of ordination where their eyes met on the inordinate curve of doubt.

  There was a crash in the hallway. Reverend Gwyon threw the study door open. The cruz-con-espejos lay on the floor. Streaks of light pierced him from the sharp silvered fragments around it, and held him, blinded for a moment.

  Rounding the corner from the kitchen, Janet collided with the figure coming in the other direction. She drew back aghast. —Has it begun? she managed to say, clutching one gloved hand in the other.

  —Begun? Good God, I . . . I didn’t . . .

  —Is it time? she asked eagerly. —Time to tell them . . . you have come back?

  —Yes, tell them, he said, getting round her with the speed of a shadow when a light is moved, —I came back to preach, but I . . .

  —They doubted, she said drawing her upper lip down with the sudden modesty of veiling, —but I . . .

  —Janet! Reverend Gwyon emerged, and pushed the cross aside with his foot. —Lunch, he said, advancing.

  —Father . . . father, I . . .

  Janet was gone. Reverend Gwyon, coming forth from the dark hallway, seemed to become larger as he approached the light, and the figure dancing backwards, still like a shadow retreating, went on, —Something I have to ask you, I . . . what was it? . . . you . . .

  In this fashion they reached the dining room. With expletive —Thank God, once or twice, the voice had risen and went on more rapidly, drawing Gwyon on with the expression on his face of a man tormented by a question to which everyone else in the room knows the answer.

  —You look like Valerian, very much, yes very much like the Emperor Valerian . . . the words came on, every syllable expletive and the more rapid, the sound sustaining itself in ni
mble surprise, alert for the right words, the right question when it came out to be rescued and repeated.

  Reverend Gwyon reached the head of the table, and stood at his place. His nostrils worked for an instant. There did, in fact, issue from the kitchen the smell of frying fish.

  —In the painting by Memlinc you know, the painting by Memling, Valerian in the painting by Memlinc . . .

  —How many kings are there left in the world, then? Right now, today, how many kings are there left? The blue woman was drawn to full length, as her master extended an empty glass across the bar.

  —I’d rather work for a living, said the small man with beer, staring up at the sign Law forbids cashing welfare checks on these premises.

  —Counting the Pope of Rome? asked the man furthest from the storm, at the end of the bar.

  —I said kings. He’s no more king than that coconut, the Pope isn’t.

  —He’s a kind of a king, the Pope is. Anyone who holds a temporal sway is a king, so the Reverend said.

  —And when did he say that?