The Cruft of Fiction by Letzler David;

Author:Letzler, David; [Letzler, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General
ISBN: 9780803299627
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-04-13T06:00:00+00:00

As with most speech throughout the scene, the dialogue communicates nothing to anyone: Feasley and the Argentine simply repeat phrases they have thrown at each other for the past forty pages, Esther murmurs meaningless words to her impaired sister, and Stanley mutters clichés to Anselm. However, though no one is saying anything of importance, their propagation of the party’s chatter prevents anyone from realizing what has happened to the cat, whom Agnes has sat on and killed. Even Agnes does not realize what she has done, apparently, given her worried reaction to her purse being stolen several pages later.106

Gaddis works hard to obscure this moment from his readers, too. The cat’s death is recounted in a prepositional phrase concluding an aside between speech tags, and the previous paragraphs’ anticipation of the event are misleadingly described: when Agnes reaches beneath her and suspects what she has done, the her (“The hand under her”) is placed so that its antecedent appears to be Esther, not Agnes, making the sentence about the former’s embarrassment rather than the latter’s horror. Similarly most of Agnes’s reaction to the kitten’s death is reported before what she has done has been revealed, prompting us to misattribute it toward one of the other things that has been disturbing her through the novel, like her relationship with Stanley. Even the phrase “cinnamon-colored body” does not express exactly what has happened, since the cat’s coloring has not been previously described. In other words the cat’s death is clearly reported to readers by only two words dissolved in an entire scene’s worth of cruft misdirection, to the extent that it becomes very easy to glaze over and miss the dead cat as entirely as the partygoers do.

This is not the only example in the chapter. None of the scene’s three most consequential plot threads—Agnes’s accidental crushing of the kitten, Maude Munk’s abduction of the unexplained baby crawling around the apartment, and Charley Dickens’s unsuccessful suicide attempts—take up more than a page of text, most of which is scattered several lines at a time across the scene’s four-score pages of jabber. The latter does include some passages popular with critics—including Stanley’s stuttering thoughts about fragmentation and tradition, Benny’s blather about how the intellectual class doesn’t understand “real life,” and Otto’s conveyance of Wyatt’s half-baked criticism of America’s youth-centered culture—but to take any of these passages as either serious philosophical statements or satires of their speakers’ self-importance would reflect poorly on the book’s craftsmanship.107 Better we see them as blending into the rest of the stupidity. As with the Brueghel that Wyatt forges, the scene’s suffering, in Auden’s famous lines, “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,” as unnoticed as Icarus’s leg in the bottom right corner of his most famous landscape.108

The Recognitions’ readers, then, must decide how to avoid getting bogged down in the constant hum of idiocy while also observing the important events that occur in that background. As the novel comes to its close, this process becomes exceedingly hard.

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