Googling stuff from virtually every page has been annoying.
There's a whole year's curriculum of references on every couple of pages! What do people think of the density of literary-philsophical-religious references? I'm nearly at the end of chapter 3, and though I'm really, really enjoying big stretches of the dialogue, I'm just not sure I think all the references are well handled or enlightening. (I would say broadly I've been enjoying the book more as these started to become a bit less frequent and the emotional/relationship elements started to come to the fore a bit more)
The back of my copy (the Dalkey Archive) suggests Gaddis "anticipates the spirit of Pynchon"- but I think imagining a sequence James Joyce-Gaddis-Pynchon would run like this- (maybe buttgammon will correct me on this):
-Joyce almost certainly had all the weird references in Ulysses ready-to-hand: though Ulysses is obviously dense, I never really get a sense of him throwing stuff in that was outside of his understanding as a well-educated man with a knowledge of Irish/Catholic/Classical history. Other grand encyclopaedic books similarly convince as one mind's gargantuan vision (e.g. Anatomy of Melancholy).
-Pynchon uses references in a very different way- he wants to show something of how overloaded with information contemporary life is, so the mad range of references in Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow suggests not one mind's vision, but vast, inhuman, impersonal collections of data.
-On what I've read so far, Gaddis sits in an uncomfortable place between these two extremes: there are so many references in there that aren't doing anything except sort of sit there. If "The Recognitions" had been written today, I think I'd be saying that Gaddis was just throwing things into the text that he'd googled- he somehow doesn't sell the idea that he knows this stuff well, but on the other hand I don't really see that he's satirising or parodying anything about this knowledge. I found this getting in the way of the imaginative or evocative power of the book- for example the sentence:
"
When the great monastery was finished, with turreted walls, parapets, crenelations, machicolations, bartizans, a harrowing variety of domes and spires in staggering Romanesque, Byzantine effulgence, and Gothic run riot in mullioned windows, window tracings, and an immense rose window whose foliations were so elaborate that it was never furnished with glass, the brothers were brought forth and tried for heresy"
didn't put images of an extravagant building into my mind, just images of Gaddis looking up words in an architectural reference book.
Maybe if it had been restricted a bit, so as to suggest more specifically that Gwyon and Wyatt had esoteric interests I'd have felt it was working better, but really Otto, and Esther's voices, and the narrator's are very similar.
Are there supposed to be references in the characters names? Otto as in "Auto"biographical character? The density of references is making me try and see something of Wyatt Earp in Wyatt and Old Testament Esther in Esther...
