Victorian Hoaxes and Postmodern Counterfeits: The Figure of the Forger in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

In Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Portrait or Mr. W.H.” and his essay “The Decay of Lying,” he uses acts of deceit and counterfeit to examine the porous gap between artifice and reality. He holds up falsehood as art’s highest purpose, writing in “The Decay of Lying” that “[lying], the telling of beautiful, untrue things, is the proper aim of art”[1] and that “when art surrenders her imaginative function, she surrenders everything.”[2] In “Mr. W.H.,” Wilde offers (fictitious) supplemental evidence to support a theoretical identity for the Fair Youth figure of Shakespeare’s sonnets that was originally proposed by eighteenth century scholar Thomas Tyrwhit. His evidence ultimately turns out to be a hoax carried out by the deceased Cyril Graham. The story makes a counterintuitive case for forgery as a path to knowledge. Forgery, observes the story’s narrator, “is nothing but a “desire for perfect representation.”[3] Not only does such counterfeit display a rigorous adherence to flawless imitation, it also offers the narrator a new point of entry into the work of William Shakespeare, which, regardless of its basis in fact, provides a fresh lens through which to examine Shakespeare’s sonnets. It illuminates the rest of his work, offers an insightful meditation on the relation between an artist and their material, and provides a philosophical exploration of Platonic love.

Wilde’s collapse of appearance/reality, surface/depth, and copy/original anticipates the postmodern sensibilities on display in William Gaddis’s 1955 novel, The Recognitions, which follows painter Wyatt Gwyon’s search for artistic authenticity against the backdrop of 1950’s American consumer society. Like Wilde’s narrator in “Mr. W.H.,” Wyatt turns to forgery as a potential enclave of higher truth when Recktall Brown, a cut-throat profiteer, recruits him to aid in a counterfeiting ring with the help of his companion, Basil Valentine, a Jesuit priest-turned-decadent-aesthete. Wyatt, despite his many misgivings about Valentine and Brown’s mendacious project, sees the opportunity to reintroduce the painterly process and ambition of the Dutch masters into the twentieth century market as a means of escape from the twentieth century Greenwich Village art scene — a world that he believes is diluted by consumer forces as well as a performative, pseudo-intellectual avant-garde. Throughout the novel, Gaddis satirizes the equivocating market forces of capitalism in which exchange and buying power blur the line between authentic originality and simulated fraud. Valentine indoctrinates Wyatt with his Wildian attitude that conflates perception with truth, telling him that if “the public believes that a picture is by Raphael and will pay the price of a Raphael […] then it is a Raphael.”[4] Referencing an episode in which Wyatt mistakenly copies a forged copy of Hieronymus Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins tabletop, John Johnston observes that in The Recognitions, every original

may turn out to be an imitation or counterfeit […] in the increasingly manifest absence of anything true and authentic in the novel, the very proliferation of forgeries, counterfeiters, imposters, and sham items of every sort and description augurs a possible dissolution of the basis on which the difference is grounded.[5]

Such slippage between original and copy offers an intensified privileging of simulacra over originals to that of Wilde’s prioritization of forgery that reflects the fast-paced information society in which Gaddis wrote.

Despite Wilde and Gaddis’s similar narrative and thematic use of the figure of the forger, the two writers ultimately turn counterfeit and hoax toward opposing ends. Wilde takes an idealized, aspirational view toward lying and falsehood. He not only breaks down the distinction between life and art, but he also moves a step further by inverting the commonsense notion that art is supplemental and secondary to life. His readiness to see art, and in turn, artifice, as generative forces that feed back into a world where life imitates art elevates lying to the status of virtuousness. In The Recognitions, Gaddis builds a world that enacts Wilde’s argument that “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life”[6] through characters such as Otto Pivner, a plagiaristic playwright who adopts the identity of Gordon, a character from his unfinished script constructed almost entirely from fragments of either Wyatt’s drunken aesthetic ramblings or pre-existing literature. However, Gaddis takes a more pessimistic view toward a world drained of authenticity. He satirizes twentieth century American capitalism, where the ceaseless exchange of copies, copies of copies, counterfeits, and all other forms of Wildian “perfect representation” annihilates the difference between the real and the false. Where Wilde looks to the telling of “beautiful lies” as a utopian ideal that disregards facts in favor of higher, Platonic truths, Gaddis enacts Wilde’s regime of duplicity, bending it toward a dystopic worldview of social collapse as his characters search in vain for authenticity in an entropic backdrop of social decay.

Wilde: Duplicity as a Path to Critical Insight

Anthony Grafton opens his Forgers and Critics with an account of literary duplicity borrowed from antiquity. Grafton’s study begins by tracing out an exchange between Heraclides of Pontus, a “dignified, respectable, and corpulent gentleman”[7] and Dionysius “the Renegade,” a more “disreputable” philosopher who started his career as a stoic “who denied the existence of pain and pleasure” and later “developed an acute eye inflammation” that altered his perception and ultimately led him to discard his entire philosophical framework. After departing from his previous stoical school, Dionysius “spent the rest of his life — apparently a long and happy one — as a Cyrenaic, haunting bars and brothels.”[8] In his post-stoic hedonism, Dionysius wrote a forged tragedy, the Parthenopaeus, which he attributed to Sophocles and duped his staid counterpart. On revealing his prank by way of an acrostic that spelled out the name of Pankalos, Dionysius’s boyfriend, Heraclides remained convinced that the work was authentically Sophoclean. On further instruction to read further into the counterfeit text, the play revealed a further acrostic couplet that read “An old monkey isn’t caught by a trap./Oh yes, he’s caught at last, but it takes time”[9] along with an indisputable barb constructed of still more initial letters pointing out that “Heraclides is ignorant of letters.”[10]

The episode, both in Dionysius’ prank, as well as Heraclides’ readiness to double down in the face of evidence, anticipates Oscar Wilde’s fictional account of literary deceit in his short story, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” It likely would have been met with praise from Vivian, Wilde’s authorial mouthpiece in his essay-in-dialogue, “The Decay of Lying.” These two short pieces work together to build toward what Nicholas Frankel calls Wilde’s “liar’s manifesto.”[11] Wilde’s dictum from “Decay” that “[lying], the telling of beautiful, untrue things, is the proper aim of art”[12] demonstrates his commitment to beauty at the expense of fact. Writing of both Wilde’s, as well as his circle of aesthetes’, deliberate flaunting of a moralizing avocation for art, R.V. Johnson observes that their prioritization of aesthetic experience, was “not merely a devotion to beauty, but a new conviction that the importance of beauty as compared with — and even in opposition to other values” was the definitive feature of the aesthetic movement of the 1890’s. [13] Like Edgar Allan Poe, aesthetes such as Wilde, Walter Pater, and John Ruskin shunned the “heresy of the didactic” in art; they embodied Poe’s argument that “there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified” than a “poem written solely for the poem’s sake.”[14]

Wilde was unabashed in his emphasis that aesthetics should emphasize surface, superfluity, and beauty over symbolic depth, social praxis, or moralizing edification. Much of his oeuvre is packed with aphorisms discounting both sincerity and facticity. In “The Critic as Artist,” another essay-in-dialogue, Gilbert, his stand-in character observes that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”[15] Similarly, the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray argues that “No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved./No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style,” that “All art is at once surface and symbol./Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril./Those who read the symbol do so at their peril,” and finally that “All art is quite useless.”[16] In “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde makes his most vocal attack on reality as the correct basis for art as Vivian guts literary realism, journalism, and nature itself as inferior to the world of artifice. He laments that “the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”[17] Close adherence to accuracy and an epidemic of “a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling” undermine literature’s highest aims. It runs the risk of forcing “Art [to] become sterile” and causing “Beauty [to] pass away from the land.”[18]

“The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” serves as both a companion piece as well as a practical embodiment of the aesthetic theory laid out in “The Decay of Lying.” The story follows an unnamed narrator’s epistemological path from “skepticism to belief to disillusionment”[19] in an internally consistent yet externally unconfirmable theory identifying the Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets as “Willie Hughes,” an actor in Shakespeare’s company who specialized in playing women.[20] The theory offers no evidence for the factual existence of Hughes; it builds its case entirely from evidence found within the poems and argues that the occurrence of words such as “will” and “hues” are subtle punning hints to the identity of the youth. The narrator’s friend, Erskine, recounts the theory, which he picked up from another friend, Cyril Graham, and presents a definitively forged portrait of Hughes that Graham. The narrator finds himself “converted at once” to the theory’s authenticity, in spite of the counterfeit portrait, which Graham himself claimed “[did] not affect the truth of the theory” and served “simply as a concession” to allay Erskine’s skepticism for want of hard fact over and above logical proof.[21] As the narrator explores the theory, Graham’s lie leads him to believe that he has found “the key to the greatest mystery of modern literature.”[22] It provides a new reading of the sonnets that retains its truth, regardless of the facticity of Hughes’ existence, which sheds light, not only on Shakespeare’s corpus, but also on art as a whole. The narrator’s new interpretation, following Frankel’s assessment of Wilde’s positive revaluation of lying, as “in a sense truer to the imaginative ambitions of art than is that work which remains circumscribed by the trammeling accidents and limitations of real life.”[23]

The skeletal plot to “Mr. W.H.” is fairly straightforward. The story opens with a dinner scene between the narrator and his friend Erskine in “his pretty little house in Birdcage Walk.”[24] During their conversation over coffee and cigarettes, they touch on the topic of literary forgeries following a “long discussion about Macpherson, Ireland, and Chatterton,” as the narrator, “to the last” insists that “his so-called forgeries were merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation” and that viewers or readers, confronted with such a forgery have “no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work […] all art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality.”[25] According to the narrator, to condemn artistic forgery is to confuse an “ethical with an aesthetical problem.”[26] Erskine responds to this claim by asking the about the possibility of bringing such a duplicitous approach to the act of literary criticism, posing the question of what the narrator would say “about a young man who had a strange theory about a certain work of art, believed in his theory, and committed a forgery in order to prove it[.]”[27]

The conversation then turns to the topic of Cyril Graham’s Willie Hughes theory. Erskine lays out its details and explains how Graham worked backward from the sonnets to reach his conclusion and details Graham’s suicide that took place after a falling out with Erskine after the discovery of his forged portrait. The narrator, captivated by the idea, plunges into the sonnets, not only adding evidence of his own in its favor, but also using the discovery to offer a profound analysis of the sonnets. After exhausting himself in building a convincing case for the theory that also re-convinces Erskine, the narrator immediately becomes disenchanted with the idea and again loses faith in Hughes’ existence. Meanwhile, the theory has taken a similar possession of Erskine to that of the narrator in the story’s first half. After searching in vain for empirical, external proof for Hughes’ existence, he sends the narrator a letter telling him that like Graham he has chosen to commit suicide in act of martyrdom for the theory. On visiting Erskine’s doctor in the wake of the death, the doctor responds with confusion when the narrator mentions Erskine’s supposed suicide. The letter, like so much else in the story, proves to have been yet another falsehood: Erskine “did not commit suicide. He died of consumption.”[28] The story concludes as the narrator explains that, though the portrait still hangs in his library, he has never “cared to tell his guests [its] true history” yet, sometimes when looking at it, he still believes that “there really is a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s sonnets.”[29]

The bulk of the story, and its main thrust lies not in its plot, but in a single, extended set-piece chapter in which the narrator elaborates upon the groundbreaking discoveries that the Willie Hughes theory offers in making sense of Shakespeare’s sonnets when viewed through the Hughes lens. It is not, as Erskine claims early in the story, “a trail that leads no where” but rather “the key to the greatest mystery of modern literature,”[30] regardless of Hughes existence. The narrator explains that filtered through the theory, the sonnets no longer stand apart from Shakespeare’s work as a dramatist, but rather reflect “the moods and passions” that are essential in interpreting Shakespeare’s plays.[31]

By using Hughes as a decoder ring through which to analyze the sonnets, the narrator teases out a reflexive, self-referential turn throughout the sequence that addresses the interdependence shared between player and playwright, which, according to Gerard Genette, serve the respective roles of “realization” (which “consist in performances”) and “denotation” (which “consist in material objects”).[32] Like Genette, Wilde’s narrator sees the performer as crucial in manifesting a poetic work of drama’s immanence. For example, he reads the lines from Sonnet LV “O, how much more doth beauty beauteuous seem/By that sweet ornament which truth doth give” as an “invitation” by Shakespeare to “notice how the truth of acting, the truth of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form.”[33]

As he works his way through the sonnets, the narrator brings several biographical details from Shakespeare’s life to bear on his interpretation using Hughes as their central figure. He builds a case that through the poems, Shakespeare expressed his faith in a mutually assured vitality and “‘marriage of true minds’” in their collaborative effort:[34]Shakespeare provides raw poetic material through which Hughes may practice his art; Hughes, by making manifest the immanent beauty of Shakespeare’s drama gives to “life to [Shakespeare’s poetry’s] loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form.”[35]

The narrator’s investigation into the Hughes theory leads him to further meditations on an artist and the medium through which he works. He pulls back, examining not just the connection shared between Shakespeare and his company to a broader examination of aesthetics. Writing of the specific attachment he believes Shakespeare felt for Hughes, he finds that

the love that Shakespeare bore him was as the love of a musician for some delicate instrument on which he delights to play, as a sculptor’s love for some rare and exquisite material that suggests a new form of plastic beauty, a new mode of plastic expression.[36]

Through Hughes, the perfect vessel for Shakespeare’s verse and drama, Shakespeare finds himself enabled to push his poetry to new heights. From there, the narrator zooms out to broader considerations on the ineluctable attachment between creator and material, observing that “for all Art has its medium, its material, be it that of rhythmical words, or of pleasurable colour, or of sweet and subtly-divided sound […] it is the qualities inherent in each material, special to it, that we owe the sensuous element in Art.”[37] Art, regardless of its ideality, remains dependent on sensuous and material means in order for the artist to bring it forth.

In his work to resolve the mystery of Cyril Graham’s theory, the narrator of “Mr. W.H.” unwittingly carries out the role that Wilde hands over to art critics in “The Critic as Artist.” Good criticism, argues Wilde’s mouthpiece, Gilbert, “is more fascinating than history,” and “more delightful than philosophy.”[38] It is the ideal playground for one to sift through Wilde’s idealize liars because it deals not “life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.”[39] Despite the vaunted place he affords art, Wilde places the role of the critic above that of the creative artist as Gilbert observes that “modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn.”[40] Graham’s theory, regardless of its historical veracity, offers the narrator exactly such a freedom to explore “imaginative passions of the mind” unfettered from “physical accidents of deed or circumstance.” In his freewheeling examination of the sonnets, the narrator is, as Frankel argues, “capable of generating an enchantment which the ‘real’ artwork” cannot effect;[41] he is liberated into an enchanted state that momentarily “[detaches him] from the empirically verifiable and alerting [him], albeit briefly, to a world not yet called into being.”[42]

Gaddis: The Economy of Counterfeit

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions is a massive, encyclopedic novel with an enormous cast of characters and a digressive plot that juxtaposes the painter Wyatt Gwyon’s involvement with the leaders of a counterfeit ring Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine, a sequence of dialogue driven New York City art parties, an assassination plot, and Wyatt’s protestant minister father’s descent into madness and syncretic blending of Mithraism into his New England protestant sensibilities. Fraudulence and forgery crop up at nearly every turn as Gaddis’s protagonists muddle their way through twentieth century America searching for some sort of authentic touchstone on which to ground their lives. As Christopher Knight observes, the overall mood of the novel (and Gaddis’s work as a whole) is “one of mourning, reflective of the sense that an unnameable [sic] something has vacated the stage of our existence.”[43] Knight goes on to explain that in a posttheological age, society has yet to find “a raison d’etre to replace that which it has rejected,”[44] which leaves its inhabitants left, as Gaddis states in an interview, with a “sense of loss overreaching any of fulfillment.”[45]

Several of the work’s plotlines offer complementary analogies to Wilde’s praise of forgery and his collapse of artifice/reality: the playwright Otto Pivner spends the entire novel constructing his identity from bits and pieces of (often contradictory) aesthetic creations; the currency counterfeiter Frank Sinisterra harangues his wife with crankish arguments about the decline of craftsmanship when looking through what he sees as shoddy work in a copy of Counterfeiters’ Quarterly (calling to mind the argument for forgery as an aspiration for “perfect representation” in “Mr. W.H.”); Mr. Feddle, a groupie in the Greenwich art scene, makes a habit of forging authors’ signatures in copies of books he finds at parties; Stanley, a Catholic composer, who serves as one of Gaddis’s few sympathetic characters, embodies the Wildian elevation of art over nature to the point that he alienates his closest friends and dies alone while playing an organ in a cathedral. However, Wyatt’s involvement with Brown and Valentine’s counterfeiting ring offers both the clearest parallel as well as the strongest point of contrast between Gaddis and Wilde’s treatment of forgery.

The opening episode of the novel’s Wyatt subplot (as well as the novel itself) establishes the constant play of falsehoods against one another. It begins as his mother, Camilla, dies aboard a ship traveling to Spain with Wyatt’s father, The Reverend Gwyon, at the hands of a fraudulent surgeon (who later proves to be the conman Frank Sinisterra). The Rev. Gwyon refuses to permit a burial at sea and faced with the challenge of bringing his deceased wife’s body into Spain, overcomes the difficulty “by payment of a huge fee covering the fine, duties, excises, imposts, tributes, and archiepiscopal dispensation” in order to have his Protestant wife interred in a Catholic funeral.[46] Adding to the duplicity and confusion, Camilla’s body is buried next to the body of a murdered twelve-year-old girl from the town of San Zwingli and later mistakenly disinterred when the church returns to inspect the girl’s corpse based on a specious martyrdom story that Gaddis confirms and contradicts repeatedly throughout the novel.

The trip deals a severe blow to The Rev. Gwyon’s mental health. On his return, he leaves most of Wyatt’s upbringing to his sister, Aunt May, a caricature of Calvinist piety. When Wyatt, to Aunt May’s horror demonstrates artistic proclivities at an early age, she punishes him for trying to take the place of God as a creator and comparing his early interest in originality to Lucifer. In response to a childhood drawing of a robin “which looked like the letter E tipped to one side, Aunt May chastises him, ranting that “[t]o sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did […] He tried to become original […] to steal Our Lord’s authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light!”[47] The tirade does not crush Wyatt’s desire to paint and he continues to work in secret, “terrified with guilty amazement as forms took shape under his pencil.”[48] Despite his continued pursuit of art, Aunt May’s tirade leaves an indelible mark on Wyatt, who struggles throughout the novel to paint anything of his own. Gaddis alludes to only one original piece by Wyatt, an unfinished portrait of his mother that his quest for artistic perfection prevents him from completing. However, the censure on Wyatt’s painting covered only the act of original creation. Aunt May allows him to copy “illustrations from some of the leather-bound marathons of suffering and disaster”[49]that fill the books of martyrs on her shelf, a skill at which he excels to the point that he successfully swaps his own copy of Hieronymous Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins tabletop with his father’s forged copy (which, in a typical Gaddis turn, the family believes to be authentic at this point in the novel) and sells it in order to finance his art education in Europe.

While in Europe, Wyatt lives in Munich and continues to hone his craft as he delves into the work of the Flemish masters under the tutelage of Herr Koppel, a renaissance traditionalist who holds his students to the standard of medieval painters’ guildsmen. Like Aunt May, Koppel further instills Wyatt with a distaste for originality. He offers a secular echo to her charge against the “romantic disease” of originality, arguing that “to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way,” cautioning Wyatt “only [to] think about [his] own work, how to make it better” and to “copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates.”[50] It is also during his stay in Munich that Wyatt meets his first accidental brush with forgery when Koppel steals one of his copies of a Memling painting and is later arrested for trying to pass the painting off as (ironically) an original. After completing his education, Wyatt moves to Paris, where his career as a painter is abruptly curtailed when he refuses to cooperate with Cremer, an art critic who solicits a bribe in return for a favorable review of a gallery opening.

Wyatt returns to New York where he aimlessly drifts through the Greenwich Village art scene while working as a draughtsman for an architecture firm. While in New York, he meets Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine, who enlist him into their employ to forge paintings by Hugo van der Goes and Hubert van Eyck. Wyatt is initially apprehensive at the pitch, objecting that forgery “cheapens the whole…it’s a calumny.”[51] However, Valentine, offering the opportunity to restore the aesthetic ethos of his Flemish heroes and Brown, offering powerful financial incentive, persuade him to join their scheme. Brown and Valentine plan for Wyatt to “recover” a “lost” Van Eyck painting, about which Valentine will initially sow skepticism, which he will later refute to strengthen the case for the painting’s authenticity. Wyatt gradually becomes disillusioned with the plot and begins to attempt to expose the forgeries and eventually destroys his work. At the novel’s climax during a party at Brown’s home, heated words between Valentine and Wyatt over the hollow profit motive driving all art, including the Flemish, leads Wyatt to stabbing Valentine. In the fallout, Wyatt flees to the same monastery in Spain that his father visited after Camilla’s death, where he works to restore medieval and renaissance paintings for the church in an effort “to live deliberately.”[52]

Wyatt’s entry into the forgery ring mirrors the real life case of Dutch forger Han van Meegeren — a figure whose counterfeiting parallels both Grafton’s recounting of the episode between Dionysius and Heraclides, as well as the disputes between Erskine and the narrator of “Mr. W.H.” Van Meegren successfully passed off several forged Vermeers as authentic before being arrested in a highly publicized 1947 trial.[53] Much of the motivating force behind van Meegren’s crime was his distaste for modern art. Hope B. Werness writes that along with financial motivation, van Meegren’s hoax was carried out to prove “the lasting importance and beauty of seventeenth-century art as opposed to the despised decadence of modern art; proof of his genius as an artist; proof of the venality of the experts — art historians, dealers, and critics who look at signatures and not the merit of the work”[54] Similarly, a significant driving force in Wyatt’s readiness to join Brown and Valentine’s plot is driven by his veneration for the Flemish masters, who he believes strove for a perfection absent from 1950’s America. While speaking to Brown and Valentine, he explains that to his heroes, “[t]here was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this…and so in the painting every detail reflects…God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then.”[55] Wyatt hopes to restore to modern art the care and craftsmanship that van Eyck and van der Goes brought to their work out of devotion to a transcendent, absolute power rather than in order to drive out the vanity and consumption that he believes motivate the work of his contemporaries. Like Cyril Graham, Wyatt, in making his Faustian bargain with Brown, attempts to use his forgeries to point toward higher truths than the commercialism that plagues the twentieth century.

Despite the Wildian optimism that Brown and Valentine manage to instill in Wyatt by bringing him into their circle, Wyatt still intuitively grasps the impossibility of transposing anachronistic value into his materialistic environment. Not only does he know at his core that forgery cannot bring forth the reassessment of aesthetics that his criminal counterparts try convince him may be possible, he also knows that the medieval and renaissance devotional artistic spirit is inaccessible both to modern society in general and himself in particular. In response to a request from Brown to forge a Fra Angelico, Wyatt acknowledges his spiritual shortcomings, answering,

Do you know why I could never paint one, paint a Fra Angelico? Do you know why? Do you know how he painted? Fra Angelico painted down on his knees, he was on his knees and his eyes full of tears when he painted Christ on the Cross. And do you think I…do you

think I…[56]

No matter his technical skill, Wyatt remains convinced that modernity has cut him off from the state of spiritual commitment demonstrated by that of his forebears. Gerard Genette gives a concise summation of such an unbridgeable gulf between copy and original, writing that “in certain arts, the notion of authenticity is meaningful, and is defined by a work’s history of production, while it is meaningless in others, in which all correct copies of a work constitute so many valid instances of it.”[57] Though Wyatt remains confident in his ability to make passable forgeries “from a commercialpoint of view,”[58] he remains convinced of the inadequacy of his work form a spiritual point of view. Wyatt’s conviction that such modernity severs him from such a spiritual affinity with the objects of his forgeries remains at the heart of his internal turmoil while working as a counterfeiter. He can attain Genette’s concept of “material immanence” in his work, however, the ideal immanence of Fra Angelico or the Flemish masters’ “ideal immanence” remains forever blocked from Wyatt’s grasp.[59] Through the cognitive dissonance that strains Wyatt’s duplicitous work, Gaddis undermines Wilde’s argument in favor of lying. What appears as profound insight, when accessed through forgery, can only remain a palimpsest built on a tenuous foundation.

Wyatt remains unable to reconcile his internal conviction that there is a deep spiritual lack that resides in his work with his aspirational hopes to restore the very lack he feels to modern art through his forgeries. He makes several threats to expose Brown and Valentine, who manage to convince him that modern critics and collectors are too vain to accept the truth. Brown asks him if he thinks they could ever “even admit they paid forty or fifty thousand for a fraud” and whether he believes “anyone would thank [him].”[60] He continues:

Do you think they’d even believe you? They’d lock you up, my boy. You could get up there and paint these things all over again, and they wouldn’t believe you. They’d think you’re crazy. That’s what they’d want to think. My boy, you’ve fooled the experts. But once you’ve fooled an expert, he stays fooled.[61]

Brown believes that in a society driven by vanity and exchange, the truth is reduced to a matter of what those who can pay for flattery decide they want it to be.

Despite Brown’s admonitions, Wyatt eventually abandons the scheme. He destroys the paintings and shows up drunk at a cocktail party to confront Brown and Valentine. However, the entire enterprise has also slowly undermined Wyatt’s faith in the past as a repository for the values he seeks to restore. Christopher Knight notes that though things may once have been whole, “it is important not to romanticize the past of our frustration with the present […] and it is unlikely that things were ever as integrative as Stanley and Wyatt imagine.”[62] As he attempts to justify his position, Valentine sweeps the rug from beneath Wyatt, with an uncompromising challenge to his previous praise of the Flemish belief that God was in all things:

— Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? That everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessismism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that’s why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn’t watching. Maybe he doesn’t see. Oh, this pious cult of the Middle Ags! Being looked at by God! Is there a moment of faith in any of their work, in one centimeter of canvas? Or is it vanity and fear, the same decadence that surrounds us now. A profound mistrust in God, and they need every idea out where they can see it, where they can get their hands on it.[63]

Valentine’s tirade hits home and entirely disabuses Wyatt of the naïve certainty he attributed to Bouts, the van Eycks, and van der Goes; he flies into a rage, stabs Valentine, and flees to Spain. In a turtles-all-the-way-down twist, Wyatt comes to the recognition that the doubt, cynicism, and material greed of the present age were equally present the past that he idealized as an integrative whole. Rather than arriving at deeper truths about art through his engagement with forgery as does the narrator in “Mr. W.H.,” Wyatt falls into existential despair as his hope for a redeemable past fades.

In his 1995 survey of twentieth century American satire, literary theorist and critic Steven Weisenberger notes a marked shift in the tone and focus of satire in the period between 1930 and 1980 that helps to account for Gaddis’s treatment of forgery in The Recognitions. Satire of the preceding centuries served what Weisenberger calls a “generative” function as a “rationalist discourse launched against the exemplars of folly and vice, to rectify them according to norms of good behavior.”[64] The role of the satirist, according to Weisenberger (who builds Northrop Frye’s assertion that satire can no longer “speak for the twentieth century” because it has gone “stale and mouldy,”)[65] underwent a drastic change during the rise of modern capitalism as the generative function could no longer “sustain the dominance of ideal over merely commodified being” or “[work] to sustain the dream of ‘original’ signified standing in clear relations to signifiers, thus to retell the fable of a utopian, transcendental goal for capitalist production.”[66] The drastic societal changes that took place under modernity outpaced the conventional, generative satirist’s ability to keep pace and contain or critique their subject matter.

However, Weisenberger takes issue with Frye and the New Critics’ belief that modernity rendered satire as a literary mode entirely obsolete. Rather, he sees the generative role for satire as outdated. Weisenberger makes the case that several experimental writers of the twentieth century, such as Nathanael West, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover successfully offer a postmodern makeover for satire as a whole by building toward what he terms a new “degenerative” satire: a malleable template that works to keep pace with historical contingency. Degenerative satire starts by addressing its broader social condition (instead of a limited target): “A contemporary mega bureaucracy and its blindly progressive ‘information society.’” [67] It attempts to navigate “the ‘fast image’ world of advertising, politics, electronic media, and the like,”[68] it appears in an age facing “the onset of a radical doubt towards representation in general” and “master narratives in particular.”[69] Writing in an age of mediated simulacra, Weisenberger’s degenerative satirists do not wholly reject representation, but do it “doubtfully” and “subversively;”[70] they are suspicious of structure, specifically structures of “perceiving, representing, and transforming.”[71]

Over the course of his career, Gaddis maintains a degenerative approach in his satirical takedown of the mass media, information, and consumer society that rose to prominence in the early- to mid-twentieth century. The Recognitions and JR, his first two novels tackle the market economy’s capacity to level any and all values, be they theological, ethical or aesthetic. Art and morality, in Gaddis’s novels are subject to the same economic forces as any other commodity on the market. Weisenberger notes that in Gaddis’s work, “all significations are bound over to the authority of the vast market. Money, ordinary speech, artworks, affects, and information in the form of quotes, clichés, data, and sheer drivel — all are traded in a bewildering process of symbolic exchange.”[72]

In The Recognitions, Gaddis works to critique the contemporary condition of endless, flattening exchange. Like Wilde, he uses the figure of the forger to center his novel as he follows the painter Wyatt’s descent into an international counterfeiting underworld. However, unlike Wilde, Gaddis presents a society in which the distinction between falsehood and fact or nature and artifice grows increasingly blurry. Authenticity, like the value of any other stock commodity, becomes subject to fluctuating, qualitative assessment, as noted by Basil Valentine, who explains to Wyatt during his initiation into the criminal underground that “If the public believes that a picture is by Raphael, and will pay the price of a Raphael […]then it is a Raphael.’”[73] Market speculation acts as a designifying process in The Recognitions; provenance becomes one value among many through which to evaluate authenticity or origin. Rather than a pathway to the higher Platonic values that Wilde sees in a well-executed lie, Gaddis treats the unfettered proliferation of forgeries in his novel as a descent into chaotic entropy. It leads to, in Weisenberger’s terms, “a ridiculous abject loss” as “patterns of propriety and property encoded in language, erode in the ceaseless flux of signs.”[74]

Conclusion:

Wilde and Gaddis traffic in falsehoods and deceit in a significant portion of their work. Both writers make strong cases that lies, forgeries, and falsehoods in the aesthetic realm have a powerful effect on reality, and their work converges on the fact that in many cases, the line between life and art is a blurry one. They are also in agreement that the state of the world is a regrettable one and they find aesthetic experience to be an important outlet that offers an opportunity for imaginative escape and deeper reflection and opening for profound philosophical insight. Wilde would most certainly approve of Wyatt’s brief concession to modern art in his response to Picasso’s Nightfishing in Antibes when he says that “when I saw it it was one of those moments of reality, of near-recognition of reality…When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it”[75]

However, despite their many similarities, the two writers drastically part ways in their response to deception. On the one hand, Wilde sees lying as a liberatory opportunity to liberate oneself from “life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind” and “limitations of real life” by affording the opportunity to reflect on more profound philosophical insight. Gaddis, on the other hand, pushes Wilde’s idealized liar’s paradise to its logical conclusion by presenting a world where his characters can no longer discern lies from facts, leaving them in a ceaseless state of existential dread as they search for meaning in a world stripped of foundations.

Bibliography

Frankel, Nicholas. “Forgery as a Means of Knowing: Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W.H. as a Liar’s Manifesto.” In Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890’s. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2009.

Gaddis, William. The Recognitions. New York, New York. New York Review Books, 2020.

Genette, Gerard. The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. Translated by G.M. Goshgarian. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Johnson, R.V. Aestheticism. London: Methuen, 1969.

Johnston, John. Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

Knight, Christopher. Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: Univeristy of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Weisenberger. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1108–1155. London: Harper Collins, 2003. 1108–1155

Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1071–1094. London: Harper Collins, 2003.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 2011

Wilde, Oscar. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 302–351 London: Harper Collins, 2003.

[1] Wilde, Oscar, “The Decay of Lying,” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 1091–1092

[2] Ibid. 1079

[3] Wilde, Oscar, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 302

[4] Gaddis, William, The Recognitions, (New York: New York Review Books, 2020), 236

[5] Johnston, John, Carnival of Repetition, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 10–11

[6] Wilde, Oscar, “The Decay of Lying,” 1091

[7] Grafton, Anthony, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3

[8] Grafton, 3

[9]Grafton, 4

[10]Grafton, 4

[11] Frankel, Nicholas, “Forgery as a Means of Knowing: Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W.H. as a Liar’s Manifesto,” In Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890’s, (High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2009), 21.

[12]Wilde, Oscar, “The Decay of Lying,” InThe Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 1091–1092

[13] Johnson, R.V., Aestheticism, (Methuen, 1969), 1

[14] Johnson, 51

[15] Wilde, Oscar, “The Critic as Artist,” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 1148

[16] Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. By Nicholas Frankel, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 2011), 273

[17] Wilde, Oscar, “The Decay of Lying,” 1073

[18] Wilde, Oscar, “The Decay of Lying,” 1074

[19] Frankel 52

[20] Frankel, 52

[21] Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” 308

[22] Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H., 312

[23] Frankel, 55

[24] Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” 302

[25] Ibid. 302

[26] Ibid. 302

[27] Ibid. 302

[28] Ibid. 349

[29] Ibid. 350

[30] Ibid. 312

[31] Ibid. 313

[32] Genette, Gerard, The Work of Art, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 97–98.

[33] Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H., 314

[34] Ibid. 318

[35] Ibid. 314

[36] Ibid. 323

[37] Ibid. 323

[38] Wilde, “The Critic as Artst,” 1125

[39] Ibid. 1125

[40] Ibid. 1125

[41] Frankel, 55

[42] Frankel, 58

[43] Knight, Christopher, Hints and Guesses, (Madison: Univeristy of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 3

[44] Knight, 3

[45] Qutoed in Knight, 3

[46] Ibid.12

[47] Ibid. 38–39

[48] Ibid. 39

[49] Ibid. 39

[50] Ibid. 91

[51] Ibid 246

[52] Ibid. 876

[53] Knight, 72

[54] Quoted in Knight, 70

[55] Gaddis, 247

[56] Gaddis 238

[57] Genette, 16

[58] Ibid, 16

[59] Ibid, 16

[60] Gaddis, 357–358

[61] Ibid. 358

[62] Knight, 62

[63] Gaddis, 671–672

[64] Weisenberger, Steven, Fables of Subversion, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 1

[65] Quoted in Weisenberger, 1

[66] Weisenberger, 1–2

[67] Weisenberger, 6

[68] Ibid. 6

[69] Ibid. 3–4

[70] Ibid. 4

[71] Ibid. 5

[72] Ibid. 209

[73] Gaddis, William. The Recognitions, (New York: New York Review Books, 2020), 236

[74] Weisenberger, 212

[75] Gaddis, 93