Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2025 Drake Roth. All rights reserved. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may only be used for non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. For all other uses, including reproduction and distribution, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English Literature Department

First Advisor

Peter Schmidt

Abstract

What is the purpose of art? What is the relationship between such complex binaries as: art and science, art and artist, music and musician? How do forgeries or fraudulent creativity complicate such relationships? And how (mechanistically) does art allow for a more holistic understanding of self and imagination? This thesis attempts answers chiefly using William Gaddis' The Recognitions, a gargantuan post-modernist American fiction novel published in 1955. By underpinning his book with themes of hands, binaries, and mechanized art Gaddis proffers an apparatus for understanding the relationships between opposing forces. Carl Jung’s theory of enantiodromia, or the process by which something comes to know itself by transforming into its opposite, is central since it illuminates how objects and characters in Gaddis’ novel similarly become their opposites. This approach also offers a novel framework for understanding Gaddis’ early novel: that of physicality and gesture as key to understanding how binaries in The Recognitions interact. Since most meaningful interactions between characters in the novel are based upon interactions using hands — chiral interactions, if you will — the physicality of gestures and hands (which are themselves mirror images) serves as the key to understanding Gaddis’ mechanism for interaction between art and artist, artist and forger, artist and artist. As a final turn, Gaddis’ lifelong and tireless obsession with the player piano (a rigged piano that plays itself using a pneumatic system) frames conclusions about how hands and art generate conditions for enantiodromia to occur. Come the climacteric end of the novel, when a church collapses in a small Spanish town, so too do the chiral binaries — artist becomes forger, piano becomes player piano, art becomes mechanized science.

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