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1 results

  • Chapter 1 - Faustian Pacts

  • Kate Montague, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    Tragedy, Affect and Labor in American Literature, 1945–2020
    Published online:
    26 September 2026
    Print publication:
    19 November 2026, pp 37-62
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  • Summary

    This chapter is about William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitionsand its depiction of creative labor in the thoroughly commercialized space of New York City’s culture industry. In this novel the classically tragic trope of recognition or anagnorisis plays out against a social backdrop of art and commerce and within a narrative whose dominant mood is comic. In this way Gaddis’ novel presents a dialectical movement between the comic and melancholicregistering tragedy above all in the stylistic shifts that occur between long stretches of dialogueon the one hand and omniscient description on the other. Here a profound melancholia registers in the exchange between the Faustian satire performed at the level of narrative content and the sincerely wrought descriptions of art studios and the urban environment. Specifically tragic affect persists within scenic descriptions of postwar New York as though to recognize the exhaustion and defeat of artists laboring under the emergent regime of consumer capitalism.