“Earlier, you know, he mentioned the idea of a novel factory, a sort of assembly line of writers, each one with his own special little job. Mass production, he said, and tailored to the public taste.”
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
This idea for industrialized artistic production comes from Basil Valentine, a man whose shrewd exploitation of painting for cash is so Scrooge-eqsue you have to imagine he dresses like the Monopoly man. Valentine is speaking to Wyatt Gwyon, a jaded young painter who has accepted a Faustian bargain to forge works by classic Flemish artists. Both are characters in William Gaddis’s behemoth of a novel, The Recognitions. Content with Wyatt’s abilities, Valentine later abandons this industrial fantasy. A factory would require a brick-and-mortar facility, electrical bills, salaries… why bother, when Wyatt is content to toil in depressive seclusion?
But fast-forward from 1955 to the present day, and the logistics of such an assembly line are far more feasible. No longer need Valentine worry about brick-and-mortar: digital platforms could allow his team of writers to complete and churn out ideas, no electrical bills necessary. Even better, Valentine, in all his cigar-twirling avarice, could get around the need to shill out decent wages to his skilled artisans. A present-day novel factory would only need a computer and a couple subscriptions.
The billions of dollars spent in pursuit of artificial intelligence make Valentine’s thought experiment a lot less absurd and a lot more cataclysmically imminent. A novel created by the current iteration of ChatGPT or Claude is soulless, lifeless, full of prose anyone above a fifth-grade reading level could find fault in. But what do we do if these performances improve? If they make novels we can’t distinguish from our own? What do we do when we can no longer reliably identify the distinct humanity of art?
“Why are you still writing if you know the book is finished and we all know the book is finished and we all know you’re still writing?”
“I’ll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump.”
—Don DeLillo, Mao II
In his Mao II, Don DeLillo introduces us to the enigmatic Bill Gray. Bill is a writer—in his words, “like a donut-maker only slower.” In thirty years, he hasn’t even published a picture of himself, let alone an entire novel. That’s not to say he’s been unproductive. When a photographer pays Bill a visit as part of an effort to capture writers in the midst of their craft, she finds his office overflowing with material: cardboard boxes stuffed with manuscripts, color-coded folders of passages rewritten in twenty different styles. If Bill wanted to publish a novel, he could; he could probably put out ten. A new novel could bring him an embarrassment of riches. He has corporate figureheads clamoring for the rights to his work. So why doesn’t he just release the damn book?
There are a couple ways you could interpret Bill’s defiance. He might take hubristic joy in watching his mythos expand, reveling in the same passively-expanding fame that Playboi Carti enjoyed for nearly half a decade. He might also have given up on the novel as a social force, instead seeing the public consciousness as a place dominated by extremist actions of “bomb-makers and gunmen.” Or maybe he’s simply paralyzed by the fear of expectation, his compounding self-doubt preventing him from ever subjecting his talents to public scrutiny. But none of these explanations feel quite right to me.
To understand Bill’s indecision, we need to look at a different work of DeLillo’s. In White Noise, narrator and protagonist Jack Gladney ventures out to “The Most Photographed Barn in America,” and finds … nothing. The road is littered with billboards advertising the barn. The visitor’s lot is jammed with cars. But no barn. The barn was surely a magnificent work of architecture at some point, but by presenting itself as a product, it disappears.
The vignettes that adorn these books can be looked at, in a didactic sense, to point towards DeLillo’s beliefs. The writer that can’t release a book and the barn that becomes invisible as soon as people try to see it coalesce into a philosophy on art. In DeLillo’s eyes, creating a piece of art for consumption makes a bastard of creation. The process itself is not just the most important thing—it’s the only important thing. This is why Bill never publishes his book. At dozens of times he held what could have been a “finished” product, a body of work he could ship off to a publishing house and rake in the cash and critical acclaim. He knows it. In his later years, when his drive to create starts to wane, he hires a full-time assistant just to make sure he’s constantly working. If Bill lived a hundred additional years, he’d end up with a hundred more boxes and ten more broken typewriters—but no new novels. Bill is a writer, and that ability is instrumental to his existence. But the fact that he publishes books? Well, he might as well be making donuts.
“You … you’ve never seen a picture of God, have you Fuller?”
“No sar. If some artist paint His picture it become quite a hindrance to the faith, sar.”
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Understanding art’s value requires more than just DeLillo’s rejection of the audience. DeLillo tells us why the art isn’t important to the viewer; it is Gaddis who will tell us why the art is important to the artist. For as many lines of The Recognitions are concerned with art, it may not even be the primary focus of the novel. Gaddis spends an enormous amount of time talking about Catholicism, intertwining religious subtext into nearly every encounter. The first sixty or so pages of the novel follow Wyatt’s upbringing by his fanatically pious Aunt May and his more thoughtful father Reverend Gwyon. Wyatt disavows the faith, abandoning a life spent in the seminary, but the effects of his spiritually-charged childhood reverberate throughout the novel.
Wyatt is cast against Stanley, a deeply pious young man who dreams of having his organ piece played in a church in Rome. The two exist in a similar tension as the Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers—seeking the same end through opposite means. Wyatt is the secular and cynical Ivan, Stanley the Bible-clutching Alyosha. Wyatt has buried his faith; Stanley lets it permeate his life. Wyatt finishes his forgeries; Stanley is constantly remaking his composition. One loves God. The other feels betrayed by Him. Who wins?
Wyatt’s triumph would signal Gaddis’s disdain for the fanaticism of Aunt May and the hypocritical discrepancies of the Church, while Stanley’s would mean an acceptance of a more pious, more childlike devotion to God. It seems inevitable at some point that he will bury Stanley—he ridicules Aunt May’s fervor into caricature, he routinely inserts diatribes against theological inconsistencies, and the novel’s most spiritually thoughtful character ends up joining an archaic, irrelevant congregation.
But Gaddis cannot bring himself to make this move. Despite everything, Gaddis clutches an affection for Stanley’s ignorance. Why? It doesn’t make sense until roughly three hundred pages in, when Gaddis gives perhaps the most illuminating examination of belief in the entire novel: “There was, in fact, a religious aura about this festival, religious that is in the sense of devotion, adoration, celebration of deity, before religion became confused with systems of ethics and morality, to become a sore affliction upon the very things it had once exalted.” Gaddis criticizes the systems, the rules, the institution—but he has a soft spot for the belief, the willful blindness of allowing oneself to be completely insignificant, the sheer power of trust required to have faith in something and mean it. He makes fun of Aunt May, but he has a deeper contempt for the secular avarice of Basil Valentine and Recktall Brown, the higher-ups that instigate Wyatt’s forgeries. Religion is deeply, deeply flawed. But without faith, we might not have art. We might not have anything.
“We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us?”
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
In 2017, The New York Times published an article detailing the AI research of Canadian computer scientist Geoffreery Hinton. The piece ran under the headline “A New Way for Machines to See, Taking Shape in Toronto.” In the article’s photo, Hinton and his colleague stand ecstatic, smiling in front of a whiteboard full of illegible jargon. Six years later, the Times visited Hinton again. This time, he stands solo before a shadowy background. His expression is pensive, dark. The article ends with a quote from J. Robert Oppenheimer.
AI is not scary because it could destroy us—we’ve been worried about destruction since the Cold War. It’s scary because of what its existence could say about our own. A system that can take in human cognitive abilities that philosophers have deified for millennia and spit out novels and paintings no different from what we can make forces us to reassess something fundamental. It forces us to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask: What’s the point of art? What’s the point of writing or painting or anything else we thought only we could do? What’s the point of our own creations?
In the next five, ten, twenty years, we’re going to have to face something that holds cognitive superiority over us in every conceivable way and find a way to still find value in ourselves. This is why I put so much importance in Bill’s refusal to publish, Jack’s inability to see, Stanley’s dedication to naivete. Ultimately, artificial intelligence takes inputs and creates output. There is no thought, no belief, just an order of operations. It is entirely possible that the quality of its output will far exceed ours. It is entirely possible that a future bookstore contains nothing but auto-generated text, shelved with novels of dazzlingly flawless prose. That sounds terrible. But even if this does come to pass, all is not lost. We can turn to DeLillo’s insistence on creation, on Gaddis’s insistence on belief. We can still be the Bill Grays of the world, tucked away in the hidden corners of the world, trying to finish novels we know we never will.
Image: Lewis Wickes Hine, Newsies at Skeeter Branch, St. Louis, Missouri, 11:00 a.m., gelatin silver print, 1910 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).