Otto ("auto") is Gaddis's self-insert, right?

>is it ironic or something
haha ;)

there's actually a character later called William who is literally the stand in, think of all the characters as a sort of fragmented versions of wyatt

>>9209522
Otto is literally all of you. Every single one of you who has ever written anything down on paper and thought they could be a writer is otto.

>>9209565
wow haha he must really not like pseuds and people who try haha

>>9209579
What ever you say max

>>9209565

>If I scream that it's all of you really loudly it'll hopefully drown out the voice in my head telling me that it's me

It's okay to feel indicted sometimes. It shows you hypocrisies and flaws that you entertain and may just spur you on to correcting them. Don't overcompensate to avoid it.

as this >>9209551 anon said, when you hear people talk about Gaddis putting himself in the book this is what they mean (similarly, a critic is reading The Recognitions later on in the book). But Otto is a part of a larger commentary on the relationship between the real world and its representations. How much disparity between representation and reality is needed for something to be considered art? is a central question that the book explores through different examples, you can see Anselm's memoir as one end of the spectrum where the work is directly representational. Opposite Anselm is a character like Esme, whose poetry is so transformative that the world from which the work is born is lost almost entirely the process of writing. Someone like Otto is around the middle, trying to live out the cliche of an expat writer. This ability to see the real world within an abstracted representation of it is one meaning for the word 'recognitions' that the book offers us. Which poses the question; at one point on this spectrum does something become art? and in that sense can reality itself be art? The book goes on to observe how these questions are increasingly confused by the 20th century treatment of art as a product or commodity.

These are all issues that Gaddis likely considered while writing the book. Most of the locations and presumably many of the events and characters where taken directly from his experiences traveling the world during the 10 years in which he worked on the novel. It is not far-fetched that Otto was born from a feeling of fraudulence that Gaddis held as a result of this.

>>9209551
I forgot, is that the writer visiting the church where Wyatt ends up restoring things at the end? I always really liked that part. I need to reread the book but it's so damn huge

>>9209794
Nah the author is Ludy