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The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Richard Godden
Richard Godden
Affiliation:
Richard Godden is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England .
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Extract

“I'll tell you God's truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways — and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West? ” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

Does Gatsby know where San Francisco is? If he does, his response is an odd gesture. “Epic theatre is gestural,” wrote Walter Benjamin of Brecht. Gatsby, too, is gestural: as Nick Carraway would have it, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (p. 2). Except that Gatsby's gestures are broken, and by Gatsby himself. To “tell … God's truth” he raises his right hand — isn't that taking the truth a little too seriously? When speaking of loss he pauses in the right place; indeed, in a place so right that the addendum “all dead now” might just be bad acting, not lying. The creator of a criminal network operating Richard Godden is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , December 1982 , pp. 343 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribners, n.d.), pp. 65–66Google Scholar. Subsequent page references will be to this edition, the 182pp. Scribners' paperback reprint. Where I have inserted ellipsis during extended quotation, I have noted that usage.

2 Brecht, Bertolt, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Willett, J. (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 93Google Scholar.

3 ibid., p. 95.

4 The timing of Nick's writing is problematic. It is certain that he began work between leaving New York (Autumn 1922) and Autumn 1923 (see p. 2). However, it is equally clear from his opening to Chapter 10 that the work engaged him until at least the start of 1924 (“After two years I remember…,” p. 164). Fitzgerald pinpoints the time span of composition in order to indicate that the book is no memoir, composed easily after the manner of diaries, but a hybrid (somewhere between autobiography and biography) that troubles its author. For an alternative account of the dating as a probable error see Bruccoli, Matthew J., Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), pp. 118–19Google Scholar.

5 A recent reading by John S. Whitley makes a comprehensive case for Gatsby as a Keatsian Romancer (F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby [London: Arnold, 1976])Google Scholar. Few interpretations are as thoroughly interesting (though misguided). See also McCall, Dan H., “‘The Self Same Song that Found a Path’: Keats and The Great Gatsby” American Literature, 42 (1970–1971), pp. 530–43Google Scholar. More typical of the bland “dream” school is Fahey, William A., Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973)Google Scholar. For useful and unusually historical readings see Callahan, John F., The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (London: University of Illinois Press, 1972)Google Scholar, and Way, Brian, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction (London: Arnold, 1980)Google Scholar. Callahan recognizes that “experience has horrified Carraway into myth” (p. 29) but is imprecise as to the class content of that experience. Though Way offers a declaredly social interpretation, he does so from as essentially static account of Fitzgerald's own class position (see p. 137).

6 Brecht, p. 97.

7 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Unwin, 1970), p. 164Google Scholar.

8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (New York: Ardis, 1973), p. 163Google Scholar. Subsequent page references will be to this edition.

9 Veblen, p. 51.

10 Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 96Google Scholar. Jameson offers what is effectively a paraphrase of Marx, Capital, Vol. 1. Ch. 1, “The Commodity.” The terms “true/primary” and “false/luxury” repeat Marx's distinction between “use” and “exchange” values. The work of Jean Baudrillard calls this distinction into question (see particularly “Beyond Use Value,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign [St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981], pp. 130–42). However, the quotation remains strategically useful: despite the hint that some levels of experience exist beyond historical determination, Jameson takes terse issue with the generally privileged vocabulary of “nature,” “physicality” and “feelings.”

11 With the formation of The Commonwealth Edison Company in 1907 Samuel Insull established a unified power supply for all Chicago. The monopoly took fifteen years to build, and though Forrest McDonald locates “the moment of corruption” in 1912 when Gladys Insull “close[d] her bedroom door” (an intriguing notion of economic motive), Chapters 3 and 4 of his biography suggest how fine were the lines walked by Insull between business innovation and financial malpractice, between political influence and the corruption of politicians (MacDonald, , Insull [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962], pp. 147, 55–101)Google Scholar. Whatever “the moment” when Jimmy Gatz instructed himself to “Study electricity, etc…,” his “etc.” may well have sought to embrace the energies alluded to in MacDonald's summary of Insull's Chicago career: “If Samuel Insull had not existed, it would have been necessary for Chicago to invent him: he became the last and fiercest of the long succession of restless giants who ruled the city and its surrounding prairie countryside. Chicago had men who built and dared on a colossal scale…” (p. 55).

12 Eagleton, Terry, Walter Benjamin or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981), p. 157Google Scholar.

13 Way, p. 115.

14 Bakhtin, Ch. 4 on Carnival. Carnival, like Gatsby and capital, jars together eccentrically different histories and words. Gatsby's laughter remains for the most part silent, since his intent is serious, but as Bahktin notes of the carnival mode, “we see laughter's footprints in the structure of reality, but we do not hear the laughter itself” (p. 137).

15 Brecht, p. 93.

16 Brecht, , “Indirect Impact of the Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre, p. 60Google Scholar.

17 Bruccoli, p. 134.

18 By the close of the 19th century Germans had settled in considerable numbers throughout the Midwest. During the last decades of the 19th century the Dutch, expanding from their earliest centres of settlement in Michigan and Wisconsin, spilled over into Southwestern Minnesota. By the first decade of the 20th century Dutch farming communities were well established in Gatz's home state (and in the region of Fitzgerald's birthplace, St. Paul).

19 Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1968), p. 208Google Scholar. Subsequent page references will be to this edition.

20 Stidger, William L., Henry Ford: The Man and his Motives (London: Hodder, 1923), p. 219Google Scholar. Subsequent page references will be to this edition.

21 If, as Adorno insists, “Reification is always a form of forgetting,” it may also be said to be a way of remembering badly. For discussion of the relation between commodity production and time see Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 120–167Google Scholar, and Eagleton, pp. 25–29.

22 Gatsby's mansion is an ideal set for the “Star” kiss that so impresses Daisy — “Under the white-plum tree” lit by a “thin ray of moonlight” (p. 108) the director arranges his protegée. Klipspringer may be an eccentric “boarder” in such an environment, but at least he produces an immediate service in popular tunes as an accompaniment to Daisy's first visit (pp. 96–97).

23 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Colletti, Lucio, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (London: New Left Books, 1972), pp. 86–87Google Scholar.

25 Kenner, Hugh, A Homemade World (New York: Knopf, 1975), Ch. 2Google Scholar.

26 Alger wrote about Edison, stressing that one of his first major successes was the Universal Stock Ticker. Samuel Insull, as Edison's personal secretary, was in charge of his financial dealing; as he once put it, “My engineering has been largely concerned with engineering all I could out of the dollar.”

27 Williams, Raymond, Modern Tragedy (London: Verso, 1979), p. 71Google Scholar. Subsequent page references will be to this edition.

28 ibid., p. 97.

29 Brecht, , “From a Letter to an Actor,” Brecht on Theatre, p. 234Google Scholar.

30 Cited by Delcuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix in Antioedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 26Google Scholar.

31 Bruccoli notes of the use of “orgiastic” in the Scribners' edition: “Fitzgerald clearly intended organic — not orgiastic — and explained to Perkins that ‘it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy’ (January 24, 1925). In Fitzgerald's marked copy an i is inserted in orgastic, but it is impossible to identify the hand that wrote this single letter as Fitzgerald's. Beginning with the second edition… all subsequent Scribner's editions print orgiastic” (Bruccoli, p. 50). Though quoting from the Scribner's edition, I have restored “orgastic” to the passage.

32 Culpeper's Complete Herbal (London: W. Forulsham and Co. Ltd., 1653)Google Scholar. Fitzgerald may have known of the medicinal use of caraway seed. He describes New York, seen from the Queensboro Bridge, in terms that suggest he might have been familiar with the habit of taking caraway oil on sugar lumps after meals, to ease digestion: “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of nonolfactory money” (p. 69).

33 Bakhtin, p. 27.