From The Dream To The Womb Essay, Research Paper

From the Dream to the Womb:

Visionary Impulse and Political Ambivalence in The Great Gatsby

It seems hard to believe in our period, when a three-decade lurch to the political Right has anathematized the word, but F. Scott Fitzgerald once, rather fashionably, believed himself to be a socialist. Some years before, he had also, less fashionably, tried hard to think himself a Catholic. While one hardly associates the characteristic setting of Fitzgerald’s novels, his chosen kingdom of the sybaritic fabulous, with either proletarian solidarity or priestly devotions, it will be the argument of this essay that a tension between Left and religiose perspectives structures the very heart of the vision of The Great Gatsby. For while Gatsby offers a detailed social picture of the stresses of an advanced capitalist culture in the early 1920s, it simultaneously encodes its American experience, at key structural moments, within the mitigating precepts of a mystic Western dualism.

Attempting both a sustained close reading of the novel, and the relocation of that reading within wider philosophic and political contexts, this essay will therefore consider the impact of a broad mystical strain of Western thought upon Fitzgerald’s political analysis. For while it is a commonplace that Fitzgerald was fascinated, throughout his life, with what is variously conceived as the “ideal,” “the Dream,” “inspiration,” the “visionary,” or “Desire,” a tradition with which this essay opens, the political uses of the ideal have largely escaped notice. Fitzgerald’s excitably visionary sensibility, nourished in high school years by Catholic mysticism, fashioned him into a superbly perceptive critic of the appropriation of human need of the ideal by developments in American capitalism in the 1920s. In response to economic crisis in the early years of this decade, the national advertising media developed and promoted a new cult of glamour, seeking through its allure to create a mass consumer market and revivify the foundering work ethic. Fitzgerald’s entrancement by the suggestive power of beauty sensitized him both to the spell and the mendacity of that mass promise: to the cruel contradiction between the fostered impulse of ecstatic outreach and the terminal drudgery in which the many were entrapped, a drudgery ideologically occluded by the national imagery of a “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” allotted the glamorous few. It sensitized him, too, to the crunch choice, in a polarized yet paralyzed legitimate economy, between poverty and crime.

But if at one level the novel works to demystify North American society in the Roaring Twenties, at another it redeploys the ideal to absolve the system from its inequities, aligning the failure of economic and cultural aspiration with a tradition of high metaphysical defeatism. The ancient creed of the unattainability of the Dream thus functions in theological exculpation of a social formation in crisis, conferring apotheosis on pessimistic quietism. Fitzgerald’s remystification of social values, and the ambivalent, uneasy conservatism that asserts itself as the novel’s ultimate position, are confirmed, finally, in Gatsby’s construction of gender relations and of the lower classes. Woman, in Gatsby, is the exquisite vehicle of solipsistic disengagement from a social order in crisis: not only at the obvious level of Romantic transcendentalism but as offering, on a subliminal plane, through a submerged and recurrent maternal imagery of sanctuarizing womb and suckling breast, a yearning for regressive, infantilizing retreat from the relentless pressures of competition. Conversely, the spectral underclass, simultaneously invisible and obtrusive, marginalized and central, wreaks the novel’s horrific climax, emerging as the apocalyptic assassin of that ideologically saturated “ideal” order. In summary, we shall find that, in a sterile dialectic of demystification and prompt remystifying, the “Marxian” critical perception so powerful in The Great Gatsby, rather than generating progressive impulse, becomes, by anxious turns, metaphysically annulled, sexually eschewed in regressive libido, and climactically demonized in proletarian displacement.

It is commonly acknowledged that at the heart of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald there runs a poetry of desire, an unshakable process of quest set in motion by beauty. The youthful reveries of Gatsby, for instance, effect perhaps what Greek philosophy called a metanoia or conversion of vision to a further dimension of truth or destiny: “a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing” (100). Ineluctably compelled by visitations of a transfiguring beauty, oriented round a field of transcendence, the novelist who in the 1920s styled himself the trumpeter of the Jazz Age would in an earlier age have articulated his ravishing disturbances in the discourse and dyad of a mystic. Listening to the “tuning fork struck upon a star,” Fitzgerald stands squarely in an ancient and Western tradition of inescapably frustrate enchantment. “Only I discern / Infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn,” wrote Browning; and these lucid terms of Romantic formulation recapitulate a metaphysical tradition common to two millennia of idealist aesthetics. In this tradition, the cravings set in motion by inspiration reach upward towards an ideality ontologically far removed in splendor from the quotidian material realm, which the ideal haunts nonetheless with a kind of incalculable and aesthetic gravitational pull. The ecstatic outreach this inspires may be interpreted as towards the immaterial world of First Forms (Plato) or an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover that “calls like a lover” (kinei hos eromenon); it may be towards a transcendent Christian Creator, upon whose natural forms play, in the discourse of Christian Platonism, dazzling beams or enargeiai that draw back the contemplative observer into their divine source; or it may be that the raptus draws poets into a pantheistic Romantic world-spirit, into “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused.” However construed, structural to the entire tradition is a shining higher order by which mortals mired in a corrupt, contingent realm become, in Fitzgerald’s language, “for a transitory enchanted moment compelled into an aesthetic contemplation” (Gatsby 182), and “gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder” (112). Fitzgerald, then, and his Gatsby experience intimations of what was once conceived as the “beatific.” Daisy, as the inexpressible exquisite disclosing the radiant higher kingdom (here, indefeasible wealth), necessarily remains descriptively discarnate, in contrast to the sexually profiled Jordan and Myrtle (11, 25). Daisy “gleams like silver,” like “the silver pepper of the stars,” exists as a voice, “a singing compulsion,” “an incarnation,” educing the marriage of “unutterable visions to her perishable breath” (150, 21, 9, 112).

But Daisy is, precisely, perishable: tragically inadequate to the inspiration she kindles. For Fitzgerald, the terms the world affords for the instantiation of ideality are inadequate; yet the ideal remains indefinable in terms of any other order, any specifiable transcendent origin. Fitzgerald thus diverges from the classic Western dualism that offers a transcendent situating of inspiration: for him, it has neither “ground” nor viable instantiation. Displaced and demystified by contemporary secular cynicism, Fitzgerald’s relation to the ideal is precisely Nick’s:

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. (112)

The traditional sacramental instinct endures, internalized yet alien, an elevated profundity fast fading into unintelligibility. As a liminal reflex persisting within modern America’s metaphysical amnesia, its wording proves illegible to a society whose telos is the vulgarity of private profit.

If beauty lacks a transcendent “ground,” personality’s springs become problematic, impossible of final judgment: there may, reflects Nick, or there may not be more to the lifestyle of romantic grace and aspiration than “an unbroken series of successful gestures”; and conduct may ultimately be “founded on the hard rock or wet marshes” (2). Given the disappearance of an Absolute, the emotional triad on which Gatsby is built is decisively distinct from that of Christianity and Platonism. In the latter, awakened desire, colliding with a resistant phenomenal world, can yet remain assured of some ultimate translation to immutable and perfect transcendence. But in Fitzgerald’s secular narratives of desire, the impetus of lyric promise is decisively disintegrated by the world’s crude bathos and despoliation; and the Dream lacks sanctuary beyond the sphere that resists it. Lyricism, proceeding thus to frustration, must always revert to nostalgia, to elegy: “Can’t repeat the past? . . . Why of course you can!” (111). In the tragic chiming of these three tones — lyric promise, its failure, elegy — is composed all Fitzgerald’s work. In Gatsby they are found from the outset in the opening meditation, where “romantic readiness” issues only in a “foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams,” but where, in retrospect, “[o]nly [dead] Gatsby was exempt from my reaction”; and they form a pattern pursued to the final page, where the “green light” and “orgiastic future” turn out “year by year [to] recede before us,” our boats being “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” yet where the mind consolingly retrieves from a half-enchanted past the Dutch sailors and their magnitude of wonder. The triad structures, too, the essential outline of the narrative and the mood-modulation of the parties. Those parties which open with blue gardens, where “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (39), but falter into violence, drunken stupor, screaming wives, and cars in the ditch, close upon the glance backward to Gatsby alone on his lighted porch bidding courteous farewell. Missing its final triumphant harmonic, the beat of a sacramental rhythm becomes the pulsing headache of private tragedy; Fitzgerald the mystic turns nostalgic drunk.

As this brutally condensed outline suggests, Gatsby, on one crucial plane, is a religious, almost a crypto-theological narrative, displaced thoroughly and with explicit, ironic inadequacy into the secular discourse of a sharply portrayed social formation. And within this particular society, “the unutterable visions” of this “son of God” (112, 99) may no longer figure and excite an assimilation to the universal, a passage from epiphany to serene contemptus mundi. They are socially conditioned, on the contrary, to kindle a strife for merely personal and financial achievement, to seek a “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” (99).

I have emphasized this “religious” dimension at length because I think it vitally important to appreciate the power, centrality, and dignity of this rapturous pull toward the ideal — its “colossal vitality,” as Fitzgerald puts it: “no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (97) — in order to understand both Fitzgerald and ourselves. The Platonic and medieval worlds — though doubtless deluded in their metaphysics, which they moreover betrayed in their social practice — could affirm that, in some bedrock ontological sense, the real was the radiant and the radiant was the real. The substance of joyous and visionary beauty was not the delusion of a youthful libido or abnormal temperament but rather possessed the stature of noesis: it was, that is to say, the momentary experience of authentic insight into the ultimate nature of reality as ineffably glorious. Against this, we have the society of Daisy and Tom, whose crabbed credo is “I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. . . . Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated!” (18). Fitzgerald’s novel thus stands as a locus classicus of the affective impoverishment, the crippled cynical sensibility, of the twentieth-century West, which has shriveled and discredited the ideal, peripheralizing the human faculty of wonder to the misfit status of the merely “aesthetic.”

At the age of twenty-three, however, Fitzgerald had written to a Catholic friend: “I can quite sympathize with your desire to be a Carthusian. . . . [I am] nearly sure that I will become a priest” (quoted in Bruccoli 109-10). The Catholicism of his upbringing, in which Monsignor Fay had confirmed him as a teenager, was subjected to gnawing doubt in his Princeton years and finally rejected the year after leaving: the sublime cravings of Catholic mysticism had been routed by one for the freshly encountered Zelda; but a form of religious sensibility never left him. Indeed three stories (”The Ordeal,” “Benediction,” and that section on the early life of Gatsby which was to become excised from the novel and form an independent story, “Absolution”) center on the pain, fervor and self-consecration of visionary religious experience. Fitzgerald had been attracted to Catholicism in the first place by the way that Fay had revealed in the “church a dazzling, golden thing,” and by the fact that Fay “loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate.” He was drawn in Fay, as in Gatsby, to “the faith shining through all the versatility and intellect” (Bruccoli 40-41). “There’s that gift of faith that we have, you and I,” Fay had told him, “that carries us past the hard spots” (quoted in Allen 44). Like the young Gatsby in “Absolution,” Fitzgerald outgrew Catholicism but not his sense of the ideal, which he relocated in the City of the World: in a mysterious “something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God” (Fitzgerald, “Absolution” 150). It was, one might comment, a worthy translation, for the great city, at least in one of its aspects, summons the immense poetry of the possibilities of the future, imaging transformation, joy, prosperity and beauty. Musing on the great towering cities, Raymond Williams reflects, “This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then possible?” (6).

It is precisely as a kind of dislocated mystic, surveying North America with the paradoxical eyes of an atheist thirsty for a visio dei, that Fitzgerald becomes, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis, acutely sensitized to what, in his period and ours, replaces the traditional teleological sublime: the allure but also the fraudulence, the “spectroscopic gaiety” and “foul dust” (Gatsby 45, 2), of capitalism’s transaction with the ideal. Transposed into more sociological terms, I hope to demonstrate that Fitzgerald’s deracinated, incorrigible, vocational aestheticism positioned him, in a secular age, as a superlative critic of capitalism’s appropriation and concentration of beauty in a new and historically unique institution: glamour, which Fitzgerald knows as thoroughly as a martyr his Bible. Fitzgerald’s more-than-aestheticism makes possible, in a dialectic of addiction and contempt, a searching demystification of capitalist society and its debased teleology of glamour — which, by the same token, he can never quite renounce. Anti-capitalistic, yet ultimately reactionary, throwing upon the commodity the devotional light of a vanished absolute, The Great Gatsby recalls Luk?cs’ dictum that the characteristic form of the bourgeois novel is that of “the epic of a world abandoned by God” (88).

Although Gatsby has often been exposited in terms of its tragic paradox of corrupt hero and “incorruptible dream” (154-5), nearly all such readings have been conceived in the very general, sometimes even universalizing, “cultural” terms of an erosion of the “American Dream” by “materialism.”1 We need, however, to impart economic and class specificity to such hazy generalities — for so Fitzgerald’s novel did — and one such welcome case is the work of Michael Spindler. My own essay, while it agrees with Spindler’s that Gatsby is “particularly expressive of that ideological conflict which the rise of the leisure class and the growth of consumption-oriented hedonism was generating in American society in the 1920s” (167), will attempt a textually and psychologically fuller reading than Spindler’s shrewd, cogent but very brief study allows. Further, I do not agree that Fitzgerald repudiates and distances himself from Nick’s constant romanticizing of Gatsby’s love of Daisy and of wealth: Nick’s ambivalence is precisely Fitzgerald’s, as his essays, “My Lost City,” “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” and “Early Success” make clear. Such ambivalence can rather be traced, I feel, to the coexistence in Fitzgerald of the cool “Marxian” eye with the fervent “dislocated mysticism” of his Catholic inheritance, though I must also disagree sharply with the sancta simplicitas of Joan Allen’s conclusion in her pious study of “the Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald” that the novels project an Augustinian antithesis of matter and spirit by which the fate of the world and its revelers is one simply of damnation for sin (44, 103). A properly historicist reading of Gatsby is one true, perhaps, not only to the tension we shall see between the work ethic and the ethos of consumption but to the fullness of bathos between the meretricious ideal hymned by capital and the ideal of a joyous, stable and beautiful integrity of being, adumbrated in older traditions: an ideal whose very violation suggests so hauntingly that infinitely richer structures of human social life and feeling are both necessary and possible.

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—. “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” 1931. The Crack-Up. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 9-19.

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—. This Side of Paradise. 1920. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

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Piper, Henry Dan. “Social Criticism in the American Novel in the 1920s.” The American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer. London: Edward Arnold, 1971. 59-83.

Posnock, Ross. “‘A New World, Material Without Being Real’: Fitzgerald’s Critique of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby.” Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby.” Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston: Hall, 1984. 201-13.

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