Bloom's gu

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14. White, the traditional color of purity, is used ironically in the
cases of Daisy and Jordan. Daisy is the white flower with the
golden center, and brass buttons both grace and tarnish her dress.
Off-whites, brass and variants of yellow, symbolize money, greed,
corruption.
28. Joan S. Korenman, A View from the (Queensboro) Bridge,
Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1975), 93 96.
29. Dalton H. Gross, The Death of Rosy Rosenthal: A Note on
Fitzgerald s Use of Background in The Great Gatsby, Notes and
Queries, 23 (January December 1976), 22 23.
30. See Douglas Taylor, The Great Gatsby: Style and Myth, The
Modern American Novel: Essays in Criticism, ed. Max Westbrook (New
York: Random House, 1966), p. 66:
The most eloquent irony of the novel is generated by the subtle
interplay between, on the one hand, the elegance and charm of
Daisy s world as opposed to the cunningness of its inner
corruption and, on the other hand, the gaudy elaborateness of
Gatsby s efforts to emulate its surface as contrasted with the
uncontaminated fineness of his heart.
JOHN F. CALLAHAN ON FITZGERALD S USE OF
AMERICAN ICONOGRAPHY
In dreams begins responsibility, Yeats recalled at the
beginning of one of his volumes, and that is the assertion we
must make about Gatsby and the American dream generally.
What Gatsby overlooks are the connections between culture
and personality. He pursues Daisy without relation to objects,
except (an overwhelming exception) as their accumulation is
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necessary to attain her. He nourishes the fantasy that if one
keeps his goal a pure dream, keeps the focus fixed on the same
being, nothing else that exists is real or necessary. The logic
turns vicious, though, for Gatsby comes more and more to
define himself, as best he can and his best is shoddy and
affected in terms of Daisy s world. Thus when he finally has
Daisy again, he desperately and insecurely diverts her from
himself to his possessions.
Look how the sunset catches my house.
See its period bedrooms.
Feel all my English shirts.
Listen to my man, Klipspringer, play my grand piano
In my Marie Antoinette music room.
He has, during and because of his five-year quest, lost the very
contingent responsiveness which, one imagines, moved Daisy
to him in the first place.
Gatsby s house indeed might as well be a houseboat
sailing up and down the Long Island coast, as the rumors
contend. Material without being real, it is both as
intangible and as monstrously tangible as his dream. To
Gatsby himself it is never real, unless for the moment he
wondrously discovers it while showing it to Daisy, who at
once sees the house as grotesque and dislocated from its
time and place. The house itself? A factual imitation of
some H�tel de Ville in Normandy (6). Its brief cycle of
ownership has descended from German brewer to dreaming
bootlegger. Soon Daisy will find Gatsby himself as irrelevant
to her world and culture, to herself, as is his house. So also
Gatsby s nightmare began when he wedded his unutterable
visions to her perishable breath. We re talking about a
particular cultural vision. Even before he met Daisy,
Gatsby s focus was upon that vast, vulgar, and meretricious
beauty of the America over which goddess Daisy presided.
Or, to paraphrase a question Nicole Warren will ask late in
Tender Is The Night: How long can the person, the woman in
a Daisy Fay transcend the universals of her culture? In
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America, clearly, not very long. An interlude at best. Like
the song said:
In the meantime,
In between time (72)
Jay Gatsby was doomed from the start by just the sort of
Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy in early twentieth-
century small-town America would be likely to invent (75).
Archetypically American are the materials of his self-creation.
True last will and testament seems the biographical document
Henry C. Gatz carries East to his son s funeral. On the inside
cover of a Hopalong Cassidy comic book read SCHEDULE and
as afterthought and afterword: GENERAL RESOLVES. In stark
relief issues Gatsby s cultural context before he leaves home for
St. Olaf s and thereafter for Dan Cody s service. The
SCHEDULE maps out a regimen for every hour of the day. In
addition to the Victorian notion of a sane mind in a sound
body, there is the implicit encouragement toward ambition,
toward the proverbial tradition of American greatness. Worst
of all is the proverbial mode which dissociates success from the
uses of power.
But young Gatz looked beyond Poor Richard to the master
himself in his adolescent determination to study needed
inventions (131). Yes, between 7:00 and 9:00 P.M. after his self-
instruction in elocution and poise. The GENERAL RESOLVES
catalogue those practical-moralistic doses of cultural codliver
oil at the root of Franklin s reading of experience (his public
reading, that is):
No wasting time at Shafers or (a name, indecipherable)
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 (crossed out) $3.00 per week
Be better to parents (132)
Yet annihilating it all to the sixteen-year-old s imagination is
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the paper it is written on. No tabula rasa this Hopalong Cassidy
comic book. Hopalong s white horse and chivalric cowboy
adventures utter the fantasy far more graphically and kinetically
than do the prosaic Alger-Franklin schedules and resolves.
Why shouldn t the young provincial just go and be a hero in an
America beyond the small town? Hopalong Cassidy has no
family either, no continuous identity beyond hat and horse, no
responsibilities other than to preserve law and order and keep
crime rates low in the Wild West. Who can doubt the
inevitability of James Gatz s flight from North Dakota or his
creation of Jay Gatsby? Or his switch of filial allegiance from
shabby, powerless Henry C. Gatz, like St. Joseph merely a serf
in the vineyards, to Dan Cody, patriarch of expansion, man of
action and entrepreneur both, a man who could beat the
Robber Barons at their game of violent ownership, then draw
their jealous admiration at his physical exploits in a Wild West
Show? Quite clearly, Fitzgerald means Dan Cody to be a true
and historical version of Hopalong Cassidy.
* * *
So in each echelon of the world Nick Carraway enters we find
options closed out; in himself because of the failure of
sensibility and moral imagination, with the Buchanans because
of a lack of fundamental decencies. In the case of Gatsby the
end precedes the beginning because that man fails to plant his
identity in subsoil, in earth more responsive to the aesthetic
pulse than the twin shoals of an ahistorical yet all too historic
false heroic (Alger-Cassidy) and a complementary ethic of
salvation by accumulation (Franklin-Cody). But what of
Carraway himself? He is guilty neither of the amoral cruelty of
the Buchanan set like him or not, he does possess some
capacity for relationship nor of Gatsby s delusion that man
can simultaneously ignore and conquer history through a
platonic self-creation derived from and modeled on that very
same history and culture. What are we, the we whom Carraway
invokes in his last prophetic sentence, to do with his absolute
judgment that aesthetic sensibility has, does, will fail to
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penetrate history and culture in America? The assumption is so [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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