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    Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and WestAuthor(s): Robert OrnsteinReviewed work(s):Source: College English, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Dec., 1956), pp. 139-143Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/372321 .Accessed: 26/03/2012 02:36

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    COLLEGE ENGLISHgerald's mature realization that the pro-tective enchantment of the romantic ideallies in its remoteness from actuality. Heknows the fascination of yellow windowshigh above the city streets even as he looksdown from Myrtle Wilson's gaudy,smoke-filledapartment.He still remembersthe initial wonder of Gatsby's parties longafter he is sickened by familiarity withGatsby's uninvited guests. In one summerNick discovers a profoundly melancholyesthetic truth: that romance belongs notto the present but to a past transfiguredby imagined memory and to the illusorypromise of an unrealizablefuture. Gatsby,less wise than Nick, destroys himself in anattempt to seize the green light in hisown fingers.At the same time that Fitzgerald per-ceived the melancholy nature of romanticillusion, his attitude towards the very richcrystalized. In Gatsby we see that thecharming irresponsibility of the flapperhas developed into the criminal amoralityof Daisy Buchanan, and that the smugconceit of the Rich Boy has hardened intoTom Buchanan's arrogant cruelty. Weknow in retrospect that Anthony Patch'stragedy was not his "poverty,"but his pos-session of the weakness and purposeless-ness of the very rich without their protec-tive armor of wealth.The thirst for money is a crucial mo-tive in Gatsby as in Fitzgerald's othernovels, and yet none of his major char-acters are materialists, for money is nevertheir final goal. The rich are too accus-tomed to money to covet it. It is simply thebadge of their "superiority"and the justi-ficationof their consuming snobberies.Forthose who are not very rich-for theMyrtle Wilsons as well as the Jay Gatsbys-it is the alchemic reagent that trans-mutes the ordinary worthlessness of life.Money is the demiurgos of Jimmy Gatz'sPlatonic universe, andthe proof, in "Baby-lon Revisited," of the unreality of reality(". .. the snow of twenty-nine wasn't realsnow. If you didn't want it to be snow,you just paid some money"). Even before

    Gatsby, in "The Rich Boy," Fitzgeraldhad defined the original sin of the veryrich: They do not worship material gods,but they "possess and enjoy early, andit does something to them, makes themsoft where we are hard, and cynical wherewe are trustful. . .." Surrounded fromchildhood by the artificial security ofwealth, accustomed to owning rather thanwanting, they lack anxiety or illusion,frustration or fulfillment. Their romanticdreams are rooted in the adolescence fromwhich they never completely escape-inthe excitement of the prom or pettingparty, the reputation of being fast on thecollege gridiron or the college weekend.Inevitably, then, Fitzgerald saw his ro-mantic dream threadedby a double irony.Those who possess the necessary meanslack the will, motive, or capacity to pur-sue a dream. Those with the heightenedsensitivity to the promises of life have itbecause they are the disinherited, foreverbarred from the white palace where "theking's daughter, the golden girl" awaits"safe and proud above the struggles of thepoor." Amory Blaine loses his girl writingadvertising copy at ninety a month. An-thony Patch loses his mind after an abor-tive attempt to recoup his fortune ped-dling bonds. Jay Gatsby loses his life eventhough he makes his millions because theyare not the kind of safe, respectablemoneythat echoes in Daisy's lovely voice. Thesuccessful entrepreneurs of Gatsby's ageare the panderersto vulgar tastes, the highpressure salesmen, and, of course, thebootleggers. Yet once, Fitzgerald suggests,there had been opportunity commensuratewith aspiration, an unexplored and unex-ploited frontier where great fortunes hadbeen made or at least romantically stolen.And out of the shifting of opportunitiesfrom the West to Wall Street, he createsan American fable which redeems as wellas explains romantic failure.But how is one to accept, even in fable,a West characterizedby the dull rectitudeof Minnesota villages and an East epit-omized by the sophisticated dissipation of

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    FITZGERALD'S FABLE OF EAST AND WESTLong Island society? The answer is per-haps that Fitzgerald's dichotomy of Eastand West has the poetic truth of James'santithesis of provincial American virtueand refined European sensibility. LikeThe Portrait of a Lady and The Ambas-sadors, Gatsby is a story of "displacedpersons" who have journeyed eastward insearch of a larger experience of life. ToJames this reverse migration from theNew to the Old World has in itself no spe-cial significance. To Fitzgerald, however,the lure of the East represents a pro-found displacement of the Americandream, a turning back upon itself of thehistoric pilgrimage towards the frontierwhich had, in fact, created and sustainedthat dream. In Gatsby the once limitlesswestern horizon is circumscribed by the"bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyondthe Ohio, with their interminable inquisi-tions which spared only the children andthe very old." The virgin territories ofthe frontiersman have been appropriatedby the immigrant families, the diligentSwedes-the unimaginative, impoverishedGerman farmers like Henry Gatz. Thusafter a restless nomadic existence, theBuchanans settle "permanently"on LongIsland because Tom would be "a Goddamned fool to live anywhere else." ThusNick comes to New York with a dozenvolumes on finance which promise "to un-fold the shining secrets that only Midas,Morgan and Maecenas knew." Gatsby'sgreen light, of course, shines in only onedirection-from the East across the Conti-nent to Minnesota, from the East acrossthe bay to his imitation mansion in WestEgg.Lying in the moonlight on Gatsby's de-serted beach, Nick realizes at the close justhow lost a pilgrimage Gatsby's had been:... I becameaware of the old island herethat had flowered once for Dutch sailors'eyes-a fresh, green breast of the newworld. Its vanishedtrees, the trees that hadmade way for Gatsby's house, had oncepanderedin whispers to the last and great-est of all human dreams; for a transitory

    momentman must have held his breath inthe presenceof this continent,compelled ntoan aestheticcontemplationhe neither under-stood nor desired, face to face for the lasttime in history with something commen-surate to his capacity for wonder.Gatsby is the spiritual descendantof theseDutch sailors. Like them, he set out forgold and stumbled on a dream. But hejourneys in the wrong direction in timeas well as space. The transitory enchantedmoment has come and gone for him andfor the others, making the romanticpromise of the future an illusory reflec-tion of the past. Nick still carries withhim a restlessness born of the war's ex-citement; Daisy silently mourns the ro-manticadventureof her "white"girlhood;Tom seeks the thrill of a vanished footballgame. Gatsby devotes his life to recaptur-ing a love lost five years before. When thepresent offers nothing commensurate withman's capacity for wonder, the romanticcredo is the belief-Gatsby's belief-in theability to repeat the disembodied past.Each step towards the green light, how-ever, shadows some part of Gatsby'sgrandiose achievement. With Daisy's dis-approval the spectroscopic parties cease.To preserve her reputationGatsbyemptieshis mansion of lights and servants. Andfinally only darknessand ghostly memoriestenant the deserted house as Gatsby re-lives his romantic past for Nick after theaccident.Like his romanticdreamJay Gatsby be-longs to a vanished past. His career beganwhen he met Dan Cody, a debauchedrelicof an earlier America who made his mil-lions in the copper strikes. From Cody hereceived an education in ruthlessnesswhich he applied when the accident ofthe war brought him to the beautifulhouse of Daisy Fay. In the tradition ofCody's frontier, he "took what he couldget, ravenously and unscrupulously," butin taking Daisy he fell in love with her."She vanished into her rich house, into herrich full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. Hefelt married to her, that was all."

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    COLLEGE ENGLISH"He felt married to her"-here is thereaction of bourgeois conscience, not ofcalculating ambition. But then Gatsby isnot really Cody's protege. Jimmy Gatz

    inherited an attenuated version of theAmerican dream of success, a more moraland genteel dream suited to a nation ar-riving at the respectability of establishedwealth and class. Respectability demandsthat avarice be masked with virtue, thatpersonal aggrandisement pose as self-im-provement. Success is no longer to thecutthroator the ruthless but to the diligentand the industrious, to the boy who scrib-bles naive resolves on the flyleaf of Hopa-long Cassidy. Fabricated of pulp fictioncliches (the impoverished materials ofan extraordinary imagination), Gatsby'sdream of self-improvement blossoms intoa preposterous tale of ancestral wealthand culture.And his dream is incorruptiblebecause his great enterprise is not side-street "drugstores," or stolen bonds, buthimself, his fictional past, his mansion andhis gaudy entertainments. Through itall he moves alone and untouched; he isthe impressario, the creator, not the en-joyer of a riotous venture dedicated toan impossible goal.It may seem ironic that Gatsby's dreamof self-improvement is realized throughpartnership with Meyer Wolfshiem, butWolfshiem is merely the post-war succes-sor to Dan Cody and to the ruthlessnessand greed that once exploited a virginWest. He is the fabulous manipulator ofbootleg gin rather than of copper, themodern man of legendary accomplishment"who fixed the World's Series back in1919." The racketeer, Fitzgerald suggests,is the last great folk hero, the Paul Bunyanof an age in which romantic wonder sur-rounds underworld "gonnegtions" insteadof raw courage or physical strength. Andactually Gatsby is destroyed not by Wolf-shiem, or association with him, but by theprovincial squeamishness which makes allthe Westerners in the novel unadaptableto life in the East.Despite her facile cynicism and claim

    to sophistication, Daisy is still the "nice"girl who grew up in Louisville in abeautiful house with a wicker settee on theporch. She remains "spotless," still im-maculately dressed in white and capableof a hundredwhimsical, vaporous enthusi-asms. She has assimilated the urbaneethicof the East which allows a bored wife acasual discreet affair. But she cannot, likeGatsby's uninvited guests, wink at the il-legal and the criminal. When Tom beginsto unfold the sordid details of Gatsby'scareer, she shrinks away; she never in-tended to leave her husband, but now evenan affair is impossible.Tom's provincialityis more boorish than genteel. He has as-sumed the role of Long Island countrygentleman who keeps a mistress in a mid-town apartment. But with Myrtle Wilsonby his side he turns the role into a ludi-crous travesty. By nature a libertine, byupbringing a prig, Tom shatters Gatsby'sfacade in order to preserve his "gentle-man's" conception of womanly virtue andof the sanctity of his marriage.Ultimately, however, Gatsby is the vic-tim of his own small-town notions of vir-tue and chivalry. "He would never somuch as look at a friend's wife"-or atleast he would never try to steal her inher husband's house. He wants Daisy tosay that she never loved Tom because onlyin this way can the sacrament of Gatsby's"marriage"to her in Louisville-his priorclaim-be recognized. Not content merelyto repeat the past, he must also eradicatethe years in which his dream lost itsreality. But the dream, like the vanishedfrontier which it almost comes to repre-sent, is lost forever "somewhere back inthat vast obscurity beyond the city, wherethe dark field of the republic rolled onunder the night."After Gatsby's death Nick prepares toreturn to his Minnesota home, a place ofwarmth and enduring stability, carryingwith him a surrealistic night vision of thedebauchery of the East. Yet his return isnot a positive rediscovery of the well-springs of American life. Instead it seems

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    FITZGERALD'S FABLE OF EAST AND WESTITZGERALD'S FABLE OF EAST AND WESTa melancholy retreat from the ruinedpromise of the East, from the empty pres-ent to the childhood memory of the past.Indeed, it is this childhood memory, notthe reality of the West which Nick cher-ishes. For he still thinks the East, despiteits nightmarish aspect, superior to thestultifying small-town dullness from whichhe fled. And by the close of Gatsby it isunmistakably clear that the East does notsymbolize contemporarydecadenceandtheWest the pristine virtues of an earlierAmerica. Fitzgerald does not contrastGatsby's criminality with his father's un-spoiled rustic strength and dignity. Hecontrasts rather Henry Gatz's dull, grey,almost insentient existence, "a meaning-less extinction up an alley," with Gatsby'spilgrimage Eastward, which, though hope-less and corrupting, was at least a journeyof life and hope-an escape from the "vastobscurity" of the West that once spawnedand then swallowed the American dream.Into this vast obscurity the Buchanansfinally disappear. They are not Western-ers any longer, or Easterners, but merelytwo of the very rich, who in the end repre-sent nothing but themselves. They arecareless people, Tom and Daisy, selfish,destructive, capable of anything excepthuman sympathy, and yet not sophisti-

    a melancholy retreat from the ruinedpromise of the East, from the empty pres-ent to the childhood memory of the past.Indeed, it is this childhood memory, notthe reality of the West which Nick cher-ishes. For he still thinks the East, despiteits nightmarish aspect, superior to thestultifying small-town dullness from whichhe fled. And by the close of Gatsby it isunmistakably clear that the East does notsymbolize contemporarydecadenceandtheWest the pristine virtues of an earlierAmerica. Fitzgerald does not contrastGatsby's criminality with his father's un-spoiled rustic strength and dignity. Hecontrasts rather Henry Gatz's dull, grey,almost insentient existence, "a meaning-less extinction up an alley," with Gatsby'spilgrimage Eastward, which, though hope-less and corrupting, was at least a journeyof life and hope-an escape from the "vastobscurity" of the West that once spawnedand then swallowed the American dream.Into this vast obscurity the Buchanansfinally disappear. They are not Western-ers any longer, or Easterners, but merelytwo of the very rich, who in the end repre-sent nothing but themselves. They arecareless people, Tom and Daisy, selfish,destructive, capable of anything excepthuman sympathy, and yet not sophisti-

    cated enough to be really decadent. Theirirresponsibility, Nick realizes, is that ofpampered children, who smash up "thingsand creatures . . . and let other peopleclean up the mess." They live in theeternal moral adolescence which onlywealth can produce and protect.By ignoring its context one can per-haps make much of Nick's indictment ofthe Buchanans. One can even say that inThe Great Gatsby Fitzgerald adumbratedthe coming tragedy of a nation growndecadent without achieving maturity-anation that possessed and enjoyed early,and in its arrogant assumption of superi-ority lost sight of the dream that hadcreated it. But is it not absurd to interpretGatsbyas a mythic Spenglerian anti-hero?Gatsby is great, because his dream, how-ever naive, gaudy, and unattainable is oneof the grand illusions of the race whichkeep men from becoming too old or toowise or too cynical of their human limita-tions. Scott Fitzgerald's fable of East andWest does not lament the decline ofAmerican civilization. It mourns theeternal lateness of the present hour sus-pended between the past of romanticmemory and the future of romanticprom-ise which ever recedes before us.

    cated enough to be really decadent. Theirirresponsibility, Nick realizes, is that ofpampered children, who smash up "thingsand creatures . . . and let other peopleclean up the mess." They live in theeternal moral adolescence which onlywealth can produce and protect.By ignoring its context one can per-haps make much of Nick's indictment ofthe Buchanans. One can even say that inThe Great Gatsby Fitzgerald adumbratedthe coming tragedy of a nation growndecadent without achieving maturity-anation that possessed and enjoyed early,and in its arrogant assumption of superi-ority lost sight of the dream that hadcreated it. But is it not absurd to interpretGatsbyas a mythic Spenglerian anti-hero?Gatsby is great, because his dream, how-ever naive, gaudy, and unattainable is oneof the grand illusions of the race whichkeep men from becoming too old or toowise or too cynical of their human limita-tions. Scott Fitzgerald's fable of East andWest does not lament the decline ofAmerican civilization. It mourns theeternal lateness of the present hour sus-pended between the past of romanticmemory and the future of romanticprom-ise which ever recedes before us.

    T h e Genu i n e a n d Counterfeit:A S t u d y i n Victorian a n dM o d e r n F i c t i o n

    WAYNEBURNS

    T h e Genu i n e a n d Counterfeit:A S t u d y i n Victorian a n dM o d e r n F i c t i o n

    WAYNEBURNSAnd here lies the vast importanceof thenovel, properlyhandled.It can inform andlead into new places the flow of our sympa-thetic consciousness, and it can lead oursympathyin recoil from things gone dead.. .. But the novel . . . can also excite spuri-ous sympathies and recoils . .. can glorify

    And here lies the vast importanceof thenovel, properlyhandled.It can inform andlead into new places the flow of our sympa-thetic consciousness, and it can lead oursympathyin recoil from things gone dead.. .. But the novel . . . can also excite spuri-ous sympathies and recoils . .. can glorify

    the most corrupt feelings, so long as theyare conventionally "pure."-D. H. LAWRENCEThe human mind has broadened sinceHomer. Sancho Panza'sbelly has burst theseams of Venus' girdle.... Hence, what I

    the most corrupt feelings, so long as theyare conventionally "pure."-D. H. LAWRENCEThe human mind has broadened sinceHomer. Sancho Panza'sbelly has burst theseams of Venus' girdle.... Hence, what I

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