Oh dear. I didn’t finish The Great Gatsby by April 30. That’s okay. There’s no expiration date on Gatsby. The book, I mean — Gatsby himself is about to expire, of course:
Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.
Interesting to note how things have changed. Now notoriety and newsworthiness are simultaneous. But the pace was slower then, and only here at the halfway mark of the book is Gatsby reaching the apogee of his success as Gatsby. Nick drops a bomb with little warning:
James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name.
James Gatz was a boy who seized an opportunity perfectly shaped to his ambition to re-invent himself as Jay Gatsby: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself….So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
Gatsby, then, was fixed in a trap of his own making. “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” Of course he would need to believe that he could — the past was all he had. This why, I think, the events on West Egg have a fairy-tale aspect. Overnight, the parties transform the mundane into the magical. In the morning, the lawn is covered with debris and discarded glitter, but by the evening everything is back in place and the party begins again. Gatsby’s realm is timeless, and static.
In the story of Gatsby’s transformation, there’s a hint that James Gatz used almost feminine wiles to secure his place with the millionaire Dan Cody. Cody picked him up in the oddly named Little Girl Bay. “I suppose he smiled at Cody — he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.” Cody supplies him with clothes and employs him “in a vague personal capacity.” “The arrangement lasted five years” — until Cody died. It all sounds very familiar.
Hoping to impress Daisy, he invites her and Tom to one of his parties. The theme of “oblivion” takes center stage: Tom prefers to “look at all these famous people in — in oblivion.” Later, “Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together.” It would be very convenient for Gatsby if Tom were magically to disappear off the face of the earth, and in fact he seems to expect it.
Time can be obliterated as well in this world. Daisy fears the rolling back of the years:
Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.
While Gatsby longs for it:
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken.
In the last paragraph, Fitzgerald as a sort of anti-Proust tells us that even knowledge, memory, and communication have been obliterated:
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.
thx for this
cheers from
somehwere in sydney
[...] Chapter VI [...]
[...] Chapter VI [...]