Write a summary of “The Great Gatsby and the Grotesque”.

Howard S. Babb

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 311. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

Full Text:

[(essay date 1963) In the following essay, Babb analyzes aspects of The Great Gatsby according to the “intermingling of the laughable and the frightening” that characterizes the grotesque in art and literature. He cites exaggeration and distortion in Fitzgerald’s depiction of society, tracing these elements through the structure of the novel, emphasizing relevant events, images, and characterizations.]

Most critics of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work hold The Great Gatsby to be his major achievement, discovering the reasons for its success in such interrelated factors as its concentration, the author’s increased concern with novelistic form, and his use of a narrator to focus the story. Without disputing these findings, I want to call attention in what follows to another formal element in The Great Gatsby: the mode of grotesque representation that Fitzgerald brings to bear time after time. For this mode seems to me the chief source of the story’s power, Fitzgerald conveying through it his most penetrating judgement of the society shown in the novel.

Grotesque is a dangerous term for my purposes, partly because its meaning is notoriously vague. Moreover, when the word is used in a reasonably technical sense—as by Wolfgang Kayser in his book on grotesque art1—it has come to denote some features reflected only partially in The Great Gatsby or not at all: the actual intermixing of different realms of being, for instance, usually the human and the animal; or the suspension of what we ordinarily take to be reality and its laws; or a pervasive air of the fantastic. And we do not really feel—to follow Kayser’s analysis of the grotesque a bit further—that the metaphysical principle animating the world of this novel is the Absurd, or that at bottom “the formations of the grotesque are a game with the Absurd” and thus ultimately suggest “the attempt to exorcise the Demonic” from man’s universe. But if the deepest implications of grotesque art have little relevance to The Great Gatsby, still I think the word does remain applicable. For one important trait of the grotesque is that it represents a world fundamentally like ours, but in a markedly distorted manner, with the result that this world seems alien—fancifully exaggerated, yet uncannily ominous. More than that, the central characteristic of the grotesque is its intermingling of the laughable and the frightening, which precludes the more conventional, more unequivocal sort of response that we associate with comedy or tragedy. It is Fitzgerald’s union of the oddly humorous with the terrifying in his portrait of society in The Great Gatsby that compels one to use grotesque in discussing the book. Also, he makes us aware periodically that the world in this novel is distorted, though not to the degree that it would be in a thoroughly grotesque work.

What tempers the distortion is the continuing presence of a sympathetic narrator in the story, Nick Carraway, and in general his “normality” mutes the grotesque effect of the whole. Insofar as we take the book to be about him, his growing entanglement in the world of Gatsby and the Buchanans via Jordan Baker and his subsequent retreat from the East to the West, our attention is deflected from the Eastern life itself to his conventional moral decision. And in his capacity simply as our point of view, Nick always regards the Eastern world and its inhabitants with a compassion alien to the “cold glance” that marks the perspective of quintessentially grotesque works (Kayser, p. 200). Yet for all of his influence on the story, the world he presents to us reveals its grotesqueness again and again. Incidentally, the book never encourages us to imagine that this quality inheres in Nick’s own way of seeing, with Fitzgerald thus obliquely dramatizing him as a person; rather, Fitzgerald’s attitudes pretty much square with Nick’s—though one feels that the author sees the grotesqueness of the world more readily than the narrator does—and for both of them the quality belongs strictly to the world that they observe. As The Great Gatsby proceeds, the grotesqueness of this world impresses itself little by little on the reader: first through some descriptive passages, later through the representation of certain characters, finally through the very plotting of the climactic incidents. Indeed, Nick himself comes at last to recognize that the reality surrounding him is grotesque, that the convention of reckless behavior which he can accept as appropriate enough to the East’s gay parties informs as well the whole range of this society’s deeds. Under the shock of this discovery, he explicitly calls the world “grotesque,” as we shall see later on, and turns his back on it. Whether Fitzgerald also retreats, ultimately, from this vision of reality as in fact grotesque is a question better postponed until we have noticed the variety of grotesque elements within the story.

The first movement of The Great Gatsby parallels three parties: at the Buchanans’, at Myrtle Wilson’s apartment, and at Gatsby’s. In doing so, it essentially equates the three different social groups in their pursuit of pleasure and their irresponsibility. But clearly the surface of these scenes is much gayer than such a claim would indicate, Fitzgerald exposing us first—along with Nick—to the lighter side of Eastern life. And through this opening third of the book, most of the grotesque passages have a dominantly humorous tone. As we approach each of the parties, Fitzgerald offers some bit of description in which, chiefly by his use of figurative language, he exaggerates one or more details to the point of comic distortion. When we close in on the home of the Buchanans, for example, we are told that “The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run” (p. 8; my italics).2 A similar effect of over-magnification is produced by Nick’s report of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker waiting in a living room full of the wind:

The only completely stationary object … was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains. … Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows … and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.(p. 10; my italics)
In both passages, the figure is continued to the point where what it literally says intrudes upon our attention; Fitzgerald thus leads us to imagine the account momentarily as a factual one rather than merely a way of speaking, and so imparts to his picture a whimsical extravagance3—the quality which he captures again by repeatedly describing Jordan Baker as seeming to balance some object on her chin (pp. 10-11).
The language introducing the apartment of Mrs. Wilson, the mistress of Tom Buchanan, reveals the same kind of distortion:

The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with a copy of “Simon Called Peter,” and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway.(p. 34)
The “to stumble … over” is so pointedly physical that, applied to “scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles,” it actualizes the “scenes” as the things tripped over, making them solidly three-dimensional for a moment. The net result is to inflate the already comic contrast between the refinements of Versailles and the coarseness of the apartment. The ludicrous in the remaining sentences also arises from the juxtaposition of extremes—the “picture” that is not any painting but “an over-enlarged photograph,” the “hen” and “blurred rock” which become “a bonnet” and the face of a woman, the gossip columns which lie side by side with a book concerning religion—all of the contrasts hooting at the vulgarity of Mrs. Wilson.
As Nick begins settling in to his own first party at Gatsby’s, another passage crops up in which our usual perspective on the world is intermittently wrenched askew:

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan [to “the two girls in yellow”], and I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.(p. 52; my italics)
The first italicized phrase we may respond to as a figure hit on at random, one which happens to transform a natural phenomenon into something artificial. But the second expression that I have marked transforms the artificial into something natural, the “tray of cocktails” appearing vaguely possessed with a life of its own. And the third phrase reduces natural, animate “men” to the level of the devitalized, the mechanical, through neutralizing each of them as a featureless “Mr. Mumble.” These interchanges in the normal categories of being occur in such quick succession as to develop a feeling of fantasy. Yet the fantastic is domesticated, as it were, by the number of purely factual comments in the paragraph (about the movements of the girls, Jordan, and Nick) because Fitzgerald employs precisely the same tone for these statements as for his bizarre observations.
While the scenes I have been discussing do strike the reader as chiefly comic, in each of them Fitzgerald adds another dimension to his world by illuminating it briefly from a different angle. For all three contain some more or less muted indication of violence (though how firmly this fact registers with Nick is hard to say) and so echo with the emotional dissonance of the grotesque. At the Buchanans’ party, the relevant details are Daisy’s black and blue mark, and the suppressed quarrel about Tom’s liaison; at Mrs. Wilson’s apartment, Tom’s sudden breaking of her nose; at Gatsby’s, the automobile accident which ends the evening. This accident itself, which virtually concludes the first section of the novel, closes out Nick’s introduction to the Eastern world with a grotesque flourish (pp. 65-68). The incident is wonderfully funny in its unfolding, what with the muddled surprise of the first drunken man, who gets out of the car claiming that he “wasn’t even trying” to drive, and the unexpected emergence of second, who is equally perplexed at the stopping of the car. Yet Fitzgerald sustains an undertone of terror through noting the more sober reactions of the spectators, developing suspense for a few moments about the possibility of injury to the second man, and reminding us frequently of the “amputated wheel.” And of course in spite of the laughs that the men provide, they have clearly acted with no regard for consequences in undertaking to drive at all. Moreover, Fitzgerald induces us to see them as confirmed in irresponsibility even after the accident, for he makes us suppose the first fellow to have been the driver all the while that the man is protesting his ignorance of automobiles, and Fitzgerald allows the second man to persist in his irrational attempts to drive the wrecked car away. The habit of irresponsibility implied here obviously parallels this event with the car accident fatal to Mrs. Wilson at the climax of The Great Gatsby—but the prevailing ludicrousness of the incident at Gatsby’s gives way to a prevailing seriousness in the later incident, the complementary tones defining the grotesque effect of this controlling element in the novel’s structure.

In the course of the story’s second movement (Chapters IV-VI), Nick becomes more and more involved in the Eastern world through attaching himself to Jordan Baker and through helping to advance Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy Buchanan. But the new section is prefaced by that famous list of people who visit Gatsby’s home during the summer. The preface represents the last distanced look at the East that Nick achieves until the close of the novel, and Fitzgerald’s list lights up this world brilliantly, the passage coming nearer than anything else in The Great Gatsby to pure grotesque art (pp. 73-76). For one thing, he manages something like the intermixing of different realms of being in the names which he concocts for these people: names often linking them with the animal world (the Leeches, Blackbuck, Edgar Beaver, the Catlips, Ferret, Francis Bull)—though sometimes with fishes (S. B. Whitebait, the Hammerheads, Beluga), or with the vegetable world (Clarence Endive, Newton Orchid, Ernest Lilly, George Duckweed, Henry L. Palmetto). Also, a number of the names juxtapose elements that seem for one reason or another incongruous: the Willie Voltaires, Russel Betty, Claudia Hip. Yet this splendidly amusing catalogue—and Fitzgerald uses a host of other devices to make his names sound comic—is punctuated again and again with some notation of violence. A single excerpt will illustrate the effect, as well as the types of name-coining just described:

From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand.
The violence, here as everywhere in the list, is so matter-of-factly and circumstantially reported that it belongs to this world as surely as do the bizarrely-named inhabitants. Indeed, the achievement of this whole prelude lies in Fitzgerald’s perfect control of his materials. For, taken together, the details build up the impression of a world too overdrawn to be ours, an alien and absurd world; yet each detail taken alone seems quite plausible, a true enough reflection of our own world.
The second movement proper of the story deals largely with the renewal and past history of the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. In their actual meetings, the grotesque touch is remarkable by its absence. Of course Nick’s growing tendency to ally himself with Gatsby through this phase of the novel disposes him to view the proceedings sympathetically. And Fitzgerald himself, in refraining from treating the meetings grotesquely, seems bent on stirring our compassion for Gatsby and thus on making us respond very differently to the affair with Daisy than we do to Tom’s essentially comparable affair with Mrs. Wilson. But if the author handles Gatsby with kid gloves (as I shall bring out after a moment), he strips them off readily enough when dealing with one of Gatsby’s business acquaintances, Meyer Wolfshiem—Fitzgerald thereby making the East’s professional life appear grotesque, as well as extending his grotesque technique to the representation of character (pp. 83-87). Plainly Wolfshiem’s name itself echoes the animal realm. And Fitzgerald seizes again, though with a less pleasant effect than in his introduction of Jordan Baker, on a physical detail, his repeated descriptions exaggerating Wolfshiem’s nose into a fantastic being: Wolfshiem “regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril”; his “nose flashed at me indignantly”; “His nostrils turned to me in an interested way.” Furthermore, Wolfshiem’s conversation abounds in startling emotional incongruities. For he proceeds without a break from phrases reeking with sentiment for “The old Metropole” (“Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever.”), to the history of a murder (“I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. …”), to a professional inquiry addressed to Nick (“I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion”). The encounters between Gatsby and Daisy, however, show neither the over-exaggerated lines nor the blending of discordant tones that characterize this portrait of Wolfshiem, even though Fitzgerald might easily have developed several details grotesquely. For instance, Gatsby’s display, “one by one,” of a mountainous “pile of shirts” (and thus of his status) to Daisy—on the first visit to his home of the woman he has worshipped so long—is certainly a heightened gesture, and potentially ridiculous. Yet Fitzgerald endows the whole scene so successfully with an air of romantic sentiment that we are forced to regard the gesture simply as Gatsby’s rather extravagant way of offering himself and his life to the person he loves—an effect confirmed by the response of Daisy, who is overwhelmed at her sense of all she feels she has lost in not having waited for Gatsby five years earlier: “‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before’” (p. 112).

But in spite of Gatsby’s blissful reunion with Daisy, the atmosphere of the second movement becomes more and more menacing. We have already noticed the undercurrents of violence in the pages naming Gatsby’s guests and presenting Wolfshiem; and the reunion itself is followed immediately by a vicious snub to Gatsby at the hands of Tom and the Sloanes, and by the party at Gatsby’s—painted now in dominantly harsh colors—which Daisy at last attends and finds offensive. Thus Fitzgerald prepares the way for the lurid closing movement of The Great Gatsby, in which the eruptions of violence drive Nick finally to reject the East.

The very plotting of the climactic incidents seems calculated by Fitzgerald to make the operation of the world appear grotesque. For in the case of Mrs. Wilson being run down by Gatsby’s car, we feel a great disparity between the shocking result and those trivial impulses—Daisy’s, to go to town; Tom’s, to drive Gatsby’s automobile; Jordan’s, to have Tom stop for gas—which unite so casually to make up the necessary conditions for the death. This incongruity magnifies hugely the irresponsibility of the Buchanans’ world as well as the dominance of the merely accidental in the universe of the story. As for Wilson’s determination to avenge the killing of his wife (pp. 188-191): Fitzgerald permits him to mull over the details of Mrs. Wilson’s infidelity with an unknown man (details which cry out the name “Tom” to us), to link the infidelity quite rightly with the death, to identify—with fundamental moral truth—the lover of his wife as the guilty party (“… he killed her …”)—and then to settle on the wrong man. (Clearly Tom is made responsible at bottom for the killing by the fact that Mrs. Wilson is rushing out to seek him in the car which his own words have given her reason to think his, even though Daisy happens to be the actual culprit; in similar fashion, Fitzgerald makes both the Buchanans guilty of Gatsby’s death, Daisy now bearing the chief responsibility in concealing the fact that she was at the wheel, and Tom directing Wilson to Gatsby’s home.) Wilson’s grotesque muddling of moral truth and practical error here has its counterpart on the next page, where he converts Doctor T. J. Eckleburg into God:

… Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.
“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him.(p. 192)
The equation is ludicrous—and of course quite true. For Fitzgerald has prepared us, through the earlier introduction of the billboard and the scattered references to the Doctor in the text, to conceive of him as the Spirit presiding over this world: an informing principle mindless, conscienceless, vaguely associated with money; a God abstracted to the immense pair of eyes which peer out of a vacuum at the human wasteland.4
How fully Nick comprehends the incongruities just discussed is hard to decide. But certainly he is shocked by the violence of events and responds by repeatedly describing the world of the East as “grotesque” during the final stage of the novel. As he uses it, the term means “distorted” and connotes the threatening (but not the laughable). Thus, when he goes to bed after the accident fatal to Mrs. Wilson, “I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams” (p. 176). And grotesque recurs in the vignette, almost at the end of The Great Gatsby, where Nick views the East from a distance once more and expresses his sense of all that has happened:

Even when the East excited me most … it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.(pp. 212-213)
The passage is itself grotesque in the heavily accented lines with which the picture is drawn and in its series of emotional dissonances: the uniting of “conventional” with “grotesque,” of “solemn men” with “drunken woman,” of party with accident (or at least collapse), of the men’s apparent concern for the woman with the mistake they make and with their actual lack of interest in her. In catching together so many of the story’s motifs—parties, violence, money, blunders in identification, a fundamental indifference in personal relations—and coloring them grotesquely, the vignette images most effectively the world which has come to repel Nick and which Fitzgerald has exposed trenchantly through much of The Great Gatsby.
In thus reviewing only the most important ways in which Fitzgerald represents the universe of the novel as grotesque, I have slighted several elements which strengthen this effect. In the matter of characterization, for instance, such minor figures as Wolfshiem, Owl Eyes, and old Mr. Gatz may be the most obvious grotesques. Yet surely something of the same quality attaches to Gatsby himself, even though we have seen Fitzgerald protecting his hero in the scenes with Daisy, and even though the grotesqueness of Gatsby is in general leavened by the admiration of Nick, and I think of Fitzgerald himself, for the very intensity of the hero’s romantic dreams. After all, the author dwells on only a few traits and gestures in sketching Gatsby, thus abstracting the figure to several extravagantly drawn outlines. Moreover, Fitzgerald handles Gatsby so as to bring out a multitude of incongruities: between the public’s version of him as some sort of monster, probably possessed of a sinister German background (p. 73), and the attentive host we see, who in fact has a commonplace origin; between his magnificent visions of Daisy, and the essential worthlessness of the object on which he lavishes them; between his pathetic subjection to human limitations, and his conception of himself as a kind of God;5 between his utterly corrupt activities, and his commitment to an “incorruptible dream” (p. 185). Probably we feel no sense of the grotesque in the characterization of the Buchanans, and certainly none in the portrait of Nick. But the intermingling of figures drawn somehow larger than life with those represented more conventionally is itself a phenomenon of grotesque art.6 Finally, the whole swing of The Great Gatsby from comedy towards tragedy—as the sort of irresponsible behavior treated humorously in the first part of the novel becomes fraught with more and more serious consequences—leaves with the reader an indelible impression of the grotesque.

An indelible impression, but in the last analysis a somewhat blurred one. For we can never escape the narrator of the story. And Nick is constantly made out to be an essentially moral person—even though his judgments may often strike us as less than morally mature. For example, his rejection of the East seems altogether too facile, given his own involvement with Jordan Baker (and perhaps our uneasiness that he should remain as silent about the identity of the car, right after Mrs. Wilson’s death, as Jordan Baker and Tom Buchanan do, yet turn against them almost immediately as somehow guilty). Similarly, his final return to the West seems adolescent, an attempt to preserve the innocence of youth rather than to come to terms with the realities of experience. Yet, despite the inadequacy of these judgments, the association of Nick everywhere with morality acts to put a conventional frame around the world he tells us of, to distance it from us, and so to soften the impact of its grotesqueness. This may be only to say that Fitzgerald is to some extent trapped by his chosen form: that the very narrator who serves to unify the events so powerfully has the effect as well, because of the morality with which he is endowed, of weakening the most compelling vision of reality communicated by the story. But I think we are entitled to wonder whether Fitzgerald himself does not back away, as it were, from this grotesque vision which he has created through the novel’s structures and style. So far as one can discover, his feelings about Gatsby are as ambivalent as Nick’s, both of them finding Gatsby’s vulgarity offensive, yet remaining deeply attracted by Gatsby’s capacity to dream. It is quite typical that, in the well-known concluding paragraphs of the book, the irony at Gatsby’s pursuit of an illusion should be overbalanced by the grandeur he gains through the linking of his dream and his wonder with “the last and greatest of all human dreams,” about “the new world,” and with the “wonder” of the early explorers at their first sight of America (pp. 217-218). But Gatsby’s capacity to dream, particularly when exercised on so trivial a person as Daisy, appears less of a redeeming feature to the reader than to Nick and Fitzgerald. To differentiate Gatsby from his world on this account, as Fitzgerald does, leaves the reader with an impression that the author glosses over the actual corruption which allies Gatsby so firmly with the world of the novel. By thus imbuing its central figure with an aura of sentiment, Fitzgerald inevitably tones down the grotesqueness of the world and to this extent betrays the vision of experience that seems to me to underlie the story.

Although I have been complaining that The Great Gatsby falls short of being pervasively grotesque, the mode is more integrated and consistent here than in Fitzgerald’s other works. A story like “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” may seem potentially grotesque in that it shows Fitzgerald manipulating the most fantastic materials with a straight face; but the tale strikes me as verging on allegory, the whole thing becoming a commentary on our world instead of rendering a world slightly alien to ours. If one hears the emotional dissonance of the grotesque in the conversation of Father Schwartz at the close of “Absolution”, yet the story focuses largely on the boy—and its tone is too prevailingly serious to produce an impression really comparable with The Great Gatsby’s. The same holds true for Fitzgerald’s other completed novels. In The Beautiful and Damned, for example, he seems straining so hard to make the book disillusioned that comic effects (such as our first, distorted view of Gloria Gilbert’s parents) are rare indeed, and potentially grotesque scenes—like the wild parties at the Marietta home or the drunken Anthony Patch’s fight with Bloeckman—feel intended to be simply depressing and significant. Similarly, the scenes of violence in Tender Is the Night—Tommy Barban’s duel with McKisco, or Dick Diver’s beating up in Rome—are managed in accordance with the realistic method of the entire novel. Only in The Great Gatsby does Fitzgerald match his style with his dramatization of events and his portrayal of character to achieve, in a number of crucial passages, a predominantly grotesque effect. These passages are the moments of truth in the novel, a compelling testimony to Fitzgerald’s powers and to his insight. And it is precisely because they are so fine that we wish at last for more: wish that Fitzgerald had sustained his vision and succeeded in rendering the whole of The Great Gatsby in a grotesque mode.

NOTES
1. Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg, 1957)—cited as “Kayser” hereafter. For most of the formulations concerning the grotesque in my second paragraph, I am drawing pretty directly on this very useful book, translating Kayser’s words literally in the quoted passages. There follow some local references to his mention of characteristics listed in my text: the mixed realms of being (p. 25); the suspension of everyday reality and the aura of the fantastic (pp. 22-23); the relevance of the Absurd (pp. 199-202); the “alienated world” (pp. 198-199).

2. I quote from the first edition of The Great Gatsby (New York, 1925)—and later follow its spelling of the name “Wolfshiem.” For allowing me to use his copy of this edition, as well as for general advice about Fitzgerald’s texts, I am grateful to my colleague Matthew Bruccoli. And I am indebted to Roy Harvey Pearce for many suggestions which helped to clarify the argument of this essay.

3. The typical figurative language of Fitzgerald’s style affects us very differently, and it can also be illustrated from The Great Gatsby: “… it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men” (p. 3); “At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor” (p. 181). These expressions are highly intensive, yet they operate quite conventionally, the vehicle subserving the interests of the tenor; whereas in the figures quoted in my text, the vehicle temporarily takes on a life of its own, the total effect verging on the absurd.

4. The passage introducing Doctor Eckleburg is the only grotesque one, through the first movement of the story, in which the effect is more ominous than comic. Fitzgerald is again playing tricks with his language, now transforming ashes into the animate force in this fully circumstanced world presided over by the Doctor:

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the gray land … you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes … are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens. … But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.(pp. 27-28; my italics)
The single touch of humor in this distorted picture, where the desolation looms so large, is Fitzgerald’s reference to the “wild wag of an oculist.”
5. The idea of Gatsby as some sort of God is suggested most directly by Nick’s account of him as self-begotten: one who has sprung “from his Platonic conception of himself” (p. 118). Gatsby’s own conviction that he can “repeat the past” show that he imagines himself in control of time. And he conceives of his relationship with Daisy in absolute terms, first insisting that she confess to “never” having loved Tom (p. 158), and later allowing that whatever love she might have felt for Tom was “just personal” (p. 182). The whole notion of Gatsby’s divinity is reinforced through the language sometimes applied to him—as in Nick’s remark that “we scattered light through half Astoria” (p. 82)—and especially by the way in which Fitzgerald arranges Nick’s introduction to Gatsby so that the latter is suddenly revealed in his true person, comes to be miraculously there (pp. 57-58).

6. See the description of a painting by Velasquez (Kayser, p. 18).

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)Babb, Howard S. ““The Great Gatsby and the Grotesque”.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 311, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420119495/LitRC?u=ccl_deanza&sid=LitRC&xid=c95a304f (Links to an external site.). Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420119495 o

Critical Article #1: Gatsby and the Grotesque
“The Great Gatsby and the Grotesque”

Howard S. Babb

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 311. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

Full Text:

Critical Article #2 “A Note on Gatsby”
A Note on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

David F. Trask

University Review 33.3 (Mar. 1967): p197-202. Rpt. inNovels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. From Literature Resource Center.

[In the following excerpt, Trask asserts that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s critique of the American dream and the outmoded values of traditional America.]

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is certainly more than an impression of the Jazz Age, more than a novel of manners. Serious critics have by no means settled upon what that “more” might be, but one hypothesis recurs quite regularly. It is the view that Fitzgerald was writing about the superannuation of traditional American belief, the obsolescence of accepted folklore. The Great Gatsby is about many things, but it is inescapably a general critique of the “American dream” and also of the “agrarian myth”—a powerful demonstration of their invalidity for Americans of Fitzgerald’s generation and after.

The American dream consisted of the belief (sometimes thought of as a promise) that people of talent in this land of opportunity and plenty could reasonably aspire to material success if they adhered to a fairly well-defined set of behavioral rules-rules set forth in a relatively comprehensive form as long ago as the eighteenth century by Benjamin Franklin. In addition, Americans easily assumed that spiritual satisfaction would automatically accompany material success. The dream was to be realized in an agrarian civilization, a way of life presumed better—far better—than the urban alternative. Thomas Jefferson firmly established the myth of the garden—the concept of agrarian virtue and the urban vice—in American minds. During the turbulent era of westward expansion the myth gained increasing stature.

James Gatz of North Dakota had dreamed a special version of the American dream. Fitzgerald tells us that it constituted “a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” When Gatz lay dead, his father told Nick Carraway that “Jimmy was bound to get ahead.” As a child, Gatz set about preparing to realize his dream. He early decided that he could contemplate future glory so long as he scheduled his life properly and adhered to a set of general resolves— resolves quite obviously derivative from Poor Richard. “No smokeing [sic] or chewing.” “Bath every other day.” “Be better to parents.” Yes, James Gatz was bound to get ahead, bound as securely to his goal as was Captain Ahab to the pursuit of the white whale. The Great Gatsby is the chronicle of what happened when James Gatz attempted to realize the promise of his dream.

Gatz thought himself—very different—from the common run of mankind. We learn that his parents were “shiftless and unsuccessful”—and that: “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.” He possessed a “Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God.” As a son of God— God’s boy—he “must be about His Father’s business.” What was that business? It was “the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Gatz plainly imagined himself a Christ— one of the anointed—born of earthly parents but actually a son of God. This is what Fitzgerald sought to convey in establishing that “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” That conception moved him to seek out goodness and beauty—certainly a prostituted goodness and beauty, but goodness and beauty nevertheless.

When his moment came—at seventeen—James Gatz changed his name. The question of the name change has not received the attention it deserves. Some believe that Fitzgerald derived “Gatsby” from the slang term for pistol current during the Jazz Age—gat. Others see in the act of changing names an intimation of “Jewishness” in the hero, a view supported by the frequency of the name “Jay” among the Jews. Jay Gould comes immediately to mind as do Jay Cooke and J.P. Morgan. Also, it is known that the inspiration for the novel came from Fitzgerald’s chance encounter with a Jewish bootlegger.

It is, of course, conceivable that Fitzgerald had some or even all of these things in mind, and it is also possible that he had still another thought. Could it be, however unlikely, that he was rendering the literal “Jesus, God’s boy” in the name of Jay Gatsby? (In ordinary pronunciation, the `t’ easily changes to “d” as in “Gad.”) This conjecture might appear hopelessly far-fetched, were it not for Fitzgerald’s discussion of Gatz’s “Platonic conception of himself,” and his direct use of the phrase “son of God.” In any case, Gatsby began his pursuit of goodness and beauty when he changed his name, and that pursuit ultimately ended in tragedy.

Fitzgerald develops the tragedy of Jay Gatsby as the consequence of his quixotic quest for Daisy Buchanan. Daisy represents that “vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” to which Gatsby aspired. When Jay met Daisy, he realized that he had “forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath.” He knew that “his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” When he kissed her, “she blossomed for hint like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” What was the incarnation? In Daisy, Gatsby’s meretricious dream was made flesh. He sought ever after to realize his dream in union with her.

The trouble with Gatsby’s quest was that Daisy was completely incapable of playing the role assigned to her. She was as shallow as the other hollow people who inhabited Fitzgerald’s Long Island. She could never become a legitimate actualization of Gatsby’s illegitimate dream. Gatsby was himself culpable. He was not truly God’s boy perhaps, but he possessed a certain grandeur, an incredible ability to live in terms of his misguided dream. Nick Carraway understood this, telling Gatsby at one point that he was “worth the whole damned crowd put together.”

Both Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, possessed wealth. Gatsby at least used his wealth to seek out beauty and claim it for himself. Buchanan the lecher lacked any larger goals. In the end, Daisy chooses to remain with Buchanan, and Gatsby is murdered by the deranged husband of Myrtle Wilson, Buchanan’s mistress, who had been accidentally run down and killed by Daisy. Buchanan serves as Gatsby’s executioner; he allows George Wilson to believe that Gatsby had killed Myrtle.

Gatsby was as alone in death as he had been in life. Of all the hordes who had accepted his largesse when alive, only one—an unnamed “owl-eyed man” who had admired Gatsby’s books— appeared at the funeral. He delivered a pathetic epitaph: “The poor son-of-a-bitch.”

The tragedy is over; Fitzgerald speculates on its meaning through the narrator, Nick Carraway. Carraway notes that Jay and the others—Nick himself, his sometime girl friend Jordan Baker, Daisy, and Tom—all were from the Middle West. It was not the Middle West of popular imagination, of the lost agrarian past, but rather the cities of the middle border. “That’s my Middle West,” muses Carraway, “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.” Carraway continues: Gatsby and his friends “were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” The East held many attractions, but the expatriate Westerner lived there at his peril. So Carraway went home. He could at least survive, though he might not prosper, in prairie cities.

Why had Gatsby failed? It was because the time for dreaming as Gatsby dreamed had passed. In what must be, in its implications, one of the most moving passages in American literature, Fitzgerald completes his commentary on Jay Gatsby: “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast ob-scurit y behind the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

The future to which Gatsby aspired is indeed in the past. His dream—the American dream—had been nurtured in the agrarian past that was no more. Fitzgerald’s symbolism is never more ingenious than in his depiction of the bankruptcy of the old agrarian myth. This task he accomplishes through the most haunting and mysterious of the symbols which appear in the book—the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Here is one of the cruelest caricatures in the American novel. For Dr. T. J. Eckleburg is none other than a devitalized Thomas Jefferson, the pre-eminent purveyor of the agrarian myth.

What is it that Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes survey? It is the valley of democracy turned to ashes—the garden defiled: “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight … [Dr. Eckleburg’s] eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.” Fitzgerald thus presents a remarkably evocative description of the corruption that had befallen Jefferson’s garden.

At the very end of the novel, Fitzgerald betrays his affection for the myth of the garden, despite his awareness that it could no longer serve Americans. His narrator Carraway once again serves as the vehicle for his thoughts: “And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Alas, poor Jay Gatsby! “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning—” Alas, all of us! The novel ends on a desperately somber note: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

American writers in the Twenties were an entirely new breed— divorced from the literary tradition which had matured between the Civil War and World War I. That tradition culminated in the literary Establishment presided over by William Dean Howells in the last years before the outbreak of the Great War. Henry F. May has summarized the basic tenets of Howells and his minions in The End of American Innocence: Howells “had always insisted that real truth and moral goodness were identical, and he had always held that politics and literature were both amenable to moral judgment. He had always believed that American civilization was treading a sure path, whatever the momentary failures, toward moral and material improvement.”

What had outmoded Howells? It was the realization, anticipated before the Great War but complete only in the Twenties, that America had been transformed—transformed by the onset of an overwhelming process of industrialization and urbanization which had superannuated traditional American beliefs—beliefs nurtured in the bosom of the agrarian past.

In these circumstances, a revolution in manners and morals was inevitable. World War I augmented rather than inaugurated the trend. Postwar writers undertook a comprehensive critique of traditional faith. Some abhorred the change; others welcomed it. In any case, almost all of the great writers of the Twenties accepted the fact of the intellectual and emotional revolution deriving from the obsolescence of prewar standards. They launched a comprehensive critique of traditional faiths, and for their efforts they received much public notice and approbation.

What accounts for the success of these literary revolutionists? The answer resides in the fact that America was generally “new” in the Twenties. George Mowry and other recent historians have effectively documented the distinctive “modernity” of America in the wake of World War I—a modernity discernible in the mass culture as well as among the elite. The transitional years had passed; the change from the rural-agricultural past to the urban-industrial future was relatively complete, and readers as well as writers responded to this reality. To be sure, the defenders of the old America ensconced behind crumbling barricades in the Old South and the farther Middle West fought extensive rearguard actions—fundamentalist assaults on evolution, prohibitionist bans on spiritous liquors, and racist campaigns for the preservation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America—but these were last desperate attempts to postpone the inevitable. The most important fact about reaction in the Twenties was that it failed. In each instance “modernity” ultimately triumphed over tradition.

Significant writers in the Twenties were above all dedicated to the imposing task of pointing out the error of living in terms of obsolete values—however useful those values might have been in the past. This effort is perhaps most obvious in the novels of Ernest Hemingway. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway wastes little time investigating the reasons why Jake Barnes, Lady Brett, Robert Cohn, and other characters in the novel must live differently than before. Hemingway’s emphasis is on method—on how to live in the revolutionized context. Scott Fitzgerald dealt with the other side of the coin—the bankruptcy of the old way. Jay Gatsby’s dream was patently absurd—however noble, however “American.” Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were unsound guides to life in the modernity of the vast eastern Urbana, the East of West Egg, Long Island—and also for life in the new Midwest to which the chastened Carraway returned. The final irony of the novel is that Fitzgerald could discern no beauty in the city to compare with the beauty, however meretricious, inherent in Gatsby’s Platonic conception of himself.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)Trask, David F. “A Note on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Novels for Students, edited by Diane Telgen, vol. 2, Gale, 1998. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420013472/LitRC?u=ccl_deanza&sid=LitRC&xid=700abfd7 (Links to an external site.). Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Originally published in University Review, vol. 33, no. 3, Mar. 1967, pp. 197-202.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420013472

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