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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER

Lecture 4 - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby [September 13, 2011]
Chapter 1. Maxwell Perkins and the Vagueness of Gatsby [00:00:00]
Professor Wai Chee Dimock: We'll get started on The Great Gatsby. I'm sure that you guys have your own views
on the novel. So what I'll be talking about today is in some sense a more focused or sharp-edged take on Gatsby, which
you're certainly free to dispute in section.
But I want to begin with Maxwell Perkins. And his name actually came up last time -- when Fitzgerald read the In Our
Time stories, the Paris edition, the person he wrote to was Maxwell Perkins, to say that he's the real thing, you have to
get him. So Maxwell Perkins is obviously very important. I would say that he really is the muse of the 1920s. The
muse doesn't have to be a woman, doesn't have to be a romantic relation. He's just a very good reader, careful reader,
critical reader, as we'll see.
And this is a book about Maxwell Perkins and his three sons, Fitzgerald on the left, Hemingway in the middle, and
Thomas Wolfe on the right. And these people wrote to him constantly. He really was the mentor and muse to all three
of them. And so Hemingway and Fitzgerald have that in common as well. It's great to have an editor that you're both
responding to.
Anyway, Maxwell Perkins was the one who read the initial drafts of The Great Gatsby, and this is what he said
November 20, 1924.
"Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader's eyes can never quite focus upon him. His outlines are dim. Now everything
about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e., more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but
I think it is mistaken. Couldn't he be physically described as distinctly as the others, and couldn't you add one or two
characteristics like the use of that phrase 'old sport,' not verbal, but physical ones, perhaps?"
Very upfront about what he likes, and in this case, what he doesn't like. And he's also giving us the terminology, words
like vague, to think about The Great Gatsby. And this is what Fitzgerald says back in turn December 20, 1924.
"Strange to say my notion of Gatsby as vacant was OK. This is a complicated idea, but I'm sure you'll understand. I
know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct after your letter was to let him go and have Tom
Buchanan dominate the book. But Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for a while, then lost him, and now I know I
have him again."
You can't have a better description of an author's relation to his creation. And I think that this is actually probably
quite common, the feeling that you know this character better than you know your family members. But in this case,
Fitzgerald is also being quite deliberate and stubborn in not giving in to Maxwell Perkins' suggestion that he should
make Gatsby less vague.
Chapter 2. The Experimentalism of The Great Gatsby [00:03:51]
And one other quote from Fitzgerald to Perkins. This is much later, in 1940.
"I wish I was in print. It would be odd a year or so from now when Scottie"--his daughter--assures her friends I was
an author and finds that no book is procurable. Will the $0.25 press keep Gatsby in the public eye, or is the book

unpopular? Has it had its chance? But to die so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now, there is
little published in American fiction that doesn't slightly bear my stamp. In a small way, I was an original."
It's heartbreaking that Fitzgerald in fact never knew that The Great Gatsby would become the kind of book that it now
is. He would have been totally flabbergasted. His idea was that this was something that would just completely
disappear.
So I think that we can see several things from this exchange. First is that Fitzgerald really didn't know how this book
was going to end up. It's a matter of hindsight that we are able to say now that this is the American classic. He didn't
know that it wasn't a classic back then. It was experimental. So we shouldn't lose sight of that fact. It was an
experiment, and he really didn't know if it was going to come out well or not. In fact, his hunch, even in 1940, was that
it was going to be a failure, that it was going to go nowhere: that it wasn't going to be picked up by anyone, that all this
effort, so much given to the novel, all that was going to come to nothing. I think that this in itself suggests to us the
experimental nature, that he was trying something new and because we're so used to it now, in some sense, it stops
being new to us. So it's very important to go back to that original sense of things being in flux and not being sure if this
was the way things were going to go.
The other interesting point about this letter is that Fitzgerald said that, "In a small way, I was an original." This is not
actually modesty. I think that he's very proud of the fact that in a small-- well, no, it is modesty too -- but I think that
he's also taking pride in the fact that his greatness resides in his smallness, that it's really in the small details of The
Great Gatsby that he would most like to be read. So we are very much operating on the micro register today,
respecting Fitzgerald's sense of what kind of an author he was.
Chapter 3. Counter-Realism in The Great Gatsby [00:06:56]
And what I'd like to do today--this is basically the outline for today's lecture--is to take the terminology from Maxwell
Perkins--vagueness--and add a slightly more formal term and also stretching it a little bit. So the term that I'd like to
propose for us to consider today, as a synonym for vagueness, is counter-realism. We know that there's a lot that is
realistic in The Great Gatsby, but there's also a strain of counter-realism. And maybe that's why it gives the impression
of being vague. And I'd like to tease out some of the attributes or manifestations of the counter-realist mode of writing.
First of all -- and I'll explain all this -- but there's some desire to capture motion. This is actually something that was
done in 19th-century photography, daguerreotype, trying to capture motion. This was started very much by using
machines and the early camera to capture motion. And I think that Fitzgerald was trying to do something like that
in The Great Gatsby.
Another component of this counter-realism is the uncertain boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, and
related to that, human attributes, properties of human personalities or properties of the human body being channeled
or routed through properties of the machine. And then, going back to our discussion of comedy and tragedy, there's a
variety of high-tech comedy and a variety of high-tech tragedy in this novel, but they're also interconnected.
Let's first look at what Fitzgerald is trying to do in capturing motion. But I thought that I would just give you a
completely static image of the mansion. This is the Guggenheim Mansion. Merve mentioned that she went to a
wedding there.
Merve: My senior prom.
Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Your senior prom. And all of us can go and visit. Since this is the Guggenheim
Mansion, it's over-the-top. But this is the nature of those mansions at Sand's Point or East Egg, where Tom and Daisy
live. And so this is a very static--very impressive but static image of a mansion.
Chapter 4. The Animation of the Inanimate [00:09:39]
Let's see how Fitzgerald describes that Buchanan mansion.

"The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front lawn for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick
walls and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the
momentum of its run."
It's completely not a static description at all. There's a little bit of static description of what the house looks like, but I
think what jumps out at us is the translation of a static physical object into motion. This is not even trying to capture
something that is actually moving but trying to attribute motion to something that is otherwise stationary and static.
And this is quite early, so we don't quite know yet why Fitzgerald would choose to write in this way. But definitely, this
is a very, very deliberate way of writing, so make sure to keep that in mind. There's quite often a kind of conversion.
Conversion takes place all the time in Fitzgerald. We've already seen that he converts qualities of sound into visual
images. And he also converts stationary objects into moving objects. It gives a sense that, even right here, we can say
that it's almost as if the lawn has agency. It's not just sitting there. It's not just a lawn that is mowed by someone. It
starts somewhere, it goes someplace, it jumps over things, it generates its own momentum. The least we can say is
that inanimate objects in Fitzgerald have life and motion and agency.
And that has tremendous implications both for those inanimate objects and possibly also for animate objects, like
human beings. When you have inanimate objects taking on the properties of animate human beings, what happens to
human beings, who are supposedly in possession of those properties? This is not a dramatic moment, but it says a lot
about the strategy that Fitzgerald uses. Let's go on now and look more at the boundaries between the animate and the
inanimate, because I think that this is really a major strategy performed throughout The Great Gatsby. This is an
image of Corona, which is the original for the Valley of Ashes that Fitzgerald describes somewhere. Just this no-man's
land, even in this very desolate visual image. But still we can visualize such a place, desolate as it is.
Let's look at the way Fitzgerald describes this place.
"About halfway between West Egg and New York, the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a
quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. 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 grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and
comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud,
which screens their obscure operations from your sight."
I honestly don't know what Fitzgerald is talking about, whether he's really talking about actual ash-grey men. Who are
those men? They don't look like people who work at gas stations. We just don't know what they are. So by the time we
get to the end of the passage, the ontological status of the passage is reallly in doubt. We don't know if this is just
hallucination, if this is an optical illusion, or something even worse than that, a hallucination on the part of Nick.
So we can now see the fact that inanimate objects have agency and are capable of moving, that they tend to render the
visual field very wobbly, very shaky. It's quite often out of focus. Quite often, it's like a camera that is moving, this
blurry image. We don't exactly know what we're looking at. But even though we can't exactly say, we can name the
thing that we're looking at. There is something grotesque about this scene, and the grotesqueness comes not so much
from the landscape itself: in the original landscape, it's just sad, but it's not especially grotesque. The grotesqueness
comes entirely from Fitzgerald's rhetoric, from his rhetorical intensification of that landscape. Ashes growing like
wheat and into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, ashes taking the form of houses, and so on, and maybe ashes
turning into those ash-grey men, maybe they're just optical illusions, that they're not really biological human beings.
We don't know.
It seems as if there's a grotesque fecundity to inanimate objects. Ashes are capable of reproduction. They are capable of
reproducing themselves in a way that we tend to think that only animate things are capable of doing. Reproduction is
not a property, is not a prerogative of inanimate objects. But here, it seems as if it actually is within the province of
inanimate objects to be grotesquely reproductive.

So already what we're beginning to see is the writing-over of a lot of the things that we had imagined to be on the
human side of the equation. All those things that we have, that are in our possession, that we are the sole owners of -all those things are being written over to inanimate objects that might or might not be benign to us. Because we don't
really know what the relation is between these inanimate objects and us.
But I think there's yet another twist to this passage, and it has to do with a very unobtrusive but I would say nontrivial
phrase, which is "the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile." Do you guys
remember anything, hearing that phrase before? "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front lawn for a
quarter of a mile." This is the kind of verbal echo, a very small but telling detail that suggests that those two passages
are connected. We can really see what kind of a craftsman he is, a genius in a small way. That's why he's so great -it's this seemingly factual phrasing that serves as the bond between those two passages.
The suggestion would seem to be that there's kind of an underside to the Buchanan garden, grand mansion, going on
and on, that the Valley of Ashes is the underside. And in fact, the two of them actually have a lot in common. And the
life, the strange and obscure but very fertile and menacing life of the inanimate object would seem to be the common
ground between those two. So we don't have to read very far into Great Gatsbyto know that there's something very
wrong with that marriage between Tom and Daisy. And the landscape itself suggest that the desolation is never really
absent from that household.
Chapter 5. The Human and the Machine [00:19:31]
I know that we are all thinking about Gatsby because really Maxwell Perkins objected mostly to this portrait of Gatsby,
that he's very vague. So here is this 1974 version embodied by Robert Redford of Gatsby. And I have to say, when I see
this, it's not--I wouldn't say it's not not my image of Gatsby, but it's also not my image of Gatsby either, because I really
haven't really visualized Gatsby all that much. So I have a funny relation to this. It's OK, but I guess I really could do
without it.
But anyway, it is an interesting foil to what Fitzgerald is trying to do. Certainly we should see the movie, but the book
is trying to do something very different. Fitzgerald is not trying to create a Robert Redford-like image of Gatsby.
And that is why Maxwell Perkins thinks that Gatsby is vague:
"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register
earthquakes 10,000 miles away."
There is almost no physical description. This is very early--it's true, we haven't seen Gatsby--but there really is never a
full-fledged physical description of Gatsby. And instead, we get these very oblique, very abstract descriptions of Gatsby
telling us about his personality, but not even supplying us with adjectives to name that.
So we can just look at the simple level of syntax. Its heading is circuitous. It's in the conditional tense. "If" it begins
with the word "if" -- "If personality is an unbroken series." So right there, it's not even a declarative sentence. It's a
conditional sentence, "if" and "then" construction. Nick is not even fully committing himself to that description. He's
holding back to some degree. And not only that, not only is there this very obtrusive conditionality to the syntax, but
then out of nowhere, there's this description that Gatsby is related to this machine, seismograph machine that "register
earthquakes 10,000 miles away." It really isn't very graphic at all. It's not a visual analogy. Gatsby does not look in the
least like that kind of machine. We don't know what he looks like, but we know for sure he doesn't look like one of
those machines. So it is not an analogy that's helping us to visualize Gatsby. Quite the contrary. That's why I think that
the movie is really its own entity -- it's not really related to the book, it's a totally different medium. It is the linguistic
medium that Fitzgerald is working with and is trying to do something different.
And I have to say, it is an open question: some of us actually are more stimulated by the visual medium than by the
linguistic medium. So I'm not saying here that the movie is absolutely inferior to the novel. But I do think that we have
to be sure to give the linguistic medium its due, in the sense that it really is trying to do something different.

So we don't know what Gatsby is like, other than that he is someone who seems to be able to work with great distances,
registering an earthquake 10,000 miles away. That is really not a skill or talent that is necessary in The Great Gatsby.
There are no earthquakes in The Great Gatsby. But there is something that does call for a long-distance tenacity and
persistence, which is across time, being able to be faithful to one idea. It's not 10,000 miles away, but over a
significant number of years, and remaining stubbornly attached to that one idea of a woman.
So right there, there's also a substitution or a transposition of a temporal attribute onto a spatial attribute as well. But
in any case, by not completely pinning Gatsby down, I think that Fitzgerald is really inviting us to project our own
meaning or project our own reading of Gatsby into this very loosely assembled portrait: pointed, but oddly enough,
pointed but not focused. It's a paradox. I think that that's really the effect that Fitzgerald is trying to cultivate.
We spent quite a bit of time talking about comedy and tragedy last couple of classes. And I want to bring those back
now and talk a bit, once again, about them as a mixture, that they are not two very discrete genres in the three authors
that we are reading. They tend to be very much crossover genres in The Great Gatsby.
And here, because machines are so important in this novel, comedy is quite often channeled through high-tech
gadgets. And here is one very local, just-right-there instance of comedy.
"Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York. Every Monday these same
oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could
extract the juice of 200 oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed 200 times by a butler's thumb."
I think that Fitzgerald is having fun with this. This is comedy both as it comes to us but also comedy in the act of
composition. This is obviously an author who's having a good time writing about this, this reduction of the butler to
just his thumb, and the thumb reduced once more to a completely utilitarian function of pressing this button 200
times in half an hour, and having this effect on the oranges.
All this is hilarious. I guess it's terrible if we think about it from the butler's point of view, that this is what he has to
do. And maybe it's repetitive, monotonous, terrible labor, if were the ones stuck doing that. But, as Fitzgerald is
telling the story, it's really not supposed to be tragic. It is comic, although I would say that tragedy, or at least the
phenomenon of unbearable, repetitive labor, is not so far away either. That is the nature of comedy here.
Chapter 6. The Telephone [00:27:40]
We'll move on. That little machine, even though it's memorable, it's not a star player in The Great Gatsby. The
telephone is a star player. And this is an image of what the telephone looked like a very glamorous-looking machine,
very beautiful. So you can see why people would want to write works of literature about such a beautiful machine. And
you guys know I'm going to talk about that phone ringing when the Buchanans are having dinner, so we'll get there.
But for now, I just want to have a little detour by way of the great poet who mostly is known for his writing about
nature and is not known for his writing about technology, Robert Frost. But Robert Frost actually has a poem called
"The Telephone." And I think it's a very useful counterpoint, actually, to Fitzgerald. You'll decide whether or not he's
really talking about a telephone. The title of the poem is "The Telephone." And, often in Frost, there is this dramatic
dialogue, a dialogue between two speakers:
"Having found the flower and driven the bee away,/ I leaned my head./ And holding by the stalk, / I listened and I
thought I caught the word --/ What was it? Did you call me by my name?/ Or did you say -- / Someone said, 'Come'--I
heard it as I bowed./ I may have thought as much, but not aloud./ Well, so I came."
It's a lovely poem, and it's a love poem about two people who are in love. We don't know the gender, actually, but I
think it's a man and a woman. It's someone really wanting to see someone and just finding an excuse to come and see
that person and claiming that he's hearing a voice telling him to come. And that is the telephone, in big quotation
marks. Frost calls it by that name, but he's really not talking about the machine. He's talking about some kind of
audible bond, or a bond of audibility, that just brings one person to the presence of another person. And that is the

telephone line. It is an emotional cord that really binds one person. And that is the most powerful telephone line of
all.
It's a lovely poem, and it's very much humanizing the telephone, turning it into an emotional, romantic context
charged with human emotions. And it's really the fact that it's the carrier of human emotions that makes the telephone
such an important human vehicle. It has been completely assimilated into the everyday world of human intimacy.
Let's see what Fitzgerald does with the telephone.
"The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom, the subject of the stables, in
fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table, I remember the
candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all
eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have
mastered a certain hardy skepticism, was able to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind."
This is the other end of the spectrum from Robert Frosty. Actually, the telephone here is also charged with intense
emotions. This is not just a machine. So we can almost say that machines are always carriers of human emotions in
one way or another. And that's why they're important machines. If they were just like that button that the butler
presses with his thumb, it wouldn't be a very important presence at all. But the telephone is a very important presence
in The Great Gatsby.
And what's interesting about this particular scenario, constructed around this high-tech machine of the 1920s, is the
association of this high-tech machine with an intrusive force into a traditional household. Before the telephone rang, it
was a pleasant occasion. Daisy and Tom and her cousin, Nick, and good friend, Jordan Baker, are all sitting down to a
very civilized dinner. And in the course of that civilized dinner, suddenly, the appearance of barbarian hordes that was
mentioned by Tom hes reading this book about the rise of the colored empires. So there's the first intrusion of
somebody not wanted, but not quite dismissible. That is not a trivial point, because actually Daisy then picks this up
and starts talking about her white girlhood. So The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard, that Tom has been
reading this is the first intrusive, uninvited guest. It's just a book, but it still was an uninvited guest to the dinner.
And then there's a second uninvited guest, coming by way of the telephone. We can almost say there's a causal relation
between them. It's not as if the telephone is always bringing in people from a different social class -- though we know
later that Myrtle, who's calling here, is of such a unacceptable social class that even though she's OK as a mistress, it's
not OK for her to mention Daisy's name. When she mentions Daisy's name, Tom breaks her nose. This is the taboo
that Tom would not allow Myrtle to break. Someone like her has no right to mention his wife's name.
That comes later. Right now, all we know is that there's a lot of malice on the part of Myrtle. If you want to talk to
someone discreetly, you don't call during dinnertime. So it was a call that comes bearing malice to begin with and is
met with--well, malice, or just the luxury of being able to ignore her, which is what Daisy and Tom are summoning at
this moment. So all the social antagonisms that are bubbling, actually, beneath the surface of The Great Gatsby, all
those antagonisms are being foregrounded by this high-tech machine. We shouldn't forget: The Great Gatsby is not a
book about race. We have to be very careful that, even though there's a reference to Rise of the Colored Empires, it's
not primarily about race. But race is also not trivial inThe Great Gatsby. Somebody should write a paper about this,
beginning with the reference to The Rise of the Colored Empires.
There's a persistent undercurrent of blackness, actually, in this novel, just as there is also an undercurrent of
Germanism -- Gatsby is supposed to be in the pay of the German army. He's supposed to be a cousin of the Kaiser. All
of those are quite peculiar and quite insistent. As you go on to write papers, this is something to notice. They are
marginal references, but they are not trivial.
Chapter 7. The Automobile [00:36:55]
Let's look now at the real star player, the high-tech machine thats going to be the star player all the way through The
Great Gatsby, which is the car. And we should call it automobile, because it's a more dignified name. So here's the

automobile -- the 1920s Rolls-Royce. And this other one is a pretty good approximation of the car that was used
in The Great Gatsby. And we see Nick and Gatsby there, Sam Waterston as Nick, Robert Redford as Gatsby. It must
have looked like that car.
Now, a better view of the Rolls-Royce -- sorry, I have all due respect for the Rolls-Royce, but this doesn't seem like
such a knock-out vehicle. I could work up some excitement for it, but I wouldn't say it's really that stunning. It looks
more stunning with human beings in it. But on the whole, it's just a car.
But here is Fitzgerald's description of the Rolls-Royce.
"I had seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its
monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirror a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we
started to town."
This is not a description of that car. No. This is pure fabrication on Fitzgerald's part. And there's a reference back to
classical mythology, to a labyrinth. I don't know what car would have a "labyrinth of wind-shields." So it seems that
Fitzgerald is not really talking about a car so much as an occasion to invoke classical mythology. And this is, in fact, the
stuff that modern mythology is made of. The car is the heart and soul of modern mythology. It's high-tech mythology
-- this is what enables us to create myths about ourselves and about other human beings that we are intrigued by.
So in many ways, this is Nick's tribute to this completely mysterious and seemingly superhuman person -- not
superhuman in the way that he's better than all of us, but in the sense that he's not merely human, maybe even
subhuman and superhuman combined. There's something about him, he's just not like the rest of us. And so as a
consequence of Gatsby not being quite like the rest of us, his car also has to be not quite like anything else on Earth. It
has to be this figment of language. But what is also interesting is that there's a gesture or an attempt to go back, to that
original image of the Valley of Ashes and the grotesque fecundity of the ashes, inanimate objects capable of
reproduction. Here, the car is a "green leather conservatory." We don't know what vegetation is in that conservatory.
Obviously, it's not real vegetation. It is whatever is growing in Gatsby's heart. Something has to be growing there in
order for his obsession to survive all those years.
And oddly enough, whatever is growing there can be preserved and nourished only by high-tech machines. Gatsby is
very much a self-made man, and he's also self-making a particular kind of romantic relation. But the nourishment that
that kind of self-making needs is actually high-tech sustenance, high-tech maintenance and high-tech sustenance. In
all those ways, we can see that the inanimate has taken over and is really contributing and shaping the human world.
Chapter 8. Race and the Automobile [00:42:10]
I want to end with two more images of the automobile. This is looking ahead -- the first one is a for-now marginal and
not especially noticeable detail that I think that we should, in fact, try to notice and try to do something with. This is
when Nick is going to New York with Gatsby:
"A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more
cheerful carriages for friends. As we crossed Blackwell's Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in
which sat three modish negroes, two bucks, and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in
haughty rivalry."
This is really what I mean by race being a very unexpected undercurrent in The Great Gatsby. This really is a
completely unnecessary detail. We'll never see that limousine driven by the white chauffeur with the two black men
and a young black woman sitting in that car. It's the reversal of the iconic image of what skin color the chauffeur
usually is of and the skin color of the people who are usually sitting in the limousine. A complete reversal of the color
scheme inside a limousine.

But even though that's a striking visual detail, it is not necessary. There's no obvious necessity for its placement in the
novel. This is one instance where something is -- I would say it is under-determined in the sense that the passage right
there, and in fact the rest of the novel, is not giving us an adequate explanation. Under-determined, not enough
information is given to us to enable us to make sense of this particular moment in the novel. The only way we can
make sense of it is through interpretation. So interpretation is actually a necessary link in order for this passage to
make sense, to be an organic part of the novel. My interpretation is that, in some sense, race is being adduced
sometimes as a visual analog to people crossing class boundaries, that there's something--this is an act of
transgression or a reversal of social hierarchy. Myrtle intruding into the dinner of her social betters --and I'm using
that phrase deliberately. It has to be in quotation marks. But the offense, part of the offense of Myrtle, is that she really
should stick to her social station and stick to her place, and she's intruding into this private space of those above her.
And in some sense, this is the same kind of transgression or intrusion or reversal of the traditional hierarchies in the
three African-Americans being driven by a white chauffeur. It is almost as if Fitzgerald can't really talk about it in
terms of Gatsby, who's actually the person who's most responsible for that kind of transgression. And Gatsby is related
to Myrtle in that way. When we think about who gets killed at the end of the novel, this is one bond linking Gatsby to
Myrtle. But there are numerous other bonds between them, and race -- a kind of oblique racial transposition -- actually
is one of the common grounds between Gatsby and Myrtle.
Chapter 9. Death and the Automobile [00:46:46]
This is a very intriguing moment in The Great Gatsby -- just to round up what we know, the plot of The Great Gatsby.
I don't think I'm giving anything away. This is the moment when Fitzgerald actually uses the word "tragedy:
"The 'death car,' as the newspapers called it, didn't stop. It came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a
moment, and then disappeared around the next bend."
We know that this is the moment when Myrtle gets killed, and of course she is -- Im sorry if you havent gotten to it.
The book doesn't really rest on that one detail. You can know it and still it's a great novel to read. But this is what
happens to Myrtle.
And in some sense, there's an echoing already. There was a dead man in a hearse in that previous passage about an
automobile. And in this passage, the second mention of the car, it actually is a real hearse, not in the sense that there's
a dead body in it, but in the sense that it's the carrier of death, it's the bringer, conveyor, of death to Myrtle.
So we can get a sense of what a careful writer Fitzgerald is right here. He's someone who works over details over and
over again so that there're all these intricate interconnections in the novel. And in that way, even though it is every bit
as complicated as Faulkner, it's not as difficult to read on the face of it. But it's a novel that we should read over and
over again, just to get all those echoes and interrelations.
We'll come back on Thursday and wrap up The Great Gatsby.
[end of transcript]
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AMST-246: HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD, FAULKNER

Lecture 5 - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Part II [September 15, 2011]
Chapter 1. The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby [00:00:00]
Professor Wai Chee Dimock: Last time, we talked about the odd presence of race in The Great Gatsby. Even
though there's no African-American character in The Great Gatsby, there's an undercurrent of allusions to race,
especially in that seemingly gratuitous scene when Nick and Gatsby are going to town in Gatsby's car, and they see this
other car with two black men and one black woman in a car driven by a white chauffeur. So that's a very odd,
gratuitous reference.
And I just want to pick up on that and push that a little further. Because there actually is a more important connection
to African-American music, very important to the novel. And I would say that jazz started out as and is still very much
African-American music. Fitzgerald has written an essay -- this is after The Great Gatsby -- a 1931 essay called,
"Echoes of the Jazz Age." And he says, "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was
an age of satire."
A lot of those terms are religious -- "miracles," "son of God" -- language of Christianity in The Great Gatsby. And
miracles, and other religious allusions, are obviously being remapped onto a secular context. But certainly Gatsby is
someone who would believe in miracles, the miracle of turning time back and completely erasing a few years of Daisy's
life. That's the miracle that he wants to achieve.
So miracles, what Fitzgerald associates with the Jazz Age, is a very important term for The Great Gatsby. Excess
we know about, and age of art as well. And there's actually an allusion to jazz in the novel. When Nick goes to
Gatsby's party, the music that was playing is actually the "Jazz History of the World." So lots of cross-references,
basically a kind of a web, a musical web that's being woven into The Great Gatsby, with jazz being the genetic ground
of that web.
And jazz was in fact crucial to the 1920s, not just to Fitzgerald but to the entire decade, so I just want to bring up some
other important figures. The piece called "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" -- that's an especially resonant
piece. It started out with Fats Waller singing it in "Ain't Misbehaving." And then it was picked up, played on the
trumpet and also sung by Louis Armstrong.
There's an allusion to Louis Armstrong in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. But for some reason, that is not showing up
here, so I must have erased that when I was getting ready for class. So I'll just read this to you. This is the opening of
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. "Then somehow I came out of it, ascending hastily from this underground of sound to
hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking, What did I do to be so black and blue?"
This is something that started out in music and then crossed over into literature: it was basically the underlying
conceit for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I'll put this back on the PowerPoint when I post it to the website. Oh, it's
right here. My computer is playing tricks on me.
So this is the passage, and we can think about music as furnishing a chromatic spectrum to a linguistic medium. We
don't think of language as having colors, and language does very much have colors in The Great Gatsby. It's very, very
striking. Blue garden, yellow music, the blue honey of the Mediterranean -- numerous instances of color being used in
abstract ways as the basic operation of the linguistic medium.
Given the cross-mapping of music onto language and the addition of color as well, of course sight and sound are being
combined in this cross-mapping. I want to bring all of this back to the word that we heard last time from Maxwell

Perkins, his complaint that The Great Gatsby is vague, with not enough physical details, not enough info about
Gatsby.
Chapter 2. Cross-Mapping Visual and Auditory Fields [00:06:03]
Last time we talked about this in terms of what I called counter-realism. Today, I would like to talk about this as the
sensations of vagueness. I would like to highlight it in terms of a cross-mapping of sight and sound, because this is not
something that we do all the time. It's not common usage. It can create impressions of vagueness, even after we get
used to it. It's a deliberate strategy that Fitzgerald is using.
The three headings that I'd like to use for this cross-mapping is, first of all, auditory field with colors. We've already
seen a little bit of that when Fitzgerald is seemingly talking about sound, but colors are operative in those descriptions.
And then the obverse of that, the visual field with sound or with noise, lots of noise. The same, exactly symmetrical to
that, but happening on the visual end.
And then the third--really, this is the central structure that I'd like to talk about today--is this visual-auditory coupling
as thematic coupling. First of all, we see two characters in the same visual or the same auditory tableau, two people
seemingly accidentally being paired together. We just see them in the same frame. This is the visual impact of that
image.
And it turns out that that visual logic, that visual mode of association, actually has thematic implications. So the
visual-auditory coupling turning into a thematic coupling, it's a very complicated structure, but I do think that this is
something that Fitzgerald works very hard to create. And this is one of the miraculous, I would say, architectural
features of the novel.
Chapter 3. Auditory Field with Color [00:08:15]
First, let's just think about the auditory field with colors. And this is actually just still at Gatsby's party and Nick talking
about what he hears there, but something else as well:
"The lights grow brighter as the Earth lurches away from the Sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail
music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher."
What hes hearing is the music -- this is the occasion when the "Jazz History of the World" is being played. But it
seems that it's impossible to talk about qualities of sound without thinking of visual images. And not even visual
images of the people who were there, although certainly there are plenty of descriptions of those people. But right now,
it's a very, very cosmic vision of the world. The Earth lurches away from the Sun. It's on that kind of cosmic scale,
astronomical scale, that the yellow cocktail music is pitching into.
The cosmic reference is coming out of nowhere, and thats surprising. I'm not sure what to say about it other than that
it seems very deliberate on Fitzgerald's part. So once again, lots and lots of really interesting details and packed
moments that invite us, compel us, to give interpretation to. So this is one end of the spectrum, auditory field with
colors.
Chapter 4. Visual Field with Noise [00:10:03]
Let's go to the other end of the spectrum, visual, optical field with noise. And this is, once again, very early, when Nick
goes to the Buchanan household for the first time. Daisy is his cousin. He hasn't seen her for a while. The first image
that he has of Daisy is actually not of Daisy alone, but she's on this couch with another young woman.
"The only completely stationary object in the room 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 and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan

shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young
women ballooned slowly to the floor."
It's an amazing image. And it says a lot the about Buchanan household. It says a lot about Daisy. It's really a visual
allegory for the entire novel. The entire novel of The Great Gatsby can be seen as Daisy ballooning up and taking
flight, going back to that earlier romance with Gatsby. But it's just a very short trip, and she's going to be brought down
to earth by Tom. So it's really interesting that there should be this intensification of what might seem a very neutral or
very casual visual image into something that carries tremendous thematic weight. This is basically the whole story
of The Great Gatsby, being encapsulated in this one visual image.
And what allows this visual image to have such tremendous thematic weight is actually an intrusion of sound into that
image. If there had not been sound, it would not have been so pregnant with meaning. And the sound has to do with
the whip and snap of the curtains these are remarkable words to use. Curtains: they don't make sounds like a whip,
or they don't make snapping sounds. So clearly, this is the superimposition of something else much more brutal, -violent auditory images being superimposed upon the otherwise very benign and very harmless sound made by the
curtain.
So already, the whip and the snap are paving the auditory ground for the appearance of Tom Buchanan. When he
finally appears, towards the end of the passage, it's almost not surprising. Even though he doesn't show up until the
last sentence of the passage, the snap and whip of the curtains already carry his signature. Tom Buchanan is a very
physical presence. We know him by his physical attributes, his body filling up every inch of his clothes, his riding
boots, and so on, a very visual figure. But nonetheless, Fitzgerald is careful to give an auditory dimension to Tom.
And then the final auditory act that he does is to bring down, shut the rear window. This is not the rear door, but it's
the rear window, almost as though somebody is trying to get into his house by the back door or the back window. And
Tom Buchanan is shutting that right then and there, before any action has taken place. So this is a forecast of the rest
of the novel. It's a capsule summary of everything that we need to know aboutThe Great Gatsby.
Just to see how carefully crafted this is: because this is already finished, because this comes to us ready-made, we
don't notice how much craftsmanship actually goes into that passage. So I just wanted to show you a visual image that
is almost similar to this, by Manet. This is a picture called Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining. We also see the curtains
in there. But we just know that those curtains are not going to make a noise like a whip, or they're not going to be
making whipping or snapping sounds. So this is in contrast to Fitzgerald. This is a visual field without noise. It is
purely visual. It doesn't carry the auditory signature and auditory menace that is encoded in Fitzgerald's very careful
coupling of sight and sound in his description.
So we also know that Daisy doesn't appear by herself, so it's important that she appears with Jordan Baker, that the
first glimpse that we have is of the two of them on that enormous couch, and both occupants of a visual field that
carries noise. So that is the first common link between Jordan Baker and Daisy.
Chapter 5. Thematic Implications of Visual-Auditory Coupling for Daisy and Jordan [00:16:15]
Let's go on to explore that visual-auditory coupling--what does that mean in thematic terms? How does that translate
into features of the plot that maybe will also bring the two of them together? Well do this first, and then we'll do the
same thing with Gatsby and Nick as well. But let's just move on to Jordan Baker.
And last time, we talked about the importance of the car, of Gatsby's Rolls-Royce. And the car really is a key player
in The Great Gatsby in all kinds of contexts. It turns out that, for Jordan Baker, one very important aspect of her
relation to Nick actually revolves around the car.
"It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed
so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat. 'You're a rotten driver,' I protested.
'Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all.' 'I am careful.' 'No, you're not.' 'Well, other people

are,' she said lightly. 'What's that got to do with it?' 'They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. 'It takes two to make an
accident.'"
So this says a lot about the relation between Nick and Jordan Baker and why it might come to nothing. So there are
actually lots of little, local allegories of the entire plot all the way throughout The Great Gatsby. And the fact that she's
a bad driver who's counting on other people being careful to prevent accidents from happening, that is not a good basis
to get into a marriage with. And Nick seems to know that, so this is really one of the many signs that this is not going to
come to anything.
But what is also interesting, I think, about this particular image of Jordan Baker coming by way of her relation to the
automobile is a notion of accountability that is perhaps not just limited to Jordan Baker herself. It is really an
explanation of why things go wrong and one's responsibility, one's input, one's contribution to the fact that something
is going wrong.
And for Jordan Baker, accountability is almost always written over to the other side. If there's an accident, it's because
the other person isn't a good driver. That's why there's an accident -- not taking into account the fact that she's herself
a bad driver. She's right that it takes two to make an accident, but the explanation that she's looking for is that it is
another person's fault. And we'll see that there're other characters in the novel who share this understanding of
accountability, this attribution of fault to the other side.
Let's see how Daisy relates to the car. And it turns out that she also has a nontrivial relation to the car. This is while
they're leaving that terrible scene in New York, when basically Gatsby is just falling apart. But Tom allows him to drive
Daisy back. So Gatsby and Daisy are in the car, and this is Gatsby telling Nick what happened:
"When we left New York, she was very nervous, and she thought it would steady her to drive. And this woman rushed
out at us just as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute, but it seemed to me that she
wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the
other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back."
This the death of Myrtle at the hand of Daisy. It is not intentional, though I think that this says a lot about Daisy.
Fitzgerald is not portraying a bad person, really. She is a bad driver because she's lost her nerve. We really have to be
pretty careful in our assignment of blame. I think that Jordan Baker has an almost too clear assignment of blame in
putting it squarely on the other person's side. Fitzgerald is actually quite careful about saying what kind of a woman
Daisy is. She's just not a very brave person, not a very feisty person. She doesn't have sturdiness of nerve, and she
loses her nerve at a critical moment, both at this very critical moment but also in a kind of abstract way when Gatsby
needed her to stand by him. She's not there for him.
So this is the kind of person she is, and it comes out most dramatically in her handling of the car. But it also comes out
in the way that she handles other affairs of life as well. In all those ways, we see the same logic that we saw last time -that is, very important human attributes are rooted, are channeled through our relation to objects. Daisy's relation to
the car says a lot about how she would behave in other strictly human contexts of interaction.
Jordan Baker and Daisy were joined together at the very beginning by virtue of that visual tableau. And it turns out
that it actually is a very deep connection. They're both bad drivers, although for bad reasons. So we have to be careful
as well. They're both bad drivers, but in the case of Jordan Baker, she's just much more cavalier about the whole thing,
whereas Daisy is just incompetent and not very skilled and lacking nerve.
Chapter 6. Thematic Coupling of Nick and Gatsby [00:23:15]
Let's turn back now to another coupling. And you guys will notice that I'm not talking about Gatsby and Daisy, the
most obvious couple in The Great Gatsby. But I want to talk about that couple in a roundabout fashion actually, by
way of Nick and Gatsby. And I just want to go back to one very small point that we talked about much earlier, which is
about the legacy of World War I.

We know that Nick and Gatsby have this in common. They both fought in World War I, and they both named the units
that they were in. Nick was in the Ninth Machine Gun Battalion, and Gatsby was in the Seventh Infantry. Very precise
in naming the number of that unit. So already, we know that there's a prior connection between the two of them.
And I would argue that they also have an ongoing connection as well, because they are both very sensitive to,
responsive to, and captivated by a certain quality of sound that resides in Daisy's voice. It's very, very odd that Nick,
who has no romantic attachment to Daisy, should be captivated in almost exactly the same way that Gatsby is
captivated. It doesn't actually take a romantic attachment for it to be completely within the powers of a certain quality
of voice. Here is Nick talking about Daisy's voice:
"It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never
be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. But
there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget, a singing compulsion, a
whispered, 'Listen.'"
When we look at the visual description of Daisy, it's not very striking. Fitzgerald is using very generic words to talk
about Daisy. Her face is "sad and lovely with bright things in it." Almost no actual description of the physical features
on Daisy's face. It is a very vague image of Daisy. We know that supposedly she's beautiful, but we don't actually know
the exact features that render her beautiful.
It is her voice that gives a very exact rendition of Daisy. This is a voice that nobody can forget, that nobody who cares
about her can forget. And in this case, it is really the intimation of mortality. And I think that voice-- well, now we can
capture-- obviously, sound recording makes that less of an intimation of mortality. But if it's just a voice that you hear
for that one moment and you never hear it again, you do have the sense that it's just that one time, and it will never
again be heard again. If you go to a concert that's not being recorded, then you just know that this is it. Once it's gone,
it's gone. And so that partly accounts for the compulsion that comes from Daisy's voice, it both is an intimation of her
mortality, and it's an intimation of mortality on the part of the person who's listening to her.
Let's look at one another description of Daisy's voice coming from Nick. This is something that we actually read before,
but I just thought that I would read it again:
"For a moment, the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face. Her voice compelled me forward
breathlessly as I listened. Then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a
pleasant street at dusk."
This is in the context of Nicks visit to the Buchanan household, and Nick is just about to find out about Tom's affair
with Myrtle. So in some sense, the fading light is also a prelude, or perhaps even an allegory, of the rapidly fading light,
even in the course of that evening, as the phone rings, all the light goes out of everyone's face. And so it's the quality of
sound that registers the dramatic development in that episode.
As I said, Nick really doesn't have a deep relation to Daisy, but he has a very deep relation to Daisy's voice. And Gatsby,
who has a very deep relation to Daisy, also has a very deep relation to Daisy's voice as well. And this is the moment
when he's meeting Daisy after all these years in Nick's house. We'll read that passage a little later. Nick conjectures
that he's been keeping her in his heart for so long that this is actually not the big moment for him. This is actually the
moment of the letdown. Here is this woman he's been waiting for all these years, doing everything, building up his
whole life towards this moment, and it's a letdown. And so Nick is noticing that in Gatsby, and then something else
happens:
"As I watched him, he adjusted himself visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear, he
turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth,
because it couldn't be over-dreamed. That voice was a deathless song."
Everything else about Daisy actually could be, and is, over-dreamed, and Gatsby almost knows that, that he's projected
much too much onto Daisy, that there's no way she can live up to all the projections of all those years that he's been

involving her in. No human being-- it's not just that Daisy can't live up to that kind of massive projection on the part of
Gatsby. No human being can. But one thing about Daisy can stand up to that magnification, emotional magnification
and amplification on the part of Gatsby, and that is her voice. Every time, any time, he hears her voice, he's captivated
by her over and over again, as if everything is really starting at that moment. So the voice for Daisy captures the
possibility of fresh beginning. It seems to have come to an end. It seems to have arrived at the moment where Gatsby is
finally disillusioned with Daisy. And then he hears that voice again, and it's almost as if there's a fresh start.
This is what Fitzgerald alludes to, about the new world and the "fresh, green breast of the new world," at the very end
of The Great Gatsby: some people actually have the capability for endless new beginnings. You think that they've come
to the end of the road or that they come to the end of the dream, and all of a sudden, they're starting up all over again.
That is what's impressive about Gatsby he is sad and pathetic, but also impressivein that he can always start again.
That passion for Gatsby can always start afresh because of the quality of Daisy's sound. But Gatsby is not so captivated
or so blindly in love that he doesn't know what is in that voice, what constitutes that voice, or what gives the voice its
magical power. This is a surprisingly cleared-eye evaluation of Daisy's voice from Gatsby:
"'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly. That was it. I never understood before. It was full of money. That was
the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. High in a white palace, the king's
daughter, the golden girl."
Usually people who are madly in love are not so great at analyzing the nature of the object that they love. But in a
surprising move, Gatsby is very analytical here and completely right, that that really is the power of Daisy, that in some
sense, she is the golden girl, in a very literal sense, that it is the gold that makes for that goldenness of Daisy. That's
what creates her, what gives her her initial magic over Gatsby when he was just a poor, young boy.
And that's what makes for the continual magic of Daisy. Yes, this is an age of miracle, as Fitzgerald says about jazz,
but it is an age of miracle underwritten by the miracle-creating power of gold. This is really what the novel is about:
this magic in this world, but coming from an inanimate, nonhuman source. Even human beings can quite often be the
creation of that miracle-working substance, gold.
Chapter 7. Extinguishing Sound for Nick and Gatsby [00:34:05]
So far, we've seen the two of them being completely captivated by Daisy's voice. But Nick and Gatsby also have
something else in common as well, in that even though sound is what keeps them going for a good part of the novel,
actually, at some point, sound is also extinguished for them. Let's look at the mode by which sound is being
extinguished for each of them. And not surprisingly, those come at the end of the novel, because when sound is
extinguished, that's also a signal that the novel is coming to an end.
Here is Nick actually watching Tom and Daisy after the accident when Tom and Daisy are back in the house. And Nick
is outside, and so he's watching the two of them. And all he can see is this visual tableau of Tom and Daisy, but he can't
hear what they are saying. And I think we can really actually get a more dramatic moment when you can only see but
not hear.
"Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold fried chicken between them
and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness, his hand had fallen upon
and covered her own. Once in a while, she looked up at him and nodded in agreement. They weren't happy, and
neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale. And yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable
air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together."
So this actually is the "happy ending," in heavy quotation marks, for Daisy and Tom, the reconstitution of that
marriage that had come under so much stress from both sides, Myrtle and Gatsby. And this is another way in which
Myrtle and Gatsby are linked together. They're both people coming from a different social station trying to destroy that
marriage. They are not successful. The marriage survives. And this is the comedy, this is the happy ending for Tom

and Daisy. And the nature of that comedy -- obviously, I'm being very ironic here -- the nature of the comedy is that it's
just the two of them.
The marriage is between the two of them. Even her cousin can only watch, but cannot actually hear what is being said
between the two of them. This is a happy moment for Tom and Daisy that, for Nick, has to be experienced as silence
from the two of them. He's so used to hearing her voice. In this one instant, he's not hearing her voice at all, and that's
because she's talking to Tom. She's not talking to Nick.
Let's look at a comparable, symmetrical moment of sound being extinguished by Gatsby, and this is a truly
unforgettable moment. And once again, all the objects that we've seen, all the objects that are imported in the first part
of The Great Gatsby actually come back and play a very important part. So the extinguishing of sound for Gatsby
towards the end of The Great Gatsby actually comes by way of the telephone, nothing coming through to him from the
telephone. He was waiting, obviously, for a call from Daisy.
"No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until 4 o'clock, until long after
there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps
he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living
too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as
he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight is upon the scarcely created grass."
We see the very carefully planned transition from the silence of the telephone once again to a strictly visual tableau.
This is exactly symmetrical to the scene witnessed by Nick, the suspension, non-appearance of sound, and then the
domination of the visual field. And now, finally, this is a visual field completely without sound. It hasn't been the case
before it has been a visual field with sound before.
Now, however, we get the visual field without sound, and all of a sudden, it's become grotesque. We don't tend to
think of the rose as a very grotesque thing, but when you're that up close to the rose, when you're seeing it in such
minute features, the rose becomes a very grotesque thing, unbearable to look at, really. And that's really what the
world is for Gatsby at that point.
So right now, we've talked about the two of them, Nick and Gatsby, as if they were almost exactly alike. There's this
very strong symmetry between the two of them. But this is not our only impression of those two characters, either, as
we read The Great Gatsby. The two of them are not so exactly alike that they are interchangeable.
Chapter 8. Thematic Divergence between Nick and Gatsby [00:40:16]
So I want now to start another train of thought that points to a difference between Nick and Gatsby. Nick and Gatsby
have a very important common ground up to a certain point, and then they diverge after that point. Let's trace the
divergence between them.
It turns out that sound is extinguished for Nick in two dramatic scenes. Not hearing Daisy talking to Tom, that's one
moment. But there's another one, not as dramatic, but equally consequential for him. And actually it also comes by
way of a phone conversation -- so at least there's that symmetry between him and Gatsby as well. But here's Nick
talking to Jordan Baker, the day after the accident.
"'Suppose I don't go to Southampton and come into town this afternoon?' 'No, I don't think this afternoon.' 'Very well.'
'It's impossible this afternoon. Various--'We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren't talking any
longer. I don't know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know I didn't care."
Here too is a phone conversation that simply turns into a non-conversation, and then silence descending on the two of
them. This scene is very, very close to the silence of the telephone for Gatsby. But there is a crucial difference. Nick
had conjectured earlier that Gatsby didn't care if the phone call came or not, but that's obviously not true. How could
he not care? He was devastated. It was devastating that there was no phone call from Daisy. But this is a moment when
Nick truly doesn't really care. And he doesn't care because of who he is.

So now we've come to a very important parting of the ways between Nick and Gatsby. Gatsby is someone who actually
cares so much that it's almost as if there's no reason for him to live after that moment, and so it's fitting that he should
die right then and there, the plot almost reflecting his psychology. But Nick is someone who doesn't care and who
survives in some sense because he doesn't care.
Chapter 9. The Logic of Substitution for Nick Carraway [00:43:01]
Now's a moment to go back to, something that Fitzgerald and Hemingway actually have in common. We talked a lot
about the logic of substitution in Hemingway, and especially the picador's horse being the substitute for the picador
when a bull is charging. That's a very noticeable logic of substitution in Hemingway. And it turns out that there's also
a logic of substitution in The Great Gatsby as well, if only because the word "substitute" is actually used by Fitzgerald,
once again in a seemingly gratuitous context. But this is the family history of Nick Carraway.
"The actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in '51, sent a substitute to the Civil War,
and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today."
This entire passage, when we first read it, seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the novel. Why would we care
whether or not back one generation--and not even his grandfather, but his uncle, grand-uncle--sent a substitute? He
didn't fight. So he has something in common with some of Hemingway characters. This is someone who doesn't fight
his own battle. He allows another person to suffer for him in the Civil War. And then as a consequence of surviving
because of not having died in the Civil War, hes able to found a very successful hardware business.
So all these details about Nick's family history, appearing, very early, the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. It seems
simply just to stand there and to be doing nothing. And it's only in hindsight that we can impute a meaning. We can
retrospectively impute a meaning to that initially seemingly gratuitous detail. And it really has to do with the vital
difference between Gatsby and Nick.
Here is Gatsby, the moment when--just before he is captivated by Daisy's voice again -- this is the moment of illusion
but also re-enchantment that Nick is noticing in Gatsby.
"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy stumbled short of his dreams, not through her own
fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown
himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his
way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart."
This is really why Gatsby is what he is, is that he has this enormous storage capacity in his ghostly heart. And Daisy
will be stored there forever. It almost doesn't matter who she is, what she really turns out to be. And when he finally
realized what she is, it almost doesn't matter. It has no relation to reality at all, because it is strictly a dream about
Daisy that Gatsby has stored up in his own heart and mind. So the colossal vitality of illusion, and that is what's
deathless about Daisy in Gatsby's own mind and what enables Gatsby to be deathless to some extent as well, in spite of
his physical, biological death.
With Nick, it's the other way around. So I just wanted to read you why he doesn't care and why it turns out that his
family business is the hardware business. He is someone who can never be hurt by anything that happens to him.
"Jordan Baker was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this
unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool,
insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body."
We have seen Gatsby be very analytical about Daisy, that her voice is "full of money." And here is Nick performing a
comparable analytic operation on Jordan Baker, that she's just incurably dishonest, she can't bear to lose. She will do
anything she can to win. Hes right about Jordan Baker. That's why this marriage is not going to take place. But more
than that, it's not even that she's not such a great marriage companion. It is that Nick really doesn't even care enough

to be hurt by that realization. He is insulated by the emotional hardware that has been his family's business for these
two generations.
And so that's why the family history is so important to Nick and why he really needs a substitute, because he is simply
incapable of feeling the ecstasy that Gatsby is capable of feeling. Nor is he capable of feeling the devastation that
Gatsby is capable of feeling. Those two go hand in hand. You get ecstasy, you get devastation. Nick is not capable of
either. And that's why he's such good friends with Gatsby and why he's always standing by Gatsby, because he really
needs that indirect experience of what it feels to be in Gatsby's mind and to have that ghostly heart with its miraculous
storage capacity.
Anyway, this is Fitzgerald's way of encouraging us to think about different constellations, different configurations, of
characters. Nick and Gatsby are not the most obvious couple, but it turns out that actually the whole story of The
Great Gatsby can be told by looking at this nontraditional couple. And I would encourage you in section to think of
other nontraditional couples as well. We'll turn to Faulkner next week.
[end of transcript]
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