by May, Rollo
But in spite of all Nick’s phoning, and though the funeral cortege of three cars waited an extra half hour, Gatsby’s final loneliness at his funeral is summed up in two words: nobody came. Not a word or a flower from Daisy. A drizzle added to the sad mood around the grave, as though nature itself were taking part in this inutterably bereft moment, when not just a man was being buried but also, most important, the American dream; the central myth of America was being placed in its grave.
There was one exception to the little group at the grave; oddly enough one of the men who had been drunk at Gatsby’s parties turned up at the funeral. Aghast, he cries, “Why, my God! they used to go there [to the parties] by the hundreds!” He adds the phrase the equivalent of which is present in every reader’s mind, “The poor son-of-a-bitch.” The funeral is like Willy Loman’s in Death of a Salesman, except there is not even the handful of people to discuss what really went wrong.
Fitzgerald himself felt this deep loneliness. Only as a self-defeating effort to break through his loneliness can we understand his panicky cavorting and compulsive drunkenness. Indeed the rootlessness was present throughout the whole Jazz Age; it was not till the crash in the 1930s that we were forced to look directly at our problem and ask whether there was something wrong in our alienation from each other, our isolation from the fountain of life.
THE AMERICAN-STYLE GOD
Can this loneliness and carelessness be due to the fact that human beings have become estranged from God? This may seem a queer question here, but it is implicit in The Great Gatsby. True, when people lose the capacity to experience myths, they also lose their gods. This question comes up in The Great Gatsby in a remarkable symbol, again a demonstration of Fitzgerald’s genius, that of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.
Halfway between New York and West Egg a wasteland confronts the commuter, a desolate landscape as barren as the moon. Fitzgerald calls this wasteland the “valley of ashes,” where ashes take the fantastic forms of houses and chimneys and “ash-gray men who move dimly … through the powdery air, swarming up an impenetrable cloud of ash dust and dismally gray surroundings.”*
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, … which 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 non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an occulist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then … forgot them and moved away.†
The whole scene takes on a strange—and hell-like—religious aspect. George Wilson, half-crazed after his wife is killed by Gatsby’s car on the road in front of his garage, stands with his visitor Michaelis across the road from the valley of ashes. This young Greek neighbor has stayed beside George all night in his bereavement. But Wilson keeps staring at these gigantic eyes. Michaelis tries to console him, “In a time like this, George, a man needs a church.” But George mumbles,
“I spoke to her, I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God.” And he repeats, “I said, You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”
Standing beside him, 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.
“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.*
During his adult life Fitzgerald had continuously wrestled with his Catholic upbringing. The struggle is obvious in this novel, and the undercurrent of sin and hell are present in his other works as well.
In his biography of Fitzgerald, Le Vot argues that it was a lesser god, like Lucifer, who created the world and then abandoned it. In any case, he believes Fitzgerald’s meaning is clear, “that it is not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe.”†
It was the nostalgic, self-pitying aspect of the Jazz Age which led it to react with resentful rebellion against all restraints, which felt itself abandoned, a mood which comes out in Fitzgerald’s own self-pity. (Hemingway tried to get this across to him; in a letter to Fitzgerald he wrote, “We were all bitched at the start—we are not tragic characters.”) This was partially Fitzgerald’s inheritance from the overprotection and overconcern of his mother in his childhood days, when he lacked an image of a strong and successful father with which to identify. But more extensively, the “pampered child” psychology was a central part of the 1920s, when people believed in their rights for everything, when legal and other standards of justice were sneered at by persons high and low, and the eat-drink-and-be-merry philosophy seemed to hold everyone in its grip.
The most significant thing about Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s billboard was the fact that it was a huge, blown-up photograph. Susan Sontag has pointed out that our modern age confuses photographs with reality. Many people when traveling assume that if they can only take a photograph of a treasure in a distant land then they have it; they do not need genuinely to look at the statue until it becomes part of their imagination, until they have absorbed it into their being. With the “shot” taken in a jiffy, they have “captured” the scene. We note that both words—to shoot and to capture—are from the hunter’s or soldier’s vocabulary. The traveler has the “treasure” in its minute form in the camera roll which he can take home. It is filed away, only a name and a number to call it forth to show other people. This is the meaning of God-has-abandoned-man; the substitute God, filed away in these photographs, makes it impossible for the genuine God to return.
These gigantic eyes, which George Wilson worships as the eyes of God, are, as Michaelis has pointed out, an advertisement. Its purpose is to sell eyeglasses; it was put there with the hope of sprucing up an occulist’s business. Commercialism, the buying and selling, the rattling of silver dollars in one’s pocket, has usurped the role of God. The advertising man, the person who is skilled at making photographs of things in order to sell them, the triumph of profit making—these capacities were part and parcel of the 1920s, of the culture of Gatsby and Fitzgerald and the tragedy that is presented in this book. This triumph of advertising and commercialism ironically appears “in a place where ruin is the sole residue of industrial prosperity.”*
A prophecy made by Edmund Concourt, concerning the new deity in industrial societies, appeared in a Paris journal:
Sometimes I think that a day will come when modern peoples will be blessed with an American-style god … his image no longer elastic and adaptable to painters’ imaginations, no longer floating on Veronica’s veil, but caught in a photographic portrait…. Yes, I picture a god who will appear in photographs and who will wear glasses.†
This god will not have the face of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a Whitney. Indeed, it will have no discernible face at all, only the man in the gray suit, anonymous, a mirror representation of the Advertising Man, who is not concerned about what he believes—indeed, beliefs are irrelevant—but only about how much he can sell. He knows that in the Jazz Age he must first of all sell himself. The man who worships this god of commercialism is a strangely robot-like type of person who fittingly is spawned by this wasteland, has no “up” or “down,” no “north” or “south,” and probably doesn’t even want any. This myth does not involve the pioneers of production or invention, but only of marketing. The new goal, what Le Vot calls the “new hero of daily life,” the myth that still is convincing, is the seller, the hustler, the “ad man.” The only real tragedy written by an American playwright, says Le Vot, “the one deeply rooted in the people’s mythology, is Death of a Salesman.”* Willy Loman is a salesman in the full meaning of the word. If you are selling yourself—a smile on your face and a shine on your shoes—you make yourself into an object, you then have no identity, and so it mak
es entire sense that they should say at his grave, “He never knew who he was.” We only know he “was the best liked.” This fits the way much of the technology has been moving in the West, and especially in America, to the extent that our chief goal, our sought-after myth, is to “keep our country one in which anyone can become rich.”
CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICA
After Gatsby’s burial, Fitzgerald, through the person of Nick, muses about his own consciousness of America. In his musing the tragedy of Gatsby becomes explicitly identified with the loss of American myths and the demise of our American dream. He recalls the long trips home from prep school at Christmastime, meeting with old friends in the Chicago station, the railroad trip across Wisconsin when he and the other young people were “unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”
That’s my Middle West—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. I am part of that.*
He recognizes that this story has been about the west—Gatsby and Tom and Daisy and he himself are all from the middle west. Not the far west, whence came our myth of the lonely cowboy; nor the Horatio Alger myth, the collapse of which he is describing. But the middle west, which, however one may want to get away from it, is the birthplace of modern American morality and literature. Perhaps, Nick ponders, we people from the middle west “possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” For the east was Babylon, where one can only sit by the waters and weep. The real soul of the nation was beyond New York, “back where the dark fields of the Republic roll on under the night.”
“Gatsby’s whole story,” writes Andre Le Vot, “and, behind it, that of a grand dream gone awry center on this symbol of Contemporary America and its companion vision…. The collapse of Gatsby’s dream is implicitly paralleled … with the failure of the American dream.”†
With the genius of a great novelist, Fitzgerald is struggling to make clear the crisis in which America was and is existing. The novel bears a curious resemblance to another myth, beginning, in Genesis before the flood, with the crowd surrounding the ark and jeering at Noah’s efforts to prepare to meet the holocaust toward which his world was sliding headlong.
Nick decides to leave the east and go back to his home. But before he leaves, he feels he is haunted by Gatsby’s house in those last days:
I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant….
One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.”*
On his last evening, he went down to the beach and, sprawling out on the sand, gave himself over to his reminiscing. The big shore places were closed and there were “hardly any lights except the shadowy moving glow of a ferry boat across the Sound.” America had its flowering in the prosperity of this lush countryside with its great mountains and fertile plains.
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 sailors’ 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.
Nick then remembers Gatsby and his capacity to wonder.
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the Republic roll on under the night.† “Gatsby believed in the green light,” like millions of other good Americans. But Nick knows this “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 farther…. And one fine morning—”
This last sentence hangs in the air with only a dash and no period to conclude it. In the silence Nick gropes in momentary despair. He pauses as he gropes. Is there any sense to it all? Is there any principle, any wisdom, any thought that will shed some light on this apparent hopelessness in American consciousness? Or are we doomed to live in a world nobody can make sense of? Nick gropes for a myth that will cast light, as a man seeks a light switch, to turn on whole heavens. He seeks a myth to absorb this ceaseless failure, a myth which will make of the eternal return something that we human beings can endure, a myth that can lend meaning to our absurd existence. Nick then adds the last line in the book, a paragraph in itself, almost like a postscript:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”*
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
Out of that moment of despair is born this myth which is new but eternally old, the only myth that fits this seemingly hopeless situation. This is the myth of Sisyphus. The one myth which directly counters the American dream, this myth denies progress, goes no place at all, seems to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in perpetual monotonous toil and sweat.
But that is to omit its crucial meaning. One thing Sisyphus can do: he can be aware of each moment in this drama between himself and Zeus, between himself and his fate. This—because it is most human—makes his reaction completely different from that of the dark night of the mountain up which he rolls his rock.
Punished by Zeus for deceiving the gods, Sisyphus is described by Homer:
With many a weary step, and many a groan,
Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone:
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thunders impetus down.*
Indeed, Homer tells us then that “Poor Sisyphus” could hear “the charming sounds that ravished his ear,” which came from Orpheus’ flute in Pluto’s realm.† The myth of Sisyphus is sometimes interpreted as the sun climbing to its apex every day and then curving down again. Nothing could be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the sun.
Out of the melancholy brooding about Gatsby comes the monotony which all human creatures must endure—a brooding which the Jazz Age with its boozing and dancing and parties and endless agitation went crazy trying to deny. For we face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. But out of this repetitiveness of breathing the Buddhists and Yoga have formed their religious meditation and a way of achieving the heights of ecstasy.
For Sisyphus is a creative person who even tried to erase death. He never gives up but always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; he is a model of a hero who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such capacity to confront despair we would not have had Beethoven or Rembrandt or Michaelangelo or Dante or Goethe or any others of the great figures in the development of culture.
Sisyphus’ consciousness is the hallmark of being human. Sisyphus is the thinking reed with a mind which can construct purposes, know ecstasy and pain, distinguish monotony from despair, and place the monotony—the rolling of the stone—in the scheme of his rebellion, the act for which he is condemned. We do not know Sisyphus’ reveries, his ruminations, as he performed his act, but we do know that each act may have been again a rebellion against the gods of conformity, or each act could have been an act of penance. Such is the imagination, the purposes and human faiths which we construct. Sisyphus takes his place in that line of heroes who declare their rebellion
against the inadequate gods for the sake of greater gods—an illustration and inspiring line consisting of Prometheus, Adam, and hopefully even down to our own myths and gods. Out of this eternal capacity to see our tasks, as Sisyphus did his, comes the courage to move beyond the rock, beyond the monotony of day-to-day experience.
Sisyphus, furthermore, must have noticed in his trips some wisp of pink cloud that heralds the dawn, or felt some pleasure in the wind against his breast as he strode down the hill after his rock, or remembered some line of poetry to muse upon. Indeed, he must have thought of some myth to make sense of an otherwise senseless world. All these things are possible for Sisyphus—even, if he had been Gatsby, to be aware that the past cannot be relived but in every step he can leave the past behind. These capacities of human imagination are the hallmark of our paradoxical condemnation and our epiphany as human beings.
The myth of Sisyphus needs to be held in juxtaposition with the Green Light to lend some balance, some dialectic to us as individuals as well as to America. It is a safeguard against unallowed arrogance of the chosen people, and it makes clear that Horatio Alger only leads us astray. Sisyphus balances the myth of the Promised Land: it requires us to pause in our exploitation of this promised America-the-beautiful to meditate on our purposes and to clarify our aims.
It is the one myth which Gatsby so clearly lacked. At the very least the myth of Sisyphus can help us understand why the dream collapsed; and at the most it can show us the way to an ecstasy which balances our hopelessness and inspires us to a new age in which we can directly confront our despair and use it constructively.
We know then that the meaning of human existence is infinitely deeper than Gatsby’s dream and the American dream. No matter how far we are borne back into the past of fatigue and ultimate death, we have harbored some ecstatic thoughts, we have wondered and experienced some poignancy as well as sadness in our wondering. And for a while the sadnesses are freed from guilt and the joys are relieved of anxiety. When eternity breaks into time, as it does in myths, we suddenly become aware of the meaning of human consciousness.