by Peter Turchi
One of Ritchie’s largest drawings is Blue Twilight. The houses in Twilight reappear, toward the bottom of the image, but they’re dwarfed by an enormous tulip poplar. In its equal illumination of the scene, the image presents a distorted or extended twilight.
The print of Blue Twilight—the result of those nine months spent etching the image, in reverse, into copper, using a scalpel—allows for a more natural gradation of light. Stare as hard as we might at the bottom of the image, those houses won’t come into full focus. We know they’re there, we try to see them, but we can’t, quite. The visual information ends; we’ve reached the limits of sensory understanding. As a result, we’re forced to contemplate anew what we can only glimpse in twilight.
Blue Twilight drawing, by Charles Ritchie
Blue Twilight print, by Charles Ritchie
We tell ourselves we know people well (some people, at least). Our sense of them is based on what we can see clearly, or what we think we see. Visually and psychologically, we might be able to detect more about them than they can see themselves, but there will always be parts of their interior lives that remain inaccessible.
STRATEGIC OPACITY
Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, hereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar reassuring explanations.
— STEPHEN GREENBLATT
Greenblatt’s statement is helpful to consider but potentially misleading. The key isn’t to take out a true “explanatory element,” so simply withhold a piece of information; rather, it’s to reveal information that makes impossible the “familiar reassuring explanation,” the sort of easy answer provided by pop psychology and genre fiction.19 To see complex characters brought fully to life and yet left unresolved, and to see strategic opacity at work in the depiction of an individual, it will be useful to look at an example or two in detail.
Jay Gatsby, the golden boy, the millionaire party host, is a projection, one as vivid and insubstantial as any image carried by light onto a silver screen. What F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel examines, brilliantly, are the distortions in that projection, its inaccuracies and inconsistencies as well as its shallowness. The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, is deeply and rewardingly fascinated by what’s wrong with the picture—the doubts and insecurities that make it impossible for young James Gatz to play the role of Jay Gatsby successfully and which, ultimately, reveal Jay Gatsby to be a misguided creation.
When Midwestern Nick takes a job in New York, he finds himself living alone in a commuting town, West Egg. He’s invited to have dinner with his cousin, Daisy, where he learns her friend, the golfer Jordan Baker, knows Nick’s neighbor—the owner of the mansion next door. That very night, when he returns home, Nick sees a man he assumes must be Gatsby “emerge from the shadow” and then “vanish.”
Every reader of the novel knows that the title character is presented as two people: wealthy Jay Gatsby, host of lavish parties, and the former Jimmy Gatz, son of poor farmers, intent on making good. Late in the narrative, Nick imagines the moment of transformation:
It was James Gatz [of North Dakota] who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat. . . . He’d had the name ready for a long time. . . . His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. . . . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
But that transformation doesn’t quite take. The novel is ultimately less interested in how James Gatz became Jay Gatsby than in why, and Gatz/Gatsby’s own answer is not the most revealing one. A different book might focus on Gatsby’s unveiling, the climactic showdown in the New York hotel room when Tom Buchanan aims to expose the truth. (Many lesser books do just that. This sort of “moment of truth” routinely appears in fiction that is more puzzle than mystery.) But just as Truman Capote refuses to reduce Holly Golightly to an eighteen-year-old blonde, and as Graham Greene resists any easy explanation for why a woman in a bar is crying, Fitzgerald insists that we consider Gatsby from many angles, to try to understand what he wants and whether it’s worth the wanting. We could say Nick Carraway plays the role of Gatsby’s biographer, trying to “put the pieces together until they make a properly connected whole.” There are many gaps and, as Nick learns, many possible ways to assemble the pieces. By the end, Nick believes he’s solved the puzzle—he feels he knows who Gatsby is and what he represents. But the novel allows us to see both less and more than Nick sees.
Who is Jay Gatsby? The novel offers many answers. They take the form of descriptions, facts or apparent facts, and assessments provided by other characters:
• “A man of about my age.”
• “A regular Belasco.” [David Belasco was an actor and playwright known for creating elaborate realistic effects on stage.]
• “A person of some undefined consequence.”
• “Simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house.”
• “Fine fellow . . . Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman . . . A man of fine breeding.”
• “A penniless young man without a past.”
• A man who “dispensed starlight to casual moths.”
• A “regular tough underneath it all.”
• “A strained counterfeit of perfect ease.”
• “An ecstatic patron of recurrent light.”
• “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. . . . I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”
• A lieutenant in the First Division, promoted to be a major, with decorations from every Allied government, including Montenegro.
• A student janitor at St. Olaf.
• A “poor son-of-a-bitch.”
• Trimalchio. [In The Satyricon, Trimalchio, a former slave married to a chorus girl, devotes himself to lavish feasts and self-indulgence.]
Even when we see him firsthand, through Nick, Gatsby is enigmatic, an apparition:
[He had] one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you might come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. . . . It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.
So Gatsby isn’t just James Gatz with money—even in the present, he’s at least two people. And even he seems to recognize a flaw in the presentation: “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself. . . . His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.” This is Gatsby’s crisis on the last night of his life—a crisis of identity. It resembles the crisis of adolescence, the crisis of middle age, and the perhaps quieter, ongoing crisis of living.
That last quotation comes from Nick’s recollection of his final conversation with Gatsby, the night before he is murdered. In it we can hear clear echoes of Oliver Wendell Holmes: “He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself. . . . His life had been . . . disordered”—or dissected, li
ke that child’s jigsaw puzzle—“but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.” Again, the conditional phrase underscores both the yearning and the impossibility of the task. Gatsby cannot recover that clear view of himself, the one that has been shattered, and that would have been shattered even if Daisy had agreed to leave Tom. Without the dream of some fantasy life with Daisy, Jimmy Gatz/Jay Gatsby doesn’t know who he is. Having devoted himself to an illusion, he is profoundly lost.
While we eventually learn about his past, and we know something about how he acquired his wealth, Gatsby remains distant; and, on closer inspection, we realize that most of what we think we know about Gatsby’s desires and motivations is conjecture, speculation asserted as knowledge by Nick.
Gatsby doesn’t appear in a scene in the first quarter of the novel. Up until that point, we’ve seen him—Nick has seen him—only from afar, standing behind his house briefly in the dark. Much of the opening of the book isn’t even about Gatsby—it’s about Daisy and Tom and Jordan and, ultimately, about Nick. In telling this story, Nick Carraway is trying to stand back far enough, to see clearly enough, to assemble another whole: his own life. Specifically, Nick is trying to document, for himself and for us, what happened, why he feels the way he does about it, and what it means. He believes it changed him.
But who is Nick Carraway? Nick’s voice is so persuasive, and his perspective is so central to the novel, that we can be forgiven if, on first reading, we regard Nick as he’d like us to regard him: as the one sane, grounded, moral voice amid what he keeps calling “riotous” people in a “riotous” summer. We live in the world as we imagine it, and our imagining influences everything we see. Nick alone is cautious and deliberate and responsible and trustworthy—or so he’d like us to think.
But Nick Carraway is a bachelor, a Yale graduate who returned to his native Midwest until, he tells us, he became restless, and decided to go east to learn the bond business. Why? Because everyone he knows is in the bond business, he says; because, at the age of twenty-nine, Nick has no idea what to do with himself. Nick is miserable in New York, and he leaves at summer’s end. He accuses Tom and Daisy of drifting restlessly, but that same shoe fits him.
From the famous first lines of the novel to its more famous last lines, Nick Carraway presents himself as a figure of authority, a guide, the one person who truly understands these people he means to tell us about; but Nick is a kind of genteel slacker, a well-educated young man without clear aim or ambition. In addition to the extraordinary prose style provided by his creator, Nick’s virtues as a narrator include the facts that he has strong and sometimes contradictory opinions and that he is engaged in deep internal conflicts, at least some of which he appears not to recognize.
One of the many things Nick doesn’t want us to think about, and that he doesn’t want to think about—he provides the information only after Daisy raises the subject—is that he came east in part because of a rumor circulating about his engagement to an old friend. Nick doesn’t reveal much about his relationships with women, and he would rather we not look too closely at them. His avoidance of the topic in a narrative prompted by romantic desire is curious, and draws the careful reader’s attention.
Nick asserts that his cardinal virtue is honesty. He says that, interestingly enough, by way of explaining why he can’t enter into a serious relationship with Jordan Baker. “I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them: ‘Love, Nick’ . . . there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free. . . . I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” But just two pages earlier he told us: “I . . . had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so . . . I let it blow quietly away.” The fact that he was writing his friend back home letters signed “Love, Nick” didn’t stop him from having an affair with that girl in accounting, so his rationalization regarding Jordan is questionable at best. If he were a courtroom witness, it wouldn’t take much of a lawyer to point out other, similar contradictions in Nick’s story. He simultaneously acknowledges his interest in Jordan and all but denies it.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest . . . [but that] made no difference to me.
That’s an interesting assertion, coming from a man who prides himself on his honesty. Elsewhere he tells us, “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity”; “I thought I loved her”; and “I’d had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that included Jordan, too” (the implication being that, until then, he hadn’t had enough of her). Toward the end of the novel he tells us, “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
What’s significant about Nick’s inability to decide on or admit to his true feelings toward Jordan is that he doesn’t recognize his confused and contradictory statements. He doesn’t seem aware of the pattern he’s revealed whereby he enters into a relationship only to back out because neighbors gossip about marriage, or a woman’s brother looks at him cross-eyed; he doesn’t recognize that the woman who most appeals to him, the one he banters with and who shares his horror at displays of emotion, is Daisy; and he doesn’t realize that his inability to commit himself to a relationship with a woman, and his inability to decide where to live and what profession to pursue, is directly tied to the loneliness and deep romanticism that he ascribes to Gatsby.
Nick’s feelings about Gatsby, too, are greatly conflicted.
“I’m inclined to reserve all judgments,” he tells us; but he goes on to say, “Gatsby . . . represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.” And yet, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him . . . an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” And “Gatsby turned out all right at the end.”
When Gatsby explains that he was a student in Oxford for five months, Nick tells us he had “one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.” He has “complete faith” in a man who represents everything for which he feels “unaffected scorn”? Nick’s image of Gatsby is in flux—the jigsaw pieces keep moving, or even changing shape. Not much later he says, “I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.” Still later—after feeling scorn for him, after reaffirming “complete faith” in him, after disliking him—Nick expresses one of his most explicit contradictions:
I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. . . . “They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.
If Nick so strongly disapproves of his neighbor, why, when Gatsby has been killed, does Nick say, “I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone. . . . It grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested. . . . I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: ‘I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry.’”
Nick takes on that responsibility out of loyalty, and out of a sense of friendship he finds it very difficult to admit to.
Jay Gatsby is an unresolved character because our views of him are limited and contradictory.20 Nick’s view of Gatsby is given greatest authority, and it’s compelling, but the novel reminds us that other characters see him in other ways. Depending on where we stand, we might see Gatsby the bootlegger, Gatsby the wealthy available bachelor, Gatsby the romantic dreamer, or Gatsby the lost boy in a suit of gold. Like Meyer Wolfsheim, Nick makes his own Gatsby for his own purposes. Even then, his vie
w is conflicted.
Nick’s conflicted view of Gatsby is one of the indications that he, too, is unresolved.
The key to understanding the complexity of Nick’s story isn’t the novel’s introduction, in which he tells us that others confide in him, or the conclusion, in which he compares Gatsby to Dutch sailors approaching the New World; those are consciously crafted statements, ideas Nick has formed and polished. What’s most revealing is a confession that slips out almost as an aside:
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into a warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life. Again at eight o’clock . . . I felt a sinking in my heart . . . there was laughter from unheard jokes. . . . Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their excitement, I wished them well.