The Shadow Knows
Page 13
*Cambridge*
While still a teenager James Gatz decides to transform himself into something that, unbeknownst to him, never existed and the poor bastard actually pulls it off. When he takes a bullet meant for someone else and dies face down in a hardly-used swimming pool years later, as Jay Gatsby, we realize that we’ve witnessed the creation (and destruction) of a whole new reality, founded on the fragile and vulnerable wings of Fitzgerald’s imagination. Gatsby’s identity, like his past, is a made-up thing, but while he lives he conducts himself as though nothing in the whole world was more real. The reader wonders who was fooling whom.
The thought triggered others and he speculated about their relevance. Just as you could have flashbacks to moments of truth in your life, couldn’t you also refer back to moments of fiction, moments of fantasy and pure imagination, and use them all to your present advantage? An eager doctor might call it psychotic behavior or a retrograde hallucination, but if it helped keep you sane in an increasingly insane world then maybe the labels weren’t so important after all. He knew some very conservative liberals and the most blatant fascist he ever met was a dedicated communist. No, the categories were not crucial; it was what you did with them that mattered.
Visibly patriotic people often made him feel uneasy and exaggeratedly patriotic people with real power scared the hell out of him. He questioned the true motives of the first group and he’d seen the destruction wrought by the second in the name of nationalistic identity. Walking the line between cynicism and idealism invariably meant that you’d be buffeted by both, but he found it difficult to wholly forego either and he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to anyway. To remain an observer, disengaged from the action yet an active and voluble critic of it, probably afforded the opportunity of pushing your point of view without having to back it up with your body, with your life. To choose to become a participant, engaged in the action yet absolutely silent about it, probably allowed you to live with fewer ambiguities, fewer uncertainties, except about your survival. There were definite advantages to both, of course, and he wondered if his choice would be influenced as much by heredity as by experience, as much by who his genes said he was as by who he had played at being, had chosen to be, all these years.
Very few parental pressures to become one thing or another had ever been exerted on his behalf, and for that he had always been grateful. As an immigrant his father had worked long hours for little pay, but he recalled no bitterness ever directed at the country that had taken his father in and eventually the man had paid his adopted country back, fueling the economy in typical American fashion and allowing his children to choose their own form of labor. One of them was simply at a point now where he had to choose all over again.