Attempting both a sustained close reading of the novel, and the relocation of that reading within wider philosophic and political contexts, one must therefore consider the impact of a broad mystical strain of Western thought upon Fitzgerald’s political analysis. For while it is a commonplace that Fitzgerald was fascinated, throughout his life, with what is variously conceived as the “ideal,” “the Dream,” “inspiration,” the “visionary,” or “Desire,” a tradition with which the book opens, the political uses of the ideal have largely escaped notice.
It seems hard to believe in our period, when a three-decade lurch to the political Right has anathematized the word, but F. Scott Fitzgerald once, rather fashionably, believed himself to be a socialist. Some years before, he had also, less fashionably, tried hard to think himself a Catholic. While one hardly associates the characteristic setting of Fitzgerald’s novels, his chosen kingdom of the sybaritic fabulous, with either proletarian solidarity or priestly devotions, it is clear that a tension between Left and religiose perspectives structures the very heart of the vision of The Great Gatsby.
For while Gatsby offers a detailed social picture of the stresses of an advanced capitalist culture in the early 1920s, it simultaneously encodes its American experience, at key structural moments, within the mitigating precepts of a mystic Western dualism. Attempting both a sustained close reading of the novel, and the relocation of that reading within wider philosophic and political contexts, one must therefore consider the impact of a broad mystical strain of Western thought upon Fitzgerald’s political analysis.
For while it is a commonplace that Fitzgerald was fascinated, throughout his life, with what is variously conceived as the “ideal,” “the Dream,” “inspiration,” the “visionary,” or “Desire,” a tradition with which the book opens, the political uses of the ideal have largely escaped notice. Fitzgerald’s excitably visionary sensibility, nourished in high school years by Catholic mysticism, fashioned him into a superbly perceptive critic of the appropriation of human need of the ideal by developments in American capitalism in the 1920s.
In response to economic crisis in the early years of this decade, the national advertising media developed and promoted a new cult of glamour, seeking through its allure to create a mass consumer market and revivify the foundering work ethic. Fitzgerald’s entrancement by the suggestive power of beauty sensitized him both to the spell and the mendacity of that mass promise: to the cruel contradiction between the fostered impulse of ecstatic outreach and the terminal drudgery in which the many were entrapped, a drudgery ideologically occluded by the national imagery of a “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” allotted the glamorous few.
It sensitized him, too, to the crunch choice, in a polarized yet paralyzed legitimate economy, between poverty and crime. But if at one level the novel works to demystify North American society in the Roaring Twenties, at another it redeploys the ideal to absolve the system from its inequities, aligning the failure of economic and cultural aspiration with a tradition of high metaphysical defeatism. The ancient creed of the unattainability of the Dream thus functions in theological exculpation of a social formation in crisis, conferring apotheosis on pessimistic quietism.
Fitzgerald’s remystification of social values, and the ambivalent, uneasy conservatism that asserts itself as the novel’s ultimate position, are confirmed, finally, in Gatsby’s construction of gender relations and of the lower classes. Woman, in Gatsby, is the exquisite vehicle of solipsistic disengagement from a social order in crisis: not only at the obvious level of Romantic transcendentalism but as offering, on a subliminal plane, through a submerged and recurrent maternal imagery of sanctuarizing womb and suckling breast, a yearning for regressive, infantilizing retreat from the relentless pressures of competition.
Conversely, the spectral underclass, simultaneously invisible and obtrusive, marginalized and central, wreaks the novel’s horrific climax, emerging as the apocalyptic assassin of that ideologically saturated “ideal” order. In summary, one must realize that, in a sterile dialectic of demystification and prompt remystifying, the “Marxian” critical perception so powerful in The Great Gatsby, rather than generating progressive impulse, becomes, by anxious turns, metaphysically annulled, sexually eschewed in regressive libido, and climactically demonized in proletarian displacement.