FREE ESSAY ON FROM THE DREAM TO THE WOMB

FROM THE DREAM TO THE WOMB

From the Dream to the Womb:
Visionary Impulse and Political Ambivalence in The Great Gatsby
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 will be the argument of this essay 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, this essay will 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 this essay 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, we shall find 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. 
It is commonly acknowledged that at the heart of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald there
runs a poetry of desire, an unshakable process of quest set in motion by beauty. The
youthful reveries of Gatsby, for instance, effect perhaps what Greek philosophy called a
metanoia or conversion of vision to a further dimension of truth or destiny: a
satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was
founded securely on a fairy's wing (100). Ineluctably compelled by visitations of a
transfiguring beauty, oriented round a field of transcendence, the novelist who in the
1920s styled himself the trumpeter of the Jazz Age would in an earlier age have
articulated his ravishing disturbances in the discourse and dyad of a mystic. Listening
to the tuning fork struck upon a star, Fitzgerald stands squarely in an ancient and
Western tradition of inescapably frustrate enchantment. Only I discern / Infinite
passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn, wrote Browning; and these lucid terms
of Romantic formulation recapitulate a metaphysical tradition common to two millennia of
idealist aesthetics. In this tradition, the cravings set in motion by inspiration reach
upward towards an ideality ontologically far removed in splendor from the quotidian
material realm, which the ideal haunts nonetheless with a kind of incalculable and
aesthetic gravitational pull. The ecstatic outreach this inspires may be interpreted as
towards the immaterial world of First Forms (Plato) or an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover that
calls like a lover (kinei hos eromenon); it may be towards a transcendent Christian
Creator, upon whose natural forms play, in the discourse of Christian Platonism, dazzling
beams or enargeiai that draw back the contemplative observer into their divine source; or
it may be that the raptus draws poets into a pantheistic Romantic world-spirit, into a
sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused. However construed, structural to
the entire tradition is a shining higher order by which mortals mired in a corrupt,
contingent realm become, in Fitzgerald's language, for a transitory enchanted moment
compelled into an aesthetic contemplation (Gatsby 182), and gulp down the incomparable
milk of wonder (112). Fitzgerald, then, and his Gatsby experience intimations of what was
once conceived as the beatific. Daisy, as the inexpressible exquisite disclosing the
radiant higher kingdom (here, indefeasible wealth), necessarily remains descriptively
discarnate, in contrast to the sexually profiled Jordan and Myrtle (11, 25). Daisy gleams
like silver, like the silver pepper of the stars, exists as a voice, a singing
compulsion, an incarnation, educing the marriage of unutterable visions to her perishable
breath (150, 21, 9, 112). 
But Daisy is, precisely, perishable: tragically inadequate to the inspiration she
kindles. For Fitzgerald, the terms the world affords for the instantiation of ideality
are inadequate; yet the ideal remains indefinable in terms of any other order, any
specifiable transcendent origin. Fitzgerald thus diverges from the classic Western
dualism that offers a transcendent situating of inspiration: for him, it has neither
ground nor viable instantiation. Displaced and demystified by contemporary secular
cynicism, Fitzgerald's relation to the ideal is precisely Nick's: 
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of
something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere
a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted
like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled
air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
(112)
The traditional sacramental instinct endures, internalized yet alien, an elevated
profundity fast fading into unintelligibility. As a liminal reflex persisting within
modern America's metaphysical amnesia, its wording proves illegible to a society whose
telos is the vulgarity of private profit. 
If beauty lacks a transcendent ground, personality's springs become problematic,
impossible of final judgment: there may, reflects Nick, or there may not be more to the
lifestyle of romantic grace and aspiration than an unbroken series of successful
gestures; and conduct may ultimately be founded on the hard rock or wet marshes (2).
Given the disappearance of an Absolute, the emotional triad on which Gatsby is built is
decisively distinct from that of Christianity and Platonism. In the latter, awakened
desire, colliding with a resistant phenomenal world, can yet remain assured of some
ultimate translation to immutable and perfect transcendence. But in Fitzgerald's secular
narratives of desire, the impetus of lyric promise is decisively disintegrated by the
world's crude bathos and despoliation; and the Dream lacks sanctuary beyond the sphere
that resists it. Lyricism, proceeding thus to frustration, must always revert to
nostalgia, to elegy: Can't repeat the past? . . . Why of course you can! (111). In the
tragic chiming of these three tones — lyric promise, its failure, elegy — is
composed all Fitzgerald's work. In Gatsby they are found from the outset in the opening
meditation, where romantic readiness issues only in a foul dust [that] floated in the
wake of his dreams, but where, in retrospect, [o]nly [dead] Gatsby was exempt from my
reaction; and they form a pattern pursued to the final page, where the green light and
orgiastic future turn out year by year [to] recede before us, our boats being borne back
ceaselessly into the past, yet where the mind consolingly retrieves from a half-enchanted
past the Dutch sailors and their magnitude of wonder. The triad structures, too, the
essential outline of the narrative and the mood-modulation of the parties. Those parties
which open with blue gardens, where men and girls came and went like moths among the
whisperings and the champagne and the stars (39), but falter into violence, drunken
stupor, screaming wives, and cars in the ditch, close upon the glance backward to Gatsby
alone on his lighted porch bidding courteous farewell. Missing its final triumphant
harmonic, the beat of a sacramental rhythm becomes the pulsing headache of private
tragedy; Fitzgerald the mystic turns nostalgic drunk. 
As this brutally condensed outline suggests, Gatsby, on one crucial plane, is a
religious, almost a crypto-theological narrative, displaced thoroughly and with explicit,
ironic inadequacy into the secular discourse of a sharply portrayed social formation. And
within this particular society, the unutterable visions of this son of God (112, 99) may
no longer figure and excite an assimilation to the universal, a passage from epiphany to
serene contemptus mundi. They are socially conditioned, on the contrary, to kindle a
strife for merely personal and financial achievement, to seek a vast, vulgar and
meretricious beauty (99). 
I have emphasized this religious dimension at length because I think it vitally important
to appreciate the power, centrality, and dignity of this rapturous pull toward the ideal
— its colossal vitality, as Fitzgerald puts it: no amount of fire or freshness can
challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart (97) — in order to
understand both Fitzgerald and ourselves. The Platonic and medieval worlds — though
doubtless deluded in their metaphysics, which they moreover betrayed in their social
practice — could affirm that, in some bedrock ontological sense, the real was the
radiant and the radiant was the real. The substance of joyous and visionary beauty was
not the delusion of a youthful libido or abnormal temperament but rather possessed the
stature of noesis: it was, that is to say, the momentary experience of authentic insight
into the ultimate nature of reality as ineffably glorious. Against this, we have the
society of Daisy and Tom, whose crabbed credo is I've been everywhere and seen everything
and done everything. . . . Sophisticated — God, I'm sophisticated! (18).
Fitzgerald's novel thus stands as a locus classicus of the affective impoverishment, the
crippled cynical sensibility, of the twentieth-century West, which has shriveled and
discredited the ideal, peripheralizing the human faculty of wonder to the misfit status
of the merely aesthetic. 
At the age of twenty-three, however, Fitzgerald had written to a Catholic friend: I can
quite sympathize with your desire to be a Carthusian. . . . [I am] nearly sure that I
will become a priest (quoted in Bruccoli 109-10). The Catholicism of his upbringing, in
which Monsignor Fay had confirmed him as a teenager, was subjected to gnawing doubt in
his Princeton years and finally rejected the year after leaving: the sublime cravings of
Catholic mysticism had been routed by one for the freshly encountered Zelda; but a form
of religious sensibility never left him. Indeed three stories (The Ordeal, Benediction,
and that section on the early life of Gatsby which was to become excised from the novel
and form an independent story, Absolution) center on the pain, fervor and
self-consecration of visionary religious experience. Fitzgerald had been attracted to
Catholicism in the first place by the way that Fay had revealed in the church a dazzling,
golden thing, and by the fact that Fay loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate. He
was drawn in Fay, as in Gatsby, to the faith shining through all the versatility and
intellect (Bruccoli 40-41). There's that gift of faith that we have, you and I, Fay had
told him, that carries us past the hard spots (quoted in Allen 44). Like the young Gatsby
in Absolution, Fitzgerald outgrew Catholicism but not his sense of the ideal, which he
relocated in the City of the World: in a mysterious something ineffably gorgeous
somewhere that had nothing to do with God (Fitzgerald, Absolution 150). It was, one might
comment, a worthy translation, for the great city, at least in one of its aspects,
summons the immense poetry of the possibilities of the future, imaging transformation,
joy, prosperity and beauty. Musing on the great towering cities, Raymond Williams
reflects, This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then
possible? (6). 
It is precisely as a kind of dislocated mystic, surveying North America with the
paradoxical eyes of an atheist thirsty for a visio dei, that Fitzgerald becomes, as it
were, sub specie aeternitatis, acutely sensitized to what, in his period and ours,
replaces the traditional teleological sublime: the allure but also the fraudulence, the
spectroscopic gaiety and foul dust (Gatsby 45, 2), of capitalism's transaction with the
ideal. Transposed into more sociological terms, I hope to demonstrate that Fitzgerald's
deracinated, incorrigible, vocational aestheticism positioned him, in a secular age, as a
superlative critic of capitalism's appropriation and concentration of beauty in a new and
historically unique institution: glamour, which Fitzgerald knows as thoroughly as a
martyr his Bible. Fitzgerald's more-than-aestheticism makes possible, in a dialectic of
addiction and contempt, a searching demystification of capitalist society and its debased
teleology of glamour — which, by the same token, he can never quite renounce.
Anti-capitalistic, yet ultimately reactionary, throwing upon the commodity the devotional
light of a vanished absolute, The Great Gatsby recalls Lukacs' dictum that the
characteristic form of the bourgeois novel is that of the epic of a world abandoned by
God (88). 
Although Gatsby has often been exposited in terms of its tragic paradox of corrupt hero
and incorruptible dream (154-5), nearly all such readings have been conceived in the very
general, sometimes even universalizing, cultural terms of an erosion of the American
Dream by materialism.1 We need, however, to impart economic and class specificity to such
hazy generalities — for so Fitzgerald's novel did — and one such welcome case
is the work of Michael Spindler. My own essay, while it agrees with Spindler's that
Gatsby is particularly expressive of that ideological conflict which the rise of the
leisure class and the growth of consumption-oriented hedonism was generating in American
society in the 1920s (167), will attempt a textually and psychologically fuller reading
than Spindler's shrewd, cogent but very brief study allows. Further, I do not agree that
Fitzgerald repudiates and distances himself from Nick's constant romanticizing of
Gatsby's love of Daisy and of wealth: Nick's ambivalence is precisely Fitzgerald's, as
his essays, My Lost City, Echoes of the Jazz Age, and Early Success make clear. Such
ambivalence can rather be traced, I feel, to the coexistence in Fitzgerald of the cool
Marxian eye with the fervent dislocated mysticism of his Catholic inheritance, though I
must also disagree sharply with the sancta simplicitas of Joan Allen's conclusion in her
pious study of the Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald that the novels project an
Augustinian antithesis of matter and spirit by which the fate of the world and its
revelers is one simply of damnation for sin (44, 103). A properly historicist reading of
Gatsby is one true, perhaps, not only to the tension we shall see between the work ethic
and the ethos of consumption but to the fullness of bathos between the meretricious ideal
hymned by capital and the ideal of a joyous, stable and beautiful integrity of being,
adumbrated in older traditions: an ideal whose very violation suggests so hauntingly that
infinitely richer structures of human social life and feeling are both necessary and
possible. 
Works Cited
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Fitzgerald. New York: New York UP, 1978. 
Bewley, Marius. Scott Fizgerald's Criticism of America. Mizener 125-41. 
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New
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Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 1995. 
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