[In the following essay, Seguin uses the theme of “ressentiment” (loosely, the envy of the lower toward the upper classes) to explore Fitzgerald's social sensibilities in Gatsby, also noting similarities between Fitzgerald's novel and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady.]

Following his bout of emotional exhaustion in the mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald came to describe what he called his “crack-up” in more than strictly personal terms. In his meditation on his depression, the crack-up expands outward in waves from Fitzgerald as individual, encompassing disparate social and cultural materials and achieving a certain allegorical intensity. At one point, the shape of Fitzgerald's psyche becomes expressive of the very curve of national history, from the bull-market twenties to the depressed thirties:

My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but I had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books—and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural—unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.

(Crack-Up 84)

There is an extravagance to this declaration, an extravagance I want to take seriously. I will thus assume as my working hypothesis that Fitzgerald is entirely correct in this bit of analytical retrospection, and that the discontinuous sine waves of emotions and history can, in some exceptional cases, become temporarily synchronized. Indeed, the nexus mediating between the individual subject and the social ground in this passage seems principally an affective one, and in general Fitzgerald's writerly metabolism, its shape and trajectory through time, appears tied with unusual intimacy to a consistent and highly wrought emotional set. This affective matrix, as the above quote from The Crack-Up illustrates, is often self-consciously foregrounded as a kind of interpretive apparatus in its own right. What I wish to pursue in these pages, then, is the manner in which a particular affect can attain a deeper historical resonance, how it might furnish a singular set of conduits or relays between the facts of an individual life, a determinate set of aesthetic practices, and the specific rhythms of a given historical moment.

The social and political sources and functions of the emotions in general remain poorly understood, screened off in part by a tendency to grasp their material complexity as a matter of the individual subject as such, of one's own idiosyncratic makeup. The case of Fitzgerald prompts us, however, to explore a little further, to imagine the affective realm as one of concrete social expression, complete with precise temporal dynamics and figural embodiments which variously mediate social content and lived experience. The specific affect that I focus on here is, not happiness, but rather ressentiment, “resentment” in English. I retain the French to remind the reader of its Nietzschean usage, wherein it already begins to assume the form of a social-structural passion, as Nietzsche (in a politically conservative manner) positions ressentiment as the principal class affect—the “smouldering hatred of a peasant,” as Fitzgerald would describe his own attitude toward the upper classes (Crack-Up 77)—directed at the putatively superior aristocracy and related titled or monied groups. While it remains an ideological maneuver to interpret progressive and egalitarian political movements in terms of envy and hatred—a move that marks ressentiment's discursive translation into what Fredric Jameson has termed an ideologeme, one of the minimal units of antagonistic class discourse¹—nonetheless ressentiment is real, a corrosive emotion that extends across the breadth of the class structure, the very tone of both its grim dramas of rising and falling and its petty quotidian power games alike. Such a choice of affect, one that already displays vivid social content, perhaps makes our overall task here somewhat easier, and allows us to specify at the outset that class dynamics—one of Fitzgerald's abiding interests—will be a central preoccupation in what follows.²

But things become complicated at once, as I suggest that what we discover in Fitzgerald is not so much ressentiment in its naked aspect but rather a kind of sublimated and softened form of it, its deeper energies still active but its surface manifestations, its characteristic linguistic expressions, having undergone a decided shift. Certainly the requisite familial context was in place for the early nurturing of social slights and resentments: Fitzgerald expressed lifelong shame over his déclassé upbringing and was haunted by his father's career failures, and as a child frequently prayed “that they might not have to go to the poorhouse” (Mizener 38). Though never actually in poverty, the experience of growing up on the frayed edges of more well-to-do neighborhoods marked him deeply, resulting in a lifelong sense of social unease and inculcating a kind of compensatory snobbishness. The full metamorphosis of such attitudes into an aesthetic practice occurs only with The Great Gatsby, and only after, I would argue, the intercession of another literary practice, that of Willa Cather's in A Lost Lady. It is only after Cather's literary mediation that Fitzgerald finds himself able to rewrite a certain personal history in consonance with economic and social developments, suffused with the characteristic notes of loss, of regret, of diminution—the lyrical echoes of feeling oneself to have been burned by History. Hence this essay will in a small way be a study of that rather old fashioned thing, literary influence, but in a new key, the emphasis upon affect and historical rhythm designed to aid in my larger purpose: a clearer understanding of the ultimate social grounds of the literary achievement that is Fitzgerald's in The Great Gatsby. I will begin by looking at the inter-textual currents flowing between the two writers before turning in the second part of the essay to a closer examination of The Great Gatsby itself.

In The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald invokes the voice of an unnamed woman who urges him not to think small but instead embrace his breakdown in world-historical fashion: “By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you that's cracked—it's the Grand Canyon” (74). By the end of his account, as we saw above, Fitzgerald seemed willing to entertain such an approach. In 1936, the same year that The Crack-Up was written, Willa Cather, in a famous remark in the headnote to Not Under Forty, echoed something of Fitzgerald's interlocutor: “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” (v). Here Cather grandly names a crack in the world, and while there is no clear evidence that she suffered the sort of psychic ordeal that Fitzgerald experienced, still the year 1922 was an exceptionally difficult one for her: having undergone several operations related to gastrointestinal troubles, she was in poor health for much of the year; her great love Nellie McClung moved permanently to Europe; and her novel One of Ours was published that fall to harsh reviews that pierced her usual stoicism and wounded her sharply. As if seeking a kind of solace or retreat, she joined the ceremonious and tradition-oriented Episcopal church that December, signaling a renewed interest in religion and the beginnings of a slow movement into the past that would increasingly mark her fiction.

The novel that Cather published after this “year of the break” was A Lost Lady. In it, the prairie town of Sweet Water has decidedly seen better days. The town's leading citizens, the Forresters, are facing decline: Daniel Forrester, the incorruptible railroad magnate known mainly as the Captain, has suffered business failures and a stroke, while his beautiful wife Marian begins spending too much time with dubious locals like the unpleasant Ivy Peters, a crude and ambitious young man whose principal desire is to ascend the town's social ladder and displace the Forresters. Their troubles provoke a wave of hitherto suppressed and unsuspected bouts of spite and resentment from those who no longer regard the Forresters as models of civility and citizenship, or who no longer see in them the fulfillment of their own most powerful desires. In short, the veil of social decorum in Sweet Water is tearing apart, revealing a parched and bitter social and affective landscape.

As is well known, Fitzgerald read A Lost Lady in 1924, while he was working on the first draft of The Great Gatsby. He subsequently sent a copy of Gatsby to Cather with a letter acknowledging a writerly debt to her and even asking her leave for his close modeling of some passages in The Great Gatsby on A Lost Lady. Critical work on the precise nature of this debt has tended to follow Fitzgerald's lead and concentrate on the question of a certain transference of style.³ Others have pointed specifically to Fitzgerald's rendering of the first-person narrator in The Great Gatsby: the Nick Carraway we know today only fully emerges after Fitzgerald reads A Lost Lady, where there is, if not a first-person narrator, at least a limited third-person narrator who closely follows the perspective of Niel Herbert and his ambivalent fascination with the charming Marian Forrester (a relationship echoed in The Great Gatsby). While these stylistic and technical aspects are important, I prefer to grasp the matter of influence more in terms of an awakening or sharpening of an aesthetic or theoretical problem field. From this perspective, what comes into focus is the question of social representation, of how to narrate social and historical content, a primary concern as both Cather and Fitzgerald are equally concerned with questions of class and social structure. In particular, it is Cathers's use of affect as a means of charting social space and cultural change that Fitzgerald learned from but also altered for his own purposes: what is an aesthetic pedagogy is also, and at a certain level indistinguishably, an emotional pedagogy.

For it is indeed ressentiment, a searing, class-driven force, that grips Sweet Water. In addition to the hate-driven Ivy Peters, the townspeople in general are portrayed as sheer vermin whose sole purpose is to invade and bring down the Forresters' once elegant hilltop home. Even some of the wives of those “handworkers and homesteaders” who have settled the area, women who elsewhere in the Cather imaginary might merit considerable sympathy, fall prey to this bitter passion. When Marian Forrester falls ill, they have their opportunity: into the house they trounce, rooting through the closets and cellar and discovering, to their satisfaction, that in its diminished state there is really “nothing remarkable about the place at all!” (138).

Meanwhile, Niel Herbert, the young man who at first idealizes Marian only to become disillusioned with her once the household begins to decline, is himself marked as déclassé, a state that at length occasions his own bout of ressentiment. Niel's father has lost his property, and “there was an air of failure and defeat about his family” (30). Niel's status clearly informs his basic perspective: he can libidinally invest in the Forresters as representatives of a realm of wealth and beauty once available to him, but turns on Marian when the same fate befalls her after the death of her husband. Hence, the narrator's striking statement that “what Niel most held against Mrs. Forrester [was] that she was not willing to immolate herself, like the widow of all these great men [that is, the bourgeois pioneers], and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged” (169), can be understood as less an exaggerated expression of pain at the passing of obsolete ideals than an externalization and transference of Niel's own self-hatred, the self-hatred of the déclassé whose imaginary escape from failure has been definitively blocked.

The resemblances to The Great Gatsby are evident. Nick Carraway shares with Niel an ambivalent attraction to those of higher social status as well as an air of failure (Nick does not finally make it in the East and returns to the Midwest, to the bosom of his family and the hardware business). The texts also share a concern with the real or imaginary fluidity of class positions—the apparent increase in the permeability of the upper social strata. What seems absent from the parched and intolerable social world of Sweet Water is any imaginative space of escape, or at least this space is present only minimally in the figure of the Blum boys, sons of German immigrants who are clearly marked as peasants (that is, Old World types who know nothing of American democratic ways). There exists between them and Marian a natural bond of sympathy, a note of interclass harmony at odds with the rest of the novel and very different from that “smouldering anger” of which Fitzgerald spoke.

If we imagine the vocation of narrative to be the working through of the various representational possibilities inherent in a given social content, the narrative task remaining after the aesthetic and ideological work of A Lost Lady is a more complete envisioning of some alternative or negation of Sweet Water's social bitterness. This task was taken up not only in The Great Gatsby but also by Cather herself in her next novel, The Professor's House, published in 1925, the same year as The Great Gatsby. In The Professor's House, this effort emerges first in a more fully elaborated version of the relationship between Marian and the Blum boys. Here there is a naturally harmonious relation between the Professor, a slightly aloof man of dark Spanish aspect who is figured as an aristocrat, and his peasant opposite, the earthy German seamstress Augusta. More crucial, though, is the figure of Tom Outland, described as an orphaned “tramp boy” who roams the Southwest as a cowboy until he eventually falls in with some Jesuits who clean him up and teach him some Latin. This rudimentary education soon launches him toward a metamorphosis into a scientific genius: chemist, physicist, and a mean amateur archaeologist to boot. Still, he retains a roughhewn and naive charm that wins over any social situation, and almost everyone in the novel is or was in love with him. In short, he's a wholly implausible fantasy figure, a utopian fusion of High and Low in all the cultural and social senses of those terms, a kind of “classless” narrative register. At some level Cather's novel recognizes this very implausibility, for Tom is already dead when the narrative opens. The only extended exposure to him that we receive is in the form of an interpolated first-person account of one of his Southwest adventures.

Is not Jay Gatsby a similar wish-fulfillment figure, intensely if variously invested in by those around him? His obsessive history with Daisy begins, of course, when he steps across the threshold of her house in Louisville, traces of his impoverished class background wiped clean by the “invisible cloak” of his military uniform. Bootlegger, Oxford man, distinguished veteran, rumored murderer: the sense of implausibility drapes him like a cheap suit. Rather than registering that implausibility indirectly, at the edges of the narrative as Cather does with Outland, Fitzgerald pulls that very uncertainty wholly within the perspective of Nick Carraway, creating a figure who alternately doubts and endorses Gatsby, or who sometimes seems to do both at the same time. Perhaps more importantly, the Nick/Gatsby dyad affords Fitzgerald the opportunity of critically restaging the thematics of ressentiment found in A Lost Lady. In Cather's novel, they had been used to chart in a lucid fashion the shifting social dynamics of Sweet Water; right alongside them, however, was a persistent register of idealized romanticism, waxing nostalgic about the faded ideals of the original Western pioneers. Cather puts some efforts into keeping these domains separate, marking the romantic imaginings as belonging to the past and the various resentments as part of the contemporary moment, but at certain points, particularly in the figure of Niel Herbert, the two strains are sufficiently conjoined, suggesting a rather more interdependent and symbiotic relationship.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald seizes upon this more conflicted and ambivalent possibility, interweaving romanticism and ressentiment more intensely and in the process transforming both. Again, this is chiefly in the consciousness of Nick, where a related kind of splitting occurs. Characteristic of someone suffering from resentments of his own, Nick attributes ressentiment to all those around Gatsby, those who emblematize the “foul dust” that envelops and destroys him. Nick reserves for himself and Gatsby the more lyrical and romantic registers. It is the textual productivity of this conjoined affect machine that I wish to draw attention to here, one which seeks in its own fashion the eradication of the present. Fitzgerald's aesthetic practice creates a sensitive apparatus for the detection of new socio-historical content, one which has presented something of a conundrum to later critics in regards to its possible political and ideological valences. The novel has famously been taken as both a clinical exposé and a ringing affirmation of the American dream, as radical and conservative all at once. I think here of Fitzgerald's own characterization of himself in 1924 as “a pessimist, [and] a communist (with Nietzschean overtones)” (Bruccoli and Jackson 270), certainly an interesting phrase from our present perspective, implying as it does a simultaneous fealty and animus toward social hierarchy.⁴ Something of this dynamic is present in Cather as well, where some hierarchical relations are destructive while others point toward an imagined self-transcendence (though her generally conservative ideological investments are more readily limned). This works itself out in intricate ways in Fitzgerald.

In his 1932 essay “My Lost City,” one of several pieces collected in The Crack-Up which center on loss and dissipation, Fitzgerald recalls a striking moment from sometime in 1920 when This Side of Paradise was out and selling well, and he was on top of the world: “And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again” (29). His crying is precipitated, not by happiness itself, but via a secondary and temporally removed operation, as if Fitzgerald was at that moment imaginatively placing himself ten or twenty years in the future, a future already assumed to be diminished in comparison to that present, looking back on the moment and thereby generating what appears to be an intense regret. This recalls the stark process of inexorable declension announced at the opening of “The Crack-Up”: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down […]” (69). It is a process that follows various paths, with distinct temporalities: some psychic blows are registered quickly, while others are more stealthy and only come to consciousness long after the fact. The latter is the form taken by Fitzgerald's trauma, as he realizes that for two years he has been an empty shell, a man merely going through the motions of living. It is in either case a peremptory affair, seemingly less a matter of inexorable Spenglerian decline—a minor interest of Fitzgerald's, and another Nietzschean motif—than of a sudden rupture, or a series of staggered, unpredictable blows. In his writing from this period he broods on such rhythms, imagining, as above, similar occurrences much earlier in his life, in what amount to dress rehearsals for the definitive crack-up in the thirties. Recalling again in “Early Success” the time of his first rush of good fortune, he notes that “it is a short and precious time—for when the mist rises in a few weeks, or a few months, one finds that the very best is over” (Crack-Up 86). Or, after a distressing visit to Princeton during that same period: “But on that day in 1920 most of the joy went out of my success” (89). First months, then weeks, now days—what takes shape in the movement of these reminiscences is a kind of vanishing point of experience, a hole slowly opening up within the frame of a (now past) present such that immediacy is hollowed out and slips rapidly out of one's grasp. The duration of experience steadily shrinks until, as in the limousine, Fitzgerald is in a sense after or beyond the moment even as he lives it, caught in a complex movement of proleptic retroactivity and its attendant affective correlatives of loss and longing.

“But one was now a professional”: with this rather grim-faced assertion from “Early Success” Fitzgerald introduces what is in effect the counter-temporality to that more breach or rupture-oriented one just examined. The advent of this, too, occurs around 1920, when This Side of Paradise is due out: “While I waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place—a sort of stitching together of your whole life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another” (86). Here then is an unbroken continuum, a seamless expanse stretching to the ends of time, one whose inner logic maintains a peculiar symbiosis with the multiply-segmented breakdown line, at once a countervailing force and a kind of incitement.⁵ Fitzgerald never stopped lauding what he called the “old virtues” of work and courage, but he was also perpetually bitter over the extensive amount of inferior (he thought) writing he had to do, chiefly for popular magazines, in order to maintain his notoriously extravagant lifestyle—work which he felt kept him from his real vocation as novelist. A professional, then, is not quite an artist, or not only one; rather, a professional is someone for whom every moment is at least potentially one of work, a position familiar enough to intellectual and cultural laborers whose generally privileged and satisfying work is shadowed by this disconcerting temporal structure. This is overcoded in Fitzgerald's case by his early terror of the poorhouse, suggesting that he was being oddly evasive in his characterization of that peasantlike rage which supposedly marked his feeling toward the wealthy. Setting aside the anachronism, what emerges from the poorhouse in this society is not a peasant but a proletarian; the deeper fear of this potential destiny, like some alternate life line lodged inside his actual one, colored his class metabolism. It is thus striking that the chapter of Marx's Capital that he perhaps knew best was the central one on the working day (that “terrible chapter,” he called it [Crack-Up 290]). Here Marx precisely notes that, considered in the abstract, the very definition of the worker is that of a person whose every instant of lived time (minus the necessities of eating and sleeping) can be considered potential labor time. This is a “stitching together” into an infernal and inhuman continuity that resonates with Fitzgerald's own conception of his craft, constituting something like the “inner ressentiment” of the writing profession as such.

Signs of these competing temporalities are present throughout The Great Gatsby. Some of Daisy's remarks, remarkable for their simultaneous evocation of a breathless excitement and a peculiar sadness, elicit this competition: “‘In two weeks it'll be the longest day of the year.’ She looked at us all radiantly. ‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it’” (12). This is Fitzgerald again in the taxi, in some ways a textbook lesson about the absence of presence: you move toward a future moment, one which in this case promises some particular enchantment, then suddenly you are on the far side of it, “it” having never really taken place—or perhaps it took place without you, which might well be Nick's great fear—leaving you with only a vague regret. Or a slightly different version: “‘What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’” (118). Here, rather than the vanishing nodal point of the longest day, we have the setting up of a sharp anticipation, then, leaping across a suddenly empty-feeling thirty years, a desolate stretch perhaps more akin to the world of the “professional.” Jordan Baker catches the flavor of this: “Don't be morbid” she says at once to Daisy, at which point Daisy herself is on the verge of tears (118).

These examples rhetorically concretize and enact in miniature much of the prevailing mood of the novel as a whole, dramatizing the absent or hollow center which animates it—the invented life, the glamorous ephemera, the death in which it culminates. In them the present wavers just a little, not unlike those gaps or seams Nick perceives in Gatsby's self-presentation. These seams afford a glimpse of the dull machinery behind what Nick describes as the gorgeous “unbroken series of successful gestures” (2) that constitute Gatsby's personality. “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now,” Nick says when Gatsby informs him of war decorations received from the Montenegrin government. “It was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines” (67). This makes of Gatsby a virtual parable of the modernist crisis of Schein or aesthetic appearance,⁶ as a host of processes during this period—from painterly abstraction, to Dadaist interventions, to the increasing autonomy of narrative episodes and even of the sentence itself—threatened the aesthetic object with a collapse back into its initial raw materials: smudges of paint on canvas, black marks on a page, or (in Tolstoy's famous example of the theater) people milling about and occasionally talking on a raised platform. Indeed, Mitchell Breitwieser posits Gatsby as a kind of modernist impresario, a Long Island Le Corbusier whose enormous parties strive toward the totality itself, liquor-fueled villes radieuses which stand as prolegomena “to the construction of a society utterly responsive to unification by a single design” (32). But the trick can fall flat, the plan can be seen through, and those who have invested considerable time and effort participating in a particular elaboration of Schein can turn away in bewilderment and hostility (a hostility Nick will be quick to attribute to those around him and Gatsby). Gatsby as Gesamtkunstwerk thus falls short of realization and is shunned and disowned, a certain failure of aesthetic possibility being at one and the same time the allegory of the failure of a dual social and national possibility itself conceived largely in aesthetic terms. This is a persistent theme in American letters, from Hawthorne through Williams and West and beyond, and I will return below to its further implications.

There is a particular sort of excess figured in moments like Daisy's outbursts or in others like Gatsby's straightfaced offering of an anecdote of his life while seemingly doubled-up with laughter at the same time. They have in them something overwrought or histrionic, a straining to express more than is possible (“I'm p-paralyzed with happiness” [9]), or a rapid inflation and sudden deflation, like a balloon quickly filling then bursting. This excess, and there are perhaps different forms of it, is the most characteristic motif or pattern in the novel. This excess is produced when the generalized ressentiment of Cather and the social portrait she fashions is drawn within one centering consciousness or point of view, where it meshes with a certain expressive tonality and becomes a kind of aesthetic resource in its own right. Ressentiment in A Lost Lady already had a formal complexity to it, at once temporal and emotional: a rage directed at the present and the force of its circumstances and exigencies in the name of an imaginary past of idealized values that is at the same time the place of an original (and unrecognized) wound or insult—an intricate play of destruction and preservation. The animating irony, or even aporia, at work here is that the afflicted white bourgeois or petit bourgeois Americans of the story are precisely, as instigators of a pattern of historical modernization, the source of the wound in question. The temporality of the crack-up is, as Deleuze argues (though I think he too quickly assimilates the matter to alcoholism as such), strikingly similar, though it is wound-up more tightly and concentrated within the movement of a singularity: it is a kind of permanent past perfect (passé composé), a constant “I have been” in which a momentary hardness or intensity of the present (“I have …) invariably fades or takes flight into phantasmatic pasts (… been”). “It is,” Deleuze says, “at once love and the loss of love, money and the loss of money, the native land and its loss” (The Logic of Sense 160).⁷ He calls this the depressive aspect of Fitzgerald's condition, though Breitwieser, in examining the affective texture of The Great Gatsby, employs what strikes me as the more productive term, melancholia. He nicely characterizes this as an “anorexic” strategy designed to keep at bay the everyday viscousness of the Real and create a space for lyrical flights, “a chamber in which the dream can echo because the chamber is otherwise silent” (31). Here then is one register of the rather more sweetened form of ressentiment articulated by Fitzgerald seeking expression in those lyrical registers he learned so well from Keats (a lower-middle-class fellow with some fervid resentments of his own).

Melancholic, indeed, though this term risks remaining tied too closely to Fitzgerald's psychology and to a lyric embodiment. Hence it is together with those moments of “excess” that the full scope of the pattern detailed by Deleuze is played out. A certain level of excess in the novel is obvious enough: the lavishness of the parties, the Rolls Royces, the servants—the familiar trappings of Veblenesque leisure-class conspicuousness. But it extends down into individual narrative and linguistic moments in an instructive fashion. “He found her excitingly desirable,” (148) says Nick of Gatsby's initial reaction to Daisy. Not just exciting, or just desirable, but both, a little adjectival whirligig that spins and chases its own tail; this marks the origin of Gatsby's dream, which might well be recast as his obsession, a form of excess in itself. Think, too, of the wonderful, Homeric list of partygoers at Gatsby's that gathers a kind of deadpan comic momentum, or the old man selling dogs “who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller” (27), or (the already excessively Jewish) Meyer Wolfsheim's cufflinks made of human teeth that suddenly lend him the dark aura of some cannibal chieftain. There are as well those sheep rounding the Manhattan street corner, and Myrtle Wilson's pent-up, volcanic energy. All of these examples are moments or figures that momentarily exceed what they actually are, hijacking the world of present appearances and creating a parallel track of fantasy which flees into some alternative, but indefinite, realm. So, too, with the witness to Myrtle's death, the “pale well-dressed negro,” (140) whose appearance, as Breitwieser argues, exceeds narratological requirements: Why light skinned? Why well dressed? Is he too an aspirant, an outsider wanting in, not unlike Gatsby himself? We cannot know, as this figure vanishes at once, but the suggestion has been lodged. What to make, as well, of that odd and slightly notorious scene at the end of chapter 2 when Nick ends up beside Mr. McKee's bed, where the half-naked McKee shows Nick his book of photographs? An extravagant innuendo, at the very least (“keep your hands off the lever!” [38]), exceeding anything we might reasonably ascertain.

Finally, recall Gatsby's remarkable response to Nick's question about where he's from: the middle west, it turns out. What part of the middle west, asks Nick? “San Francisco” (65). Does Gatsby really think that San Francisco is in the Midwest? But this is a pointless inquiry. The sheer absurdity of the response, aside from giving it the aforementioned aspect of deadpan comedy, makes it another figure of excess, something that does not quite fit the container in which it is placed, threatening to burst things asunder. This already incredible answer of Gatsby's is in the midst of a longer and even less credible account offered of his Oxford education and his cavorting with European princes. Just as Nick seems about ready to call his bluff, Gatsby produces a photograph showing him with some other young men, holding cricket bats, with spires in the background. “Then it was all true,” says Nick, “I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart” (67). For the reader, however (less given to romantic leaps), the photograph does not exactly dispel all doubts: given the evident fabrications of Gatsby's tale, in what sense could it be simply “true”? What indeed is it really depicting? That is, rather than standing as some mundane arbiter of the facts of the matter, a simple registration of empirical realities, the photo instead becomes an exceedingly strange artifact, an excessive and even surrealistic object glowing with mysterious energies.

Such “excess” suggests the narrative and even rhetorical refiguration of the encounter between Fitzgerald's and Cather's particular instantiations of ressentiment. This stems at least in part from the very nature of ressentiment, which might itself be grasped as a form of excess, as it is an insistent, corrosive, and often malignant intensification of a certain class awareness, wherein what might have remained a discrete piece of social knowledge becomes an overriding passion or drive. Within the field of Fitzgerald's narrative and ideological practice, a form of splitting or fragmentation occurs, and different expressive forms of ressentiment crystallize. These range from Nick's snobbish asides, melancholic intimations of longing, and (one suspects) well-nigh permanently delayed gratification through to the notes and images of excess detailed above.⁸ Nick's romanticism tends to carry the more palpable affective charge and does the work of deflecting felt slights and cruel deprivations into a compensatory structure of fantasy which softens the rage into something more bittersweet. The figuration of excess is generally more affectively neutral, but all of this, I think—much like Daisy's utterances—involves a temporal component that seeks the sudden inflation and distortion of the present moment, a brief placement of the present sous rature or under erasure, as an early Derridean protocol had it, both absent and present, an incursion of the supramundane that renders the present temptingly fungible. Together these registers work to produce the simultaneous intensification and flight of the present: moments never quite realized, events that never quite took place, desires that were never quite fulfilled—or, as Deleuze more sharply puts it, they all were and were not in the one selfsame movement. “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (36), Nick muses in a formulation that nicely approaches what we are describing here.

The tension thus created stands as the very material index of the intricate and ambivalent positioning of the novel with respect to both its social ground and its exemplary place in the arc of Fitzgerald's career. Indeed, I like to imagine, in an Adornian fashion, a kind of utter subordination of the writer to his or her project, as a certain social and historical content, seeking, in the dynamism of its becoming, adequate aesthetic expression, seizes upon the accidental features of an individual life and psychology and draws them wholly within the process of its artistic self-elaboration. The artist in effect becomes a now fascinated and helpless appendage to this process—not passive, exactly, but one whose intentions and emotions themselves become transformed into so much literary raw material (what Goethe once spoke of in terms of “possession” by an aesthetic demon). It is to this social content that we can at last turn, by way of recalling that problematic of social representation that A Lost Lady embodied for Fitzgerald. For A Lost Lady is in some sense a narrative of social crisis, of rapid and debilitating social change that had implications for Cather's own aesthetic practice: in the twenties, after the world has “broken in two,” she can no longer write the same sorts of novels she once did. For Fitzgerald, however, this combined social and writerly crisis takes a rather different form.

Indeed, are the 1920s not themselves conventionally imagined as a period of excess, “roaring” from one over-the-top display to the next, with Fitzgerald himself as their duly-anointed chronicler? There are important truths in these popular images, though I think that sociologically speaking things were rather more complicated and ambivalent than this. While what I referred to above as a Veblenesque social structure was still much in evidence with its ostentatiously visible ruling elites, another material force to be reckoned with was on the scene, implying a rather different logic of social and ideological relations. I refer of course to the first full implantation of a mass consumer society in America: the assembly line, the five dollar day, the invention and aggressive extension of consumer credit, and the quantum leap forward in mass communication and advertising. This is much more than certain upper- or middle-class sectors buying commodities; this is the purchase of ever more and ever cheaper industrially produced goods by ever greater numbers of the whole population (including the working classes, numerically the greatest segment).⁹ This links for the first time what might be called the formalism of the profit motive—the restless, purely formal necessity for more pluses than minuses at the bottom of the accounting ledger—with consumption itself, now a formalized “more more more” en route to becoming a generalized social value for the first time (rather than a local “ethos” of this or that regional bourgeois fraction). Such a movement involves more than a simple ideology, but is a genuine material force, instantiated in practices, institutions, and social apparatuses, as well as ideologies, an excess which represents a problem for the kinds of leisure class representations of class content we normally associate with The Great Gatsby. This new sort of excess is of course nominally “democratic.” Unlike the Veblenesque scenario, which vividly dramatized class hierarchies and exclusions, the dynamic of consumption—partly ideologically but also partly for real, existing regardless of whatever patterns of status differentiation it becomes enmeshed with—this dynamic presented itself as at least tendentially available to all. This play of distinction versus leveling is interestingly complicated in the text by the figure of Gatsby, who is a transitional figure in that he himself uses conspicuous consumption to challenge and open up a still older form of distinction as represented by East Egg. Even this putative antiquity is deceptive, though, since the Buchanans—Midwestern interlopers themselves—happily take their place in it, testament to the difficulties involved in trying to preserve intact boundaries of wealth, exclusivity, and “breeding” that have essentially been generated out of thin air.

More crucially still, industrial production and its attendant dynamic of mass consumption encode within their historical deployment and elaboration the ultimate suppression or shearing away of older style class content, such that we end up, as in the contemporary period, with no functional or socially resonant representations of the ruling class (pop-cultural detritus like TV's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in no way fulfilling this role). Fitzgerald's contemporaries, such as Leon Samson, an unorthodox socialist and analyst of American exceptionalism whose work deserves wider recognition, were beginning to notice this trend. “The more complete and complicated the American system becomes,” Samson wrote, “the more independent it gets to be of its owners and heirs […] American capital has succeeded in scaling such titanic heights that it has proletarianized even the capitalists themselves” (281-82). Samson here employs what was for him a characteristic mode of ironic overstatement, but the trend he calls attention to was genuine enough. The individualizing and leveling effects of mass consumption work over time to suppress the meaningful visibility of ruling groups, a visibility necessary for the cultural and discursive maintenance and presentation of the class character of society. I presume, of course, that ruling groups still rule; the problem, however, is with their representability, with the fashioning of a culturally credible image of this power, something beautifully allegorized in the novel in the contrast between the initial view of Tom and Daisy and our later glimpses of them. The opening is sweeping and cinematic:

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy evening, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

(7)

Later, however, after the accident that kills Myrtle, Nick does a little reconnaissance for Gatsby, in search of Tom and Daisy, who are now secreted away:

I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly, and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open, and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where we had dined that June night three months before, I came to a small rectangle of light which I guessed was the pantry window. The blind was drawn, but I found a rift at the sill.

Tom and Daisy were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table […].

(146)

A dramatic decrease, then, in the Buchanans' visibility, an allegorical sequestering from public view whose now small-scale intimacy is itself tellingly described by Nick, who notes that “anybody would have said that they were conspiring together” (146). This is a remarkable premonition of what happens when the functionality of social groups is suppressed, a condition precisely identified by Jameson as the tendency “to dissociate the acknowledgment of the individual existence of a group from any attribution of a project that becomes registered not as a group but as a conspiracy” (Postmodernism 349). The cultural existence or presence of the economic and political agency of social classes is thus a signal casualty of our era and a development with serious social and political consequences. In the Marxian optic, of course, the very possibility of “real” politics—those that can significantly alter and improve the material well being and daily lifeworld of the broad masses of the population, indeed permitting them to undertake such a profound renovation for themselves—depends in large measure on at least some sort of tendentially dichotomizing dynamic (whose initial contours need not express themselves in strict class terms). In other words, the potential for working-class consciousness is itself dependent in part upon the perceptible reality of ruling groups.

So the excess of mass consumption is in tension with the excess of Veblen's conspicuous consumption. The latter is on the surface in The Great Gatsby, but I think it is the former which is at work in those more local, figurally striking moments. Such a reading is further suggested by the chief desire projected by Nick throughout the course of the story, a desire for security. This might be seen, for example, in his reluctance to involve himself in the uncertain play of human affairs (his “anorexic” tendency), the counterpoint to which are the moments when an unwanted public attention is turned upon him: “[Myrtle] pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past” (35). Here the force of the Look pulls him out of his more comfortable spectatorial role; recall as well the suspicious glances of the women on the train as Nick bends to retrieve a dropped pocketbook. More crucial is the gravitational pull of that “warm center of the world” (3) represented by the Midwest of his childhood, to which his thoughts so often turn and to whose comforting embrace he has returned to write the narrative we now read. Indeed, he is now virtually as “safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (150) as Daisy herself. There is perhaps an infantile and Oedipal aspect to this, but before leaving it at that Freudian level it must be noted that security is also a value projected by mass consumption. Whereas the leisure class seeks to affirm itself via the direct or indirect class humiliation of everyone else, and thus promote a certain level of social insecurity, mass consumption promises something else. If, as Jameson notes, “we all do want to ‘master’ history in whatever ways turn out to be possible” (Postmodernism 342), and hence seek out a certain insulation from blind historical forces, then piles of more or less available commodities offer themselves up to recently proletarianized populations as another warm center of the world, something which again is more than mere ideological trickery but is bound up with materially dense forces of attraction and appeals to deep Utopian impulses.

And so, finally, Gatsby's shirts: another very famous scene, usually taken as emblematic of the commodity-drunk twenties and the mediation of Gatsby and Daisy's relationship by these commodities. Let me instead suggest a somewhat different reading, inspired in part by Richard Godden's observation that Daisy's precise action—“she bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily” (93)—to the extent that she does not simply collapse with abandon into them, implies more consideration than is normally supposed, a kind of distance or gap between herself and the shirts (Fictions 86). Rather than try, as Godden does, to ascertain what is really going through Daisy's mind here,¹⁰ I would simply observe a certain tension or agon between these two images, the leisureclass woman on the one hand, and on the other the pile of commodities whose very logic threatens to erase her social visibility. Allegorical tears, then, from a character whose “disappearance” will be as marked as (if, as so often with this class, rather less violent than) that of her working-class double, Myrtle Wilson.

Hence, in the end, the profound ambivalence and unique achievement of this novel, as the narrative tracks the emergence of new social content whose laws of operation will suppress the very social meaning of those images and representations from which Fitzgerald's aesthetic practice drew its initial and enduring inspiration. As in some devil's pact—though in this particular pact the two moments of charmed existence and terrible payment are coterminous—Fitzgerald's aesthetic impulses seize upon (or are exploited by) an historical dynamic that both sustains and destroys, and which portends the ultimate extinction of his writerly vocation and being. And, at some obscure level, this is at once known and fearfully cherished: getting burned by History as a kind of ecstatic self-realization. This dynamic issues in the complex movement of splitting and sublimation of ressentiment that we have discussed here, with its simultaneous intensification and undermining of present reality, its vivid excess and sharp longing, its romantic nostalgia and quiet bitterness (at once love and the loss of love, money and the loss of money). These all remarkably dovetail and spiral around one another in an effort to vehiculate a dense and tense knot of social, and essentially class, relations, themselves in complicated transition. This effort to capture and portray what is in the end an historical conundrum is one that perhaps can only end in exhaustion, and indeed, from this point onward Fitzgerald's career will never be quite the same. Writing will never again come so easily to him, and will at times, as during the writing of Tender is the Night, become a veritable torment.

Thus it is appropriate that the novel ends (as we, and so many other commentaries on the text, also end) with Nick sprawled on Gatsby's beach, his thoughts returning to the dawn of the New World. Here we are at that moment of the break with the old world, that moment of breathless Utopian possibility when the project of “America” rises in the imagination as an essentially aesthetic project, something it has largely remained ever since. But with remarkable echoes of Adorno's interpretation of Odysseus's encounter with the Sirens, Fitzgerald offers a rhetorically complex version of a dialectic of myth and enlightenment. In Adorno, the aesthetic (the Sirens' song, heard only by the bound master Odysseus) and exploited labor (the oarsmen, deaf with plugged ears to the fatal temptation) split off from one another at the very outset of “western” culture.¹¹ Fitzgerald's Dutch sailors are themselves afforded a moment's aesthetic contemplation before the frenzied plunge into the continent which will inaugurate that very historical dynamic destined to vitiate the aesthetic dream, namely the stupendous eruption of human labor aimed at extracting as much wealth as possible: that is to say, class dynamics as such, the very ones so consistently disavowed in the dream of America and now materially masked by the advent of mass consumption. What results is a kind of spatio-temporal loop or prison, a seemingly forward movement that leads only backward: “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 […]. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (182). Like Fitzgerald in the taxi, or Daisy awaiting the summer solstice, what is evoked here is a vanishing point in time that amounts finally to a foreclosure on the future, a condemnation to empty longing and repetition without issue. This includes both Fitzgerald's future, left now with only the insidious and changeless grind of sheer professionalism and its particular ressentiment (an omen of the crack-up to come), as well as our collective future as such. Here is the kernel of materialist insight that emerges from the political unconscious of this text and its serendipitous interaction with the details of Fitzgerald's writerly metabolism: no ultimate political or social future is possible without that class dynamic which The Great Gatsby at once dramatizes and effaces. Until such a development, a spectral “America” remains suspended in mythic brooding over the trauma of its always-failed attempts to realize itself.

Notes

1. For this discussion, see Jameson, The Political Unconscious 201-205.

2. Here and throughout I intend the term “class” not only in its more mainstream sense of income stratification but also and more crucially in the Marxian sense of a hierarchical organization of the labor process which affords the imposition of surplus labor and the extraction of surplus value via the production of commodities.

3. On this, see Quirk. I have written in more detail on A Lost Lady and The Professor's House in my forthcoming book, Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (Duke UP).

4. Compare as well the following, taken from a letter Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins (March 5, 1922): “I'm still a socialist but sometimes I dread that things will grow worse and worse the more people nominally rule. The strong are too strong for us and the weak too weak” (Kuehl and Bryer 57).

5. For this terminology of break and segmentation, see the brief discussion of “The Crack-Up” in Deleuze and Guattari 198-200.

6. The term Schein comes from German idealist aesthetics, where it designates the aesthetic effect achieved by the application of some process of construction upon a given set of raw materials. Its English equivalents (aesthetic appearance or illusion, fiction) tend to suggest some truth or reality existing behind the mere appearance, an implication not present in the German original. For a useful discussion of these issues, one which also broaches the problem of modernism, see Jameson, Late Marxism 165-176.

7. I think that this passé composé can shift into a futur antérieur (“I will have been”) from time to time, though Deleuze, with characteristic schematic rigor, attributes this latter tense exclusively to another literary alcoholic, Malcolm Lowry.

8. Though there has been much debate over his ethico-political status as narrator, I take Nick's snobbishness as a given. Not only is it announced on the first page—“as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat”—it is effectively performed. His father's advice, after all, concerned the need to be mindful of the disparate “advantages” available to people; it counseled, in a liberal and democratic spirit, a certain forbearance in the face of material inequality. Nick translates this into the unequal distribution of “a sense of the fundamental decencies,” an altogether more vaporous and idealistic matter far more open to corruption by class attitudes. This of course leads into Nick's oft-noted belief that he “reserves judgment,” when he is in fact busy judging left and right.

9. For a persuasive periodization of the full creation of consumer society, one nicely grounded in the details of economic history, see Livingston.

10. Godden suggests that Daisy momentarily recalls here the “original,” uniformed and classless Gatsby she knew from Louisville; the awful distance between that earlier, innocent figure and the improbable parvenu before her sparks her tears.

11. See Horkheimer and Adorno, 33-4. I follow the widely shared feeling (by no means provable) that this astonishing rewrite of the myth, given its sheer dialectical brilliance and concentration, must be Adorno's doing, rather than that of the more prosaic Horkheimer.

Works Cited

Breitwieser, Mitchell. “The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz, and the Eye-Witness,” Arizona Quarterly 47.3 (1991): 17-70.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. and Jackson R. Breyer, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1972.

Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. 1923. New York: Vintage, 1972.

———. Not Under Forty. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1945.

———. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's, 1925.

Godden, Richard. Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

———. Late Marxism; or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.

———. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Kuehl, John and Jackson Bryer, eds. Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald/Perkins Correspondence. New York: Scribner's, 1971.

Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.

Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise. New York: Avon, 1974.

Quirk, Tom. “Fitzgerald and Cather: The Great Gatsby.” American Literature 54 (1982): 576-91.

Samson, Leon. The American Mind: A Study in Socio-Analysis. New York: Cape, 1932.