Desire's second act: "race" and The Great Gatsby's cynical Americanism

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2007 by Benjamin Schreier

This cynicism will govern Nick's final judgment of Gatsby, his simultaneous craving and unwillingness to identify with him. If Gatsby is attractive in his "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" (Gatsby 6) and his rare sincerity, then Nick, in declaring also that Gatsby "represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn," marks disenchantment as the register in which that sensitivity and sincerity are proven to be incommensurate with the welter of cliches to which they were directed. Gatsby's naively romantic sincerity and sentimental dream of fetishized identity, of course, are not the center of this text; their impertinence is, and while Nick remains skeptically incapable of identifying with Gatsby's desire, he also wants to disown the conditions that undermine it. Nick reads Gatsby's fate through his own ambivalence, caught between acknowledging Gatsby's effort to maintain ignorance on the one hand and the benign productivity enabled by such ignorance on the other. As we do, he sees through Gatsby long before he starts liking him, but he does start liking him, and the end of the book is nothing if not an attempted defense of him. The text puts us in the position of wanting to sanction both poles of Nick's ambivalence, rendering Nick--precisely in his skepticism--the reader's potential proxy. Indeed, the one thing Nick does that the reader really cannot sanction is retreating back to the Midwest, racially pure or not. This is decisive: just as Nick can't quite identify with Gatsby, so the reader can't quite apologize for Nick. But if this novel is not really about Gatsby, Nick--with whom we feel more empathy--untragically validates Gatsby's failure, and not the dream it followed: Gatsby mistakenly believed he was justified in shaping his world, while Nick correctly knows he is unjustified in valuing Gatsby's imaginative labor. (8) So, while The Great Gatsby is more fundamentally the story of Nick Carraway's disillusionment than it is of Jimmy Gatz's tragic rise and fall, it is about Nick precisely to the extent of his miscarried identification with Gatsby. Through Nick, Fitzgerald's novel dramatizes a naive longing for interpretive security. If it emerges in desire's canny bad conscience before Nick even meets Gatsby, the novel's cynicism coalesces around the representation of Nick's disenchanted and unsustainable identification with Gatsby's failure. Staging an identification that ultimately cannot be consummated even as it is repeated for the reader, this book renders representivity itself untenable.

Nick never discovers something in Gatsby that survives outside Gatsby's sentimental delusion. The discomfiture or Gatsby's naive imaginative project and the banality by which it is framed articulate for Nick Gatsby's inevitable trajectory: Gatsby is a cliche searching, via Nick, for substance. He expends himself in his vigorous, futile faith, and Nick is left alienated from this faith because he knows it transcends nothing of its contemptible field of exercise. The pathos of Nick's "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together," coming on the heels of "They're a rotten crowd," is that Gatsby may stand out from his milieu, but it is a milieu he has chosen.