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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2007 by Benjamin Schreier

The Great Gatsby and American identity

In order to show what is at stake--and especially what is lost--in reading the novel in terms of identities that can already be recognized, I start with an examination of how Gatsby has recently been read for race. This new scholarship falls into the historicist habit of relying on recognition as the final warrant of legitimacy. Looking for the national present in the literary past, it takes as self-evident the very racial and ethnic differences--along with the behaviors that, according to racialist logic, constitute those differences--that it presumably wants to challenge. Thus this criticism, which seeks to uncover racial particularities elided in an existential fantasy of universalized American identity, remains constrained by a positivist national fantasy that particular identities can reliably be recognized.

With Our America, Walter Benn Michaels is probably the most visible recent critic to pay close attention to The Great Gatsby's engagement with race and ethnicity. In arguing generally for a "structural intimacy between nativism and modernism" (2)--for a link between modernism's "fantasy about the sign" as material and self-sufficient and nativism's fantasy about identity as inherited, racial, and determinative of beliefs and practices--and more polemically that "the great American modernist texts of the '20s must be understood as deeply committed to the nativist project of racializing the American" (13), Michaels rereads The Great Gatsby as an anxious meditation on racial identity. Michaels is most interested in characters--in particular, Gatsby and how other characters think about him. At root, Michaels suggests that Gatsby functions in the book as a figure of the threat of racial admixture. As the text's most transparent register of xenophobic concern, Tom is most overtly sensitive to this threat: "For Tom ... Gatsby (ne Gatz, with his Wolfsheim 'gonnegtion') isn't quite white" (25). Thus Michaels cites the confrontation at the Plaza, where Tom begins by mocking Gatsby's lack of origins--"Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" (Gatsby 137)--and "ends by predicting 'intermarriage between black and white'" (Michaels 25), as evidence of how the text evinces anxiety about the danger of inherited racial difference. Indeed, Tom isn't the text's only racist in Michaels's account: Nick also seems to think Gatsby wants to defile Daisy's--and nativist white America's--racial purity. Nick understands Gatsby's love for Daisy as "the following of a grail. [Gatsby] knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a 'nice' girl could be" (25). Michaels argues:

    "Nice" here doesn't exactly mean "white," but it doesn't exactly not
    mean "white" either. It is a term ... that will serve as a kind of
    switching point where the Progressive novel's discourse of class
    will be turned into the postwar novel's discourse of race.

Nick's confusion arises in part because Gatsby initially appears oriented toward the "magically" (Michaels 26) transformative future and away from his possibly racially suspect grandfathers, who, as Horace Kallen reminds us, cannot be changed (220). Socioeconomic barriers give way before him: that he initially misleads Daisy into believing he is not, in fact, penniless is immaterial because all those things whose absence he conceals from her--including "one's clothes, one's manners, [and] one's friends," as Michaels puts it--are easily obtainable. But Gatsby's real problem, in Michaels's account, is that he is "without a past": he does not have an acceptable pedigree, and winning Daisy (in the nativist imaginary) requires that he have one. Only rewriting the (racialized) past--precisely what Gatsby cannot do through (economically) transformative agency--could "retroactively make him someone who could be 'married' to Daisy" (Michaels 26). The past cannot be changed; indeed, in Michaels's modernity, the "meaning" of an American's past "has been rendered genealogical," has been racialized, suggesting that no degree of class mobility can make Gatsby into something he is not (which is to say, in the crucial instance for Michaels, a [white] American). "Insofar as the desire for a different future is the desire to belong to a different class," Michaels argues, "the desire for a different past that replaces it should be understood as the desire to belong to a different race" (150).