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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2007 by Benjamin Schreier

It remains unclear, however, who Michaels imagines "should" be doing this understanding. He convincingly indicates the representation of nativism in the text by demonstrating how certain nativist characters respond to what they see as a racial threat. But this isn't the same as showing that Fitzgerald's novel enacts its cultural milieu's nativist worry over a racialized American identity, or illuminating "the structural intimacy between nativism and modernism." Racist characters alone do not make a racist book, and Michaels has done little to argue that Fitzgerald's book itself--rather than Tom and, to a lesser extent, Nick and Daisy, and, to a more "vulgar" extent, Myrtle Wilson and Lucille McKee (26)--is "deeply committed to the nativist project of racializing the American." It is indeed probable that "race" operates for Tom et al. as a self-evident category, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily does so for the text. Suppressing this distinction, Michaels doesn't engage Fitzgerald's complex relationship to the hold of self-evidence itself. In fact, we don't have to draw attention to the fantasy that signs like race are unproblematic in The Great Gatsby: the book already does this. Michaels sees Gatsby as a reactionary book because he doesn't account for how it already worries about the manner in which signs signify. Fitzgerald's novel is far more concerned about how identity is understood than it is about the representative traits of its particular characters. Michaels thus seems to treat the book in the same way that Tom, encouraged by "this man Goddard" (Gatsby 17), treats Gatsby: he reduces it to a simple signifier within an unquestioned sign system where race is already visible and subject to social hierarchy and valuation. (2)

In a book published the same year as Our America, Bryan Washington also appears to reduce the novel's perspective to that of a group of its characters. Like Michaels, Washington claims that The Great Gatsby is "preoccupied with and intolerant of the racial and social hybridization of America" (42) and that Gatsby is a threat to the "family" (45), the "Middle West," and to "the white cultural center" precisely because he "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself" (Washington 45; Gatsby 104). Lacking the right kind of origin in a novel where all origins are racial, Gatsby is "the worst kind of outsider" (Washington 45). Also like Michaels, Washington sees Nick as nativist, even if, as in Nick's reaction to the "three modish negroes" in a limousine "driven by a white chauffeur" (Gatsby 73) who pass Gatsby and Nick on the way into the city, (3) it is less obtrusive than Tom's "unabashed racism" (Washington 43). Revealingly, Washington finds the many "so-called ethnic" names of Gatsby's party guests--as recorded by Nick--to

    clearly attest to Fitzgeraldian outrage at the new America, one in
    which so-called ethnics are ubiquitous--in which the citizens of
    East Egg, who form a "dignified homogeneity" in the midst of "many-
    colored, many-keyed commotion," must contend not only with the
    inhabitants of West Egg but with all of New York. (49; my emphasis)