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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2007 by Benjamin Schreier

Finally, Betsy Nies, too, argues that the "theme of the rise and decline of a Nordic civilization prevails" in the novel (95), but in lieu of arguing either the book's racism or its performative potential, she promisingly claims that identity--especially as a racial category tied to the body--is held in contention by Fitzgerald's text, which, by worrying about the diminishing "physicality" of identity, focuses attention on the mechanisms by which race and ethnicity become legible as facts:

    The text's ethnic angst--registered both as a fear and fascination
    with shifting identities--seems bound up with the idea that identity
    itself may be a performance, a textual performance linked only
    loosely to some referential reality, not to a stable, definable
    body. The concern about Gatsby as either black or a new immigrant
    send-off seems based on the idea that Gatsby has created an
    identity, thus rendering the whole concept of identity as physically
    based unclear. Gatsby, of course, is the ultimate text, fabricating
    an identity in a unique imitation of the real. Nick's concerns over
    changing ethnic identities seem interminably tied to this concept of
    textuality. (102)

Because Gatsby can "narrate" his own identity, according to Nick's anxious logic, any identity can be "simulated" or "fabricated," endangering the physical foundation of Nick's own privileged WASP identity. Nick's reaction to Gatsby's prevarication about his past is important to Nies's argument:

    Nick, while not concerned with racial purity per se, is still
    concerned with a certain type of eugenic logic when he tries to find
    out Gatsby's background. He looks desperately for a referent for
    Gatsby's sign, something to undergird and back up the image of the
    man Gatsby proposes to be. (103)

Nies reads Nick's faith in Gatsby as diminishing to the extent that he marks Gatsby's performance as performance; for as long as Gatsby sounds like a textual melange, like discontinuous "bits and pieces of collected phrases" and "misplaced textuality removed from any defining anchoring physicality" (103), Nick distrusts him. But Gatsby's presentation of the photograph from Oxford quiets Nick's doubts and establishes, in Nies's words, "physical proof of his identity."

Nies wants to expose in Fitzgerald an anxious desire to hold on to the body or some other physical basis as "an anchor for the meaning of identity" (107), and she discovers a suspect nativist drive to conflate racial identity with nation in Nick's elegy to "my Middle-West ... the thrilling, returning trains of my youth" (183) traveling at Christmas time through the "the real snow, our snow," and in his recognition of his own "complacen[cy] from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name" (184). For Nies, this scene presents

    a vision of ethnic similitude naturalized against the background of
    an American landscape. As the text ends, Nick returns to the image
    of the train tracks [the first tracks being those along the ash
    heaps], yet covers them not with the ashes of outlying New York, but
    with the snow of his Mid West. (104)