Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word, The

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Will, Barbara

Hence those few crucial scenes where Gatsby s character promises to be revealed as meaningful and directed toward a significant end invariably prove to be "provokingly elusive." In the famous flashback scene of chapter VI, for example, Nick recalls Gatsby's past as "James Gatz of North Dakota" in order to explain Gatsby's present, portraying his youthful rejection of family and original name as a necessary precondition to his later "glory" as a wealthy, upwardly-mobile adult (Fitzgerald 1999, 76 ff.). Nick's account of Gatsby's adolescence attempts to cast him in a familiar mold: the self-made man, "spr[inging] from his Platonic conception of himself," the spiritual descendent of other hard-working national icons like Horatio Alger or Benjamin Franklin (whose famous "Plan for Self-Examination" would be invoked later in the text in Gatsby's own childhood "Schedule"). Yet the text consistently undermines these seeming "causes" of Gatsby's actions at the very moment of their "revelation." For what this chapter in fact reveals about Gatsby is not so much his identity with an American tradition of hard work and "luck and pluck" but rather his dreaminess, his entrapment in "a universe of ineffable gaudiness," his belief "that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing." What motivates Gatsby is not the desire for material betterment ("food and bed") but the evanescent and the intangible; what satisfies him is confirmation of "the unreality of reality." Whatever is, for Gatsby, can be contradicted, "the real" is always "the unreal," and this is troubling both to the descriptive terms and to the larger narrative of American achievement within which Gatsby is meant to emerge as "great." To be sure, to tell the story of a figure trapped in the oxymoronic "unreality of reality" is to tell a modernist story, if modernity, as Jean-François Lyotard suggests, "does not occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality-a discovery linked to the invention of other realities" (1992, 9). Consistently dreaming beyond the material, social, economic, and temporal boundaries of his surroundings, overturning and reimagining the hierarchies of power and social status that constrain him, Gatsby could be seen as a modernist figure, a deconstructive figure, a figure of diffémnce, whose "motivation" is to "shatter . . . belief" and hence "invent . . . [new] realities." Yet The Great Gatsby is no Ulysses, capturing in the play of signifiers the movement of Gatsby's "différance"; however "modernist" Gatsby may be, his character can only be revealed through the moments in which he vanishes from the narrative, through oxymorons, through dashes-all of which point to an unrepresentability at the center of this textual reality.

III.

In a text so haunted by indeterminacy and unrepresentability, what stands out are precisely those efforts that work against "vanishing," that attempt to affirm, make visible, and police boundaries of meaning, identity, community, sexuality, and nation. These are also efforts directed against Gatsby and his elusiveness: efforts either to make sense of Gatsby's character (as in Nick's effort to "reveal" Gatsby's formative past) or to cast him as inherently corrupt and "obscene," as outside the boundaries of sense, propriety, and order, as racially and sexually perverse. These latter efforts are centered in the character of Tom Buchanan, denizen of the isolated town of East Egg, two-timing husband of Daisy, and single-minded adherent to the nativist views of a tome called "The Rise of the Colored Empires," modeled on Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 volume The Rising Tide of Color Against White WorldSupremacy.* For Buchanan, following Stoddard, "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly submerged," a statement whose characteristic use of the dash emphasizes the anxiety that underwrites American nativism in the 1920s, its sense that the process of Nordic "submersion" by an ever-expanding "colored empire" may already be underway. What the dash in Tom's statement represents is what, for him, would be unspeakable-miscegenation, a process through which "whiteness" and "color" become undifferentiated, through which "race" itself, and the white race in particular, become indeterminate. For Tom, it is Jay Gatsby in particular who represents a mode of racial indeterminacy or "vanishing" that threatens to violate not only the immediate community of East Egg but also the very concept of Americanism itself.