Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word, The

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Will, Barbara

In his recent study of nativism and American literature in the 1920s, Walter Benn Michaels argues that the threat of a disappearing white race constitutes Tom's real concern about Gatsby's union with Daisy; it is the fact that "[f]or Tom . . . Gatsby (né Gatz, with his Wolfsheim [sic] 'gonnegtion') isn't quite white," that sustains his antipathy toward his rival (Michaels 1995, 25).5 Gatsby's "off-white" status is confirmed earlier in the novel by the comment of Tom's relation-by-marriage Nick Carraway that "I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York" (Fitzgerald 1999, 41), a statement that associates Gatsby not with radical otherness but with creole or Jewish difference, both in the 1920s "assigned to the not-fullywhite side of the racial spectrum."6 What most disturbs Tom, and clearly troubles Nick, is not just the fact that Gatsby is a mystery but more that he signals the "vanishing" of whiteness into indeterminacy, and thus threatens the whole economic, discursive, and institutional structure of power supporting the social distinctions and hierarchies at work in The Great Gatsby. For Tom (and possibly Nick), whiteness and its attendant privileges-material well-being, entitlement, the feeling of being "safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor"-is something that must be preserved, safeguarded, barricaded. Thus when Gatsby is most dangerously close to "winning" Daisy, it is not so much his social ambition that threatens Tom as the fact that his pursuit portends "intermarriage between black and white." Gatsby's "obscenity" for Tom lies in the challenge he poses to sexual and racial norms. In exposing Gatsby's link to miscegenation, Tom brings out the deeper social menace against which his own claim to whiteness stands as guardian: "Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization" (101).

That Gatsby is associated with a Jewish crime syndicate, moreover, only redoubles his threatening presence in the text. With his "Wolfsheim 'gonnegtion'" Gatsby seems contaminated by more than just criminality and sexual perversity; for it is the fact of Wolfshiem's crudely stereotyped, animalistic Jewishness that most seems to "taint" Gatsby. The same "taint" is also suggested by Gatsby's layered, problematic name. "Jay Gatsby," of course, is only a WASP fiction adopted by one "James Gatz of North Dakota," yet although the text is directed toward exposing this fiction, the significance of this exposure remains obscure. While the name of "Gatz" is clearly haunted by ethnic, and specifically Jewish, overtones, "Gatz" is also a decidedly ambiguous name. Not not Jewish (as opposed to "Gaty," the first version of "Gatz" shown in Fitzgerald's drafts), the name "Gatz" is also not identifiably Jewish (as opposed, for example, to the more common "Katz"). Both Jews and nonJews have the surname Gatz; moreover, the name "Gatz" sometimes appears as a germanicized alteration of a Yiddish name, "Gets."7 That Fitzgerald knew of this etymological complexity would not be surprising; as Lottie R. Crim and Neal B. Houston have pointed out, Fitzgerald's use of names in Gatsby is remarkably rich and nuanced.8 By choosing a name, "Gatz," that can generate both Jewish and gentile chains of associations, Fitzgerald seems to be emphasizing once again the way in which his protagonist is always "vanishing" into racial and hence social indeterminacy. Neither identifiably black nor identifiably Jewish, the shifting, obscure, ever-vanishing figure of James Gatz/Jay Gatsby troubles the category of "whiteness," problematizing the force of this category at a moment when such force is of crucial significance.