Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word, The

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Will, Barbara

Jesus, we're the few remnants of the old American aristocracy that's managed to survive in communicable form-we have the vitality left. And you choose to mix it up with the cheap lower middle class settled on Park Avenue. You know the distinction-and in most of your relations you are wise enough to forget it-but when it comes to falling for a phoney-your instincts should do a better job. All that's rude, tough (in the worst sense), crude and purse proud comes from vermin like the _____s. (Undated note to Scottie from F. Scott Fitzgerald)11

"Mix[ing] it up with the cheap lower middle class," Scottie fails to let her "instincts" create the necessary distinction that would preclude her "falling for a phoney." The "distinction" Fitzgerald refers to is one of class, to be sure, but even more of race-a point made clear by his emphasis on familial "vitality," which directly echoes contemporary nativist discussions of race and degeneracy. Lothrop Stoddard, for one, would differentiate between "Nordics" and "aliens" on the basis of "vitality": "there seems to be no question that the Nordic is far and away the most valuable type; standing, indeed, at the head of the whole human genus" (1920, 162). Yet Stoddard also fears that in the post-War period, "Nordic vitality" has suffered a two-fold blow: decimated by the War, which has left "the men twisted by hereditary deformity or devitalized by hereditary disease . . . at home to propagate the breed," Nordics are also victims of immigrant ambition: "the Nordic native American has been crowded out with amazing rapidity by . . . swarming, prolific aliens, and after two short generations he has in many of our urban areas become almost extinct" (181; 165). Given Fitzgerald's own failure to see action in the War, his lifelong battle with alcoholism, tuberculosis and neurasthenia, and his confession, in the 1930s, "that lack of success of physical sheer power in my life made trouble,"12 it is somewhat ironic that he would appeal to Scottie on the grounds of their shared claim to familial "vitality." Yet "vitality" is precisely what distinguishes "the old American aristocracy"-or in Stoddard's terms, "the Nordic native American"-from "vermin," and it is the terms of this distinction that Fitzgerald means to emphasize in his letter.

Whether or not Fitzgerald means to emphasize this distinction in The Great Gatsby is another matter; beyond his presentation of Tom's ideas as not only hopeless but "pathetic" is the fact that Jay Gatsby is not identifiably Other-like the "modish Negroes" on the Queensboro Bridge or the Greek Michaelis-but simply "not quite white." Yet again, being "not quite" is perhaps Gatsby s most troubling aspect. Located in the liminal space between categories, the space of indeterminacy and differance, Gatsby consistently eludes the terms of both national and textual belonging, and it is these terms which, as Fitzgerald explains to his daughter, enable "distinctions" between self and other, white and non-white, American and un-American, to emerge with clarity. To this extent, finally, Gatsby is not only a mystery in the text, a signifier of indeterminacy and unrepresentability; he is also, quite simply, an obscene threat to the national "vitality" of which Tom Buchanan laments the loss, and which The Great Gatsby itself purports to celebrate in its final pages.