Scott Fitzgerald, the story goes, wrote his classic novel The Great Gatsby in response to being jilted at Princeton by a young lady well above his caste. Ostensibly created to exorcise that green worm of envy, Gatsby, simply put, describes a lovelorn soldier, Jay Gatsby, home from war who moves into a house across a bay--and an economic divide--from that of a now married former girlfriend. He obsesses over this ex-girlfriend and attempts to woo her by throwing extravagant parties, inviting wealthy, stylish people in the hopes that she will show up and be duly impressed.
On its face, the premise of Gatsby appears 'cringe.' A man too shy to approach his -ex, Daisy Buchanan, instead 'stalks' her. Daisy's cousin, Nick Caraway, narrates. He sits somewhere in the midwest, one year after events, and he extols the man who spent the summer previous using him to get to Daisy. In the telling, that man associates himself with known underworld crime bosses and has created an entire identity based on a series of lies and nefarious financial dealings. Self-made, wealthy beyond his dreams, Gatsby has created an image--a persona--in order to one day attain the object of his desire.
Gatsby's real name, it turns out, is Jay Gatz, and he is a farm kid from North Dakota who migrated slowly east and learned to grift along the way. In Louisville where he met Daisy, a debutante, and consummated their affair, he trained in the Army. After serving in the Great War in Europe and returning circuitously by way of Oxford University, Gatsby has arrived on a Long Island bay in a location called West Egg, which sits across from East Egg and Daisy, who has married, unhappily, an American aristocrat, Tom Buchanan.
This timeline--the timeline of Gatby's life and interaction with the other characters in the book--trickles out through Nick's narrative. Through it we come to regard in Gatsby a Dionysian energy that relates, in the simplest sense, to Great Myth. The book is perhaps as much an ode to Romanticism, or:
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet."
This is from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," a canonized poem, in which the poet describes remembering a walking trip, five years past, to the ruins of Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley. Much has been made of the ways the English Romantics wrote about grief, loss and death.
For those unfamiliar with the terms Romanticism and Modernism, the former describes the period of time between the the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, while the latter describes the era beginning with the turn of the century and ending at about the Second World War. Arbitrary markers, yes, but useful in that they are defined by the distinct series of attributes related to art, architecture and literature of those specific time periods. Trends, if you will.
Academics hold that the modern sense of the sublime relates directly to the earlier Romantic appreciation of Nature and represents a break, in the Arts, from that which came before. In other words, whereas before the Revolutionary fervor of the late 18th Century the sublime in Art was expected and appreciated, it was not foregrounded. By the early 20th Century, artists like Gertrude Stein began making an Art that made everything about the sublime. Their theory of Aesthetics was meant to be persuasive and it ignored certain aspects of life: the banality of politics and of the direct experience of things like war.
In American letters, one notion of the sublime, when we talk about Art and artistes (and their coordinated efforts), relates to "the myth of (the) un-transacted destiny propose(d) as the spirit of the true America: the long suppressed...'deific' sensibility that is common to all." (Jeffrey Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem). Jay Gatsby does not suppress this deific sensibility and it attracts Nick to Jay.
Of course, Gatsby exists first and foremost as image. Sure, he is fond of addressing people as, "old sport," and he pleads with Daisy to leave her marriage. But we get absolutely no sense of an inner life and the people who revel in their interactions with him reveal a variety of narratives that attribute to his murky past.
He first appears in the book in the last two paragraphs of the first chapter on a warm summer night, standing at end of his lawn, on bay's edge looking across at the green light on the end of the dock that juts out in front of Daisy and Tom's mansion. Nick watches unobserved as Gatsby stretches his arms out towards the green light.
"Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness." (18-19)
Fitzgerald returns to the green light--and the color green generally--as symbol. The light at the end of the dock anchors the book and forms the basis for teaching Gatsby to high school english students. What does the green light represent? Power? Wealth? Greed? Renewal? Spring? Rebirth?
Whatever it is, Fitzgerald points to the subconscious urges that undergird desire and he seems to argue that the energy that runs through Gatsby--the energy that makes it appear as if he is trembling when Nick watches him stretch his arms towards the green light--is the same as the energy that drives, for instance, a daisy, forcing it from the earth and into bloom. In the western world, we call this energy, when seen in human form, Dionysian. It was the god Dionysus who was celebrated during Spring festivals in the ancient world. Fitzgerald's interpretation of this concept relates, consciously or not, from Ezra Pound, the fascist poet tried after World War II for treason.
In the aughts of the 20th Century, Pound put forth a theory of Aesthetics called imagism based on artistic expression shaped in its precision and sparseness from natural forms. A simple summation of Pound's Theory of Aesthetics goes like this: “Beauty is sexuality, and sexuality/Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility/Of the earth is economics,” which makes sense from an agrarian standpoint.
One significant context of The Great Gatsby, though, is the world of high finance. Nick makes a living as a stock broker and Tom Buchanan and even Jay Gatsby, it could be argued, are part of the investment class. Buchanan comes from 'old money' while Gatsby possesses what is called 'new money.' He has hustled his way to wealth.
The novel only became fashionable at the end of the Second World War when it was distributed to soldiers coming home from Europe. One suspicion I have is that this was done in order to dissuade those soldiers from attempting to take up with ex-girlfriends who had moved on during the war. After all, that is exactly Gatsby's story and the warning in his story is that, of course, he fails to attain Daisy, in the end, and is instead murdered in a case of mistaken identity abetted by Tom Buchanan.
What about finance makes the world Fitzgerald describes differ from that of Pound's world of fertility as economics? Here we arrive at the fulcrum of the text.
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