The standard cliché of every writer’s workshop is that you should show and not tell. F. Scott Fitzgerald avoids this dichotomy by neither showing nor telling: he insists. He conjures a world by sheer acts of literary will. Take the scene when Gatsby drives across the Queensboro Bridge towards the midtown skyscrapers:
Over the great bridge, with the sunlight
through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the
city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a
wish out of non-olfactory money. The
city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first
time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
All the
promise and mystery of the big city contained in those white heaps and sugar
lumps. In the hands of a lesser writer,
this kind of tossed-off description would seem, well, tossed-off. But Fitzgerald makes it work. Something in the music of his language
invites you to invest your heart into this tableaux, to fill in the blanks with
your own private pangs of hope and hunger:
the New York City of your own distantly remembered dreamed.
While there
are many other settings and situations in the novel that Fitzgerald wills into
existence, none is more problematic than the hopeless love at the center of the
story: Jay Gatsby’s years-long obsession
with Daisy Buchanan. On the surface, it
makes no sense. Gatsby is a man who has
built himself out of opportunism and self-invention. In the course of five years, he has abandoned
his family, ingratiated himself with a millionaire yachtsman, served as an
officer in the first World War, studied for a semester at Oxford and become a
major player in the underworld of bootlegging and stolen bonds. He has become such a smooth criminal that he
can throws lavish parties at a palatial mansion every weekend and never have to
worry about a police investigation.
And why has
he done this? Because he fell in love
with Daisy on a summer night in Louisville and has never gotten over it. Does it seem likely that a man of Gatsby’s
remorseless ambition, a man who can effortlessly shed his own identity over and
over, would remain fixated on one woman?
His awkward attachment is a hole at the center of the novel and yet we
accept it, we accept the whole ridiculously doomed romance. We accept it because of the words intoned by
a master conjurer:
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s
white face came up to his own. He knew
that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her
perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer
to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like
a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Taken as a rational explanation, this paragraph
will never convince. But the hum of that
tuning fork—much like the melody of Daisy’s voice, which sounds like money—is
difficult for anyone to resist. We come
to accept Gatsby’s infatuation because Fitzgerald knows something about the
mind of God, how to create a world out of a well-chosen utterance.
The Great Gatsby
remains a classic because of this elemental power of language. Sentence by sentence, this novel recreates
the experience of those men who first held their breath in the presence this
continent, who built a new world out of nothing but the bounty of nature and
the abundance of their aspirations.
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