Disembodied Voices and Narrating Bodies in 'The Great Gatsby.' (Issues in English and American Literatures)
1994; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIn Storyteller (1936), Walter Benjamin juxtaposes plight of modern novelist, his text produced in isolation and consumed in private, with idyllic situation of oral storyteller: physically present to-an audience, engaging his responsive community of listeners in process of narration, and leaving traces of his presence in his story like the handprints of potter on his pot (91-92). The Great Gatsby (1925) reflects Fitzgerald's concern with a series of analogous oppositions: with stories written and told, absent and present authors and listeners, voices converted into inky excretions, and voices emanating from physically present bodies in a network of ongoing relationships.These oppositions are implicit, to begin with, in contrast between Nick's story itself (written, like Fitzgerald's, for anonymous readers) and stories exchanged by individual characters in course of novel. Every imagined relationship between writer and reader is shaped by silence, distance, and elliptical sequences of narrative. The Great Gatsby highlights disjunctures of writer-reader interaction through a recurrent focus on direct contact and personal exchange of face-to-face narration. Throughout Gatsby, characters in close proximity to one another swap stories in person rather than in print. Such stories are seen to derive at least part of their meaning from interaction of teller and listener as visible, physical presences, temporarily bound to one another as well as to tale being told.In This Side of Paradise, act of reading--particularly aloud--becomes basis of emotionally satisfying, intensely binding human contact. Amory Blaine and his roommate virtually dispel devil one night by aloud to one another till dawn (119). Fitzgerald's rendering of Amory' s last love affair, moreover, becomes a kind of meditation on certain particularly intense, if somewhat uncanny, rewards of experience.There was something most passionate in Eleanor's aloud. [She and Amory] seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was in his arms. . . . (231)This passage provides one of earliest and starkest examples of a recurrent motif in Fitzgerald's work. From start of his career Fitzgerald associates scene of reading with notion of physical proximity, even intimacy. In Paradise, figure of Eleanor, a kind of double for Amory from outset, is naturally his most receptive reader. (Years later, Amory and Eleanor still send each other their poems.) As a figure for Fitzgerald's own reader, however, Eleanor projects only part of story, a young author's idealized image.The Great Gatsby is written by a more cautious and skeptical Fitzgerald; later novel reflects a more complex and oblique (if no less intense) imagination of pleasures and pitfalls of writing, reading, and being read. Like other authors in heyday of best-seller and writer celebrity, Fitzgerald conceived of his readers as distant and alien on one hand: as particularly close, indeed too close for comfort, on other. In late nineteenth-century America, rapidly changing conditions of professional authorship had multiplied novelist's opportunities for publicity and profit even while increasing writer's sense of isolation, anonymity, and exposure.(1) By 1880s discomfort created by growing distance between celebrated author and anonymous public was inscribed within texts of period. Numerous motifs within realist fiction reflect a profound yearning for and fear of contact with reader (Hochman, Rewards and Portrait). After turn of century as public continued to expand (and to grow more heterogeneous), it came to seem ever more distant, unknowable, invisible. Fitzgerald himself was acutely conscious of these changes(2) but uncertain as to their implications for himself either with regard to marketing and advertising of his fiction or with regard to his own narrative posture within it. …
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