Another Reading of The Great Gatsby
1979; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esc.1979.0039
ISSN1913-4835
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoA N O T H E R R E A D I N G O F T H E G R E A T G A T S B Y K E A T H FR A SE R University of Calgary Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created — nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal — and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision. Narrator in “The Rich Boy” 1 Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. Narrator in The Great Gatsby2 \JTonnegtions” are of course important in The Great Gatsby, for without them Gatsby’s rumoured association with crime, and its particular dialect, would not ring as true. The presence of Wolfsheim serves to connect Gatsby with the underworld from which his riches are hatched and his plans to marry Daisy made possible. “Gonnegtions” are Gatsby’s dream, and also Nick’s. What Gatsby of West Egg is seeking, by means of the lucrative business afforded by the underworld portrayed in Wolfsheim, is a coneggtion with Daisy Fay of East Egg. In this light, Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself” is enriched by what I take to be Fitzgerald’s allusion to Plato’s parable in The Symposium about the origin of love. In The Symposium Aristophanes is made to tell how Zeus, angered at the behaviour of the three circular shapes constituting the original sexes, decides to cut each in half: like eggs, says Plato, sliced in half by a hair. Yearning ever since to be reunited with himself, man has sought to couple with his other half. According to Plato, the resultant halves of the original hermaphrodite became heterosexual men and women; halves of the original female, lesbian, women; while fragments of the first E n g l ish Stu d ies in C anada, v, 3, Autumn 1979 male turned into men who have devoted their lives (honourably in Plato’s eyes) to the intimacy of boys and other men (“it requires,” says Plato, “the compulsion of convention to overcome their natural disinclination to mar riage and procreation” ) .3 If The Great Gatsby is a love story, and it is, it is one aware of this complex sexuality of antiquity. As we shall see, it is not only to The Symposium that we must turn for confirmation of the novel’s peculiar and hitherto unnoticed sexuality — the theme of what follows — but also to The Satyricon of Petronius. II Here and there in Fitzgerald’s novel inklings of depravity turn reader into voyeur. One never quite knows, for example, how to read the last page of Chapter 2, a scene which follows the dissolute party in Myrtle Wilson’s apartment, when Nick Carraway follows Mr. McKee out to the elevator. Descending, McKee suggests Nick have lunch with him some day — any where— and the elevator boy snaps: “Keep your hands off the lever” (G, 38). Apologetic, McKee says he was unaware he was touching it. The nar rator says he would be glad to go. Where they go is to McKee’s bedroom: “ . . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” Then some more of the narrator’s ellipses between what we presume are titles of photographs taken by McKee are followed by Nick’s abrupt removal to “the cold lower level” of Pennsylvania Station where he lies waiting for the morning train. It is an odd scene because Nick never goes to lunch with McKee and McKee never reappears. Odder still is the...
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