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Reading Nostalgia

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.12.1.0067

1755-6333

Niklas Salmose,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly a novel about nostalgia; it explores themes such as the impossibilities of recapturing the past, the role of myths in our lives, the shattered dreams of our youth, and the unrealized ambitions of the founders of America. Much has been written about these issues. However, this essay will argue that Gatsby is also a nostalgic novel, using the work of French philosopher Paul Ricœur, who made a distinction between a novel about time and a time novel (101)1: Fitzgerald's 1925 classic generates a nostalgic, phenomenological experience in the reader with its thematic content, through its deliberate style and form. Jay Gatsby's nostalgic inclinations are thus mimicked, paralleled, and enhanced by the novel's structure and style, creating a profound effect on a reader responsive to the novel's devices.Fitzgerald uses several tools to create the nostalgic aesthetic of Gatsby. The plot is fundamentally analeptic in construction (told in flashbacks), while the narration is subsequent (narrated after the main story takes place). The narrator, Nick Carraway, fits the definition of a homodiegetic perspective (a narrator who is also part of the story he tells): as countless commentaries have discussed, Nick is a distanced observer, retelling the events of the summer of 1922 in first-person singular, infusing through his commentary value into their importance, a technique that creates a distinct "now" and "then" between the time of the story and the time of the narration. Additionally, the order of the narration is not chronological but jumps back and forth in time in order to support the emotional experience of inner time instead of clock time.2 Furthermore, the choice of words in The Great Gatsby is often undeniably romantic, alluding to Keats or simply evoking nostalgic sentiments using romantic conventions: "For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face" (Gatsby 14). This essay will not deal with all of Fitzgerald's nostalgic strategies in his most famous novel but will focus on one particular and highly original method: the use of the reader's textual memory in order to create a nostalgic experience within the text as an enhancement of the novel's nostalgic themes.Textual memory can be explained by taking into account how the reading process works. In order to make narrative sense, reading is dependent on remembering what came before the present sentence—the past events of the reading—and assessing this memory in the present reading situation. Wolfgang Iser writes that "what has been read shrinks in the memory to a foreshortened background, but it is being constantly evoked in a new context" (111). Reading does not merely flow forward, but the recalled segments also have a retroactive effect, with the present transforming the past. The deliberate use of past narration in order to create a specific effect in present narration invokes the reader's textual memory. Menakhem Perry writes in his illuminating article "Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings" that "a 'backward' directed activity, even only in the mind, plays a major role in the reading-process" (58). He makes the important distinction between retrograde movements that are forced more explicitly by the text through flashbacks or narrative directions toward past narrative events and more implicit patterns in the present text that, in conjunction with the reader's own investments, trigger past textual memories.3In order fully to comprehend what constitutes a literary nostalgic experience, we need to define the nostalgic experience. The nostalgic experience can be simplified into a two-fold experience. The emotional content of the nostalgic experience consists of two emotional phases. The first is the remembrance of an idealized image or event that brings immediate happiness and great emotional affection as the senses unite in recreating something past and perhaps even lost. We can call this element happiness. It is soon transformed into a more intellectual and reasoning second state, which we can call reflection. When we leave the spontaneity of the first emotion and enter the more reflective state where one is reminded of the passing status of the idealized image or event, what could be referred to as a hyper-memory, a melancholia, is created; ultimately nostalgia ends in the bittersweet. In literature it is possible to use these two elements of the nostalgic experience and create a literary nostalgic experience. One part can engage and thrill the reader into experiencing it as a present. A second part confronts the reader through melancholia and reflection upon his or her own textual memory of the first part. What is gained here is a fictional creation, or substitution, of the nostalgic experience.In experiencing the narrative of Gatsby, the reader encounters two divided and opposing structural halves. The first one (chapters 1–4) enhances the imagination of the reader through a set of stylistic and narratological devices such as movement, speed, narrative coherence, atmospheric imagery, and the trigger of reader sensations in order to stimulate a creation of a reader's textual hyper-memory (an idealized memory of the text).4 These strategies are fulfilled through a literary presence, a prose that captures and involves the reader in the present literary events. Chapter 5 forms an obvious zenith, where not only dreams but also memories crash along with the present through Gatsby's effort to recreate the past: "'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'" (110). At this point, the novel also begins to employ a more sober, distanced, commenting style.The second half of the narrative (chapters 6–8) creates a strong movement and longing back to this textual hyper-memory, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The style of the narration is more distanced, reflective, mimetic, and filled with direct speech and flashbacks that slow down its speed. The past textual memory in the reader is not only evoked through the very change of style, but also through the reuse of common symbols that were developed in the first part. This strategy is called literary distance. This division mimics that of the division of the nostalgic reaction. The first part represents the happiness of the memory, and the second part illustrates the melancholic reflection on this memory. Thus, the process of reading Gatsby is similar to the process of a nostalgic reaction. One way to dramatize how these halves function is through Leonard Baird's description of the structure of Gatsby as a party followed by a hangover: "[W]hen you get through with the story you feel as if you'd been some place where you had a good time, but now entertain grave doubts as to the quality of the synthetic gin" (208). The sense of a party giving way to a hangover corresponds very well with the binaries of presence and distance.Since the first part of Gatsby is so direct and so immediate, closely simulating a selected memory of our own, we confront the latter part of the novel with great emotion. This confrontation, one could argue, is really an encounter with our own textual hyper-memory—the idealized memory of the events of the first part of the book. The dream, not only Gatsby's but our own as well, recedes further and further away from us until it freezes into the effects of nostalgia—the reflective and distanced melancholia of the last chapter. As Gautam Kundu has recognized, the world in the first part is "made gorgeous by the magic touch of a romantic imagination that nevertheless moves inexorably toward eventual disintegration and dissolution" (34). The following two sections of this essay will explore this progression in a more detailed way.In Gatsby, chapters 1 to 4 have spontaneity, a stylistic directness that seduces the reader into the happiness element of nostalgia. The aura of mystery, the uncertainty about the characters, the romantic lyricism, and the narrative coherence transfer the reader to the summer of 1922 in a way that turns this summer not only into Nick's memory, but also into the reader's own textual memory. This, together with a more attentive reading in the beginning due to a lack of expectations, gives the earlier part of the text greater importance and increases the possibility of emotional inclusion (Perry 52–53).5 This is a never-ending party.In order to create a lasting impression on the reader, which will form the reader's textual hyper-memory, Fitzgerald uses several narrative and stylistic techniques. It is crucial to include the reader in the textual experience, to draw him into the narrative emotionally and eliminate the distance between narrative and reader, in order to seduce him. In order to accomplish this, the narrative has to exert a strong impression on the reader. One of Fitzgerald's most important techniques is the carefully constructed and coherent narrative structure in the novel's first part. The narrative flow, the feeling of narrative consciousness and order that comforts the reader in the first three chapters, is constructed through different "relations between the structural units" (Doyno 103). This coherence is achieved in three different ways.Several critics, among them James E. Miller Jr., have noted that the first three chapters of Gatsby depict three different parties: "The first three chapters of the book, for example, are devoted to the preparation for and presentation of three scenes: the comparatively 'proper' dinner party at the Buchanan's in East Egg, the wild drunken party at Tom and Myrtle's apartment in New York, and the huge, extravagant party at Gatsby's mansion in West Egg" (100). Although Miller regards this as evidence of Fitzgerald's "art of selection" in which the author introduces the key characters of the novel as well as its main themes and locations, his point is similar to Norman Holmes Pearson's, when he argues that these chapters introduce the reader into a world of illusions and a sense of one long, never-ending party. The three parties "blend into a stereopticon of the illusions which give color to the world in which all of these people live" (Pearson 25). In addition, the chapters are interlaced through a continuous temporal progression, even though they take place on different days, "a continuance in time" as Robert Emmet Long describes it. The Buchanan party takes place from lunch to afternoon, the hotel party from afternoon to evening, and Gatsby's party from evening until long after midnight. Thus, there is a time progression from lunch to after midnight, a structure that "binds the opening chapters together and adumbrates the novel's movement from day into night, from light into darkness" (Long 112).Finally, in much the way a detective story works, Fitzgerald creates reader curiosity thanks to a technique that links the different chapters to each other, reminiscent of the cliff-hangers of mystery fiction. In each chapter, Fitzgerald introduces a theme, an event, or a character that creates curiosity about the next chapter. This tension increases as we approach the chapter's coda. One such example occurs in chapter 1, when Gatsby is introduced almost as a mythic figure during the dinner at the Buchanans' estate: "You live in West Egg," she [Jordan] remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there.""I don't know a single—" [said Nick]"You must know Gatsby.""Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced. (11) The reader is certainly well aware of Gatsby through the title of the novel, and through Nick's passing mention of him in the opening of the introductory chapter (2); but nothing concrete has been revealed about him. As a result, the reader's curiosity is aroused by Daisy's strong reaction when his name is mentioned. Gatsby is mentioned once again before the end of the chapter when Nick tells Jordan that Gatsby is his neighbour (14). Even here, the dialogue abruptly shifts because Jordan is more interested in listening in on Daisy and Tom's conversation: "This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor," Nick says, but Jordan cuts him off: "Don't talk. I want to hear what happens" (14).Reader curiosity about Gatsby reaches a climax at the end of chapter 1 when the reader stands in West Egg with Nick and gazes out over Gatsby's garden: 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. (20–21) This scene creates an atmosphere of mystery. It includes several words associated with the gothic: "silhouette of a moving cat," "moonlight," "figure," "mansion," "stars," "dark water," "nothing," "unquiet darkness." Gatsby remains enigmatic, a "figure" since Nick chooses not to address him. Gatsby's physical pose is quite peculiar: "he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way." Then he disappears into the darkness like a Mephisto, leaving Nick alone in the dark, wondering, together with the reader: "Who is Gatsby" and "What does the green light represent"?In chapter 2, Gatsby is not even mentioned, so reader curiosity is further stimulated by his absence. Inquisitiveness about Gatsby is further reawakened in the very first paragraph of chapter 3: "There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights" (39). Readers hope that they will learn more about Gatsby through this repeated mention that he is Nick's "neighbor," but this turns out to be a faulty presumption because even though Nick describes in great detail the first party he attends, Gatsby remains a figure in the shadows. Reader desires are further deferred at this point through rumors and false statements. A woman relates an incident when Gatsby bought her a new dress when her old one had been ruined at one of his parties. Her friend answers: "There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that…. He doesn't want any trouble with anybody." The woman disagrees: "I don't think it's so much that … it's more that he was a German spy during the war" (43–44). Guests then testify about a host nobody seems to know or recognize. And when Gatsby finally appears, he does so in a shimmer of anonymity: I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there—" I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation."For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand."I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly. (47–48) This technique of mystery runs through the whole novel. As with most mysteries, however, the curiosity is more intriguing in the beginning than toward the end if only because the eventual revelation of the "true story" resolves rather than increases the suspense. We have seen how Gatsby's background and economic enterprises have been purposely obscured through repeated narrative frequency, by having the information being retold and repeated with different content by several characters. This mystification of Gatsby is an important part of creating narrative movement and progress and therefore sustains a flow in the early chapters that encourages the reader's inclusion.Another inclusive strategy, identified by Kundu, is the speed and movement in the first three chapters (75). This motion is realized through a summarizing style based on elliptical montage techniques and a distinct style that Kundu compares to that of a movie camera. The inclusive character is a result of these strategies' effect on "the reader's sense impressions" and creates a reader's "happening" (75). This is similar to Ronald Berman's assertion that the "first half-dozen pages of the novel are an atlas of impressions" (44). This summary, leaving out important information, engages the reader and intensifies the prose to a more effective and elevated style. The quick narrative pace in the opening chapters is partly a result of the many ellipses and numerous scenes in these chapters; the long flashbacks that we find later in the novel are almost absent. In chapter 1, beginning with Nick's arrival in West Egg, there are four ellipses. In chapter 2, there are twenty-four, several due to Fitzgerald's capturing of Nick's drunkenness at Myrtle's apartment. Chapter 3 contains about twenty-nine ellipses. This count has to be approximate since it is difficult to separate scenes with any accuracy in Nick's repetitive and summarizing style. The approximation allows a comparison to chapter 6, which contains ten scenes, chapter 7 (six scenes), and chapter 8, whose innumerable flashbacks retrace the past more than the living present.The rich texture of Fitzgerald's prose in the first part of Gatsby also creates much visual stimuli in its exploration of colors and texture through its extensive use of adjectives. The gardens are "burning gardens," windows are "glowing … with reflected gold" or "gleaming white against the fresh grass" (6, 8). Even the Valley of Ashes is inviting in its textured descriptions, despite its bleakness (Kundu 38–39). This visual appeal suggests the motion of a camera that transforms the fluid prose into a sensation of awe. Thus the traditional slow narrative speed of a heavily descriptive narrative paradoxically creates a sense of movement and speed.6 Both Kundu and Berman describe this when Nick for the first time visits the Buchanans (Kundu 34–35; Berman 137–38). The initial description of the house is like a cinematic long shot, covering a wide scope of the surroundings over the bay: "Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water" (5). When Nick actually arrives at the house, the long shot has been replaced with a tighter one: "a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay." Then Fitzgerald's prose moves further inward: The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. (6) This inward motion toward Tom, simulating that of a movie close-up, creates a sense of textual motion that is seductive in the way it emphasizes motion, speed, and a three-dimensional world.This cinematic form of motion is also present in the scene in which Nick sees Gatsby for the first time. It is can be seen as a pan shot, where the cat's movement reinforces the horizontal movement of Nick's head (Kundu 37): "The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone" (20). This movement is continued through Gatsby's stretching out his arms towards the sea: "I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light" (21). Similarly, Berman identifies this scene as "intensively cinematic" in not only its movements but also its staging, lightning, and framing (151–52). Its romantic allure to the audience is due to the reader being a "silent witness" to Gatsby's trembling arms (Berman 152). These "tracking shots" and their cinematic quality create the kind of motion that engages and draws the reader into the textual world. This further establishes an envisioning, a participation in the action of the first part of the book, which reinforces the textual hyper-memory.The long never-ending party, from the reader's perspective, is thus a result of narrative strategies. The vagueness of such an atemporal party facilitates possibilities of reader associations with their own biographical past and is therefore important in heightening the emotional content of the textual hyper-memory. The fact that these parties take place during the summer further encourages nostalgic identification since summer is often linked to our own nostalgic memories. One technique that serves to emphasize the feeling of a long, never-ending party (the party of a lifetime) is Fitzgerald's use of iterative frequency, or more specifically pseudo-iterative frequency. Iterative frequency involves referring to narrating events as if they occurred more than once. Instead of relating to an event as "happened," Fitzgerald says, it "used to happen." Pseudo-iterative frequency occurs when the detailed description of an event appears to be not completely truthfully presented.7 In chapters 1 and 2 the frequency is singulative in that what is told once in the narrative also happens once in the story.8 However, in the beginning of the third chapter, Fitzgerald departs from this classic narrative strategy and starts telling once in the narrative what happens several times in story time.9 There was not music from Gatsby's house once, but "through the summer nights" (39). Before Nick arrives at Gatsby's party, Nick briefly summarizes all parties of the summer. That passage is a cavalcade of events and experiences as these illustrative fragments show: "In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and champagne and the stars, … [o]n week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, … [and e]very Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves" (39). Fitzgerald's nouns remain indefinite— "week-ends" and "men and girls"—or through the use of the word "every" before the nouns. Iterative time is a summarizing time, a "best-of" summary of the memories and festivities of the summer. The pseudo quality arises out of the unbelievably detailed repetitiousness of the acts. This pseudo-iterative further creates a sense of idealized timelessness through its unreliable narration, relating it to the idealized time of nostalgia.In the midst of this iterative description, something occurs that further accentuates the feeling of presence in these opening chapters. Fitzgerald abandons his faithful use of a sober past tense in favor of a more direct present tense—shortening the distance in French narratologist Gérard Genette's terms.10 The transition is marked only with an indentation: In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. (40; emphasis added) Fitzgerald continues his lyrical meditation upon these nostalgic summer parties in the present tense for a dozen lines before he returns to the past tense when Nick arrives at the party. The return to the past tense also concludes the iterative form, and the parties become the party, as in the first party in which Nick participates. This shift in tense also becomes a shift from a more distanced narration to a more immediate prose that brings the reader closer to relating Nick's experience to his own. With the split narrative, the reader's experience of this first part must be so strong that when the second element of nostalgia (reflection) is manifested in the second half of the novel, he reacts with a feeling of loss, a textual loss since it is fundamentally linked to the deprivation of the past literary experience of the text rather than to his personal biography.Further, the method of triggering nostalgia through music is appropriate since music and sound communicate directly to a reader's feelings. In doing so, they often become important connotations of memory. The long quotation above represents a good example of the musicality in Fitzgerald's prose, a matter discussed by Langman (31–40) and Bryer (123–27). This musicality is especially noticeable in the first half of the novel when it is designed to pull the reader into the ecstasy and presence of the narrative, as well as at the very end when there is a resolution of the two different nostalgic elements. The long winding sentences, where the subordinate clauses play with and complement each other, are not unlike the instruments in a string quartet. In the passage above, we find only four periods, which means there is a flow and a rhythm amidst repetitions. Asyndeton and polysyndeton function as pausing elements instead of periods. Asyndeton connects clauses through the use of comma, while polysyndeton primarily uses the word "and." The repeating rhythm is most prominent in the enumeration of instruments in the beginning of the passage or in the phrase "the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names"; the several "and[s]" create a feeling of breathlessness, which can be compared to the hyper-excitement so often found in children when they experience something important and immediately want to try to tell someone about it. The specific phrasing in this case seems to emphasize action and eventfulness in an almost impressionistic manner, so that the atmosphere of the actual scene is syntactically transferred into the reader's experience. This is further enhanced by the aforementioned switch into present tense in the middle of the description, which minimizes the distance between the reader and the narrated impressions.Asyndeton increases the sense of speed and energy by disregarding normal punctuation. It can be valuable if one attempts to convey motion, tumult, and vigor as part of an exceptional memory. This device also helps to involve the reader in the scene. However, it is actually the use of polysyndeton that carries the most nostalgic value. "And" in normal context signals both the oral and the ordinary, such as a single occurrence in an opening phrase such as, "And then we went there." The repetitive "and" has another connotation: that of pathos and expansive emotions. In Genesis 1:2 we find it contributing to the high-toned style: "And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Polysyndeton has the capacity, as in the example from Gatsby, to infuse a text with awe, pathos, and poignancy. Its general seriousness combines well with lyricism or symbolism to establish the gravity of the nostalgic emotion, as opposed to more ironic or satirical moods.In addition to the numerous references to music there is also much in the style that is associated with music. Bryer calls attention to Fitzgerald's use of verbs to create movement. As examples, he quotes words like "splash" and "slit" (Bryer 126). In the sequence above we find fifteen verbs, a fact that would not be worth noting if they were not in a paragraph that usually is characterized as descriptive and illustrative. At least one of these verbs, "shorn," also contains onomatopoetic phonetic qualities. The sound imagery is otherwise based on phrases such as "the bar is in full swing" and "the air is alive with chatter and laughter." The rich texture of Fitzgerald's prose is thus not only reflected in its visual qualities but also in its descriptions of sounds, which further work inclusively in that they add atmosphere and sensuality to the narrative. The sounds of the summer are constantly infiltrating and fortifying our physical reading experience. It is the "whip and snap" of curtains, white dresses "rippling and fluttering," and the "groan" of a picture on the wall in the windy summer room at the Buchanans. It is the "boom" and death of the "caught wind" when the door is shut (8). The nightingale sings outside (15). Jordan Baker reads a newspaper, her words "murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune," turning pages with "a flutter of slender muscles in her arms" (17). At night 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" (20).In this coherent first part of the book, where readers are drawn into the never-ending party, our no