The Great Gatsby's Aesthetics of Non-Identity

JOHN HILGART The Great Gatsby's Aesthetics of Non-Identity The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald, TL· Crack-Up Like nick caRRAWAY's two most direct and famously perplexing statements of simultaneous approval and disapproval ofJay Gatsby, the whole of The Great Gatsby is strung tautly on apparent self-contradiction (6, 162). While the novel's formal effect depends strongly on the strategic gaps of modernist natrative, their provocative ambiguity is both muddied by a surprising number of blunt declarations and emphasized by the fact that most such declarations are thoroughly undercut immediately or eventually by othet evidence. The question of Nick's reliability that has prompted so much critical ink undershoots the mark; Nick seems to go out of his way to make us a dubious audience, from his opening invitation to look for the "obvious suppressions" in "the intimate revelations of young men," to his claim of unique and absolute honesty at a moment of patent deception, to the novel's final lines, which caress us seductively as they declare that we are all doomed to repeat the tragedy we have just finished reading (6, 64, 189). Arguments that attempt to correct Nick's account are often provocative in revealing just how difficult it is to attach certainty to much in his natrative , but they inevitably attempt to build something solid on and out of what they must simultaneously acknowledge is shifting sand. Gatsby becomes a sort of detective novel, with one critic concluding that Gatsby was indeed, as he lamely claims, driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson, while another asserts that Daisy knew that Myrtle was Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 o John Hilgart Tom's mistress and ran her down intentionally (Edwards, Cartwright). In another account, it is not Wilson who kills Gatsby but Wolfshiem's thugs (Lockridge). One critic judges Nick to be "slow-thinking, sentimental , and occasionally dishonest," but proceeds to separate the reliable from the unreliable with sufficient confidence to judge Nick's favorable comments on Gatsby "ultimately quite humorous" (O'Rourke 58). After a certain point, the sheet volume of correcting-for-Nick arguments , contradicting each other as they do, persuade us that contradiction must be very much the point, but correction beside it. A more productive approach to the novel's overt dissonance considers it to be less a matter of "the facts" than a function of Nick's own conflicted character and divided loyalties. Scott Donaldson carefully accounts fot Nick's competing evaluations of Gatsby by showing Nick to be both obsessively concerned with propriety (bad for Gatsby) and a victim of a romantic imagination much like Gatsby's. However, the richest mystery of contradiction concerns the apparent ideological divide between Nick's thorough exposé of commodified materialism and the degree to which he still seems to be seduced by it. Richard Godden is representative in his judgment that Nick's unmodified boutgeois identity and class affiliation account for his "averting his eyes from Gatsby's dramatization of contradiction," even as he seems so smart about it (365). Moving this angle into the realm of style, Janet Giltrow and David Stouck argue that at the level of plot, the novel is quite critical of materialism, but that at the level of prose—especially in the lyrical passages—Nick falls prey to the allure of commodity culture. We have agreement, then, that at the levels of narrator, narrative, ideology, and style The Great Gatsby manifests pervasive tensions and contradictions. At the center of this is, of course, Nick himself; the criticism is always finally about Nick, who is the text's surrogate authot, and who is generally judged to be limited in his capacity to see what we, the readers, see. In this essay, I resist the conclusion that contradiction in the novel defines Nick's limitations, arguing on the contrary that contradiction is very much Nick's overt technique, serving not to undercut his ctitique of commodity culture but to...