Back West: Time and Place in The Great Gatsby

B A R R Y G R O S S Michigan State University Back West: Time and Place in The Great Gatsby “I see now,” says Nick Carraway, “that this has been the story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all W esterners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” W hatever can he mean? If by “Eastern life” Nick means moral indifference, chaos and corruption, dishonesty and decadence, the Buchanans and Jordan Baker are right at home. True, Gatsby is sufficiently removed from Eastern life to keep his dream “in­ corruptible,” but he does exploit and function in it. Nick is the only really unsuccessful tran sp lan t though even he has his moments of adaptability. Nick’s statement has provided incontrovertible evidence for those who interpret The Great Gatsby as a “tragic pastoral.” Accord­ ing to this interpretation, Fitzgerald posits a corrupt, materialistic East against a simpler and, hence, morally superior West. But Tom ’s Lake Forest, Daisy and Jordan’s Louisville, Nick’s St. Paul are hardly frontier towns and certainly not pastoral. Nor do their products manifest a moral superiority to the Easterners with whom they come in contact. Nick explicitly denies that the wheat and the prairies constitute his Middle West. Jimmy Gatz is raised on a North Dakota farm but he leaves it. Indeed, the novel’s only rural W esterner is Henry C. Gatz and it would seem that if Fitz­ gerald wanted to suggest the West’s moral superiority he would have invested it in him. But Henry C. Gatz is just a sad old man as dazzled by the splendors of the East as his son ever was; he is gifted with no special insight or moral sensitivity. Fitzgerald wrote Maxwell Perkins on June 1, 1925, two months after Gatsby was published: As a matter of fact the American peasant as “real” material scarcely exists. He is scarcely 10% of the population, isn’t bound to the soil at all as the English and Russian peasants were — and, if he has any sensitivity whatsoever . . . , he is in the towns before he’s twenty. Either Lewis, Lardner and myself have been badly fooled, or else using him as typical American material is simply a stubborn seeking 4 Western A merican Literature for the static in a world that for almost a hundred years had simply not been static. It would seem that literary critics, at least those who subscribe to the “tragic pastoral” thesis, are not immune to the desire to repeat the past. The statement could be dismissed if Nick had made it earlier in the novel'as just another example of his faulty perception, along with his assumption that the squalor of Wilson’s garage cannot be all there is but “must be a blind” for “sumptuous and romantic apartm ents . . . overhead” and his guess that Gatsby bought his house across from Daisy’s by “a strange coincidence.” But Nick declares this the story of the West now, now that he has been educated, now that he has learned to look behind the pink suits and the frantic parties and the unbelievable house, now that he has perceived that the essential Gatsby is “worth the whole dam n bunch put together.” We must take the statement seriously. The statem ent makes sense to me — and, more im portant, illuminates the novel for me — if I regard East and West in The Great Gatsby not so much as places but as times, not so much as geographic locales but as states of mind — and at a specific historical mom ent in the history of the American imagination, that m om ent when the country suddenly reverses itself, turns in on itself, when manifest destiny makes an about-face, as if a cultural hourglass were suddenly tipped over and the grains of sand pursued a new course as irresistibly as they had pursued the old one. If this were a nineteenth century novel, if the author were a W hitman or Thoreau, West would be the geographical and psychological direction of the future, East...