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O ne aspect of TheGreatGatsbythatenteredmyconsciousnesswith my first reading of the novel and intrigued me ever after—though I could not have stated it clearly at the time and only became aware of its importance retrospectively—was the trope of self-invention embodied by its protagonist. The notion of creating another self, of imagining and objectifying a persona and a life based on one’s mental image of an ideal other (the real me that ought to be) was a trope so powerful and appealing that it led to my ongoing interest in doubling in all its structural and psychological ramifications . And though my first critical book, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner, was about a different author, I realize now that my original interest in this structure had been initiated by Fitzgerald. Doubling in one or another of its several manifestations has been to some degree the theme of all my five previous books of literary criticism, particularly in the sense of doubling as the metasubject of those writers I dealt with—metasubject in the sense that the literary artist creates with the body of his work an imagined and imaginative other self, a corpus meant to embody the author’s real me (his interior life) and meant, he hopes, to have sufficient mental and emotional life to survive the moment when his physical body becomes a corpse. I was also influenced in this idea of the writing self producing its written double (in effect, projecting a shadow self created by black ink on white paper) considered as the metasubject continually at work in the formation of a writer’s corpus, no matter what the ostensible subject of any individual work, by Faulkner’s musings on authorship in his second novel Mosquitoes and by Borges’s seminal essay “Borges and I.” In contemplating the involved notion of an author’s written self, I’m reminded of that moment in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield, after reading Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, says that he’d like to phone up Hardy to tell him that he knew just how Eustacia Vye felt. Yet I’ve always thought that, strictly speaking, one can never talk to the person who c h a p t e r f i v e Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method 159 wrote a book one loves. One might be able to speak to someone bearing the same name as the writer, but the person who wrote the book is a self that only comes out to play when the writer is alone in a room with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil or a typewriter or computer—when the author is by himself with himself. The only way you can meet that person is on the printed page. It was in response to this notion that I decided long ago, during the same years I was producing books of literary criticism, to publish my poems under the name John Bricuth, a persona, a written self wholly, and solely, constituted by the words on the page. And it is now this same deep and abiding interest in doubling, originally instilled by Fitzgerald, that leads me back to treat an aspect of that subject in his work. In the previous chapter I suggested that the quantum leap in quality that Fitzgerald’s fiction made with The Great Gatsby was due in part to his being able—after the failure of The Vegetable—to thematize his interest in drama and the theater by structuring this novel, as well as subsequent novels, around the notion of social theatricality. But there were other things Fitzgerald learned in writing Gatsby that were to become recurring elements in his later novels, things that clearly became associated in his own mind with the high artistic level he had achieved in Gatsby and that he repeated as a way of replicating that book’s critical success. The first of these elements reflects the influence of T. S. Eliot on Fitzgerald ’s fiction. It is a critical commonplace that the valley of ashes in Gatsby is, as Bruccoli observes, Fitzgerald’s imagistic evocation of The Waste Land (1922), “which Fitzgerald greatly admired.” Bruccoli goes on to note that “Eckleburg can be read as a Long Island version of the blind seer Tiresias, and the ash heaps are actually and symbolically a waste land” (Grandeur 209). On the...

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