"My Way" in "Our America": Art, Ethnicity, Profession

I am tempted by the wondrous elegance of Mitchell Breitwieser's essay to try to match it: to honor the call-and-response of its jazz aesthetic with a formal echo modeled on what he has written. But I am working under space constraints and am afraid as well that I would, ultimately, in this model, sacrifice clarity to form. The essay is so finely wrought I do not think it warrants my belated editorial hints. What he has done is tease out from The Great Gatsby's (1925) polyphony the discordant tonalities of an emergent discourse of tonal dissonance--"fractured, internally complex"; he has done so most literally and palpably in F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of the avant-garde composition, "Vladimir Tostoff's Jazz History of the World," recovered from the manuscript and ironically identified with Paul Whiteman's 1924 Aeolian Hall concert, and he has demonstrated, with conviction and convincingly, how jazz fragmentation anticipates Tender is the Night (1934) and, especially, The Last Tycoon (1941). A success on its own terms, above all in bearing witness to the "new ways of thinking about social and personal coherence that Fitzgerald was exploring at the time of his death." I have taken particular delight in Breitwieser's underscoring of the postcoital beach walk in The Last Tycoon, which suggests that, contra Fiedler, Fitzgerald could write about "it" after all.

Although Breitwieser gracefully eschews righteous polemic, the work he is doing--what else? where else?--demonstrates beyond dispute what aesthetically focused interdisciplinary outreach--that is, comparative arts and media studies--can bring to literary studies proper. Fitzgerald helped to hoist "The Jazz Age" flag, which has long obscured more than it has explained, but under Breitwieser's informed ear and deft direction this hackneyed symbol of an epoch takes its rightful place as antisymbol: Fitzgerald's alienated attraction to jazz stylistics in the mid 1920s prefigures his relinquishing of what Breitwieser neatly characterizes as Emersonian expressive causality, wherein Representative Men are taken to incarnate, destructively, national (read dominant, read exceptionalist, read nationalist) temper.

Sharply seen and forcefully put: it is a joy to see literary philosophy and musical aesthetics moving together this, well, musically, like lyric to tune; to see him proffer the liberatory discourse of freedom with which he identifies--"avenues of possibility"--as itself an ideological agenda, poised against the dominant discourse of what he calls "mystical essentialism"; and to use the essay form to exemplify, I would say make immanent, his meaning. Check out that evocatively fragmentary, Coltranesque ending, or the resonant cross-soundings throughout of theory and artifact, quotation and commentary, knowledge and hope. To put this another way, Breitwieser may eschew wholism, coherence, and self-identity, but he is certainly a practitioner of linguistic and narrative embodiment--not necessarily the same thing, and a distinction that, I would like to think, is more early Fitzgerald than this essay lets on.

For instance, if we return to the strong recognition that The Great Gatsby is at least as much a visual (filmic) as a musical (aural) text, then the visual discourses of fragmentation, of discriminatingly reflexive perspectivalism, and of the semblance-that-brutally-defamiliarizes (each of which is approximate though of course not identical to the jazz aesthetic) may be in fact more constitutive of the main trajectory of The Great Gatsby than we have been instructed, recently as well as traditionally. By visual I mean (and here I recognize a kindred viewer in Michael North) that The Great Gatsby is voyeuristic. One of my principal pleasures is in the phenomenology of glimpsing and attributing and conjecturing that Nick provides; we are, in short, always doing what Nick is doing. The reader watches Nick watch these intersecting love triangles go by; we get to experience the discrepancy between what Nick sees and does not see, including blindnesses in himself ("bad faith"), knowing full well that we, like Nick, are somewhat in the dark, where the shadows...