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Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest D. G. Kehl Arizona State University Aliene Cooper Boise State University Near the end of Fitzgerald's This Side ofParadise, Amory Blaine, returning to Princeton after his disillusioning sojourn in Atlantic City, concludes that he knows one thing: "If living isn't a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game" (278). For Fitzgerald, by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby five years later, living had become both a quest for the grail and "a damned amusing game," with emphasis sometimes on the quest and sometimes on the game. It took Fitzgerald another eleven years and a "crack-up" to verbalize the paradox: "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" (The Crack Up 69). Jay Gatsby "found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail" (149). The grail, personified in Daisy Buchanan, is paradoxically beautiful and romantic but also, like the cut-glass bowl in Fitzgerald's 1920 story with that title, hard, empty, and, at least for Nick, "easy to see through" (Flappers and Philosophers 97). Fitzgerald's interest in the quest tale has been noted. For example , James E. Miller has discussed This Side ofParadise as a "quest book" (16-22), and Edwin M. Moseley has commented on Gatsby as "a prose 'Waste Land'" with Nick as "modern quester" (31). Several other studies have made passing references to the grail motif in Gatsby, perhaps the most pertinent being K. G. Probert's limited discussion in "Nick Carraway and the Romance of Art." Probert, however, failing to grasp Fitzgerald's paradox, faults both Gatsby and Nick, the former for transforming "highminded romance impulses into mere gangsterism" and the latter for voyeuristically "distort [ing] the story of Gatsby in order to affirm his own unrealistic and childish nostalgia" (204, 206). Fitzgerald's early and lasting fascination with the Arthurian romance, perhaps surpassed among modern American writers only by that of John Steinbeck, is little recognized, nor has the ambivalent function of the grail quest in The Great Gatsby been examined. "Did you ever read The Passing of Arthur?" Josephine asks Mr. Bailey in Fitzgerald's "A Snobbish Story" (The Basil and Josephine 203 204Rocky Mountain Review Stories, 253). The reference to Idylls of the King, in which Tennyson first included the Grail story in 1869, is perhaps the best clue to Fitzgerald's source of the Grail Quest story. Of the many versions composed between the 8th and early 20th centuries, those most familiar include Chrétien de Troyes's story of Perceval in Li Contes del Grail (1160-1185), Malory's The Tale of the Sankgreal (1460-1470), and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (1200-1207). Other possible sources include those versions made available by the resurgence of interest in medieval lore in the 19th century that prompted Tennyson and Wagner to write their works on the Grail (Loomis 3). It is unlikely that Fitzgerald was familiar with Chrétien de Troyes because his Perceval was not available in English until 1952 (Linker vii). Although Vinaver's 1954 edition of Caxton's Malory is the definitive text today, it is most likely that Fitzgerald knew one of the popular editions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Larry Benson, in his review of Malory editions, holds that Pollard's abridged 1900 edition was probably the most popular version from 1900 to 1947 and that "for the last third of the nineteenth century [the reader] will have to consult Strachey's bowdlerized version" (8990 ). Wolfram's German grail legend may have been available to Fitzgerald in the only English translation at the time, Jessie L. Weston's 1894 edition (Zeydel vii). Fitzgerald may also have been acquainted with Wagner's Parsifal, his last opera, completed in 1882. Most likely, though, Fitzgerald knew the grail quest story from Tennyson's Idylls, likely reading material for him as a student. He may have been introduced to the story by The Boy's King Arthur, edited by Sidney Lanier, published in 1880. That...

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