An Imaginary Life - David Malouf

Reading An Imaginary Life right now seems entirely appropriate. According to Amy Chua in Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, “America is beginning to display destructive political dynamics much more typical of developing and non-Western countries: ethnonationalist movements; backlash by elites against the masses; popular backlash against both “the establishment” and “outsider minorities” viewed as disproportionately powerful; and, above all, the transformation of democracy into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.” 1

In a system of zero-sum political tribalism, group identity is fostered by the rhetoric of threat and fear of the "other," resulting in the insular “us” beginning to demonize the external “they”. The "other" often becomes the simplified scapegoat for complex societal problems. This demonizing and pejorative myth making of a subgroup then serves to legitimize hostility and aggression. 

This increase in polarizing rhetoric and hostility isn’t a modern problem, first century Rome controlled her vast empire comprised of disparate people groups with the fear of the "barbarian. "According to Diodorus (2) the Galatians/Gauls were savage barbarians, little better than wild beasts. They were wild and untamed with hair so thick from their “lime-water” treatments that it resembled the mane of a horse. These barbarians were blonde haired and blue eyed with “rippling muscles” and a predilection for fighting naked…but most of his grievances come dangerously close to the pot calling the kettle black. Coveting “gold and heavy jewelry of which they own a great deal” (5.28) Or my favorite example of a barbarian: “They are also sexually promiscuous and transgressive, men and women alike. The men “rage with lust, in outlandish fashion, for the embraces of males,” and they do not see it as a dishonor to prostitute themselves freely to one another.”(5.32)…Um…

In her provocative book Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished Brigitte Kahl discusses the visual aesthetics that emphasized power over the vanquished, such as the denarii issued by Julius Caesar that showed the armor and weapons of a defeated Gaul. Even their places of worship had depictions of Gauls/Barbarians being defeated by the pantheon of the Greco-Roman Gods. Visually the oppression of the barbaric/ other was inescapable. 

“Roman authors frequently used the Latin term terror when they discussed Gauls/Galatians. We should understand the Gallic War not as a singular event under Julius Caesar but as part of an ongoing, multistage Greco-Roman campaign against a Galatians ‘global terrorism;’ an archetype that has informed later occidental warfare as well.” 3

The one thing a Roman citizen could agree upon was that barbarians were less than human with little to no favorable attributes and that the last place you would want to be is in barbarian country, surrounded by horselike promiscuous men and women…

And this is where An Imaginary Life(4) begins. Ovid finds himself banished to Tomis in 8CE for a “poem and an error.”  In exile from his rhetorically beloved Rome, he is surrounded by recently “tamed” barbarians in the furthermost corner of the Roman Empire. 

Written as a letter in five parts to an unknown reader, Ovid tries to make sense of his life and his surroundings in the far reaches of modern day Romania. When it isn’t bitterly cold their encampment is being pillaged by hordes from the north, and for the few short months of the year when it is temperate enough to be endurable, it stinks and the horde of barbarians is exchanged for campaigns of warring insects. 

“I have found no tree here that rises amongst the low, grayish brown scrub. No flower. No fruit. Even the higher orders of the vegetable kingdom have not yet arrived among us. We are centuries from the notion of an orchard or a garden made simply to please…The grasslands and beyond all lead to a sky that hangs close above us, heavy with the snow, or is empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine, cloudless, without wings. 

But I am describing a state of mind, no place. 

I am in exile here.”  (p.11)

For one of the most prolific writers of the first century, to be in a place where language has failed him is a more crushing exile than his physical displacement. He cannot communicate. These barbarians speak their own form of gibberish and even their poor attempts at Latin are incommunicable. Perhaps for the first time in his life he is left entirely alone with his thoughts. And slowly the reality of where he is and who and what he has become begin to creep into the confines of his soul. No longer is he a court poet of the patrician order, none of that matters here. In Tomis he is a doddering old man, a “crazy, comic old man, grotesque, tearful, who understands nothing, can say nothing, and whose ways,…are absurdly out of keeping with the facts of our daily existence.” (p.13) 

For nearly a year he has been rendered dumb. Wandering “in a dream, as isolated from the world of men as if I belonged to another species.” An old man, Ryzak, has been appointed his caretaker, and slowly Ovid begins to translate the nonsensical way of the barbarians one gesture at a time. 

Part I weaves Ovid’s waking life with his dream life. His dreams still tether him to a semblance of reality that grounds his identity. He reminds himself of who he was and the legacy that he has had, all meaningless now, but the memories serve as a talisman to ward off the barbarianism. His dreams are filled with frenzied searching at the edge of the world for something he can’t quite conceptualize. He digs and claws at the earth, begging it to reveal it’s answers: 

“I fall to my knees and begin digging with my long nails in the earth. Sometimes wolves come, and they claw at the earth besides me. Howling. We dig together, and they pay no more attention to me than they would a ghost. But I know that whatever they are scratching after, I must discover before them, or I am lost. So I dig harder, faster, sweating, with the moonlight greasy upon me. Unable to tell myself: this is a dream.”  (p.14)

This nightmare is reminiscent of the story of Nebuchadnezzar.(5)  Another exile, driven away from his people, who slowly devolves into a wild animal “eating grass like an ox, his body drenched with the dew of Heaven until his hair grew like feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.” While left in an animal like state he is forced to wrestle with his dependence on God for even his sanity. When Nebuchadnezzar acknowledges God his sanity is restored and he returns to his rule as king of Babylon. 

Ovid doesn’t believe in the gods, he has no one to call on that could rescue him or unravel the algorithm that has brought him here. He is stuck in the quagmire of Cartesian materialism. Cogito ergo sum seems unhelpful when surrounded by the desolate wasteland at the edge of civilization. There is no recognition of a truth that will reinstate him to his former life of conspicuous living. He is stuck here. Stuck asking one question after another, trying to find himself, trying to find a way to survive. 

One of the questions Ovid is seeking an answer for is what makes us human and what is our place in this vast cosmology. Ovid defines his humanity in terms of his place within Roman society; all others are compared and found wanting. The Getae have a language that sounds barbarous and guttural, even as Ovid contemplates the sounds of this foreign tongue he feels himself slipping back “a step in the order of things”  toward a lower species. This lower order of beings he describes as having “not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully human, who have not yet entered what we call society and become Romans under the law.”(p.16)

As Part I comes to a close, Ovid has exchanged the gods of the pantheon for the gods of human potential. “We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for whose delight we have prepared a landscape, and who can only be god.” (p.26) With enough time and the Roman predilection for cultivation, they (humans) will graft and transform the landscape slowly until it reveals “to us the creatures we long for and must become.”

Over time Ovid begins to assimilate into the culture around him and grudgingly he begins to admire aspects that had originally felt foreign and barbaric. He begins to admire his caretaker, the old man that each day seems more noble and gentle than any Roman. Idealistically he makes a 180 degree turn: 

“I now almost understand these people’s speech almost as well as my own, and find it oddly moving. It isn’t at all like our Roman tongue, whose endings are designed to express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling. This language is the raw life and unity of things. I believe I could make poems in it. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer to the first principles of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are and changes them into what they would be.” (p.60)

The hopeless pessimism of Part I has been exchanged for almost blind idealism in Part II. The natives are still being classified but this time on the other end of the spectrum, reminiscent of Rousseau’s noble savage. In a sense Ovid has past the first test and has been able to see beyond the presumed rhetorical savagery and has come to respect these tribal people as a type of fellow human. His next test is another proverbial step down the ladder: he will convince the tribe to adopt a wolf boy he has found while on a hunting expedition. 

Here’s his chance at cultivating and sculpting a human tabula rasa. An eleven year old boy, raised by wolves, unsullied from the politics of man. Ovid takes this boy on as a project and his life is renewed with a sense of vitality and purpose. While Ovid believes he is rescuing the boy, albeit for a science experiment, he admits that he cowardly refuses to trap and truss the boy. As the boy is being “rescued” by the hunting party Ovid looks on: 

“When he suddenly stumbled into the clearing and stopped before me, he was in a state of utter panic, exhausted, half-crazed, his shoulders torn and bleeding where twigs had caught them…”(p.63)

Ovid justifies a bit of brutality in the belief that speech, i.e. Latin or Getaen will humanize this young person and allow him to experience reality in a far superior way. Very slowly, in fits and starts Ovid begins to form a type of trust with this wild boy. As Ovid begins to teach the boy the language of men the boy in turn teaches Ovid the language of the birds, mimicking with perfect accuracy the language of the world around him: 

“All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. It is his consciousness that he leads me through on our walks.” (p.88)

Ovid begins to have doubts about who is teaching whom. This wild-boy slowly begins teaching the language of the landscape, exposing the secrets buried deep within the earth, that have always remained on the periphery and inaccessible to the “cultivated” mind. The boy reveals a world beyond Ovid’s imagination, beyond his capacity to dream up or conceive. “I think therefore I am” seems isolating and narrow in a world of possibility. Perhaps “I see therefor I hope” begins to creep into Ovid’s epistemology. 

Despite his best intentions, Ovid has plucked the boy out of his world and enforced his own upon him. When the first snowflakes begin to fall the boy is desperate to return to the wild and has to be physically restrained and for the first time Ovid begins to feel a sense of overwhelming guilt: 

“All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my will, a figure in my dream. Now as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me.”  (p.102)

The story doesn’t end here though. There is another important lesson for Ovid to learn about his “noble savages.” He has almost neutered them in his idealistic rendering of their society and now must confront the fact that these tribal people are complex and mercurial, like all human societies, with rites and rituals outside of his purview. 

During the winter the wild-boy gets sick and as he lies on his pallet for days battling a fever, the matriarch cautions the family members to keep their distance. The boy contains the spirit of some animal being that is trying to escape in order to devour one of their own. Despite the matriarch’s disapproval the young mother offers care and compassion to the sick boy, a cup of cool water, a cloth across his brow. But as the wild-boy gets better the young tribal boy, Lullo, gets sick. The old woman believes that: 

“…the Child’s spirit has worked all this (sickness) out of malice, and that the boy’s mother has indeed been made the carrier, but through her own weakness and pity. In turning aside to care for the Child she has betrayed her son’s life to him. She has permitted the death spirit to pass between them.”  (p.116)

In the end it is fear of the unknown other that galvanizes the tribe into action. Thankfully Lullo gets better before the wild boy can be sacrificed or murdered, but then the old man, Ovid’s friend and protector gets sick and the matriarch again claims it is the fault of the boy and his evil animal spirit. The old man gets sicker and then is bludgeoned to death by the tribal men so he will die fighting and be victorious in death. While the funeral rites are taking place Ovid and the boy sneak off into the wilderness and run for their lives across the edge of the known world into the endless void at the ends of the earth. 

An Australian author, Malouf wrote An Imaginary Life in 1978, when issues with the systemic treatment of the indigenous people of Australia was beginning to be questioned. Ovid’s blatant attempts to colonize his indigenous wild boy and cultivate his little plot of soil reveal the brokenness of such narrow perspectives. Unfortunately, this lesson is not easily learned. The tendency to gravitate to “us” vs “them” language is almost an inherent human quality. While it seems Australia has made a few steps forward in recognizing the sovereignty of their indigenous people, in the United States tribalism is fostering group hatred and fanaticism. 

Perhaps we should all spend less time getting sucked into political tribal rhetoric and more time reading books. 

1. Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York: Penguin Press, 2018),12.

2. Diodorus, Library of History (80-29 B.C.E.) You can find the complete text here

3. Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010)

4. All quotes from: David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (London: Vintage Books, 1978)

5. Daniel 4:33

*Beloved - Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an exercise in traumatic haunting and the impact of slavery on both the individual and the community. Dedicated to the “sixty million and more,” the book operates as a type of monument to the unspeakable tragedy that was institutionalized through systemic slavery. 

Told through shifting perspectives in both narrative and chronology, one of Morrison’s major themes throughout the novel is the subsequent fragmentation created by trauma, and the text itself embodies this fragmentation. There are gaps in the story as characters attempt to rationalize tragedy and communicate their past.  These gaps create a space for the reader to engage, to reconsider details and attempt to reconstruct the lives of the characters in an active rather than passive way.

Another one of Morrison’s major themes is “unspeakableness.” The title character, Beloved, functions as both the individual ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter and all those lost and disembodied throughout this tragic history. Her tragedy is a microcosm of all the tragedies that have come before and will come after. Yet, as a narrative voice Beloved remains to some extent silent.  We have but a glimpse of her internal turmoil in her brief monologue, within that narrative space her language is layered, fragmented and broken.There is no language that can describe her tragedy and so she speaks in a multiplicity of voices throughout time and space, exchanging the unique specificity of a two year old girl murdered in a woodshed for the generalized “Dearly Beloved.”

The ambiguity of who is speaking, as well as the layering of text, creates a type of narrative columbarium. We see in Beloved’s monologue the suggestion of characters we caught mere glimpses of now given a line of text to memorialize their death. We recognize Sethe’s mother crouching from the men that will impregnate her on this voyage. We recognize the girl locked away since she was a “pup” in a house “over by Deer Creek,” watching herself break into pieces as: 

“he hurts where I sleep  he puts his fingers there    I drop the food and break into pieces …” (246) 1

The chorus of the ‘Dearly Beloved’ pour out their stories in scraps and whispers, the narrative is broken and in ‘pieces’ just as the lives it tries to describe. Syntax and structure metaphorically have been thrown overboard along with the dead bodies. 

The impact of slavery and it’s residual trauma was not something you could leave behind. It not only destroyed human bodies, but it was also something that distorted identity and fragmented human minds. For Morrison slavery has distorted everything.  Her characters must cross not only the physical Ohio river, geographically separating them from freedom, but also the metaphorical Ohio river psychologically separating them from healthy wholistic conceptions of themselves. Each one haunted by the ghosts of slavery in a unique and individualized way. 

The shifting perspectives create vignettes into the many permutations of ‘freedom’ and what it has cost. Baby Suggs is the only character to be manumitted, but the cost was to leave her son behind. As the novel opens she is waiting to die, contemplating different colors, because to let her mind wander through the memories of a lifetime of pent up grief would destroy her. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Denver is born into ‘freedom,’ and yet represents the dysfunction of generational trauma. She has spent her life in isolation and fear. The details of Beloved’s murder seem to have never been fully communicated and so she has no context in which to interpret them. The only thing she knows is that the murder happened outside, and so while Sethe believes she has woven a cocoon of safety for her daughter, Denver avoids leaving the house so that: “it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me.”(273) The thing Sethe has tried to create: i.e. safety, is exactly the thing missing from 124. 

For Sethe, as the novel opens her grief has been manageable. Their house is merely haunted by a baby ghost, and they consider themselves lucky. (12) When Paul D. shows up he threatens this manageable grief by offering hope. Hope will destroy the structure of grief she has created; hope that she won’t exist in isolation, that someone will care enough to take responsibility for her breasts and put his story next to hers. Hope is enough to enrage the demons of grief, guilt and shame, and although the baby leaves the house, she comes back, a full grown ‘Beloved’, the past literally haunting the present with it’s physical presence and accusatory gaze. 

When Sethe realizes that Beloved is her murdered daughter, she becomes enslaved by grief. She is consumed and devoured by Beloved one story at a time as she attempts to explain and justify her actions to a ghost. Slowly, Sethe walks away from her job, from the last exposure to the outside world and tunnels, in isolation, into her grief.

“She began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered…none of which made the impression it was supposed to. Beloved accused her of leaving her behind.” (278)

Left alone with her grief, her words are ineffective. Both Beloved and Sethe are communicating in different vortices, their words never quite reaching each other. Beloved says dead men have laid on top of her, that “ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark.” These accusations slip past Sethe, who tries to untangle the meaning of each word, tries to justify how the unspeakable could have happened. 

Beloved operates as a foil to expose each character’s greatest fear and brokenness. For Paul D. his life is a representation of the emasculated and impotent black male. Unlike the sexually aggressive black men in “Birth of a Nation” that haunted the American imagination in 1915, or the equally haunting “super-predator” of the 1990’s, the men of Sweet Home have been taught that “one step off the ground they were trespassers among the human race…gelded workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated into a language responsible humans spoke.” (146)

Paul D. has grown up in a petri dish of abuse. His formative sexual experiences were with cattle, and now years later, having escaped the horrors of Georgia, he is still enslaved to a broken sexual narrative. Cattle come up over and over again as his sexual standard: 

“..he had become a rag doll- picked up and put back down anywhere any time by a girl young enough to be his daughter. Fucking her when he was convinced he didn’t want to. Whenever she turned her behind up, the calves of his youth (was that it?) cracked his resolve.”  (147)

Beloved has “cracked” more than just his resolve. He is forced to recognize the reality of who he is: a play thing, a rag doll, with little volition and no agency. He mistakenly believes that virility can absolve shame, but what he actually needs is not virility but the freedom to love big. Whatever capacity he had to love before was fully and equivocally stripped from him in Alfred, Georgia. He sees Sethe’s love for her children and envies it: 

“He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose- not to need permission for desire - well now, that was freedom.” (189)

Eventually, by putting his story next to hers he recognizes that he is no longer capable of judgement. To pretend that they managed to escape from a world that treated them as less than human with their humanity intact is now no longer feasible. After both of them have been in some sense destroyed by Beloved, they are now able to coalesce with honesty about what their own specific tragedies have cost them. Sixo's description of his Thirty-Mile Woman makes sense in a new and tangible way: 

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order..”(314)

Morrison’s perspective is powerful. It doesn’t allow the reader the comfort of distance, but rather drags the reader into a dialogue about trauma. Grief in isolation destroys the human spirit. It isn’t until a community of women come to her aide, that Sethe is set free. In the same way, the stories that haunt our past in isolation are allowed to grow and metastasize, unfettered and without restraint. Morrison’s thesis is that healing from our wounds whether singular or communal will never happen in isolation. That we need a community to speak truth to us when we are too blind to see the battleground laid out before us. These stories need to be told, remembered and recognized in both their past and present day permutations so that we don’t repeat them in our ignorance or pass them on to our loved ones. 

1. All quotes taken from: Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2006

Operation Shylock- Philip Roth

In modernist novels there is a preoccupation with the fragmentation of language and the impossibility of communication. In postmodern novels there is a preoccupation with the fragmentation of reality. Operation Shylock is perhaps one of the most creative postmodern novels I’ve read in a long time. There is such a masterful blending of fact and fiction as the novel is  framed within a distorted version of a true story. The moments of fact are more of a mirage than anything that could ground the reader to an objective reality, and the polemic set up between fact and fiction thread their way throughout the narrative in a web of unnavigable complexity.

“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that mainly involve details of identification and locale and are of little significance to the overall story and its verisimilitude…” 1

This is how the preface begins. 

At the end there is a note to the reader, after the reader has lost all hope of deciphering any shards of objective reality, that says: 

“This book is a work of fiction…names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.”

Which confession is false? The specific note to the reader? The entire work? The frame is ambiguous and we find ourselves lost within the complexity of a frame within a frame. It’s perfect. 

The book opens with Philip Roth learning of an impersonator making his way throughout Jerusalem (this actually did happen) and arguing for a policy of Diasporism, or the return of European Jews back to the European heartland. (Where he is sure they will be met, as the cattle cars, now repurposed agents of transportation, arrive at the station and the civilians meet the refugees with the cry of “Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!”) As the real Philip Roth processes this news of mistaken identity he remembers how he almost lost his mind a few months back to a Halcion induced mental disintegration after knee surgery. 

This impersonator is obviously suffering from some mental collapse, but as Roth ruminates on his own recent mental collapse the line between sanity and lunacy seems to dissolve. 

“My mind began to disintegrate. The word DISINTEGRATE seemed itself to be the matter out of which my brain was constituted, and it began spontaneously coming apart. The fourteen letters, big, chunky, irregularly sized components of my brain, elaborately intertwined, tore jaggedly loose from one another, sometimes a fragment of a letter at a time, but usually in painful unpronounceable non syllabic segments of two or three, their edges roughly serrated. This mental coming apart was as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled. and the agony of it was excruciating.”  (20)

“Where is Philip Roth?” I asked aloud. “Where did he go?” I was not speaking histrionically. I asked because I wanted to know.” (22)

The drug, Halcion, has led to hallucinations and intense nightmares, and as Roth begins to try to make sense of this impersonator in Jerusalem he wonders if this is just his mind playing tricks on him once again…if perhaps the temporary insanity was only partially due to the pharmaceuticals and partially the result of his own exhausted mind. He calls the hotel and hears the voice of the impersonator, but even this doesn’t feel definitive. Who is this new Philip Roth? Could he be“…a specter created out of my fear of mentally coming apart while abroad and on my own for the first time since recovering - a nightmare about the return of a usurping self altogether beyond my control.” (29)

This fear of losing power to one’s double is played out frequently in literature, most notably for Roth in Dostoevsky, Kafka and Gogol. My favorite being Gogol’s short story “The Nose.” Kovaloff finds his nose missing one morning and as he goes about his routine in a state of shock trying to piece together how he has lost such as estimable portion of his face he witnesses a carriage pull up, a gentleman disembark…only this gentleman turns out to be Kovaloff’s very own nose! 

“The hat, adorned with a plume, showed that it held the rank of state-councillor. It was obvious that it was paying “duty-calls.” It looked round on both sides, called to the coachmen “drive on,” and got into the carriage, which drove away.” 2

Finally Kovaloff makes up his mind to approach the nose…even though it seems that his own  nose somehow now outranks him and he approaches with an attitude of deference. 

“Honorable sir,” said Kovaloff with dignity, “I do not know how I am to understand your words. It seems to me the matter is as clear as possible. Or do you wish- but you are after all my own nose!” 

The Nose looked at the Major and wrinkled its forehead. “There you are wrong, respected sir; I am myself. Besides, there can be no close relations between us. To judge by the buttons of your uniform, you must be in quite a different department to mine.” So saying, the nose turned away.” 

Despite Kovaloff’s protestations the nose will not relinquish its independence. As Kovaloff attempts to track down his nose and make sense of this new disorderly world his ontological framework slowly begins to collapse. 

Roth recognizes in his impersonator the childlike imp of Jewish folklore Moishe Pipik, loosely translated as “Moses Bellybutton” and for the rest of the novel this how the two Roth’s are distinguished. Philip Roth and the unruly and out of control ‘bellybutton” bent on usurping the identity of the real Roth and exposing his mental fragmentation. 

Roth calls his imposter to try and expose the farce. He pretends to be a journalist, Pierre Roget, the author of the Thesaurus, “the definitive book of synonyms.” And while Pipik is pretending to be Roth, Roth is pretending not to be himself. Initially this seems to be a hilarious caper, but then the sincerity of his imposter throws Roth into a small existential crisis. If this fake so truly believes himself to be the real Roth, if he’s so committed to this identity that it is not pretend but the most extreme version of truth he knows…then the only one pretending is the real Roth. As he argues with “himself” on the phone the only thing that seems definitive is the absurdity of the whole situation. 

Throughout the novel the doubling shifts, with the pretending frequently distorting reality and always saturated in the absurd. At one point when Roth learns that his imposter was a detective, as ludicrous as this seems, the explanation makes contextual sense. Then when Pipik disappears, supposedly heading back to the states, (after being defeated intellectually by the real Roth) the real Roth makes his way to the hotel room of Pipik and begins some detective work of his own. “If he could disguise himself as a writer, I could pretend to be the detective.” (252)

As Roth combs through the pristine room, looking for clues in a space that looks un-lived in, the beds still have that fresh laundry scent about them, nothing looks out of place or disordered, he finally finds a singular pubic hair on the underside of the toilet seat and a small pile of beard trimmings. He puts his findings in an envelope and then a trickling fear begins to run through his mind: what if these are simply his hairs? What if Pipik has done the same thing to him that he is know doing to Pipik? What if he came to his room and collected these samples simply to leave behind for the anticipated sleuth. 

“These envelopes and their contents remind me that the spectral, half-demented appearance was, in fact, the very earmark of its indisputable lifelike realness and that, when life looks least like what it’s supposed to look like, it may then be most like whatever it is.” (253)

While Pipik is offered as the double of Philip Roth, the uncontrollable appendage wandering around and wreaking havoc, Shakespeare’s Shylock is offered as a double for Jewish identity as a whole. For four hundred years Jews have been living within the shadow of this literary imposter, introduced to the world with the lines “Three thousand ducats.” Lines pronounced in such an oily and innuendoed voice by Mr. Charles Macklin that he “instantly aroused, with just those three words, all of the audience’s hatred of Shylock’s race.” (275) 

“Today a Shylockless Venice, tomorrow a Shylockless world. As the stage directions so succinctly puts it after Shylock has been robbed of his daughter, stripped of his wealth, and compelled to convert by his Christian betters: Exit Jew…” (276)

This whole treatise on Shylock is given by a bookseller, Supposnik, in the lobby of the hotel (after Roth’s detective work has been completed) as Roth is attempting to make his way back to the trial of Ivan the Terrible. Like so many climactic moments throughout the novel the movement forward is impeded by an immense digression. Here in the lobby, person after person presents themselves to Roth who finds himself trapped in constant dialogue while trying to escape. School children pepper him with questions: “What comes first, nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.” (268)

Identity is voiced over and over again, the refrain for the inevitable mental implosion. 

The oily hatred directed historically at the Jew is reexamined throughout the trial of John Demjanjuk, who is argued to be none other than Ivan the Terrible, the infamous guard and champion of brutality that personally was responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Jews at the death camp of Treblinka. 

The defense argues that Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible are two different people, the evidence is worthless and the identity photos are unreliable…but at what point does the absurdity of the trial breakdown into merely a show trial, an attempt to find a singular scapegoat for the atrocity of the holocaust? Will a single scapegoat ever be enough? The defense buries the trial in meaningless details, they spend two days “arguing over the paper clip on the identity card to establish if the paper clip is authentic or not.” (340) If the identity and authenticity of a paperclip can not be determined how likely will the trial ever come to consensus about the identity and authenticity of a real person? 

The trial is reimagined in a dream sequence Roth has about the water company demanding he pay $128 million for his water bill. He wakes up, slumped in a chair, his skin has become the physical diary of the last few days, collecting every smell along the way and the stench of must and feces is overpowering. Smell is objectively true, a sense you can’t manipulate and he smells of all of “them”: 

“The shitting driver. The fat lawyer. Pipik. He was the smell of incense and old, dried blood. I smelled of every second of every minute of my last twenty-four hours, smelled like the container of something forgotten in the refrigerator whose lid you pop open after three weeks. Not until I decompose in my coffin will I ever be so immensely pungent again.” (261)

But after a shower, when the smell has been eradicated…he contemplated whether it ever actually existed, or did he simply dream it? 

I bathe. 

Two words. 

I dress in clean clothes. 

Five words. 

I no longer smell. 

Four words. 

Eleven words, and I no longer know if I ever did smell like my corpse. 

(261)

So, in a Rothian style, we are confronted with the reliability of memory. Do all the eye witnesses of Ivan the Terrible truly remember this senior man sitting before them? This family man from Ohio with the unblemished record? When Roth walks into the courtroom and is first confronted with John Demjanjuk he says “There he was,” and begins a two and a half page imagined reverie of Ivan the Terrible, as a young twenty-two year old Ukrainian, crushing skulls and bludgeoning to death his victims. Roth is riding the hatred, bottled up and waiting for an unleashing, a focus for its wrath and vengeance. But John Demjanjuk, as he sits there chewing his cud, seems so harmless. So meaningless…so banal. Has he changed? Is he a different person? After a six part repetition of “There he was.” he ends with “Or wasn’t.” 

As Roth is caught in this paradox between “Was” and “Wasn’t” he thinks the only thing that is certain is that while justice may be served by this trial, John Demjanjuk’s children will be plunged into a world incensed by hate- and the curse will be revived. 

Roth’s dream of a $128 million water bill becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of the trial. How can one man be responsible for a water bill of $128 million? How could any one person use that much water? The enormity of the accusation becomes the perfect obfuscation to hide behind. The suburban father can hide all the transgressions and regrets of his youth behind a bill that is too enormous to fathom. “Everything putrid in the past just snaps off and falls away. Only America happened. Only the children and friends and the church and the garden and the job have happened.” (261) How can he be both? Was he there or wasn’t he? 

Either way the trial has morphed into something unmanageable.  Demjanjuk sits there unconcerned, with the occasional smile on his face he seems to say: 

“…$128 million worth of water? You sent me the bill for the city of Cleveland. You sent me the bill for the state of Ohio. You sent me the bill for the whole fucking world! Look at me in this courtroom, under all this, and still at the end of the day all I have sipped from my glass is maybe three or four ounces of water. I’m not saying  that I don’t take a drink of water when I’m thirsty, of course I do…but do I look to you like somebody who could be wasteful of water to the tune of $128 million?…There has been a mistake. I am just an average suburban consumer of water and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill!” (262) 

In the end what we are left with is a compilation of parodies. The detective novel, seeking to unravel a mystery or a crime, is left with two envelopes containing ambiguous pubic hairs. Nostalgia becomes a joke, as unreliable as memory and fed on our current preoccupations and hatreds. And lastly, and perhaps most dishearteningly, justice has become little more than a parody, a circus act, an illusion of smoke screens and tightrope walkers. Zionism, Diasporism and all the other “isms” have been submerged in the most “powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is “Pipikism”, the anti tragic force that inconsequentializes  everything.” The radicals and truth tellers, the prophets and sages are little more than disembodied noses and bellybuttons, walking around as autonomous individuals, so removed from their contextualized base that everything they espouse has become meaningless. 

Or is it? For postmodern novels there really is no such thing as a simple thesis statement. And after 398 pages as we have witnessed every serious thing get turned into a farce, we are left struggling with the ambiguity of everything. 

1. All quotations from: Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock. New York: Random House, 1993. 
2. Nikolai Gogol "The Nose": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol/Field)

As I Lay Dying -William Faulkner

As I lay Dying is an exercise in the chaotic failure of language. The world has been rocked by the aftermath of WWI, where men looked around them and were forced to reassess a world order that no longer made sense. The orgiastic 1920’s have vanished like a dream.The world that Faulkner creates in the beginning of the 1930’s is fractured and broken and each character is forced to slowly pick up the pieces of themselves and hold themselves together in a way that seems continuously on the verge of falling apart. 

The story is told through fifteen different focalizers, each with a different perspective and point of view. This creates a novel where reading becomes an active experience rather than passive. This is not the type of novel you can read at night with a cup of tea to escape the chaos of life…this is the chaos of life distilled into roughly 260 pages and it demands attention and focus. Without an objective narrator there is no objective truth. There is no center. The reader is forced into something textually resembling a piece of abstract art and finding one’s bearing in this densely packed landscape can be incredibly challenging. 

“The front, the conical facade with the square orifice of doorway broken only by the square squat shape of the coffin on the sawhorses like a cubistic bug, come into relief.” (Darl, 219)1

There is a type of sensory overload to the text as well. The reader is exposed to a barrage of sights, smells (“sulfurous,” the slowly decaying body, etc), sounds (the chuck, chuck, chuck of the saw,) and tastes. All of this plunges the reader viscerally into the context of the narrative. 

The plot line itself is fairly simple at first glance: As the narrative begins, the matriarch of the Bundren family is on her death bed. Her son Cash stands in the courtyard, just outside her bedroom window and builds her coffin, holding each piece of wood up for her inspection. When she finally dies the family wraps her in a quilt, covers her face which has holes bored through it by the youngest son, thinking he was rescuing her from her entrapment, and they begin their trek to Jefferson where they will bury Addie in her family’s plot. 

But then slowly everything unravels. 

In Puritanism to Postmodernism, Ruland and Bradbury argue that: “…what dominated the 1920’s was the postwar novel- the novel permeated by war as an apocalyptic metaphor, the sign of a world severed from its past, changed, darkened, modernized…the writing of the 1920’s abounds in images of fragmentation, waste, castration and sterility.”  2

Fragmentation is a great way to describe this novel. The main focalizing voice is that of Darl, whose origination begins with a 'verbal trick': 

“Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed I would kill Anse. It was though he had tricked me, hidden within word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I realized that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know that I was taking revenge.” (Addie, 172)

Darl’s character is distilled into verbal processing, wrestling with a system of language that is ultimately broken. He is given the largest portion of narration, but seems to be the least heard and most misunderstood character in the family. The more one communicates the more isolated and alienated they become. For the modernists, language is little more than each of us tricking each other and being tricked by the impossibility of ever really truly understanding each other’s reality. 

Darl also represents the collateral damage of the first World War. We find out towards the end of the novel that he is suffering from shell shock having served in the trenches in some capacity during the war: “Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the War. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face.” (Darl, 254)

This realization coming at the end of the novel, forces the reader to reassess his reliability as a narrating voice and wrestle with the protean definitions of insanity. 

In some capacity, the metaphor of a spyglass becomes a cue on how we are to read this novel. Darl’s spy glass and distorted vision is juxtaposed with Tull’s spy glass and vision of ownership and destiny. Tull is one of the few outside “objective” focalizers that is supposed to ground the reader in the world outside of the chaos of the Bundren family, but we are left questioning whether or not his sight or vision is truly tenable or just a mirage. 

“When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated often it like it was more the sweat, the broader the land…”(Tull, 139) 

For Tull, the objective outside perspective that should provide a counterpoint to the Bundrens’ narrative and ground their perspectives in a less abstract reality, we see optimism and ownership. The power to consume; the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. But Darl’s spy glass has revealed a completely different world. A world comprised of distorted pig-women, a world where the intelligible falls apart. This is the Modern world, gruesome and chaotic without equilibrium. Throughout the text we hear echoes of Yeats poem: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” 3

As a family, the Bundrens are doing more than just traveling for 6 days across the inhospitable world to bury their mother, they are predominantly wrestling with the effects of modernism, with things falling apart. Rather than pulling the family together into a “bund”: a league or confederacy, their wrestling drives them apart into individualized and unique isolation. 

Addie’s monologue does a couple important things. First it offers a new “spy glass” for the reader to view the narrative context within. Prior to this moment, it would have been feasible to believe that the family, with the direction and guidance of the father, Anse, were making this trip to Jefferson out of love and affection for their mother/wife. After her monologue this view is no longer possible. Their marriage was not based on “love.” (Arguably either “love” or “hope” was the word that had tricked them.) Rather, their marriage was ground in a type of selfish haunting of each other. 

Addie’s description of Anse as “a tall bird hunched in the cold weather,” (170) portends the buzzards that will eventually follow the coffin, hoping to pick apart and devour the carrion within. Does Addie metaphorically become the buzzard? Watching her family’s slow progression as they subject her remains to one atrocity after another. Is she haunting her family, growing in number as they get closer and closer to Jefferson, her origination point? 

From the beginning their marriage has embodied a type of relational carrion, neither person is fully alive, and both circle the coffins of each other’s flesh waiting to bite off pieces of decaying soul. 

“When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord, I said “He has wore her out at last.” And I said a damn good thing, and at first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back, by God.” (Peabody, 41)

So after Addie’s monologue we realize that far from a noble quest of an honorable burial in Jefferson, so she can be laid to rest with her family…the burial has actually become an excuse to go to Jefferson to purchase new teeth….something Anse has been waiting for fifteen years to acquire. In some sense he has been metaphorically circling Addie for fifteen years, waiting for her to die, so that he would have an excuse to make this trip and create a new beginning for himself. 

The phrase “I won’t begrudge her”/“She won’t begrudge me” seems to mask the fact that begrudging each other has been the bedrock of their relationship. She tries to curse him with an impossible journey, but her curse becomes little more than an empty threat. Anse takes her body on a six day journey, after waiting three days for the boys to get back from an errand…with each hour that goes by her body begins to breakdown with “little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling.” (Darl, 212) As if even in death she’s attempting to communicate. Attempting to persuade or explain, yet being reduced to a language even more incomprehensible than her last. 

Addie has had a vision of Jewel rescuing her from water and fire. But her monologue is inserted at the point in the narrative where the family is attempting to cross a flooded river, an aggressive and hostile River Styx, not ushering the family to the peace of the afterlife, but to the reality of the hell which they already inhabit. She is already dead and her coffin keeps slipping into the water at risk of being swept away and unmemorialized. Is this what she had in mind? 

Again, through Addie’s monologue we see the struggle and failures of language, which is also her struggle with the modernist world of which she is a part. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…” there is no center for language. Barthe’s “cultural codes” have been broken, there are no shared symbols or signs in the residual chaos. ‘Spy glass’ means different things for everyone, there is no shared sight or vision. The actual words Addie uses challenge our sense of normative grammar, and the reader is forced to almost physically wrestle with the language she uses, looking for things between the lines, looking for our own spy glass to create a sense of shared intelligibility: 

“I would think how words go straight up in thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doings goes along the earth, cloning to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.” (Addie, 173)

1. All quotes from: Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House, 1992. 

2. Roland & Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. New York: Penguin Books,1992. pg. 296

3. Yeats, The Second Coming The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The first time I read The Great Gatsby I was less than enthused. I remember proudly stating to my teacher (my mom’s friend that was exchanging literature lessons for babysitting) that “His name isn’t Gatsby and he isn’t even great!” As if I was imparting some gem of understanding and wit. 

I recently read through the book again for a class I’m taking on the Modern American Novel and I was blown away by its depth and substance. This time I took note of how status and power were defined, who had the power to consume or to speak, and how this power revealed each character’s identity. 

In The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions by Thorstein Veblen,Veblen argues that status of individuals within a capitalist society is based upon social stratification rather than upon merit. And similar to feudal systems of past eras the wealth you are born into is far superior than the wealth you must attain and retain. 

This could be the synopsis of The Great Gatsby in a nutshell. Gatsby, although a hard working, Benjamin Franklin sort of self made man…will forever be that: self made. His wealth and status will never be able to compete with the wealth and status of the leisure classes, because ultimately his wealth and status is precariously balanced on a black market industry that relies on Prohibition to pay dividends. 

I’ve seen many references to The Great Gatsby being a quest for the “American Dream.” In his introduction to The Great Gatsby, Malcolm Bradbury describes Fitzgerald’s novels as a general rule following a similar template: 

“An imperfect but interesting man falls unreservedly in love with, and pursues to the end, an imperfect dream, usually embodied in a beautiful and generally wealthy woman. This is part  of a much bigger dream, made out of the American sensibility of expectation, hope and promise, the belief that it is possible for Americans to live out myths that are larger than the life of plain reality or unadorned history.” (XX) 1

Arguably, this book takes place in the interstitial space between the “American Dream” and a world structure built on consumer capitalism, a structure that emphatically relinquishes its soul for the power to consume.  

The first glimpse we see of Daisy, Gatsby’s personified American Dream, she is encased in a cocoon of white billowing fabric. 

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few minutes listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

There are many significant things to this introductory passage. First, Daisy is both an object of her husband’s conspicuous consumption and a sign of his conspicuous leisure. She has the leisure to be unemployed and is well dressed and as such displays his wealth and status. The irony is that even within the post-suffrage age of the liberated woman, life for women remains bleakly the same, if not worse, because now there is a level and expectation of independence and freedom. 

But as Tom walks in the door, the metaphorical floating and liberation comes to a halt and both women are once again tethered to a dreary reality. 

How do I build a case for Daisy’s dreary reality? I took note of all the times characters were interrupted throughout the novel. Daisy is interrupted seven times, twice while trying to talk about her daughter. Although an object of status, she is voiceless. Although a mother, her status as such is overlooked and ignored: 

‘Then she added irreverently: ‘You ought to see the baby.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘She’s asleep. She’s three year’s old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’ 

‘Never.’

‘Well you ought to see her. She’s —‘

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. 

‘What you been doing, Nick.’

(pg. 10)

Interestingly for a book struggling to come to terms with identity, the daughter is never named. The nanny at one point refers to “Pammy”…but this is obviously a derivative of something else. Instead Tom, who is described earlier as “a brute of a man, a great big, hulking physical specimen of a —“ (Daisy is once again interrupted by Tom mid-sentence), by the end of the novel has become described as a “child.” So in some sense Daisy’s maternal duties have been redirected from her child to Tom.

At one point as Gatsby is dragging Daisy through the nooks and crevices of his enormous house he rouses the sleeping piano player that has been living with him and demands a song:  

“‘One thing’s sure and nothing’s sure

The rich get richer and the poor get- children. 

In the meantime, 

In between time—“

(pg. 78) 

And yet for Daisy, she gets neither. She has neither the freedom to consume independently nor even the power to mother her child. 

Clothing is constantly referenced throughout the novel in great detail. There are pink suits and cream colored chiffon dresses. At the end of the book, a caller asks for the shoes he has left at one of Gatsby’s infamous parties, while giving his condolences about not being able to make it to the funeral. The shoes outrank the social obligation of friendship.  

According to Veblen “… the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required

for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying as

far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently

prima facie evidence of social worth.” 2

My favorite example of this is Myrtle who is married to a low class car mechanic and also Tom’s paramour. In the span of a few hours she changes her outfit three times. While her sartorial identity crisis references her ambiguous sense of self and her lack of power, it also shows her status as an object of desire and as such secondary wealth. 

“Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.” (pg.26)

This again reminds me of Veblen. In his chapter on “Pecuniary Emulation” he argues that low-status people will attempt to emulate the rich by their consumption. They will consume over-priced luxury items to identify themselves with the purchasing power of the higher classes. When Myrtle spontaneously asks for Tom to buy her a puppy and he does, and when she creates a list of all the new purchases she must make in the near future, she is asserting her place within the pecuniary world. In the end the farce is exposed when Myrtle thinks she has a right to mention Daisy’s name. Tom disagrees and breaks her nose with his open hand. 

Between the lines we see the underlying sterility of this wealth and status. While the right kind of (hulking) men have purchasing power and ownership of this capitalist modern discourse, the wrong kind of men and all women are left marginalized. 

Gatsby is the wrong kind of man, without heritage or legitimacy. But in some sense, Nick Caraway, our pathfinder through this incomprehensible world is also the wrong kind of man. Although he has the right lineage, he does not posses the right wealth. His wealth is not of the leisurely kind but of the “make something of yourself” kind. As such, within this jungle he is equally marginalized. He is the most interrupted male character. While both Gatsby and Tom are described as powerfully standing with their feet on the ground as if expressing a type of general ownership and manifest destiny, Nick is the masculine counterpoint. His presence actually serves to make Gatsby and Daisy feel “more satisfactorily alone.” (pg. 77) 

His first image of Gatsby comes in the evening, as silhouettes make shadows in the moonlight. Nick sees Gatsby standing on his lawn, looking up at the stars: 

“Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.” (pg. 19)

Nick decides to call out to him, and then decides against it. Gatsby’s certainty of universal position is contrasted with Nick’s ineffectual existence. He wants to communicate but can’t, he “involuntarily” glances seaward following the trajectory of Gatsby’s view, yet unlike Gatsby’s vision of destiny and ownership of the local heavens, Nick “distinguishes” nothing. Our narrative guide is figuratively blind. When he looks again Gatsby is gone and Nick is alone in the “unquiet darkness.” (pg.20) 

From Nick’s narrative viewpoint Gatsby is enigmatic. A self made man, confident in what he has created: 

"The truth was that Jay Gatsby...sprang from a Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about his Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” (pg.80)

Nick on the other hand is less sure of himself. After Gatsby’s narrative of exchanging his ‘divinity’ for Daisy, Nick is rendered speechless/ voiceless. 

“Throughout all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.” (pg 91) 

Interestingly when Myrtle calls Tom at home he picks up the phone, but toward the end of the novel when Nick calls Gatsby (four times) his call doesn’t go through and the operator tells him the line is being kept open for a long distance call from Chicago. Another example of the impotence of Nick’s voice. 

Nick, in some undefinable way is “other.” He is the counterpoint to the definitive masculinity of both Gatsby and Tom. Unlike Gatsby and Tom he has no “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs…” Unlike Daisy he does not have a voice “full of money”…his status is ambiguous and intangible. Ultimately he is the only character that seems objectively not consumed by the culture of consuming and the drive for status. 

He pursues a career after his family agrees it’s the best choice. He lives in an unassuming house in West Egg, and devotes himself without much ambition to a career in finance. By being neither an idealist (like Gatsby) or a pessimist (like Tom) he manages to survive as a realist. 

In his essay “Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream” Marius Bewley describes the Great Gatsby as an “exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and its attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions.” 3

I would argue that America has always existed in a period of corruption, the specificity of the corruption just ebbs and flows and recreates itself for each new generation. The “Dream” has always been limited to a few while rhetorically accessible to everyone: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

As hypocritical as this statement was in 1776, it was equally unaccessible in 1925 despite both the 13th amendment (outlawing slavery) and the 19th amendment finally granting suffrage to women. The 1920’s were less interested in an ideological “American Dream” and more interested in their right to consume. The Roaring Twenties became an era of avaricious consumption, people were encouraged to buy on credit and recognize their identity in their ability to consume. Like Gatsby, America nourished the “colossal vitality of this illusion.” 

The Great Gatsby was not a financially successful book. It was not the breezy college boy novel that gave Fitzgerald so much success and notoriety as his previous books had. But then the financial market collapsed, and what had initially seemed like a bit of a depressing take on exceptionalism became a clarion call for the illusive hopes and dreams of the middle class and the empty sterility of the wealthy. 

This narrative plays out over and over again. Culturally we define status and identity in terms of consumption, the consumption is encouraged beyond the sustainable means of the middle classes who begin to consume on credit, until eventually the market collapses and the cycle begins again. We see a similar quest for the American Dream, in slogans like “Make America Great Again” as if there was a time when America was ever truly great while simultaneously glossing over the specifics of how to go about getting to that place “again.” When we begin to define that greatness in smaller and more contained definitions we destroy the thing that makes America truly great: its resilience and diversity, its multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and its hopefulness that there is always a better more equitable future around the corner. 

By being an emasculated voice, Nick allows the reader to navigate these hopes and illusions for ourselves, forcing us to choose which reality we will pursue.  

1. All quote from The Great Gatsby are found in: Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Everyman’s Library, 1991.

2. Veblen, Thorsten. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. 1899, pp.78.

3. Bewley, Marius. “Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream.” Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp.32.

Here's a link exploring some of the great cover art of this book over the years!