FICTION: THE GREAT GATSBY, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Thou hast made us for Thy Own O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” St. Augustine

“A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for.” Robert Browning.

PLOT SUMMARY

Excess! Excess is the theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald's splendid novel, The Great Gatsby. The theme can be captured in one simple principle: Every excess is disorder and thus leads to sin. Even excessive love leads to disorder.

Background: The novel is set in 1922, when Americans emerged from World War I. After a brief period of economic stagnation and high unemployment, the stock market crashed. In fact, the market lost more, percentage wise, in 1921 than it did in the great crash of 1929. President Warren G. Harding did nothing. Left alone, the stock market self-corrected and recovered rapidly. The result was an economic boom that lasted almost the entire decade. Except for farmers, most people lived well, and many people lived excessively well.

Gatsby, the protagonist, was fabulously wealthy. The source of his wealth was a mystery. Apparently he was involved in some kind of illegal bond trading. Gatsby lived by himself in a mansion facing Long Island Sound. His frequent parties were attended by crowds of the most prominent people dressed in extremely expensive clothing. Those parties were excessive—guests feasted to the point of gluttony on a vast variety of the best foods available. Champagne flowed as Prohibition was ignored, just as drug laws are ignored today. Drunks were all over the luscious landscape.

Gatsby's excessive parties were a diabolical aping of God's Celestial Banquet. Diabolical because the deadly sins were on display---pride, gluttony, drunkenness, lust, greed, and envy. Gatsby;s house was a kind of diabolic Eden, a pleasure garden of visceral delights not to be enjoyed in this side of Heavenly Reality. “Lots of people come who haven't been invited...They simply force their way in and he [Gatsby] is too polite to object.” Note that people came to his parties, but are not interested in the Celestial Banquet. This is a recurring theme in world literature—a longing to return to the original Garden of Eden.

Strangely, Gatsby himself remained aloof from his guests. At most, he would occasionally wave goodby from an upstairs porch as people left. The few that were allowed entrance into his living quarters noticed that he eschewed the sumptuous food and drink. Only much later does the reader learn the purpose of his parties—they were attempts to impress a woman. Some five years previous, Gatsby was in love with Daisy. She came from a well-to-do Louisville family. While Gatsby was away in Europe during World War I, she married Tom Buchanan, also from a wealthy family. Gatsby felt that he lost Daisy because he had could not provide her with the life style to which she was accustomed. When he became wealthy, he contacted a scheme to win her back from her spouse. He purchased a house on Long Island across the water from Daisy's house. He figured that he would find a way to meet her and thus impress her with his new found wealth.

Gatsby was certain that Tom did not love Daisy. He was right. Tom was a louse. At the moment, he was in an adulterous affair with a low class woman, Myrtle, whose husband, George was a mechanic barely eking out a living.

Nick Carraway, the narrator, lived in the house next to Gatsby's. After Gatsby made a name for himself among wealthy New York people, he prevailed upon Nick to invite Daisy to Nick's house. The plan was for Daisy to unexpectedly meet Gatsby whereupon their romantic relationship would reignite. Gatsby then invited Daisy to tour his own house. She was suitably impressed.

Gatsby's romantic plan worked. Soon enough, Tom realized that Gatsby was systematically stealing his wife. Tom, extremely possessive even though he kept a mistress, provoked a showdown with Gatsby in front of Nick and his close lady friend, Jordan. To ease tensions, Daisy suggested everyone drive into town. Tom commandeered Gatsby's sporty automobile. They left in separate cars. Just at the same time, Myrtle broke up with George, and drove off at high speed.

Gatsby, Jordan, and Nick drove in Tom's car. Tom and Daisy drove in Gatsby's car. Myrtle, driving at reckless speed, collided with Gatsby's car, driven by Daisy. Because the car was identified as Gatsby's, George believed that Gatsby was responsible for the accident. Moreover, George supposed that Gatsby was the cause of Myrtle's infidelity. Desperately lovesick and excessively angry, George sneaked into Gatsby's yard. Finding him in floating in his swimming pool, he shot him to death and then shot himself.

THEME COMMENTARY

That's the plot summary. What was F. Scott Fitzgerald telling his readers? Note: as in all my reviews, I attempt to understand exactly what the author intended. However, I concur with G. K. Chesterton who said that authors often tell us more than they intended. I look for those meanings also.

Consider the most revealing symbol. From a billboard, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, “blue and gigantic” stared at the various characters, keeping watch as if to say, “What fools these mortals be.” Cars had to pass over a drawbridge by the billboard, which was was near a foul smelling valley of ashes. The scene suggests the River Styx over which the damned souls pass to enter Hell.

One thing for sure is that the story is basically autobiographical. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda said once said to him that “Everything you write is about us.” So we must understand Daisy and Gatsby as Zelda and Scott. Zelda was from a well-to-do Southern, i.e., Alabama, family. They met when Scott was in the Army.

Daisy seemed less than intelligent. She often replied in non sequitors. Daisy described herself as sophisticated. Like many others, she confused sophistication with world-weariness. And she had, as Nick said, turbulent emotions. Self-centered, she had little interest in her infant daughter. When the girl was born, Daisy said, “I hope she'll be a fool—that''s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Zelda, to make a long and bizarre story short, was often highly irrational, possibly bi-polar—as was Daisy. She and Scott frequently engaged in terrible quarrels, but he could not leave her. He may even have lost his soul because of her. I say that because the novel foreshadows Scott's eventual demise. He wrote the story in 1925. He died in 1940, aged 44, due to a heart attack likely bought on by chronic alcoholism. Gatsby was murdered on account of Daisy; Scott was possibly damned on account of Zelda.

Love may be psychologically described as what happens within the psyche when all the unconnected notions of the ideal mate coalesce upon meeting the person who fits those notions. It is always powerful. According to Charles Williams, a lesser known but profound writer and friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Dante had just such an experience when he first saw Beatrice and he spent the rest of his life reflecting on it. Williams deemed it the Beatrician experience.

Daisy constellated Gatsby's archetype. Zelda did likewise with Scott. Usually such constellations last 18-24 months. However, because Gatsby's love for Daisy was not requited, it continued for several years. In Scott's case, his love for Zelda continued because he could never fully possess her.

Daisy is best understood as what the psychologist Carl Jung defined as a primordial female. Such women captivate men, but have little authentic feeling for them. Like the black widow spider, she spins a web out of which her men cannot escape and then she destroys them. When her men pass out of her life, she forgets them and seeks another. Like all primordial females, she reduced her lovers to the point of foolishness. When Gatsby finally met her after a separation of five years, his suave demeanor dissipated and his talk was virtually senseless. As Nick said to him at that moment, “You're acting like a little boy.” Gatsby acted like a grouse in mating season when he toured Daisy through his elaborate house. He clearly felt that he had to show her that he was now in her financial league.

The primordial female does exactly the opposite of what good women do. Good women transform men. That is one of their most important tasks—to transform, to civilize, beastly men. Think of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale in which the love of a girl transformed the beast. When women refuse that task, men live like half-civilized, and often dangerous, animals. Or, as someone said, they live like bears with furniture. That is exactly the situation in contemporary America. When women attempt to function as equals to men, they lose their ability to control men. Men then prey on such women, as is now all too common.

One strange phenomenon of primordial females is that men and even women associated with them often experience horrible consequences, accidents in particular, even though nothing happens to the primordial female herself. Recall that Daisy was uninjured while driving the car that was in the fatal accident. How such consequences come about is unclear; suffice to say that I have seen examples myself. We do indeed live in a reality possessed of things still undreamed of in contemporary philosophy.

This is not all. Men, unaware of their deep need for the transforming power of women, nevertheless seek women, but for the wrong reasons. The English critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, said that sex is the “mysticism of the atheist.” He had that right. Men, and women too, seek psychological transformation in ongoing sexual adventures. Great fun perhaps, but doomed to failure. In the finest line of psychology ever written, St. Augustine said that “Thou hast made us for Thine Own O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” We are primarily made for God, not for other humans. No loving relationship can raise anyone to the level to which we are created.

So we have a need for transformation, but instead of seeking God, contemporary men seek a woman capable of producing a lesser kind of transformation. Unfortunately, the most powerful women, those who seem most capable of strong transformation, are the primordial females, but they do not transform men, they destroy men.

Daisy, like Zelda, was a God substitute. They functioned as idols, replacements for God, a common practice, but insufficient to reach the proper end of all humans. Gatsby felt that that in reaching for Daisy, he was reaching for a woman out of his league, so to speak. What he failed to understand is that his love for Daisy was a really a love for his proper end, God. Ironically, God dwells in an the infinitely higher Celestial Realm which was nevertheless within his reach. His desire for transformation to a higher self, to achieve that for which he was created, was proper. He simply sought the wrong person. Robert Browning knew better. “A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for.”

COMMENTS ON THE MINOR CHARACTERS

People sin either out of maliciousness or from weakness. And, while not all psychological anomalies are sinful, sin is always accompanied by one or more psychological anomalies.

Gatsby sinned out of weakness. His excessive love for Daisy was disordered. But his love for her was admirable in itself. By contrast with Gatsby, Tom Buchanan was malicious. He was totally self-centered with little or no concern for his wife. When his mistress Myrtle irritated him, he smacked her so hard he broke her nose.

In his youth, Tom had been a successful athlete. Unfortunately for him, he, like so many other men and women who had achieve high status while young, he never outgrew his early triumphs. Such people tend to employ the same dynamics they did when young. That is not uncommon. There is a strong tendency in all people when they find themselves in a crisis to employ the last dynamic that worked. Knowing this phenomenon,incidentally, makes for predicting the behavior of those in high positions, political, business, military, whatever.

Relying on his collegiate status as an excellent athlete, Tom insulted everyone, and he threatened to violently attack Gatsby. “Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final...just because I am stronger and more of a man than you are.” That insecurity and possessiveness was motivation for his potentially horrific reaction when he learned that Daisy planned to leave him for Gatsby.

Tom imagined himself as a superior example of the human condition. And yet, he was oblivious to his own failings. Speaking of George, whose wife was Tom's mistress, Tom said that “George is so dumb he doesn't know he is alive.” Maybe so, but Tom, who lives only a little above the animal level, has no idea that created in the “image and likeness of his Creator,” he possessed a rational intellect. Aside from his financial work, he used that rational intellect to advance his animal inclinations. Furthermore, Tom, supposedly a superb example of the dominant race, married one stupid woman and was in an affair with another.

Tom was a reader of Stoddard,'s The Rise of the Colored Empires who taught that the era of Caucasian civilization was nearing its end, soon to be replaced by the colored peoples of the world. This caused him to feel a “terrible pessimism” about the future. Actually, his calculated pessimism was more a way of asserting his superiority given that he was such a fine specimen of the Caucasian race, by his own definition of course. Fitzgerald had Tom say “Goddard” not Stoddard, just to emphasize that Tom could not get even the small things right.

There were many minor, or even unmentioned characters. These were the party goers. Essentially they lived to amuse themselves. They were easily bored, which is why they sought ever more exciting parties. Boredom is not a sign of mental health or of intellectual well being. Boredom is what happens when nothing in the external environment makes contact with one's inner self, with one's intellectual resources. For mentally healthy people, no matter what happens, no matter what situation one is in, there is always something to reflect on about it. (Faculty meetings are an exception.) Guests at the parties “conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.” There was talking, dancing, and singing all without inhibitions. One lady sang a sad song, but then fell into a drunken stupor during which her tears flowed over her colored eyelashes causing inky rivulets to flow down her cheeks—thus did pathos become bathos.

Naturally, vapid people seek amusements, just as our contemporary young people are amusing themselves to death, while living in denial of the realities of an ongoing war carried on by millions of hate filled militants, and of an impending economic collapse. The same young people were common in Rome, circa, 450 A. D.

Charles Williams presented an excellent exegesis on the love of money as root of evil. He said that the real spiritual problem with money is that wealth permits one to replicate his experiences, and thus one becomes spiritually and psychologically stuck at that level, never getting to the proper source of all that is truth, beauty, goodness, and justice, that is, God. Here again as we read of Gatsby's super lavish parties, we see that excess leads to disorder. When one gets stuck on something, excessive behavior results. To put it another way, because for vapid people, there is nothing beyond the moment, people default to everything but God and attempt to find satisfaction with worldly attractions.

St. Paul said “Sensuality kills the spirit.” That was undoubtedly true in Tom's marital relationship with Daisy. And, of course, we may assume that the many sensual attractions of the parties killed whatever spirituality may ever have been possessed by the party goers.

Nick Carraway was fascinated by Gatsby albeit with mixed emotions. Carraway worked for a living. Undoubtedly he would have liked to live as Gatsby did. But he sensed that something was wrong with those frequent, pointless parties. His name, “Carraway,” suggests that he is Gatsby's other self—the personality held aloof from everyone. Nick is Gatsby's alter ego. He is also the one character that truly cares for Gatsby, who loves him as he is, not for what he might be able to do for him.

DIGRESSIONS FROM THE THEME

Great literature tends to lead to related subjects. Herewith a digression on the subject of rape. Psychologists say and people believe that the rape is motivated by a desire to assert ultimate control over a woman. I am not so certain. It fits too nicely with the so-called feminist insistence that men have an irrational urge to control all women all the time, and therefore rape is only the most dramatic form of control. And of course they believe that men are so motivated because in our Western Civilization masculine and feminine roles are culturally constructed to that end. But as the intellectually honest feminist, Camille Paglia asks: If society constructs masculine and feminine roles, what constructs society? See her Vamps and Tramps. Her answer: Biology. Therefore, while I do not altogether dismiss the control motivation, I offer another motivation: Transformation.

If, as I wrote above, women have the power to transform men, then I suspect that rape is a desire for instant transformation. The key word is “instant.” Yes, rape is gravely sinful; stupid in the original sense of “stupid” , i.e., the act is contrary to the purpose of sexual intercourse and thus cannot possibly produce the hoped for instant transformation; and of course is devastating to the victim.

Herewith a digression on the subject of racial inferiority. Stoddard's views were not uncommon in the 1920s. In fact, they were the common sense of most Europeans and many Americans. In England, H. G. Wells shared the same fears and advocated eliminating the mentally and psychically deficient. In the United States, few took issue with Margaret Sanger who advocated birth control for the expressed purpose of ridding the country of Negroes. See John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses for an extended treatment of this subject. Hitler was no anomaly. He was simply the one willing and possessed with the means to carry those racist views to their logical conclusion. For the college educated Tom to venture such racism and to have his positions accepted by his college educated friend would be perfectly in keeping with Americans, circa 1922. Whereas racism is now pretty much marginalized to America's lowest social class, in the early 20^th century, it was, as Carey amply proves, the common sense of the intellectuals.

Contemporary eugenics, far more sophisticated than the Nazis imagined, has encouraged the production of designer children—kids with high intelligence and excellent physical conditions and perhaps athletic abilities as well.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Seeking God, Scott found Zelda. She took over and eventually ruined his life. To say they quarreled, is not even close to their destructive relationship. Did Zelda intend to act as she did? Who knows. Suffice to say, it was in her nature to be the primordial female

In college, Scott was the lone practicing Catholic student at Princeton. Coming from upstate Minnesota to Princeton's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant environment was more than Scott could bear. He tried excessively hard to be one of them. Many years later, he famously said to his friend Ernest Hemingway, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway, who came from a well-to-do family, famously responded, “Yeah, they have more money.” And yet, in terms of intelligence and talent he was, as Nick said to Gatsby, better than all of them put together. Scott lost to the world, the flesh, and the devil. Gatsby's death was a foreshadowing.

Zelda did nothing to lift Scott. To emphasize what was stated above--There is a hint that Scott anticipated that Zelda would somehow destroy him. Considered the symbolism of Gatsby's death. He died floating on a pool of water, which may suggest a rebirth, except that he does not emerge from it, but dies there. F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed guilty of damnable despair many years before his death.