But in this ephemeral weightlessness of Gatsby’s there is beauty, real beauty, and on this the whole story turns. The man’s monstrous accumulation of things is nothing if not vulgar, a grotesque display as pitiful as it is absurd. But what Nick understands, as nobody else does, is that this mountain of things is the vehicle of a man’s passion, and as objects they are nearly drained of material reality. The afternoon when Gatsby takes Daisy through his house, we are told that he “stares at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real.” His nerves running high, the owner of the property begins pulling shirts from his closet, one gauzy, gorgeous article after another, “in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue,” piling them high before Nick and his beloved. Then Daisy bends her lovely head and weeps into the shirts. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.” I marveled again at the power of this passage, which is at once tender and ridiculous. But Fitzgerald lets neither feeling get the upper hand. Daisy pours out the grief of her young love for Gatsby into a heap of his splendid shirts without understanding her own feelings. But she recovers quickly. Sometime later the same afternoon, she stares out the window at pink clouds in a western sky and says to Gatsby, “I’d just like to get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.” The shirts, the clouds, the dream are colored like a fading rainbow. Gatsby stands at the edge of his lawn and watches the green light across the water from Daisy’s house. The last suit Nick sees him wearing is pink. If your feet are rooted to the ground, you can’t be blown willy-nilly, but you can’t fly up to those rosy clouds either. It’s as simple as that.
Things and nothings. Bodies and nobodies. The ground and the air. The tangible and the intangible. The novel moves restlessly between these dichotomies. Surely Fitzgerald was right when he said that The Great Gatsby was “a new thinking out of the idea of illusion.” Illusion is generally coupled with its opposite, reality, but where is the real? Is reality found in the tangible and illusion in the intangible? Besides the nuts and bolts of hardware out west, there is ground in the novel, the soil of ashes in West Egg, the ground that Eckleburg unblinkingly surveys, but it is here that Fitzgerald lavishes a prose that could have been taken straight from Dickens, a prose of fantasy, not realism.
This is the valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
With its crumbling men, the valley of ashes plainly evokes that other biblical valley of death, and this miserable stretch of land borders the road where Myrtle Wilson will die under the wheels of the car driven by Daisy. But like the pink clouds, it lacks solidity and dissolves. The difference between the vision of Gatsby’s mansion and this earth is that money does not disguise mortality here. The gaping cracks of poverty are fully visible.
Nevertheless, among the residents of this ashen valley is Myrtle Wilson, the only person in the novel to whom Fitzgerald assigns “vitality.” The word is used three times in reference to Mrs. Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s working-class mistress: “… there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” As Nick passes Wilson’s gas station in a car, he sees her “at the garage pump with panting vitality.” And in death: “The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.” It is this vivid life, not her character, that makes Myrtle Wilson’s death tragic. A silly and coarse woman, she is nevertheless more sympathetic than her lover, Tom, who is worse: stupid and violent. Between them, however, there exists a real sexual energy that isn’t found elsewhere in the novel. The narrator’s attraction to Jordan is tepid at best, and Gatsby’s fantasies about Daisy seem curiously unerotic. The slender girl has no body to speak of. She seems to be made of her beautiful clothes and her beautiful voice. It is hard to imagine Gatsby actually having sex with Daisy. It’s like trying to imagine a man taking a butterfly. And although her marriage to Tom has produced a daughter, as a mother Daisy communicates detachment. She coos endearments at the child, Pammy, and then dismisses her. Only once in the novel is the reader reminded of Daisy as a creature of flesh and blood, and, significantly, it is through a finger her husband has bruised. Daisy looks down at the little finger “with an awed expression.” “You didn’t mean to,” she says to Tom, “but you did do it.” The passage is not only a premonition of Tom’s brutality that erupts horribly in New York when he breaks Myrtle’s nose or of Myrtle’s bruised and opened body on the road. Daisy’s awe expresses her remote relation to her own body and to mortality itself, which her money will successfully hide, not forever, of course, but for now.
What Tom and Myrtle have that Jay and Daisy don’t is a personal relation, with its attendant physicality and mess. That is why, after admitting to Nick that Daisy may have once loved Tom “for a minute,” Gatsby comforts himself by saying, “In any case, it was only personal.” What Gatsby has been chasing all these years is neither personal nor physical. Its transcendence may have been lodged in the person of Daisy, but it is not limited to her. Her very shallowness makes Gatsby’s dream possible. But Myrtle Wilson is not a simple incarnation of the flesh and its weaknesses. She harbors dreams as well. As it does for Gatsby, her intangible wish finds form in an object. In her drawer at home, wrapped in tissue paper, Mr. Wilson finds the expensive dog leash Tom once bought for her to go with the dog he also bought. The dog didn’t come home. The useless, beautiful thing is a sign of absence, a string of absences, in fact — the dog, the lover, and the emptiness of desire itself. Just as the green light shining from Daisy’s house may be counted among Gatsby’s “enchanted objects,” one he loses when Daisy actually enters his life again, the dog leash possesses a kind of magic. It is the tissue paper that makes me want to cry, that sends this frivolous possession into another register altogether, that imbues the silver-and-leather dog leash with the quality of true pathos.
The tangible and the intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don’t think so. And I don’t think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths. The play between the material and the immaterial in The Great Gatsby is riddled, not simple. The fairy tale contains the valley of ashes as well as the castle by the sea, the heavy weight of the corpse and the pretty bodies blown in the wind. And which one is more real than the other? Is death more true than life? Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? The book goes to the heart of the problem of fiction itself by insisting that fiction is necessary to life — not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning. Nick imagines Gatsby at the pool just before Wilson kills him. The man has understood that there will be no message from Daisy, that the great idea is dead.