He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
This passage tells of dramatic change, but it is not a change from illusion to reality, from enchanted nature to real nature. This world may be new, but there are ghosts here, and they are fantastic. It is now a world made of matter, but that matter is no more real than the magic lights and music of the summer parties that went before it.
One can argue that nearly every word of dialogue uttered in the novel, every exchange, and every event is ordinary. Tom Buchanan and the poor Wilsons are glaringly limited and unattractive. Gatsby’s business partner, Wolfsheim, is clever and dishonest without the grandeur of being satanic. Daisy’s charm is not revealed in anything she says. Gatsby converses in a stiff and clichéd manner that sets Nick back on his heels. Jordan is a cheat. These characters do not elevate themselves above the crowd. They are not remarkable people, and yet to read this novel is to feel as if you have taken a walk in a fairy wood, as if while you are reading, you glimpse the sublime.
The magic is in the book’s narration, in its shades of sunlight and darkness, its allusions to fairy tales, to music, songs, to dusty dance slippers and bright voices. Better than any other writer I know, Fitzgerald captures the tipsy aura of parties, that slight glazing of the mind that dawns after two glasses of champagne. The ordinary world trembles with adjectival enchantment here — Fitzgerald’s prose is dense with surprising adjectives. Although some of his characters are glib, the narrator is not. The sorcery that infuses the book cannot be explained as the golden effect of money, although that is part of it, or even by youth. They are mostly very young, these people, and life still holds an unwrapped newness for them. Nick Carraway’s voice carries a deeper understanding of enchantment, which at once grounds and elevates the narration. It returns us to the beginning. The father’s words render up a world in which every human being, no matter how flawed, is granted an essential dignity. Remember, every person is a product of his own history, one that is not necessarily like yours. He or she has come out of a particular story and to judge that man or woman is not fair unless you know the story. The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. All characters are born of this effort to be another person. And its success is rooted in the grounded self. The “carelessness” of Tom and Daisy manifests itself in flightiness. Unballasted, they flit from one place to another, and their wealth only facilitates their disconnectedness. Yet we trust Nick, this man who speaks to us, and we believe him when he says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” And we trust his imaginings, because the imaginary is crucial to his tale. He did not witness Gatsby’s murder. He cannot be Gatsby, but he says, “He must have…” Nick Carraway’s voice bears the conviction of his empathy.
Fitzgerald did not give part of Nick’s story to Michaelis because it was convenient. By seamlessly transferring Nick’s vision into Wilson’s Greek neighbor, Fitzgerald lifts the narration out of the “merely personal.” Nick sees beyond himself, and this second sight is reinforced by the eyes of Eckleburg and the owl eyes of the man in the library. Nick sees vicariously what Michaelis and another man actually witness: Myrtle’s dead body, the body Daisy will not see and cannot face. It is more than enough. The men undo Mrs. Wilson’s shirt “still wet with perspiration” and see “that her left breast was hanging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen to the heart below.” Later Nick tells Gatsby, “She was ripped open.” He did not have to be there to see. For a moment, with Nick, the reader stares into the heart of being, and it has stopped. I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.
A Plea for Eros
A few years ago a friend of mine gave a lecture at Berkeley on the femme fatale, a subject he has been thinking about for years. When I met him, he was a graduate student at Columbia University, but now he is a full-fledged philosopher, and when it is finished, his book will be published by Gallimard in France and Harvard University Press in America. He is Belgian but lives in Paris, a detail significant to the story, because he comes from another rhetorical tradition — a French one. When he finished speaking, he took questions, including a hostile one from a woman who demanded to know what he thought of the Antioch Ruling — a law enacted at Antioch College, which essentially made every stage of a sexual encounter on campus legal only by verbal consent. My friend paused, smiled, and replied: “It’s wonderful. I love it. Just think of the erotic possibilities: ‘May I touch your right breast? May I touch your left breast?’” The woman had nothing to say.
This little exchange has lingered in my mind. What interests me is that he and she were addressing exactly the same problem, the idea of permission, and yet their perspectives were so far apart that it was as if they were speaking different languages. The woman expected opposition, and when she didn’t get it, she was speechless. Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic — that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It’s pretend listening. But by moving the story — in this case, the narrative of potential lovers — onto new ground, the young philosopher tripped up his opponent.
It is safe to assume that the Antioch Ruling wasn’t devised to increase sexual pleasure on campus, and yet the new barriers it made, ones which dissect both sexual gestures and the female body (the ruling came about to protect women, not men), have been the stuff of erotic fantasy for ages. When the troubadour pined for his lady, he hoped against hope that he would be granted a special favor — a kiss perhaps. The sonnet itself is a form that takes the body of the beloved apart — her hair, her eyes, her lips, her breasts. The body in pieces is reborn in this legal drama of spoken permission. Eroticism thrives both on borders and on distance. It is a commonplace that sexual pleasure demands thresholds. My philosopher made quick work of demonstrating the excitement of crossing into forbidden territory — the place you need special permission to trespass into. But there is distance here, too, a distance the earnest crusaders who invented the ruling couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The articulation of the other’s body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.
Objectification has a bad name in our culture. Cries of “Women are not sexual objects” have been resounding for years. I first ran into this argument in a volume I bought in the ninth grade called Sisterhood Is Powerful. I carried that book around with me until it fell apart. Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book’s cover. Of course women are sexual objects; so are men. Even while I was hugging that book of feminist rhetoric to my chest, I groomed myself carefully, zipped myself into tight jeans, and went after the boy I wanted most, mentally picking apart desirable male bodies like a connoisseur. Erotic pleasure, derived from the most intimate physical contact, thrives on the paradox that only by keeping alive the strangeness of that other person can eroticism last. Every person is keenly aware of the fact that sexual feeling is distinct from affection, even though they often conspire, but this fact runs against the grain of classic feminist arguments.