The achievement of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby lies among other things in the fact that the novel does not allow us to adopt an unambiguous attitude to the grandiose dreams of its protagonist. Gatsby turns out to be a crook and a corrupt fan- tasist, but there is a splendour all the same about his implacable desire for Daisy, a truth secreted at the heart of its falsehood. Gatsby has what the narrator calls 'a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life . . . an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again'. His hopes, to be sure, will come to nothing, since the force of the past proves stronger than the pull of the future:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic [sic] future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back cease- lessly into the past.
The past exists no more than the future; yet it has the edge over the latter in having once loomed large, which is why it can still wield an authority denied to what is yet to come. If the present cannot escape the orbit of the past, it is not only because the past is for the most part what we are made of, but because, as with Gatsby's forlorn impulse to repeat, it has no desire to do so. Much of the present consists of an effort to recapture what has been irreparably lost. It is as though it is little more than an op- portunity for the past to happen again, this time as comedy. The world itself, writes the satirist Karl Kraus, is simply an erroneous, deviating, circuitous way back to paradise.
Even so, the fact that Gatsby is so poignantly self-deceived is not allowed entirely to tarnish his aura or dispel his enigma, rather as the vision of those refugees from Europe who first set foot in America has not been entirely undermined by the nation's chequered later history. In what The Great Gatsby parochially and presumptuously calls 'that last and greatest of all human dreams', 'for a transitory moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contem- plation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder'. In similar vein, the narrator of Paul Auster's City of Glass imagines the entry of these pioneers into the New World as 'the quickening impulse of utopian thought, the spark that gave hope to the perfectibility of human life', even though we are aware that the results of this colonial adventure were by no means unequivocally positive.
On this rather questionable view, there is a utopian core even to the most baneful or megalomaniac of hopes, as we shall see later in the work of Ernst Bloch. It is thus that Fitzgerald's novel can admire 'the colossal vitality of [Gatsby's] illusion', even though its consequences are death and destruction. Properly de- ciphered, so the story runs, every death-dealing hope can yield us a dim, distorted echo of a life-yielding one, rather as the most calamitous of human actions represents a bungled attempt at happiness. In this sense, the inauthentic can serve as the medium of the authentic. There is, perhaps, a specifically American liter- ary motif at work here. In Moby-Dick, Ahab achieves tragic stat- ure by the very tenacity with which he remains true to a lethal delusion, and the same might be said in less epic mode of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman. In formalistic style, one is invited to ad- mire the passion and steadfastness of a commitment regardless of its disastrously wrongheaded content.
Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton
(Yale, 2015)
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