Abstract
Most students are stopped dead in their critical tracks when they meet words like ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’. When it comes to writing about a literary text such terms, which suggest a semi-mystical conception of the work of art, are off-putting rather than helpful. They are evaluative not analytical, and as such can be described as ‘merely subjective noises’.3 Such subjective noises, however, have one noticeable effect: in their clear assumption of privileged knowledge both about a text and a philosophical and aesthetic field (truth, beauty, art) they close down possible responses to that text on the part of others. How can I approach a novel which has already been so grandiloquently and conclusively assessed by Sklar?
In The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald] found truth in the beauty of art, and beauty in its truths
(Robert Sklar)1
The knowable is at the heart of the mysterious
(Gérard Genette)2
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Notes
Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 ) p. 196.
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse translated by Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 [1972]) p. 23. Where appropriate, page references will be given after quotations in the text from henceforth. Where I modify Genette’s words on Proust to fit my analysis of Fitzgerald, I make use of square brackets.
Terry Eagleton uses this phrase in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) p. 92, in describing the intended target of Northrop Frye’s critical project.
Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative ( Berlin: Mouton, 1982 ) p. 163.
Ann Jefferson and David Robey (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction ( London: Batsford, 1982 ) p. 90.
Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 [1973]) p. 5. Where appropriate, page references will be given after quotations in the text from henceforth.
Diana Knight, ‘Structuralism I: Narratology: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness’, in D. Tallack (ed.), Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts (London: Batsford, 1987) p. 14.
Douglas Tallack, Diana Knight, Bernard McGuirk, Steve Giles, ‘New Ways of Reading Old Texts’, English in Education, Vol. 20 (Summer, 1986 ), No. 2, p. 15.
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 147. Telling and showing are terms which develop out of the distinction between diegesis and mimesis in Plato’s Republic (see Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction p. 106; Genette, Narrative Discourse pp. 162–9).
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1988 [1926]) pp. 7–9. Where appropriate, page references will be given after quotations in the text from henceforth.
William Faulkner, ‘Barn Burning’, in Collected Stories of William Faulkner ( New York: Random House, 1950 ) p. 3.
Richard Godden, ‘The Great Gatsby: The Great Gatsby:’, in Journal of American Studies Vol. 16 (Dec. 1982) No. 3, p. 369.
John F. Callahan, The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972 ) p. 45.
Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968 ) p. 219.
This quotation is from T. J. Jackson Lears ‘From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930’, in Lears and Richard Wightman Fox (eds), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) p. 8. Lears traces the development of such a sense of self back to the 1890s. Both he and Stuart Ewen, however, apply such a notion to the 1920s too. Ewen quotes, for example, the ‘social psychology’ of Floyd Henry Allport, who asserted in 1924 that ‘our consciousness of ourselves is largely a reflection of the consciousness which others have of us… My idea of myself is rather my own idea of my neighbor’s view of me’.
See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976 ) p. 34.
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© 1990 Peter Messent
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Messent, P. (1990). Speech Representation, Focalization and Narration in The Great Gatsby. In: New Readings of the American Novel. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21117-3_2
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