Nature and Optics in the Great Gatsby
Author(s): J. S. Westbrook
Source: American Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Mar., 1960), pp. 78-84
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2922804
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Notes and Queries 79
To understand the unity of The Great Gatsby we must first
recognize that its primary subject is the growth of an awareness.
The awareness belongs to the narrator, Nick Carroway, who not
only enjoys the advantage of distance in time from the events he
relates, but even at the scene of their unfolding has been more of a
perceiver than a participant. It is significant that his retrospections
are never so concerned with what he did as with what he saw. His
freedom from crucial dramatic involvement enables the internalities
of poetic vision to widen and deepen the implications of the ostensibly
shallow world The Great Gatsby deals with. Unattended by this
kind of vision the purely dramatic ingredients of the novel-as the
movies and television have demonstrated-merely add up to a disjointed impression of fast living in the Twenties, affording no haunting sense of the penalties levied upon an ethos by the excitementsor, more accurately, the excitations-of an era.
The lyricism, given such wide scope in the narrative, works
rhetorically and visually to arrest qualities of setting, conduct, and
states of mind. At the heart of the excesses, the extravagant hopes
and failures of the generation portrayed, has been its refusal to
countenance limitation, the consequences of which are symbolized
in two patterns of reference which combine to serve as the organizing principle for the poetic design of the novel. One revolves
around the problem of seeing; the other around the idea of nature.
If with respect to other characters The Great Gatsby is a record of
conduct, with respect to Carroway it is the record of an ocular initia-
tion into the mysteries and wonders of a magical country, during
which he is constantly absorbed in the process of adjusting his
credulity to received visual data, and checking and rechecking to
ascertain whether his eyes have played him false. The images that
confront them are either blurred, or comprised of utterly improbable
amalgams: the disconcerting alignment of Mrs. McKee's eyebrows;
the vaguely familiar look of Meyer Wolfsheim's cufflinks, which turn
out to have been constructed of human molars; the shirtless figure
of Gatsby's boarder, Klipspringer, doing "liver exercises" in a silklined bedchamber; the "scarcely human orchid" sitting under a white
plum tree at a Gatsby party who, upon closer scrutiny, turns into a
"hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies"; the whole ashen world of
the dump with its ashen houses, chimneys, chimney smoke, and
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80 American Literature
men; and finally the oddly frivolous corpse of Gatsby afloat on a
rubber mattress in his swimming pool.
In all of these details there is a contention of elements and a
striving of forms for a completion which the disparity of elements
denies. Symbolically they reflect the abortive commitments of a
generation whose sense of distinctions has been destroyed by the
prodigious acceleration of a commercial and technical civilization.
If we look at them closely, however, we find that they are bound
together by another idea. In one way or another they all represent
an assault upon nature, and as the tale unfolds the idea of nature
insulted and abased is raised to the level of a general metaphor.
The people in The Great Gatsby, ironically enough, have not
consciously renounced nature. They have only ceased to perceive
its limits. They think continually in terms of fertility, but the forms,
of it that they wish upon the world are either altogether specious, or
else "forced." When Carroway first arrives in West Egg, he finds
"great bursts of leaves growing on the trees," but these are special
leaves to go with a special place. They remind him of the way
things grow "in fast movies." Whether they actually grow that way
is beside the point; the atmosphere of West Egg makes them seem
to. Its leaves are allied with the spirit of technology and fast money,
and this sort of alliance is basic to a whole scheme of images and
references that follow. So many and various are they that no convenient order of citation is possible. If the dump and the oculist's
sign make up the all-encompassing symbol of the novel, it would
seem unfair not to mention little touches like the wreath Myrtle
Wilson wants to buy for her mother's grave, which will "last all
summer." It is safe to say, however, that of all the devices whereby
nature is "crossed," the most frequent involve the use of color; and
in the majority of instances where colors are used it will be noted
that the contexts in which they are presented deflect their primary
meanings. The light on Daisy's dock is green-and electric. The
"golden arms" of Jordan Baker are not simply those of a healthy girl
who spends her afternoons on fairways, but of a girl whose wealth
is linked with dishonesty. And the innocence of white suffers when
that color is employed to describe Manhattan rising in "heaps and
sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money." But
the color which comes in for the most extensive manipulation is yel-
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Notes and Queries 8I
low. It figures prominently at Gatsby's parties-the "yellow cocktail music," and the stage twins in yellow dresses who do a baby act.
Gatsby's cars, too, are yellow, the station wagon that transports
guests to his parties and the "death car" with which Daisy runs
down Myrtle Wilson. George Wilson's garage is yellow and, across
the highway from it, the spectacles of Dr. J. T. Eckelburg. In general, the world of The Great Gatsby may be said to abound in colors,
all of the brighter varieties, but the most brilliant of them attends
ironically upon its unhappiest events.
Yet although we are subjected at every turn to these cheapenings,
vulgarizations, and distortions of the idea of fertility, the fact that
that idea is kept in the forefront of our minds from one end of the
book to the other is what accounts for its pathos. If The Great
Gatsby can be interpreted as a study of an ethos in transition, the
Americans it deals with retaining a certain innocence and vitality of
desire we connect with a simpler, less deceptive phase of their history, but now confused as to values, mistaking losses for gains, and
committing their hopes and beliefs to symbols that are shallow and
inadequate, then the continual references to violated nature deepen
our sense of what they have betrayed in themselves. Significantly
enough, the ineffability of their dreams and the perishability of the
things upon which they are founded are evoked in repeated references to flowers. Not only is Daisy Buchanan named after a flower
but her whole history has been spelled out in orchids and roses.
And Gatsby, for whom, five years prior to their reunion in West
Egg, Daisy has "blossomed like a flower," cannot believe that that
blossoming is irreclaimable, that indeed the world cannot be made
to bloom perpetually. He, even more than she, is bent upon wringing from life impossible consummations, a fact which is symbolized
by the prominence of his gardens in the novel's setting, the bales of
cut flowers he imports by truck to Carroway's cottage for his first
meeting with Daisy, not to mention his predilection for yellow
autos and pink suits. The profusion of horticultural effects becomes,
at last, oppressive. There is an overripeness, an unnatural plenitude
in this new Eden, and its unwholesomeness is caught in such random details as Gatsby's garden paths clogged at the end of a party
with "crushed flowers and fruit rinds," the flower-laden hearse
Gatsby and Carroway pass on their way into New York, and the
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82 American Literature
feeling expressed by Jordan Baker on
that "all sorts of funny fruits" are go
No wonder, then, that in everythin
the suggestion of hallucination, and that he finds the problem of
seeing such a challenge at every turn. Nor is he entirely alone in his
optical adventures. They are comically shared by a minor character
named Owl Eyes, whom we first encounter exclaiming over the fact
that the books in Gatsby's library contain bona fide printed matter,
and who later turns up unaccountably at Gatsby's funeral and keeps
wiping his glasses "inside and out." For Owl Eyes reality constitutes a phenomenon, reality is hallucination. The same, in a more
tragic sense, is true of Gatsby. When he walks to his pool minutes
before his demise, the world, now unyoked to his "single dream," has
become fantasy. The yellow leaves overhead are "frightening," roses
"grotesque," the sunlight "raw . . . upon the scarcely created grass."
For the most elaborate expression of the disparity between illusion
and reality, however, we must turn finally to the image of the dump
presided over by the yard-high retinas of J. T. Eckelburg. It is here
that we get a synthesis of the whole constellation of ironies inherent
in the theme of the novel, and it is here that the idea of violated nature and that of distorted vision are brought into the most striking
conjunction. Eckelburg may be thought of as a commercial deity
staring out upon a waste of his own creation.2 But the enormous eyes
behind yellow spectacles are diseased, "faded," "dimmed ... by many
paintless days." And the quality of dimness is carried over into the
rendering of the "ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." Their shade-like forms, along with
the "small, foul river," where periodically a draw-bridge is raised to
let barges through, lend the scene overtones of an inferno; but the
dump is also described as a "farm where ashes grow like wheat into
ridges and hills and fantastic gardens," and what is implied is that
a universal myopia has apprehended fertility in "a valley of ashes,"
and mistaken a hell for a paradise.
The dump is introduced early in the novel, and is the scene of
those ocular confusions that lead to its major dramatic climaxes. It
is because Myrtle Wilson thinks the yellow car is Tom Buchanan's
2 Fitzgerald's debt to The Waste Land has been generally recognized by critics, but
the spirit of the poem is adapted to materials so unique that the originality of the novel
is in no way impaired.
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Notes and Queries 83
that she runs out to stop it. It is because
tentous message in the eyes of Eckelburg ("God sees all") that he
takes upon himself the role of avenger. When in the first days of
the summer Gatsby's hopes of reclaiming Daisy have been at their
highest, and the East has held a certain enchantment 'even for Carroway, it has been impossible to pass between New York and West
Egg without passing the dump. And when the final event of a
generally disastrous "last day" has brought all paradisiacal illusions
to an end, the dump is again the setting.
Carroway's Eastern adventure, as I have tried to show, is defined
largely by references to a spurious and hallucinatory order of nature,
the only kind acceptable or even recognizable to the people he is
thrown in with. But in fleeting intervals throughout the story we
are confronted with unadulterated nature. They happen late at
night when the lights of the houses have gone out. The moon survives the glow of Gatsby's parties, the stars wheel in their courses;
on the night that Carroway descries Gatsby genuflecting to the light
on Daisy's dock, "the bellows of the earth have blown the frogs full
of life," and there is a sound of "wings beating in the trees." At
such intervals the intensity of nature's own utterances is a little eerie
and inexplicable, like the crashing of surf on a deserted beach. These
are adumbrations of the forgotten, the "unknown" island, which
can now be summoned in its fullness only in visions. Carroway's
vision of it, like a buried theme in music, struggles for articulation
from the early pages of the novel to the moment near its terminus,
with Gatsby dead and the houses in West Egg shut up, when it
emerges in the famous "ode" to a buried fertility, the "green breast
of the new world" that greeted Dutch sailors' eyes. Earlier in the
tale we have been told that Gatsby has felt he could climb to "a
secret place above the trees [on Daisy's street] ... and once there . . .
suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of
wonder." But one cannot live indefinitely on wonder, and the real
fertility invoked in the vision of the old island which might have
been commensurate with his "sensitivity to the promises of life" is
irrecoverable.
Even when Carroway resolves upon returning to the Middle
West, it will be to a part where nature has been compromised by
cities, granted that sleigh bells, holly wreaths, snow, and lighted
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84 American Literature
windows make for a more equable compromise than deep summer,
gas pumps, and roadhouse roofs, or sunsets and the apartment houses
of movie stars on the West 5o's. Carroway's resolve to settle for a
Midwestern city-where, unlike the palaces of East Egg and West
Egg, houses "are still called through decades by a family's name"signalizes the end of an era built on adventure and discovery, and the
beginning of one built on consolidation. His reformation augurs
the passing of a youthful culture into middle age, all of which accounts for the curiously affecting state of feeling communicated
through the tone of his narration wherein renunciation of the Gatsby
brand of sensibility is not unmixed with regrets that it has been lost
to us forever.
Hemingway's Riddle of Kilimanjaro: Idea and Image
ROBERT 0. STEPHENS
University of Texas
IHE CONNECTION between Hemingway's riddle
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and the story itself is tenuous at
best. Nowhere in the story does author or character mention the
mysterious leopard carcass which, set in such a significant place,
seems to offer some key to Harry's predicament. Rather, the riddle
itself states a predicament: "Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain
I9,7I0 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa.
Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai,' the House of
God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen
carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was
seeking at that altitude." The closest the bedridden Harry comes to
either the mountain or the carcass is in his imaginary flight on the
rescue plane to Arusha.
The connection between riddle and story becomes more apparent,
however, in light of Hemingway's probable source for the riddle.
We know of his interest in travel books: he deals sympathetically
with Kandisky's note-taking on the country and natives in Green
Hills of Africa, and in "A Natural History of the Dead" he cites the
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