SESIONES DEL SUBCOMITE.

The central question this study has aimed to address is how Scott Fitzgerald subverts the possibilities of a uniquely American protagonist133 in literature by reconfiguring failure as key to re-invigorating the heroic mode. Jackson Bryer observes, “One of the best attributes of Fitzgerald’s fiction is that there are no pure heroes; while he clearly admires those who aspire beyond life’s limitations––the romantic dreamers–-he has no illusions as to their ultimate success.”134 While this may be true, there is more to Fitzgerald’s treatment of the heroic mode than a purely symbolic convention. In Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver and Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald works out of, and at the same time deconstructs the ideology of manifest destiny, by which the American hero is constructed and mythologized, which subverts a traditionally white, hetero-normative language of “heroism”. I would also argue the theme of “failure” in Fitzgerald’s work highlights a dynamic between American masculinity, and the closing of the frontier, whereby Fitzgerald explores a more counter-intuitive possibility regarding the renewal of the American literary hero as a worthy aim. Consequently, I have focused much of my reading on examining the premise that Fitzgerald uses the possibilities of successful, or more ironically, unsuccessful self- invention, as a potential means of renewing a heroic model of America.

The consistent re-envisaging of the heroic mode in Fitzgerald’s fiction links to the unifying theme of his life and work, perhaps most poignantly epitomized in “The Crack-Up”,135 as writing serving as a metaphor for his own personal and creative recovery as an artist.136 _{Writing in 1936, at a point where both public and critics}

Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” – and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills – domestic, professional and personal – then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from

nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last. (The Crack-Up 70)

This passage taken from the first essay of “The Crack Up”137 highlights a number of key nouns, that would appear essential to Fitzgerald’s conception of the heroic mode namely, ‘futility’, ‘necessity’, ‘conviction’, ‘determination’ and ‘nothingness’. Fitzgerald’s rendition of heroic character does not deny the contradiction inherent in ostensibly declaring himself an un-heroic figure. Fitzgerald moves from a more abstract conception of the romantic hero, and to a certain extent himself during his early career, to a more refined critical awareness that heroic success has nothing to do with quality of work or artistic purpose as a motivating factor.138 Whereas ‘futility’ and ‘nothingness’ merely offset the stoicism of ‘necessity’, ‘conviction’ and ‘determination’, they are in fact catalysts for what Fitzgerald considers the moral, emotional, intellectual and physical virtues of courage required for creative work.139 This position remains a contentious one among Fitzgerald scholars.140 In

understanding Fitzgerald’s use of failure in “The Crack-Up”, as representative of more than a mere misanthropic confessional, Scott Donaldson141 stresses, “The articles hardly achieve a “heroic awareness.” It took courage to say as much as he did, but Fitzgerald left a great deal only hinted at and blamed too many outside forces for his

predicament to be adjudged a hero of self-revelation” (188). However, what

Donaldson overlooks is that Fitzgerald in assessing the nature of his own breakdown is addressing failure counter-intuitively as a means of self-affirmation. Moreover, the qualities and conditions of failure Fitzgerald ascribes to heroism, and which pattern his self-analysis are not simply traits of an aesthetic cognitive dissonance in his writing, but point towards the grander narrative cycle of American life and letters through which he sought to position himself and his fiction.

Fitzgerald is constantly aware of a spirit of migratory movement in America, as fundamental to the development of national character. This movement is resonant in his sense of the frontier as a constant means of rediscovery and reinvention, yet

equally cognizant in “The Crack-Up’s” directed image of, “an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last”. It is the same nothingness absent nihilism, which carries the kinetic energy to project Gatsby, “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere”, as Tom Buchanan labels him, to the level of a more worthy dream, where he can, “suck on the pap of life . . . gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder” (GG 86). What carries and sustains Gatsby is quantifiable as a constant acceleratory movement towards, and retreat from the “orgastic future” (GG 141) conveyed in the very rhythm and pace of Fitzgerald’s sentences.142 _{Again in Tycoon, this image of a descending momentum is detectable in}

Cecelia’s description of Stahr, as a kind of modern Icarus:

The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific . . . this was where Stahr had come to earth after that

extraordinary illuminating flight where he saw which way we were going, and how we looked doing it, and how much of it mattered. You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him but I don’t

think so. I would rather think that in a “long shot” he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming down into the Glendale airport, into the warm darkness. (TLOTLT 21)

The image of the arrow and the airplane both have a potency, uniting past and future through the textual space, where this dream of flight presents a new configuration of space and time. From this perspective, Gatsby is the true starting point for

understanding Fitzgerald’s claim as he was writing Tycoon that, “I am the last of the novelists for a long time now” (Notebooks 326) and his self-comparison to the legacy of the western movement itself as, “ . . . the history of all aspiration – not just the American dream but the human dream and if I came at the end of it that too is a place in the line of the pioneers” (Notebooks 332). T.S. Eliot’s own assessment of Gatsby, as the first major step forward in the American novel, when contextualized as merely the initial stage of a broader artistic vision expanded on in Tender and Tycoon, underlines what may be considered Fitzgerald’s own critical awareness of his final three novels speaking to each other, as a discourse of constant re-invention. Just as the novels of Henry James and Joseph Conrad represent a significant bridge143 between 19th century realism, and the more experimental work of early modernism, their influence on Fitzgerald reflects how by 1925 and the publication of Gatsby, he views his own work as seeking new forms that stretch beyond the modernist experiment.

Consequently, from 1925 onwards, Fitzgerald works on developing a singularly American novel, that is not only capable of combining and investing the more avant-garde elements of modernist narrative with the thematic substance and gravitas of 19th century realism, but also of matching and absorbing the new

storytelling potential of cinema and radio. As a result, Gatsby, Tender, and Tycoon work out of a more nuanced awareness of an American protagonist developing as part of the same heroic cycle, not only over time, but also textual space. It is the

contemporary reception and reading of Fitzgerald’s ‘hero’ through this textual space, in terms of how he is encoded and constructed with regards to an understanding of race, gender, sexuality, and class, that continues to address and engage the multi- media environment of 21st century American society, as it comes to be shaped by an increasingly diverse population of subjects and readers. Thus it is not to the past, but rather a vision of the future, that Fitzgerald speaks of himself as “the last of the novelists” and taking a final place “in the line of the pioneers”. The ‘hero’ of

Fitzgerald’s novels carries an awareness of a failed “falling” history that nevertheless continues to propel America forward. The American novel, as Fitzgerald conceives it, functions in dynamic terms as a form of both individual and collective social

movement, fundamental to American history and culture. It is furthermore a

transformative mode of self-discovery, which allows Fitzgerald to self-identify, as a man who has survived himself as a part of that history and culture. Consequently, while Fitzgerald underpins his own ongoing project of heroic renewal, in relation to a number of other protagonists in American literature,144 his true courage reveals itself, in the attempt to use the American novel to discover a new form of cultural vitality in American life.

The structural movement of the frontier in Fitzgerald’s novels captures a textual instability, through which new narrative paradigms continue to emerge. For Dick Diver the American frontier manifests on one level as, “the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people – illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon, falsely, that there were no

wolves outside the cabin door” (TITN 134). Here it is the absence and perceived diminishment of a tangible father figure in Tender, as a centrifugal force of moral authority, which links the lies of “frontier mothers” to the cynical currency and urban corruption of the Warren family’s millions. Nicole’s incestuous relationship with her own father, and the death of Dick’s own, both influence the movement which his life steadily takes in returning West, first for his father’s funeral and finally at the end of the novel. It is at the funeral of Dick’s father, where again the frontier stands as a point of both orientation, and dislocation for him,145 “Flowers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century” (TITN 233). Dick’s emotional bankruptcy and ruin are thematic material, which Fitzgerald treats as textual fissures, where the illusions of the frontier, and America as a nation are played out as a study of personality disintegration. Consequently, in Diver Fitzgerald presents a hero, whose acceptance of failure ensures a much more profound resolution to the overall narrative of Tender, and represents a major step forward in Fitzgerald’s development as a writer, in looking to address more complex themes of psychology and pathology. It is precisely this sense of a stalled creative momentum at the heart of Tender is the Night, which in providing a transitional link between Gatsby and Tycoon, cannot be

overstated.

Historically the Western movement towards the Pacific provides Fitzgerald with the conditions for developing the heroic trajectory, which he traces in each of his three mature novels. Through Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver and Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald introduces and advances a new take on the American principle of self-invention, by

linking the idea of ‘failed’ history to the symbolic language of the “green light”, that informs America as a pioneer nation, where as Jeffrey Steinbrink notes:

The roar of the twenties . . . announced the arrival of the first generation of modern Americans . . . Disenchanted observers remarked . . . the perennial fruits of the American experience were frustration and disappointment. The New Jerusalem envisioned by our Puritan fathers was never to be realized; the possibilities of spiritual regeneration in a boundless New World were fatally diminished by the closing of the frontier . . . The very impetus or direction of American history came repeatedly into question, and what once had appeared . . . an ascending spiral curve now became a steady downward sweep toward the void of nonexistence. (158)

In relation to the closure of the frontier, Fitzgerald’s ‘hero’ certainly assimilates the Puritan fathers’ vision of an unrealized second Eden, and the initial promise of the New World. Similarly Ronald Berman asserts that, “Fitzgerald has taken the subtext of the early twentieth century, its obsession with energy, action, progress, and becoming, and replaced them with displays of anemia, passivity, blank and unreflective

suspension, unconsciousness, negation, and even delusion. His insight into the authority of failure may be a historical stance” (49). Yet equally Gatsby, Diver, and Stahr may all be said to paradoxically stand in direct opposition to this reading of American history, as determined through a white, patriarchal power structure. The stimulus of unsuccessful, rather than successful self-invention, as driving forward the renewal of the American hero, brings into focus a new criteria for examining

Fitzgerald’s work, that seeks to move beyond a more well trodden analysis of the American class system. Within Fitzgerald’s heroic model, and the use of narrative

voice, there remain a much more subversive range of ‘other’ voices. This is

particularly evident in Tycoon, and how it both links back to and yet at the same time represents a natural advance on the themes and language of Gatsby, illustrative of a more political engagement and awareness on Fitzgerald’s part, with the anti-Semitism and racism which underscores much of his own writing, and American society as a whole.

What makes Fitzgerald’s ‘hero’ so relevant, as we read him at the beginning of the 21st century is the ability to subvert the meaning and conditions of failure, by taking the idea of writing not only as a metaphor for existence, but a means of looking to self-repair, and recover following failure. It is the inability of the white, hetero- normative male within traditional Western narrative, to respond and answer to ‘the other’ as a threat to established tropes of romance and tragedy, which Fitzgerald’s American hero explores and challenges. Here, the emphasis on the nature of recovery as writing itself, offers a genuine possibility for new critical voices and identities operating within the field of Fitzgerald scholarship to emerge. Moreover, while failure as an underlying theme in Fitzgerald’s work has long been recognized as

representative of his maturity as a writer, particularly during the dark years of the 1930s,146 one of the more intriguing characteristics of Fitzgerald’s development of the heroic mode, is the non-western quality of noble failure traditionally attributed to Japanese tradition and culture. I submit that the model of the Japanese warrior, who willingly accepts his death in the face of overwhelming odds, finds a Western equivalent in the same qualities of sincerity and purity of vision, which informs and defines the characters of Gatsby, Diver and Stahr. Each of Fitzgerald’s heroes reach of a moment of epiphany, where despite their failure being clear to them, they continue to stay true to the qualities of integrity and courage, which have

paradoxically contributed to the conditions of their defeat, and a goal which they know will elude them.147 However, at the same time, there are clear differences that must be acknowledged between the Japanese and American attitude to failure as a feature of tragedy.148

Fitzgerald writes to borrow his own phrase from Gatsby, ‘within and without’ both an American and Japanese conception of heroic behavior. The evidence to support this lies, not only in the way Fitzgerald’s heroes bear an uncanny resemblance to the virtues of noble failure present in the Japanese hero, but conversely in the way they may also serve as models for contemporary authors working from an Eastern tradition. Haruki Murakami’s 2018 novel Killing Commendatore149 makes explicit, not only the self-acknowledged influence of Fitzgerald on Murakami’s work, but also the way the shift from a Western to an Eastern perspective, allows for an inversion of standard readings of masculinity, race and class, that may be subverted and

questioned. In doing so, Murakami as a Japanese writer, uses the figure of Gatsby as a Western model of heroism, to experiment with and reconfigure the generic

possibilities of the 21st century novel. Moreover, Murakami’s own translation of

Gatsby points towards the modernity, or even postmodern quality of the American

hero, as being read outside conventional Western paradigms.150 For future Fitzgerald scholarship, the implications of acknowledging the Japanese model of heroic failure, goes far beyond informing Fitzgerald’s reputation as a prose stylist, and offers a means of reading Gatsby, Tender, and Tycoon as a narrative cycle, not only in stressing the ‘heroic’ similarities of the central protagonists, but also by focusing on how the novels are working together collectively.

Questions remain as to whether Fitzgerald’s model of heroism is merely a renewal of an older literary trope, or a genuinely new conception of how the

American novel continues to move forward. This poses the question, as Fitzgerald’s novels continue to evolve along with America into the 21st century, as to how does his model of heroism continue to reflect and acknowledge American individualism as a development of Enlightenment liberal values, that have themselves been seen largely to have failed? One way is certainly to reconsider how Fitzgerald’s work may be received and re-positioned in relation to non-Western critical paradigms. While I am not suggesting that Fitzgerald is consciously writing with a working knowledge of Japanese folklore, the values and beliefs of his heroes closely align with noble failure, most notably in their shared quality of ‘makoto’ whose, “common denominator has always been a purity of motive, which derives from man’s longing for an absolute meaning out of time and from a realization that the social, political world is

essentially a place of corruption whose materiality is incompatible with the demands of pure spirit and truth” (17). In Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and Monroe Stahr,

Fitzgerald traces this purity of motive as key not only to overcoming his own personal breakdown, but essential to the act of creation, which comes through the conditions of failure rather than success.

One might argue that the real hero of Fitzgerald’s work is not so much Gatsby, Diver nor Stahr, but the novel itself, as the chief agent essential to restoring the

cultural vitality of American life. In other words, through ascribing action as

character, Fitzgerald achieves a full artistic awareness of what he is doing in adapting the function of the novel to a re-imagining of America, as a creative territory socially, historically, and geographically. As such, and in these terms, it is possible to justify describing Fitzgerald, as a genuine pioneer of American letters. Through Gatsby,

Tender, and Tycoon Fitzgerald identifies the novel as crucial in moving from past to