Fitzgerald's TN

[alice wellintown]

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" and the Imagination of Wonder
Author: Giles Gunn
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 41, No. 2,
(Jun., 1973), pp. 171- 183


Yet when morning finally comes and the shadows of disaster lift at least
high enough for us to see the landscape about us, all we are still
likely to perceive
is what we have put there ourselves, something which in the daylight looks
more like a metropolis than a mushroom cloud, but which, as Thomas Pynchon
has suggested in The Crying of Lot 49, is less identifiable as a city
"than a grouping
of concepts-census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping
nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway."
To be sure, even in a world whose most discernible and meaningful patterns
suggest nothing so much as the printed circuitry of a transistor radio, one may
still, like Oedipa Maas, discover what appears to be "a heiroglyphic sense of
concealed meaning, ... an intent to communicate." The problem is that when
the environment has become but an extension of man himself, there is no way
of telling the difference between what Robert Frost calls
"counter-loveo, riginal
response" and "our own voice back in copy speech." Thus one is left yearning,
as Americans have always been, for "a world elsewhere"5 beyond the self, yet
suspicious that whatever traces of it are left constitute evidence of
nothing but
our own paranoia. In such circumstances as these, wonder gives way all too
easily to cynicism, yearning to submission, and hope to the madness of boredom.
This is a prospect of which F. Scott Fitzgerald was acutely conscious.

..
notes:

In this there is, to be sure, a marked parallel between Gatsby and all
those other devotees
and avatars of something like an American religion of wonder-Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman, Twain, a certain side of James, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood
Anderson, Hemingway,
Salinger, and Walker Percy-whose idealization of an unencumbered simplicity of
response Tony Tanner discusses in his The Reign of Wonder: Naivete and
Reality in
American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). But
where Tanner
is interested in wonder chiefly as a way of seeing, as "the
cultivation of a naive eye," I am
more interested, as I think Fitzgerald was as well, in wonder as a
mode of being, as something
intrinsic to the very nature of life itself.

http://mmagsig11.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/gatsby-narrative-strategies1.pdf

Review of Tanner:

http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/tanner.htm
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:48 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry, but I can't help but toss books into this Schiller Theater.
> Remember the hand in opening of Chiller Theater? Was it a Thing or an
> Idea or better, an Ideal? Thing was a Hand on The Adams Family, and
> Thing One and Thing Two upset the innocense, the naive view of
> children, their play....well, anyway, if we must Hem our Way in to
> Schiller Theater with naive and sentimental pathos, we can examine a
> poetic use of Nature, in the Rain that Pynchon, when a Slow Learner,
> as writer, though at this point a Strong Reader (Bloom), perhaps too
> self-consciously aware of his anxiety of influences, tags onto "The
> Small Rain" in the allusions to Hemingway and Eliot. There is is, like
> a bubbling breakout on the nose or a teenage boy at the prom, a
> blemish so boneheaded and naive, an attempt to make it literary with
> rain imgages from TWL and FWA, and ToC  (SL.4-6). . But is that all it
> is? Pynchon says that the character may have carried the day, that,
> and the theme, the chiller theater's very own Death, of course, but
> then looking back P decides the only thing he can admire is the class
> struggle, and how the lower ranks are heroic while the officers are
> assholes. The language, and the other weaknesses, the critical noises
> fro this of that camo that was giving mixed signals are all quite
> interesting, but the Rain Images are the rub. The sun, the dry bones
> whitening under the sun, or down at the bottom of the sea where the
> sailor had eyes of pearl.
>
> Looking into WL would take us on digressions that could be fun, but
> Heming in our way with that Farewll to Arms may be worth more than
> Schiller. For Hemingway, so the character at the end of "A Small Rain"
> claims, hates the rain. But maybe Pynchon, Slow Learner, though Strong
> Reader, has it wrong. The Rain is just water from the sky. No love or
> touching respect merely because it is Nature. But isn't hate, like
> love and touching respect, naive and sentimental as well?
>
> That first passage of FWA is striking. Call it plain style
> reestablished, it is as American as apple pie in style, and yes, the
> men are pregnant with arms, walking in the killing rain. That late in
> the novel a soldier's lover and child. will die from the gas, not the
> rain, is sentimental, our hero, cool under pressure, naive. The
> iceberg, hidden in the images beneath the surface, sink his illusions,
> the war is his mother and They may not make the rain, but They can
> make a muddy, bloody,  mess of Nature.