The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books was supposed by New Yorkers to have goggle eyes behind large spectacles, and a ragged mustache saturated in lager beer, and consequently to be incapable of forming literary judgments.
N.B.:
April’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Diana Brown, Owen Paul Edwards, Celeste Marcus, Will Snider, and Kelly Xio, will take place today at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.
April’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 22 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”
And the N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the same question.
Links:
In ,
on the Romanticism of The Great Gatsby:The Great Gatsby, unlike Fitzgerald’s first two novels, is as carefully and closely composed as a lyric poem. This time, Fitzgerald wrote slowly, with painstaking attention to each word, and the text is accordingly about a third the length of its rapidly written semi-potboiler precursors. Like a lyric poem—like his beloved Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—The Great Gatsby is narrated by a sensitive speaker circling a magnetic and mysterious object, in this case Gatsby’s (corruptly) self-made prominence and doomed attempt to win Daisy from her cruel husband Tom, a situation radiant with both ecstatic desire and grisly violence, frozen in a frieze of evocative language and elusive symbols the meaning of which the narrator finally leaves for us to decide.
Granted, the moralist in Fitzgerald remains active in the novel with narrator Nick Carraway’s famous final censure of Tom and Daisy as “careless people.” The disappointed male lover’s wounded propensity to make women’s immoderate and shallow desire symbolic of civilization’s whole decay, as in The Beautiful and Damned, recurs in the gruesome fate the narrative deals out to Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson in the culminating car accident—“her left breast was swinging loose like a flap”—which is just the obverse of the conclusion’s equally and oppositely unreal idealization of “the fresh green breast of the new world.”
[Cf. Pistelli’s earlier notes on the debt modernist fiction owes to Romantic poetry, which were linked to and commented upon in WRB—July 31, 2024. I want to reiterate the recommendation I made there of Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald by Jonathan Bate (2021), a parallel lives-style treatment of the two.
I think I got from there—I can’t check, my copy is in a box in Maine—the idea that the end of The Great Gatsby, and specifically the paragraph Pistelli mentions,
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
is indebted to “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” The Dutch sailors (plural; as with Fitzgerald this is not a solitary aesthetic experience but a shared one) have reached the end—“the last time in history”—and find in their discovery what Cortez and his men did:
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
And in the next paragraph “Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock” echoes
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
The new light in the darkness reshapes his life. —Steve]
In our sister publication of the marginal notes, Amit Majmudar’s afterword to the final volume of his retelling of the Mahabharata (The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy, Volume 3, this fall in India):
Art is one more layer of maya. The artist shapes maya to portray the maya of times past—the age of heroes, Kurukshetra’s inflection point between the Dvapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. Words and images are not the things themselves, but mixed together, they make a story. The story becomes a replica of what happened and stands in for it. The epic poem is a portrayal of illusion, fashioned of illusion, nested in illusion.
About those weeping epic heroes: In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan warrior Aeneas, future founder of Rome, flees the sack of Troy and ends up at Carthage, Rome’s future enemy. Carthage is newly founded; everything is still being built. A temple to Juno, though, is already established—Juno, the same Goddess who has been an enemy of Aeneas, responsible for his wanderings. In that temple, Aeneas sees bas-reliefs portraying a war and the sack of a city: The war he just survived, the city whose sack he just fled.
He lived through the real events, but he breaks down sobbing before the artistic representation of them—in a way he did not while he was living them. It may be that distance was the crucial element. Because he was not living the events, because the Priam he saw in marble was not the Priam he saw in the flesh, he was able to stand outside Troy’s tragedy and cry out of pity for himself and his own.
[Odysseus merely tells a bunch of lies. Virgil pushes further:
Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish’d ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro’ transparent horn arise;
Thro’ polish’d ivory pass deluding lies.
Of various things discoursing as he pass’d,
Anchises hither bends his steps at last.
Then, thro’ the gate of iv’ry, he dismiss’d
His valiant offspring and divining guest.
(Dryden’s translation.) Which parts of the epic passed through the ivory gate—it doesn’t say. —Steve]
In Socrates on the Beach, Brian Patrick Eha on Proust, friendship, and other people:
For a long time, Proust’s hero idealizes Madame de Guermantes as much as Dante did Beatrice. Lovesick, he posts himself along the path of her morning walks; longs for a smile, a glimpse of her gown; he ingratiates himself with her relatives, tries every stratagem to secure an invitation to her inner sanctum. But having finally won her favor, he sees her in a new aspect. In this single woman he watches “so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency.” Yet in the novels they exist side by side. Proust’s art isolates and analyzes each woman in turn, as the motion studies of Muybridge show us in sequential frames a running horse, now with its hind legs outflung, now with its front legs thrusting or planted perpendicular to the earth, now with all four hooves tucked high like the appendages of a winged insect in flight—the animal eternally airborne in this captured slice of time.
[I kept thinking of Emma while reading this for reasons I can’t quite explain. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
The unity of rhythm and harmony
Max Beerbohm continues to be funny
Grace on a Poem by Tolkien about sitting by the fire
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.
—Steve]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Washington Review of Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.