Sangria in the Sangreal: "The Great Gatsby" As Grail Quest Author(S): D

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Sangria in the Sangreal: "The Great Gatsby" as Grail Quest Author(s): D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper Source: Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4 (1993), pp. 203- 217 Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1348307 Accessed: 30-05-2016 22:16 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest

D. G. Kehl Arizona State University Allene Cooper Boise State University

Near the end of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine, returning to Princeton after his disillusioning sojourn in Atlantic City, concludes that he knows one thing: "If living isn't a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game" (278). For Fitzgerald, by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby five years later, living had become both a quest for the grail and "a damned amusing game," with emphasis sometimes on the quest and sometimes on the game. It took Fitzgerald another eleven years and a "crack-up" to verbalize the paradox: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" (The Crack Up 69). Jay Gatsby "found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail" (149). The grail, personified in Daisy Buchanan, is paradoxically beautiful and romantic but also, like the cut-glass bowl in Fitzgerald's 1920 story with that title, hard, empty, and, at least for Nick, "easy to see through" (Flappers and Philosophers 97). Fitzgerald's interest in the quest tale has been noted. For exam- ple, James E. Miller has discussed This Side of Paradise as a "quest book" (16-22), and Edwin M. Moseley has commented on Gatsby as "a prose 'Waste Land'" with Nick as "modern quester" (31). Several other studies have made passing references to the grail motif in Gatsby, perhaps the most pertinent being K. G. Probert's limited discussion in "Nick Carraway and the Romance of Art." Probert, however, failing to grasp Fitzgerald's paradox, faults both Gatsby and Nick, the former for transforming "highminded romance im- pulses into mere gangsterism" and the latter for voyeuristically "dis- tort[ing] the story of Gatsby in order to affirm his own unrealistic and childish nostalgia" (204, 206). Fitzgerald's early and lasting fas- cination with the Arthurian romance, perhaps surpassed among modern American writers only by that of John Steinbeck, is little recognized, nor has the ambivalent function of the grail quest in The Great Gatsby been examined. "Did you ever read The Passing of Arthur?" Josephine asks Mr. Bailey in Fitzgerald's "A Snobbish Story" (The Basil and Josephine

203

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Stories, 253). The reference to Idylls of the King, in which Tennyson first included the Grail story in 1869, is perhaps the best clue to Fitzgerald's source of the Grail Quest story. Of the many versions composed between the 8th and early 20th centuries, those most familiar include Chretien de Troyes's story of Perceval in Li Contes del Grail (1160-1185), Malory's The Tale of the Sankgreal (1460-1470), and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (1200-1207). Other possible sources include those versions made available by the resurgence of interest in medieval lore in the 19th century that prompted Tennyson and Wagner to write their works on the Grail (Loomis 3). It is unlikely that Fitzgerald was familiar with Chretien de Troyes because his Perceval was not available in English until 1952 (Linker vii). Although Vinaver's 1954 edition of Caxton's Malory is the definitive text today, it is most likely that Fitzgerald knew one of the popular editions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Larry Benson, in his review of Malory editions, holds that Pollard's abridged 1900 edition was probably the most popular version from 1900 to 1947 and that "for the last third of the nineteenth century [the reader] will have to consult Strachey's bowdlerized version" (89- 90). Wolfram's German grail legend may have been available to Fitzgerald in the only English translation at the time, Jessie L. Weston's 1894 edition (Zeydel vii). Fitzgerald may also have been ac- quainted with Wagner's Parsifal, his last opera, completed in 1882. Most likely, though, Fitzgerald knew the grail quest story from Tennyson's Idylls, likely reading material for him as a student. He may have been introduced to the story by The Boy's King Arthur, edited by Sidney Lanier, published in 1880. That Fitzgerald himself identified with the grail quest knights is clear in a Notebook entry: "As a novelist I reach out to the end of all man's variance, all man's villainy-as a man I do not go that far. I cannot claim honor-but even the knights of the Holy Grail were only striving for it, as I remember" (Bruccoli 324). In reaching out, in questing, for the extremities of the human condition-both the negative, villainy, and the positive, honor-Fitzgerald identified with the quest knights and manifested his ability "to hold two opposed ideas in his mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." For him, striving, questing, is all. In addition to the polarities of striving/achieving and negative/ positive, the entry presents those of person/artist in worlds of mundane reality/romantic magic. These dichotomies appear in a 1921 story that anticipates Gatsby in significant ways-"'O Russet Witch,' " Fitzgerald's second fictional work (after This Side of

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Paradise) to allude to the Arthurian romance. In its reference to the Arthurian tale and its other parallels, this story relates to Gatsby in ways perhaps as striking as those noted between "Absolution" and the novel. Appearing originally as "His Russet Witch" in Metro- politan Magazine and included the following year in Tales of the Jazz Age, the story is about a young man employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop in Manhattan, Merlin Grainger, and his "romantic yearning" for the Daisyesque femme fatale, Alicia Dare, whose luxu- rious apartment faces the single window of Merlin's single room. Captivated by her beauty, Merlin watches her through the window, like the prototypical Midwestern boy outside the ballroom with his nose to the glass, and constructs an elaborate romance. One day when she walks into the bookshop, he has "the sense of a breathless second hanging suspended in Time" (Six Tales 94). If Daisy's voice was "indiscreet" and "full of money" (Gatsby 120) it also conveyed a "warm human magic" (109), a point usually overlooked. Similarly, Alicia's "voice was rich and full of sorcery" (94). As Gatsby watches the green light across the bay, Merlin draws from Alicia's presence a "dazzling essence of light" (96). Then for a week after her visit "her lights failed to go on" (100), in the same way that "when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest . . . the lights in his house failed to go on" (Gatsby 113). Unlike Gatsby, Merlin settles for the plain, mundane Olive Masters, marries her, and fathers a son, fittingly named Arthur. Six years later, in a crowd of people exiting churches on "a radiant, flowerful Easter morning" (108), Merlin catches a glimpse of Alicia, no daisy but "an orchid rising from the black bou- quet" of her surroundings (108). Some thirty years later, at sixty- five, he sees her one last time in the Moonlight Quill-"an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman" (114)-"her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream" (116). Unlike Gatsby, Merlin accepts that he cannot repeat the past: "He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth" (119). Merlin, unlike Gatsby, seeks the magic of romance in books; rather than pursuing the elusive grail, he settles for what Fitzgerald else- where calls "the cracked plate" ("Handle with Care," The Crack Up 75). Merlin begets Arthur, but Arthur, too, is "a cracked plate." "Young Arthur was gone into Wall Street to sell bonds [a profession for which Fitzgerald had special disdain], as all young men seemed to be doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be. Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books-the place of young

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King Arthur was in the countinghouse" (Six Tales 111). King Arthur in the countinghouse! Where has the Arthurian romance been sub- jected to such burlesque since Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)? (In another Notebook entry, Fitzgerald added this postscript to a "bread and butter" letter: "If you called that thing a cocktail then listerine is the Holy Grail" [Bruccoli 270].) Beyond simple burlesque, however, Fitzgerald, in his typical "double vision" manner, presents two aspects of himself and perhaps of the American self: Merlin seeking his magical dream in fantasy but wasting opportunities and settling for the mundane, Arthur seeking a modern desacralized grail of worldly success. However, Merlin, a nonquester who settles for the mundane, is revived in the character of Jay Gatsby, who is perhaps a composite of King Arthur and Bors/Galahad/Perceval. Gatsby will not accept mundane reality, nor can he accept Nick's insistence that one cannot repeat the past. "'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'" (111).1 It is Nick, of course, who goes East to "learn the bond business" (3), but it is Gatsby who, like Arthur in the story, commits himself to "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" (99). It is clear, then, that Fitzgerald had been keenly interested in the Arthurian and grail quest romance for at least six years before he wrote The Great Gatsby. Examining the novel in terms of the typical grail quest story illuminates some obscure passages and clarifies some misunderstandings. In an essay on "The Quest Hero," devoted largely to a discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, W. H. Auden specified six essential elements of the typical quest story, all of which appear in Gatsby: 1) A precious Object and/or Person to be found and possessed or married; 2) A long journey to find it, for its whereabouts are not originally known to the seekers; 3) A hero. The precious Object cannot be found by anybody, but only by the one person who possesses the right qualities of breeding or character; 4) A Test or series of Tests by which the unworthy are screened out, and the hero revealed; 5) The Guardians of the Object who must be overcome before it can be won. They may be simply a further test of the hero's arete, or they may be malignant in themselves; 6) The Helpers who with their knowledge and magical powers assist the hero and but for whom he would never succeed (83).

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The precious object or person Gatsby seeks to find, possess, and marry is Daisy Buchanan nee Daisy Fay. Her maiden surname in- vests Daisy with ambiguity: "fay," from Middle English fai, means fairy (a cognate of "fate"), in some legends a fairy who lives in a lake among precious treasures; in Arthurian legend the name suggests Morgan le Fay, King Arthur's evil fairy half sister who seeks every opportunity to do him ill. But the name Fay, from Middle English fei, means "faith," reminiscent, at least in her ambiguity, of Hawthorne's Faith Brown whose pink ribbons are a combination of passion's scarlet and purity's whiteness. "High in a white palace [Daisy is] the king's daughter, the golden girl" (120). Even the metonymic green light at the end of her dock becomes one of Gatsby's "enchanted objects" (94). Gatsby "knew that Daisy was extraordinary" (149), the epitome of his romantic ideal, and

he wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say 'I never loved you.' After she had obliter- ated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house. . .. (111)

In Celtic tradition the grail as vessel also represented the Female principle of reproductive energy, as the lance or spear represented the Male (Weston, Ritual 75). The personification of the grail as Daisy, a woman, to be possessed or married thus fits the legend. The medieval grail held special properties. Various writers of Fitzgerald's time, perhaps most notably Jessie L. Weston in The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913) and Alfred Nutt in The Legends of the Holy Grail (1902), both accessible to Fitzgerald at Princeton, and later Weston in From Ritual to Romance (1920), describe those properties Fitzgerald included in his own quest tale. "To the romance writers the Grail was something secret, mysterious and awful" (Weston, Ritual 138). When Gatsby first visited Daisy in Louisville, "there was a ripe mystery" about her and her house, "an air of breathless intensity," a hint of romances (148). The Grail was also known for its exquisite beauty and captivating charm, whether a stone as in Wolfram, the gleaming chalice used at the Last Supper, or a silver cup, vase, or dish in which Joseph of Arimathea captured the blood flowing from the wounds of Jesus on the cross. Daisy, too, "[gleams] like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor" (150). Her voice, Nick says, carried an "inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 208 Rocky Mountain Review cymbals' song of it" (120). The paradox of Daisy as grail is suggested here by two words: jingle, whose connotation is more pejorative than honorific-the sound of metal against metal, the sound of money; and cymbals' song, again a variety of metallic sounds, themselves hardly "songs," produced by percussion instruments. Perhaps significant to Daisy's paradoxical identity with the holy chalice is the de- rivation of cymbal from the Latin cymbalum, the hollow of a bowl or vessel. Daisy's voice has at once the meretricious sound of lucre and the mellifluous song of the grail. For Gatsby, "that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed-that voice was a deathless song" (Gatsby 97). Perhaps most significantly, the grail was said to have mystical qualities as a talisman, possessing magical powers of healing and life-restoration. According to one version, the grail was a food-sup- plying vessel that sustained Joseph of Arimathea in forty years of solitary captivity. Similarly, Gatsby is sustained by his dream, dur- ing "five years of unwavering devotion" (110), to possess his grail. One autumn night five years earlier, as he walked with Daisy, "Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees-he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder" (112). Again, the im- agery is ambiguous: the ladder is at once a child's access to a tree house and a Dantesque/Eliotesque Ladder to the transcendent. "Pap," or nipple, is a conceit, as in Song of Solomon and in Edward Taylor's Meditation 150, representing spiritual sustenance. Thus the grail represents the higher secret of the Mystery of Life, regen- eration, and spiritual fulfillment. Daisy, of course, hardly measures up, for, as Nick says, she and Tom "were careless people ... [who] smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess" (180-181). In fact, Daisy, rather than healing or restoring life, is responsible for the death of Myrtle Wilson and, because of her callous insensitivity, for the death of Gatsby as well. Yet, paradoxically, Gatsby's quest for his grail does lead to a form of spiritual transformation. Gatsby's quest requires a long journey both in space-Louisville to Long Island via Europe and three times around the continent with Dan Cody (101)-and in time. The journey commenced with a kiss five years earlier, just as Perceval wandered five years. "Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete" (112). Underlying the novel are not merely four incarnations, as Probert has noted (203), but seven,

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper 209 suggesting the symbolic, and perhaps anagogic, layering of much of Fitzgerald's fiction. Basic to all is the prototype/archetype from Fitzgerald's Catholic theology: "the Word made flesh." On a national level, the Dutch sailors incarnate their idealistic visions in the "fresh, green breast of the new world" (182). James Gatz of North Dakota incarnates his "Platonic conception of himself" (99) in Jay Gatsby of West Egg. Nick Carraway, bond salesman from St. Paul, incarnates his romantic ideals in Gatsby, even though he "represented everything for which [Nick had] an unaffected scorn" (2). Aesthetically, Fitzgerald incarnates his own ideals in the novel and invites universal reader response: "So we beat on, boats against the current" (182, emphasis added). Shortly after their incarnating kiss, Gatsby and Daisy are sepa- rated by Gatsby's military tour of duty in Europe. The "grail" subsequently falls into the hands of the crude, materialistic monster, Tom Buchanan. Gatsby commits himself to finding his Blancheflor avatar, whose whereabouts are unknown to him, and to possessing her despite overwhelming odds. Initially Gatsby's quest took the form of reading the Chicago newspapers for years "just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy's name" (80). Then, as Jordan tells Nick, he bought the house "so that Daisy would be just across the bay.... He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths-so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden" (79, 80). He gave extravagant parties in hopes that Daisy would wander in some evening. Gatsby's efforts are endowed with ritualism, a ceremonialism that renders his quest beatific. "The Grail story," Weston writes, "is not . . . the product of imagination, literary or popular. At its root lies the record, more or less distorted, of an ancient Ritual, having for its ultimate object the entrance into the secret of the sources of Life, physical and spiritual" (Ritual 203). In a ritualistic gesture, Fitzgerald first presents Gatsby through Nick's eyes: "-He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward-and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock" (22). The scene is reminiscent of the experience of Gawain, who, having ridden "all day through a land waste and deso- late . . . at nightfall comes to the seashore; he sees a causeway, arched over by trees, leading out into the water, and washed over by waves; at the end glimmers a light" (Weston, Quest 34). Gatsby's raising of his arms toward the green light, a beatific gesture of veneration and supplication, is only the first in a series of

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 210 Rocky Mountain Review such ritualistic gestures which are part of his quest. The second occurs, significantly, as one of Gatsby's lavish parties is breaking up: The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell. (56, emphasis added) Perhaps not since Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, in which "the sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer," has a fictional scene been so fraught with mystical overtones. "The host" steps to his balcony and raises his hand in a pontifical gesture of consecration. By the gesture, Gatsby wishes to transubstantiate the hollow laughter and empty frivolity of his parties into his precious prize. A third ritualistic gesture occurs when Gatsby stands vigil outside Daisy's house after the accident that killed Myrtle Wilson: "He put his hands in his coat pockets, and turned back eagerly to the scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight-watching over nothing" (146, emphasis added). Here the gesture is one of accommodation, of self-immolation, for Gatsby, in not revealing Daisy as the driver of the "death-car," has chivalrously sacrificed his life for her. Paradoxically, though, he sacrifices himself for and conducts a sacred vigil over-nothing. Gatsby tells Nick of a fourth gesture, one of desperation which oc- curred when he returned after the war to Louisville, while Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip: The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand, desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by so fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever. (153, emphasis added) Here the sun, like the moon in the earlier passage, offers benediction, a blessing, ironically over the conspicuous absence of the pre-

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper 211 cious object. Or, viewed from another perspective, the consecrated Host, Gatsby, is exposed in a monstrance for blessing and adoration. The novel ends with the sixth ritualistic gesture, a universal one of anticipation, of expectation. "Gatsby believed in the green light," Nick concludes, "the orgiastic [Fitzgerald's original orgastic has been restored since 1988] future which year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning-" (182, emphasis added). Fitzgerald nationalizes, even universalizes, the quest. As Auden notes, each of the elements of the quest story corresponds to "an aspect of our subjective experience" (83). Gatsby is a true quest hero not because he possesses special qualities of breeding and aristocratic stature; on the contrary, he begins as "a penniless young man without a past" (149). In typically American fashion-like Ben Franklin, James J. Hill, and P. T. Barnum-Gatsby acquires "the right qualities" to win his "grail"- money, a mansion, material possessions, power and mystique of the nouveau riche-through association with Dan Cody and Meyer Wolfsheim, but he remains uncorrupted by mammon. It is, after all, the love of money which St. Paul said was "the root of all evil," not money itself or its possession. Accordingly, someone without a dime could be corrupted by love of money and someone like Gatsby, with ill-gotten wealth, could remain uncorrupted. Gatsby, Nick tells us, valued "everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from [Daisy's] well-loved eyes" (92). He remained aloof from his own parties. And his beautiful shirts are, as Marius Bewley has correctly noted, "sacramentals," and he shows them "neither in vanity nor in pride, but with a reverential humility in the presence of some inner vision he cannot consciously grasp, but toward which he desperately struggles in the only way he knows" (271). According to Alfred Nutt, the quest hero is "a shadowy perfection, a bloodless and unreal creature ... [removed] from a world in which he has neither part nor share," his romance being characterized "by the fervour of its sacramental symbolism" (37). Gatsby, in the world of corruption but not of it, measures up to this description. Rather than being simply "childish" as some commentators sug- gest-manifesting negative characteristics of childhood: self-cen- teredness, impatience, lack of self-control, naivete-Gatsby is largely "childlike"-manifesting positive characteristics of childhood: an uncorrupted innocence, a sense of wonder and awe, a romantic sense of hope. Auden specifies two types of Quest hero: "One resembles the hero of Epic; his superior arete is manifest to all. . . . The other type, so

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 212 Rocky Mountain Review common in fairy tales, is the hero whose arete is concealed" (84). Gatsby is of the second type, yet his arete, though concealed even to some critics, is considerable. The Greek term means "virtue," "good- ness," or "good quality of any kind." Wolfram's Perceval is "one who suffers and sins, but who also loves and endures, is staunch and true, and who, purified by the discipline of suffering, attains at last the summit of usefulness" (Nutt 96-97). Gatsby remains faithful to "his incorruptible dream" (155); he "turned out all right at the end," Nick concludes (2). The "summit of usefulness" he attains is his self- immolation and his model for Nick. According to St. John, "greater love has no person than this, that one lay down his/her life for a friend," but what of the love which motivates one to sacrifice life for a selfish, insensitive person like Daisy? Those who argue that Gatsby is not "great," that his life and death are a pathetic waste, fail to make a crucial distinction, one which Robert Penn Warren's Murray Guilfort in Meet Me in the Green Glen learns and verbalizes: "The dream is a lie, but the dreaming is truth" (370). So it is with Gatsby: Daisy, his dream, is a lie-superficial, manipulative, selfish, insensitive, materialistic- but his dreaming is truth. To Nick, Gatsby is truly "great" because of his "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" (2), his "romantic readiness" (2), his commitment to his grail, and his faithful single- ness of purpose in making the quest. The quest hero must pass certain tests-physical, psychological, spiritual-to prove his worthiness. The tests vary from one version to another: surviving a terrible storm; passing a night in the Chapel Perilous where a Black Hand snuffs out the light; confronting a Head, then the Devil in full form. Frequently he is required to weld a broken lance or sword; failing to do so will prevent him from achievement. In several texts, Perceval fails to ask the right question of the grail. According to Weston, "The test here demanded of the Quester is that he shall ask concerning the nature and use of the mysterious vessel" (Quest 91). To ask would have effected the healing of the king and his lands. Instead the quest hero falls asleep and subsequently wanders for five years without thinking of God. Gatsby is subject to various tests, most notably remaining faithful to his dream, staying uncorrupted by mammon, and being will- ing to sacrifice himself for his "grail." The tea party with Daisy at Nick's house is a major test for Gatsby. Because he was not wealthy, Daisy had not waited for Gatsby to return from Europe to marry her. At the tea party and in the subsequent events, Gatsby attempts to retake the test he could not pass five years earlier. To prove himself worthy, Gatsby dresses in his "white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie" (84-85). He attempts to be

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"the gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover," of the novel's epigraph, to bounce high enough to win the king's daughter, the golden girl, high in her white palace (120). Later he invites Daisy to tour the splen- dors of his mansion. All he possesses-his collection of imported shirts, his toilet seat of pure gold, his swimming pool and hy- droplane-are calculated to alter in Daisy's eyes the deficiency of his past. He passes this test but fails to restore the king and the waste land, perhaps because he does not ask the right question of the grail. He asks not what it is but whom or what it serves, and is thus doomed from the beginning by devotion to an unexamined ideal. But perhaps his quest is as pure as his grail is not. If the grail legend is, as Weston has said, "the story of an initiation ... carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical" (Ritual 182), Gatsby poignantly dramatizes both the initiation and the fatal consummation. The "fatal result," Gatsby's loss of his dream and his death, results from his inevitable conflict with the Guardians of the grail, who are a further test of the hero's arete and, in some ways, malignant in themselves. According to one account, after Joseph of Arimathea's death, the grail passed into the keeping of his kin, from whom were descended Perceval's father and the Fisher King, who was wounded supposedly for his presumption in approaching too near the Holy Grail or for sleeping in the Castle Corbenic. In Wolfram, the grail was guarded by a sacred order of knights, the Templeisen. Some versions mention three grail-keepers (believed by some to symbolize the Trinity): Joseph, Brons, and the grandson of Brons. In other versions, there are only two-father and son or uncle and nephew. Weston notes that "Chretien and Wolfram know of two kings: the lord of the Grail Castle in their versions uniting the characters of Fisher, and Maimed, King. . . . The title of 'Fisher' King [is] applied to the Guardians of the Grail" (Quest 93, 94). It remains a mystery how the grail-keepers fell from their high estate and how Pelles, the last of them, became wounded and his lands laid waste. Weston concludes that the "Guardian would represent the Life-Principle" and "the Maimed King would correspond closely with the Dead, or Wounded, God" (Quest 94). Viewed with these legends as a backdrop, several of the novel's characters take on added meaning. The most obvious guardian of Gatsby's "grail" is the unmistak- ably malevolent Tom Buchanan. Nick describes him with such words as "supercilious," "arrogant," "aggressive," "hard," "gruff," and "cruel" (7). He displays "contempt" and "fractiousness" (7), cheats on his wife, breaks his mistress's nose with his open palm,

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spouts racist views, and investigates Gatsby's background with the intention of ruining him. According to Nick, "'Jay Gatsby' had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice" (148). If Tom is the fallen, malignant guardian, Doctor T. J. Eckleberg, whose "persistent stare" presides over the "waste land" (24), is the Maimed King who corresponds to the Dead or Wounded God. In his grotesque deformity, retinas that "look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-ex- istent nose" (23), this god of the Waste Land reflects the ruin of his lands. "This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens" (23). Eckleberg, along with his walking extensions, George Wilson and Owl-Eyes, is a maimed agrarian deity presiding over a wasted land, once fertile and fructuous, once the "fresh, green breast of the new world" (182) that held such promise for the Dutch sailors. Had the grail quest been successful, the Waste Land would have been restored and its people liberated from the evil spell of a devastated so- cial order. Gatsby attempts to break the spell on the lost generation by cre- ating his own new world, and at times Nick sees a vision of what Gatsby can create. At Gatsby's party, "the scene ... [changes] before [Nick's] eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound" (47). With Gatsby in New York, Nick feels that "anything can hap- pen . .. anything at all," and he sees the city filled with "wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world" (69). Fitzgerald's ambivalence, his trust and doubt in America, is soon manifested as Nick's hope-filled visions of beauty and order dissi- pate. Gatsby's charmed guests turn into "highly indignant wives" and "sheepish" husbands (52). New York's promise of beauty is marred by "a dead man" in a hearse and by the "ferocious" eating habits of the gangster Wolfsheim (71). Gatsby's new world of wealth and a mansion full of interesting people do nothing to restore the wasted land of the lost generation. Gatsby's hopes, like those of Tennyson's Arthur, are disappointed: And when King Arthur made His Table Round ... surely he had thought That now the Holy Grail would come again; But sin broke out. Ah, Christ, that it would come, And heal the world of all their wickedness! (115)

As noted above, however, Gatsby does not heal the Fisher King or restore the Waste Land. He cannot revive an American Dream turned profanely meretricious, but he does at least set his own lands

This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper 215 in order. He learns and demonstrates the Words of the Thunder: "Be disciplined"; "Have compassion"; and "Give." The sixth element of the typical Quest story is "Helpers who with their knowledge and magical powers assist the hero and but for whom he would never succeed" (Auden 83). In the Perceval romances, the hero is given wise counsel by his mother. In the ac- counts of Chretien and Wolfram, "the hero, after leaving Arthur's court, finds his way to the castle of an old knight, who receives him kindly, and, shocked at his lack of knightly breeding and accom- plishments, does his best to impart to him a measure of skill in arms and courtesy of manner" (Weston, Quest 42-43). After leaving the old knight, the hero is given shelter in the castle of his late host's niece and subsequently in the hall of another castle, where he is pre- sented with a mysterious sword. One of the main features of the Gawain quest is the presence, outside the grail chamber, of twelve weeping maidens who offer prayers and orisons. Gatsby's helpers are Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker, who arrange the tea party so Gatsby and Daisy can be reunited. Gatsby's childlikeness and his trepidation because "he's waited so long" (80) are reminiscent of Perceval's naivete and fear. Nick and Jordan are able to help Gatsby because they, like the traditional quest helpers, possess knowledge which Gatsby lacks. Nick, like the old knight, is astounded at Gatsby's seeming naivete, especially about repeating the past. Nick offers psychological and spiritual support of Gatsby as well; he goes far beyond mere assistance to approbation and even identifi- cation. "They're a rotten crowd," he shouts to Gatsby across the lawn; "you're worth the whole damn bunch put together" (154). "I found myself on Gatsby's side, and alone," he says later (165). "I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all" (166). The night before he returns to the Midwest, Nick erases an obscene word from the white steps of Gatsby's house (181), a key symbolic act, especially because of the earlier descriptions of Gatsby in "his gorgeous pink rag of a suit [making] a bright spot of color against the white steps" (154). Nick's admiration of Gatsby and his romantic dream can hardly be labeled "tawdry," "voyeuristic," or "scatological" (Probert 204). Rather than a "childish nostalgia," it is a childlike Sehnsucht, a profound, bitter- sweet longing. Gatsby as grail quest knight is an archetype of fi- delity to the ideal in a paradoxical world. With his "extraordinary gift for hope," his "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" (2), and "the colossal vitality of his illusions" (97), Gatsby illustrates Fitzgerald's paradoxical view that such dreaming, though never to be fulfilled, greatly enriches life.

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Note

'In a real sense, as Karen C. Way has pointed out (123), Gatsby does repeat the past: having won and lost Daisy previously, he does so again, just as Nick also repeats the past in words, including his warning to Gatsby that the task is impossible, and just as Fitzgerald repeats the past-as artists regularly do.

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. "The Quest Hero." Texas Quarterly 4 (1961): 81-93. Benson, Lai'ry. "Editions of Malory." Critical Approaches to Six Major English Works: Beowulf Through Paradise Lost. Eds. R. Lumiansky and Hershel Baker. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. Bewley, Marius. "Scott Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream." The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. The Notebooks of F Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Chretien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Trans. W.W. Comfort. London: Everyman, 1984. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Macmillan, 1986.

. The Great Gatsby. New York: Macmillan, 1986. . Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories. New York: Scribner's, 1960. . The Basil and Josephine Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

. Flappers and Philosophers. New York: Macmillan, 1987. . The Crack Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Direc- tions, 1956. Linker, Robert White, trans. Chritien de Troyes: The Story of the Grail. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952.

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Loomis, Roger Sherman. The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. New York: University of Wales Press, 1963. Miller, James E. F Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and Technique. New York: New York University Press, 1964. Moseley, Edwin M. F Scott Fitzgerald. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967.

Nutt, Alfred. The Legends of the Holy Grail. London: David Nutt, 1902.

Probert, K. G. "Nick Carraway and the Romance of Art." English Studies in Canada 10 (1984): 188-208.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Idylls of the King. Ed. Willis Boughton. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1913. Warren, Robert Penn. Meet Me in the Green Glen. New York: Random House, 1971. Way, Karen C. "'So We Beat On': Quest and Ennui in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby." West Virginia Philological Papers 28 (1982): 119-126.

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. . The Quest of the Holy Grail. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913.

Wolfram Von Eschenbach. Parzival. Trans. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage. New York: Vintage, 1961. Zeydel, Edwin H. The Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951.

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