Oakley 1

Ryan Oakley

Professor Sprague

English 101, Paper 3, Module 4.9

26 May 2018

Instant Death: The Shadow of Trauma in The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby affords an understanding of the American dream as an inevitable and reproductive trauma rooted in the self-made mythology and mobility of Jay Gatsby. This paper will show that the tensions embedded in the American dream’s conception of ultimate mobility are augmented with and exaggerated by mechanized violence. It will further show that the characters within the novel are not examples of the dream’s failure nor its corruption but expressions of the dream’s basis in trauma, a basis that is found in representations of the self-made man in The Great

Gatsby and in other representations, criticisms and artifacts of the American dream. As the self-made man, Jay Gatsby, accelerates towards the past and encounters destructive instantness, the assortment of embedded tensions within him and the dream itself create its paradoxical logic of murderous replication at progressively higher orders of technological realization. There, at its limit, it links fluidity and mobility in the silent realm of the impossible. The dream has not failed in The Great Gatsby, nor has it been corrupted; It is in the bloody process of its success. Oakley 2

First, the American dream is a mess of illusions, advertisement and self-flattery directed towards the goal of producing amnesiac cyborgs. It is the advertisement driven dream of car ownership, which, when realized, becomes the homicidal fantasies of people stranded in traffic, a dream of violent liberation from the norms and consequences that the materialization of their own fantasy has imposed.

Fredrick Jackson Turner, in a breezy idealization of the American character, says it is based in

“perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society” (Turner). Turner’s use of “fluidity” is as interesting as it is inaccurate. The American character has never been fluid. Fluidity is change without destination. Fluid evaporates and it freezes. By itself, fluid contains no motion. A genuinely fluid people would have found little reason to have destroyed the nations they came in contact with on this continent. A fluid people would have adapted themselves and their customs to these societies. They probably would not have named their colony “New England.” Yet, the arriving Europeans showed none of this fluidity. Instead, they brought with them some of the most extreme beliefs found in Europe so that they may practice them without moderation. “The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like the Pilgrims, sailed to America principally to free themselves from religious restraints” (Encyclopedia

Britannica.) These early, Americans, like later ones, engaged in a campaign of extermination against those they encountered. The people already living on this continent were not drowned below the sheer amount new arrivals. After inadvertent exposure to pathogens and a virgin soil epidemic, The First

Nations were subject to biological warfare and massacres. Jeffrey Ostler writes:

“To fully comprehend U.S. policy toward Indians it is important to realize that

policy was grounded in the nation’s fundamental commitment to territorial

expansion. This commitment arose not just from the aggregation of individual

settlers’ and speculators’ pursuit of wealth, but also from the premise—central to Oakley 3

Americans’ republican political philosophy—that liberty depended on widespread

ownership of private property. To build what Thomas Jefferson described as an

“empire for liberty,” then, mandated obtaining Indian lands. How would this be

done? Policymakers envisioned an ideal scenario in which Indians would

willingly sign treaties ceding their lands in exchange for assistance in becoming

civilized. But what if Indians refused to cede their lands? What if they rejected

the “gift” of civilization? At that point, U.S. policymakers consistently stated,

Indians would be subject to war—not the limited warfare that European legal

theorists had agreed was acceptable between civilized nations but a war of

extermination. In 1790 Secretary of War Henry Knox sanctioned such a war when

he ordered the U.S. Army to “extirpate, utterly, if possible” a confederacy of

Indians centered in Ohio that had rejected U.S. demands for a land cession.

Facing similar opposition seventeen years later, President Jefferson sent word to

Indians near Detroit that “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any

tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the

Mississippi,” adding that should Indians go to war, “they will kill some of us; we

shall destroy all of them.” Genocidal war, then, was not just an option, it was

necessary in situations of Native resistance” (Ostler).

Insofar as America possess fluidity, it is the fluidity of water sprayed from a firehouse at protesters. It is not the water itself that the American character resembles so much as its speed and violence. The

American dream does not enshrine fluidity but mobility. As a fundamentally expansionist fantasy, it has fetishized speed to promote the idea of the limitless upward mobility of anyone who works hard, dreams big and moves fast. It has long sought to increase this speed with technology and technology Oakley 4 has been its primary mode of realizing speed. Before the Internet and its ethos of “move fast and break things” (Statt), Americans seized upon the car as both a concrete symbol of and a method to attain the fantastic speed and limitless mobility of their dream. But this dream had a shadow. Invented with the car was the car crash. As cars invaded public areas and claimed them through bloodshed, the scenes of twisted metal and dead pedestrians became the subject of lurid interest.

“Those killed were mostly pedestrians, not drivers, and they were disproportionately the

elderly and children, who had previously had free rein to play in the streets.

“The public response to these deaths, by and large, was outrage. Automobiles were often

seen as frivolous playthings, akin to the way we think of yachts today (they were often

called “pleasure cars”). And on the streets, they were considered violent intruders.

“Cities erected prominent memorials for children killed in traffic accidents, and newspapers

covered traffic deaths in detail, usually blaming drivers. They also published cartoons

demonizing cars, often associating them with the Grim Reaper.” (Stromberg, 2015)

In response, the car companies invented the jaywalker (Stromberg, 2015). They relocated blame onto the murder victim. Such is the nature of American individualism: The victim must be held responsible for their own murder. This is the speed, violence and paradox, magnified by power relations, that the

American dream is constantly born from. When it cannot render those it kills or excludes, the people on whose labor it depends, invisible, it must hold them, the victims, culpable for their death. The dream engages in this process so that it may replicate itself by turning its survivors into cyborgs. Its expansion is the violent privatization of public areas. In these zones, it transforms the communities it meets into technologically fortified, atomized units of production and consumption. Memory is moved out of the Oakley 5 organic component of these cyborgs and relocated in a mechanical trauma. (Cars contain iterated safety features that physically remember their history in formations of their design but humans only rarely remember city streets as places where children safely played.) When the dream’s promised mobility finally becomes commonly available, hit and run speed slows to the crawl of a traffic jam. From that new paradoxical zone, where dreamed speed creates real stasis, novel expressions of the dream’s murderous logic emerge at a higher technological order. Road rage replaces the hit and run. Road rage escalates into deliberative murderous fantasies of running down protesters (Graber). Fed by major national news outlets (McKay), bills are presented to reify these fantasies of vehicular manslaughter into law (Levenson, Hassan). These fantasies have long been incorporated into the design of the cars themselves. “The Dodge Challenger—even more so than its two rivals, the Ford Mustang and Chevy

Camaro—is a kind of mechanical embodiment of Making America Great Again, a dinosaur car utterly shameless in its evocation of a never-was national past” (Dudley). At all times, the American dream, frustrated by the dilated time of its democratic realization, is fueled by a belief in the exceptional nature of its individual parts. People forget that they are not in traffic but are traffic. This exceptionalism is fostered by a constant roaring celebration of the dream’s mascot: The Self-Made Man. This mythological figure appears in all shapes through the religion of the American dream. While stuck in a traffic jam, one will likely tune into a radio to hear songs embodying His mythology and encouraging identification with it, advertisements promising the proximity of His realization in your own life and radio hosts celebrating His many attributes. Although The Great Gatsby was written and published over five years before the American dream was named (Churchwell, 344), this novel portrays the shadow of

The Self Made Man’s ultimate mobility: Collision. The Great Gatsby maps the birth of trauma and its iteration through increasingly higher orders of technology. In these technologically replicated and augmented collisions, the thing that suffers most is soft flesh. This is not a mere side effect of the dream but its essence: Its speed is defined by trauma. Its expansion is not weakened by human sacrifice Oakley 6 but fueled by it. It is a road forever leading to a crash. The dream is a trauma that regenerates out of the minds of rubbernecking gawkers, each of whom views even the accidental death of strangers as evidence of some quasi-moral failing (‘they must not have been driving right’) and their own continued life, in contrast, as evidence of their exemplary behavior. Everyone is meant to believe that they are the exception to the rules. Unlike everyone they share they road with, they have a good reason to speed, to check their phone and to run the red light. Trauma turns its witnesses and perpetrators into The Self-

Made Man. Americans dream of being rich and white enough to murder the marginalized without legal consequence. They dream of being celebrated for doing so. This is the substance of the American dream. This is the shadow of its promised mobility. It has been so for a very long time.

Like the dream itself, which is often rendered in trite, anti-historical aphorisms or the sloganeering of advertisers, the warmth and elegance of Fitzgerald’s prose, combined with a nostalgic view of the 1920s, cloaks the darkness of his concerns1. Just a few years prior to the novel, the

European powers had unleashed mechanized death on startling scales. Many of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries died in the conflict or returned home seriously damaged by it. In Tender is the Night, after reflecting on the lack of mobility in trench warfare, Fitzgerald’s character Dick Diver says about the Somme “All my beautiful safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love”

(150). Rather than view the twenties through the lens of nostalgia and thereby perceive it as the glittering party so stylishly rendered on screen, it is more accurate to see the 1920s as time of people, who did not dream of empty wealth or facetious new dance crazes but were, instead, haunted by an otherworldly and irrational nightmare of mechanized death in the trenches. These people came home to partake in a similar dynamic on the very streets where they lived. Bootleggers discharged the weapons of war into civilian spaces. The cars of the rich ran over the bodies of the poor without consequence.

Fitzgerald himself spoke about this in a 1924 article about rich young Americans, where he stated they

1 Even the title of the novel, invoking a hokey old-time magic act, both obscures and reveals the book’s concerns. Oakley 7 were right to think that “when he is arrested for running his car 60 miles per hour he can always get out of trouble by handing his captor a large enough bill – and he knows that if he has the bad luck to run someone over when he’s drunk, his father will buy off the family and keep him out of jail”

(Churchwell, 255). Everywhere, money and the machine wrested control of space from the human. The people of this era often responded with frantic displays of pleasure and violence. They reacted to prohibition by drinking themselves blind on bathtub gin. While Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway meet at such a party, where prohibition is responded to with excess, it is in the traumatic war that they discover a common origin. Their relationship was not born at one of Gatsby’s luxurious parties but in American military divisions stationed in “some wet, gray little villages in France” (38). They are, in a sense, twins. One honest, the other, less so. Both are born of mechanical trauma and defined by a sense of status in relation to Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Nick expresses his ostensible sense of superiority by taking on the persona of a detached, carefully “honest” and judgmental observer of other people’s recklessness (44) while Gatsby expresses an apparent sense of his own inferiority through a gaudy persona and a mad longing for acceptance. Both of these senses, a self-concept in the case of Nick and a perception by others in the case of Gatsby, seem, paradoxically, born of their opposite. Gatsby may be more honest than Nick. Nick may be beset by a greater sense of illusion and inferiority than Gatsby.

It is, after all Gatsby, who seems aware that he is playing a game of some kind, often referring to Nick as “Old Sport”, and Nick who seems to have internalized the rules so deeply that he believes they are real. It is Gatsby who hardheadedly observes that Daisy’s voice is “full of money” and it is Nick who immediately, translates that cynical observation into an almost mystical language of privilege, thinking

“high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl” (76). Money can be gained and money can be spent. It can be controlled. To Gatsby, money is a mere vehicle for his desire. But the king’s daughter? Someone like that serves no one. Indeed, she is, herself, served. Throughout this novel,

Fitzgerald plays many such tricks, which not only makes the reader question the honesty of the Oakley 8 characters, but how the reader constructs the very concept of honesty. Is the truth more the realm of the honest conman posing as liar or the conned liar posing as an honest man? Fitzgerald provides clues but leaves this question in the telling ambiguity of silence.

What Fitzgerald addresses, much more directly, are the consequences of mobility. Fitzgerald conceives of truth as a phenomena briefly revealed through mechanized collision, which acts as both consequence and cause of illusions. It is only after Jordan almost collides with another car that we learn that Nick “suspects” himself to be an honest man (44), a statement that can only be suspected of truth.

When Gatsby’s car, driven by Daisy, collides with and kills Myrtle, it is again Nick, who accesses some knowledge of the truth, though one can question the depth and accuracy of his knowledge. What seems inarguable, is that the consequences of these collisions are unevenly distributed. They follow clearly laid out lines of “wealth, power and prestige” (Kottak), always landing on the bodies of the socially marginalized. Myrtle, a working class woman and wife of a mechanic, receives the worst of it. Early in the book, while at a party with Tom and Nick, she dares to say the name of “Daisy.” While this has a variety of meanings, being both an act of memory in its invocation of absent but real history and also invoking some version of truth, it is also, primarily, a confession of belief. Myrtle is shouting this name, almost chanting it, “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!”(33), because Myrtle wants to be Daisy. She believes this is not only possible but possibly real. Indeed, she even believes that it is her current reality that is at odds with reality, her current marriage to a mechanic that is “crazy” (32) and Tom’s marriage to Daisy that is the sham (31). Her faith in her ability to supplant Tom’s wife is rewarded with a broken nose.

And while Tom might have an impassioned voice, the way that he delivers the blow through “a short deft movement” (33) is telling. Far from being some boozy, looping hay-maker or red-faced strangulation, this foreshadowing blow is short and reflexive. In its unthinking efficiency, it contains the element of a machine. In its opposition to his human passion, even as it expresses this passion, it suggests the cyborg. Later in the novel, Myrtle directly encounters mechanical collision. Once again Oakley 9 inspired by an erroneous belief, this time that Tom is driving the Rolls Royce, she rushes into the road to wave it down. She believes that she can rise above her station, hitch a ride towards the reality of her delusion. Acting on this belief, she steps into the road. This step proves to be a disastrous miscalculation. The car is not driven by Tom. Behind the wheel is his wife, Daisy, who is both Myrtle’s rival and true object of desire. The car does not stop for this would-be passenger. It collides with

Myrtle. It instantly kills her (86). Instant. The word is repeated. Instant. This choice of words is important. While “instant” has been around for a long time, its importance has certainly increased under technological capitalism. Instant is of the essence. Instantness is the state to which the American dream aspires. It is the temporal component of ultimate speed, which is a factor in ultimate mobility. At the universe’s peak speed of light, a form of the atemporal takes hold. For the superluminal object, time itself stops, history ends, and seemingly instantaneous travel is allowed through the illusions of simultaneity born from inertial frames (Takeuchi). On a less cosmic level, “instant” is a favorite false promise of advertisers. There is Instant Rice, Instant Noodles and Instant Communication. In The Great

Gatsby, there is Instant Death. But there is also another type of death. That of the slow and planned murder. It is to this second sort of death that Gatsby succumbs. At first glance, it may seem that his murder by Myrtle’s husband, Wilson, the mechanic, reverses the order that death travels in this book.

He is, after all, by the terms of the America and the novel, of a lower station than Gatsby. But, here, the novel births another paradox. While Wilson kills Gatsby, he is less a murderer than he is the murder weapon. It is Tom who has encouraged the act. In this, he has taken belief and not only used it to victimize people but to mechanize them. Here, the novel reaches a paradox of personal responsibility:

Wilson pulls the trigger but he himself is a trigger that has been pulled. So is Tom. He does not know that Daisy was driving the car. He does believe that it was Gatsby behind the wheel. Under threat of violence, he tells Wilson this and he believes that he told Wilson the truth. None of these people know the facts and, therefore, none can be said to be properly thinking about them or responsible for the Oakley 10 consequences of their actions. They are, like America and the machines themselves, the simple autonomic nervous system of capitalism. Fueled by illusions born from trauma, they are not so much thinking agents but the reflexive actions caused by articles of belief – beliefs partially created, in this case, at the increased technological level of an information economy. And the so-called one honest person in the story? Faced with all of the lies surrounding Instant Death, Nick finds that he has nothing to say “except for the one unutterable fact that it was not true” (106). Honest as Nick may believe himself to be, he says nothing. He finds the truth unutterable.

Ironically, describing the truth as unutterable is the most true thing that Nick says in the entire course of the novel. An unutterable truth is central to trauma. The paradoxes of the American dream, the tension that they exist in and the violence with which these replicate, exceed the informational capacity of mere words although they can, perhaps, be used in careful arrangement to dramatize and derange the dream. Fitzgerald proves this, in practice, by avoiding the gibbering excesses of his contemporaries, who, like the dadaists, often responded to the horrors of the First World War with embodied unlogic. He instead uses lucid and elegant prose, a perfected boredom, to transport the reader into a world of mechanized trauma, paradox and perplexity as strange as anything conceived by the surrealists. He finds epiphantic truth to be expressed and glimpsed in violence but, unlike his fascist and proto-fascist contemporaries, he remains unsentimental about the honesty of violence itself. He carefully refuses to assign violence or truth a position of unclouded, moral superiority. Instead, he links trauma and epiphany into a common space of the unutterable limit-experience. He views collisions as an inevitable result of mobility and as the birthplace of more lies. These lies are generative of the judgments that lead to more catastrophes. In using words to show the limits of words, he carefully leads the reader to a deeply paradoxical and fluid understanding that unsettles a conception of the American dream and the formulation of honesty itself. Oakley 11

While Fitzgerald is interested in causality, it is a paradoxical causality. He is asking ‘what happens when an unstoppable force meats an unmovable object’ and discovers that the answer is a carnage that births the opposite of its motive force. The characters in the story, like the conceptions of truth and honesty, are both mobile and static. Jay Gatsby exemplifies this process with his mobility in the world but stasis of his dream; Myrtle Wilson in the stasis of her position and the mobility of her dream. Only a pair of glasses, who switch the faces that they appear upon and, although sightless themselves, are the novel’s one true witness to truth. Under their gaze, these fluid concepts collide and result from collisions. Like the American dream, this novel is a clockwork of trauma.

Second, Jay Gatsby has a troubled relationship with reality but, perhaps, not one to truth. He has created “a platonic conception of himself” (64). This version of Gatsby that Gatsby has created is not glib nor is it hedonistic. It is an ideal. Like the American dream, literalist constitutionalism or biblical fundamentalism, his self-concept is an eternal and static program unmoored from facts, self-evident or otherwise, that actively forms the reality of its believers. It is a form of truth but only its form. The form itself is the recognizable shape of trauma. “Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disconcertingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel.” (LaCapra). This is the trauma that paradoxically produces mobility. Outside of

Gatsby’s static self-conception, he is “quick and extravagantly ambitious” (66). His speed and mobility is seen, by his father, as evidence of Gatsby’s potential greatness (101) and his static conception’s intrinsic worth. Pointing to a list Gatsby had made as a child, his father brags that “It just shows you”

(103) but all it really shows is young Gatsby’s strict discipline. This interplay between stasis and speed, where each births its opposite, is not only a cause of trauma but a result of it. Gatsby embodies these tensions. Far from the pleasure seeking hedonist he seems to be, Gatsby does not even drink but allows champagne to rubbed into his hair (66). There is, about his person, a whiff of the detached a rebours of certain schools of dandyism, which have a strange and often misunderstood stoicism at the root of their Oakley 12 decadence (Baudelaire). In his parties, there is something of the lunacy of King Ludwig II of Bavaria,

“who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals” (McGuinness xxvii). One doubts that these parties are any more alive to Gatsby than these animals were to Ludwig. He dismisses them with a snap of his fingers and says “Old sport, the dance is unimportant” (70). Wolfsheim might claim to have

“made him” (102) but it is clear that Gatsby also made himself. From the time he was just a boy,

Gatsby created his mobility from strict lists, schedules and “general resolves” (103). The value that

Wolfsheim detected in Gatsby, when he met this starving young man just out of the army but unable to change his clothes (102), is that a traumatized stasis births a corresponding mobility, both of social position and morality. And what is more mobile than currency? Just as Tom later mechanized Wilson,

Wolfsheim earlier monetized Gatsby. Insofar as he made Gatsby, he made him into money. As such, like money, Gatsby became a creature of seemingly unlimited speed and mobility. He moves between classes, legality and illegality, lies and truth. But he reaches the end of this mobility. There is a solid limit to speed. An object cannot cross the speed of light. To do so, it would expand to a size that would require more energy than the universe contains to move it. At the upper limit of mobility, an object freezes into an instant. This is true in reality. But, in theory, if an object could move beyond that barrier and past the “critical speed limit at which the total trip time is a negative number” (Russell), it could move backwards in time. And this is the line that Gatsby wishes to cross. He is a man at the speed of light, straining against impossibility and trying to throw himself backwards into history. “Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” (71). Yet, ironically, he is paused, trembling, in front of the green light (25). Frozen, he cannot move forward into the past. But his dream of traversing this final barrier is honest. Born from his mathematical self-conception, of its truthful form, he genuinely feels this desire towards ultimate mobility. It is honest in that it holds to his form of truth. It may even be accidentally true. Ultimate speed and mobility should work in time, allowing history to repeat, allowing changes to be made, reversing the flow of cause and effect into retrocasual Oakley 13 paradoxes. But neither Gatsby’s honesty nor the relative truth of his beliefs will matter much. Reality will complicate these things. In translating his static formations into mobile reality, he creates carnage.

A collision on the highway. A dead body on the road. Instant Death. But, briefly, just after the impact and before his murder, Gatsby does succeed. He reverses time and repeats history. Daisy falls into his lap (88). (One can only imagine the strange temporal dilation that occurred in this instant. This must have been both the longest and the shortest moment of Gatsby’s life.) In acceleration and murder, his literalist constitutionalism is briefly but completely fulfilled.

The first victim of this collision is Myrtle Wilson. She is, in many ways, the inverted image and

“exotic negative mass” (Russell) of Gatsby.2 She, like Gatsby, is a type of shadow. In physical and social reality, she lacks mobility. Even when taking the train into the city with Tom Buchanan, she must defer to the sensibilities of those around her and sit in a different car than her rich lover (27). Behind her static social position, fidgets the unbounded nature of her dreams. She possesses none of Gatsby’s monastic strictness. She drinks. She lacks his single-minded focus. When buying a dog, she does not mind that it is not the breed of dog that she wants (27). She does this in spite of believing that she made a similar mistake in her choice of husband. She thought her husband “knew something about breeding” but discovered that ‘he wasn’t fit to lick her shoe’ (32). When her sister claims that Myrtle was crazy about Mr. Wilson but Myrtle not only changes the meaning of word “crazy” but points at a different man to make her point. This changeability and mobility, not just of herself but of meanings and people, its freedom from static definition and its resulting causality, is the revealed essence of her mental life.

She claims that she needs to make a list to keep track of all the things she needs to get and another to remember all that she needs to do (32-33). It seems clear that none of these things will be done and these lists will never be made. Like a photon, her dreams lack mass and are therefore capable of superluminal speed (Baraniuk). Just as Gatsby’s physical mobility is facilitated by the paralysis of his 2 In the larger sense of the novel, it would be more accurate to say that Jay Gatsby is, himself, the “exotic negative mass” of all the other characters but, for the purposes of this essay, viewing Myrtle as such has some utility. Oakley 14 ideas, Myrtle’s mobility of ideas paralyzes her physical mobility. But the causality of this is hardly straightforward. One phenomenon grows out of the other and loops back upon itself. Trapped in an unhappy marriage in the ash-heaps, imaginary mobility is the only mobility available to Myrtle. Since mobility and wealth, including Gatsby’s, depends on the stasis of the poor, one should be careful not to blame her poverty and social paralysis on the flightiness of her character. It is simply a result of larger issues of stasis and mobility. In these circumstances, she can imagine freedom but she cannot actually partake in it, while Gatsby can be free but cannot imagine it. These two characters collide at the exact point of their desire. They both want to possess Daisy. Gatsby desires possession in the sense of owning

Daisy, Myrtle in the sense of inhabiting Daisy. And neither can easily speak of this true desire. Gatsby keeps his desire hidden below an elaborate artifice, while Myrtle, less cautious and emboldened by alcohol, dares to openly and repeatedly name her desire. “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” (33). Both are, at the moment of collision, speeding away from the perceived barrier to their desire, in the case of Gatsby,

Tom, and in the case of Myrtle, Mr. Wilson. And it is Daisy, their object of desire, which they have both pursued, in inverted ways, that ultimately kills them both. It is Daisy who drives the car that instantly kills Myrtle. It is the lie to protect Daisy, told by Daisy, that mechanically kills Gatsby. Both of their deaths are mediated by technology (the car kills Myrtle and Mr. Wilson is made into a weapon by Tom) but not caused by technology. They are killed by the very fact of their differing speed. Through their respective versions of mobility, both Gatsby and Myrtle manage to touch the dream but, in doing so, the stasis of their differing traumas and areas of mobility also touch. They erase each other in a “real pair annihilation event” (Russell). This collision and the resulting carnage is the dream’s fulfillment, its annihilation and its bloody rebirth into another realm of regenerating paradox. Collision is the shadow of the dream’s machinery. The human memory is destroyed by death, occluded by lies and confused by the newspaper accounts. But every collision leaves a mark. The machine, the inanimate portion of the cyborg, remembers with its very body. Its body is externalized memory. Every safety feature is a scar. Oakley 15

The novel’s only real witness to the totality of the dream in its birthing violence and paradoxical fakery, is not Nick Carraway, but a pair of round glasses.3 The Glasses are first encountered in the ash- lands, where “ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight” (26). The Glasses watch over this but “they look out from no face” (26). Their face has dripped away. They find a face on a man with no real name. Worn by

Owl-eyes in Gatsby’s library, they associate themselves with, you, The Reader, just as they did in their first appearance when they witness operations obscured from your sight. In this library, they peer at what appear to be books. Through Owl-Eye’s mouth, they relate the nature of these books. They do not say that the books are fake. Instead, they say “they’re real” (37). These books, like Gatsby, are genuine fakes. One need only to slightly rearrange their definition of a book from the abstract to the actual to understand the realism of these books. A book can be both viewed as a physical object or as the words contained within it. “Bonafide pieces of printed matter” (37) that lack pages might be said to lack the soul of a book, to be a mere machine, but an orally transmitted story could just as easily be said to lack the physicality of a book and only be a dream. To act as if The Great Gatsby has a clear judgment about the authenticity of these books, that they merely reveal a con, is to go far outside of what the text allows and to impose a judgment that Fitzgerald is not only careful to avoid but one that seems contrary to the entire soul of his novel. The relationship between illusion and reality is a troubled one. The books in Gatsby’s library are not fakes. They are machines. Not only does the problem of locating authenticity in a book replicate the issue we find in Gatsby and Myrtle, one of whom has physical mobility but static dreams and the other who has mobile dreams without physical embodiment, these books generate illusions as surely as any novel. This is their purpose. These books generate an illusion in the mind of those who do not peer inside them – they place the illusion totally outside of themselves.

3 While it may seem odd to view an object as a character rather than a symbol, drawing a clear line between characters and symbols engages in a form anthropocentrism that Fitzgerald clearly does not share. A defining feature of his prose and of this novel is that he imbues objects with life and intent. In Fitzgerald’s work, the lines between the animate and inanimate, character and symbol, are purposefully confused. Oakley 16

The reader must remain outside of these books to read them. Entry is impossible and that generates its own story. The story these “books” tell is about Gatsby himself. The round glasses should be viewed in the same fashion. They are the image of reading located outside of eyes. The Glasses leave a faceless billboard to appear on a face and leave a face to reappear painted on the same billboard. They are the treachery of images (Magritte). From the vantage point of a billboard, where advertisement typically divorces image from reality, these glasses without a face, blind, unreal and painted, watch Myrtle’s

Instant Death. They reappear on a face to attend Gatsby’s funeral and are removed to be cleaned so that a pitiful understanding can finally be rendered: “That poor son-of-a-bitch” (104). These glasses are the technological agent that mediates the relationship between this novel and we, the readers. They are corrective perspective divorced from reality but attached to perception. They are an inertial frame through which we observe Instant Death. Fitzgerald has led us to the final paradox that truth, dreams, illusions and reality, are a matter of our own flawed vision. We must remove the glasses and embrace the flaws in our sight to come to an understanding rather than a judgment. The truth of the dream is a collision that always moves truth further out of reach. Fitzgerald, in embracing this paradox, led us, through a dream, back to collide with ourselves. Here, we find that the truth is unutterable. Spoken or touched, the dream would annihilate us. But, somehow, in spite of the American dream, mercy remains possible. If we only remove our glasses, we can see the poor-son-of-a-bitch.

Third, The Great Gatsby, Citizen Kane and The Story of Chuck E. Cheese all show that trauma is central to the American dream but differ in their assessment of its expressions and possibilities. In

Orson Welles’s film, Citizen Kane, the lead character, Charles Foster Kane, is, like both Gatsby and

Cheese, deeply traumatized and motivated by his relationship to that trauma. With the corporate pamphlet, The Story of Chuck E. Cheese, a corporation seeks to indoctrinate children into the dominant ideology of redemptive trauma by claiming that Cheese’s endless reenactment of childhood trauma, unlike the repetitions of Kane, helps the wounded party and brings joy to others. Fitzgerald, however, Oakley 17 embraces the mysterious and impossible aspect of Gatsby and, in doing so, avoids the trite cynicism of

Welles and the dangerous reassurances of Cheese. These characters are alike in that they all seek something that resembles love but this “love” is only a perverse form of acceptance and applause mediated through concepts of possession, which both men (and one mouse) locate in different people or things according the complex interplay of their specific traumatic stasis, its resulting mobility and the relation of these things to time. Fitzgerald asks the reader to have mercy upon the trauma without fully understanding it, Welles asks the viewer to fully understand the trauma without having mercy upon it and the unknown author of The Story of Chuck E. Cheese asks for neither mercy nor understanding but for money.

If Gatsby’s relationship to the dream can be characterized by Instant Death, Kane’s relationship with it might be termed “I’m Already Dead.” The film begins with Kane dying behind a “No

Trespassing” sign. Like an intruder, the camera takes the viewer past the fence and through the windows of his vast estate to find him whispering his last word: “Rosebud.” The film immediately becomes a newsreel obituary and then, as the faceless writers of this myth find themselves dissatisfied with their construction, the film continues as a biography of an obituary. It inquires into the meaning of

Kane’s last words. This perspective of postmortem intrusion and witnessing is vital to this film. Not only is Kane’s privacy shown as a fortress being intruded on, the idea of witnessing, like in The Great

Gatsby, works on a variety of levels. On the most obvious level, the viewer learns about Kane as a side effect of an investigation into his life as told by people who saw it. On another level, just as Fitzgerald represented the reader through a pair a glasses, the viewer is represented in the film. Like in Mystery

Science Theater 3000, a silhouette often sits in the foreground and bottom right hand side of the screen and asks questions of these witnesses. This acts as an avatar of the film viewer. But, in all these cases, the overarching perspective is one of atheism towards towards the mythology of The Self-Made Man.

Through the dialogue between witnesses and investigator, in which the investigator is himself a would- Oakley 18 be witness to the fictional public but also the embodiment of the real public, the true story of Kane is told. Welles believes in truth and lies and clear difference between them. As evidenced by his The War of the Worlds broadcast with The Mercury Theater, Welles had long possessed an element of magician and that of the pranking child. He also had a certain cynicism about his audience. During his apology for The War of the Worlds, he became “sarcastic about gullible listeners” (McGilligan). Some of these traits are apparent in his later work, particularly F is for Fake, in which he takes on the persona of a magician and directly questions notions of authenticity. But, throughout all of these works, even where he attempts to blur the distinctions between reality and illusion, he often has the sensibility of a great stage magician revealing the crude tricks of a psychic because he is affronted by the vulgarity of their sham. When he admires the trick, he takes the tone of a fellow conman praising the cleverness of a peer and showcasing the superiority of his own brilliance through the condescendingly delighted understanding of the con’s mechanisms. In Citizen Kane, this sensibility of illusion undergirded by hard reality and of intruding upon the secrecy the illusion requires, is applied to The Self-Made Man.

The illusion here is one of greatness, power and creative wealth located in a businessman. The truth is a spiteful and wounded child. What appears to be power is, in reality, total powerlessness. Kane, who looms large throughout the film, is not even alive. He is already dead. What the viewer sees of him is only a ghost haunting his autopsy. But this situation of living death is one that Kane has had a long time to become accustomed to. Gatsby can be shown to be characterized as ultimate personal mobility born from total stasis located within his individual person but Charles Foster Kane is a total personal stasis that results in the mobility of everything around him. He is a black hole at the center of a galaxy, rotating the stars around and towards him. Compulsively repetitive in his behavior, Kane cannot move himself except by pulling others close and turning them into himself. He is a creature without beliefs who seeks to create them in others. In a series of scenes, which repeat the same dinner scenario in different points in time, showing the increasing strain Kane is putting on his marriage and visually Oakley 19 mirroring his own repetition of a single moment in his past, he finishes his wife’s sentence, forming:

“The people will think - what I tell them to think” (Citizen Kane). His wealth combined with his increasingly destructive repetitions move the world around and towards him, turning it into him as he does so, until he finally brings the objects or people he possesses to the point of destruction and utterly annihilates his relationship to them. At the center of Kane is his trauma, a gravitational singularity of space and time (Mastin). He is a form of living death. In a series of newsreels, Kane’s estate, Xanadu, is shown to be full of items he has attracted into his gravitational field and is referred to a “monument to himself” (Citizen Kane). This suggests a tombstone. Making the point explicit, the announcer likens it to the pyramids of the pharaohs. The pharaohs, who mediated a relationship with the gods (Mark) just as The Self Made Man mediates one with the American dream, did not live in their pyramids. They were entombed there (MacDonald). So it is with Kane. Xanadu is not “a stately pleasure-dome”

(Coolridge) nor is it a home. Xanadu is a tomb. But Kane died long before he ever moved into that tomb, surrounded by statues. He died long before he whispered the word “Rosebud” and dropped the snow globe. He died, inside of the globe, when the sled was taken from him and he was taken from his parents. This incident is his foundational trauma. It is his gravitational singularity. It arrests him in time. He acts only according to its script. Almost everything that he is to accomplish in his life, becoming the richest man in the world, ‘maybe going to Washington’ (Citizen Kane), is described by his father at the moment of the traumatic separation from his parents. The dynamic and visuals of this scene will recur throughout the movie. When we first see Kane after this trauma, as an adult, he is being played with boyish charm by Welles. He briefly drops this charm to exhibit the disassociated selves produced by trauma (Kaplan), declaring that Thatcher’s problem, when he sees Kane acting against his own interests, is that Thatcher ‘does not realize that he is talking to two people’ (Citizen

Kane). One of these people is Kane the plutocrat and another is Kane the publisher. Kane’s problem, however, is that he does not realize that he is talking as three people. The plutocrat, the publisher and Oakley 20 the wounded child. It is this wounded child, spiteful, irresponsible and desperate for love, that births the other two people. It is this singular creature that Thatcher is, in fact addressing, as made clear when he says to Kane, “Still the college boy, aren’t you?” (Citizen Kane). He is only wrong in that even this college boy was arrested at an earlier time. Kane was already dead in college. Thatcher was, in reality, talking to one person, the same little boy who hit him with the sled and was now hitting him with newspapers. And it is that same little boy’s ghost who plays a variety of roles, obliterating their relationship to himself and each other in the process. It’s that undead child who twists and transfers his love of his mother onto the people. But what he hopes for is not to express his love of the people but to receive a mother’s unconditional love from them. This is a relationship he cannot actually accept but one that he must force into rejection to complete the repetition of his script. When his overtures towards the people are rejected, because of a self-destructive affair with Susan Alexander, his political career comes to an end in a seedy room that strongly recalls the scene of separation from his parents

(Ebert). He does not accept defeat and move on but instead starts to repeat his script of rejected love.

He transfers his need for unconditional love into Susan Alexander. He disassociates into her and turns her into him, reducing her into a doll-like avatar for himself, and engages in an obsessive quest to make her loved by the same people who rejected him. Believing that the love she receives from the people would belong to him, he uses her as proxy to charm them, to gain their love as expressed in the white noise of applause. In pursuing this course, he ends his relationship with his old friend Leland. How

Kane terminates this friendship is telling. He ends it, not through an act of blatant aggression but through an act of total agreement, in which he take Leland’s side, acts as Leland, and even completes and publishes Leland’s negative review of Alexander’s performance. He turns himself into Leland and

Leland into himself. In doing this, Kane not only ends this friendship but also ends his previous relationship with “the people” as elucidated in his “Declaration of Principles” and mediated through his papers. But Kane’s new relationship with his mother’s lost love, embodied by the audience and Oakley 21 mediated through Alexander is another disaster for the people around him. The public reject Alexander and Kane by proxy. Kane’s applause becomes another lonely monument to himself. Unable to accept this defeat, like a child, he tries to force this love or perhaps just understand his desire for it through repetition. He repeats the same disaster as her opening night across the country until he finally breaks his new toy. Alexander, who lacks Kane’s compulsive interest in rejection and cannot endure it, attempts suicide. Only then does Kane allow her to stop singing. But he still keeps her, much as one would cage a bird. He returns into himself and his need for love becomes totally focused upon this woman whom he once described as “a cross section of the American public” (Citizen Kane). While she may not understand the root causes of his behavior, she understands the selfishness of it and tells him

“You don’t love me. You want me to love you” (Citizen Kane). Understanding this much, she too rejects him, allowing Kane to once again complete his traumatized reenactment of love and rejection.

Kane is left alone with his statues. A monument making pharaoh entombed with his wealth and by his trauma. A creature totally beholden to and personifying this “special form of memory” where “the event has affect only, not meaning”(Kaplan). As a weakened Kane dies, he can only act this trauma out one final time in its simplest details. He whispers the name of his sled, “Rosebud” (Citizen Kane).

While the audience experiences the sight of the sled being tossed into the fire at the end of the film as an epiphany, Kane experiences no such insight into himself. His whisper neither heals nor understands his wound. Instead, it represents the shrinking of the immense and destructive scope of his repetitions down to a mere two syllables. Only physical death relieves him of his burden. His hand relaxes and he drops the globe that he has been trapped in all these years. Alive, he held onto the globe with the grip of rigor mortis. As a condition of his gravitational existence, the people around him were possessed, pummeled and stretched until they were torn to shreds. The viewer can understand Kane’s cruelty but understanding does not create sympathy. At best, Kane appears a pitiable figure. He is a little boy with too much power forced to haunt a life that he cannot actually live in. He tortures the people around Oakley 22 him, most of whom only made the error of actually caring about him without understanding that his traumatized imitation of love would force him to force those close to him to forcibly reject him. At the event horizon of Kane’s affection, he turns these people into himself and destroys the relationship. Like

Kissinger observed about America, it may be dangerous to be Kane’s enemy but to be his friend is fatal

(Wall Street Journal).

It is, of course, very different for the friends of Charles Entertainment Cheese. The corporate pamphlet, The Story of Chuck E. Cheese, is a religious artifact of The Self-Made Man, (in this case, a self-made mouse) that provides an unadulterated version of the mythology that Welles applied his atheism against. Unlike Citizen Kane, the pamphlet contains no witnesses to question its bland assertions about the nature of The Self-Made Man. These assertions are simply treated as biographical truth. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, The Story of Chuck E. Cheese, does not ignore the centrality of trauma to a realization of the American dream or the formation of The Self Made Man. Instead, it regards trauma as a source of universal happiness. The orphaned mouse, Charles Entertainment Cheese, experienced a similar, perhaps worse, trauma than Kane. Cheese was separated from his family in unclear circumstances and raised as the only mouse in an orphanage full of humans. No one knew the date of his birthday. He never had a birthday party. “This made Chuck E. sad” (2). Adding to his troubles, there was a birthday party at the orphanage almost every week. In spite of what must have amounted to a form of weekly torture for this young mouse, surrounded by humans who did not care enough about him to give him his own party, he disassociated his personality into the human children, learning to make their parties his so that he might experience one every week. He grew to “love” the song “Happy Birthday” and learned to sing it. He also loved the pizza that was served at these parties.

After winning fifty dollars in a Pong tournament, he bought a ticket to New York City. There, “Chuck

E. felt lonely” (5). Missing the orphanage, he started squatting above a pizza restaurant. The owner,

Pasqually, discovered him and attempted to murder the mouse with a rolling pin. Cornered and shaking Oakley 23 in fear, Chuck E. immediately returned to his trauma and started singing “Happy Birthday” to soothe his nerves. Not only did it soothe his nerves, it saved his life. Like Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby 4,

Pasqually recognized a traumatized potential in this homeless mouse and saw an opportunity to make

Chuck E. into money. He changed the name of his restaurant and put the mouse on stage. However, the performance was a disaster on par with Susan Alexander’s opening night. Chuck E. could not even perform. But he overcame this obstacle when he saw a little boy wearing a birthday crown, at which point he engaged in a trauma specific reenactment, a form of repetitive play “in which themes or aspects of the traumatic event(s) are expressed” (DSM-5). He sang “Happy Birthday.” Unlike with

Kane, this constant reenactment of trauma did not result in a mobile world being destroyed as it was dragged towards him. Unlike Gatsby, the stasis did not result in movement that culminates in collision.

Instead, this stasis replicated in acts of bloodless creation and assimilation. It moved outwards to create other states of stasis - the externalized and concrete stasis of a chain restaurant, each franchise becoming “a great place for birthdays” (9). A stasis that draws children towards and into it so that they can assimilated into this cheerful trauma. Unlike Kane, who destroys those attracted to him, Chuck E.

Cheese claims to allow those drawn into its perpetually happy zone to realize themselves. It is a zone

“where a kid can be a kid” (10). This zone has reproduced itself as a site of potential self-realization across America in over six hundred locations (Franchising). These zones create instantness. They do so, not by creating speed that results in alocality, but by creating an alocality that abolishes speed. When every place is the same, the idea of motion becomes obsolete. These locations obliterate any spacial difference between themselves. Within them, time is recreated as a measurement of game-play bought with tokens. Time is money. Each location resembles each other and all resemble Las Vegas. This capitalistic gaming zone is a self-similar fractal reflecting concepts of repetition. These concepts are

4 These characters roles as racial caricatures and the relationship between this concept and America’s fixation on anthropomorphized vermin should be noted as relevant to a discussion of the American dream, particularly in the area of to what degree Fitzgerald was merely reproducing these prejudices but this is beyond the scope of this essay. Oakley 24 embodied in the very experience, the repetitive play, of the slot-machine-like video games these sites contain and promote. These games are the strongest common link between the wildly divergent mythic and historic creation stories of Chuck E. Cheese. Should the atheism of Welles be applied to this story, if the material reality was assigned a position of of unquestionable truth, any witness with access to that material reality could see that the self-told origin story of this mouse and company is, like the doctrinal

American dream, which it so perfectly forms and expresses, utterly false. The restaurant chain was not founded in New York but in San Jose (Chuck E. Cheese’s). It was not the product of cooperation between a racist trope and a singing mouse but was created by Nolan Bushnell -- the white Atari co- founder and inventor of the first computerized video-game, Computer Space, which later became Pong

(Who Made America?). Pong and pizza are among the very few things that actually exist in both the pamphlet (as product placement) and in the restaurant (as objects). Repetitive play and consumption are the capitalistic binding between the two differing realms of mythology and history. The mouse himself also reproduced at increasingly higher orders of technological smoothness. In 1979, he manifested as a sleazy, cigar-smoking rat in a San Jose restaurant plastered with racist memorabilia (Brown). His band was staffed by animitronic robots. This concept started to be disbanded in 2017 as the restaurant chain looked “to reengage families and kids with a ‘modern experience’” (Picchi). Now, the mouse is primarily a two dimensional cartoon, whose appearance suggests a harmless and permanently immature child and this idealized simulation represents the real existence of Chuck E. Cheese; a reification of the doctrinal American dream augmented by underpaid humans in costume. In a striking reversal of his origin story, it is now humans who become the mouse. The games can be paid for with cards instead of tokens and one must assume that this is part of a corporate data-mining operation. The restaurant has become partially digital. From animatronic robots, the restaurant is evolving, according to the mobility focused logic of capitalistic production, into stacked digital platforms. “The digital is free (or incredibly cheap), perfect (as in, the copy of data is perfect), and instantaneous (or so fast it may as well be)” Oakley 25

(Weatherby). As far as the restaurant being a happy place as opposed to a site of birthday related trauma, that judgment will have to be left, in part, to the individual experiences of its patrons.5 But the falsity of The Story of Chuck E. Cheese can only be partially apprehended using the atheism of Welles.

It is not a mere matter of the story’s divergence from facts. Fiction itself, even Citizen Kane, diverges from facts as a condition of its existence yet it may still make some claim to the truth. The falsity of this story is of a fundamentally different nature than that of works of fiction. In works like The Great

Gatsby or Citizen Kane, the viewer or reader is aware that they are playing a game of fiction. The stories manipulate the emotions of the reader but the reader understands that they are being manipulated. They knowingly consent to this manipulation, often hoping to increase and expand their understanding of truth by playing a game of lies. Rather than work as an act of fictive witnessing with a goal of truth, the pamphlet is a fabricated testimony with a goal of profit. It is an artifact of the mass culture of The American Dream™ and, as LaCapra states in Representing the Holocaust, “artifacts to some extent affect social and cultural stereotypes and ideological processes, even when they insistently attempt to reproduce and reinforce banality” (7). Aimed at the fluidity of children who have not yet clearly learned to differentiate between reality and lies, backed up with staff, costumes and locations to provide evidence for this lie, artifacts such as this pamphlet are fragments of the nexus through which

Americans are indoctrinated into the secular religion of the dream – a dream that celebrates mobility and its resulting trauma and is itself mobile and traumatizing. These children are turned from potential thinking witnesses into actual reflexive consumers of products and ideology. Although the society is built to insulate even adults from reality, this insulation is imperfect. In some form, these children will eventually encounter the divergence between reality and illusion in the very place where these concepts meet – at the object of their desire. When the collision occurs, they will, with varying amounts of success and denial, have to engage with some small part of the vast network of lies they have been told 5 For my own part, I only ever went to place once, on a class trip, and all I can remember is quickly running out of tokens and hiding at the bottom of the pool of balls until I was yanked out by security. Oakley 26 by adults and the cynical greed that engendered this deception. When this encounter occurs, one should expect further collisions. These overwhelming traumas of mobility will replicate unless they are met with the equally overwhelming silence of fluidity and epiphany.

Fitzgerald recognizes that mysterious and silent space shared by trauma and epiphany. The

Great Gatsby lacks both the religious dogmas of The Story of Chuck E. Cheese and Citizen Kane’s atheism towards illusion but it leaves space for both. Fitzgerald writes towards a mystical perspective.

Informed by a Catholic imagination, his work is “often deeply sensual, even erotic” and “extreme or paradoxical, focusing on collapsing binaries of sacred and profane, good and evil” (Burton). A writer of secrets, he is fascinated by and fascinates with mystery. While Citizen Kane has a mystery at the root of its story (what or who is Rosebud?), Welles is interested in solutions. To him, mysteries are only disguised solutions. The mystery of Kane has a solution and it is easily solved. The witnesses in Citizen

Kane are reliable. They all have different perspectives but none of them contradict each other in the style of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. All of Kane’s witnesses are lifting the curtain on a lie. In the one moment when Welles comes closest to merging epiphany and trauma in Citizen Kane, during the scene where the audience is shown the burning sled, the resulting epiphany is located in the feeling of the audience, who feel a sudden overwhelming understanding that they cannot quite yet articulate. But one cannot help but think that the epiphany the audience is experiencing is one of realizing that Welles is a genius. One can almost sense him off-screen, saying “TA-DA!” His genius is a fabulous cynicism informed by an imposing arrogance. He destroys the idea of Kane and, by proxy, the businessman as

America’s prototypical self-made man but he leaves the concept intact, only modifying it by putting himself, the celebrity and artist, in the place formerly occupied by the Henry Fords and Charles

Randolph Hearsts of the world. Insofar as this moment of self-realizing immolation of the sled relates to the story of Kane himself, it is pat as an explanation and hollow as an epiphany. It explains too much. After the initial surprise, the burning sled only reduces and solves mystery. It provides a simple Oakley 27 explanation of everything Kane has done while mocking him as a stunted child. It does not forbid articulation but simplifies it into a single word: “Rosebud.” (Citizen Kane).6 Fitzgerald, on the other hand, recognizes the faultiness of witnesses and embraces the generative power of the silence and mystery. His primary witness is the unreliable narrator Nick, whose flawed perspective complicates the construction of truth. Unlike the witnesses in Kane, Nick does not seem to be performing an autopsy upon a human corpse but an exegesis upon a transcendent experience. On the level of execution, this advises the reader against judgment. The unreliability of Nick’s perspective, as well as issues raised in the content of the story itself, resist clear notions of truth. These unreliabilities and issues make definitive judgments about reality difficult, if not actually impossible. (The reader cannot know for certain who really drove the car – they can only measure spoken evidence.) Yet Fitzgerald does not use this mystery to shy away from the brutality of trauma. As he often does, he renders trauma as erotic, alive and sublime. In Tender is the Night, the “beautiful safe world” does not blow itself up with gore, noise and mud but “with a great gust of high-explosive love” (150). But one should not mistake his view of the sublime for the vulgar tale of ennobling trauma contained in The Story of Chuck E. Cheese.

While it does have some similarities, it is not that view which “becomes most dubious when it is figured as sacrificially redemptive or salvational” (LaCapra, RtH, 13). No one in The Great Gatsby, nor the world itself is improved or saved by the trauma of collision. Fitzgerald’s view and use of the fluid sublime in the self-madeness of Jay Gatsby does, however, correlate to “an invidious distinction between the (narcissistic) self and the other wherein the autonomy and freedom of the self depends on a radical constructivism (or secular creationism) requiring a nihilating relation to the other (nature, history, the past, the maternal and so forth)” that also involves “gendered fantasies about self-genesis

6 In this light, it’s hardly surprising that the movie is consistently thought to be a sort of unauthorized biography of Charles Randolph Hearst. It also explains the persistence of the rumor that “Rosebud” was, actually, Heart’s nickname for his mistress’s, Marion Davis, clitoris (Thomson). This is only the logical progression of the type of truth Citizen Kane aims at – a lifting of curtains to reveal crude literalism that finally delights in and assigns truth to childish profanity. Oakley 28 and creation ex nihilio” (LaCapra, RtH, 15). This correlation is real but misleading. Gatsby’s self- creation and its consequences are indicative of concepts unavoidably embedded in The Self-Made Man and the American dream itself. They are not nessessarily embedded in Fitzgerald’s view of these concepts. His view of the American dream and its relation to the trauma and the sublime is only a recognition that trauma and epiphany, are linked by the overwhelming unutterablilty, even the unknowability, of their truth. It is a space that dissolves lies and truth yet allows both to exist as each other. This is a fluid area that allows the impossible itself to possibly exist. Fitzgerald often takes this approach. As Churchwell notes in Careless People:

“Most of The Great Gatsby remains fixed in a single gorgeous moment of potential, ideas

that are described as “unheard,” “unintelligible,” “uncommunicable,” “unutterable,”

“unfathomable,” “indefinite,” “ineffable,” “inclaculable” – and yet hover in the margins.

The characters, too, are suggestions rather than declarations: they have strong physical

presences, and yet they are strangely featureless” (186).

Although Nick provides a scathing judgment upon Tom and Daisy’s carelessness (106) and Fitzgerald himself seems to have little patience for the manufacturers and beneficiaries of the American dream, he and his characters often speak through silence, in what they do not say rather than what they do. He resists imposing the easy access to truth that would allow a reliable value judgment on the phenomenon of self-creation. He avoids compromising the self-realizing potentialities of this dream, which we see in

The Story of Chuck E. Cheese, by establishing its falsity through a parade of facts. He preserves a potential for self-realization in Jay Gatsby by never being too diagnostically and straightforwardly descriptive of the actual content of his personality. While this could be a failure of cynicism on Oakley 29

Fitzgerald’s part, this crucial space for mystery can also be regarded as the true nature of the American dream, in that it represents the paradoxical complexity and confusion that occurs when the dream is criticized from within it and by using the bootstrapping terms and ideals of mobility that the dream has itself established – a philosophical dead-end where Americans find themselves colliding against each other with dreary and increasing frequency. Fitzgerald understands silence. He understands it as a space outside of this dream. It is a zone of private reflection, as in Nick’s discovery of an ununtterable truth yet one that can be shared, as in Nick’s retreat away from the party and to the library, a shared quiet space where much is said about the books but nothing directly. Silence, in Fitzgerald’s hands, is gorgeous, fluid and immobile. Silence, in its total dissolution of binaries, becomes a site for genuine self-realization outside of the capitalist restraints of mobility. Furthermore, Fitzgerald emphasizes

Gatsby’s (and the dream’s) impossibility instead of any of its supposedly redemptive qualities. As well as he understands the fluid power of silence, he understands the appeal of mobility. Both the power and the appeal are located in their impossibility. He unites trauma and epiphany into a limit experience and that both may be destructive and creative. But, just as he does with concepts of authenticity (which

Americans are indoctrinated to locate in trauma) he refuses to assign either trauma or epiphany a clearly privileged moral position over the other. Neither makes the resulting bloodshed worthwhile.

The limit experience itself and as personified by Gatsby is carefully shrouded in mystery. Nick never actually sees the accident, only its results. The collisions in The Great Gatsby, like Pong in The Story of

Chuck E. Cheese, act as links between two different and inverted realms. Collision links mobility and stasis, birth and death, wealth and poverty, illusion and reality, noise and silence, the seen, the unseen and the unseeable, through their mutual annihilation. The offspring of these collisions are not redemptive. They are not improvements upon their parents in any sense other than that of trauma regarding itself through its own terms – that is, the offspring is not superior when regarded at the level of moral judgment but they are more contagious and operating at higher levels of technology. Gatsby’s Oakley 30 traumas do not redeem the trauma nor do they save its victims. The limit experience of his self-created existence simply creates more trauma. It does so particularly when it is combined with judgment and concepts of justice as enforced by the powerful. Gatsby himself was murdered in an attempt to acquire moral justice based in incorrect judgments created by the false information. Unlike Welles, Fitzgerald is uncomfortable with solution, judgment and morality. In a 1925 letter that responding to a review complaining that “his characters dissolve too readily” (Churchwell, 301), Fitzgerald wrote:

“I give you my word of honor that this isn’t a moral tale . . . It happens to be extraordinarily

difficult to write directly and simply about complex and indirect people. And I should

prefer to fail at the job ridiculously than to succeed ignobly . . . Dostoyefski said that

people’s motives are much simpler than we think by[sic] any uncorrupted motive has an

average life of six hours or less” (Churchwell 300).

Rather than morality, Fitzgerald’s view is rooted in a humble acceptance of and comfort with mystery7, its potentials and its dangers. He distrusts the judgmental because it is often false and its moral element almost always incompatible with mercy. Fitzgerald describes Gatsby but avoids dissecting him. He might have simply lacked the theoretical tools of psychology, required for that task, tools that would have been more easily available to Welles in the time of Citizen Kane or he may have lacked political convictions, since his mysticism seems to preclude both political action and Utopian solutionism, but, if that’s the case, these are, perhaps, absences that readers should be grateful for. While his view denies the possibility of change, thereby preserving the status quo as an inevitability, itself an intensely political act, the mysticism of his view allowed Fitzgerald to show that mercy cannot be arrived at 7 This may also be a function of the strengths and weaknesses of their different mediums, which would magnify the differences in temperament and reward the differences in sensibility. The visual nature of film itself may discourage mystery and the text of a novel may make it more accessible to a writer. Words can easily double their meanings. Oakley 31 through understanding and understanding cannot be arrived at through proximity. Fitzgerald trusts silence. He keeps Gatsby at a distance. Even, especially, when he is close, Gatsby remains aloof. In another of Fitzgerald’s strange little paradoxes, Gatsby is the most close when he is viewed from distance. When Carraway first sees him, he says “I saw that I was not alone-fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars” (25). This view from fifty feet is the most intimate that

Carraway ever becomes with Jay Gatsby – seeing him in the emotional nude. Knowing almost nothing about him, he understands Gatsby better than when he speaks with him. He knows him better in this moment than he does when he comes to know him. More information does not create more understanding. Unlike Kane or Cheese, Gatsby seems “content to be alone” (25). Kane is man who compulsively collects statues, perhaps sensing little difference between them and humanity, and Cheese is a moving statue that compulsively collects humans and sees little difference between itself and them.

Both Kane and Cheese are dissatisfied with this, expressing loneliness at different times in their stories,

Kane because he knows too many people (Citizen Kane) and Cheese because he knows too few (5).

But Gatsby is neither man nor mouse but a mobile mystery, content with his own unknowability. He gathers people around him without seeing importance in their presence. His parties do not increase or decrease in size.8 Unlike Kane, whose trauma repeats at higher orders of “fun” -newspapers, speeches, music, parties- or Cheese whose traumatic “fun” metastasizes as a self-similar fractal at higher orders of technology, Gatsby’s parties are simply there and then they are not. Gatsby never vocally expresses loneliness in relation to any of this nor does he express any pleasure at the presence of the parties or regret at their vanishing. Yet one could not imagine Jay Gatsby with a large “No Trespassing” sign on his estate. Nor could he be imagined inviting children over because he wanted them to be happy. While

8 Neither does Gatsby’s size. Both Kane and Cheese do change in size. In Kane’s case, it’s a trick of perspective rendered by his relationship to other objects and people such as a window or fireplace (Ebert) and is reflective of his emotional states. In Cheese, we also see striking variances in size which seem to correspond to his feelings – loneliness shrinking him and birthday parties growing him. This special effect is also, probably, deliberate. Oakley 32

Kane’s friendship is increasingly limited and deadly and Cheese’s friendship is expansive and cheering, any friendship with Gatsby seems impossible. His “No Trespassing” sign hangs over himself. Not only does it refer to relationships to him but also to his relationships with others. Jay Gatsby is jaywalking through life. He lives in accord with a promise of the commons but in constant violation of his own warning. His estate is wide open but Gatsby is a trespasser upon it. In the one case where he claims absolute private ownership, over Daisy, he is, again, trespassing. Even as a young man, he “was in

Daisy’s house by a colossal accident” (90). Older, he deliberately attempts to intrude upon her relationship with Tom. Intrusion is a consequence of his mobility. Daisy represents the one area in which he cannot fully intrude and the one area that he claims ownership over, taking, like a burglar,

“what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously” (106). Unlike Kane and Cheese, who both seek a lost concept (a mother’s love, a birthday party) and use people as disposable and/or replaceable objects to pursue this goal, Gatsby seeks a single irreplaceable person who represents a limit to his own mobility – an unopenable market for his monetized existence. In this, he can be regarded as more single-minded than Kane or Cheese. Kane’s pursuit starts in the very general “the people” and gradually transfers into the more specific representative, Susan Alexander, and finally to the single word “Rosebud” and the globe. Cheese’s pursuit, on the other hand, moves from a specific individual party to an ever widening field that first includes the other orphans then expands until it includes all birthday parties and all children. But Gatsby is focused like a laser upon a single object of desire. His desire for Daisy is unwavering. At no point in the book does he stray from it nor does he expand or contract his goal. His methods may change, as when he decides to recruit Nick into his plan, but his impossible object remains static. And he differs again from Kane and Cheese, in that he seems somehow self-aware. He seems aware of his own intrusive impossibility – an awareness that is, like so much in the novel, left ambiguous but one that is, perhaps, evidenced in his resigned acceptance of a tragic fate when he takes the blame for Daisy. But if Gatsby is unaware of his own impossibility, then Oakley 33 the people around him do not share his ignorance. Nothing in the novel seems as quite as implausible as Jordon’s statement that “He’s just a man named Gatsby” (39). And yet, when the reader travels beyond that assessment, into the details of Gatsby’s life, they find a collection of lies, facts and perceptions that obscure rather than clarify the truth of his motivations. Kane’s “Declaration of

Principles” is a list that is full of content, a morality which is eventually betrayed, the contents and the betrayal both speaking to his character. But Jay Gatsby’s lists are remarkably banal. They’re totally devoid of anything but the most insipid and common morality. They completely lack detail. He holds to these lists but this is character without content. Like Gatsby’s conception of truth, these lists are only a form. Gatsby is a deceptively simple character who personifies the mysterious aspect of The Self-Made

Man. There is a perfectly paradoxical hole at the heart of him and, around him, a confusion around the construction of honesty itself. Only by inviting The Reader to look carefully at this genuine fake, and to give up the search for content within him, is The Reader finally allowed to stop looking for a solution in place of a soul and to conclude, mercifully, that Jay Gatsby is just “that poor son-of-a-bitch” (104).

The truth is not only unutterable but unknowable. He is not undone by his fluidity but by his mobility in the impossible silence where they intersect. “But that’s no matter -to-morrow we run faster, stretch out our arms farthar . . . . And one fine morning--” we too will be found in a pool (107).

Unlike with Kane, where the aggrandizing illusion results in destruction and the truth only results in cynical pity, or Cheese, where believing the illusion results in happiness and the truth results in overwhelmed bewilderment at the mercenary, manufactured and clear falsity of the American dream,

Jay Gatsby presents the reader with a mystery about how the truth itself is constructed. Gatsby has more in common with Kane’s burning sled and the intrusive camera that films it, in that both reveal trauma and epiphany, than he does with Kane. But where that sled is a hollow epiphany that reveals a traumatized character and reduces him to the childish size of that trauma, Jay Gatsby is a hollow character that reveals a link between trauma and epiphany. In embracing the indescribable nature of Oakley 34 impossibility, Fitzgerald still retains some biting cynicism but, in allowing the mysterious, he leaves open the possibility of the sites of self-realization promised by Chuck E. Cheese – places where a Jay

Gatsby can just be a man named Jay Gatsby. Whether these mysterious, impossible but potential sites are sources of trauma or epiphany, their truth, like that of death, will be utterly unspeakable.

Fourth, does this book say that the dream is being fulfilled through trauma or that trauma is the failure of the dream? Is the American dream attainable, unattainable or attained in this novel?

The unspeakability of truth that Fitzgerald embraces lends itself to a sense of corruption and nostalgia. Faced with all the beautiful and alluring impossibilities of The Great Gatsby, one could conclude that the dream is possible but that these characters are unable to attain it and then locate that inability within the characters’ lack of good moral fiber. One could also conclude that the dream is noble but impossible and then look for reasons why that should be the case. Perhaps it is the dream itself, rather than the characters, that has been corrupted. Perhaps the dream is no more than a lie. Both interpretations bear a degree of scrutiny but the truth is far darker than either – the dream within The

Great Gatsby is not only real and possible, it is attained and it is an apocalypse of destruction.

The questionable morals of the characters provides the basis for an interpretation of The Great

Gatsby that favors the possibility of the American dream. This view believes, not only in the dream’s desirability, but as its role as arbiter of meritocracy. The fault “lies not in our stars but in ourselves”

(Shakespeare). The faults of the characters are numerous and easy to spot. Myrtle is unfaithful, Jordon is a cheater and Gatsby a gangster. All of them are dishonest mercenaries in the service of their own happiness. They use each other easily and often. The books only moral center is the advice of Nick

Carraway’s father to “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had” (1). But even this advice to remember his privileged position is a strange sort of noblesse oblidge that actually demands very little. It represents an obligation that Nick mainly fulfills through his prudish emphasis on responsibility. Should the reader be surprised that these characters are unable Oakley 35 to achieve the American dream? That their plans are not only thwarted but culminate in disaster? If the immoral hopes of flawed people were to end in great success, a very American sense of justice, a serious component of the dream’s justification and reproduction, would be violated. The bad guys would win. But, in this moral view of the novel, which advocates for the fundamental goodness of the

American dream, that can never happen. The American dream will not tolerate a con for long. In the words of the old advertising slogan, which are often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, “you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time” (Parker). And fooling all the people all the time, is what these characters set out to do. Some of them even succeed. Nick reserves the bulk of his sanctimony for Tom and Daisy, the people who manage to fool all the people all the time. Nick is not fooled. Not any longer. He calls Tom and Daisy

“careless people” (106). He berates them but not to their faces, for retreating behind their money and leaving others to clean up their mess. The bad guys might not have won but they certainly escaped.

But, even though Fitzgerald tells us in the “often misused and misquoted line” that “there are no second acts in American lives”, Americans (and probably Fitzgerald himself) know better than than that

(Cornish). There’s always a sequel. A part two, three and four, a remake, a prequel, a franchise – an interlocking of franchises into a shared universe, all of it moving plastic toys from the hands of laboring children into the hands of squealing children and, when Americans grow bored with the old story, when those joyful squeals have turned into fresh begging, all of those plastic toys move into the dumpster ocean, where they await the humans who will join them below the rising tide of global warming to await the inevitable reboot. Perhaps, next time, humans will be robots, cyborgs or angels.

Maybe cockroaches will become humans. Most importantly, the problem with this dream is always located in the people rather than the dream itself. When the dream is unrealized, it is the fault of the morally compromised. When it is realized by the morally compromised, they are seen as hucksters unworthy of it. But, not to worry, the dream is good and possible. The dream will correct these errors. It Oakley 36 will shine a light and these hucksters will be exposed. Eventually. Tom and Daisy will get their comeuppance. They may avoid the bright revelation of justice today, but, in the words of Little Orphan

Annie, ‘Tomorrow, the sun will come out, Tomorrow, tomorrow. It’s only a day away’ (Annie).

But perhaps tomorrow never comes. The dream could be an impossibility. A simple con sold by people like Tom and Daisy to the public in the service of plutocratic profit. After all, these orphans reaching the highest heights of society are far more common in the media than they are in reality.9

America is a country with one of the highest amounts of “intergenerational earning elasticity or IGE, which measures how much of a child’s deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents’ income” in the developed world (Stewart). That is, America experiences some of the lowest amounts of social mobility among developed nations. Yet it is also the country that spends the most time promising that mobility. It is the only nation that has made that mobility into a foundational myth.

It has compounded that error by believing that this mobility is unique to itself. That it is a beacon of a hope or exceptional in its freedoms. America’s shoddy reality has a causal relationship with its self- affirming lies. In the words of H.L. Mencken, often attributed to P.T. Barnum, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” (Deis). Jay Gatsby’s fatal error, was not being a conman with a library of fake books. Rather, his error was in believing these books “absolutely real”

(37). His tragedy, like all the characters in this novel who end badly, is simply that he believed the con.

They all desired something from a country incapable of granting it. Myrtle wants a better life and is killed in the road. Her husband wants justice and becomes a murderer, even killing the wrong man. And the man he killed? Jay Gatsby only wanted to be loved. He only wanted to be accepted. He does not want tomorrow but to return to yesterday. A time when these desires were, perhaps, possible. For his trouble, he ended up dead in a pool. This is a vision of the dream similar to that of Orson Welles, who has Charles Foster Kane say that “the people will think – what I tell them to think” (Citizen Kane).

9 In both cases, being roughly as common as singing mice. Oakley 37

Gatsby’s mistake was thinking exactly what he was told and acting upon it as if it was possible, as if it was ever meant to be possible. The only people who emerge unscathed from the accident are Tom and

Daisy, the defenders of the perverse status quo. They are just as unscrupulous as any other character in the novel, perhaps more so, but their eyes are also wide open. Both Tom and Daisy have a better of idea of who Jay Gatsby actually is than any other character. Both seek to thwart him, Tom outs him as a gangster and, secure in the impossibility of Gatsby progressing any further into his life, sends him off, alone, in a car with his wife. Even a collision cannot rattle this security. His wife lies about who drove the car and Tom sends a man to kill the only witness of this accident. Here, the bad guys win. The good die young. The game was rigged from the start. In playing it, Jay Gatsby is transubstanitated from a conman into the conned. He becomes a tragic hero. He has the nobility to protect the woman he loves.

This protection ends in his own death. This death proves the authenticity of his desire. The authenticity and worth of the American dream is ironically redeemed in his sacrifice. Jay Gatsby becomes an

American Christ figure. He proves the value of the dream through his death and becomes “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (93).

Yet, The Great Gatsby, which Fitzgerald insisted was not a moral book, demands another interpretation. This slippery fish of a novel purposely complicates the easy comforts of cynicism and morality without outrightly denying them. As such, it requires a reading that is not rooted in approval or disapproval yet still incorporates the very real elements of these previous mentioned interpretations, without becoming overly beholden to the shallowness of their waters. There, the fragile contradictions of the book drown in air. The Great Gatsby’s paradoxes and complications, its unutterable elements must be allowed to breathe in fluid. It is in their very unutterbility that the novel’s truth ultimately resides. The only view that can sustain this novel is one in which the American dream is not only possible but also attained and, in its attainment, catastrophic. In this version, the dream is unhinged from morality. Its attainment is not dependent upon the morality of its pursuers, nor is it measured by Oakley 38 its outcomes. The dream is not an arbiter of meritocratic or moral justice but an amoral fantasy of unlimited mobility. A feat of speed which its believers and proponents only conflate with morality – a conflation that the dream does depend upon to reproduce but one that a reader should be wary of reproducing in their own reading of the novel. The dream portrayed in this novel is not a complete con but, in presenting a vision that is as alluringly glamorous as it is impossible, it possesses elements of the con. Here, the reader should be careful to avoid conning themselves. The dream as relayed by

Fitzgerald resembles the fiction of speedometer. It is a machine that translates an incredible complexity of movement and object relations into simply understood numbers and these numbers into a quickly read display. The dream, like Jay Gatsby, is a form of guiding truth made from lies and a form of lies made from reduced truth. The dream of self-madeness personified by Jay Gatsby creates, inhabits and is a paradoxical zone that challenges notions of authenticity, even as it presents these notions, through their witness Nick Carraway, without direct challenge, as indoctrinating facts. The relationship between these two characters and their competing concepts of truth brings into question the assumptions of isomorphism lurking behind any symbolization of the real. This fundamental question deepens when the reader, who must make most of the determinations relating to the truth of the events on scarce evidence, enters the novel. In the space between reality and illusion, in the sea below the thin bridge of isomorphism that links fiction with reality and stasis with speed, there is only a howling silence. There, the dangerous and alluring impossibility of the void. Its boundless potentialities calls its victims forward. In its noisy silences, total mobility is possible. In reality, speed has limits. When the dreamed speed of the void meets the real limits of objects, when the desires of Gatsby or Myrtle meet the normative limits of their society, when these characters jump into their illusions and their fiction meets the real, as it must, this encounter can only be translated as collision. At any speed, the dream wounds.

At the apex of its speed, the dream kills instantly. This trauma plants the seeds of judgments, distortions and lies. From them, the dream grows to kill again. The instantly killing collision expresses the fullest Oakley 39 attainment of the American dream. Like the car, the dream is less a mode of transportation than it is a machine for releasing the unconscious erotic desires of the driver. These desires can only reach a state of orgasm, of le petit mort, in friction, itself a form of collision. Only in trauma can these desires be discharged and realize their generative potential. Jay Gatsby must meet his limits and collide with them in order to even briefly fulfill his dream. The Death Car becomes the erotic site where Gatsby “pulled on the emergency brake” and Daisy, however briefly, finally falls into his lap (88). This realization of the dream, its brutal translation into reality, and the lies told about it, lead to his own death. According to the logic of the dream, it can be no other way. Just as the invention of the car birthed the shadow of its crash, the invention of the dream of self-realization created the shadow of self-annihilation. The apogee of the dream’s expression is not located only in perfect self-realization nor in simple self- annihilation but in the limit experience where self-realization becomes self-annihilation. A zone where these two states exist simultaneously as each other. A state expressed in Instant Death. In the limit experience that Gatsby personifies, there resides an unspeakable region of truth that unites trauma and epiphany in its witnesses’ inability to articulate this zone. Like a mirror, Jay Gatsby cannot actually be seen. Only the reflection is visible. These objects may be closer than they appear. The shadow made of light distorts and blinds. Here, in the American dream, the self-made self is only fully realized through its total annihilation. This obliterating collision is the destination. Before seeing the results of the collision, Nick says: “So we drove on towards death in through the cooling twilight” (84). Not only are the characters driving towards death, they are doing so in the liminal space of twilight – a time that is both day and night yet carries none of the optimism of its counterpart, the dawn. The air is not hot nor cold but cooling. The temperature is traveling on a road that, followed through a frictionless void to its own conclusion, would pass by the cold of mammalian death and terminate in the molecular stasis of absolute zero, thereby also annihilating itself at its limit – a temperature that is both superfluid and superconductive. Only the intervention of the real world and it progress around the sun can stop this Oakley 40 process of cooling. But Jay Gatsby is not beholden to these rules. He is a fictional representation that can travel to his very limits and this is exactly where Fitzgerald pushes him. In doing so, he shows that the American dream, even in its purest and most uncorrupted form, unbeholden to the moderating interventions of reality, must still meet its self-annihilating limit. The bloody scene that Nick witnesses, the results of the collision, do not show the failure of the dream, the corruption of it or the characters, nor does it show the impossibility of the dream’s attainment by corrupt characters. The collision shows what happens when the pure dream is attained by the pure dreamer. The collision shows how the

American dream is attained. The dream depends on death and trauma. The dream reaches the perfect fulfillment of its mobility in Instant Death. Like a flag only made visible by the violence of “the rocket’s red glare” and “bombs bursting in air”, the dream can only be seen in the apocalyptic light of collision (Key). The only honest response to its revelation is an epiphantic silence.

The Great Gatsby, read, not as a paean to the American dream or eulogy for its death by corruption, but as a simple unflattering description of the dream’s traumatic clockwork, can be reborn in the modern world as more than object of nostalgia but as a source of terrifying and valuable insights.

Treated this way, this novel explains much that Americans see, both on the news and in their everyday lives. It explains Rachael Dolezal, who, largely due to a traumatic childhood and informed by the pictures in National Geographic magazines, attempted to make herself into an African American woman and had a catastrophic impact on the very people she claims she sought to help by becoming

(Oluo). It maps her movement not as fluidity but as co-optive mobility. She travels through power relations. Her mobility is related to the total stasis of her personality and delusions, which only become more resolute and extreme as they are challenged. Through this novel, she can be understood as a car- crash. She is a very American hit and run. In her attempt to privatize a public zone of identity so that she could privately benefit from it, a reader of The Great Gatsby can see the inevitability of her traumatic and traumatizing collision with her mobility’s limit. The reader can see who was victimized Oakley 41 by her co-optive struggle. Not her but the people whose identity she sought to co-opt, whether they be

African American or, later in her progress, transgendered. One suspects that she should embrace silence and racial fluidity rather than mobility. The same can be said of Donald Trump. Here, is another self- created character, who, like Dolezal and Gatsby possesses elements of the career conman. He lies like he breathes, yet is completely static in his changeability. He cannot be altered or improved in his character. This is an undead situation that can be mistaken for honesty and one that, perhaps, makes the binary distinctions between truth and lies obsolete. He relates to words in a similar manner that

Gatsby’s books relate to truth. Trump functions as peculiar sort of vampire. He drains words of their meaning and assigns all the power of their meanings, without their living substance, to himself. He only uses words to form a protective haze of invidious and mercenary bullshit10. He too is mobile. He is a man whose entire career is a series of collisions that created his own replication at higher orders of technology -through print, television, reality television and internet- and through increasing magnitudes of power, eventually landing him in The White House where he now controls the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. When reading his slogan “Make America Great Again” one can not only hear the force

(make), nationalism (America), arrogance (Great) and radicalized nostalgia (Again) of the fascist

(Pussy Riot) but Gatsby’s most homicidal assertion: “Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously.

‘Why of course you can!’” (71). This is a process that this novel insists is not a corruption of America, nor an exception to its rules, but is instead the typical expression of very mobility fundamental to the

American dream. A mobility that will, one day, in attempting to return to the idealized past, meet its catastrophic limit11. The Great Gatsby shows and explains the environment that nurtured this creature.

The realm of social media where the total instant mobility of information has resulted, not in fluidity,

10 Here, “bullshit” is used in the technical rather than emotional sense in accord with Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition that identifies bullshit as information “produced without concern to the truth” (47) and the bullshitter as being “neither on the side of the true, nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose” (57). If the shoe fits . . . 11 God help us all. Oakley 42 but in endless micro-collisions between friends, family and strangers at ever increasing levels of technology and the almost absolute paralysis of beliefs that only move through digital voids towards their extremes. In this realm of total informational openness, people form filter bubbles and, when they don’t, their exposure to opposing information fails to open their their minds but, instead, only closes them further and makes them more extreme. Paradoxically:

“People who are exposed to messages that conflict with their own attitudes are prone to

counter-argue them using motivated reasoning, which accentuates perceived differences

between groups and increases their commitment to pre-existing beliefs.”12 (Bail, et al)

It further shows how the stasis of constitutional fundamentalism leads directly to the trauma of gun violence at ever increasing levels of technological reproduction. It explains why these traumatic incidents do not result in evidence based regulation but in higher gun sales. Why these traumatic incidents are so quickly forgotten by people but remembered in the machinery, just as America’s slavery and genocides and wars of aggression are quickly forgotten by the perpetrators but remembered in the segregated architecture of American cities, its ubiquitous carceral machinery and the gaudy tributes to its sacralized warrior class.13 The traumas are recalled by metal detectors over doors and armed security guards at the grocery stores. In stop and frisk. In endless drills and alerts. In classrooms taught by armed teachers. Through this lens of traumatic reproduction, one can see how the resulting

12 This study shows that Republicans are more inclined to engage in this process than Democrats. While the study only draws tentative conclusions regarding the reasons for this, for the purposes of this paper, it should be noted that they are the party with the stronger self-conception as traditionalists. This perceived traditionalism could perhaps be linked to concepts of extreme political stasis in response to total informational mobility. It may also illustrate that the two parties are not so much opposites as they are extreme (Republican) and moderate (Democrat) versions of the same ideas and that this technology more easily influences people towards the extremes than towards moderation. 13 Watching the civic ceremonies around the military, who are believed to redeem American freedom through the sacrifice of whole other nations, one can easily understand the “imperial death drive” of the exceptionalist Aztec empire which nourished its gods “in the form of freshly harvested human hearts” (Flannigan). Oakley 43 storm of lies after each mass murder of children causes gun advocates to dehumanize their living victims as “crisis actors” (Wilson). Before this current iteration, in saying things like “All Lives

Splatter” and using words like “terrorist” combined with outlandish conspiracy theories, many of these same people dehumanized and puppetized Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock protesters, in order to mechanize their own supporters (Graber). By doing so, they helped lay the groundwork for the vehicular murder of a protester in Charlottesville. The powerful dehumanize others as puppets, so that they can, in the same manner that Tom mechanized Wilson, mechanize their own supporters into acts of violence. Being thus mechanized is easier than facing the bland horror of their own, unheroic, selves – a humble condition that the dream has taught them is an unacceptable indicator of weakness and poor moral fortitude. The dream has taught them that this condition can be remedied by violence against those weaker than them. It further shows how the honest and hurt can most powerfully respond to these traumas. It predicts the presence and power of the epiphantic silence of Parkland shooting victim and survivor, Emma Gonzalez (Washington Post). This young woman said more about the daily trauma of

American life with manifest unutterbility than many older people have said with their endless thoughts.

She moved closer to the sublime with silence than any politician has with their useless prayers. In the empathy and mercy she generated in those impossible six minutes, she illustrated the difference between a productive silence and a simply immobile one. Words may be viewed as containers for meanings. Sometimes, the malevolent drain them of meaning to suit their own purposes. Other times, the meanings overflow their containers and words are lost. Trauma is one such case. Epiphany is another. Sometimes, words must simply be withdrawn. Service, even lip-service, must be withdrawn.

Labor must join this withdrawal in a general strike against mobility itself. The noisy sites of capitalist self-realization must be vacated and left unstaffed so that alternate modes of being can be born in the resulting quiet. The mouse costumes of the casino must be emptied of humans so that better Americans may be born. The roadways must be shut down so that relationships other than collisions may be Oakley 44 allowed to generate. Until that strike against this pernicious American fantasy happens, until words, actions and belief, co-operation and consent are totally withdrawn from this destructive bullshit, the

American dream, a mobility bred in these traumas, an endless outcome of its own endless atomizing violence, only visible by the blinding light of colliding cyborgs, will continue to exist and reproduce.

The dream is an alluring void. Only silence, a fluid, as large as the dream itself, can meet and drown this unstoppable force. The Great Gatsby shows us that neither this dream nor its consequences are new. The dream is not corrupted. It lives as it always has. The catastrophic stakes of the dream’s existence will not get lower. Fed with blood, the vampire only grows hungrier. The stakes only grow higher. “This is America” (Glover), “the home of the brave” and the land of Chuck E. Cheese. It’s time to take a knee (Reid). It’s time for drowning silence. Instead, we will have collisions.

In summary, Fitzgerald asks ‘what happens when an unstoppable force meats an unmovable object?’ and discovers that the answer is reproductive carnage. What appears on the surface of the book to be simple casual relationships between the characters and the dream are instead generative paradoxes in which a quality is born from its opposite. In conclusion, the American dream is portrayed in The

Great Gatsby as the wounded and wounding shadow of The Self-Made Man, Jay Gatsby, in inevitable collision with the limits of bright possibility. The American dream either allows a belief in freedom at the expense of its realization or the potential of freedom at the expense of its dream. However the

American dream is approached, it can only be fully realized in the silence of instantaneous death. Oakley 45

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I. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby affords an understanding of the American dream as an inevitable and reproductive trauma rooted in the self-made mythology and mobility of Jay Gatsby.

II. First, the American dream is a mess of illusions, advertisement and self-flattery directed towards the goal of becoming an amnesiac.

III. Second, Jay Gatsby has a troubled relationship with reality but, perhaps, not one to truth.

IV. Third, The Great Gatsby, Citizen Kane and The Story of Chuck E. Cheese all show that trauma is central to the American dream but differ in their assessment of its expressions and possibilities.

V. Fourth, does this book say that the dream is being fulfilled through trauma or that trauma is the failure of the dream?

VI. In conclusion, the American dream is portrayed in The Great Gatsby as the wounded and wounding shadow of The Self-Made Man, Jay Gatsby, in inevitable collision with the limits of bright possibility.