F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" and the Imagination of Wonder Author(s): Giles Gunn Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 41, No. 2, (Jun., 1973), pp. 171- 183 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1461411 Accessed: 02/05/2008 16:14 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org F. Scott Fitzgerald'sGatsby and the Imaginationof Wonder GILES GUNN T HERE are certain occasions,I believe, when it is useful, even necessary, to formulatean interpretationof a book which attemptsto explain why we keep coming back to it, to suspend the usual critical apparatusand simply try to concentrateon those details, selective as they may sometimes be, which shape or determinethe way a particularbook reads us as well as we read it. I regardthis, in fact, as an indispensablepart of the critic'stotal job of work. For criticismdoes nor end with explication,it only begins there. It ends, if at all, only with an account of how specific books, writers or traditions somehow re- order the mental, emotional and spiritual furnitureof our lives, somehow move us, if ever so slightly, to accept new ideas of order, fresh reconceptionsof what will suffice. In this, one of its furthestreaches, the act of criticism is very like the act of love: The critic finds himself in the paradoxicalsituation of seeking to preserveand enhance the memoryof something he cherishesonly to discover in the process that this response has been compelled almost from the very be- ginning by an odd sense that he is merely reciprocatingin kind. Hence, as much as the critic should strive, in Matthew Arnold'swords, "to see the object as in itself it really is," there comes a point in his negotiationswith certain liter- ary texts when his comprehensioninevitably will, and necessarilyshould, be de- termined as well by how the object sees him.' Though few may wish to go quite as far as Leslie Fiedler, there is still a certain warrant to his confession that "the truth one tries to tell about literatureis finally [no] different from the truth one tries to tell about the indignities and rewardsof being the kind of man one is-an American,let's say, in the second half of the twentieth century,learn- ing to read his country'sbooks."2 What Fiedler is suggesting has been beauti- 1Certainpassages in this and the following paragraphare drawnfrom my "Reflections on My Ideal Critic,"Criterion, II (Spring, 1972), pp. 18-22, which I here use with the permissionof the editors. aLeslie Fiedler,Love and Death in the AmericanNovel (New York: CriterionBooks, 1960), p. xiv. GILESB. GUNN (Ph.D., Chicago) is AssistantProfessor of Religion and Literature in The Divinity Schooland the Departmentof English at The Universityof Chicago. He has recentlyedited a volume of criticalessays entitled Literatureand Religion. A shorter version of this essay was presentedas a paper at the annual meeting of the AAR, held in connectionwith the InternationalCongress on Religion, Los Angeles, September,1972. Copyright? 1973, by AmericanAcademy of Religion 172 GILES GUNN fully expressed by Erich Heller where he claims that the ultimate business of the student,teacher and critic of literatureis "not the avoidanceof subjectivity, but its purification;not the shunningof what is disputable,but the cleansingand deepening of the dispute." To this degree, Heller maintains,there are no meth- ods which completelyand satisfactorilycomprehend the critic'ssubject matter- "only methods, perhaps,that produce the intellectual pressureand temperature in which perception crystallizesinto conviction and learning into a sense of value."3 This, I would argue, is how the critic tries, if he ever really can, to improve the quality of life. By assessingthe actual in light of its own potential, that is, by seeking to comprehenda work not only for what it is in and of itself but also in terms of what it merely suggests but still elicits, he struggles not only to preservea sense of value but also to increaseit. Yet in a culture characterized chiefly by what Richard Gilman has described-and far too sanguinely, I be- lieve-as a confusion of realms,he can afford no illusions about the heavy odds stackedagainst him. His position, like that of the writer'sfor whom he serves as an advocate,is always an embattledone; for he knows, or should know, that in the realm of cultural and spiritual values, as T. S. Eliot once remarked,"we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph."4 It is no accidentthat F. Scott Fitzgeraldcould have said very nearlythe same thing. For The Great Gatsby is nothing if not an attempt to keep something alive in the face of a certain conviction that it has no possibility of ultimate tri- umph. What is at issue, of course, is not the survival of Gatsby himself nor even the substanceof his vision; the one is fatallyvulnerable, the other hopelessly naive and corruptible. The novel is rather about the energy and quality of the imaginationwhich propels both Gatsbyand his vision, and which endures,if at all, only in the narrativestrategies of Fitzgerald'sart. Viewed as a story about Gatsby and his dream, the novel is merely an elegy, or, more specifically, a threnodysung over the death of one of our culture'smost affecting but flawed innocents. Viewed instead as a story about Gatsby'spoetry of desire, his imag- ination of wonder, the novel is an act of historical repossession,an attempt to release and preserve some of the unspent potential of our spiritual heritage as Americans. I Nonetheless, there is no blinking the distance which separatesmost of us from F. Scott Fitzgerald'sThe Great Gatsbyand what I would call "the Imagina- tion of Wonder." For in a world bounded on the one side by the agonies and 'Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind; Essays in Modern German Literatureand Thought (MeridianBooks Edition;Cleveland: World Publishing Company,1959), p. ix. 4T. S. Eliot as quoted by F. O. Matthiessen,The Achievementof T. S. Eliot; An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1935), p. 6. GATSBY AND THE IMAGINATION OF WONDER 173 atrocitiesof Vietnam or the Americanurban ghetto and on the other by televised moon landings,I would suggest that we wonder, if at all, only about what is left to wonder at or wonder about. The imaginativecapacity for wonder-whether it takes the primitive form of awed and passive astonishmentbefore the un- expected,or the more sophisticatedform of active, imaginativepenetration into modes of being other than our own-requires a special openness to the unantic- ipated, a certain susceptibilityto surprise,and most of us can no longer allow ourselves to be so vulnerable. Instead of remaining receptive to novelty, we have become rotten-ripewith knowingness as the imagination'slast defense in a world which, if experienceddirectly, might stun us back into the Stone Age. Having innured ourselves to strangenesswith a surfeit of information,we are all but dead to those startling confrontationswith otherness which have tradi- tionally given shape and substanceto the literaturewhich has createdas well as reflected our national experience. The reason is not hard to find. In the shadows of a possible nuclearholo- caust where we have now lived for more than a quarterof a century,reality takes on proportionsof enormity simply too vast, too horrific, for the imaginationto grasp. What we have made, what in fact we have it in our power to do, is now beyond our capacity to dream. Suddenly there seem to be no "others"more monstrous than the ones which, if MarshallLuhan is to be believed, are mere extensions of ourselves,and this is something beyond the compass of even our darkest,our most diabolic, night thoughts. Yet when morning finally comes and the shadows of disaster lift at least high enough for us to see the landscapeabout us, all we are still likely to per- ceive is what we have put there ourselves,something which in the daylight looks more like a metropolisthan a mushroomcloud, but which, as Thomas Pynchon has suggestedin The Cryingof Lot 49, is less identifiableas a city "thana group- ing of concepts-census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway." To be sure, even in a world whose most discernibleand meaningful patterns suggest nothing so much as the printed circuitryof a transistorradio, one may still, like Oedipa Maas, discover what appears to be "a heiroglyphic sense of concealedmeaning, ... an intent to communicate." The problem is that when the environmenthas become but an extension of man himself, there is no way of telling the difference between what Robert Frost calls "counter-love,original response"and "ourown voice back in copy speech." Thus one is left yearning, as Americans have always been, for "a world elsewhere"5beyond the self, yet suspiciousthat whatever traces of it are left constitute evidence of nothing but our own paranoia.