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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2015
“‘Can't Repeat the Past?’ Gatsby and the American Dream at Mid-Century” analyzes The Great Gatsby's Cold War rise to explain its subsequent canonization. The essay uses Ernst Bloch's theory of disappointment and utopianism to dwell, in particular, upon the novel's representations of the American Dream as intimately related to failure and the promise of the New World. Bloch's insistence that disappointment is embedded within utopian formations suggests that the novel's tragic take on Gatsby's dreams is the key to its mid-century fame and its continued cultural appeal.
1 “Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44,” Obituaries, New York Times, 23 Dec. 1940; Mencken, H. L., “As H. L. M. Sees It,” in Bryer, Jackson R., ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, New York: Burt Franklin, 1978, 211–14, 211Google Scholar. Despite his scathing review, Mencken expressed great admiration for the quality of Fitzgerald's writing.
2 Charles Poore, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, 27 Dec. 1951, 116; M. L. Rosenthal, “Poets Reappraised,” New York Times, 28 Nov. 1965. The posthumous publication of Fitzgerald's letters and essay in the volume The Crack Up, also a best seller, similarly facilitated Fitzgerald's Cold War rise to fame. However, these best-seller lists should not be seen as a definitive index of a work's popularity. At least in certain cases, the FBI manipulated such lists by buying certain editions in bulk in order to boost their sales and make them seem more popular. Robins, Natalie S., Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression (New York: W. Morrow, 1992), 17Google Scholar.
3 Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950), 251Google Scholar.
4 In addition to its relation to futurity, the term “utopia” also has geographic implications that bear upon the novel. Coined by Thomas More and literally translating as “no place,” the concept of utopia has always been intimately bound to the landscape and encoded an element of impossibility.
5 For the sake of convention, I have adopted the colloquial “American” in my discussion of the American Dream. Otherwise, I employ the phrase “United States” and “US” unless I use the term to imply a hemispheric sense of Americanism indebted to New World exploration.
6 Decker, Jeffrey Louis's Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)Google Scholar is a comprehensive and excellent source for the various applications and understandings of the idea of American possibility.
7 Bloch, Ernst, “Something's Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Block and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1–17Google Scholar, 12–16.
8 In what follows, I track mostly professional responses to the novel in the Cold War years. There remains further work to be done, though, on the ways that the lay reading public conceived of the novel during this period.
9 Graham, T. Austin, “The Literary Soundtrack, or, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Heard and Unheard Melodies,” American Literary History, 21, 3 (1 Sept. 2009), 518–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 537–39.
10 Goldsmith, Meredith, “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby,” Modern Fiction Studies, 49, 3 (2003), 443–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 443–44.
11 Michaels, Walter Benn, “The Vanishing American,” American Literary History, 2, 2 (Summer 1990), 220–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Decker, Jeffrey Louis, “Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28, 1 (Autumn 1994), 52–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Decker, Made in America. As Katznelson, Ira's study of the boom in college admissions during the Cold War When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005)Google Scholar reminds us, in the context of the US, discussions of race are almost always about class, and vice versa.
12 Fiedler, Leslie A., Waiting for the End (New York: Stein and Day, 1964)Google Scholar.
13 Lehan's essay links the failure of Gatsby's American Dream to European conquerors' epistolary reports of the New World as an Edenic landscape ripe with possibility. Yet the wanton violence and greed that attended the colonization of this idyllic imaginary led to its unraveling. In keeping with the title of the collection, Lehan thus creates a distinction between a pure, theoretical version of the American Dream and its material implementation as a nightmare. Lehan, Richard, “Focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: The Nowhere Hero,” in Madden, David, ed., American Dreams, American Nightmares (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 106–14Google Scholar, 12.
14 Mallios, Peter, “Undiscovering the Country: Conrad, Fitzgerald, and Meta-national Form,” Modern Fiction Studies, 47, 2 (2001), 356–90, 384CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Godden, Richard, “The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn,” Journal of American Studies, 16, 3 (Dec. 1992), 343–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 360.
16 Will, Barbara, “The Great Gatsby and the Obscene Word,” College Literature, 32, 4 (Fall 2005), 125–44, 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 151Google Scholar. As Katznelson, Ira's study of the boom in college admissions during the Cold War When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005)Google Scholar demonstrates, in the context of the US discussions of race and class frequently overlap, without necessarily converging.
18 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6Google Scholar.
19 Isabel Paterson, “Up to the Minute,” in Bryer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 200–2, 202. See, for instance, Carl Van Vechten's 20 May 1925 essay in The Nation, “Fitzgerald on the March.” Similarly, in a characteristic review from 1925, Isabel Paterson called Gatsby “a book of the season only” and even the work's defenders frequently praised Gatsby by comparing it to the novels of Henry James, an expatriate writer with an oblique relation to the putative American spirit. Beuka, Robert, American Icon: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), 1–13Google Scholar.
20 Buell, Lawrence, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Frederick, John T., “The Quarter Books,” College English, 9, 8 (May 1948), 407–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 407.
22 Friedman, Albert B., “The Literary Experience of High School Seniors and College Freshman,” English Journal, 44, 9 (Dec. 1955), 521–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 523.
23 Crosby, Harry H., “Recruiting English Majors at the State University of Iowa,” College Composition and Communication, 7, 2 (May 1956), 84–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Overton, Harvey, “Eleventh-Grade Electives: They Provide for Different Tastes and Abilities,” English Journal, 44, 4 (April 1955), 211–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 For more on the US government's covert investment in the arts see Cole, John Young, “The Armed Services Editions: An Introduction,” in Cole, Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions (Washington: The Library of Congress, 1984), 1–12Google Scholar; Culleton, Claire A., Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover's Manipulation of Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Downs, Donald A., “Government Censorship since 1945,” in Nord, David Paul, Rubin, Joan Shelley, and Schudson, Michael, eds., The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 135–50Google Scholar; Mitgang, Herbert, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War against America's Greatest Authors (New York: Primus/D.I. Fine Books, 1996)Google Scholar; Robins, Alien Ink; Schaub, Thomas H., American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Saunders, Frances Stonor, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Stecopoulos, Harry, Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Wilford, Hugh, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Winks, Robin W., Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: Morrow, 1987)Google Scholar.
25 “Armed Services Edition Books/The Art of Manliness,” at http://artofmanliness.com/2011/02/20/literature-on-the-frontlines-the-history-of-armed-services-edition-books, accessed 25 Jan. 2013.
26 Ibid.
27 Luey, Beth, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in Nord, David Paul, Rubin, Joan Shelley, and Schudson, Michael, eds., The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 29–54Google Scholar, 36. This sanguine take on the increasing diversity of the canon, though, has its downside, since many book historians see this shift as one of the contributors to the decline of the black press in the US. It is also worth noting that responding to a new market is not the same thing as political activism or change.
28 Harry Golden, “Only in America,” Chicago Defender, 9 Jan. 1971; Golden, “Only in America,” Chicago Defender, 22 Dec. 1969; Golden, “Only in America: A Removable Feast,” Chicago Defender, 5 Aug. 1964; “Great Gatsby Is Here: Cleo Johnson Shows New Look,” Chicago Defender, 31 Oct. 1973; “More of the Great Gatsby Look,” Chicago Defender, 31 Oct. 1973.
29 Interest in the American Dream unites critics inside and outside the academy otherwise frequently at odds, such as Trilling, The Liberal Imagination; Weir, Charles Jr., “An Invite with Gilded Edges,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 20, 1 (Winter 1944), 100–13Google Scholar; Wilson, Edmund, Memoirs of Hecate County (New York: L. C. Page, 1959)Google Scholar; Floyd Watkins, “Fitzgerald's Jay Gatz and Young Ben Franklin,” repr. in Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2000), 117–21Google Scholar; and Wanning, Andrews, “F and His Brethren,” in Kazin, Alfred, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (New York: Collier, 1967), 161–69Google Scholar.
30 David Dempsey, “Literature between Two World Wars – and a Glance Ahead,” New York Times, 18 Aug. 1946, 121.
31 For interwar sources on this theme see Fanny Butcher, “New Fitzgerald Book Proves He's Really a Writer,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 April 1925, 11; Edwin Clark, “Scott Fitzgerald Looks into Middle Age,” New York Times Book Review, 19 April 1925, 15; H. L. Mencken “Scott Fitzgerald and His Work,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 May 1925, E1; and Burt Struthers, “These Pregnant Thirties,” North American Review, June 1931, 484–91.
32 See Berryman, John, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Kenyon Review, 8, 1 (Winter 1946), 103–12Google Scholar; Brooks, Cleanth, “The New Criticism,” Sewanee Review, 87, 4 (Fall 1979), 592–607Google Scholar; Burnham, Tom, “The Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg: A Re-examination of ‘The Great Gatsby’” College English, 14, 1 (Oct. 1952), 7–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dempsey, “Literature between Two World Wars”; Friedman, Norman, “Forms of the Plot,” Journal of General Education, 8, 4 (July 1955), 241–53Google Scholar; Foster, Richard, “Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 1, 3 (Spring 1968), 219–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; George Mayberry, “Some Authors Never Really Die,” New York Times, 17 June 1951, BR3; Ornstein, Robert, “Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and West,” College English, 18, 3 (Dec. 1956), 139–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Budd Schulberg, “The Final Triumph Is Fitzgerald's,” New York Times, 28 Jan. 1951, Section 7; O'Connor, William Van, “The Novel as a Social Document,” American Quarterly, 4, 2 (Summer 1952), 169–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Watkins, Floyd C., “Fitzgerald's Jay Gatz and Young Ben Franklin,” New England Quarterly, 27, 2 (June 1954), 249–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Mizener, Arthur, “Scott Fitzgerald and the Imaginative Possession of American Life,” Sewanee Review, 54, 1 (March 1946), 66–86Google Scholar, 79.
34 Adams, James Truslow, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 214–15Google Scholar.
35 Troy, William, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure,” in Kazin, Alfred, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1951), 187–93Google Scholar. The phrase “authority of failure” was one that Fitzgerald himself used to describe his career in relation to Ernest Hemingway's.
36 Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, trans. Plaice, Neville, Plaice, Stephen, and Knight, Paul (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 1104–9Google Scholar.
37 Ibid., 1148–82.
38 Ibid., 1181–82.
39 Ibid., 1171–73.
40 Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 159Google Scholar.
41 Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 3Google Scholar
42 Ibid., 9.
43 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 232.
44 Mizener, “Scott Fitzgerald and the Imaginative Possession of American Life,” 79.
45 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 59.
46 Ibid., 139.
47 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 237.
48 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 13.
49 Horowitz, Daniel, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 1–9Google Scholar.
50 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 35.
51 Ibid., 126.
52 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1150.
53 Adams, The Epic of America, 174, original emphasis.
54 Ornstein, “Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and West,” 140.
55 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 137.
56 Ibid., 86.
57 Ibid., 119.
58 Ibid., 103.
59 Ibid., 140.
60 Ibid., 141.
61 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 9.