| June 6, 1999 | The 'Absolution' of Jay Gatsby |
|
This was the eighth time I've read "Gatsby" and maybe the fifth time I've read the short story "Absolution" which Fitzgerald said was a discarded beginning to "Gatsby." I love F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's so perceptive about class in America. (And he wasn't even a "poor boy" by any means -- just middle class, though painfully aware of it due to his obsession with winning over wealthy society girls, particularly Zelda.) Fitzgerald gets Gatsby's feelings about Daisy *so right*. It probably helped that he had gone through a similar emotional and financial peril when trying to win Zelda's hand in marriage while just a struggling young writer. Say what you will about the evils of money - here's a passage that really sums up its power: "Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor." And Fitzgerald's take on religion is darkly hysterical. In "Gatsby" when the gas station guy Wilson (whose wife has just been run down and killed) is in shock and says "God sees everything," it is perfect that he is referring to the gigantic eyes on a billboard advertisement. Speaking of religious imagery, I kind of regret that Fitzgerald's short story "Absolution" was severed from the book. I prfer reading it in order as an actual prologue to "Gatsby." It is damn creepy and very good. A young blue collar Catholic boy (apparently a young Jay Gatsby) goes to his priest to confess some prurient thoughts. During his conversation with the priest, it seems that the priest is a bit crazy with potential pedophiliac tendencies. The most darkly amusing part has to be when, after hearing the boy's long-winded confession, the priest impatiently commands the worried boy: "Please listen to me! Stop worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith." As he goes off on an odd tangent that makes the boy uncomfortable the priest's gorgeously irreverent advice to the young boy is: "When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering. The thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then things go glimmering. The priest also tells the boy: "Well, go and see an amusement park. It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place - under dark trees. you'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and the smell of peanuts -- and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon - like a big yellow lantern on a pole." After hearing the priest's speech, the boy concludes, "There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God." As the story closes, we pan over the stilted sensual imagery of the mid-western Swede town out the church window. Labels: book, fitzgerald, gatsby, reading posted by Jess Barron @ 8:08 PM 
|
<< Home