Gatsby and the Loss of Time
“You can’t repeat the past,” says the home-spun, somewhat literary Nick Carraway, last lingering mote in the glittering tide of Gatsby’s guests. We of the enchanted chorus, dazzled by the understanding, believing smile, can only feel a yearning in the soul assuaged by Gatsby’s eternally hopeful riposte: “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can.” Gatsby’s words bear all the promise of the American dream, the hope that through wealth our labor may place us beyond the reach of time, while Nick’s warning sounds that skeptical note which forever haunts our shores.
In the easy friendship that exists between the two men, Midwesterners both and veterans of the Great War, there is perhaps some shared recognition that the only thing that separates them is money, a thing simple enough to acquire in America, whether by the chances of birth or the dispensations of the market or the old-fashioned toils of fraud, violence, and traffic in controlled substances. Unlike Gatsby and his East Egg counterpart, Tom Buchanan, Nick moves always in the warm, golden penumbra of wealth. He enjoys its benefits, but its possession eludes him—perhaps, we could say, spares him—and although Gatsby holds out those connections which could usher Nick into the ranks of the rich, he remains apart, ever within and without.
Nick’s position allows both Gatsby and Tom to extend to him a brand of paternalism which ever seeks filial approval. Tom must demonstrate his mastery of the polo pony just as he must tout his conquests among the commoners, the Georges and Myrtles gliding along in their world of ash. Gatsby needs his Montenegrin decoration as much as his trove of unread books. Each man confesses himself to Nick and seeks absolution in his eyes.
Through the confessional act, Tom and Gatsby both rove in pursuit of the past. Gatsby would return to the Daisy of five years past. Tom would walk with her again at Kapiolani. Each present acquisition, each moment of advancement, takes its value in its service to a quest for an irretrievable excellence—whether of a golden age on the football field or an inaccessible enclave of Southern wealth and the money-tongued beauty it begot.
As witness to these broken-hearted schemes and seductions, Nick can only offer his solid, unrelenting assessment of the unrepeatable past into which we are inexorably borne. Uncomfortable prophet, less comfortable confessor, he remains a sign of contradiction to his cousin and to his friend. It takes Myrtle’s death to prompt his judgment upon Gatsby and the Buchanans, and even then his wrath can only break upon Gatsby’s undying hope and Tom and Daisy’s vast carelessness.
There is perhaps in this carelessness a hint at Fitzgerald’s genealogy of sin. For carelessness is the sin of Achilles. Homer describes him, at least, as a-kedos when in Book 9 of the Iliad Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax come to call him back to battle. We find in this one of the roots of our understanding of acedia, that malaise which St. Thomas Aquinas describes as sadness over spiritual good. Achilles’ sadness involves his repudiation of his particular excellence, though in the intensity of his being, in his demi-divinity, he can retreat into that careless self-soothing of the lyre. Likewise Tom and Daisy, in the vast wealth whereby they become like gods, may simply pack up and leave, spending themselves in pursuit of that by-gone empyrean past. We sense in their departure a kind of doom to wander the earth, the kind of doom we might have imagined for Achilles, had he decided to withdraw to the fields of Peleus.
Gatsby, for his part, spares no expense in the creation of a new, ebullient present in which the ravages of half a decade will fall away and the golden girl of Louisville find the poor military man returned from windy Ilium with riches and kingship. In his pursuit, Gatsby recalls the Augustinian description of time as nothing but a distension of the mind, the triply negative motion of the self into the no-more of the past and the not-yet of the future, unable to rest in the non-extended moment of the present. Gatsby takes no joy in his carnival because its queen lives forever in another time.
Gatsby falls prey, too, to a kind of spatial distension. While his presence is everywhere felt, he himself is rarely to be found in his own house. Chicago is calling. Philadelphia is calling. The green light is winking across the Sound. At no moment is Gatsby at home, at rest, in his Norman monument. When Daisy is there, she draws with her the specters of Tom, of her child, of East Egg propriety and the arrangements of American money.
We are told that Gatsby has more money than God. We do not doubt it. And yet the power of his wealth runs always into the irrefutable facts of husbands and daughters and marriages in which the past is swallowed up. The sacrifices he offers at the pool-side altar of the American Moloch follow each other, one after the other, in the ineluctable procession of time, until in the end, when enough people and things have been gathered up and again cast aside, Gatsby himself must become the holocaust. Even then the world continues its progress toward the light of distant stars, and Daisy and Tom proceed across the ocean or the plain after the irrecoverable game, praying for beauty and foolishness for their daughter.
Gatsby believes in the future. He trusts in that future where the past will be present again. The present escapes him, and so he falls from the glory he has gathered to himself. Like Lucifer in the moment of his creation, he takes no joy in the wonder of his own being or of Being itself.
In Gatsby we find the measure of our American dream. Prosperity, security, independence, all those elements of freedom founded on wealth must founder upon the rhythm of time, a rhythm which invites us into the mystery of being while warning us that each encounter with being will change what we are. Daisy the mother cannot become again the debutante. Mr. Buchanan the polo player cannot become the football star. Gatsby the god cannot put on his soldier’s uniform again. And Nick Carraway cannot leave care behind on the shore of the Atlantic, that green inviolate breast of the new world where once we dreamed paradise might grow again, but must bear back to the Midwest the voices of those ghosts who wandered the world, and wander still, in search of lost time.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings. His new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by sculptor Timothy Schmalz, was published this year in celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.