Style: Tuning in to Conversation in the Novel: Gatsby and the Dynamics of Dialogue

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Tuning in to Conversation in the Novel: Gatsby and the Dynamics of Dialogue - Critical Essay

Dan Coleman

I decided to play football, to smoke, to go to college, to do all sorts of irrelevant things that had nothing to do with the real business of life, which, of course, was the proper mixture of description and dialogue in the short story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Who's Who--and Why"

Some talk has an obvious meaning and nothing more, he said, and some, often unbeknownst to the talker, has at least one other meaning and sometimes several other meanings lurking around inside its obvious meaning. [...] Everything depended, he said, on how talk was interpreted, and not everybody was able to interpret it.

Joseph Mitchell, "Joe Gould's Secret"

To the degree that readers of the novel have listened for the sound of the narrator's voice, they have turned a deaf ear to all those other kinds of talk that makes novels novels. This widespread bias makes a certain kind of historical sense: developed through the close reading of poetry, the methods of formalist criticism have always worked best on texts distinguished by a verbal purity typically associated with the traditional lyric. Yet, by treating novels like poems in order to read them more closely, most formalist criticism has slighted the Novel's distinctively messy, mongrel quality, its capacity to represent what Bakhtin calls "the real business of life" by "employing on the plane of a single work discourses of various types, with all their expressive capacities intact" (200). [1]

The impact of this selective attention becomes clear when one considers how rarely critics choose to explicate an excerpt from a novel that includes characters speaking to one another. Close readings almost always analyze passages of narration, not of dialogue. As David Lodge points out, "When [...] we take what is deemed to be a representative passage (of a novel...], we invariably choose a passage of narrative description that is either authorial, or focalized through a character with whom the implied author is in sympathy" (76). But novels, as Lodge argues, are full of what he said and she said, as well as a range of other discourses that intermingle with the speech of the characters--and a critical method that would do justice to novels should be able to account for the ways in which they are "full of other people's words" (After Bakhtin 200).

In illustrating such an approach, this essay will focus on The Great Gatsby, a novel famous for the lyrical splendor created by its narrator's voice. In the memory of many of its readers, Gatsby exists as a series of magnificent descriptions: a green light glimmering across the bay, the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg hovering over a valley of ashes, the colors of silk shirts falling. Few readers remember what Daisy says or the way Myrtle talks. Gats by, then, would seem to be the kind of novel that would lose very little from being treated as "poetic" prose. Yet, to the same degree that we concentrate on the sound of Nick's transcendent narration--"a tuning fork [...] struck upon a star"--we have trouble hearing the almost-as-thrilling inflections of Daisy's banter, the no-nonsense tone of Tom's manner of speaking, and the flatly prosaic note sounded by the smallest of Myrtle's small talk (117).

In his Notebooks, Fitzgerald offers us an invitation to reconsider our critical method, to broaden our sense of how much the novel can hold: "There never was a good biography of a good novelist," he writes. "There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good" (1037). [2] By insisting that there could not be a unitary author behind a good novel, Fitzgerald suggests that there could not be a single, stable narrative voice within it. In so doing, Fitzgerald points us toward a kind of reading that could better comprehend the novel's range of voices.

This sense of the "many people" that good novelists are made of seems related to Fitzgerald's fascination with dialogue, the way that characters (and people) speak to each other. Sharply attuned to the talk going on around him, Fitzgerald reminds himself, in his Notebooks, to "listen for conversation style a Ia Joyce" (1016). In another entry, he reveals an acute sensitivity to trends in movie dialogue that seems, in this instance, to have been the source for one of Fitzgerald's "Pat Hobby" stories: "Each year there is always one line worked to ad nauseum limits by scenario hacks. Last year it was 'right behind the eight ball.' This year it is 'boil some hot water--lots of it.' This is used in all accident scenes. I snicker now when I hear it--it occurred in Stanley and Livingston" (2049). Fitzgerald's narrators seem similarly interested in how people talk:

I'd like to hear what those two little girls are saying to their father. Not exactly what they're saying but whether the words float or submerge, how their mouths shut when they've finished speaking. Just a matter of rhythm. ("The Lost Decade" 749)

[S]ome Americans were saying good-by in voices that mimicked the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub. (Tender 95-96)

"Our typical remark is a very doubtful [']Well, I don't know[']. [...] For the British it's 'Extraordinary'--a stupefaction toward something not understood--but it disposed of, for their ends at least."

"For the French i's [sic] 'Eh, voila!"' said Abe.

"Exactly. A point proved, an exposition made."

This doesn't sound real, but I'm sure that's what we said--I talk in a rather cracked bookish voice, for instance, with really quite well balanced sentences. (Notebooks 89)

For the most part, Fitzgerald seems interested in dialogue as a way of creating characters. Thus he warns Ernest Hemingway to "beware Conrad rythyms [sic] in direct quotation from characters especially if you're pointing a single phrase and making a man live by it" (Life 149). In the same vein, Fitzgerald describes in his Notebooks how a difference in real-life conversational styles might be used to mark a fictional character's change over time:

Develop this: Difference in conversation between Gerald Murphy and Tommy Hitchcock. Tommy doesn't answer foolish questions or trivial questions--Gerald on the contrary, in spite of what he says about the omnipresence of bores, contrives always a little arpeggio of grace which he uses as a bridge so that no matter what is said to him he fills in the gap between the graciousness and his own talents of wit and delicacy. Trace a character who once was like Gerald and who now tends toward Tommy Hitchcock's impatience with fools. (2005)

But Fitzgerald is far from unaware of the ways in which "what gets done conversationally is very much more than what actually gets said" (Toolan 276). It is precisely this sensitivity to dialogue's "doing" that enables the narrator of Tender is the Night to describe how Nicole Diver speaks without ever mentioning what she's talking about: "she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself--then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever" (34).

Yet the few existing analyses of dialogue in fiction typically lack this awareness. By confining their analyses to what gets said in conversation, they neglect what gets done. For example, in the only book-length treatment of the subject, Norman Page studies the speech of characters in a way that allows him to explore areas of the novel rarely visited by critics. He fails to adapt his approach however, to the particular demands of this new territory. As Deirdre Burton points out, Page treats fictional dialogue as though it were unrelated to real-world conversation. "When it comes to actual concrete analyses of text," says Burton, Page "concentrates exclusively on represented speech as an element of the prose, and emphasizes its formal relationships with the other prose elements of the novel rather than its relationship with the 'speech of real life.' Accordingly, he analyses it in terms of lexis, syntax and orthographic conventions" (7). In other words, Page treats speech in the novel as though it were no di fferent in kind than the other discourses (e.g., narrative description) of which novels are made. A more powerful approach, Burton suggests, would recognize the close relationship between the way that characters speak inside of novels and the way that people speak outside of them.

Fitzgerald criticism suffers from the same limitation. In one of the only existing studies of Fitzgerald's use of dialogue, [3] F. H. Langman describes how the characters at Myrtle's party are differentiated by the ways they speak:

Exemplified here is an appreciation of language as an index to sensibility: it is not simply that Fitzgerald economically suggests the accent and idiom of different social classes, he also uses these things to bring out the differences of feeling and perception between different speakers. (54)

By studying how "language" functions as an "index to sensibility," however, Langman mistreats the material he is studying: characters don't speak in language, per se; they talk to each other in questions and answers, assertions and replies. Characters, like people, speak with words directed towards particular audiences, in specific situations, for certain reasons. The words they say draw meaning not only from their relationships to the words surrounding them in language, but also from the changing roles they play within an ongoing conversation--roles that may have little to do with literal definitions of the words. In his analysis of how their respective idiolects identify individual characters--how, for instance, Myrtle's way of talking offers us "glimpses into the dizzy shallows of her mind"--Langman attends only to what characters say and how they say it (54). Under this treatment, Myrtle's speech reveals her character in essentially the same way that her clothes sometimes do; its content signifies somethi ng like the "elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon" into which she changes for company (35). But Langman's interpretation of Myrtle's words overlooks the sense in which they are actions as well as statements, doings as well as sayings.

In their respective studies of speech in the novel, both Page and Langman treat dialogue as though it were as static as description, as though the only important part of a character's speech were its content. But dialogue does not hold still, and speech cannot be studied in isolation from its surrounding action. In conversation, we use our words like fencers use their foils--as means by which to do things to each other in ways laid out by the rules of the game. Moreover, just as players reveal themselves by their playing styles, speakers distinguish themselves by how they behave in conversation--not necessarily by the things they typically say, but by the moves they tend to make in dialogue with other characters.

As we begin to think of speech in novels less as a series of statements (things said), and more as an interplay of actions (moves made), we might start to read them less like poems and more like plays. In order to appreciate this "dramatic" quality, critics need to treat novels more like scripts--to bridge the gap separating the words on the page from the meaning of the performance. If we are to understand conversation in fiction, we must take account of how it plays out between characters and within the dynamic plot of the story--to treat speech not only as words whose meaning comes from their relationship to other words, but as utterances that signify through their relationship to what is being done between people.

Ethereal Discourse: Daisy and Jordan's Inconsequential Banter

From a perspective that focuses on the dramatic--rather than the poetic--qualities of Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan appears as an actor whose whole existence is theatrical, a character whose identity is almost entirely limited to the role she performs in conversation. Uninterested in "pushing through language to a preexistent, divinely certified reality beyond," Daisy resembles that type of speaker identified by Richard Lanham as Homo rhetoricus. Within Lanham's taxonomy, Rhetorical Man is distinguished by his ability to

play freely with language. For him it owes no transcendental loyalties. [...] The rhetorical view of life [...] begins with the centrality of language. It conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as fundamentally a role player. [...] Such a scheme is galvanized by [...] pleasure. The rhetorical view [...] revels in what Roland Barthes [...] has called "the Eros of Language."

Like Homo rhetoricus, Daisy is "committed to no single construction of the world"; she is not interested in sincerity or verisimilitude; her words aim neither to represent what she sees around her nor to express what she feels inside (4).

(4-5; author's emphasis)

In this respect, Daisy's language is more incantatory than descriptive. It is the means by which she fabricates the world in which she lives and builds the stage upon which she acts out her way of being. Daisy's dramaturgy plays out thrillingly in her conversation with Nick and Jordan:

When [...] the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose--"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position." (18)

Repeating as refrains both her own and Jordan's phrases--the butler's nose, Things went from bad to worse--Daisy improvises with those words she likes well enough to want to hear again. As she polishes into brilliant fantasy an ordinary piece of her everyday world, Daisy smoothly integrates Jordan's plot suggestion into the fiction she makes up as she goes. Like money passed across a counter, these phrases remain the same while changing hands; yet the currency here is Monopoly money, for it makes its way around the table without anybody losing or gaining anything real. Nick--along with the rest of Daisy's listeners--knows that she's not actually going to reveal any real secret. What Daisy is really asking Nick is if he "wants to hear" what she has to tell him, to share in her enthusiastic whispering. In this sense, Daisy's off-the-cuff fable--"How the Butler Got His Nose"--isn't "about" the butler at all, but about the story Daisy can make out of him. No more than a conversation piece, the butler's nose is th e chance inspiration for Daisy's storytelling, a factual springboard for her flight of fancy.

This endless, aimless wander of conversation is all tone, a back-and-forth banter within which talk makes more talk for the thrill of talk itself. At Daisy's table, it seems, conversation serves less to convey information than to create an intimate interaction worth sustaining as an end in itself. Using words without "meaning" them, Daisy speaks an ethereal repartee that sounds very different from the terse practicality with which Tom talks to his mistress:

"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train,"

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." (30)

Whereas the bare-bones exchange between Tom and Myrtle directly communicates their desires, Daisy's words say little about how she feels, or what she wants, or where things are in the world she sees. At times, in fact, it seems as though the thrill in Daisy's voice depends on its lack of semantic content--"The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through" (90). Made of sound much more than sense, Daisy's talk resonates with the conversational aria performed by the heroine of Fitzgerald's "Babes in the Woods":

A reference, supposedly humorous, to the [events of] the afternoon, was all she needed. What Isabelle could do socially with one idea was remarkable. First she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto; then she held it off at a distance and smiled at it--her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in variations and played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in the nominal form of dialogue. (135)

Like Daisy, Isabelle only appears to be talking to the people around her; the things she says only resemble contributions to a dialogue. In fact, once she has her topic, Isabelle no longer needs to respond to the other speakers or to actual events; the game she plays is with herself. Taking with her a slight "reference" to the reality she shares with her audience, Isabelle quickly leaves behind their common ground and lifts the conversation to a place where words are so far from transparent (i.e., windows through which we may view the world) that they become tangible enough to play catch with. For both Isabelle and Daisy, conversation is not mostly a means for talking about the "real world" that exists outside of conversation; the words they speak are themselves as real as it gets. [4] Although the stories that both Daisy and Isabelle tell may occasionally be inspired by what they see (the butler's nose or the events of the afternoon), these casual fictions, most essentially, have little to do with anything b eyond themselves.

In the Buchanan's garden after dinner, Nick recognizes this "rhetorical" quality in Daisy when he realizes "the basic insincerity" of the despair she describes to him (22). Largely unconcerned with reference, Daisy's talk is not designed to transmit messages (about, e.g., the sadness she feels), but to "compel [...] attention." Her storytelling is not really about "how [she's] gotten to feel about--things," but is instead "a trick of some sort to exact a contributary emotion," a way of creating a relationship within which Daisy is clearly the queen, and her listeners, more-or-less-willing vassals (21, 22).

Free from any "transcendental loyalties" to the world outside language, this sort of banter can empty out the meaning of even the most seemingly direct statements and transform sincere confessions and desperate pleas into forms lacking any genuine emotional content. "I'm awfully tired of everything, darling" announces the heroine of "Winter Dreams," "I wish you'd marry me." But not even the story's love-tossed hero can ignore how "careless[ly]" his beloved speaks, or fail to recognize that "[s]he called every one darling" (130). "Was she sincerely moved," he wonders, "--or was she carried along by the wave of her own acting?" (131). In that purely rhetorical world where sincerity is performed as easily as cynicism, a speaker's words serve not as windows to a soul, but as mirrors for playing tricks on listeners, as means to compel attention and belief. The duplicity of this kind of "word-play" is acknowledged directly by the heroine of another of Fitzgerald's stories:

"Do you remember," he asked, "what you said last night about love being a big word like Life and Death?"

"A regular phrase; part of the technique of--of the game; a catch word," ("Sentiment--and the Use of Rouge" 154)

In a context where even the "big words" are just part of the game, Tom Buchanan's suggestion to Nick is indispensable advice for any conversational player: "Don't believe everything you hear" (24).

Yet, if this form of banter aims to manipulate its listeners' emotions, it simultaneously insists on keeping the desires it arouses completely within the speaker's control. By holding reality at a remove, Daisy--like one of the characters in Fitzgerald's "Love in the Night"--can talk all about love without making any of it. Looking out over the night sea, the unnamed young object of the hero's infatuation speaks into "the milk of the stars washing over them":

"So lovely," she whispered.

"What are we going to do about it?"

"Do we have to do something about it? I thought we could just sit and enjoy." [...] She wanted to laugh now, to make some light cool remark that would bring the situation back into the safe waters of a casual flirtation. (309-10)

These safe waters--wherein conversation is the only "doing" being done--are Daisy's home port, the harbor to which her banter continually returns her.

Talk, for Daisy, serves simultaneously to attract and repel the bodies before her. Wholly comfortable with flirtation's "casual" way of being, Daisy is disturbed by what she sees at Gatsby's party: "[it] offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an emotion" (113). At West Egg, there's always the chance that someone might mean what he says; reality is not only theatrical; desires are not just the forms of desire. In the place where Gatsby lives, the erotic continually threatens to slip Out of the play of language and into the world of bodies. Shuttling between West Egg's "raw vigor" and East Egg's polite "euphemisms" (114)--between the rough stuff of reality and the language used to obscure it--the conversation at Gatsby's party reveals the distance that separates our hero from his dream of Daisy:

"These things excite me so," [Daisy] whispered. "If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card. I'm giving out green--"

"Look around," suggested Gatsby.

"I'm looking around. I'm having a marvelous--"

"You must see the faces of many people you've heard about." (111)

From an opening expression of her own excitement, Daisy turns increasingly in toward her own language and away from the "things" around her. Unmotivated by any actual desire (she doesn't really want Nick to kiss her), Daisy's words begin a monologue which seems--until Gatsby interrupts it--as though it might go on forever. The well-formed, complex sentence that starts Daisy's speech ("If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you") spontaneously generates increasingly casual clauses ("Just mention my name. Or present a green card") that pile up so quickly as almost to outpace Daisy's ability to organize them into sentences. Unplanned and unforeseen, without any sense of where it might end, Daisy's monologue expands under the pressure of each new elaboration. As they progressively embellish the first words that come to mind, Daisy's right-branching sentences lead her through an elaborate linguistic ramble disconnected from reality and held tog ether only by her own imaginative associations: talk of kisses prompts an explanation of how they'll be dispensed that suggests the use of green cards that opens into a description of their distribution.

Fundamentally constructive, Daisy's act of speaking creates the phenomenon it purports to describe. The "subject" of her storytelling has no prior, independent existence, but resolves before our eyes (and hers) with each word that trips off her tongue. And to the degree Daisy is able to paste together a fiction-collage made exclusively from the phrases she finds in conversation--without ever having to reach into the external world for material--Daisy's talk lifts her high into a tower of babble built all of words, a skyscraper entirely ungrounded on the rock of the world.

And only insofar as Gatsby is able to drag Daisy down from this suspended state and into the world of things will he have a chance of winning her over. That same distance from necessity which first attracted Gatsby to this "nice" girl--the wealth that raised Daisy "gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor"--now serves to keep her from committing to his dream of their future together (157). "Look around," he says, "You must see the faces of many people you've heard about." In order to impress her with his glittering caravansary, Gatsby needs Daisy to turn from the rumors she's heard to the faces she can see, from the free-floating balloon of language to the material magnificence he has assembled to delight her. What Gatsby doesn't realize clearly enough is that Daisy is just flirting: at this point in the story, Daisy's conversation isn't about making connections between herself and others--bridging the gap between her desire and its fulfillment--but, rather, about distancing h erself from them.

Wrapping round herself a world of words "complete in itself' (110), Daisy aspires to an existence as self-contained as the urn in Keats's ode, a hermeticism made explicit in Fitzgerald's "May Day," whose heroine "talk[s] the language she had talked for many years--her line--made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly provocative, delicately sentimental" (44). Pieced together from the talk that surrounds her, Daisy's speech has the power to form a similarly "intrinsic whole," a banter sufficient in itself and indifferent to any reality outside language. If she can reach this safe distance from the world of burning foreheads and parched tongues, Daisy will be able "to please, to captivate, to be desired [...] without allowing herself to be taken seriously in any way." As in the flirtation that Georg Simmel describes, Daisy's banter is essentially a way for her to "detach [herself] from reality" (145).

Between an unspecified, immediate past and a hazy near future, Daisy "seems to hover" in what Catherine B. Burroughs describes as "an endless present tense." As Burroughs acutely observes, Daisy's habit of reiterating phrases "repeats the moment just past [... and] create[s] what Gertrude Stein called the 'continuous present"' (107). In the opening chapter, Nick describes Daisy sitting down for dinner:

She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.

Beginning again and again (Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it), Daisy refuses to let the present give way to the future. By thus making plans impossible, Daisy's repetitions enact the same unworried despair they express. "What'll we plan?" she asks Nick, and then again--as though helpless before the compulsion of repetition--"What do people plan?" But before Nick can answer Daisy's question and move their dialogue toward a meaningful conclusion, Daisy switches topics and wraps the conversation around her little finger.

Floating somewhere in the flirtatious space that Adam Phillips defines by the distinction between "being promising and [...] making a promise" (xvii)--in what one of Fitzgerald's narrators describes as the "divine vagueness that helps to lift beauty out of time" ("The Cut Glass Bowl" 97)--Daisy is committed to no particular outcome. Detached from anything resembling Nick's teleological conviction that "Gatsby turned out all right at the end" (6), Daisy sustains herself in what Georg Simmel describes as a state "in which there is no inquiry beyond the moment of its existence," in a purely hypothetical realm of possibility where the excitement of fantasy can be abstracted from the problems of fulfillment (144). By "being promising," Daisy becomes the screen onto which her admirers can project desires that she can always refuse to take seriously.

Whereas Nick's narration is defined by his attempt to remember Gatsby, Daisy's storytelling is fundamentally forgetful. Having accepted Nick's mysterious invitation to tea, Daisy arrives at his house and asks:

"Are you in love with me? [...] Or why did I have to come alone?"

"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour."

"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave murmur, "His name is Ferdie."

"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"

"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?" (90)

Nick prompts Daisy to join him in the melodramatic excess of Castle Rackrent; she responds with a grave restatement of what she's already implied (His name is Ferdie); then Nick invites Daisy to invent a sequel to her earlier story about the Butler (Does the gasoline affect his nose?), and Daisy entirely misses his allusion. Lacking anything like Nick's stake in the truthfulness of his fiction, Daisy has no reason to remember her stories after she's finished telling them.

The tales that Daisy tells only seem to be a way of bringing the outside world into the conversation. In fact, by avoiding conclusions, Daisy's stories serve to push the world away, to loosen her connection to things and people and the commitments they require. As Phillips argues, "In flirtation, you never know whether the beginning of the story [...] will be the end; flirtation [...] exploits the idea of surprise. [...I]t is as though the known and wished-for end is being refused, deferred or even denied. [...] Flirtation, if it can be sustained, is a way of [...] playing for time" (xix). Flirtation, as we learn from Daisy's inconsequential banter, is also a way of making time for play, of turning serious-time into play-time. That is: our ability to make promises depends on our faith in the existence of a certain kind of time. By asserting that our resolve will remain the same between the moment we make a promise and the moment when it will eventually be fulfilled, promise-making requires that we believe in the possibility of an unbroken continuum between Now and Then. But Daisy doesn't believe in this kind of time. By treating the future that stretches out before her as a series of discrete moments--"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon [...] and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"--Daisy disrupts the continuity of that "serious time" which makes promises possible.

Nick, however, believes. "I'm a bond man," Nick tells Tom. Where Daisy's is all about being promising, Nick's entire story is a way of keeping his promise. Nick begins his storytelling by insisting that "Gatsby turned out all right at the end" (6). In so doing, he opens his narratorial project with a promise: by the end of this book, he will have us believing that Gatsby really did turn out all right. The story that Nick tells, then, might be read as the fulfillment of the pledge he makes to Gatsby's unattended corpse: "I'll get somebody for you, Gatsby. [...] Just trust me and I'll get somebody for you--" (172). Like Gatsby, Nick has "dreamed it right through to the end" (97). This powerful sense of the ending might be why Nick finds the aimless extemporizing of Daisy and Jordan to be a little too unconcerned with how conversations will conclude and what they will mean. Perfectly blase, Daisy and Jordan's attitude toward talk marks their distance from the Middle West that Nick is used to, a place "where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself' (17). Everything Daisy says is "added irrelevantly"; like the sentences that run together "murmurous and uninflected" in the magazine story Jordan reads aloud to Tom, nothing the East Egg women say is more important than anything else (14). "In the absence of all desire," their conversation never hurries; it is always "To be continued" (17, 22).

As such, Daisy's unwillingness to bind her (future) self to her (present) speech--to "keep her word"--exemplifies her difference from Gatsby, who believes he can live up to the name he has given himself. Gatsby's destruction, one could argue, follows from his attempt to force Daisy to take language (and time) seriously: to say what she really means, to make her speaking into a doing--and thereby to conclude her storytelling in a single happy ending. If successful, Gatsby' s insistence that Daisy "tell [Tom] the truth--that [she] never loved him"--would "wipe out" not only everything that has happened between her and Tom, but the ever-present possibility of surprise, the continuous deferral of ending that constitutes Daisy's basic way of being in the world (139).

Tom's Decisive Speech: From Description to Definition

Set next to Daisy's casual playfulness, Tom seems, at first, to represent an opposite kind of seriousness. In turning away from Daisy and toward Myrtle, Tom chooses an intensely sensual mistress over a wife whose ethereal eroticism he cannot quite comprehend. The contrast shows clearly in a passage discussed earlier:

Before I could answer [Daisy's] eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a-

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." (16)

Rerouting the conversation with a wave of her little finger, Daisy whips up a drama from the barest of motivations, turning the conversation into a stage on which she can perform a feigned suffering and pretended accusation. That is to say, there's neither real pain here (Daisy starts complaining not because she has just bruised her finger, but because she has just noticed the bruise) nor any real blame (Daisy begins berating Tom by acknowledging that she knows he didn't mean to do it). Nor is there any real subject behind her "description" of Tom: although Daisy starts with what seems like a reference to the "brute of a man" at whom she's looking, the rest of her speech--"a great big hulking physical specimen of a"--seems more caught up in its own rhythms than aware of the person in front of her. The self-involvement inherent in this kind of talk shows more clearly when it slides into self-parody in one of Fitzgerald's notebook entries:

Her face reflected the discontent of the weather, reflected darkly and resentfully. Looking at her Deforrest Colman thought: "Bored and fierce," and then as his eyes continued to follow her, "No, proud and impatient. Not that either, but what a face--vitality and hand cuffs--where's this getting me--liver and bacon, Damon and Pythias, Laurel and Hardy." (255)

The same sort of improvisational riff that spins a narrative out of Daisy's talk about green cards and kisses--each plot event inspiring the next--operates on the sentence-level in Daisy's description of Tom, where each successive adjective is prompted by the one before. Driven more by its own momentum than by Daisy's urge to express what she sees or feels, this rush of "modifiers" threatens to carry her away from the physical world altogether.

Like synonyms listed together in a thesaurus, Daisy's words cohere to one another much more tightly than they adhere to their ostensible subject. In this sense, her talk is not "about" Tom, but about language itself. But Tom can't stand this linguistic playfulness. He hates the word "hulking" precisely because he can't take it as "kidding"--because he can only take language seriously. Unable to accept the terms of that rhetorical world into which Daisy has momentarily transported their conversation, Tom cannot inhabit a place where words can be spoken entirely for their own sake and without reference to a reality outside them. In other words, Tom can only hear Daisy's banter as though she means it.

This same inability "to be amused" reveals itself in Tom's conversational manner. Whereas Daisy and Jordan cooperate with each other in the playful pursuit of a single topic, Tom "[breaks] out violently" into the dialogue going on around him and wrenches it toward his own fixed idea (17). In the midst of Daisy and Nick's chatter, Tom puts his hand on Nick's shoulder and interrupts to ask Nick what kind of work he's doing in New York:

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively. (14)

If Daisy does everything she can to make conversation continue, Tom cuts it down to the barest exchange of information, speaking only for as long as it takes for him to figure Nick out and finish off the topic.

Yet no matter how distant Tom's seriousness may seem from Daisy's rhetorical way of being, he is "careless" in much the same way. Sharing Daisy's faith in language's power to create--rather than simply refer to--the world, Tom is just as unwilling to treat language as an intangible medium through which one can pass to a more fundamental reality beyond. Instead, Tom uses talk as a way to make reality real. "Never heard of them," Tom remarks "decisively"--as though the strength of his own ignorance fell just short of ensuring the firm's nonexistence. Like Adam standing before an unnamed universe, Tom uses language not to represent the world, but to "decide" it through the act of talking about it. By making his words into definitive names (rather than descriptive labels), Tom tries to achieve perfect denotation: if he can make things into what he says they are, Tom will eliminate any possible slippage between words and their referents.

Behind everything that Tom says, Nick hears: "Now don't think my opinion on these matters is final [...] just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are" (11). In the way that Tom speaks, he reveals his ambition to speak the Last Word, to make his opinion a final statement about the way things are. "I've got a nice place here," Tom tells Nick: his first words, like his first act--"[t]urning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista"--testify to the ease with which Tom bends the world into proofs of his strength (12). Wrapping around himself the idiom usually spoken by guests rather than their hosts (You've got a nice place here), Tom refuses to be simply the object of another's admiration; instead, he twists the cliched compliment so as to make himself at once its agent and its object. Indeed, these reversals of subject are one of Tom's linguistic trademarks: "I've heard of making a garage out of a stable," Tom tells Gatsby, "but I'm the first man who ever made a stable o ut of a garage" (125; emphasis mine).

Tom's belief in his powers of definition shows even more clearly during his encounter with the dog salesman, a scene in which the materials of the world seem briefly to become as malleable as Tom's linguistic transformations would make them. Nothing here is fixed; like the puppies hanging in a basket around his neck, the dog seller is enough "of an indeterminate breed" to allow Nick to translate him into "a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller" (31). When Myrtle asks "what kind [of dogs] are they?" the salesman responds: "All kinds. What kind do you want [. . .]?" Caught up in their owner's perfect willingness to comply with his customer's desires, the dogs' identities are no more stable than his prices:

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale. [...]"

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars." (31-32)

This scene of linguistic transmutation culminates when Myrtle "delicately" asks the salesman from whom she's just bought a puppy:

"Is it a boy or a girl?" [...]

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." (32)

By usurping for himself the power to decide a dog's sex by saying so--to assign its identity as easily as he buys it--Tom seizes for himself the right to exercise that "sovereign act of nomination" Michel Foucault distinguishes from "playing with language" (qtd. in Miller 44).

The same strong pull of egocentrism found in Tom warps Daisy's conversation, and draws her listeners nearer to the dark depths she would have them imagine beneath the smiling surface of her charm. Sitting alone with Nick in the dusk that follows dinner,

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape. [. . .]I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. [...] I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."' (21)

Because we assume that she is answering the questions Nick has asked "about her little girl," Daisy's response--"We don't know each other very well"--initially seems to mean that she doesn't know her daughter very well. But, when the delayed contre-rejet [5] comes (Even if we are cousins [.. .]) and we catch ourselves ("Oh, Daisy's talking about her and Nick"), we're soon given good reason to remember our mistaken first impression. After twice ignoring Nick's questions--apparently as uninterested in her child as she is unaware of the war that infringed on her wedding--Daisy chooses to bring her daughter back into the conversation. Yet when she does so, the still unnamed and unknown child serves as no more than a chance for Daisy to tell Nick an anecdote about herself that proves both her idle cynicism and her perfect self-absorption.

With a very different degree of sophistication but in almost the same words, Tom gestures vaguely toward the scientific proofs of his equally superficial melancholy, the reasons why he's "gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things" (17). Yet nothing is real about either of these over-handled despairs. Both Daisy and Tom's displays of feeling are no more than tricks of some sort to exact a contributary emotion. Restless and wealthy, Tom and Daisy conspire together among passions plagiarized and only half-understood. It is this absence of caring behind their show of it that Nick feels most powerfully as he leaves the side-by-side tableau into which Tom and Daisy's inconsequential bickerings resolve: "It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms--but apparently there were no such intentions in her head" (25).

Flirting with the Narrator: Daisy's "Romantic Readiness"

Free from the kind of emotional involvement that makes Gatsby so "serious," Nick can participate much more playfully in Daisy's flirtatious banter. Unlike his hero, who cares so much about how his story with Daisy will turn out at the end, Nick can "abandon himself to the fascination of [the] game" (Simmel 144). Because it doesn't really matter to Nick what Daisy means, he can play right along with her gratuitous fiction-making:

I told [Daisy] how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night a]ong the North Shore." (14)

If Daisy and Jordan's bantering duet resembles a jazz improvisation--with its origin in the materials at hand, its cooperative give-and-take, its solo riffs into rhythms suggested by the last notes played--Nick's participation might be figured as a "sitting in" on their session. When Daisy invites him into their conversation, Nick finds precisely the tone of casual excess that marks Daisy and Jordan's way of talking:

Daisy: "Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

Nick: "That's why I came over tonight."

Indeed, there's something very similar about the stories that Daisy tells "in the nominal form of dialogue" and those that Nick tells as narrator of the novel. Able on her own to make conversation sparkle, Daisy doesn't need a narrator to tell us (through indirect speech) how brightly she shines, to gild her with his lyrical narration. Unlike Gatsby, whose precarious gorgeousness requires the narrator's continual attention, Daisy--speaking directly--comes across quite splendidly without any help. This special brilliance distinguishes Daisy most dramatically in Fitzgerald's revisions of the novel: whereas the author transmutes large passages of Gatsby's leaden dialogue into Nick's glowing narration, he reverses the operation for Daisy--turning the narrator's pedestrian summaries of what was said into Daisy's ethereal banter. This, for example, is how Fitzgerald changes the story of Gatsby's self-transformation:

galleys

"I was loafing around the beach that morning. [... when] I saw [Dan Cody's boat] was going to drop anchor over one of the worst flats along the shore--and the tide would be going out in a quarter of an hour. I borrowed a rowboat and pulled for the yacht, and told Dan Cody that he'd be broken up sure before noon. [...]He asked me my name and I told him it was Jay Gatsby--I had changed it the night before. He liked me and I liked him, so a couple of days later he took me to Duluth and bought me a blue coat and six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting cap. And when the Tuolomnee left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast I left too." (163)

published text

James Gatz. [...] had changed [his name] at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of Gatsby's career--when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the Tuolomnee and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. [...] Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick, and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting cap. And when the Tuolomnee left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too. (104, 106)

By rewriting Gatsby's direct speech into Nick's narration, Fitzgerald allows Nick to watch his hero from a distance that enables his distinctly ironic panegyric. From this new perspective, Nick can comment on the commercialism of Gatsby's "brand new name" while wrapping him in the rhythms appropriate to a mythical origin (It was James Gatz who had been loafing [...] but it was already Jay Gatsby who [...]). By similar means, the material things whose specificity makes Gatsby's first-person autobiography mundane (a blue coat and six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting cap), become, in Nick's narration, the enchanted objects belonging to a slightly absurd Hero at the outset of his fairy-tale quest.

With Daisy, Fitzgerald translates in the opposite direction:

manuscript

I called up Daisy from the office next morning and invited her, alone, to come to tea. (125)

published text

I called up Daisy from the office next morning and invited her to come to tea.

"Don't bring Tom," I warned her.

"What?"

"Don't bring Tom."

"Who is 'Tom'?" she asked innocently. (88)

By taking information that is originally explained in narration (Nick asks Daisy not to bring Tom to tea) and enacting it in dialogue, Fitzgerald gets his narrator out of the way and gives Daisy more room to speak "for herself." To similar effect, Fitzgerald's revisions change the way Daisy speaks, eliminating from her banter with Nick anything resembling everyday conversation. Refusing to let Daisy dirty her hands by contact with any common kind of talk, Fitzgerald revises the perfectly ordinary question she asks Nick in the Gatsby manuscript--"How's Chicago?" (17)--into charmingly casual superlatives:

I told [Daisy] how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. (Gatsby 14)

At other points in the novel, Daisy's speech becomes so poetic that it almost blurs into Nick's narration:

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

"Look at that," [Daisy] whispered, and then after a moment: "I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around." (74; emphasis mine)

In the moment between vision and expression, Daisy pauses to find almost the same words to describe the sight Nick narrates. Daisy seems to share not only Nick's angle of vision but his sense of the world's metaphoric potential: if couches could buoy up like balloons and blow around the house, why couldn't clouds be carriages? But something happens to Nick's lyrical diction when transposed into Daisy's direct speech. Compared to Nick's elevated description of how "the darkness had parted in the west," Daisy's "I'd like to just get one of those" seems to have less of poetry in it than the colloquial glamour of Hollywood dialogue. Her pink cloud-carriage, it seems, might roll more easily across a Busby Berkley stage than any pastoral firmament.

Nonetheless, the techniques that Daisy uses in conversation throughout the novel closely resemble those employed by Nick in the novel's narration. Even within the small scope of Daisy's story of the butler's nose, she displays not only an author's sense of character, telling detail, suspense and rising action, but a remarkable ability to make use of obscurity:

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

By integrating into her story Jordan's suggestion for its next turn of plot (Things went from bad to worse), Daisy lays claim to a kind of narrative authority Nick exercises quite often. "What things?" Daisy's listeners might wonder--but won't, if the thrill of Daisy's voice (like a magician's other hand) can distract us from the action that matters. In order to succeed, Daisy's story must persuade us not to ask any questions about its entirely excluded middle, must elicit our assent to its narrator's implicit aside: "these things are important--trust me--though I can't say exactly what it is or why it matters."

With its ring of materiality, "things" seems like the most concretely demonstrative of subjects; as such, it's particularly able to imply the actual existence of the referent for which it's presumably standing in. Fitzgerald exploits this effect frequently, as in, for example, this description of Daisy:

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth--but there was an excitement in her voice [...] a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. (13-14)

Curiously, the mirrors responsible for this authorial trick are exposed to view a little later in the novel:

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what?" demanded Tom. (36)

Tom's question points directly to the ambiguity in which McKee's language has cloaked his subject, to the perfect vagueness of things.

Through direct and indirect speech, respectively, Daisy and Nick bring to the material of their world a storyteller's version of Gatsby's "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" (6). The "romantic readiness" that drives Gatsby to remake his physical world out of canvas and colored lights, drives Nick and Daisy to acts of transformation carried out in words alone:

"[Daisy's] got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of--"

I hesitated.

"Her voice is full of money," [Gatsby] said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. [...] High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. 127)

"That was it," Nick realizes: Gatsby has identified what it is about Daisy's voice that Nick has spent so much prose trying to describe. Gatsby has filled the pause in Nick's hesitant speech, the blank in his understanding. Yet the moment that should be the disillusioned end to Nick's elaborate romanticizing (the "gay, exciting things" that he has been hearing in a voice that "couldn't be over-dreamed" have turned out to be no more than money [14, 101]) becomes instead the beginning to Nick's lush fantasy. Exchanging the cheap currency of Gatsby's reply for sensuous jingling and sibilant cymbals--for kings and palaces and fairy tales--Nick transmutes the "money" in Gatsby's direct speech into a narrator's "golden" girl. Nick, it seems, is not looking for answers, but material.

The same alchemical ambition drives Nick's narrative more generally, as in that moment he retells Gatsby's autobiography:

Gatsby's speech:

"After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago." (70)

Nick's narration:

Then it was all true. t saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart. (71)

Without making major alterations to the threadbare plot materials he's been given, Nick incorporates himself into Gatsby's story as a spectator who can revise Gatsby's colorless resume into a drama: Nick watches the hero acting (opening a chest [...]) against a quickly painted backdrop (in his palace on the grand canal) and out of the hyperbolic motives of melodrama (to ease [...] the gnawings of his broken heart). Nick seems not only to have accepted Gatsby's impossible story, but to have adopted Gatsby's extravagant tone. Yet if Nick's version of Gatsby's autobiography is mockingly sentimental, it is not therefore a caricature. Gatsby's own self-understanding--pasted together out of "a dozen magazines"--is essentially plagiaristic, and the cliched terms in which Nick describes his hero are the ones in which Gatsby imagines himself (71). Like Cyrano stepping in to find the right words for the lover with a heavy tongue, Nick tells Gatsby's story in the way that Gatsby would if he could.

As Nick's "incredulity" changes to "fascination," his disbelief in the hero of Gatsby's autobiography--"a turbaned 'character' leaking sawdust at every pore"--turns into a discovery of Gatsby's sincerity (71). "Then it was all true," Nick begins, in tones that sound perfectly earnest and straightforward. But in retelling this truth--I saw the skins of tigers flaming--Nick heads immediately over the top. The story Nick tells could not be "true," if only because its intensely self-conscious style abandons any pretense of being "about" anything beyond itself. Nick seems less persuaded by the inscription on Gatsby's medal and the authentic look of his photograph than by the chance they allow him to rewrite Gatsby's "trashy imaginings" into the foundations of a "radiant world" (Life 67). Not true so much as transfigured in Nick's imagination, the skins and jewels become brilliant emblems of his new-found faith in Gatsby's fiction.

From this perspective, the epigraph that opens Gatsby seems to be as much about the narrator's ambitions to manufacture a "gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover" as it is about its hero's ongoing attempt to make himself the man that Daisy "must have." In this sense, Gatsby is not simply a homo rhetoricus, but a rhetorical occasion--an opportunity for Nick to fill Gatsby's emptiness with lyrical prose, his absence with perfect metaphors, his silence with words for the feelings that Nick imagines his hero must have felt. That is: the novel as a whole might be less about the self that Gatsby creates for the love of Daisy than about the "something gorgeous" that Nick attempts to make out of Gatsby (6).

Speech Tags and Other Ventriloquisms: Where Description and Dialogue Mix

Unable ever simply to mock Gatsby's impossible romanticism, Nick tells his story from a perspective both "within and without"--from somewhere between the rocky world and a faith in its foundation on a fairy's wing (40). At certain points in the novel, Gatsby's "experience" and Nick's account of it blur significantly. In the moment before Daisy's incarnation under Gatsby's lips, for example, narrator and hero seem bound together in an "ecstatic cahoots" (162):

The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. (117)

As Leonard Podis insightfully observes, "Gatsby sees that the sidewalk 'really' mounts up into the sky. Nick is, for the moment--along with Gatsby--partaking of the enchanted ethereality that is the privilege of those who can see with romantic vision" (69). For the moment, Nick's authority as a narrator corroborates Gatsby's fantastic vision, turning Gatsby's hallucination into a perception of how the world "really" is. It's not at all clear, at this point in the story, where the narrator stands with respect to his hero. Nick's account of what Gatsby saw is neither Gatsby's vision nor Nick's simple report of it; rather, Nick is imagining Gatsby's glimpse of those romantic possibilities on which his own narrative is built. Gatsby sees here just the kind of world that both he and Nick want most to believe in.

The distinction between "external" description and "internal" identification dissolves most completely in the speech tags with which Nick describes how other characters talk. In Gatsby, these narratorial comments often occupy a strangely intermediate space--like that of free indirect discourse--in which the narrator, while supposedly telling us about characters from the outside, seems to be speaking from inside them. For example, Nick's account of how "delicately" Myrtle asks the dog salesman "'Is it a boy or a girl"'--while "fondling [the dog's] weather-proof coat with rapture"--seems not only the narrator's exposure of a character's affectation, but his accurate representation of Myrtle's own sense of newly-purchased sophistication (32). Similarly, when Nick reports on the scene at Myrtle's apartment in New York City, his narration seems simultaneously mocking and compassionate. Myrtle's vitality, Nick tells us, has been "converted into impressive hauteur":

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time."

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there. (36)

Nick's elevated account of Myrtle's "despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders"--in combination with the terms in which he chronicles her sweeping, flouncing ecstasy--could be seen as raising him (and the novel's readers) to a place above Myrtle's colloquial indignation at "These people!" But at this point in the narrative, Nick does not seem most interested in looking down at Myrtle; the language he uses is precisely the kind she would choose for herself if she could. [6] If the dozen chefs whom Nick describes are his impersonation of Myrtle's pretension, then this passage contains not only Nick's condescension, but his ventriloquism of Myrtle's.

Nor does Nick refrain from using the same half-sympathetic, half-ironic voice when talking about himself. The way Nick describes his thoughts upon leaving the Buchanans' dinner hints at a self-conception as conventional as Myrtle's or Gatsby's: "It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms-but apparently there were no such intentions in her head" (25). The dime-novel terms in which Nick describes his disappointment with Daisy is a mockingly exaggerated sel-frepresentation--and thereby true, perhaps, to the quality of melodrama that characterizes those stories of which Nick would imagine himself the hero.

At other points in the novel, the readiness with which Nick's narration picks up the color of other characters' experience gives his indirect discourse an almost chameleonic quality:

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. (120-21)

What begins as an external account of the day's heat, the whiteness of the woman's shirt, and the dampening of her newspaper, culminates in a combination of adverbs that sympathetically express her own self-perception. That is: you can't watch someone else "perspire delicately" or "lapse despairingly," but you can imagine what it would be like for her to try to "perspire" in ladylike fashion--and keep from sweating--until finally, with a desolate cry, she abandons hope of keeping up appearances.

The narrator's and the characters' voices intermingle similarly in Nick's account of Daisy's arrival for tea:

Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.(90; emphasis mine)

Nick's mention of Daisy's "ecstatic" smile seems to continue the rest of the passage's description of how she looks from the outside; its undistinguished place among the rest of Nick's adjectives--dripping, bare, large, open, three-cornered, lavender, bright--suggests that it's the same kind of external modifier. But on closer inspection, the ecstasy Nick describes appears to have less to do with what someone could see on Daisy's lips and more to do with that "impression of [herself. . .she] hoped to convey." "Exhilarated" by the thrill of Daisy's voice, Nick's narration seems to have caught the same thrilling excess that marks Daisy's casual superlatives (absolutely, my dearest)--to have risen in response to Daisy's performance of an emotion she doesn't feel: "'Are you in love with me?' she said low in my ear. 'Or why did I have to come alone?"' (90).

In Gatsby, it is Nick's capacity to combine these different kinds of speech that enables this narrator to relate so powerfully to the characters he describes, to come close enough to sympathize with their plagiaristic ambitions while keeping that distance he needs to gild them into gorgeousness. Put somewhat differently: there is something deeply compassionate about Nick's narration. By the sympathy with which he portrays them, Gatsby's narrator focuses on his characters an attention similar to the kind paid by Gatsby's smile; through the "intense personal interest" he takes in the subjects of his narrative, Nick's storytelling accomplishes an almost divine grace. Like Gatsby's smile

It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. (52-53)

By "authorizing" the perspectives of these particular characters, Nick's narrative makes that much more real the particular world within which "even Gatsby"--or Myrtle, or Nick himself--"could happen" (73).

Dan Coleman (dcoleman@bennington.edu) is associate director of the Teacher Education Program at Bennington College. He has published an article on F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrative technique in the journal of the same name, and an essay on the integration of the liberal arts into the education of teachers in the Kappa Delta Pi Record.

Notes

(1.) In sketching out my argument, I rely on the distinction Bakhtin draws between the lyric and the novel. I hope this dichotomy proves helpful as a way of briefly describing broad trends in criticism--even though it may prove overly simple as a generic division. For a discussion of the reductive effect of Bakhtin's opposition, see Marianne and Michael Shapiro, "Dialogism and the Addressee in Lyric Poetry," wherein they argue that "the communicative aspect of lyric is fundamentally dialogistic despite Bakhtin's relegation of pure poetry to the category of monologism" (409).

(2.) Fitzgerald's understanding of the author's multiplicity was likely colored by Keats's description of the "camelion [sic] Poet" who "has no self [...] no character no Identity" (419; 418). In a letter to John O'Hara, Fitzgerald seems to allude to this remark by Keats; he explains that "John Keats felt that creative talent is essentially without character" (Life 303).

(3.) The only other work that I could find which approaches this topic is Lauraleigh O'Meara's analysis of "The Blue Coupe Dialogue in The Great Gatsby." The "dialogue" mentioned in O'Meara's title, however, is only the name by which she refers to the scene between Tom Buchanan and George Wilson, and O'Meara analyzes this conversation without mentioning the ways in which the characters talk to each other.

(4.) "We heard it from three people so it must be true," says Daisy to Nick after repeating the rumor of his engagement (24). For Daisy, who cares little for grounding her words in the world outside language, there can be no more solid basis for a fact than its existence in corroborating conversations.

(5.) By using this term typically reserved for the line that continues a poetic enjambment, I mean to emphasize how a novelist can use dialogue to create effects similar to those generated by line breaks in poetry. In this passage, Fitzgerald achieves the kind of syntactic suspense that Donald Davie discerns in Milton's poetic style: "The language is deployed, just as the episodes are in a story, so as always to provoke the question 'And then?'--to provoke this question and to answer it in unexpected ways" (73). The role played by Daisy's speech tag becomes more obvious when one imagines leaving it out, i.e., "We don't know each other very well, Nick, even if we are cousins." The cliffhanger effect thus created resembles the device that John Hollander--also discussing Paradise Lost--calls "a trick not unlike covering up one end of a line of English inscription, inviting the reader to guess at the nature of the hidden text, and then revealing it" (101).

(6.) In the terms in which Paul Hernadi discusses free indirect discourse, Nick's description exemplifies "substitutionary narration," a moment when "the narrator says in propria persona what one of the characters means" (35, 36).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Burroughs, Catherine B. "Of 'Sheer Being': Fitzgerald's Aesthetic Typology and the Burden of Transcription." Modern Language Studies 22 (1992): 102-09.

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