Jay Gatsby is gorgeous. So the reader learns in the opening pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork. It is not that he has tanned skin, “drawn attractively tight on his face,” or that his hair is cut short, “as though it were trimmed every day”—details revealed only later. Simply put, his beauty resides in his manner, his capaciousness, his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” A quintessentially American character, Gatsby sees in the world and the people who move through it a brilliant, eternal light—a possibility, at once fleeting and exuberant, that stirs him to his core. He has “an extraordinary gift for hope,” the reader observes, “a romantic readiness,” to which one is drawn, ecstatically, irrevocably, like a siren song.
Gatsby’s resonance, in his time and our own, was just one of the ideas taken up in a panel discussion on campus on April 16 as part of the university’s 250+ at American initiative. The featured scholars—Keith Leonard and Marianne Noble, professors of literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Stuart Warner, professor of philosophy at Roosevelt University—gathered to address a deceptively simple question: What is the greatest work of American literature?
Consider Moby-Dick, Noble suggests. To read Herman Melville’s seafaring tale is to “feel ourselves called to greater things,” she says, called “to seek truth,” to “respond with courage.” Ishmael, the work’s narrator, is no simple sailor, Melville maintains; he is an insatiable reader, a man who seeks to know and know fully. “I have swam through libraries,” he proclaims, “and sailed through oceans.”
Like the narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Ishmael reserves judgment in his assessment of the world. It’s precisely that capacity to live with open eyes—to not only see the other but believe in him—that forms an American ideal. Gatsby, a lucid embodiment of this, has “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,” Carraway muses. “It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”
Ántonia, the title character in Willa Cather’s classic novel My Ántonia, a favorite of Warner’s, has that same magnetism. She has “the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world,” the reader learns; “love and credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.” While Ántonia is a Bohemian immigrant, she sees the world with a wonder, a belief, that seem distinctively American. Captivated by her gaze, Jim Burden, the book’s narrator, is drawn back to the Nebraskan landscape of his youth. He laments of her eyes, “I had seen no others like them.” What makes Ántonia compelling—“profoundly heroic,” as Warner says—is that exact gift for observation: a gaze that looks out on the world, in all its deadening shadows, and sees a lasting, triumphant hope.
But that hope is transient. While the greatest works of American literature have a marvelous splendor, a beauty that runs over, it is a grandeur tinged with melancholy—a realization that all must one day come to an end. Consider the first kiss of Gatsby and his love, Daisy Buchanan, in which he waits, listening for “the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.” When their lips finally touch, “she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” It’s an airy world, gauzy in its wonders. These are lines, Leonard insists, that “ring in the ear,” that “spark the imagination.” But the effect is momentary. Gatsby’s reveries, the reader finds, are simply beautiful nothings, a world “founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”
Burden is equally entranced, remembering his grandparents’ garden and the thrill of the vast sky: “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy,” he recalls. “[T]hat is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
But what if the past is tragic? What if dissolving into it is a kind of horror?
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which Leonard cited, the formerly enslaved Sethe is scarred by the nightmare of her past—of murdering her two-year-old to spare her from the horrors of enslavement. It’s a tale not only about the cost of slavery, but about what it feels like to live in a body burdened by loss. Many of the greatest works of American fiction, Leonard maintains, grapple with “what it means to be a person, to grow,” and, critically, “to live well.” Morrison, for her part, didn’t want to coddle the reader; she wanted them to be, as she put it, “kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment.” It’s only then, when confronted with the brutalizing truth, that one comes to understand the self and its place in the world.
To read these works, Warner contends, is to acknowledge that “we are never complete as human beings.” There’s a kind of joy, he observes, when “we understand, when we see something new, when we’re able to ponder it.” Language cannot pin down slavery, Morrison once observed. “Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”
These characters are perpetually reaching toward something in the distance. Gatsby, the reader learns, is “never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand”; his plans—for his glittering soirees, for his life with Daisy—never cease spiraling through his mind. So, too, does the Nebraskan prairie in My Ántonia, a kind of world without end: “The whole country seemed, somehow, to be running,” Burden recalls, as if “underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.”
No character embodies this more viscerally than Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, who makes of the white whale a monster, a kind of phantom: “All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it … were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.”
There’s a fundamental tension in these novels, Warner explains, between the optimism of American life and an opposing force. For Ahab, it’s a tilt from the restless to the maniacal; for Gatsby, it moves from a love of Daisy to an obsession with her.
Burden studies Virgil’s Georgics, one line of which reads, “the best days are the first to flee.” If that is true, and the joys of life belong to the past, how can one recover them? Is it deluded to even think it possible? The characters in these novels remain breathless, edging toward a place that eludes them. Perhaps James Baldwin put it best in Giovanni’s Room: “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
Still, these novels continue to stir readers, awakening something long forgotten. They are a reminder to live with intention, to make a mark on the world. They “call us to our best selves,” Noble insists. They “fill us with awe.”
Indeed, Gatsby lives a full life on the memory of Daisy; Burden, upon returning to Nebraska, sees himself anew. Perhaps it is possible, in the world of these novels, to find oneself—to live with the gorgeousness of a Jay Gatsby, the wonder of an Ishmael. Perhaps there is a home to which one can return, a place of eternal possibility, an American dream. Or, as Burden concludes: “Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”