Title: The 'Seer' and 'Seen' Themes in Gatsby and Some of Their Parallels in Eliot and Wright
Author(s): Dale B. J. Randall
Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau.Vol. 183. Detroit: Gale, 2007. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay, Excerpt
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
[(essay date July 1964) In the following excerpt, Randall discusses Wright's exploration of "the seer theme" and the "subject of seeing" in his novel The Eyes of the World, comparing Wright's treatment of the theme to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald in The GreatGatsby and T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland.]
A reader of Fitzgerald's The GreatGatsby is likely to remember the bizarre memento left by Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, a billboard consisting of two enormous, spectacled eyes that brood over a "valley of ashes."1 As the story goes, Fitzgerald saw that the dust jacket designed for Gatsby was dominated by a drawing of two huge, feminine eyes looming over an urban skyline, and he was moved to return to his text and add to it six allusions to the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg.2 In this way he created a metaphorical comment on his nearly finished picture of the times, in fact a most provocative symbol for bringing together the major themes of his work. It was not a matter of mere tacking on. It was a matter of crystallizing what was already there.
In the following pages I should like to offer some inter-related comments concerning Fitzgerald's use of these eyes in conveying what may be called the "seer" and "seen" themes, as well as T. S. Eliot's handling of the same two basic themes in The Waste Land--a work which Fitzgerald is supposed to have known almost by heart--and, finally, Harold Bell Wright's still earlier use of the themes in one of his popular novels. My purpose is not to engage in exhaustive comparisons or wade into any slough of influences; it is simply to point out some rather striking parallels, most of them unnoticed previously, with the tentative implication that these three treatments of the seer-and-seen themes may have been peculiarly appropriate to their time.
.....
The subject of seeing is also of central importance in a once-popular but now forgotten novel by Harold Bell Wright. Of course the seer theme is no recent discovery. One is not likely to forget Lear or Oedipus. Nevertheless, its use by Wright is particularly noteworthy because it appears in a book which was on Fitzgerald's mind when he wrote "The Jelly-bean," one of the Tales of the Jazz Age (1920), shortly before he wrote Gatsby. As a matter of fact, The Eyes of the World was known to a good many people. King of the best-sellers, Wright boasted in 1917 that "one million, six hundred and fifty copies have been sold in two years."3The Eyes of the World, whether one read it or not, was a force at work in the world. ...
In The Eyes of the World the emphasis on vision is constant and blunt. It begins in the title and recurs throughout, one chapter even being called "As the World Sees." Primarily the theme is handled so as to point out hypocrisy and corruption in high social places. "In the eyes of the world," says Conrad Lagrange, a novelist who serves Wright as a sardonic but relatively clear-eyed seer, the Taine family (obviously "tainted") consists of socially prominent people who are "the noblest of our Nobility. They dwell in the rarefied atmosphere of millions. By the dollarless multitudes they are envied."4 Somewhat later the husband-father of this family expands on the subject, again in terms of the seer theme. Railing at his wife for shoddy morality, he addresses her as "You fiend!" and asks, "Am I so innocent that Jack Hanover, and Charlie Rodgers, and Black Whitman, and as many more of their kind, can make love to you under my very nose without my knowing it? You take damned good care ... that the world sees nothing; but you have never troubled to hide it from me" (p. 59). Many pages later, on another occasion, she answers in "a cold fury," and still with the implication that seeing is deceiving: "What right haveyou to object to my pleasures? Have you--in all your life of idle, vicious, [sic] luxury--have you ever feared to do evil if it appealed to your bestial nature? You know you have not. You have feared only the appearance of evil. ... That's the only game I know, and, by the rule of our game, so long as the world sees nothing, I shall do what pleases me" (pp. 156-157). Lagrange, the seer-chorus, nails down the point by telling her toward the end of the book that "The one thing on earth, that you fear, madam [is] ... the eyes of the world" (p. 454). ...
In Wright's book the people of the "world" are not so much dead or dying (spiritually, morally, or literally) as deluded, constantly mistaking the glitter of evil in high places for the glow of greatness. In fact, the world's eyes are so much in need of correction that they even see virtue as evil. "The world," Wright has a clear-eyed character say, "sees so crooked that it can't believe when a thing is just what it is" (p. 228). Good is seen as bad, and bad as good. To demonstrate, Wright creates a very virtuous heroine, and here again, in the earliest of the three works under consideration, we come upon a linkage of the seer and nature themes. As the girl's name, Sibyl, suggests, she is meant to be representative of true insight, of unspoiled humanity, and to the seer-chorus she is nothing less than unspoiled Nature incarnate. When she falls in love with the artist-hero, however (his name, King, suggests an affinity with heroes of still earlier romances), she is warned that the world now sees her not only as his model but as his mistress. "You see, dear," she is told, "whether it is true or not, the effect is exactly the same. If in the eyes of the world your relations to Mr. King are--are wrong, it is as bad as though it were actually true" (p. 352). It is the world and its vision which need correction, not Sibyl.
The two-sided fact that Nature is pure and Society corrupt (the epigraph of the book is from "Tintern Abbey") enables Wright not only to say a great deal about the world which is too much with us, but also to expand on the subject of Nature. The Eyes of the World is full of enthusiastic descriptions of wild blackberries, gleaming trout, and the misty mountains where Sibyl is most at home. Of the lovers, Sibyl and Aaron King, Wright says, "So they were received into the inner life of the mountains; so the spirit that dwells in that unmarred world [N. B.] whispered to them the secrets of its enduring strength and lofty peace" (p. 183).
To a reader who has pondered the possibility of calling Gatsby "a kind of tragic pastoral"5 and, more particularly, been concerned with the intricate problem of reaching the right focus on Fitzgerald's use of geography, of East and West, and of East Egg and West Egg, it is interesting to find Wright not merely rhapsodizing about "the message of the mountains" (p. 41), but even launching into such a geographical passage as the following (and again the words are those of Wright's seer-chorus):
This West country will produce some mighty artists, Mr. King. By far the greater part of this land must remain, always, in its primitive naturalness. It will always be easier, here, than in the city crowded East, for a man to be himself.(p. 40)
In fact the speaker of these words has been sent to the West in order to become himself again, to recover from having pandered "for the purposes of mental prostitution" in the East. As he puts it, "My rotten imaginings have proven too much--even for me--and the doctors sent me West to recuperate" (p. 42). The mountains of the West are another Eden, a demi-paradise. On the other hand, the rich villainess, who has just arrived from the East, proclaims, "The world that I live in is hell" (p. 113).6
Since Wright and Fitzgerald are both concerned with the relationship between falseness and fame, both may be found expressing ideas relevant to the nature of true greatness. Like an incipient Gatsby, Wright's hero begins by looking with the eyes of the world. He has the feeling that "I must succeed" (p. 43). The seer-chorus, himself a widely acclaimed writer, tries to impart to him a more correct view of most "greatness": "The statement of faith adhered to by modern climbers on the ladder of fame--such as I have been, and you aspire to be--is that 'Pull' wins. Our creed is 'Graft.' By 'Influence' we stand, by 'Influence' we fall" (pp. 50-51). It is the creed of Fitzgerald's Gatsby and the bestial Meyer Wolfsheim.7And like Nick Carraway, Wright's hero becomes stained. He paints a lying portrait of a society woman, thus assuring his fame, but then he becomes uncomfortable with his fraud, and clear-eyed Sibyl makes him more so by saying, "You do not really think that being known to the world and greatness are the same" (p. 210). King, of course, has to make no "choice of nightmares" (to use Joseph Conrad's phrase) because this is a romance. Though he is like Conrad's Marlow and Fitzgerald's Nick in that he is touched by the evil his creator wishes to present, we know even before he glimpses Sibyl's mountains that he will turn out all right. When he and Lagrange finally confront the San Bernardinos, nature begins to get through to him at once. The mountains are described as "patiently, with a world old patience, bidding them come; in the majestic humbleness of their lofty spirit, offering themselves and the wealth of their teaching" (p. 178). Lying behind King, his former self is already "submerged" in "dull, gray depths ... forcing upon the artist's mind the weird impression that the life he had always known was a fantastically unreal dream" (p. 180). One thinks again of Nick's vision of the "gray land" (p. 23) and the "quality of distortion" which still figured in his "fantastic dreams."
The waking dream which Nick lived through during the summer when he knew Gatsby is conveyed brilliantly in the descriptions of Gatsby's many-splendored parties--the essence of which, in turn, is distilled in Nick's recurrent and apparently sleep-time dream of the after-the-party scene by El Greco. Wright also has a go at describing a Trimalchio's feast.8As the hero and the seer-chorus "approached the big house on Fairlands Heights, they saw that modern palace, from concrete foundation to red-tiled roof, ablaze with many lights" (pp. 321-322). Closer to Fitzgerald in point of style, however, is the suggestion that from afar the mansion looks like a "sparkling bauble that lay for the moment, as it were, on the wide lap of the night" (p. 322). Longer and cruder, and yet somehow vivid, is the description of
the assembled guests ... as a glittering, shimmering, scintillating, cloud-like mass that, never still, stirred within itself, in slow, graceful, restless motions--forming always, without purpose, new combinations and groupings that were broken up, even as they were shaped, to be reformed; with the black spots and splashes of the men's conventional dress ever changing amid the brighter colors and textures of the women's gowns; the warm flesh tints of bare white arms and shoulders, gleaming here and there; and the flash and sparkle of jewels, threading the sheen of silks and the filmy softness of laces.(p. 324)
The simile-approach, the color, the wealth, the restlessness, and the suggestion of transience that one associates with Gatsby's parties--all these are present in the passage.9 The artist-hero muses, "what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away" (p. 324). Thus we are told that he is looking no longer with the eyes of the world. Somehow one is reminded of the morning-after mood in which The GreatGatsby concludes.
Still more striking is the fact that Wright's hero thinks of the morally distorted party-goers in terms of a visually distorted picture which he will paint. Toward the end of the book we learn what sort of scene he has produced.
Parts of the picture were little more than sketched in, but still, line and color spoke with accusing truth the spirit of the company that had gathered at the banquet in the home on Fairlands Heights. ... The figures were not portraits, it is true, but they expressed with striking fidelity, the lives and characters of those who had, that night, been assembled by Mrs. Taine. ... The picture cried aloud the intellectual degradation and the spiritual depravity of that class who, arrogating to themselves the authority of leaders in culture and art, by their approval and patronage of dangerous falsehood and sham in picture or story, made possible such characters as [the evil] James Rutlidge.(pp. 445-446)
The passage is overwritten, prejudiced, Philistine. Nevertheless, both its tone and the painting which it describes are not at all unlike the tone and the painting near the end of The GreatGatsby. Both pictures are microcosms of the novels in which they appear, and in both reality is made to seem grotesque for the sake of clarity.
As a matter of fact, Wright's book concludes with a description of two symbolic pictures, one of the party and another of Mrs. Taine, the beautiful villainess. At first the artist paints Mrs. Taine as she would like to be, but then, feeling unclean, he paints her again, persuading "her to throw boldly aside the glittering, tinsel garb in which she walked before the world, and so to stand before him in all the hideous vulgarity, the intellectual poverty, and the moral depravity of her naked self" (p. 315). And this is important because what he is actually doing, Wright says, is painting the portrait of "The Age" (p. 320), the sort of image which sent Nick Carraway back to the Midwest, wanting "the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever" (p. 2).
Toward the beginning of his novel Wright chose to put his reader on the right track by having his chief seer speak of all the major characters as if they were figures in an allegory.10 James Rutlidge, the villain, is Sensual. His friend Edward Taine is Materialism. The daughter of Materialism is Ragtime. And The Age is his beautiful, deceitful wife. The seer himself, Conrad Lagrange, withered and homely, a sinner with a great reputation, is not really so bad as he seems at first. He is Civilization, and, to his credit, he takes up lodgings with the hero, who is Art. At the end, though Sensual hopes to ravish Nature, she is saved by Art. Sensual is actually killed off, and the final scene takes place far from the eyes of the world in an idyllic glade where the light slants "softly through the screen of leaf and branch and vine and virgin's-bower, ... as through the window traceries of a vast and quiet cathedral; and where the distant roar of the mountain stream trembled in the air like the deep tones of some great organ" (p. 464).
By means of the "seer" and "seen" themes Eliot, Wright, and Fitzgerald created works which are alike--despite innumerable differences--in that they show how far man has strayed from what is natural and good. In The Waste Land Eliot suggests the nightmare fragmentation of life, and the possibility that a seer--even a degenerate modern one--may glimpse the need for spirituality. In fairly large measure he achieves his effect by depicting the withdrawal of man from nature and all it represents. His partly living people fear the mountains and dread the rain.
In the earliest of the three works considered here, Wright suggests that the eyes of the world are only too ready to be deceived, to look up admiringly to men and women who have the least affinity with nature. Except for a rare keen seer, the world is taken in by appearances, especially by the illusion of greatness and the grotesque kind of life which society would pass off as natural.
Notes
1. (New York, 1953), p. 23. All subsequent references to Gatsby are taken from this edition' and noted parenthetically in the text. Dr. Eckleburg himself, naturally a specialist in diseases of the eye, "sank down ... into eternal blindness" or forgot the sign and "moved away" (p. 23).
2. Fitzgerald said as much in a letter to Max Perkins, quoted by Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (Boston, 1951), p. 170.
3. Quoted by Bailey Millard, "The Personality of Harold Bell Wright," Bookman, XLIV (1917), 468.
4. The Eyes of the World (Chicago, 1914), p. 50. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text.
5. Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise (Boston, 1951), p. 175.
6. Gale H. Carrithers, Jr., conveys what seems to me the soundest opinion on the East-West problem in Gatsby:
Fitzgerald dramatizes "the ideas of glorious frontier on the one hand and of the elegant East on the other hand as mush-minded, outdated clichés which have been knocked out of Nick Carraway. ... Life is difficult anywhere; the real distinction is between the place where home is, and all the world where home is not."("Fitzgerald's Triumph," in the Hoffman volume just cited, pp. 312-313)