nd prompt remystifying, the "Marxian" critical perception so powerful in The Great Gatsby, rather than generating progressive impulse, becomes, by anxious turns, metaphysically annulled, sexually eschewed in regressive libido, and climactically demonized in proletarian displacement. It is commonly acknowledged that at the heart of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald there runs a poetry of desire, an unshakable process of quest set in motion by beauty. The youthful reveries of Gatsby, for instance, effect perhaps what Greek philosophy called a metanoia or conversion of vision to a further dimension of truth or destiny: "a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing" (100). Ineluctably compelled by visitations of a transfiguring beauty, oriented round a field of transcendence, the novelist who in the 1920s styled himself the trumpeter of the Jazz Age would in an earlier age have articulated his ravishing disturbances in the discourse and dyad of a mystic. Listening to the "tuning fork struck upon a star," Fitzgerald stands squarely in an ancient and Western tradition of inescapably frustrate enchantment. "Only I discern / Infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn," wrote Browning; and these lucid terms of Romantic formulation recapitulate a metaphysical tradition common to two millennia of idealist aesthetics. In this tradition, the cravings set in motion by inspiration reach upward towards an ideality ontologically far removed in splendor from the quotidian material realm, which the ideal haunts nonetheless with a kind of incalculable and aesthetic gravitational pull. The ecstatic outreach this inspires may be interpreted as towards the immaterial world of First Forms (Plato) or an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover that "calls like a lover" (kinei hos eromenon); it may be towards a transcendent Christian Creator, upon whose natural forms play, in the d...
