umb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. (112)The traditional sacramental instinct endures, internalized yet alien, an elevated profundity fast fading into unintelligibility. As a liminal reflex persisting within modern America's metaphysical amnesia, its wording proves illegible to a society whose telos is the vulgarity of private profit. If beauty lacks a transcendent "ground," personality's springs become problematic, impossible of final judgment: there may, reflects Nick, or there may not be more to the lifestyle of romantic grace and aspiration than "an unbroken series of successful gestures"; and conduct may ultimately be "founded on the hard rock or wet marshes" (2). Given the disappearance of an Absolute, the emotional triad on which Gatsby is built is decisively distinct from that of Christianity and Platonism. In the latter, awakened desire, colliding with a resistant phenomenal world, can yet remain assured of some ultimate translation to immutable and perfect transcendence. But in Fitzgerald's secular narratives of desire, the impetus of lyric promise is decisively disintegrated by the world's crude bathos and despoliation; and the Dream lacks sanctuary beyond the sphere that resists it. Lyricism, proceeding thus to frustration, must always revert to nostalgia, to elegy: "Can't repeat the past? . . . Why of course you can!" (111). In the tragic chiming of these three tones — lyric promise, its failure, elegy — is composed all Fitzgerald's work. In Gatsby they are found from the outset in the opening meditation, where "romantic readiness" issues only in a "foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams," but where, in retrospect, "[o]nly [dead] Gatsby was exempt from my reaction"; and they form a pattern pursued to the final page, where the "green light" and "orgiastic future" turn ...
