ary, throwing upon the commodity the devotional light of a vanished absolute, The Great Gatsby recalls Lukcs' dictum that the characteristic form of the bourgeois novel is that of "the epic of a world abandoned by God" (88). Although Gatsby has often been exposited in terms of its tragic paradox of corrupt hero and "incorruptible dream" (154-5), nearly all such readings have been conceived in the very general, sometimes even universalizing, "cultural" terms of an erosion of the "American Dream" by "materialism."1 We need, however, to impart economic and class specificity to such hazy generalities — for so Fitzgerald's novel did — and one such welcome case is the work of Michael Spindler. My own essay, while it agrees with Spindler's that Gatsby is "particularly expressive of that ideological conflict which the rise of the leisure class and the growth of consumption-oriented hedonism was generating in American society in the 1920s" (167), will attempt a textually and psychologically fuller reading than Spindler's shrewd, cogent but very brief study allows. Further, I do not agree that Fitzgerald repudiates and distances himself from Nick's constant romanticizing of Gatsby's love of Daisy and of wealth: Nick's ambivalence is precisely Fitzgerald's, as his essays, "My Lost City," "Echoes of the Jazz Age," and "Early Success" make clear. Such ambivalence can rather be traced, I feel, to the coexistence in Fitzgerald of the cool "Marxian" eye with the fervent "dislocated mysticism" of his Catholic inheritance, though I must also disagree sharply with the sancta simplicitas of Joan Allen's conclusion in her pious study of "the Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald" that the novels project an Augustinian antithesis of matter and spirit by which the fate of the world and its revelers is one simply of damnation for sin (44, 103). A properly historicist reading of Gatsby is one true, perhaps, not only to the tension we shall see...
