Where is my mind?

Sometimes, especially in the early hours of my day, I forget things. Mostly I forget things like overdue movie rentals and library books, but today I pulled a bigger stunt and forgot my phone and my wallet. I remembered this as I was in my car in the parking garage, but as I was just barely going to make it to class on time if I sped out of the garage immediately, I decided to just go to school without these things for the day. Plus, I figured I could swing back by and pick them up before my class at DH.

Well, when I got on the freeway I realized that I was almost out of gas -- I had maybe thirty miles to go. That's okay, I thought with my exhausted 7AM brain, I'll just get gas on the way to DH.

After the most boring class in the universe ended at 10:30AM, I split to get to DH in time to print out the materials for class. I passed the Chevron on Harbor without a further thought, and as I was trying to merge into traffic I happened to look down at my digital fuel reading: 2 Miles. I instantly get a sinking feeling in my bones, as the last thing I need is to run out of gas on the 91 FWY and have to call AAA...so I exit Brookhurst in a kind of controlled panic, and plead for my car to make it to the Chevron on Orangethorpe. I make it! Yay! I pull out my...my...I don't have my wallet.

I at least have a car phone, a hands-free cell phone built into my car's system, and I called my Mom, who drove over from Whittier and rescued me and gave me $45 worth of gas (10 gallons worth).

As I sat in my car and waited for my Mom to arrive, I thought of how much driving is a part of my life, and how much I take it for granted. I began to be ashamed of myself when I discovered I was a little bit scared that I could be stranded (Todd was in Sacramento today) with no money and no way to contact anyone. I mean, I think I remember how to collect-call someone -- and I think I have at least a couple of phone numbers memorized...actually, I would have been really out of luck. I guess I could have walked back to FC from the gas station and tried to find Blythe, or maybe I would have had to convince Phil that I was worth giving twenty dollars to (I swear I've met Phil at least five times), or maybe I would've had to walk the seven miles to my brother's house.

That would have taken a while.

If we ever have to give up our vehicles we are going to grieve. We are going to feel lost. Of course there is always relief when we lose our attachments, but shoot if it isn't a little bit frightening to think about.

Personal Truth

I recently checked out Judith Butler's book, Gender Trouble, from the university library. I haven't read it yet, but I'm hoping to find some good support for my theory on Gatsby, and maybe just learn something in general.

In related news, I just finished reading M. Butterfly, and if I wasn't at a coffee house I might have let myself shed the tears that welled up in my eyes as I digested this heartbreaker. I like its political comments, especially now that it seems China is more America's master than ever before. But really, of course, I enjoy a good love story, especially one that argues gender as a performance, and quite persuasively I might add. I read this play for the Masks class I am taking for the Humanities requirement, and I wish I was going to write my paper on this play instead of a photograph of a mask. I might be able to -- I might be able to convince him to let me write about a mask in literature (provided I can include as many quotes as possible). That will be a great paper to write, and a welcome break from learning about Western Civilization.

I titled this post personal truth because it something I feel that all literature revolves around. It's not the personal truth of the author alone, but the collective personal truth that lies in the unconscious nature of humanity. It is the tendency to mask that gives us literature. It is overwhelming, and needs a shroud to be understood -- it's sort of like an invisible entity that only appears when a sheet is thrown over it -- the sheet is not the entity, but it is how we can verify that the mass exists. We wield many sheets -- we use many masks to identify this truth. For Rene, the truth about his sexuality lies in the mask that he places over the object of is desire -- he imagines it as woman -- but "woman" is the mask, and the personal truth is revealed as genderless. Words are even a mask. Words are maybe the first mask, the most ancient mask. Without words, we lose more than the ability to communicate, we lose our identities, and maybe, as Westerners, we loose our grip on the fear of death. For without an identity, what do we have to lose? The more we reinforce our identity, with words, with titles, with categories, with names, the more we have to lose.

Chapters SIx Through Nine of Gatsby: "I disapproved of him from beginning to end."

I am dissatisfied with the finale of this book. Hemingway was right, Fitzgerald is so romantic and predictable that he ends up diving headlong into cliche. The Sun Also Rises is much more satisfying as a novel; somehow Hemingway lets all the right people live, and all the right ends left unravelled. Hemingway throws a rotten tomato onto a canvas, and then lets it dry -- Fitzgerald does the same, and then tries to make a torte out of it. Still, I find Gatsby quite fascinating, and I will have such a good time analyzing it.

I think I identify most with Nick. It may seem like I've slammed him in previous posts, but I've really come to love him. He's so scared and confused, and I find myself feeling empathy for the way that he can't tell the truth. He doesn't search himself for the true feeling; instead, he searches his thoughts for right feeling, and then presents such as the honest emotion or the passionate conclusion. That he ever "loves" Jordan is laughable. Their final meeting is so perfect -- it was the only thing I really liked about the ending.

What I didn't appreciate was the violence that suddenly erupted. Compared to the violence in The Sun Also Rises, the death of Myrtle and Gatsby and Wilson left me a little perturbed, but perhaps that was the intent. I much prefer it when everyone gets to suffer indefinitely, as Brett and Jake do, when they vanish into obscurity at the end of the novel.

Last semester I read Judith Butler's 1988 essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," and remnants of this work have been popping up in the my mind as I've examined the characters in Gatsby. Statements like "gender...is an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts," and "is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self," have cast a pretty convincing shadow over the novel, and have persuaded me to watch the characters actions and understand them as struggles to form a gender identity. I know the story consistently presents images of money and industry and class structure, but I can't help but see the drama enfold and enter into chaos through confusion concerning gender, and what Butler calls the "heterosexual contract." Lines from this essay are almost essential to my ideas about Moby-Dick and Gatsby, one of the best being:

As Foucault others have pointed out, the association with a natural sex with a discrete gender and with an ostensibly natural "attraction" to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests.

My only fear is that I'm, as my literary criticism instructor often put it, using literary theory like a sausage machine -- you put the work into the system and get a pristinely packaged thesis. I'm also a novice -- so I consistently have to test out my new legs; they're wobbly, to say the least. I can attest, however, that my ideas about Moby-Dick and gender and reproduction were formulated long before I read Butler or Foucault, and I'm going to allow myself a small measure of pride in authenticity for that, even though it's quite apparent that theorists like Foucault have been such an influence in general that my ideas could have been shaped by him without a formal knowledge of his existence. Still, I don't know that Melville or Fitzgerald have been analyzed in this way yet, and if the essays are any good. I wonder if I have a book of my own on my hands, or just single works.

Also, is my syntax terrible? I need an editor.

Chapters Four and Five of Gatsby: "My family all died..."

I really love that in Gatsby's telling of himself he kills off all his family. I suppose you could form a mythological allusion here -- scream -- Oedipus comes to mind, but I would rather include this in my overarching conclusion that American Literature often features the orphan. Only when people are orphans do we see them having wild adventures at sea (Ishmael has no one/nothing on land), or getting impregnated by a Puritan minister (daddy, where were you?), or controlling the your family from the grave (Addie, and her tale receives double points for both including an orphan hero/villan and also having that hero/villan creating orphans in the story, and I'm sure there are many more examples. I am also aware that there may not be anything highly significant in the American orphan character trend, for it seems that America is in turns an orphan and a parent society. We like to trim our roots and start over here, hopefully with the result being lots and lots of money. Still, I love that Gatsby's mask is first and foremost an orphan. Maybe there is a mask of origin to be analyzed here.

Remember when I discussed Nick's habit of leaving off relationships with women when he feels threatened by another man? Isn't it fascinating that when Gatsby merely mentions his awareness of Jordan and Nick's tea date, that Nick responds in the extreme?

Gatsby: You'll hear about it this afternoon.
Nick: At lunch?
Gatsby: No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you're taking Miss Baker to tea.
Nick: Do you mean that you're in love with Miss Baker?

I mean, come on. It's almost as if Nick wants Gatsby to be interested in Jordan, so that he can dump her.

I also want to bring up the scene where Jordan narrates the times of Daisy's romantic youth. There are several things I'm interested in here.

"...she went with a slightly older crowd -- when she went with anyone at all."
"...her mother found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York...she wasn't on speaking terms with her family for several weeks."
"Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her mine..."

Daisy is awfully mysterious, according to Jordan. Chapter four really drove home for me Nick's infatuation with Gatsby, even if it's just in his way of speaking about himself, and Daisy's role as the rich cheerleader outcast. She rejoins society, but only to become the outcast in her and Tom's marriage.

And what about when Gatsby almost makes a prostitute out of Nick?! The exact terms of Gatsby's "proposition" are not defined and the language used implies that Gatsby is trying to become Nick's pimp; my guess is that Gatsby wants more control over him, and that he is trying to be like his predecessor, Dan, and "adopt" a little poor scamp of his own. The job happens to be "a rather confidential sort of thing,"...hmmm, meaning illegal? Nick says, "...because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there." At first read this just seems like Nick defending his "white collar" status, but in the light of my focus on desire, I like to think of it as his stubborn refusal to be paid by Gatsby instead of loved and valued for other reasons and in other ways. It's like Myrtle saying, "Daisy!", instead of just keeping her mouth shut and buying a new dress. The thing is, Nick is having his relationship with Gatsby through Daisy, a much more fulfilling connection with Gatsby in terms of desire -- if Nick has a secular relationship with Gatsby there's no outlet for desire, but when Nick gets to watch Gatsby and Daisy interact there is a satifcation gained from getting to participate in the connection. It's amazing that when Nick is prompted to stay during Tom and Myrtles liason, he is moved to have his own tryst with McKee, and when Gatsby and Daisy have their first meeting he leaves alone. It's as if his desire for Gatsby is satisfied through Daisy -- but his desire for Tom, if it exists, is not satisfied through Myrtle, who he describes as corpulent in her femininity, and overly sexual (he describes seeing her pump gas when he's in Gatsby's car: "...I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by.") The figures of reproduction -- the bodacious female body -- not in fashion in the 20s anyway, although Tamara deLempicka painted some fantasically meaty nude females during this era -- is not exacly rejected entirely, not by Tom, anyway, but defintely seems replusive to Nick. He likes Jordan, this "clean, hard, limited person," who thinks he is an idiot.

Patterns are emerging.

I thought better of it...

I had the idea that I should keep my random thoughts about the universe and my (sometimes) focused blogs on literature separate -- but who am I kidding? I can't divide my love of literature from my fascination with life -- I think the two feed each other and maybe even should always be presented together...on an informal blog, anyway.

It just didn't feel right and I thought better of it.

Know Thyself

The narrator in Gatsby is turning out to be an endless source of fascination for me. I was talking about the scene in chapter two were Tom punches Myrtle in the face, and it occured to me that McKee and Nick leave the scene of violence in such a manner that suggests they might be next. Mrs. Wilson recieves the blow because she defiantly refuses to obey Tom's demand that she not speak his wife's name. She has overstepped the bounds of mistress (as defined by Tom), and stepped out of her role of compliant prostitute -- I think this role is played up and indicated by all the shopping she does before they go to the apartment -- into one of rival wife, in order to give her and Tom's relationship validity. Tom's violent reaction can be attributed to his state of inebriation, but since we have already encountered Tom's brutality with the presentation of Daisy's broken finger the message is one of both a brutal master and an irresponsible alcoholic. I'm also interested in the detail of these attacks. Tom only breaks Daisy's finger, while he punches Mrs. Wilson in the face, breaking her nose. It is like Mrs. Wilson was sticking her nose in Tom's business and perhaps Daisy was pointing an accusing finger at him. Whatever the case, Tom squashes these domestic rebellions with unethical violence, and neither Nick or McKee intervenes at all.

Neither Nick nor McKee intervene, console or defend Mrs. Wilson, or do anything that signifies they are apalled or concerend about what has happened. They simply are aroused from a stupor, and when they have adequately assessed the situation, they head for the door. I was thinking today that they do this, not because they are upset, but because they feel that they both rely on personas that could easily place them next on Tom's list. They leave together, slinking away from a volitile situation, and the possibility of having to confront Tom disappears. It seems that even their presence could cause them to be at the end of Tom's fist.

The tone of Nick's actions is that he needs a strong masculine presence around dictate his actions. Nick seems to sympathize with his cousin in her sorrow over Tom's affair, but his assesment of women in most other chapters is that of disdain, or apathy, or, even when it seems like he is really attracted to one, fear and weakness -- as is the case in chapter four when he is pained by the idea that Gatsby might have an eye on Jordan. This sort of blissfull surrender to a strong man's will would merely imply submissive compliance -- if we were talking about a dog. But we are talking about a human, with what I would hope are inately human desires and wants, so his consistent submission to a male seems to reflect a deeper unsung desire. The part of the novel that really drives this home for me are Carraway's remarks that he wishes he could have "unknown" affairs with the wealthy women of fifth avenue. This concept is so confusing...why unknown? Why not unknown? I mean, if he wanted to, couldn't he have an affair with anyone willing? I think it really means unknown to himself. The concept of having a valid affair with a woman is not appealing as knowledge. The fiance that he left back in the midwest has become knowledge, and we know how Carraway has danced around that one. The affair with the woman in New Jersey became knowledge to her brother, and with some unpleasant looks it was stopped. The only hook up that hasn't become knowledge is the one with McKee. It hasn't even become clear to Nick.

Alright, I know that its only chapter four and that I haven't read it all yet, but I have the feeling that Fitzgerald is asking us to discover what Nick doesn't know, or doesn't want to accept, about himself -- and I don't think its just that he wants to rich. BTW -- I searched for anything about Carraway and his sexuality on JSTOR and Gale and EBSCO, and guess what? Nothing. This novel apparently needs some dusting off.

Chapter Three of Gatsby: "I'm one of the few honest people I've ever known"

I burned through Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris, today while trying to ignore and/or forgive my grandfatherly history professor for his off color humor and confusing rhetoric concerning the superiority of "western" civilization. He actually remarked this week that some form of ancient trade movement, I forget which, was akin to a large gang of Orange County wives stampeding to the Brea Mall with charge cards in hand. The mixture of glee and disapproval in his telling of the joke(?) was troubling. He has this way about him that suggests he turned 65 and discovered that he could get away with sexism and a patronizing manner if he followed his bigotry with a silly giggle. Today he managed to offend me twice; once he declared that Plato would not have liked Snoop Doggy Dog (no reason to hate on my homie from Long Beach, plus I had no idea anyone had access to Plato's brain), and then he said that though Alexander is reported to have indiscriminately slaughtered people in villages he wasn't doing what Stalin or Hitler did, he was merely a little tired and not thinking clearly. This last bit was not followed by any sort of gesture indicating sarcasm, and left me feeling disturbed. Not too long after that, while lecturing on a Greek scientist who promoted a spherical-earth theory, a student informed the class the notion that people in Columbus' Day thought the world was flat is propaganda invented by mysterious "people" who want to discredit medieval scholars, or it could have been scholars that want to discredit medieval "people." Our instructor replied that this sounded very probable, and that it would appear he had been misinformed when taught in elementary school that Columbus had set off to prove the world was round. He then quickly told us that we should look up the website hosted by the Flat Earth Society, because we should get a good dose of, as he so delicately put it, "wackjobs" and "nutcases." I have the distinct feeling that by the end of the, thankfully, short semester, I will have had my fill.

This man also told us that the only religious Greek people were uneducated, and of the lower class. Combined with the, as a friend so aptly put it, "cake-faces" that sit in front of me (so called for their liberal application of what they must consider to be blemish-concealing make-up) who delight in making fun of another student that isn't able to control a small nodding tic (I'm barely able to refrain from taking both of these bullies by the throat and smashing their skulls together -- see fifth grade), I'm already just trying to survive the class. Reading Sedaris's work today was comforting, for he too fluctuates neurotically between feelings of inadequacy and imagining that he is surrounded by idiots and/or jerks.

Dress Your Family was both satisfying and disappointing. I enjoyed Me Talk Pretty One Day more, as it was funnier, but I suppose you only have so many hilarious stories about your family. It has been my experience that when you tell funny stories about your family there is a subsequent feeling of guilt, a feeling that lingers; it becomes apparent that you shared this story out of a sense of shame, a sense of wanting to convince someone else that you aren't like this group of people that looks like you, and raised you. I think Dress Your Family expresses itself with this feeling at its heart, but it has none of the real tragedy and hopeful humanity of Dave Eggers' work, and even then I didn't fall head over heels for Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, although I liked it. Sometimes Sedaris work is so funny, but I found this time around his usually clever tone had been replaced by a sort of quiet desperation to relay his perceived misfortunes, all the while attempting to convince you that his collection of memories is actually his fortune. It didn't work for me this time, and I was left feeling a little empty as he ended the book with the birth of "baby Sedaris." I think regret has somehow crept into his work, and I sort of miss the unflinching and deprecating humor he wielded against his family and himself. Still, I enjoy reading him, and I'm not sure if this is a compliment or not, but his work tends to give me hope that I can make it as a writer.

Reading Fizgerald, however, I get the impression that I should go back to the salon where I belong. Nick struggles so much with his identity that I'm afraid at every moment he's going to give up and commit suicide. But he is probably not courageous enough for such an act -- in fact, Nick seems to be afraid of everything, most of all the prospect of being alone. The fear of intimacy is clear enough in his rigid defense of what I've come to think of as his "withholding pattern," or his tendency to sum up others in his mind while withholding his true feelings from those who apparently trust him.

There is also the problem of the ambiguous ending of chapter two. I was so confused by it that I have gone over it several times. Here Fitzgerald has the narrator chronologically enduring a relentlessly obnoxious party which started off with Tom wanting Nick to hang around the apartment while he and his mistress have sex in another room and then have some people over. In fact, this whole chapter is rife with sexuality -- Nick describes the day in New York as "almost pastoral," which conjures up scenes of sexuality and fertility. Nick attributes his presence in this scene to the overbearing insistence from Tom that he stay as well as being drunk, there is no real evidence that he is out of his mind until the end of the chapter, when he is going down the elevator with McKee, who he has already described as "a pale, feminine man" and who is often dominated by his shrill wife. They flee the violent scene where man strikes woman, and after agreeing to a random lunch date with McKee, Nick breaks into fragments of text stared by and separated from one another by ellipses

...I was standing up beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

"Beauty and the Beast...Lonelieness...Old Grocery Horse...Brook'n Bridge..."

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the Morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o'clock train.

A very provocative scene. If this were a scene with a woman, it would be clearly understood that a tryst had occurred. But a quick Spark Notes scan alludes to nothing of the sort -- I haven't done any research yet, but I keep getting caught on this passage. I mean, if they left the apartment and got drunk, or got more drunk, and wanted to look at McKee's photographs, what is point of the presence of the bedroom? The bed? The underwear? Being between the sheets? There's no clear meaning, but the fact that the usually deductive Nick has nothing subjective or analytic to add to this scene tells me that it is important.

I suppose Gatsby's grand parties are supposed to represent the roaring twenties, the age where you wiped your nose with elusive thousand-dollar bills and tipped the rat who foraged through your trash. I don't know though -- however fascinated with money Fitzgerald was, and Nick is, this novel doesn't read as an excuse to discuss luxury or wealth -- it's Nick's creepy voyeuristic quality -- the fact that he can't look away from this scene of decadence, that he gobbles it up and feels insecure in the presence of it. The only time in the novel, so far, that it seems like Nick has a moment's peace, is when he admires Gatsby's smile

...It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, as assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

Aside from the obvious narcissism oozing from such a summation, there is the suggestion in this statement that hiding the true self is necessary to happiness -- or at least necessary to being happy with others, not that this is a new concept. But just what Nick is hiding remains debatable. This novel is supposed to be Nick's confession of sorts -- and it is supposed to be painfully honest. We are supposed to get the impression that we are reading something very truthful, the very experience of Nick's soul, but he blows this off when he tells in the middle of chapter three, after telling us all about the party

Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me.

Here we get a deeper version of the truth: Nick wants us to get a particular impression of him, apparently one of self-importance, but, in a rather uncomfortable way he then goes on to tell us that he had a short affair with a woman but ended it after, get this, "her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction" -- mean looks? In your direction? It doesn't appear that it takes much to defer Nick's affections. He also tells us that in his meaningful life away from his cousin, Tom, Jordan, and Gatsby he sometimes goes to Fifth Avenue to "pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove." Disapprove of what? His income? That's makes some sense, but what about this business of no one ever knowing? I don't really understand completely yet, but I do get this sense of shame that seems to emanate from Nick wherever he goes. Then there's this line:

...most affections conceal something eventually...

This reminds me of the "repression" quote from chapter one.

Then there is his observation that Jordan Baker is "incurably dishonest." That line about reached out of the book and smacked me in the face. And what about this, "dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply"! The way he likes her -- first because she's famous, then because she's mysterious; he goes on to say that she never attaches herself to clever or shrewd men, curiously accusing himself of lacking these qualities in the process! He appreciates it when she degrades and manipulates him -- in fact after a particularly back-handed remark he goes so far as to say, "for a moment I thought I loved her," and proceeds to end the chapter by announcing his plans to formally end a relationship back home in order to pursue her. What? Didn't he say that this relationship was a rumor? He asserted his singleness back in chapter one -- "I'm not even vaguely engaged" and now he rushes through the reality of a "vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free." This, immediately followed by a declaration that his "chief virtue" is honesty. Honesty! I was on the right track, after all.

This is indeed a good book -- but I don't understand what all the fuss over Gatsby is about - yet maybe he plays a role like Sartoris, or like Supten from Absalom, Absalom!, creating a reference point. I can't wait to research this book -- maybe I'll have enough evidence to support a theory that I can send in to USC for my graduate school application. (Shhhh.)