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Fitzgerald and the 1920s

Sunday, September 29, 19

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)


Fitzgerald’s Novels

•This Side of Paradise, 1920

•The Beautiful and Damned, 1922

•The Great Gatsby, 1925

•Tender Is the Night, 1934

•The Last Tycoon, 1941


This Side of Paradise

• Coming of age novel

• Amory Blaine goes to Princeton, then to war, and finally back to Princeton

• His mother dies; his mentor (Monsignor Darcy) dies; several friends die (and one disappears); the girl he loves dumps him to marry a rich man she doesn’t love; another girl turns out to be crazy


This Side of Paradise

• Fitzgerald wrote to his publisher that the title comes from lines of Rupert Brookes (Tiare Tahiti):

• …Well, this side of paradiseThere’s little comfort in the wise.

• Other epigraph from Oscar Wilde:

• Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.


Pacifism and Human Nature

• I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be.



• I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, [ought]

• and there, like an excluded middle, stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. [is, must]



• I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, [ought]

• and there, like an excluded middle, [Basic law of logic: p or not p]

• stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. [is, must]



• And this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi’s and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche’s—



• And this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi’s [or Dostoevsky’s: ___________]

• and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche’s— [___________]



• And this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi’s [or Dostoevsky’s: value, meaning come from something above humanity]

• and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche’s— [value, meaning come from within us]



• Tolstoi/Dostoevsky: realism—value is mind-independent, “out there”—“We cannot simply make it up.”

• Nietzsche: idealism—value depends on the mind—“Become the person you are.”


Morality

• If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.


Leaving for War

• And what we leave here is more than this class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here....


Change

• Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years; this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.


Change

• Heraclitus (500 BC)

• Universal flux: “On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow.” (B12)

• “Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.” (Plato Cratylus 402a)


Change


• Unity of opposites: “all things are one.”

• “Collections: wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things.” (B10)


Change


• Fire: “This world-order [kosmos], the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.” (B30)


Change

• “What opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife.” (B8)

• “We must recognize that war is common, strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity.” (B80)

• “War is father of all and king of all; and some he manifested as gods, some as men; some he made slaves, some free.” (B53)


The Final Chapter

• the “loss of faith” of the “heirs of progress”


Moral Drift• Q.—Where are you drifting?

• A.—Don't ask me!

• Q.—Don't you care?

• A.—Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide.

• Q.—Have you no interests left?

• A.—None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness [innocence, naiveté].


Good and evil

• Q.—Are you corrupt?

• A.—I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all any more.


Innocence

• I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.


No more heroes

• There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne Holiday was sunk from sight as though he had never lived; Monsignor was dead. Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing.


Life

• Life was a damned muddle ... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the referee would have been on his side....


The Romantic Elf

• He found something that he wanted, that he had always wanted and always would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable....


Epiphany

• Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: "Very few things matter and nothing matters very much."

• On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.


Two Kinds of People

• Spiritually married—take human nature as they find it

• Spiritually unmarried—continually seeks new systems that will control or counteract human nature


Two Kinds of People

• Spiritually married—take human nature as they find it [the “is and always will be”—is, must]

• Spiritually unmarried—continually seeks new systems that will control or counteract human nature [ought]

• We’re back to the excluded middle


Dream

• As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets.


New generation

• Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....


Disillusionment

• There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth—yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.


Know thyself

• "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."


Know thyself

• Oracle at Delphi

• Sometimes attributed to Heraclitus

• Used by Thales, Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato


Know thyself

• Socrates, Phaedrus: “I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things."

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!”


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