Living in a Material World: Men & Women in
The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City

The 1920s:
Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty grey 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 . . .

The 1980s:
[A] new era was starting. American culture in the 1980s would be a culture based on triumph - on the admiration of power and status - and nothing would be more important to that culture than its symbols. Especially at the start, they were what allowed the president to insist, "We have every right to dream heroic dreams." . . . Money words . . . became the key language of the 1980s, and they signaled a culture with an insatiable need to proclaim its triumphs. Even more important . . . they signaled a culture that was coherent in its promise. [19]

The fear of poverty and the worship of success, the admiration of power and status - these are key components of modern American culture, particularly in times of fiscal boom. When the economy is performing, the dualistic drive of the American dream between idealism and materialism seems complimentary rather than contradictory - that, as crude interpretations of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence can suggest, the pursuit of property and the pursuit of happiness are interchangeable ends. The 1920s and the 1980s were two such times when the promise of America seemed nearly coherent. As Kevin Phillips notes in his study of Wealth and Democracy, these times shared several characteristic aspects of all "capitalist heydays" capped by speculative busts.[20] The Twenties and Eighties were generally conservative in politics and ideology, exalting business, entrepreneurialism, and free enterprise. Laissez-faire practices were in while 'big government' and social welfare legislation were out. Commerce and finance underwent major restructuring through "repeating merger waves and the rise of trusts, holding companies, leveraged buy-outs, spin-offs et al." The coastal cities, having prominent service and finance-based economic sectors, gained in strength while the commodity-producing interior weakened. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were the places to be. Wealth became more concentrated, resulting in economic polarization and rising levels of inequality, coupled with an increase in "survival-of-the-fittest thinking . . . from social Darwinism to welfare reform and globalization." There were winners and there were losers, and the distinction was dependent upon how much money one could make to spend. Finally, the economy became heavy with "rising, increasingly precarious levels of speculation, leverage, and debt" as the costs of the decades began to outweigh their profits.[21]

For those lucky enough to be both wealthy and young, the Twenties and the Eighties were periods of great excitement as their expenditures fueled the noise of the Roaring decades. As F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably eulogized his Jazz Age, it was "the most expensive orgy in history . . . the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls. But moralizing is easy now and it was pleasant to be in one's twenties in such a certain and unworried time. Even when you were broke you didn't worry about money, because it was in such profusion around you."[22] The Eldorado atmosphere of the times was contagious, furthering styles of living that generate a strong nostalgia impulse today, even when mixed with a retrospective social repentance.[23] But while these social similarities provide a basis for comparisons, their historical context helps to clarify their existence as economic outgrowths into culture.

From Production to Consumption

Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism delineates many of the historical factors that have created American economic culture. Since the sixteenth century, economic activity has surpassed military and religious concerns as the central focus of Western civilization. A "singular new mode of operation," the socioeconomic system of capitalism, "was fused with a distinctive culture" of "self-realization" apart from "traditional restraints" and a "character structure" of "self-control and delayed gratification, of purposeful behavior in the pursuit of well-defined goals." This system traveled over the Atlantic with the colonial settlers, eventually taking root and producing individuals like Benjamin Franklin, the most emblematic figure of this first American economic culture. Theoretically, property was tied to happiness only as a mark of one's productivity, self-sovereignty and independence. Wealth was a sign of merit. Over time, as the separation from the fetters of "custom and tradition" grew, the "economic impulse" of capitalism was free to exert its "boundlessness." By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bell notes, "Change became the norm." It was the permanent "trajectory of the economic impulse" and "the trajectory of the culture," and one of the final factors in that process which is termed modernity. [24]

Modernity, of course, is a critical chimera, referring at once to a process of change and its lived experience. It connotes a certain "newness" in human history, tied to advanced technology, swelling urbanization, bureaucratic control, capitalism and consumerism, and the resulting rise in people's appreciation of their existence as individualized subjects, within localized spaces and temporalities. More a feeling than a solid definition, it has yet to be articulated beyond contention. As Miles Ogborn notes, "differences over what modernity is mean that there can be no agreement on its chronology."[25] However, most scholars would agree that modernity, both as an experience and a process, was fully evident in America by the 1910s, to the extent that the "postmodern" condition was already being discussed as early as 1917.[26] As Rita Felski states, "'modernity' is a term that 'serves to draw attention to long-term processes of social change, to the multidimensional yet often systematic interconnections between a variety of cultural, political, and economic structures.'" But modernity "'refers not simply to a substantive range of sociohistorical phenomena - capitalism, bureaucracy, technological development, and so on - but above all to particular (though often contradictory) experiences of temporality and historical consciousness.'"[27] Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a foundational and often quoted text for attempting to comprehend the experience of modernity. He writes

There is a mode of vital experience - experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils - that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this experience 'modernity'. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.[28]

Modernity, as it is described here, is essentially a process and experience of transition from tradition to the new. It can be seen at the root of the despairing conclusion Fitzgerald reaches in This Side of Paradise, when Amory Blaine declares his generation, "dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success," had "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." But, while strolling among the remnants of the old order, Amory has the comfort, if slightly cold, of self-knowledge, a base on which to build new definitions of meaning.[29] As the march of modernity progressed and the last vestiges of the old gave way to ever-changing symbols, the postmodern condition would remove even this base, particularly as the new definitions of self would be constructed through the functioning of the capitalist system.

Capitalism and modernity promote distinctly different modes of personal behavior. "At the start, the capitalist economic impulse and the cultural drive of modernity shared a common source, the ideas of liberty and liberation, whose embodiments were 'rugged individualism' in economic affairs and the 'unrestrained self' in culture," but these ideas soon conflicted. "The antagonism deepened as the organization of work and production became bureaucratized and individuals were reduced to roles, so that the norms of the workplace were increasingly at variance with the emphasis on self-exploration and self-gratification."[30] In Bright Lights, Big City, McInerney shows the cumulative effects of this division through the protagonist's inability to conform to the strictures of his position at a prestigious magazine in the Department of Factual Verification, especially its artlessness as determined by the "'Manual of Factual Verification" and the restrictions of his controlling boss, whom he calls "The Clinger." The atmosphere of the workplace is described as like "the Kremlin," and attempts at expressiveness result in instant reprisals and long-winded lectures about procedure. The protagonist experiences relief only after he prompts "The Clinger" to dismiss him.[31]

Alienating labor makes efficiency and productivity a difficult route to happiness, leaving little incentive to work. This conflict between a "bureaucratized" capitalist economy and a modernist culture of self effectively dissolved the previous prominence of "character" as a "unity of moral codes and disciplined purpose." In its place arose "an emphasis on 'personality,' which is the enhancement of self through the compulsive search for individual differentiation . . . [N]ot work but the 'life-style' became the source of satisfaction and criterion for desirable behavior in the society." The capitalist economic system, dependent on the energy of people to produce wealth, evolved to meet this potential challenge by appropriating the means of defining and satisfying the concomitant desires of a subject dependent on style. Thus, while in the "world of capitalist enterprise, the normal ethos in the spheres of production and organization [was] still one of work, delayed gratification, career orientation, [and] devotion to the enterprise," in the realm of capitalist marketing "a hedonistic way of life whose promise is the voluptuous gratification of the lineaments of desire" was promoted through "the sale of goods, packaged in the glossy images of glamour and sex."[32] The growing advertising industry of the 1920s set about "'effecting a self-conscious change in the psychic economy,' as historian Stuart Ewen puts it, creating new needs for 'prestige,' 'glamour,' or 'sex appeal,' new fears of looking old or having halitosis, and new pressures on families."[33] A life of happiness was a life of insulation in consumer goods. This new capitalism still demands a Protestant work ethic in the area of production, but it also must "stimulate a demand for pleasure and play in the area of consumption." Happiness was meeting this demand.

Wealth became a means to consumption, now the sign of merit, but technical advancements (i.e., mass production) led to the rising consumption of "past luxuries," redefined as necessities through accessibility and marketing, by the lower classes who could now purchase goods through installment buying, which revalued "debt" as "credit." "Work and accumulation" of capital were no longer ends in themselves, but rather "means to consumption and display." Advancement was no longer a matter of slowly "rising up a social ladder . . . but of adopting a specific style of life - country club, artiness, travel, hobbies - which marked one as a member of a consumption community."[34] Achievement is signified through appearance and display.

Of course, the upper class has always distinguished itself through display. Edgar Allen Poe once observed that because the United States lacked an "aristocracy of blood, and having therefore . . . fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries."[35] Writing near the close of the "Gilded Age," a time with many similarities to the 1920s and the 1980s, Thorstein Veblen constructed a telling critique of the upper class from his similar observations in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Identifying the struggle to gain social status through the attainment and display of wealth as the motivating factor in cultural development, Veblen describes how "pecuniary emulation" is the driving force behind ownership of property. To achieve esteem "in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth" as a "necessary condition of reputability." But in "order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on the evidence." The leisure class, separated by its pecuniary superiority from the "drudgery" of productive work, puts its wealth in evidence through conspicuous consumption in public and the cultivation of manners and specialized knowledge in private, thus demonstrating their ability to engage in non-productive consumptions of time. "A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence that that portion of the well-bred person's life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect . . . [The] value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure." The rich become a class of connoisseurs as a means of consuming conspicuously and marking their distinction, developing tastes for material goods and intoxicating substances that are prohibitively expensive for others and of only relative value. Their choices set the standards for the rest of society, as "the standard of expenditure . . . is an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond our reach . . . [E]specially in any community where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all standard of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary class - the wealthy leisure class."[36] But because their distinction rests on the cultivation of superiority and not some essential difference, their position is problematic.

In the modern environment, "the means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation." Consumption therefore supplants leisure as the standard measure of "decency." To a certain extent, one needs only to spend like the leisure class in order to be taken as one of its members. In the learned nature of manners, even when built upon the advantages of "a cumulative life of leisure," there also exists the potential for imitation. There is always "the possibility of producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill." "This syncopated gentle birth gives results which . . . are in no wise substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but less arduous training in the pecuniary properties."[37] The myth of "good blood" begins to disintegrate when its properties can be functionally incorporated into any personality with the desire and ability to appropriate them.

By the 1920s, mass production was democratizing the products of consumption, advertising was universally creating and disseminating codes of social deportment, and their combination was making the achievement of a desirable lifestyle seem possible for those previously restricted from the esteem granted to the leisure class. "You might not have their money," these forces seemed to say, "but you can buy the trappings of their lifestyle." From schoolbook heroes like Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the culture had turned its eyes first to the "captains of industry" and then to the increasing flood of celebrity figures produced by modernity through its various media. In a culture preoccupied with personality, "celebrity" is a natural measure of success. Celebrities, with their wealth and personality, became a new leisure class.[38] Their exalted position has led McInerney to criticize the Eighties for being "an age in which an actor is the President, in which fashion models are asked for their opinions, in which getting into a nightclub is seen as a significant human achievement."[39] The "achievement" to be signified "through appearance and display" was the ability to approximate the lifestyles of a leisure class, a class that by definition would always exceed the potential refinement of those classes that must also produce the products they consume. When capitalism seized the reins of defining style through marketing, it encouraged the conspicuous consumption of a vast range of products defined as necessary for achieving the right kind of social distinction. Those most closely able to mimic the promoted styles would find themselves achingly engaged in the orgies of wealth that were the 1920s and the 1980s.

Material Boys

Fitzgerald and McInerney microscopically examine the distances between those who inhabit the upper echelons of society and those who most closely orbit their stratum, particularly in terms of the conflicts created between men as cultural figures. The impact of modern economic life, which reaches its full effect in the postmodern era, is to alter the very nature of the self and to question the survival of the individual in an increasingly commodified world. Fitzgerald and McInerney's male characters define themselves with varying degrees of effectiveness in response to these challenges. The juxtaposition of their lifestyles, particularly in terms of their differing personalities, consumption habits, and motivating urges, produces a critique that is at once unflattering of and sympathetic towards the failings of modern men.

Ash and Soot

However, in their novels exists the ghostly presence of people that appear to subsist in the absence of all these drives, a dark specter outside the carnival of wealth. The lowest denizens of the economic system, who have either failed to begin or have ceased both producing and consuming effectively, are a source of fear and unintelligibility. For Fitzgerald, the "valley of ashes" occupied by the cuckolded mechanic George Wilson is the embodiment of this apprehension in The Great Gatsby. The emptiness of this realm has often been viewed in terms of its religious or Marxian significance, and these are valid interpretations. But reading it through the lens of Veblen leads Patricia Bizzell to another conclusion:

The valley of ashes is not, as Leo Marx has argued, primarily an instrument of judgment against wealth, and the destructive processes that support it. Rather, the valley of ashes symbolizes the condition of people who have not yet begun the process of pecuniary emulation . . . The faded eyes [on the billboard] symbolize absent orthodoxy, which if present, could mediate between this colorless world of 'bitter fact' . . . In the absence of orthodoxy to give shape to their lives, these "ash-grey men" are "already crumbling" - unless they try to emerge from this shadow world and enter the process of pecuniary emulation, the process offered by American ideology in place of authentic orthodoxy.[40]

Thus, in the valley of ashes, men exist without the comfort of tradition and without an idealized sense of self, a style in which to buttress their lives beyond the level of mere existence. Wilson, a "spiritless" and "anæmic" man "so dumb he doesn't know he is alive," mingles "immediately with the cement color of the walls" and is veiled with a "white ashen dust" just "like everything in the vicinity-except his wife," Myrtle. Her impetus can be felt behind his pretensions to pecuniary emulation, the "shadow of a garage" which he runs and his futile interest in buying Tom's car, because he "was his wife's man and not his own." Myrtle's vitality appears to be all that keeps Wilson from becoming ash himself. The realization of her infidelity has almost as devastating an effect on him as her death. As Nick describes it, "He had discovered that Myrtle had some life apart from him in another world and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discover less than an hour before - and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well." This difference, which on Wilson appears as a sign of "guilt," is also the difference between the poor and the rich, those outside of and those on top of the economic impulse. Tom can leverage his standing to control his wife; Wilson has only a locked door, and even as his wife screams "Beat me!" he cannot resort to violence to control her. Her death leaves him a "poor ghost" whose "incoherent muttering" coalesces until he becomes "an ashen, fantastic figure" of destruction, who in turn destroys himself.[41] As Aldridge writes, "Wilson carries forward and for the first time fully characterizes Fitzgerald's earlier horror of poverty and illness."[42]

For McInerney, the horror of poverty and illness finds its target in the "MIAs" of the Eighties, New York's supposedly hostile and frequently mentally ill homeless population. These "bums, beggars and hobos that return to haunt the pages of the Eighties novel were just outside the periphery of Fitzgerald's world."[43] Like Wilson, they are ghosts, but read more like poltergeists than specters. Their lack of substance is less a matter of fact or force than of social agreement, as a front-page article from the New York Times in the summer of 1988 makes clear. Choice quotes from the city's residents reveal the unshocking conclusion that as the homeless "become increasingly aggressive, even intimidating," "'people try very hard to tune them out by not seeing them and not giving them money.'"[44] The worst offenders, however, ask for more than spare change. The protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City ends up "facing a casualty, one of the city's MIAs" on the subway when "a sooty hand" taps his shoulder. While he is "more than willing to lay some silver on the physically handicapped," the "folks with the long-distance eyes" give him "the heebie-jeebies." The MIA, who proclaims that on "January 13th" he will be 29 years old in a way that "sounds like a threat to kill you with a blunt object," is "fairly neat, as if he had only recently let go of social convention, but his eyes are out-to-lunch and his mouth is working furiously." Eventually the MIA, "staring intently at an ad for a business training institute," sits down on the lap of an old lady, pinning her in place while remaining oblivious to her pleas and tears and weak attempts to dislodge him. Everyone in the car, including half "a dozen healthy men" "within spitting distance," are "watching and pretending they're not." No one intervenes, and when the protagonist finally stands, the MIA is already moving on.[45] This MIA, whose eyes and movements of mouth are defined in contradictory states of business, has left the realm of the producers who are taking the train to work. He insists on his own existence by proclaiming his birthday, as solid a determinant as any he has, and simultaneously forces this existence on others while denying their presence by invading the woman's personal space. In turn, the rest of the train denies his existence by ignoring his actions. While Wilson is a distant and outside threat, formed by the vacuum between the past and the new, the MIA is a deserter. Once engaged in the capitalist system, his current absence from it is a threat to the "healthy" men who ignore his presence in an attempt to deny the possibility of such a fate for themselves. Although they stand apart from the capitalist consumer culture, Wilson and the MIA are not figures of liberation. They are the products of industrial waste, ash and soot, and the embodiments of fear and destruction facing the starring actors of the world, Fitzgerald and McInerney's consumers in the orgy of lifestyle, the upper and middle classes.

Social Stasis, Social Climbing

Fitzgerald, temporally closer to the beginnings of change in modern American society, represents a leisure class faced with self-extinction through their own excesses, and yet maintains a sense of their magnetic quality. From his writings, it is not difficult to believe Fitzgerald once commented to Hemingway that "the very rich are different from you and me," to which Hemingway is supposed to have snapped, "Yeah, they have more money." Although Bruccoli has opposed the accuracy of this "apocryphal exchange," its continued currency adds weight to the interpretation that Fitzgerald's treatment of the extremely wealthy conveys a sense of their election, particularly in their youth.[46] Although he does not necessarily like them, he is aware of their power over others and their environment, and understands the desirability of the possessions that signify their status.

In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan emerges as one of Fitzgerald's most unsavory depiction of the silver spoon set. He is not an admirable man, particularly because his sense of superiority is under attack. As Nick describes him, Tom is the quintessential embodiment of the leisure class, drifting "here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together." His family is "enormously wealthy" and he had "come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that." But he has not earned his money, and as Gatsby's introduction of him as only "the polo player" marks, he engages in no productive occupation. Tom's achievements are limited to only "various physical accomplishments," most notably his standing as "one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven - a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax." With little else than money and the past to comfort him, Tom is destined to "drift on forever, seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game." As Bizzell notes, Tom "has not even the achievements of pecuniary emulation to his credit; presumably, he is very like his father; and as a result, he and his kind are in danger of dying out."[47] Tom, now a "man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner," has "arrogant eyes" which have "established dominance over his face," giving "him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward." He is a man looking into the future, troubled by what he sees. While other men are turning their stables into garages, Tom does the opposite, clinging to the symbols that have defined aristocratic privilege since the Middle Ages. He senses that something, the essence of modernity, might dislodge his kind from their heights, and his most obvious failings, including his brutish nature, racist ideologies, and possessive infidelity, are all attempts at resisting this social change. Tom's insecurity, as Nick notes, makes "him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."[48] Robert Sklar states that Tom's physicality is an obvious metaphor for his "real strength, his imperishable strength, . . . the power of his social standing."[49] Violence therefore emerges as a means for Tom to enforce his dominance over others and maintain strict class boundaries, as when he breaks Myrtle's nose for the audacity discussing his wife on a first name basis. Racist reading gives Tom a language for describing his sense that his civilization is "going to pieces," with his group of "Nordics" being submerged in the rising tide of the "Colored Empires." But although Tom sees himself "standing alone on the last barrier of civilization," the purpose of his rhetoric against throwing "everything overboard and having intermarriage between black and white" is based very clearly in his fear that he might lose the advantages of his birth to "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere."[50] If Gatsby can take his wife, just as he has taken Wilson's, then the power of his social standing is no longer imperishable. Retaining Daisy is simply one more of Tom's fingers in the dyke of social change. But the Flood is coming. As Stephen Matterson notes, Tom Buchanan's name refers back to the last President during slavery, James Buchanan.[51] President Buchanan ran on a "Save the Union" platform, promising to end the "agitation of the slavery question" in the North. Although he managed to prevent civil war during his term, his compromises were unable to hold for very long.[52] Implicit in the Buchanan name, upon which rests Tom's claim to superiority, is the suggestion of a temporary security that cannot postpone the progress of change forever.

Gatsby is the most obvious target of Tom's insecurity, the preeminent figure of modernity's instability in The Great Gatsby. When taken together, the variety of critical responses to his character, which detail various interpretations of his position as a figure of myth and history, reveal his contradictory nature more than anything else. He is materialistic and idealistic, a hero in the style of Franklin and a celebrity surrounded by rumor, a challenge to the past and yet its greatest champion, a self-made man and a self-defeating one, a product of society and its victim.[53] The issues surrounding Gatsby revolve around the question, as Marshall Berman asks it, of how "Gatsby is himself to be measured?"[54] Answering this question requires addressing at least four of Gatsby's aspects: his life, his style, his goal, and his fate. In life, Gatsby has risen to the heights of success by mimicking the old American ideal of self-realization, delayed gratification, and purposeful behavior in the pursuit of well-defined goals, illustrated by the schedule he recorded as a youth and by his five year pursuit of Daisy. But he has done all the right things through the wrong ways. His "Platonic conception of himself" is not based in substance, allowing him to view the ill-gotten gains of bootlegging and other criminal activities as a means of achieving his goals. Rather, Gatsby's conception is a modern one of style, a self defined by and through the compulsive search for individual differentiation. Nick romanticizes this fact beautifully, stating if "personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life . . . This responsiveness . . . was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness." Even from his earliest days, this romantic readiness is tied to the acquisition of material goods. His possessions, the grand car and expansive house and vulgarly magical parties, are the reality of the "ineffable gaudiness" that "spun itself out in his brain." His first transformation of self into the man of his dreams occurs when he spies a millionaire's yacht, which to Gatsby "represented all the beauty and glamour in the world," and his striving after Daisy can be seen as merely the final incarnation of this drive. In his quest, he becomes almost unreal, surrounding himself in the "threadbare" phrases of magazine romance, evoking no image so much as that "of a turbaned 'character' leaking sawdust at every pore" that only solidifies under the pressure of his insistence of its truth. He is, as Daisy notes, "the advertisement of the man." The rumors are true. Gatsby has in fact "killed a man," namely James Gatz, and replaced him with an image, one so grand that it "was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world." He is a celebrity by sheer wealth and the mysteries of style. Gatsby, when faced with a challenge to this image, shows the danger to himself and others innate in his existence. Tom's resolve to drive Gatsby's car, which he degrades as a "circus wagon," causes "an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable" as if Nick "had only heard it described in words" to pass over Gatsby's face. It reappears again when Tom begins to discredit Gatsby's life story, and this time Nick can places it: "He looked - and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden - as if he had 'killed a man.'" Gatsby cannot tolerate the stripping of his stylized life. Daisy, to whom Gatsby had "wed his unutterable visions," is part of this life style. His goal is not so much to claim her as his own, but to reclaim what he has already taken. Gatsby "wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy." Indeed, his desire is that she renounce Tom completely, and thus wipe away the harm done to the image for which he has killed.[55] It is the force of the image, fueled by a drive for pecuniary emulation unmatched by any other man in the book, which fills Tom with fear. As Bizzell describes it, "both men . . . derive [a] quality of threat partly from their wealth. In Gatsby's case, it may also come from a sense of the violence he's done to himself to attain such a gorgeous imitation; a fearful strength of will must have been required to raise him so high from an obscure background."[56] But this strength of will eventually crumples under the assault of Tom and the irrevocable loss of Daisy. Having been stripped of his illusions, Gatsby finds himself living in a "new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees." In the wake of his dreams, Gatsby falls prey to the "foul dust" so closely aligned with ash, the high price of both "living too long with a single dream" and living without one. His modern structure of self is incompatible with any idealistic longing beyond the immediate mode of consumption; he would have been safer simply living in his protective "womb of purposeless splendor."[57]

Upwardly Mobile and Falling Down

Elizabeth Young notes in her analysis of Eighties fiction that this decade, with its homogenized society, could never give birth to a character like Jay Gatsby.[58] She is right, for Gatsby is a product of a time in transition, when a romantic vitality of spirit and a belief in the possibility of change and self-transformation could, at least for a time, struggle against both the bounds of tradition and the new, distorting effects of capitalist modernity. But the occupants of Bright Lights, Big City were born into the world post-modern, when the last bastions of tradition are converted into marketing campaign slogans and self-definition is dissolved in the frenetic flight from one trendy, disappointing club to the next.

Tad Allagash is a hedonistic prince of this age, fully involved in the action of the Eighties, with no mission in life except to have more fun than anyone else in New York. He is the embodiment of its "perpetual motion," which is also the strict "Allagash rule." Only one drink per stop, since "there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are." His background is clearly privileged, for his "friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis" who refused to "go below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn't have a lowlife visa." Tad evidences his power by using his name as a verb to elucidate his vague plan for the evening's entertainment, which consists simply of rolling into "the heart of the night. Wherever there are dances to be danced, drugs to be hoovered, women to be Allagashed," Tad will be there, as long as it is the place to be. He is an agent of advertising, a pimp of the new and improved, willing to boost his friend's "sales" on the sexual market with lies. But he himself is his own best advertisement, "looking très sportif in J. Press torso and punked-out red SoHo trousers." Although he works, and chides the protagonist for failing to "keep appearances up" by observing regular office hours, he is one of those "faces familiar under artificial light, belonging to people whose daytime existence is only a tag - designer, writer, artist." He is the ideal of social economic behavior after the progress of modernity, working and yet defining himself through a hedonistic style of life, devoted to the voluptuous gratification of the lineaments of desire, sparing no expense. If, as David Kaufmann speculates, the yuppie "marked a reaction to . . . the renewed threat of downward mobility" in that "the new type of Yuppie became a tentative solution to the larger cultural problem of how to come to terms with the specter of economic and/or status decline," then Tad is the perfect specimen.[59] Always moving forward, never looking back, Tad denies the possibility of exhaustion or fall. He has never experienced the "urge for a quite night at home." In a way, Tad is a voice of wisdom, the one whose world view is validated by the book's title - "bright lights, big city" is the lyrical epithet he applies to the phenomena behind the desertion of protagonist's wife, and to Tad, all heartbreak is "just another version of the same old story." But Tad is also completely empty; he does not "speak the language of the inner self." As he notes, where "skin-deep is the mode, traditional values are not going to take root and flourish." He is perfectly adapted to his environment, the "new world" which is "material without being real," only because he is "a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice."[60] He is the embodiment of pure style in search of nothing deeper than self-gratification.

The protagonist presents himself as a tourist in Tad's postmodern existence. "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning," he tells himself, but "here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar." He buttresses his sense of difference from Tad with his desire for the good life, one far removed from his present circumstances. He wants to meet "the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this . . . When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a garden . . . Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't."[61] But lacking even a name, the protagonist cannot really say what he is. Referring to himself almost exclusively in the second person "You," he creates both "the sense of an everyman" and "an absence of being" which reflect the problems he is trying to escape. As Jefferson Faye has noted, the protagonist is essentially a "self divided," "exiled from himself, an ethereal voyeur helplessly watching his own self-destruction from outside." While Tad is a performer, the protagonist exists in a constant state of self-reflection, "talking to the mirror," unable to face his problems head-on.[62] He is verbally staring at the image of an identity he does not recognize nor name, or control. On the surface, his personal problems are obvious: the results of his strenuous "R & R" activities involving "Bolivian Marching Powder," his model-wife Amanda's "sexual abandonment," his failing career and lost literary aspirations, and finally the approaching anniversary of his mother's death. At the base, however, the trouble is his loss of self experienced in these events, which harkens back to his childhood experience of moving annually to a new school, where "there was a new body of lore to be mastered," and the "color" of his "bike" and his "socks" was always wrong. Thus, his "primal scene" is not "the encounter of parents in coitus," but takes rather "the shape of a ring of schoolchildren . . . laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness." The constant flood of new material definitions that he must learn is too much; he cannot keep up and fears exposure as a "fraud, an imposter in the social circle." After meeting Amanda and moving to New York, the protagonist states he "began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in." He was "the stuff of which consumer profiles - American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model - are made." But then something "changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating."[63] It takes an awful lot of marching powder to convince him that he is once again "upwardly mobile." Instead of perpetual motion, the protagonist is slowing towards a stop. Graham Caveney, working on the family psychodrama of the book, finds the "conflict between the narrator's image of himself and his quest to displace this with a new one" at the center of the novel's effect.[64] Much like Gatsby, the protagonist has seen his markers of self-identity stripped from him, and as this has happened so many times in the past, he does not have an authentic self or dream to fall back upon. Even the Hasidim, whom he admired for their "perfect economy of belief," are giving "most of the blow in the country . . . a Yiddish accent." At the end of the novel, the disheveled and bleeding protagonist, ripped from the womb of his hedonistic coma, trades his Ray-Bans for a bag of bread rolls. Something is "wrong" with the way his legs are moving, and he is unsure if his nose is still bleeding. The bread man tells him "You're crazy," and it is possible he thinks the protagonist is an MIA, or at least on the soon-to-be list. The bread makes him gag, and he tells himself "you will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again."[65] Whether taken as sacramental or degrading act, it is clear that the protagonist, having lost his identity, is starting over, once again. He is back where he started, and he may end up back where the book began.

The fear of insecurity drives Fitzgerald and McInerney's male characters. The failure to maintain social standing, a stable construction of self, a human relationship with the world, or a sense of individuality apart from the masses are the result of the process of modernity, which in promising "adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world" also "threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." The most destructive force is the operation of the economic system upon people's understanding of their relationships to their environment. Capitalism shackles the ideal of the self to material objects in place of any stable root such as tradition. The only way to survive is to essentially be material without being real, to exist as a projection of self only, and to desire in excesses of the possibility of satisfaction; basically, to exist in a state of perpetual need only remedied by the temporary and fleeting satisfaction of material goods. Understanding the world in its superficial images only, the self searches for distinction but finds only disintegration. And when the self disintegrates, personal relationships follow suit.

Marilyn Maxwell states that Fitzgerald is yet another author who "seems quite comfortable in positing woman as a metaphor for many of the frustrations and ills that plague twentieth century America," an observation also applicable to McInerney.[66] A woman's rejection is the most frequent and obvious plot device for explaining the downfall of their male characters. But their destruction is not just the loss of a woman, but also an entire disintegration of self. In The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City, the breakdown of romance forms a critique of the "frustrations and ills that plague twentieth century America," namely the corrosive influence of capitalist commodity culture on self and society.