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The Connoisseur of Desire

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great theme of erotic anticipation is never more alive than in the longings of Jay Gatsby.

Young Gatz eventually makes his own fortune in the bootlegging business and, mimicking his mentor’s self-invention, transforms himself into Jay Gatsby, a putative Oxford man (“All my ancestors have been educated there”) on the shore of Long Island Sound in a huge faux-Norman chateau, “spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy,” with a portrait of Cody hanging on his bedroom wall. Back in 2020, with her eye on the inscrutable future, Sehgal asked, “What other waves of analysis await us as the new narratives rush in?” Since then The Great Gatsby has continued to be read as, among many other things, an indictment of Jazz Age decadence, a parable of overreaching, a study of gender dynamics, a tale of old money triumphing over a parvenu, and an account of unconscious homoerotic desire—in one way or another, a modernist rebuke of the hollow mendacity of the American Dream. However counterfeit Gatsby may sometimes seem, there is, as Nick says, “something gorgeous about him,” something ingenuous in his “extraordinary gift for hope.” And so the sadness is fierce when, forced at last to relinquish his imperious dream, he “looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.” The story of this man—once brazen, now bereft—is told with such ravishing prose that he must have merged again in Fitzgerald’s imagination with Keats’s broken lover, stranded where “the sedge is withered from the lake,/And no birds sing.”

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