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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A professor says that only an African-American scholar could spot Fitzgerald's secret meaning.
Aug 9, 2000 | Questions about Jay Gatsby used to be so simple. Was he a bootlegger? Did he kill a man? Was he in on the fix of the 1919 World Series?
But now, 75 years after the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," a literature professor has a new question: Was Gatsby black? And he has arrived at an answer: Yes. "Fitzgerald characterizes Jay Gatsby as a pale black individual passing as white," says Carlyle V. Thompson, an assistant professor in the department of literature, languages and philosophy at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y. And the reason he does so? "It is the manifestation of Fitzgerald's deep-seated apprehensions concerning miscegenation between blacks and whites."
Thompson has found ample textual evidence for this throughout the book. Among the primary bits: Gatsby wears his hair trimmed short, or "close-cropped," as Thompson puts it. He owns 40 acres and a mansion, instead of 40 acres and a mule. He changes his name from Gatz to Gatsby, much the way black individuals looking to pass change their names to begin a new future. And he tells Nick Carraway that his family is dead. "The word 'dead' is significant in that those light-skinned black individuals who pass for white become symbolically dead to their families," Thompson wrote in a paper presented at a spring meeting of the College English Association in Charleston, S.C.
The general theme of the conference was "Back to the Future: Diversity for the New Millennium," and Thompson participated as part of a panel on "Passing and Colorism in American Fiction." His paper is titled "The Tragic Black 'Buck': Jay Gatsby's passing in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'" He hopes to publish it in a scholarly journal.
In the meantime, he says he has not run the idea by any Fitzgerald scholars. "I haven't had the time." Then he says, "I didn't want to spook them. In some ways, they might be offended by it. No black scholars have looked at this book in any serious way. You need a black individual grounded in African-American history and folklore, and familiar with the signs of racial passing. Scholars are heavily invested in Gatsby's being other than black. You've got Robert Redford in the movie."
Thompson adds, "When I ask people what basis there is for Gatsby being white, I get silence. I have asked students, colleagues. They don't know. They cannot give me any evidence to back up the speculation. And why haven't people made this argument so far?"
Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli has one answer. "Because it's mishigas! If Fitzgerald wanted to write about blacks, it wouldn't have taken 75 years to figure it out. If that's what Fitzgerald wanted, he would have made it perfectly clear in April 1925. Great works of literature are not fodder for guessing games. This kind of thing is bad for literature, bad for Fitzgerald, bad for 'The Great Gatsby' and bad for students who get exposed to this kind of guessing game."
But Thompson sees racial anxiety as the central narrative tension of the book, from the moment Tom Buchanan warns his friends that the white race has to "watch out or these other races will have control of things." When Fitzgerald describes Gatsby as pale, such as in the scene when he meets Daisy for the first time in five years and is "pale as death," Thompson sees evidence of an "ambiguous racial identity."
More than that, "Every time we see black individuals -- such as 'the three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl' in the limousine, or the 'pale well-dressed negro' who describes the yellow car that hit Myrtle Wilson -- we see Gatsby or Gatsby has just left," Thompson says. "And yellow always suggests high yellow, which is a signifier for people who pass."
