A Plea for Eros

Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s working-class mistress: “… there was an immediately perceptible
vitality
about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” As Nick passes Wilson’s gas station in a car, he sees her “at the garage pump with panting
vitality.”
And in death: “The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous
vitality
she had stored so long.” It is this vivid life, not her character, that makes Myrtle Wilson’s death tragic. A silly and coarse woman, she is nevertheless more sympathetic than her lover, Tom, who is worse: stupid and violent. Between them, however, there exists a real sexual energy that isn’t found elsewhere in the novel. The narrator’s attraction to Jordan is tepid at best, and Gatsby’s fantasies about Daisy seem curiously unerotic. The slender girl has no body to speak of. She seems to be made of her beautiful clothes and her beautiful voice. It is hard to imagine Gatsby actually having sex with Daisy. It’s like trying to imagine a man taking a butterfly. And although her marriage to Tom has produced a daughter, as a mother Daisy communicates detachment. She coos endearments at the child, Pammy, and then dismisses her. Only once in the novel is the reader reminded of Daisy as a creature of flesh and blood, and, significantly, it is through a finger her husband has bruised. Daisy looks down at the little finger “with an awed expression.” “You didn’t mean to,” she says to Tom, “but you
did
do it.” The passage is not only a premonition of Tom’s brutality that erupts horribly in New York when he breaks Myrtle’s nose or of Myrtle’s bruised and opened body on the road. Daisy’s awe expresses her remote relation to her own body and to mortality itself, which her money will successfully hide, not forever, of course, but for now.
    What Tom and Myrtle have that Jay and Daisy don’t is a
personal
relation, with its attendant physicality and mess. That is why, after admitting to Nick that Daisy may have once loved Tom “for a minute,” Gatsby comforts himself by saying, “In any case, it was only personal.” What Gatsby has been chasing all these years is neither
personal
nor
physical.
Its transcendence may have been lodged in the person of Daisy, but it is not limited to her. Her very shallowness makes Gatsby’s dream possible. But Myrtle Wilson is not a simple incarnation of the flesh and its weaknesses. She harbors dreams as well. As it does for Gatsby, her intangible wish finds form in an object. In her drawer at home, wrapped in tissue paper, Mr. Wilson finds the expensive dog leash Tom once bought for her to go with the dog he also bought. The dog didn’t come home. The useless, beautiful thing is a sign of absence, a string of absences, in fact—the dog, the lover, and the emptiness of desire itself. Just as the green light shining from Daisys house may be counted among Gatsby’s “enchanted objects,” one he loses when Daisy actually enters his life again, the dog leash possesses a kind of magic. It is the tissue paper that makes me want to cry, that sends this frivolous possession into another register altogether, that imbues the silver-and-leather dog leash with the quality of true pathos.
    The tangible and the intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don’t think so. And I don’t think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths. The play between the material and the immaterial in
The Great Gatsby
is riddled, not simple. The fairy tale contains the valley of ashes as well as the castle by the sea, the heavy weight of the corpse and the pretty bodies blown in the wind. And which one is more real than the other? Is death more true than life? Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? The book goes to the heart of the problem of fiction itself by insisting that fiction is necessary to life—not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning. Nick imagines Gatsby at the pool just before Wilson kills him. The man has understood that there will be no message from Daisy, that the great idea is dead.
    He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose