Dream Machines: The Motorcar as Sign of Conquest and Destruction in F. Scott Fitzgerald's <em>The Great Gatsby</em>

In my article, "A New Sound; a New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity" (Ryder), I propose that "a range of semiotic engines" may be mobilised "to argue that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the motorcar is received as relatum profundis of freedom". In that 2019 article I further argue that, as Roland Barthes has indirectly proposed, the automobile fits into a "highway code" and into a broader "car system" in which its attributes—including its architectural details—are received as signs of liberation (Barthes Elements, 10, 29). While extending that argument, with near exclusive focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and with special reference to the hero’s Rolls Royce, I argue here that the automobile is offered as a sign of both conquest and destruction; as both dream machine and vehicle of nightmare. This is not to suggest that the motorcar was, prior to 1925, seen in absolutely idealistic terms. Nor is it to suggest that by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century the automobile had been unequivocally condemned. As observed in my 2019 article for the Southern Semiotic Review, while The Wind in the Willows (1908) is the first novel written in English to deal with the deleterious effects of the motorcar, "it is [nonetheless] impossible to find a literary text from the early part of the twentieth century that flatly condemns the machine". So, from Gatsby’s emblematic "circus wagon" to narrator Nick Carraway’s equally symbolic "Dodge", I argue that the motorcar is represented by Fitzgerald as an emblem of both dreams and wreckage.The first motorcar noted in The Great Gatsby is the "old Dodge" belonging to Nick Carraway—the novel’s narrator and greatest dodger (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 17). Dreaming of success, and having declared himself restless, Nick claims to have come East to try his luck in the bond business (16). But, reflecting a propensity to dishonesty, the unreliable narrator (Abrams, 168) eventually reveals that at least one of the reasons for his migration East is to escape his emotional responsibilities to a girl "out West" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 30); a girl to whom he continues to write letters signed "Love, Nick" (61). While these notions of being dodgy and dodging—and their connection to Carraway’s car—seem to have escaped the attention of commentators, several have nonetheless observed that the make suits its owner for another reason: a work-a-day mass-produced machine, the vehicle is surely a sign of the narrator’s conservatism. Tad Burness, for instance, notes that in the early twentieth century the Dodge was a make that particularly appealed to conservative and careful drivers (91). Certainly, the Dodge brothers’ advertising of the nineteen-twenties, which steadfastly emphasised staunchness and stability, reinforces this conclusion. The make, therefore, is entirely appropriate to Nick: a man who evades the vicissitudes of romance; who shuns excitement, who aligns himself with mainstream Midwestern values, who identifies more with the mechanical than with the human, and who, until the very end, fails to commit to the extraordinary. Apropos, in reviewing the manuscript of Gatsby, Keath Fraser records an exchange between Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway that was finally, and perhaps unfortunately, excised: "You appeal to me,” she said suddenly as we strolled away.“You’re sort of slow and steady ... you’ve got everything adjusted just right.” (Qtd. in Bloom, 67)To have been included at the end of the third chapter, Jordan’s assessment of Nick suggests that the narrator has over-tuned the cognitive machinery necessary to navigation through a social milieu to which he does not belong. While Fitzgerald may have felt this to be too blunt a narrative tool, the ‘slow and steady’ approach to life attributed to Nick in the finished novel clearly suggests that the narrator lives life by the manual.It may be argued, then, that while ostensibly facilitating a new start and an associated desire for upward social mobility, Nick’s old Dodge symbolises a perfunctory approach to the business of living, a shabby escape from a "tangle back home", and an escape from self (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 61). Certainly, it represents no "on the road" conquest. Indeed, Nick’s clinical and mechanical approach to life comes close to ruining him. Short of his identification with Gatsby at the end—and the subsequent telling of a tragic tale—Nick is an archetypal loser. While claiming to identify with the "racy, adventurous" feel of New York (59), his instinct is to fall back on "interior rules that act as brakes on [his] desires" (61). He therefore fails to connect with Jordan Baker—his racy and attractive would-be lover, herself named after the Jordan Playboy automobile: the "first car to be marketed on emotional appeal alone" (Heimann and Patton, 14). So, it turns out that Nick is one of life’s "rotten drivers" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 60)—an accusation he ironically levels at Jordan Baker who eventually tackles him on this point:"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person." (154)As Fraser has pointed out, the mechanical and shifty Nick is far from honest (Bloom, 68). Rather than achieving any sort of emotional consummation, his already muted desires idle, misfire, or stall. Declaring himself to be "one of the few honest people that [he has] ever known" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 154), Nick’s self-deception is, from the outset, complete. Left without the stimulus of the hero, one wonders if perhaps Nick might become a George B. Wilson.Despite his dream of pecuniary success (something shared with Nick Carraway), garage proprietor George B. Wilson is impoverished by the automobile. A dissolute dealer in second-hand machines, this once-handsome but "spiritless man" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 33) has worked for years on scant margins. James Flink notes that dealers in used automobiles had a particularly hard time in the mid to late 1920s when profits on sales were very slight (144). The fact that Wilson is a second-hand car dealer also reinforces that everything else in his life is second-hand: built on the enterprise of others, his dream is second hand; his premises are second-hand; even his wife is second-hand. And, of course, he himself is used. Fitzgerald, then, is at pains to highlight the cultural meaning of the common or inferior car. Indeed, in the dark recesses of Wilson’s garage—which itself rests precariously on the edge of a wasteland under the faded and failed eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg—sits a "dust-covered wreck of a Ford" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 33). Emblematic of the garage proprietor’s broken dreams, Wilson’s psychic paralysis is variously foregrounded—principally by the broken car. Here we have nothing less than Heidegger’s das Gestell: the mechanised consciousness as discussed in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (in Krell, 227). Significantly, only automobiles elicit a spark of interest from Wilson—but the irony, as suggested above, is that these are signs of the technical spirit to which he has so utterly acquiesced.It is often, if not always, the case in Gatsby that automobiles signpost derailed agency and, therefore, broken dreams. After all, Gatsby’s own death and funeral are foreshadowed through the automobile. In the first chapter, for example, Nick tells his cousin Daisy that "all the cars in Chicago have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath" for her (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 22). More portentously, during Nick and Gatsby’s drive to Astoria, "a dead man" passes the hero’s Rolls-Royce "in a hearse heaped with blooms" (68). While Myrtle’s death and Gatsby’s murder are contemporaneously suggested, in this emblematic tableau Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce is also overtaken by a limousine—and so the final chapter’s depressing "procession of three cars" is subtly anticipated (153). A "horribly black and wet" motor hearse bears Gatsby’s corpse to the cemetery while the narrator arrives with Gatsby’s father and the minister in a limousine. Then come the servants and the postman in Gatsby’s yellow station wagon. That the yellow and black cars are so incongruously and so tragically juxtaposed is a structurally and semantically significant feature of the text. The yellow car that once bore cheerful guests to Gatsby’s parties now follows the black hearse—the novel’s ultimate and, arguably, most awful death car. Thus, Fitzgerald presents us with one last reminder that, corrupted by our materialistic drives, our dreams wither and die; that there is, in the end, no magic.As Robert Long points out, however, the manuscript of Gatsby confirms that Fitzgerald had originally intended such foreshadowing to be much more obvious. For instance, in the manuscript, when Gatsby drives Nick to New York he declares his car to be "the handsomest in New York" and that he "wouldn’t want to ride around in a big hearse like some of those fellas do" (Long, 193). Further confirmation of Fitzgerald’s determination to mute the novel’s funereal symbolism is provided in chapter two when, along with the word "sepulchrally", the phrase "reeks of death" is crossed out (Long, 194). As published, then, the automobile travels much more subtly in The Great Gatsby. While a ghostly machine turns up to the hero’s house shortly after the funeral, the end of the road for Nick is suggested when he sells his plain old Dodge to a plain old grocer (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 157-158).The counterpoint to Nick’s old Dodge is, of course, Gatsby’s magnificent Rolls Royce: literature’s ultimate dream car. C.S. Rolls knew very well that his automobile was the new haute couture of the privileged. In his famous article on motorcars in the 1911 edit

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