Consciencia mestiza consciousness

Analysis of Death in F. Scott Fitzgerald´s “The Great Gatsby” from a Mestiza Consciousness’ Performative Habitus

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Table of Contents

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Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1

2.

Analysis of Death in F. Scott Fitzgerald´s “The Great Gatsby” from a Mestiza

Consciousness’ Performative Habitus ........................................................................................... 1 2.1. The concept of “habitus” ....................................................................................................... 3 2.2. The Social performative ........................................................................................................ 5 2.3. The mestiza consciousness .................................................................................................... 6 2.4. Analysis from a Mestiza Consciousness’ Performative Habitus ........................................... 6 3.

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 9

4.

Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 9

1 1. Introduction The ideas in this essay arise from the framework of the seminar “(En)Gendering American Modernism. Gender and American Literature and Culture, 1920-1940”. This course aimed to “examine issues in American modernism in their relation to, and articulation through, works of cultural production from the 1920s and ‘30s.” With this reference, I will analyze death in the well-known North American novel The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s novel can be considered one of the most remarkable cultural products of the 1920s. Its importance in North American culture is easily identifiable by the multiple adaptations in films, operas, books, radio programs, plays, ballets, and even video games made since the novel was published in 1925. My attention, however, will focus on the original novel, and on a brief overview of three film adaptations: The 1949 film by Elliott Nugent starring Alan Ladd, Betty Field, and Shelley Winters; the 1974 film by Jack Clayton starring Sam Waterston, Mia Farrow, and Robert Redford, with a script by Francis Ford Coppola; and the recent 2013 film by Baz Luhrmann starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton. I will analyze Fitzgerald’s novel along with the novel’s film versions because this allows me to examine the story using contemporary social theories that aim to understand gender, race and social class issues within the complexity of the social system. I will combine Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Judith Butler’s ideas of the performative, and Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of mestiza consciousness to give a meaning to death in Gatsby’s story. In their theories, Bourdieu, Butler and Anzaldúa identify the limitation of any academic analysis from the illusory observer distance. Therefore, their concepts can be understood in the context of an eternal present captured in the three film adaptations of Fitzgerald’s novel. 2. Analysis of death in F. Scott Fitzgerald´s “The Great Gatsby” from the mestiza consciousness’ performative habitus

The three films examined in this analysis change the timeline of events and the personalities of Fitzgerald’s characters, making the narrative more consumable and understandable for their times’ audiences. These justified changes seem convenient due to the demands of the Hollywood entertainment market. Yet every new interpretation makes it more difficult to acknowledge the critique I will make of the “original” story. In his novel Fitzgerald kills Gatsby and the Wilson couple, perpetuating the status quo that privileges the Buchanan family. Although the author—in

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Nick Caraway’s voice—criticizes “these careless people”, the narrative lets them live, enjoying their innocent and childish carelessness “or whatever it was that kept them together” (Fitzgerald, 130). The three film adaptations follow the same path and go farther by presenting the victims as less empowered in every new version. An analysis from a critical perspective prepares us to think about more creative and imaginative versions that do not use death to silence possibilities of resistance to interpellation. This critique is inspired by “the work of mestiza consciousness” which Anzaldúa depicts as follows: The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between white race and colored race, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, brings us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (Anzaldúa, 102)

In this excerpt, Anzaldúa point out the problems of dualistic thinking that have gone deep into our lives, cultures, languages and thoughts. The problems of dualistic categories of analysis such as gender, race, and social class reside in the “appropriated definitions” for each term in every category: female/male, black/white, and rich/poor. The searching for a “perfect” definition makes us forget the delusions of our scientific narratives: “reality” does not stop to be observed, and delusion occurs only in our imagination. Anzaldúa remarked that a “massive uprooting” is the beginning of overcoming the dual split. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality, hopefully bringing some new meaning to the dualistic problems.

Recognizing the limits of dualistic thinking is not novel. Dualism crosses the whole European epistemic history, taking place in our everyday language in forms of inoffensive antonyms:

body/soul,

black/white,

bad/good,

internal/external,

wet/dry,

female/male,

dead/alive…etc. The innocent appearance of these adjectives wanes when we combine them with any given noun: black man/white man, black woman/ white woman, and so on. The problems go farther when we face the dualistic notions of being, in other words, of what exists and what does not. These questions seem unanswerable; yet, they condense the dual thinking that Anzaldúa wants to overcome. Anzaldúa is part of a generation of intellectuals who confront the dualistic thinking challenge; along with her, Pierre Bourdieu, with his concept of habitus, and Judith

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Butler, with her idea of performative gender, give us awareness to escape the dualistic paradigm, though their ideas still face the latent dead/alive dualism.

It seems that any possibility of resistance surrenders in the face of death because death portrays the extreme limit of life and its possibilities of resistance. Every living being faces death; therefore, life goes beyond the human species and human narratives. However, our understanding of life and death does not include the profound consequences of life as a principle on this planet: life on Earth is like the energy in the Universe—it is not destroyed, it is just transformed. In our narratives, death destroys life and overcomes resistance. For instance, hundreds of movies have been produced in the last century representing manifest destiny, which suggests that the United States will save humankind from death or extinction under any circumstance. This example has little to do with a critique of US American politics, but it is useful because a brief overview of cultural production (e.g., of books and movies) reveals this tendency. Along with many movies that represent manifest destiny and its social version of the “American Dream”, we find the versions of “The Great Gatsby”. Taking “The Great Gatsby” as a projection of the “American Dream” of the 1920s, I will analyze death in Gatsby’s story from the mestiza consciousness’ performative habitus, which may give death a meaning that opens space to imagine and accept forms of resistance.

This mestiza perspective emerges by joining the idea of the authors above mentioned. The following sections will present each concept independently. Then, before the conclusion, concepts will be joined in the analysis of Fitzgerald’s novel, and in one particular aspect of the film adaptations. 2.1. The concept of “habitus” Pierre Bourdieu develops the concept of “habitus” based on an interdisciplinary angle which among others sciences includes sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Nevertheless, his ideas have been mainly used in sociology. The complexity of Bourdieu’s theory rises from a methodology that forces observers to recognize their place in reality. Bourdieu’s theory identifies the subject/objet dilemma and looks for concepts that offer ways to leave the dualistic thinking. In this attempt Bourdieu coins the concept of habitus, which he explains as

4 [t]he conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (Bourdieu 1990,53)

I will explain this concept from a conception of time outside of the linear model (past-presentfuture) that taps into the before/after duality. Instead of the linear model, we can imagine an eternal present in which past, present and future occur all at once. Metaphors about the human brain’s functions give us clues for understanding this notion of time; for example, we can say that the past is compressed in our memories, the present happens in our thoughts when they become actions, and the future is every single intension we think. This idea gives us the chance to reinterpret time as an eternal present.

In the metaphor of an eternal present, we can understand habitus as systems of durable and transportable disposition that are structured and structure our behavior, and which generate and organize our practices and representations. In the eternal present, habitus means that we carry our past around; therefore our actions and whatever we think they represent have been determined by our memories and our intentions without any notice or willing. Beside this metaphorical explanation, eternal present and habitus take place in human living bodies. The human body is the corporality of the habitus in the eternal present. Thus, Bourdieu states that the “[human] body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life.” Bourdieu, "Belief and the Body" (Cited by Butler, 115)

The living human body brings the past to life; therefore, it reveals where the wounds of our narratives healed. I think that the scars of our narratives exceed human living bodies and leave scars in any living creature on this planet. Yet placing our narratives in the human body is the most important element of Bourdieu’s concept. Although Bourdieu point out the significance of the human body, he restricts its performance to its structured structure because the human “body believes in what it plays at [and] does not represent what it performs”. Judith Butler differs with Bourdieu in this sense, therefore; in the next section, I will use her ideas of performative to extend Bourdieu’s concept.

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2.2. Social performative Judith Butler, in “Performativity's Social Magic” (Butler 1999), questions the performativity of the human body in Bourdieu’s concept. In this regard, Butler says that

[human] body does not merely act in accordance with certain regularized or ritualized practices, but it is this sedimented ritual activity; its action, in this sense, is a kind of incorporated memory (Butler, p115) [For instance,] one need only to consider how racial or gendered slurs live and thrive in and as the flesh of the addressee, and how these slurs accumulate over time, dissimulating their history, taking on the semblance of the natural, configuring and restricting the doxa that counts as "reality".

To Butler, the human body does represent what it performs; it is the sedimented ritual activity; it does memorize the past, it is a kind of the incorporated memory. Because “if this […] operation of the social performative does become repeated and ritualized as a habitus, how would such a notion of performativity recast Bourdieu's notion of a corporeal history, the embodied history of having been called a name.” (Butler, 125)

The performative is not merely an act used by a pre-given subject, but is one of the powerful and insidious ways in which subjects are called into social being, inaugurated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpellations. In this sense the social performative is a crucial part not only of subject formation, but of the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as well. In this sense, the performative is not only a ritual practice: it is one of the influential rituals by which subjects are formed and reformulated. (Butler, 125)

Butler argues that the social performative is not a pre-given subject act but a “powerful and insidious way in which subjects are called into social being”. Therefore, it “is a crucial part not only of subject formation, but of the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as well.” The most relevant element of the social performative idea is that it puts our narratives placed in human bodies into the political arena. Butler’s performative idea gives human living bodies a political voice able to contest and reformulate “diffuse and powerful interpellations”. Human bodies that contest and reformulate interpellation should develop a new consciousness: Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness is one of many possibilities.

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2.3. The mestiza consciousness Elva Fabiola Orozco-Mendoza impeccably describes the way to arrive at the stage of “la conciencia de la mestiza or the Borderlands consciousness as Anzaldúa calls it” (OrozcoMendoza, 53):

A long way had to be walked in order to arrive at this stage, yet the confusion that she experienced in nepantla, the agony that she suffered in Coatlicue, and the crushing burden of picking up the pieces in Coyolxauhqui have all produced important outcomes which are materialized in the new mestiza, a consciousness that speaks of resistance (53).

The long walking needed to reach a mestiza consciousness is a metaphor about life. Human life etches our narratives in our bodies. Through our bodies we experience confusion and agony. Yet the outcome of this process shall be a new consciousness that endures interpellations. OrozcoMendoza highlights that “new mestiza consciousness is a state of mind” reachable and open to every human body that has been put in the political arena to contest and reformulate interpellations. In this scenario,

[t]he new mestiza [consciousness] copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. […] She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only she sustains contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else (Anzaldúa, 101).

It seems obvious to say that life is an absolute required condition to reach mestiza consciousness. Only a human body alive can tolerate ambiguity, juggle cultures, and have plural personality; only life turns ambivalence into something else. However, the narratives such as the “American Dream” use death to silence contestation and reformulation of interpellations.

2.4. Analysis from the mestiza consciousness’ performative habitus Taking “The Great Gatsby” out of context makes unfair an analysis of it as a representation of the “American Dream”. However, Sarah Churchwell in her book “Careless people: murder, mayhem and the invention of the Great Gatsby” places Fitzgerald’s story in North American social context of the 1920s. Churchwell writes, in the preface of her book, that it looks for what is left behind, the evidence of history, the clues dropped by careless people (Churchwell, 9).

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Churchwell explain that Fitzgerald left one crucial clue to trace Gatsby’s story in events that took place when the author wrote the novel. According to her, this clue was an outline list scribbled by Fitzgerald in the back of a 1938 book by André Malraux called Man’s Hope. Churchwell takes Man’s Hope outline as a starting point that offers her a catalogue of people and places that Fitzgerald knew, and allows her dives into history (Churchwell, 10). Churchwell revises news papers that possibly Fitzgerald read and used as historical base for “The Great Gatsby”. Churchwell’s account in the history behind Gatsby’s do not intend to be a unique trustworthy interpretation; nonetheless, her account help me to develop my critique that resides in Nick Carraway’s voice immediately before he closes his narrative. “[Gatsby] had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” (141)

Gatsby’s dream was the American Dream. Jay Gatsby came a long way from a little town in North Dakota to become a rich parvenu in the vast New York City. In literature this “self-made man became a model for ideal individual”(Callahan, 9). However, as Nick highlights, Gatsby did not notice that his American Dream was far behind him where the dark fields of the democracy rolled on under the night. The American Dream, explained by John Callahan, “requires three stages: the coming west to the new world and the response of Europeans to that world; the foundation of the republic; and the nineteenth-century transition from republic to empire” (Callahan, p5). Callahan states that, reworked by Fitzgerald, the American Dream became a mode of reality as well as a desire of personality. Fitzgerald, in “The Great Gatsby” as a totality, sketches the evolution of America from the “fresh green breast of the new world” to “the valley of ashes,” from a continent with a spirit “commensurate to man’s capacity for wonder” to a place of nightmare, exhaustion, and death (Callahan 12).

Death in the American Dream portrayed by Fitzgerald represents the end of any possibility to human living beings act against and contest oppressive conditions. The first death is Myrtle Wilson’s. She dies after having an argument with her husband where she cries to him "[t]hrow me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!" She runs out of the garage “waving her hands and shouting”, possibly because she recognizes the car that Tom Buchanan drove by early that

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day. Mrs. Wilson had a “tremendous vitality” that could take her outside of her marriage and even overcome her relations with Tom Buchanan (Fitzgerald, 80). Instead of maintaining the status quo, Fitzgerald penalizes Mrs. Wilson’s vitality and condemns her to die at Daisy’s hands. The second and third deaths occur as a consequence of Myrtle’s murder. Mr. Wilson realizes that his wife has hidden something from him since she had not explained why, months before, she had returned from town with her nose broken. He is determined to find ways to recover his marriage. Perhaps an effort at that point would have been effective, but it would be hard to imagine because Mr. Wilson killed himself to maintain Tom Buchanan’s privilege. Mr. Wilson notices that his habitual customer drove the yellow car that afternoon, and after a long night of thinking he decides to look for Mr. Buchanan and take justice into his own hands. Ironically enough, “picking up Wilson like a doll Tom” turns him against Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 82). The three film adaption of “The Great Gatsby” reproduce the way death is portray in the first version and go farther by presenting these bodies less empowered to reformulates interpellations in every new version. In the 1974 film as well as in the recent 2013 film, Jay Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson, and George Wilson, among other are present as wretch overwhelmed by their social life impossibilities. For instance, Gatsby is portrayed as a careless emotionally instable extravagant parvenu that, in the worst case scenario, chooses to wait patiently for Daisy’s call. However, this representation is hard to accept when the same guy has the capability run successfully what seems a national wide business. These versions omit interesting features that Fitzgerald assigned to these characters, which maybe recall Fitzgerald interpellation for the dead bodies he read in the news paper and inspired him to write the story. However, in these movies, any of these character actions’ strongly show resistance; instead it seems that circumstances drag them to death.

The 1949 film present a richer interpretation of the character histories; although, it is the oldest of the three films analyzed. In this version, for example, Gatsby narrates his own history and explains how he has overcome difficulties along his life, and how his plans and decision bring him where he wants to be. In this version, undoubtedly Mr Wilson kills Gatsby and himself after. However after the first shot, Gatsby, a well trained soldier, tries to reach his murder that keeps shooting at him. Mr Wilson imperceptible shots enough bullets but leaving one for himself. In this version the history of the character has a interpretation closer to mestiza consciousness’ performative habitus perspective.

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Recognizing that death in our narratives has been used to silence resistance to interpellation is the first step of this analysis. This perspective do not stop here, I should be performed in every interaction we have thought life and with life.

3. Conclusion To analyzed Fitzgerald’s novel and some particular details of the novel’s film versions I had combine Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Judith Butler’s ideas of performative, and Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of mestiza consciousness to develop a critical perspective that allows me to examine the Gatsbt’ story and criticize the use of death to silence resistance to interpellation. The three films examined specially play the personalities of Fitzgerald’s characters presenting them less empowered in every new version. An analysis from a critical perspective prepares us to think about more creative and imaginative versions that do not use death to silence possibilities of resistance to interpellation, and extend this suggestion to our interaction with life thought life.

4. Bibliography

Anzalduá, Gloria. Borderlands. 4. ed. San Francisco, Calif.: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990. Print. Butler, J. “Performativity's Social Magic”, in Shusterman, Richard, ed. Bourdieu. Oxford [u.a.]: Blackwell, 1999. Print. pp. 113-128. Callahan, John F. The Illusions of a Nation. Urbana [u.a.]: Univ. of Illinois Pr., 1972. Print. Chodos, Howie. Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination: A Critique. Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 2002, 39, 4, 397 2002 : n. pag. Print. Churchwell, Sarah Bartlett. Careless People. London: Virago, 2013. Print. Edgerton, Jason D. “Gendered Habitus and Gender Differences in Academic Achievement.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 2014, 60, 1, 182 2014 : n. pag. Print. Estrada-López, Lourdes. “Deconstrucción Sexual e Intersexualidad En XXY De Lucía Puenzo. (Spanish). .” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2014, 91, 3, 419 2014 : n. pag. Print. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph. Repr. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1993. Print.

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Gómez, Mariana Daniela. El Género En El Cuerpo. Universidad Nacional de Misiones. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. Secretaría de Investigación. Programa de Posgrado en Antropología Social. 2009. Print. Gutierrez, Alicia Beatriz. El análisis de la realidad social desde la perspectiva de Pierre Bourdieu. Doctorado Interinstitucional en Educación - Universidad Distrital. Bogotá. Conference.

YouTube

video.

2014.

Revised

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyD091P-CEA 27th August, 2015. Mangum, Bryant, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013. Print. Orozco-Mendoza, Elva Fabiola. Borderlands Theory: Producing Border Epistemologies with Gloria Anzaldúa. Blacksburg, Virginia. Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Political science. 2008. Web Document. Revised on http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062008175949/unrestricted/Final_thesis_corrected.pdf 27th August, 2015. Webb, Jen. Understanding Bourdieu. London [u.a.]: Sage, 2002. Print.

Full list of other adaptions http://self.gutenberg.org/article/whebn0000076033/the%20great%20gatsby#cite_note-washpost90 Photography’s http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/portfolio/fsf-all-list.html

Ich versichere, dass die vorliegende Arbeit ohne Hilfe Dritter und ohne Benutzung anderer als der angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel einschließlich des Internets angefertigt und die den benutzen Quellen wörtlich oder inhaltlich entnommenen Stellen als solche kenntlich gemacht habe.

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Datum,

Unterschrift.