[August 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s death. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some famous phones in American culture, leading up to a special weekend post on AGB’s life and legacies!]
On three
phone calls that illustrate the classic novel’s thoughtful portrayal of Modern
technologies.
When you
teach a book as often as I
have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby, you start to focus on different layers each time. Along with
the dialogues with other authors/works like Nella Larsen’s Passing that I talk about in that hyperlinked post, in my last
couple times reading and teaching the novel I’ve thought a lot about just how
many early 20th century technologies play central roles in its
story. That’s especially true of automobiles, of course; not only in the book’s
climactic events (which I won’t spoil here for the few people who managed not
to read Fitzgerald’s novel in high school), but in the central presence
(geographically as well as symbolically) of Wilson’s
gas station and auto repair shop. It’s true of Hollywood film, both in
presences at Gatsby’s parties (and
Fitzgerald’s career) and in the novel’s underlying themes of surface and
depth, illusion and reality. But it’s also certainly true of the still relatively
new technology, particularly when it comes to the idea of every household
having one, that was the telephone.
As we meet
the novel’s main characters in the opening few chapters, Fitzgerald uses a
couple key phone calls to present mysterious and ambiguous sides to them. In
Chapter 1, as Nick Carraway visits the beautiful home of his cousin Daisy and
her husband Tom for a dinner party, Tom gets a mysterious phone call; Daisy suspects
that it’s his mistress on the other end, but of course can’t know for certain to
whom he’s speaking. In Chapter 3, as Nick attends one of the lavish parties at
his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s mansion, Gatsby gets a mysterious call; other
partygoers suggest that it’s a criminal business partner of Gatsby’s on the
other end, but of course no one knows for certain to whom he’s speaking. These
calls reveal both men as defined by secrets, dynamics that precisely because of
their ambiguity are a source of intense speculation by those around them. And
those secrets can only be maintained in these scenes because of the technology
of the phone, without which their conversants would have to visit in person (or
write a letter, which of course would be far less immediate).
[Serious SPOILERS
in this paragraph.] At the end of the novel, after all the aforementioned climactic
events have unfolded, Nick has his own, quite different phone call. He is
trying to organize a funeral for Gatsby (or maybe James Gatz, since his father
who knows him by that name is one of the few who attends that tragic event),
and manages to speak with Gatsby’s elusive business
partner Meyer Wolfshiem on the phone. In one of the novel’s only moments
where a character says directly what he’s feeling and thinking, shares what
seems at least to be the unvarnished truth (even when Gatsby and Nick have
their heart-to-hearts, it’s always an open question whether Gatsby is telling
the truth), Wolfshiem confesses to Nick that he can’t possibly be seen at the
funeral, that it would be far too destructive for his reputation and
relationships. This is the side of the telephone that allows us to be more
honest, more ourselves, in its conversations than we might manage to be if had
to face someone and something in the flesh. Just another layer to how
Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the technologies and contexts of its rapidly
evolving Modernist world.
Next
famous phone tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?
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