[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21st century life!]
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 (1925),
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 call tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?
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