Reading El Greco in The Great Gatsby

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby revives American transcendental idealism which is developed further than the tremendous economic impact of the Jazz Age and its materialistic side of life in the early 20th century of America. As a Kantian transcendental subject who cognizes all the spatiotemporality of the objects of experience as they appear under the conditions of his subjective sensibility, Gatsby makes all the possible judgments abiding by his transcendental idealism in which divinity bursts into the earthly substance and human and celestial worlds are fused in one subjective time and space. Further, apparently standing for American heterogeneity, Gatsby’s idealism functions as a sustainable source of resistance to the corrupt American homogeneity which is chronically associated with the industrialized, modern American society. Transcendental idealism is all the more effectively depicted with fundamental styles of El Greco who idealized the Spanish city of Toledo with his unprecedentedly subjective and transcendental visions in his painting. Fitzgerald ingeniously sees his own character’s transcendental dream sanctified in El Greco’s transcendental depiction of human passions and faithfully follows his transcendental styles which culminate in the quality of distortion. In Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald embodies an American idealism which is an audacious imaginative extension of human possibilities beyond the material ground into ethereal divine world. Fitzgerald’s transcendental idealism is the only way available to repeat “the past” that was irretrievably lost in the 20th century’s practical reality of America.