Imprisoning (Un)reality: Photographic Allusions in The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby stands as testament to Fitzgerald’s engagement with and profound understanding of his historical and cultural milieu, as his emphasis on visual impression or “ocular centrism” expresses the cultural privileging of vision and its connection to modernity, particularly, “the culture of the photographic images.” The visual centrality of Fitzgerald’s narrative and his photographic representations in the novel, however, do not just reflect the impact of photography or photographic reproductions which had become the leading visual experience and a prime symbol for a way of seeing in the first half of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald’s graphic representations and visual perspectives in the novel actually play a key role both in documenting the experiences or memory of the characters and re-creating an objective reality and in imposting visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and managing the viewer’s knowledge and perception of them. This paper will explore how The Great Gatsby epitomizes this ambivalence about the photographic representations of the reality, that is, their dual and contradictory possibilities of being as a begetter of illusion and as a potential support to truer seeing or revelation of the truth. Particularly, this paper will demonstrate how this contradiction or ambivalence are represented through the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway whose narrative of photography becomes a vehicle for creating the well-intended illusion and fantasy of the real, and thus for creating entirely new perspectives and of controlling emotional effects for the novel.
Abstract
The Great Gatsby stands as testament to Fitzgerald’s engagement with and profound understanding of his historical and cultural milieu, as his emphasis on visual impression or “ocular centrism” expresses the cultural privileging of vision and its connection to modernity, particularly, “the culture of the photographic images.” The visual centrality of Fitzgerald’s narrative and his photographic representations in the novel, however, do not just reflect the impact of photography or photographic reproductions which had become the leading visual experience and a prime symbol for a way of seeing in the first half of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald’s graphic representations and visual perspectives in the novel actually play a key role both in documenting the experiences or memory of the characters and re-creating an objective reality and in imposting visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and managing the viewer’s knowledge and perception of them. This paper will explore how The Great Gatsby epitomizes this ambivalence about the photographic representations of the reality, that is, their dual and contradictory possibilities of being as a begetter of illusion and as a potential support to truer seeing or revelation of the truth. Particularly, this paper will demonstrate how this contradiction or ambivalence are represented through the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway whose narrative of photography becomes a vehicle for creating the well-intended illusion and fantasy of the real, and thus for creating entirely new perspectives and of controlling emotional effects for the novel.
참고문헌 (22)
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