concordiabookreview-blog

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Dr. Bryan Santin,

English Department

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Today, when readers of American literature make grand claims about F. Scott Fitzgerald as a novelist, they're usually referring to The Great Gatsby. During his own lifetime, though, the novel that inspired lofty declarations about the "Jazz Age" and the "Lost Generation" was not Gatsby (which sold dismally), but Fitzgerald's first novel, the 1920 bildungsroman This Side of Paradise. Thirteen years after its publication, Gertrude Stein's assertion was unequivocal: "it was this book that really created for the public the new generation."

Controversial at the time for its racy depictions of "necking" in cars and "petting" at parties, This Side of Paradise was either denounced or celebrated, according to the literary scholar Sharon Carson, as a kind of anthropological "handbook of modern morals" for the young. Indeed, the novel was such a cultural phenomenon that Fitzgerald himself, in one of the greatest moments of artistic chutzpah in the entire American canon, has a character in his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), reference the book's generational popularity: "My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs."

Although Fitzgerald occasionally ironized the notion that the Post-World War I generation was “going to the dogs,” dedicated readers know that he was, in fact, obsessed with making the Lost Generation's unique form of spiritual “lostness” legible to the wider public. Toward this end, Fitzgerald tells the story of Amory Blaine, a “romantic egoist” who attends an elite prep school and then spends several years at Princeton University engaging with weighty philosophical questions before World War I cuts his education short, and he joins the war effort. After having his heart broken by Rosalind—a character based on Fitzgerald’s real-life wife Zelda, and not coincidently, the best archetypal representation of a flapper in Fitzgerald’s early work—Amory joins the hordes of aimlessly intelligent young men roaming New York City at the dawn of the Jazz Age.

By the end of the novel, Amory comes to understand that he belongs to “a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” For readers today, this mode of deep existential questioning is what makes This Side of Paradise such a fascinating piece of (nearly forgotten) American literary history; not the depictions of university life in the early twentieth century, although it is arguably the first literary “campus novel” proper; not the risqué flapper characters who drink alcohol and use men like “vampires,” as one character describes a flapper’s female agency; not even the emergence of the Fitzgeraldian master trope of plutocratic wealth as both disgusting and attractive, the privileged classes being a group whom Fitzgerald could not help but critique and idolize simultaneously. Rather, what makes the novel truly worth reading is how Fitzgerald traces a particular form of modernist anxiety: the Nietzschean notion that if “God is dead,” then human life is essentially meaningless, “a damned muddle,” in Amory’s words, “a football game with everyone off-side and the referee gotten rid of.”

From a twenty-first century vantage point, we can see that Amory stumbles upon Charles Taylor’s insight in his philosophical treatise A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007): that the major epistemological assumptions of Western modernity are themselves underpinned by, what Taylor calls, “the immanent frame.” Rather than an explicit set of beliefs, “the immanent frame” is the deep contextual background in which beliefs develop; more specifically, it is a constellation of axioms that reveal a seemingly natural, immanent world over against a supernatural, transcendent one. Painfully, Amory realizes that within “the immanent frame,” if the mere desire to believe in the Christian conception of God appears like a childish fantasy, then the desire to know that God appears even more delusional, the ultimate Freudian wish fulfillment in its pathological intensity. For instance, although Amory grows up an Irish Roman Catholic, by the time he gets to college, he thinks silently to himself that he “was not even a Catholic [anymore], yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had.” Ironically, Amory identifies Christianity as a bulwark against his own experience of nihilism, but he feels as if making the necessary leap of faith would annihilate the intellectual self-respect he gained at Princeton. Amory’s tragic contradiction is precisely why this novel seems so alive today, why Fitzgerald’s early prose still seems blood-warm.

Ultimately, all of this is just to say that while The Great Gatsby is an all-around superior novel, This Side of Paradise is the philosophically deeper, more problematic text. Fitzgerald’s obvious masterpiece, The Great Gatsby feels like a novel written for a night of cocktails at Jay Gatsby’s West Egg mansion—that magical kind of night, as Nick Carraway says, where “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Conversely, Fitzgerald’s first angst-ridden novel about the malaise of modernity, This Side of Paradise feels like a novel written for a different kind of night—the kind of night that the sixteenth century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross famously called “the dark night of the soul.”