The Great American Bummer
Everything solid melts into depressing cultural commentary
Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly ambitious as an educator, I’ll ask my literature students one of those simple, super casual questions that English teachers thrive on: For instance, what makes a so-called “Great American Novel” great? But, like many of the open-ended questions I pose to them to spark discussion, I don’t really know the answer. But, like my students, I certainly have some ideas. Uncompromising criticism of cultural shortcomings? Acknowledgement of the inescapable power of wealth? Reflections on the racial inequities of the period? Perhaps, it’s like pornography, you only know it when you read it. I certainly knew it the first time I read certain seminal novels (I remember finishing Invisible Man for the first time, shocked at its ambition and success). After stewing in all the bad (read: regressive, evil, bigoted) news over the last few weeks-- when I can easily visualize the loss of more of my rights as an American citizen-- I really wish I could ask my students this question, which is essentially a query around our culture; if only to briefly encounter the optimism of youth. But, in the interim, one must (well, maybe not must, but can) ask: can the great American novel be queered?
It always felt audacious to recommend and curate together lists of books, so perhaps I’ll lean in and recommend a series of Great American Novels, itself an audacious category of novels that, at very least, claims to capture and critique quintessentially American cultural tendencies. If you’re looking to queer the GAN, check out The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerlad, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, and Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran. For my money (an apt expression considering the obsessive consumerism in each of the novels), I think the latter two are queer homages to the already gay Gatsby, moving from queer, queerer, to queerest. (Yes, I know Ripley overtly cites Henry James as its influence… but things can have multiple influences!) These novels all center on intelligent, somewhat elusive, very handsome outsiders who attempt (and seemingly succeed for a time) to fit in and dominate their chosen societies, motivated by deeply romantic motivations that are often at odds with the realities of the worlds they have clawed and reached to inhabit. By the time summer ends (and these novels all love summer with the passion of a public school teacher), some lives, and certainly some illusions about American culture, dreams, and possibilities are shattered into a gay, old mess. So, what exactly do they say to today’s gorgeous, yearning, perennially depressed outsiders?
To begin with, the very centrality of outsiders-posing-as-insiders in these quintessentially American novels lends the genre an air of queerness. Emerson may have boasted “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist,” but he made that comment cozily as an insider of established New England society. In contrast, these nonconformists desperately work to pass and hide their differences. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, as any half-conscious high school student could tell you, thrives on the margins. We know that he’s a literal conman, changing his name, hiding his profession, and criminally working on the margins of the economy and respectability. But there’s more to his otherness than simply being an outlaw, he’s an outsider. He’s new money with working class roots in an old world; he’s midwestern in the East Coast; he’s romantic in a room of cynics. Making the immortal reach across the Long Island Sound toward Cliff Notes’ favorite symbol, the green light, he desperately remakes himself with all the “creative passion…in his ghostly heart,” in a world that eschews creativity and passion in favor of convenience and comfort. Highsmith’s Tom Ripley shares many of these traits, along with the air of faint homosexuality and literal foreignness in the Italian village he goes to convince Dickie Greenleaf (ahem… Green Light) to return to his wealthy parents. Enamored by Dickie’s gorgeous looks and carefree European life, funded by the same old money impulses that whetted Gatsby’s appetite, Tom engages in equally criminal endeavors, ultimately pretending to be far wealthier than his background implies. Holleran’s Malone, like Gatsby, also finds himself in Long Island with a hopeless desire for love, an aborted romance, and a tendency to party all night. At some point, once you’re in the Gatsby mindset, you start asking what’s the difference between the drug- and sex-soaked discos of the 70s and Gatsby’s nightly gin- and sex-soaked flapper orgies?
Of course, while we don’t need to get theoretical because these novels are awash in plain old sexual alterity (ranging from Nick’s voyeuristic and subtextual longing to Tom’s aside that he “can’t make up his mind if he likes men or women” to the Dancer’s explicitly gay content), I believe it’s the central character’s outsider status (and choice to surround themselves with outsides) that rings as queerest. As Heather Love notes in Feeling Backwards, the regressiveness most often associated with queered sexual identities is often conflated not only with “sexual and gender deviants but also women, colonized people, the nonwhite, the disabled, the poor and criminals” (6). These novels do not merely describe this queer life on the margins of class, race, and society; instead they succeed best at narrating the paranoia about abilities to pass as insiders, as non-criminal, as “straight” (as the noirish parlance perhaps not so ironically goes). Certainly, this is an experience that haunted (and often still haunts) many queer individuals. Despite our best impulses, there are still times (especially during those eerily quiet homecomings) that the voice occasionally deepens, the tattoo is hidden under long sleeves for family gatherings, and inseams are more carefully considered. These novels become stories of not just the failure of being born on the outside of the white, wealthy, WASPY straight society, but about the way the very nature of that failure leads to innumerable more failures.
In these novels, that rejection of one's inescapable outsider-ness manifests in intense longing for normality personified (be it Gatsby’s desire for the rich, white girlhood of Daisy or Malone’s acceptance of Sutherland’s “marriage plot” with an attractive young scion). Regardless of the fact that the narrator (and reader) understands that the protagonist’s success or acclaim or popularity precisely because of their queerness (how could Gatsby/Malone literally get their vice of choice without outsider connections), these characters can’t get comfortable in their incredibly comfortable world, even as everyone one else seems willing to buy (or at least) ignore their shtick They need to get as close to the real thing as possible, with awful results. This desire for a literal marriage between American diversity and American conformity erupts in social and internal conflicts of passion, obsession, and violence. We already know conformity and complicity into problematic capitalist norms are fraught enterprises, but the obsessiveness and forgetfulness that dominates all these novels are apt reminders that critique is often far easier than removing oneself from the impulse.
But, these novels share so much including their desire for seemingly unattainable goals, moral compromises, erasures of uncomfortable pasts, obsessed, unreliable narrators, and a near-miraculous capacity for self-mythmaking. Every time I read them as a set, I think that there must have been something in the water. And for what it’s worth, that’s another thing these novels share: they’re dripping with water imagery. Marx might have written that “all that is solid melts into air,” but in the Great American Novel, it appears corrupt capitalist societies merely melt into oceans of water. Reach a little too far, and you’ll fall in. The book critic, Maureen Corrigan, first directed me to the overwhelming amount of water imagery in Gatsby, but her observations about the potent symbolism rings true for Ripley and Dancer as well. Bodies disappear into oceans, into pools, into baths, into drinks, into rivers, into bathhouses, into cruise ships. The protagonists are equally inundated by the various misleading vices of their ages: the booze-soaked newly monied wealth of the 20s, the elitism-soaked, old monied wealth of the 50s, and the drug-soaked party wealth of the 70s. The characters in these novels have let other influences, other people, other substances wash over them until they’ve deluded or distracted or lost themselves.
Water also informs my final suggestion of reading these novels together. Read enough nature poetry (or perhaps have a few cocktails on the beach) and you’ll remember that the sea is eternal, and we are… well… not. The sea will lap at our shores and erode our civilization, and we’ll blithely reach onward until we grow out of our naive beliefs (or suffer their consequences). These novels-- which are also obsessed with the anxieties of aging characters and aging societies-- offer various recognitions that no matter how hard we try or how handsome we look or how we rich we become, if we’re trying to occupy too many contradictory values, we’ll never be able reach across the Pines to get to the Greenleaf. Admittedly, reaching that conclusion is often a grim end to the audacious and enjoyable journeys that these books often get mistaken for.
I have to admit, it’s strangely comforting to confront the competing personal reaches and social failures in these novels. It’s often hard for me to justify imagining a future as I witness political, environmental, and economic disasters on the daily. And yet. The discord (and the obsessive voyeurism that accompanies it) evidently aren’t new or unprecedented or once-in-a-hundred year incidents. If these novels suggest anything, it’s that American failure is just as much a part of the cultural patchwork as the American optimism and striving that gets luminous op-eds around Independence Day. Whether that’s a sign of a legacy of resistance despite challenges, or, as probably many of us have felt lately, a deep-rooted, inescapable decline is certainly up to the reader, but so we beat on.
P.S. It bears note that, as preparation for this essay, I decided to delve into the very concept of the Great American Novel, which has both a long and tumultuous history that includes-- seemingly from the onset-- some of our contemporary potential dubiousness around the concept. If you’d like to go down that rabbit hole, I encourage you to read George Knox’s “The Great American Novel: The Last Chapter.”
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