"An Elusive Rhythm": The Great Gatsby Reclaims Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract

multitudinous intertextual resonances in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby collectively support both author's confident prepublication assertion that book will be a consciously artistic achievement(1) and an (unfortunately revisionist) academic portrait of as a Princeton alumous. Certainly elusive intertextual rhythms with which novel is wrought remain largely uncharted, but these allegedly include, among a great many others, relationships with works by Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, John Keats, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford.(2) With widening chronological disparity it has been argued that novel is a modern expression of grail quest,(3) and also that Gatsby is Phaeton figure of Ovid's Metamorphoses, failing like this mythic forbear to harness his chariot to sun that Daisy represents.(4) Until recently, however, nova's intertextual engagement with poems by Geoffrey Chaucer did not figure in this panoply. Yet a juxtaposed reading of Gatsby and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde announces presence of latter in Fitzgerald's novel with compelling conjunctions of character, theme, spatial and temporal structure, and a number of strikingly similar set scenes. These scenes include, for example, union of lovers at house of intermediary (Pandarus or Nick) during a rainstorm, and poignant if futile visit to departed lady's house.(5) critical work beginning to pursue this particular elusive rhythm is recent and by no means voluminous, but is becoming more assured with evidence amassing. Nancy Hoffman first argued case in her article, The Great Gatsby: Troilus and Criseyde Revisited?, drawing a number of important correspondences between two works. F. T. Flahiff removed need for Hoffman's cautious punctuation in The Great Gatsby: Scott Fitzgerald's Chaucerian Rag.(6) Essential to Flahiff's argument was version of story by fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson: reunion of two lovers echoes Henryson's to Chaucer's poem, Testament of Cresseid. Deborah Davis Schlacks departs from this point in American Dream Visions: Chaucer's Surprising Influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald. A1though she does not pursue Troilus-Gatsby correspondence, noting only existence of Hoffman's and Flahiff's articles, she argues comprehensively that found a source of creative renewal in Chaucer's dream vision poems and echoed them in his early works, including Gatsby. Such works are ringing with the melody of Chaucer's lesser known poems.(7) She also adds to evidence Hoffman produced to demonstrate that knew Chaucer's work.(8) This external evidence is perhaps more necessary here than in other cases. Schlacks recognizes that, for many, Fitzgerald simply seems an unlikely candidate to have been influenced by an author so distant in time and culture from his own. But by same token, Fitzgerald ... was better read and better educated than some people have realized (Schlacks, pp. 1, 6). Since Fitzgerald's knowledge of Chaucer is a certainty, it is more than appropriate to consider internal evidence that Great Gatsby continues to provide. It is demonstrable that novel shares many points of contact with Chaucer's poem. It is also demonstrable that it shares with Henryson's work conditions of a sequel to Chaucer's poem.(9) Yet relationship between works is not direct but mediated--In meantime / In between time(10)--by tradition that notably comprises Henryson's Testament of Cresseid and also Shakespeare's History of Troilus and Cressida. Beginning promptly with Henryson's poem, this tradition effects a popular degradation of story and particularly of Criseyde' s reputation, which sees its nadir in Shakespeare's play. While still displaying symptoms of disease that infected characters and ideals in these two intervening texts (and thereby suffering in any direct comparison of world views between Chaucer's poem and itself), Great Gatsby makes in fact a rehabilitative return towards a more Chaucerian treatment of Troilus and Criseyde story. …