Modernism and Subjectivity by Adam Meehan

Author:Adam Meehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

“It eluded us then . . .”

The final lines of The Great Gatsby unify its themes with an overwrought precision rivaled by few short passages in fiction. Although they have accordingly been the subject of much discussion, they contain a striking temporal irregularity that has gone unmentioned in previous criticism of the novel: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—” (189). If we are to assume that the referent of the pronoun It that begins the second sentence is “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” then we are encountering a temporal disjunction in the text—what Thomas Pendleton has called a “chronological incoherence” (12). The text is telling us that “It” (“the orgastic future”) “eluded us then,” and the context in which then is used suggests that the elusion occurred in the past. But how can “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”—in a continual, ongoing action—have eluded us then, in the completed past? This paradox produces the polysemous doubling elusion/illusion mentioned above. The orgastic future eludes us precisely because it is illusory. And just as the orgastic future eludes us, so too does the certainty of meaning.

We can view this temporal disjunction as what Derrida calls an aporia, a paradox or contradiction that threatens to unravel the meaning of the text. And yet this contradiction also produces meaning in the final lines of the novel. It is through this temporal paradox that the meaning of the text is disseminated; or, perhaps more acutely stated, the literal meaning is dislocated, allowing the symbolic to finally emerge. The final sentence of the book, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (189), offers an inviting analogy to the concept of the floating signifier developed by Lévi-Strauss and later adopted by Lacan. Each individual word in a sentence acts as a floating signifier because its meaning cannot be fully known or comprehended until the sentence is completed and the broader meaning crystallizes.

This brings us back to the connection between subjectivity, language, and temporality that pervades the novel. I suggest that we approach the temporal disjunction and linguistic uncertainty of the final lines through Lacan’s notion of the future anterior: “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming” (Écrits 247). Lacan suggests that the subject must continually reinvent itself by anticipating what it will become in a future moment of psychological harmony. But this unified conception of self can only be recognized retrospectively, which sends the subject into a repetitive rummaging of the past. It is this

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