Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction by Messenger Christian;

Author:Messenger, Christian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, LIT000000, Literary Criticism/Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1981-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

YALE AND TOM BUCHANAN

Tom Buchanan represents Fitzgerald’s inversion of both the light and dark romanticism of the School Sports Hero. He is associated with many themes in The Great Gatsby, including the power of American capitalism and the bankruptcy of America’s new monied classes. He is the ironic representative of the class to which Jay Gatsby desperately wants admission. Buchanan lives totally in the present, thrashing in the chains of his own boredom and restlessness, a Yale All-American end ostensibly bred for power and responsibility but reduced to the life of a country squire on Long Island with a string of polo ponies.

When Fitzgerald returned to the symbol of the School Sports Hero in The Great Gatsby, his creation of Tom Buchanan was a fully realized portrait in the physical and philosophical sense. Buchanan is not a campus idol or martyr but an individual moral disaster, the objectionable product of an American collegiate heroism that had nurtured the fictional Merriwell and Stover and Amory Blaine and had captivated Fitzgerald himself. Buchanan most strongly reinforces Veblen’s anatomy of the leisure-class sportsman as a man “slightly gifted with reflection,” one whose “life is substantially a life of naive impulsive action.” Veblen’s fundamental view that addiction to sports is “arrested development of the man’s moral nature” is seconded by Fitzgerald in Buchanan’s case while Veblen’s descriptive terms for the traits associated with the sportsman—“rant,” “swagger,” “histrionic nature”—are those that deftly characterize Buchanan.20

Whereas Allenby and Humbird are sketched in as outlines, Fitzgerald skillfully builds the physical portrait of Buchanan by repeated descriptions of his mannerisms. Tom’s “arrogant” eyes dominated his face and “gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.” 21 Under his riding clothes you could sense “the enormous power of that body” (7); “you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body” (7). With “eyes flashing about recklessly” and a voice conveying a fractious tone, Tom turns Nick around “by one arm” to survey with “a broad flat hand” his front lawn (7–8). Nick relates, “wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, [he] compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square” (12). Daisy Buchanan says, “That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a——” (12). In one of the few physical acts that he performs in the novel, Tom breaks the nose of his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, with “a short deft movement . . . with his open hand” (37). He blocks the very air in rooms with his “thick body” (116), and he can cut the romantic heart out of any scene merely by his appearance; for example, early in the novel: “Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor” (8).

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