Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

beds the daughter of the new economic fathers in a room dedicated to a founding classical paternity. As if sacrilege against one deity were not enough, Dick finds the city of papal fathers ‘dirty’, liable to ‘Victorian dust’ (241) and to the ‘sweat of exhausted cultures’ (244), a setting well suited to disaffiliation and to the guilty self-dismemberment which succeeds it. The imbroglio with the taxi drivers results directly from Dick’s disappointment at failing to contact a girl in a night club:
    She was a young English girl, with blonde hair and a healthy, pretty English face and she smiled at him again with an invitation he understood, that denied the flesh even in the act of tendering it … ‘She looks like somebody in the movies,’ he said. (242-3)
    The pick-up – a commercial extension of Rosemary – is not picked up (though, predictably, there is an ‘unpleasant’ ‘Bahama Negro’ at the edge of the scene (242)). Dick punishes himself for his desire by provoking a fight: ‘He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel’ (246). Dick asks for it, as though to prove to himself the evacuation of his own ‘integrity’. In the shadow play of allegory he has cast down multiple fathers and has responded to the delights of the sphere of reproduction; he can, therefore, no longer experience selfhood as an entity. In court he has no option other than to insist that
he
raped the five-year-old girl. By straining to bury the ‘bad’ father and to resurrect the ‘good’ so that Nicole may be made ‘whole’ again, Dick’s entire professional and domestic life up to this seemingly ludicrous protestation may have served only to repeat the ‘bad’ father’s crime. Hasn’t Rome, and Dick’s commitment to a Daddy’s girl whose very existence is wealth’s new experiment with untraced channels of expenditure,
proved
that at one level he raped Nicole? My question is at once gnomic and dogmatic.
    To clarify: read retrospectively, incest embodies accumulation; read as a projection having a different economic emphasis, Warren’s act and Dick’s complicity become expressions of accumulation’s new problematic – the problematic of self-transgression – whereby energy (in this case sexual) needs to try untried combinations and to multiply selves as a multiplication of markets. Having acknowledged incest, Dick can only come apart multitudinously. The logic of reproduction has it that self-destruction, or rather a systematic revision of selfhood, is integral to the continuity of capital. The bourgeoisie of this phase are ever their own best barbarians; only by putting themselves to the sword, in the form of the advertising-copywriter’s pen, can they ensure class longevity. Breakage becomes a structural principle of the bourgeoisie during the twenties andtherefore informs the latent plots and available personalities of that class.
    The affair with Rosemary intensifies Dick’s dawning sense of his own theatricality. In Rome he assures her ‘gently’ that his own social gifts are a ‘trick’ (236); earlier on the Riviera, he made a similar declaration to her mother, but then cheered himself up with the phrase ‘a trick of the heart’ (181). The integrative capacity of that iconic organ will not, however, withstand his later, careful distinction between manner and morale. Discussing his own transformation, he tells Rosemary at their final meeting, ‘The change came a long way back—but at first it didn’t show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks’ (307). His moral would seem to be: where manners are experienced as mannerisms, ‘whole soul[s]’ can no longer crystallize from their systematic