Functions of a photograph in F. S. Fitzgerald's the great gatsby

Abstract

The article studies functions of a photograph in the ekphrastic discourse of F.S. Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925). Under the term ekphrasis the authors understand a verbal representation of a quiescent visual depiction; so the objects of ekphrasis in Fitzgerald's novel are paintings, advertisement posters and numerous photos. The role of a photograph in the novel was examined on the level of narration in comparison with the influence of cinematography (L.J. Dessner), and it helped to figure out the ambivalent position of the narrator between Romanticism and Realism (L. Barrett). Having the works of S. Sontag, R. Barthes, and other researchers as the basis for the authors' ideas, the article brings to a conclusion that in the laconic and discrete ekphrasis of Fitzgerald's novel a photograph takes its interposition between a painting (the "hard-boiled" portrait of Nick's ancestor and El Greco's "night scene") and an advertisement (the billboard of Dr Eckleburg and magazine pictures). While the advertisement of the eye physician expresses the false understanding of America as Paradise and substitutes the idea of God, the Toledo landscape in Nick's nightdream symbolizes the idea of a real Apocalypse. Ekphrasis in Fitzgerald's novel reflects the cultural changes of the 20th century that became apprehensible in America of the 1920s. They are seen in advertisement proliferation, in substitution of paintings with photographs, in superseding classical arts with pop-culture and technological devices. The image of a photographer-looser McKee and the description of his "artistic game" precede the gallery of photos that created the legendary biography of Gatsby and marked its main points (Dan Cody's yacht, Oxford University, West-Egg villa). Nick sympathizes both protagonists, but from the very beginning he contraposes the "flabby impressionability" of the photographer McKee imagined as a "creative temperament" to the "extraordinary gift for hope", the "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life", the "romantic readiness" and "responsiveness" of Gatsby, who included his studies of painting skill into his biography. The process of making and perception of photographs is shown directly and indirectly on various poetic levels of Fitzgerald's novel. It is represented as a subject-object relationship (the choice of an object, watching, posing, picture taking, film developing, identification). In the fiction world of the novel photos are used as means of self-actualization and express a conflict between the illusory and the real worlds. Both a photograph and an advertisement justify a lie. And as a result the novel characters do not perceive themselves and their relatives as living beings but illustrations from fashionable magazines. Nevertheless a photo often helps Fitzgerald to "develop" the real feelings of his character and show tender devotion and shattered dreams beyond a glamorous picture. On the one hand, a photo is a tangible thing, material evidence which makes Gatsby's ambitions real. On the other hand, a photo distorts his personality, disguises his living a double life, and as a result a thing substitutes a real person even in his father's eyes.