Sc. Fitzgerald from “The Great Gatsby”

Chapter IV

ON Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn. 'He's a bootlegger/ said, the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers 'One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.' Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed 'This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922'. But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

{{{From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom 1 knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all. }}}

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white nickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the 0. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga's girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartz (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. ('Rot-Gut') Ferret and the DeJongs and Ernest Lilly - they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day. A man named Klipspringer was there so often that he became known as 'the boarder' - I doubt if he had another home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O'Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W.

Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square. Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names -Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalist whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O'Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr Albrucksburger and Miss Haag and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip. with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.

All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer.

 Make practical stylistic tasks

Comment on examples of cultural codes in the text, note the effect they create.

 Offer your variant of translating the cultural codes.

... But when you looked at the eyes that sparkled out like a beetle's from each side of his hooked nose, you saw at once that he inherited all the fiery spirit of his forefathers. In fact, a Frenchman's spirit never exhales, however his body may dwindle. It rather rarefies, and grows more inflammable, as the earthly particles diminish; and I have seen valor enough in a little fiery-hearted French dwarf to have furnished out a tolerable giant.

When once the Marquis, as was his wont, put on one of the old helmets stuck up in his hall, though his head no more filled it than a dry pea in its peascod, yet his eves flashed from the bottom of the iron cavern with the brilliancy of carbuncles; and when he poised the ponderous two-handled sword of his ancestors, you would have thought you saw the doughty little David wielding the sword of Goliath, which was unto him like a weaver's beam.

However, gentlemen, I am dwelling too long on this description of the Marquis and his chateau, but you must excuse me; he was an old friend of my uncle; and whenever my uncle told the story, he was always fond of talking a great deal about his host.— Poor little Marquis! He was one of that handful of gallant courtiers who made such a devoted but hopeless stand in the cause of their sovereign, in the chateau of the Tuileries, against the irruption of the mob on the sad tenth of August. He displayed the valor of a preux French chevalier to the last; flourishing feebly his little court sword with а ca-ca! in face of a whole legion of sans culottes: but was pinned to the wall like a butterfly, by the pike of a poissarde, and his heroic soul was borne up to heaven on his ailes de pigeon.

But all this has nothing to do with my story. To the point then. When the hour arrived for retiring for the night, my uncle was shown to his room in a venerable old lower. It was the oldest part of the chateau, and had in ancient times been the donjon or stronghold; of course the chamber was none of the best. The Marquis had put him there, however, because he knew him to be a traveller of taste, and loud of antiquities; and also because the better apartments were already occupied. Indeed, he perfectly reconciled my uncle to his quarters by mentioning the great personages who had once inhabited them, all of whom were, in some way or other, connected with the family. If you would take his word for it, John Balio, or as he called him, Jean de Bailleu, had died of chagrin in this very chamber, on hearing of the success of his rival, Robert the Bruce, at the battle of Hannockburn. And «hen he added that the Duke de Guise had slept in it, my uncle was fain to facilitate himself on being honored with such distinguished quarters.

 Make practical stylistic tasks

Find examples of cultural codes in the text, investigate their meaning, comment on the effect of routines they produce.

From .Days of Obligation

There is a crucifix over my bed. I am in bed; my eyes are open. I am waiting for the sound of midnight—a blare of horns, afire whistle, a dog's bark, a woman's scream.

Larry Faherty is in New Orleans for Christmas, so we have not spent New Year's Eve together. He sent me a postcard, written in Spanish. It's there on my dresser.

A car passes on the wet pavement outside. My room revolves on a rail of light. And then it is dark. January 1, 1960. The new decade has come to Sacramento, California. It is no longer Christ­mas . In the morning there will be a cold mass at church, and then the Rose Parade on TV. And the long gray afternoon will pass away through a series of black-and-white football games; in a few days I will be back at school.

The ectoplasmic corpus of the crucifix glows with confidence. Awake on my bed, I am inclined forward: I want the years coming to improve me, to make my hand a man's hand and my soul a man's soul.

Every New Year's Eve my mother weeps in front of the TV when Guy Lombardo strikes up "Auld Lang Syne."

The crowd in Times Square cheers.

T^is year, however, we have gone to bed early. The back-porch light is on for my brother. 1 have stayed awoke in the dark to feel the difference of a new decade.

There is no difference.

 Make practical stylistic tasks

Read two similar extracts. Find examples of cultural codes in the text, investigate their meaning, comment on the effect they produce.

■ ■ ■

Los Angeles was not the creation of foreign parents escaping tragedy; Los Angeles was the creation of Amer­ican children.

People I knew on the west side rarely went to the Mexican side. People in the San Fernando Valley expressed fatuous pride at not having been downtown for years. Orange County was the region's largest attempt to secede from itself. But Los Angeles named everything and everyone, claimed every horizon. The city without a center was everywhere the city. L.A. bestowed met­ropolitan stature on the suburban.

America made fun of L.A.

Europeans admired, especially Brits admired Los Angeles.

In London, I met a specimen of one of England's most congealed bloods who was disappointed to learn that I was from San Fran­cisco, oh dear—he much preferred Los Annjilleeze.

In 1971, Reynor Banham, a British architectural critic, pub­lished his pop celebration of the city, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham wrote disparagingly of the California alternative—San Francisco—with its "prefabricated Yankee houses and prefabricated New England or European attitudes."

Then David Hockney arrived in L.A. from coal-blackened northern England; dyed his hair, changed into shorts; eased into a primary palette. Hockney sold his canvas to the world: suburban tract villas, blond statue boys, an Aqua Velva Mediterranean.

Europe sought freedom from centuries. Europe craved vulgar­ity. Europe found innocence.

For all its innocence, L.A. was flattered by Europe's attentions in those years. It was the stuff of sonnets—old men taking young men to the opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In a way, Europe was turning a trick on L.A., teaching the capital of childish narcissism the confidence of outward regard. L.A. soon came to believe that it was indeed an important city, a world city. "London, Paris, Beverly Hills," read the perfume bottles. British actors and German divas were flown into town like so many truf­fles. In return, Los Angeles opened the last great European mu­seum in the world, an authentic Greek temple at the edge of the sea.

I imagined 1 knew some secret about Los Angeles that other people did not know. The architect who Bauhaused his bungalow was living in a house identical to the house I had grown up in. The Sacramento boy still refused to believe that a horizontal city could be a great city. But there were times when Los Angeles amused me for taking all I dismissed as Sacramento and selling it to the world as glamour. What a joke!

I now realize that Los Angeles was doing the same with me. I was a Mexican from the Central Valley—even then L.A. was the second-largest Mexican city in the world—a Mexican kid from the Central Valley with a big nose and glasses. I had spent my life indoors, reading about London.

But in L.A. I passed for a glamour-boy.

"Because you can talk," one angel explained. "All they want is to be amused."

I had always been intellectually arrogant. In L.A., I yearned to become glamorous enough to be humble, in the manner of the angels.

There was nothing reticent about L.A. Glamour was instant. The city took its generosity from the movies. You're beautiful if L.A. says you're beautiful, goddammit.

It was the sons of Jewish immigrants, the haberdasher s son and the tobacconist's son, who established the epic scale of the movies. Movies taught one big lesson: individual lives have scope and grandeur.

■ ■ ■

We have hurled—like starlings, like Goths—through the cas­tle of European memory. Our reflections have glanced upon the golden coach that carried the Emperor Maximilian through the streets of Mexico City, thence onward through the sludge of a hundred varnished paintings.

I have come at last to Mexico, the country of my parents' birth. I do not expect to find anything that pertains to me.

We have strained the rouge cordon at the thresholds of imperial apartments; seen chairs low enough for dwarfs, commodious enough for angels.

We have imagined the Empress Carlota standing in the shadows of an afternoon; we have followed her gaze down the Paseo de la Reforma toward the distant city. The Paseo was a nostalgic al­lusion to the Champs-Elysees, we learn, which Maximilian re­created for his tempestuous, crowlike bride.

Come this way, please. . . .

European memory is not to be the point of our excursion. Senor Fuentes, our tour director, is already beginning to descend the hill from Chapultepec Castle. What the American credit-card company calls our "orientation tour" of Mexico City had started late and so Senor Fuentes has been forced, regrettablv, ". . . This way, please ..." to rush. Senor Fuentes is consumed with contrition for time wasted this morning. He intends to uphold his schedule, as a way of upholding Mexico, against our expectation.

We had gathered at the appointed time at the limousine en­trance to our hotel, beneath the banner welcoming contestants to the Senorita Mexico pageant. We—Japanese, Germans, Ameri­cans—were waiting promptly at nine. There was no bus. And as we waited, the Senorita Mexico contestants arrived. Drivers leaned into their cabs to pull out long-legged senoritas. The driv­ers then balanced the senoritas onto stiletto heels (the driveway was cobbled) before they passed the senoritas, en pointe, to the waiting arms of officials.

Mexican men, meanwhile—doormen, bellhops, window wash­ers, hotel guests—stopped dead in their tracks, wounded by the scent and spectacle of so many blond senoritas. The Mexican men assumed fierce expressions, nostrils flared, brows knit. Such expressions are masks—the men intend to convey their adoration of prey—as thoroughly ritualized as the smiles of beauty queens.

 Listen to oral version.

Listen to the recording of the story “The Sisters” by James Joyce Comment on cultural codes from the following extracts.

1. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid * and the word simony in the Catechism.* But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

2. 'The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you: and they say he had a great wish* for him.'

3. 'That's my principle, too,' said my uncle. 'Let him learn to box his corner.* That's what I'm always saying to that Rosicrucian * there: take exercise.