Bernard R. Tanner. F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey: A Reader’s Guide to the Gospels in The Great Gatsby. Lanham MD: U P of America, 2003. Print.

The thesis of F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey is fairly plain and direct. Fitzgerald was a fan of James Joyce’s Dubliners and read Ulysses when it came out in 1922. He incorporated some narrative techniques of Joyce in The Great Gatsby.  As Joyce “burlesqued” Greek myths in Ulysses, so Fitzgerald “burlesqued” stories from the Gospels and saints’ lives in Gatsby.

I understand what Tanner is getting at, though I am unsure that burlesque, the word he uses, is the correct word. To burlesque something means to “represent mockingly or ludicrously,” and neither Ulysses nor Gatsby are especially humorous or mocking in that manner. Still, both novels present characters which echo characters and scenes from the Greek myths (Ulysses) and early Christian and medieval writings (Gatsby) and turn the stories on their ear.

Fitzgerald in his writings and letters is very conscious of his Catholic upbringing. At one point in a letter he confessed that he could never completely get over it. At the same time Tanner makes a case that Fitzgerald was influenced by Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus, which presented Jesus as an ordinary mortal. Renan’s Jesus was a charismatic figure who did not do any miracles but who was so engaging that his followers began a cult based on his teachings. So in Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim, who denied Gatsby three times as Peter did Jesus, can say that he made Gatsby because Renan would say that Peter and Paul were the men largely responsible for the success of the Jesus cult.

To give an idea of Renan’s approach, he writes that Lazarus was feverish and retired to a cave to rest and cool down. Jesus arrived at the cave at the time Lazarus was recovering, so that when Jesus called to Lazarus, it looked like Lazarus had been resurrected. The reader gets the impression that Tanner may be a disciple of Renan as well—whenever he refers to Jesus’ actions after his resurrection, he writes that people were responding to the “ghost of Jesus.”

Tanner also points to a number of stories and legends of saints, many of which are found in medieval art as well as Catholic written tradition. He claims that Fitzgerald relied on the Gospel of John but not on the other New Testament Gospels. Tanner does make a convincing case that Nick is Nicodemus, who is only found in John, but Tanner does refer to other stories of Jesus such as the Communion at the Last Supper which come from other New Testament books.

Tanner is not the first to note some of these parallels. At one point Gatsby is called “a son of God” and dies floating on an air mattress in a cross-like position. When first reading Gatsby in 1924, Edith Wharton noted that the “orgy” (her word) in Tom’s New York apartment was a “communion” using whisky and sandwiches. Still, Tanner goes into far more detail to make his case.

Does his case work? I recall being told years ago to treat any teaching that you get the way that a cow treats hay—eat the seed but spit out the straw. I cannot say that I am convinced of every assertion that F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey makes, but its overall position seems pretty solid.

For example, I am not persuaded at all that Daisy’s name came from  French Pig Latin word play (I kid you not!); however, the book draws plenty of details from the novel to make a persuasive case that Daisy is the Judas character of Gatsby.

On Daisy’s name? I see her first name referring to the traditional daisy game: “He loves me, he loves me not.” Her last name, Fay, in Middle and Early Modern English means “fairy” like Morgan le Fay in the King Arthur legends. It comes from the French word for fairy, fée, and Fitzgerald said that Gatsby was his version of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Keats’ famous poem about a knight enchanted by a beautiful but evil fairy. (We could even make a case that Gatsby was a “knight”; he was an army officer in the Great War and won numerous medals for his heroism.)

I think another reason that Tanner used the word burlesque to describe what Fitzgerald was doing is that the characters are not symbols. Jay Gatsby may be the Jesus figure in the novel, but he does not symbolize Christ the way that, say, Billy Budd in Melville’s short story of the same name or Jim Conklin in The Red Badge of Courage represent Christ. Again, think of Ulysses. There are many deliberate parallels between Molly Bloom and Penelope from the myths, but Molly is hardly the faithful wife that Penelope was. Jay Gatsby does parallel Christ in some ways, but no one would confuse him with his classical model.

Anyway, F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey should appeal to anyone who teaches the novel. Even for those who might dismiss the overall thesis, there are plenty of very good observations about The Great Gatsby. Tanner appears to know it intimately.

The book is a rough read at first. The first four chapters do not seem to be going anywhere, and the author repeats himself a lot in those chapters. By chapter six, though, the presentation really gets going. There are also numerous spelling and typographical errors—something fairly surprising coming from an academic press.

Just as Joyce’s Dubliners or Ulysses present a critique of Irish culture by contrasting the sordid, naturalistic details of Irish mores with legendary heroes and stories these books use as sources, so, Tanner says, The Great Gatsby illustrates not only the elusiveness of the American dream but how those sordid, naturalistic details of Gatsby’s life and times contrast with the “reminding backdrop of the earliest time of Christianity.” (163)

P.S. It is interesting that Renan’s “explanations” of Christianity appealed to Fitzgerald. A writer from an earlier generation, George Eliot, was influenced by a similar materialistic biography of Jesus by D. F. Straus. In my generation, it was The Passover Plot that “explained” Jesus. The current under-35 generation seems to have taken in The Da Vinci Code for its ahistorical concept of Christ. Plus ça change…

For more reviews of works related to The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald, see https://langblog.englishplus.com/?p=1473 and https://langblog.englishplus.com/?p=1370.