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Absence of Evil
Benjamin V. Beier on the Surprising Augustinian Grammar of The Great Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby brought with it renewed interest in the book and fresh commentaries on both the book and the film. For example, Fr. Robert Barron, an astute reader of popular culture, called the book a "sermon" demonstrating that a life of "conspicuous consumption" cannot satisfy. The boredom and listlessness of most of the characters—especially of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who lack nothing in terms of privilege, wealth, and physical pleasure—bear out Barron's point.
This principle is keyed in the negative because it is drawn from a story filled with characters who exemplify how not to live. But the story may hint at a positive alternative, if one reads the book as an eloquent narrative restatement of the scriptural principle that God alone satisfies the human heart.
One of the most famous articulators of this principle is St. Augustine of Hippo. The first ten books of his autobiographical Confessions movingly relate how the young Augustine slowly came to discover that God alone fulfills. Yet, when I recently returned to The Great Gatsby, it was a related, but different, insight of Augustine that stood out to me in this most acclaimed of Fitzgerald's stories. While the novel never fully points to the ultimate ground of satisfaction for the human heart—right relationship with the triune God—it does offer a nuanced answer to why "conspicuous consumption" fails to satisfy: because evil is without substance.
Augustine's Insight, Fitzgerald's Grammar
Augustine tells of his discovery that "evil is utterly not" in book seven of the Confessions. At this point he is not yet Christian, and he is grappling with the problem of evil. He is troubled by both the vicious actions of agents and the corruptibility of creation (through pain, death, decay, and so forth), which appear as devastating evidence that God is either malevolent or lacking in power.
But continued reading and thinking (and grace!) lead Augustine to a series of insights that preserve God's goodness and omnipotence in the midst of wickedness and decay: God is not a material being; he is wholly other than the creation he has made. Creation is good, and its various elements, properly ordered, achieve a faultless harmony. Nevertheless, because creation is through but not of God (Etienne Gilson's fine distinction), a human creature can deprive creation of its harmony by a "swerving of the will." This swerve indicates no fault in the Creator or his "very good" original creation (Gen. 1:31). God gives human persons a great dignity and responsibility by giving each person a will, but when a will swerves, the result is a loss of accord. Such discord is caused by absence, the privation that we commonly call "evil."
I don't know whether or to what degree Fitzgerald intended to assert the non-being of evil in The Great Gatsby. Though he received a Catholic education while young, by the time he wrote Gatsby, any remaining Catholic influence seems to have been only aesthetic, as seen, for example, in his metaphor of the setting sun "spread[ing] itself in benediction" over Louisville. But whether by design or not, his narrative does evoke the notion of evil-as-privation, and it is worth considering how it does so. I would assert that it manifests this heady principle through its grammar.
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By "grammar" I mean to suggest a concept that extends beyond mere correct usage to denote, in Sister Miriam Joseph's phrase, how "the intellect uses language to translate reality." In The Great Gatsby, the key aspects of Fitzgerald's grammar to consider are his diction and his images. Although both come to the reader via a limited, first-person narrator and the dialogue recounted by him, we can discern notable patterns of grammar that transcend any one speaker or that, even if limited to one speaker, contain multiple layers of meaning, some of which may exceed the speaker's intention.
Negative Diction
One striking way in which Fitzgerald's diction suggests that evil is a privation is through the repeated use of words with negative prefixes such as un-, dis-, or in-;for example, "uncommunicable," "unknown," "untrue," "dishonest," "dismayed," "disordered," "incoherent," and "inessential." My highly unscientific accounting yielded 49 un- words alone, to say nothing of those with in- or dis- prefixes. The accumulation of such words gives a sense that the sin-drenched world of the novel is a world of absence and privation.
Benjamin V. Beier , Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He and his family live in Topeka, Kansas, where they attend Most Pure Heart of Mary Catholic Church.
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