Sermon Library
“One fine morning…” Awakening from the Dream of Spiritual Materialism”
Joel Brence M.D.
May 15, 2011
Service Theme: 2011 Aspen Valley Big Read
“One fine morning…” Awakening from the Dream of Spiritual Materialism
Most people regard “The Great Gatsby” as one of the great American love stories. If so, it’s a drama of dysfunctional love. It is also a drama of displaced religiosity.
Some of you may have wondered what today’s scripture reading about Caesar has to do with the Great Gatsby. The answer is this: Carl Jung thought that the religious instinct in human beings was just as powerful as some of the other drives like money, food, and sex. It is this “religious instinct”—or “spiritual impulse,” if you prefer--that gives us the energy to create our dreams, our ideals and our big motivations in life. Without these, we’re afraid of being just a “blip” that falls beneath the radar screen of the universe. In ancient Rome, you didn’t have to “access this religious instinct” to create that “dream” that would give your life meaning. The collective did it for you in the person of the Emperor. Caesar was the embodiment of the Roman Empire. Here in the US, we don’t have an empire, but we do have its moral equivalent in the form of the “American Dream”—and this no presidential candidate could ever gainsay and still remain viable.
So, as I said, Jung saw this religious instinct as a vital part of the full spectrum of what it means to be human. This means that if we don’t channel this instinct properly—if we repress it, for instance—just like what happens to the sex instinct if we repress it, we’re in for some big, big trouble. Because we’re not giving the religious instinct its due. We may be as dogged in pursuit of our life goals as was Caesar, but we’re not rendering onto God the things that are God’s. And if you want to imagine how a society that cherishes the American Dream might look without any reference to God or organized religion, just read “The Great Gatsby.” How many references to organized religion do you find there? Nick does mention God in reference to Gatsby’s grandiosity—but only in the metaphorical sense of Gatsby seeing himself as “a son of God,” by which he means the narcissistic embodiment of his own godlike vision. The only other person who even mentions God is George Wilson, and this when he goes psychotic after his wife’s death and thinks that God, in the guise of Dr. Eckleburg, is telling him to avenge her. And the place where he has this command hallucination is very interesting—as we shall see later on. But, for now, it’s important to keep in mind that, if the religious instinct has been repressed—as it has in the Great Gatsby—this does not mean that the energy carried by the religious instinct disappears out of the world; rather, it resurfaces in some very weird ways—ways which I will describe here as “pseudo-religiosity.” One of the ways this energy might be manifesting is as those “animal spirits” driving Wall Street and our whole consumer way of life. As Marius Bewley puts it: “The Great Gatsby is a dramatic affirmation in fictional terms of the American spirit in the midst of an American world that denies the soul.” This has consequences: it opens the way for what Freud has called “the return of the repressed.” This means that what is primarily a spiritual impulse ends up fueling a crass materialistic vision of success. After all, who needs God when a voice full of money will do?
So, how does repressed religiosity return in the Great Gatsby? It returns primarily through that idealization of the possibilities of life known as the American Dream—an idealization on a level where the spiritual and the material have become inextricably confused. Caesar (or his avatar, in this case, Ms. Daisy) has been mis-taken for God. What do we mean by the American Dream? I would say there are three components to this Dream: 1) Success is financial achievement; 2) everything is getting better and better; and 3) life is entertainment—one big football game, as Tom Buchanan might have put it. Because it is stretched between a golden past and golden future, the American Dream is always betrayed by a desolate present—or, to speak in the words of the novel—a moment of fruit rinds and crushed flowers—all that was left over at Gatsby’s mansion once the party was over.
Every religion, of course, has its rituals. These parties that take place at the mansion—these are the main rituals of this new religion that Gatsby is promulgating with such missionary zeal. These parties were shining, alluring promises of everything and of nothing in particular. Like the American Dream, they held disappointment at every turn—though they did manage to establish, in a conspicuous manner, the extraordinary financial achievement of their host. At least for him—no one knew exactly how—things were getting better and better; so, to some extent, Gatsby functions here as the embodiment of the American Dream.
But the most dramatic illustration of pseudo-religiosity is Gatsby’s delusional infatuation with Daisy. Jorge Luis Borges says somewhere that to fall in love with a person is, in any case, to create a very fallible founder of a new religion. And Daisy certainly qualifies as a very fallible founder of this new religion that Gatsby has created by falling in love with her. But the intensity of Gatsby’s infatuation goes way beyond the mystifications of the usual love affair and rises to the level of a full-fledged delusion. Freud coined a word for this kind of delusion: he called it “oceanic feeling,” and it represents mystical union with an infinite power that just happens to be a spitting image of one’s own grandiosity. This process of delusion is palpably at work in the first scene where Jay Gatsby makes his debut on the stage towards the end of Chapter One. But he not only deifies Daisy there--he makes a veritable “sacrament” of her mystical presence across the bay. I say this not only because of Fitzgerald’s intense Catholic upbringing, but because Daisy’s presence across the bay is lit up with the kind of sanctuary lamp that Catholics traditionally reserve for the “Blessed Sacrament,” keeping it burning before the tabernacle day and night. With respect to Daisy, however, the sanctuary lamp on the dock does not point to the host in the tabernacle, but to another kind of “Holy Grail,” the sacrament of their supposed marriage, which G is convinced took place when they consummated their union sexually some five years earlier in Louisville, before he set off to war.
But in Catholic religiosity—which is, as I’ve said, where Fitzgerald is coming from—not only do we have seven sacraments, we also have what are called “sacramentals,” which differ from sacraments in that they only make it up to the level of “holy”—not to the level of “holy, holy, holy.” Sacramentals are things like holy water, rosaries, and the vestments used at Mass. Not surprisingly, Gatsby has a whole slew of “sacramentals” piled up in his closet—not to speak of the “golden chariot” parked in his garage. You may recall the scene where he shows his piles of beautiful imported shirts to Daisy and Nick? It is clear from the text that he shows them, neither in vanity nor in pride, but with a reverential humility in the presence of some inner vision he cannot possibly grasp, because it is all part of this repressed religiosity blindly groping in the dark for its devotional object—which, in this case, has been projected (displaced) onto Daisy. They impress Daisy so much, she bursts into tears. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds, much like a pilgrim melting in ecstasy before the fabled Shroud of Turin. She does this because, once again, repressed religiosity has imbued these shirts with a certain religious aura--the pseudo-sacramental quality of the Gilded Age, of which Gatsby can be said to be the self-appointed high priest.
One last indication of this displaced religiosity is “ineffability.” Ineffability means something that is unspeakable (ssh, shh—we don’t talk about that!), and this quality has belonged to all mystery religions since time immemorial. “Ineffability” is certainly inherent in the criminal activities and bootlegging by which Gatsby has managed to finance his extraordinary life style. And, for most of the novel, we are kept pretty much in the dark about just who this Gatsby cat really is. Also ineffable is what kind of work the “swarm” of men in the Valley of Ashes are doing to keep the cocktails flowing and these fabulous parties going. What one can see—what is visible above the obscured field of labor—is an ad, the billboard of none other than Dr. T.J.Eckleburg, optometrist.
As John Hilgart points out, this billboard “becomes the novel’s central image for the blindness” that our consumer way of life depends on, “if its products are to be successfully pandered off as the avatars of dreams.” Advertising is, after all, the leading edge of our society’s “transmutation of things that have been made by someone into things that will make you into someone.” Consumer goods are “perfect lovers”—they never fight back—“and advertising is their come hither glance.” Fitzgerald’s choice of spectacles as his advertisement’s product is deeply ironic. This ad “captures your gaze, returns your gaze, and promises to improve your gaze”—all in one fell swoop. Now, can you beat that? It’s almost as good as the Easter Bunny’s hairspray! The real men on the ground of the Valley of Ashes are no match for this ad of the Guy in the Sky. Dr. Eckleburg’s ad is the closest this novel comes to describing what God means for a society consumed by consumerism.
In this idealization of possibilities that the American Dream suggests, let’s not forget what the geographical location of this Valley of Ashes signifies. It’s meant to be a foil to all the luxury which surrounds it. After all, the precise location of the Valley happens to be the “shared toilet” of two adjacent areas of “rich promise and massive consumption”—Manhattan to the East and the wealthy mansions of Long Island to the West.
Before I conclude, I want to make sure that—whether you agree with me or not--what I’m trying to say about “The Great Gatsby” is absolutely clear. Two questions:
1) Is Fitzgerald saying that we Americans are as delusional about the “American Dream” as Gatsby was about Daisy? It seems that this is the message he is trying to convey. As he wrote to a friend just before The Great Gatsby was published, “the whole burden” of the novel is “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory” (Life in Letters 78). In fact, no other nation has a “dream” associated with its core identity. When the American Dream came into being it was like a fresh breeze blowing in the face of all the ancient regimes of the old world with their static, all-too-rigid norms. Where my own grandparents came from—Slovenia--the whole landscape is studded with churches like tombstones, and death, one could say, takes the form there of a beautiful landscape. All my grandmother could remember when we asked her about life in the old country were the vast potato fields where she was expected to work till she dropped. I can still hear her lament: Oj joj! Dezela je bila lepa, pa tudi pretezka –which, of course, you all understand to mean: “Country’s real cool, man, but the people…they’re, like, whack yo!” (my son’s translation, by the way—not the authorized King James Version!) In such a stifling atmosphere, change is not possible. Life is suffering; it’s an ordeal to be endured--until, exhausted from all your labors, you finally make it to the next life—or, if you’re lucky and plucky, to America—which, for my grandmother at least, was the Promised Land. When you’re preoccupied with death and suffering non-stop, and you hear about a place where “everything’s getting better and better, success is financial achievement, and life is entertainment”—this sounds just like what the doctor ordered. But to make a new norm out of what is meant to be a corrective is like trying to make horseradish your main dish. Plus, if I’ve learned anything at all from Jung, it is this: You should never take your dreams as the absolute truth. And this includes the American Dream. You have to enter into dialogue with the unconscious, sure—but you don’t let your dream dictate your life—which is what Gatsby did. It was his inability to critically question his dream that finally did Gatsby in. The more important question remains: Where will our inability to question our dream take America?
2) Am I saying that Gatsby would have turned out all right at the end if only he had gotten his proper dose of “that old time religion”? That is not what I’m saying. It was just a few months ago that I addressed some of you here in this very chapel on the first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit. I told you then that, in order to realize the kind of happiness this Beatitude proposes, we must become disillusioned with our particular ways of chasing after the extraordinary. In other words, in order to engage the spiritual process for real, two things must happen: first, we must be totally fed up with all our ego-strategies for happiness; and, secondly we must be willing to fall into our ordinariness, our simple suffering. Otherwise, I said, the spiritual process—which tolerates no fools--would spit us out, which is precisely what happened to the “Great” Gatsby at the end. A greater antithesis to what poverty of spirit means cannot be found than Jay Gatsby—at least as he is presented in the first half of the book. As Richard Lehan points out, the novel keeps coming back to this matter of sight through the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, the eyes of the owl-eyed man, and the eyes of Nick that get more myopic as the novel progresses, until we finally end up with the eyes of Gatsby himself, whose sight is transformed from the resplendent to the ordinary on the very day when he loses Daisy.
At that end stage, when a rose simply becomes a rose, and Gatsby doesn’t have the “jazz” left any more to pass himself off as “great”—at that point, but not before—this displaced person from the Midwest, this James Gatz with his displaced religiosity, would indeed have been ready to engage the spiritual process—but, this time, for real.
Joel Brence, Aspen Chapel, May 15, 2011