Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0125/01251.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 28KB | 479 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01251}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Critical Comment, Tender Is The Night}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Fitzgerald, F. Scott}
$Affiliation{Associate Professor Of English, Simon Fraser University}
$Subject{dick
own
diver
nicole
rather
himself
tommy
ideal
indeed
moral
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{}
$Log{See Discarded*0125101.scf
See Tender is the Night*0125102.scf
}
Title:       Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book:        Tender is the Night
Author:      Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Critic:      Cooperman, Stanley
Affiliation: Associate Professor Of English, Simon Fraser University

Critical Comment, Tender Is The Night

     D. W. Harding, in his perceptive essay on Tender is the Night, remarks
that Fitzgerald's protagonist in his last completed novel is a "tragic
child-hero whom no one is great enough to help." For Dick Diver, brilliant
psychiatrist and physician, brilliant husband (or rather, guardian) of a
brilliantly wealthy and beautiful neurotic, is indeed a perpetual resource for
those about him. So completely is he available to be used by others, that he
is ultimately quite used up, consumed by an essentially parasitic world whose
moral weakness feeds upon moral strength, until the strength itself is broken.
And when this happens, when the "goodness" of Dick Diver is no longer needed
(and when his own control and power have been sufficiently drained), there can
be no question of returning the favor: Dick Diver exists to help rather than
to be helped, to be used rather than use. And so he is, ultimately, discarded
like an empty medicine bottle.

[See Discarded: Is left like an empty medicine bottle. He helps others and
than he is discarded.]

[See Tender is the Night: Tender is the night.]

The 'Ideal' Of Service.

     Certainly Dick Diver's role as "physician" is essential to the novel. He
exists, as Nicole Diver's wealthy sister points out, to serve a function:
that, indeed, is what he has been "paid" for. It is Nicole's wealth, after
all, that to a great extent has made possible Dick's grace, his manners, his
mastery of the entire "carnival by the sea" atmosphere which he enjoys, and
which he is entitled to enjoy as a condition of his service. Once this service
no longer "pays off" - when the "cure" is completed and when Dick has given
all he has to give - the "contract" is cancelled and the physician-husband is
simply discharged with gratitude, with some regret, and with considerable
embarrassment when the physician himself demonstrates the poor taste of
developing weaknesses of his own. In a sick room, after all, the function of
the patient is not to take the pulse of the serviceable specialist he has
hired.

     In the moral sick room of the postwar world, Dick Diver finds himself
surrounded by "love" which is indeed the product of disease rather than
health, and as he proceeds with his various "cures" - as he expends the moral
and personal energy at his disposal-his own deterioration becomes inevitable.
For Dick Diver, who agreed to make one of his patients his wife (and so
contract for exclusive services), forgets that his wife is, primarily, his
patient. He makes the fatal error in any such relationship: that is, he fails
to remain objective enough, and confuses functional with emotional
commitment.

     Having contracted to cure Nicole, he offers her whatever is necessary to
achieve the cure itself, including - and in this lies his fatal weakness - his
love. Having offered his love, moreover, he expects her loyalty in return, but
fails to remember that whatever loyalty she is able to give, is itself the
product of the condition he has been attempting to cure. When the patient is
well, there simply is no reason for loyalty at all, and any insistence upon it
is rather embarrassing.

Morality As Weakness.

     In the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is repeated insistence
that-given the nature of the moral wasteland-love itself must be a source of
weakness rather than strength. Lovers, indeed, can only survive when they
understand that love is primarily a matter of exchange - an exchange of one
sort of currency or another, a contract which depends upon the fulfillment of
particular conditions. When the conditions (or one of the lovers) change, the
contract is, in a sense, cancelled: emotional commitment itself becomes an
irrelevancy.

     It is this realization which Fitzgerald's protagonists, inevitably
romantic Idealists in a world in which "romance" itself represents the very
antithesis of Idealism, fail to understand completely, and so create their own
destruction. Amory Blaine, for example, in This Side of Paradise, fails to
understand that the very basis of his love with Rosalind, his Fairy Princess,
must be an "enchanted" love or it is nothing; "enchantment" is the very basis
of its existence, and to ask of a Fairy Princess that she become a struggling
housewife must be a contradiction in terms, a violation of the original
contract. Given the moral wasteland, and the exploitation which lies at the
very center of all "romance" in the Wasteland, it is Amory rather than
Rosalind who becomes absurd as he insists upon commitments which had never
really been included in the original "contract" at all.

     So too a protagonist like Jay Gatsby forgets that his very role as a
lover is defined by the lack of substance of the role itself; for Daisy
Buchanan he represents the possibility of a particular kind of romantic "glow"
which must be darkened and finally dissipated at the first puff of reality. It
is, indeed, Jay Gatsby's "function" to keep such reality away from Daisy, and
when, for any reason, he is not able to do so, the conditions of the contract
change, the "bargain" is no longer in effect, "all bets is off" and Daisy
returns to her husband-whose direct and brutal management of reality
represents another kind of "bargain" altogether, but one which he is quite
capable of keeping.

Nicole As Exploiter.

     So too, in Tender is the Night, Dick Diver is not so much deserted by
Nicole, as eliminated by her when the original conditions of their
relationship no longer apply; one might say, indeed, that he is cancelled
along with their "contract." For having recovered her strength and health, a
kind of hardness of Will defined by Dick himself at the end of the book when
he observes that she has become good "Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood
known, except lignum vitae from New Zealand," Nicole is free to choose, or
rather be chosen, by a man who in his own right represents (just as Tom
Buchanan in The Great Gatsby represents) an exploiter rather than a creator
of "love." Nicole, indeed, no longer wishes or has need of a man who is
"always right" in his relations with her or in his facade of mannered
perfection which he holds before the world. Given the fact that she has
recovered her own Self, so perfect a diagnostician is simply no longer
necessary, and so she takes a man who uses what Dick Diver first creates and
then (unfortunately) actually loves.

The Users And The Used.

     Dick Diver, of course, is, by the end of the book, no longer "always
right" at all, and this in itself would be grounds for the "cancellation of
contract" between them. Having taken all through their relationship, Nicole
suddenly finds herself in the position of having to give emotional support, or
first aid, to her own physician; this is manifestly unfair and unprofitable,
and-hard as "Georgia pine" once again, she turns to Tommy Barban, the
"realist" of sound calculations and direct appetites.

     With Tommy, there need be no question of Ideal aside from act, and no
question of Loyalty aside from function. With some sentimental regret, and
with some pity as well, Nicole turns from the depleted resources of Dick to
the sleek, powerful, efficient, pragmatic "hardness" of a man who is indeed
morally Dick's inferior, and so-in all other terms-necessarily more functional
and less "risky." And for Nicole, like most of Fitzgerald's female
protagonists, risk is the ultimate sin, and a kind of functional pragmatism or
freedom of impulse the ultimate virtue; with Dick Diver there would be too
much of the one, and not enough of the other.

     Tommy, indeed, even in his "admiration" for Dick at the beginning of the
novel, is admiring not the man, but the physician; his indignant "protection"
against any sort of interference with the Dick-Nicole relationship is the
perception of weakness rather than the acknowledgement of strength. Tommy
insists that no distracting sordidness must be allowed to interfere with this
"ideal marriage" because he understands clearly that the process of the
marriage itself is one of exploitation rather than love; when Nicole is
"ready" for him (that is, when she is "cured" and has no further need for the
medication provided by Dick, medication which-on his part-so foolishly, almost
childishly, turns into love), Tommy will reappear and take what never really
belonged to Dick Diver at all.

An Ambiguous Marriage.

     Ironically, Tommy's estimate of the Divers' marriage is in many ways more
firmly based upon reality than is the weight of emotional commitment which
Dick attempts to place upon it. For one thing, the central trauma of Nicole's
life-the incestuous relationship with her own father-resulted in a fixation
dramatized as well as ultimately cured by her relationship with Dick. What she
"sees" in Dick, in other words, or rather what she requires from him, is at
once more ambiguous and less definable than any simple process of emotional
"cure."

     There is, in short, a certain element of transference in Nicole's
attitude toward her husband, who, in his role of husband no less than in his
function as psychiatrist, "takes up the burden" of Nicole's father in more
ways than one. Nicole's father, of course, like Tommy, is one of the users of
the world; having created a particular crisis, he simply uses the particular
skill and moral strength of Dick to solve the problems involved. When Dick
marries his problem as well as treats it, he-in a very basic sense-compounds
the condition he set out to cure.

     As a psychiatrist, of course, Dick knows this and is warned quite
clearly and quite forcefully that his marriage to Nicole is (from a
professional standpoint) a violation of all those carefully structured values
to which, as a physician, he himself had been committed. From a personal
standpoint, his marriage to Nicole is even more dangerous; becoming something
of a "father-figure" to a woman whose relations with her father had been so
shattering, Dick embarks upon a "love" in which emotions are very murky
indeed-emotions, furthermore, which depend for their support upon a framework
of perfection and strengths normally attributed to a parent rather than a
husband.

A Waste Of Virtue.

     In a sense, then, Dick creates for himself a situation in which his own
"infallibility," his own "goodness" and "perfection," serves as a framework,
or bulwark, for emotional and moral unhealth, and once again, as in so much of
Fitzgerald's work, we have a protagonist whose very virtues are directed (or
are used) for the perpetuation of everything to which they are ostensibly
opposed. One might almost say that Dick dooms himself to play the
"father-figure" in two directions: one, the result of psychic trauma (Nicole's
incestuous relationship with her father), can be "cured" only at the cost of
possible destruction of the physical basis of his marriage; the other-his role
as Perfect Parent-must be destroyed when he demonstrates his own weakness or
lack of perfection. Either way, Dick Diver, in so many ways the "Fitzgerald
Hero" despite his moral superiority to those about him, has built his own
Enchanted Palace on a swamp.

     Dick's virtues, furthermore, are diluted by a fatal lack of that
"toughness" or dedication to one's own code which alone can help a man shape
his life according to his own convictions. Faced with any sort of need, or
pressured by any sort of personal appeal, Dick uses his very Idealism not as a
means to shape reality, but rather as a reason for avoiding it. The fact that
Rosemary "loves" him, or rather, requires him to serve as her selfless and
gentle tutor in the process of her own development, makes Dick's involvement
with her all but inevitable; unable to say "no" to the Ideal Purity of his own
selflessness, perpetually sacrificing his own standards for noble and ideal
reasons, Dick is, finally, indeed "too good to be true."

The 'Tragic Child.'

     In this sense, Dick Diver is a child rather than a man, and it is this
quality of childishness which makes Dick's "tragedy" a matter of pathos rather
than power. Like Jay Gatsby, who attempts to "fulfill his Platonic conception
of himself" by surbordinating all means to some vaguely perceived Ideal of
Beauty, Dick attempts to fulfill an equally "Platonic" conception: the Ideal
of Pure Goodness. And also like Gatsby, who must be destroyed by his own
purity (since the Ideal, by definition, cannot be both owned and worshipped),
Dick destroys for himself the possibility of any real relationship, or love,
precisely because Pure Goodness makes any such "reward" unthinkable.

     Devoted to the Ideal of Service, Dick responds only to those situations
in which he can achieve the moral superiority of serving - those situations in
which he himself is "loved" only as long as he serves. At the same time,
however, he becomes exhausted enough to demand that he be loved "for himself
along" - quite apart from any service he is able to render. The result,
obviously, is a kind of self-created contradiction or impossibility. Like
Amory Blaine, who first creates the Ideal and then despises the reality of
emotional consummation, Dick Diver creates precisely those situations which
virtually guarantee his own "disillusion."

     "His position at the end," says D. W. Harding of Dick, "is the apotheosis
of the hurt child saying 'nobody loves me,' but the child's self-pity and
reproaches against the grown ups have been largely rooted out and in their
place is a fluctuation between self-disgust and a conviction that this can
happen to the nicest children." Even more pathetic than this "self-disgust,"
however, is the fact that "nobody loves" Dick Diver for very good reason: he
has so arranged matters that he is indeed "loved" for his services rather than
himself. And his "bitterness" as a result of this discovery hardly earns much
sympathy.

     When Dick, for example, understands that he can have Mary North by
"helping" her (as he had "helped" Nicole, and Rosemary, and anyone else who
had ever used him), the result is only a "bitter" laughter after which he
makes the gesture of self-imposed exile. But certainly the reader may well ask
of Dick Diver (as of Amory Blaine): how could he have expected anything else?
For Dick, repeating the inevitable fear-of-consummation so notable throughout
Fitzgerald's work, surrounds himself with his Ideal of Service just as Amory
Blaine surrounds himself with an Ideal of Romance, and Jay Gatsby surrounds
himself with an Ideal of Beauty.

     Ultimately these various Ideals are themselves methods of insulation
rather than commitment, methods of avoiding real love rather than achieving
it. It is Tommy Barban, the man who makes no pretence of "earning love"
through any Idealism, who takes love as it is and offers himself as he is, who
ultimately does succeed in "getting the girl." If Tommy (like Tom Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby), lacks the idealist dimension of Fitzgerald's "finer"
heroes-heroes who are also losers-perhaps we can say that his heroes lack the
strength, the will, and the knowledge of reality which enable such people as
Tommy to "win out."

Objective Narrative.

     Most of the first section of Tender is the Night (that is, most of Book
I) is narrated through the point of view of Rosemary Hoyt, a young, "dewy and
still virginal movie actress possessed of a certain strength of will and
personal soundness under a veneer of undefined romanticism." Rosemary, of
course, provides the kind of objective "observer" which Fitzgerald needs if he
is to render the peculiar kind of Idealism which at once serves to ennoble and
destroy Dick Diver, and the very "special" world that Dick and Nicole have
created.

     Rosemary, indeed, serves as a means for setting up the surface of the
"perfect" world of the Divers, before events force the surface itself to
collapse. As she becomes "initiated" into the realities of Dick, Nicole, Tommy
Barban, Abe North, and the others who make up the "circle" whom she first
meets at the French Riviera ("the carnival by the Sea," as Fitzgerald was
later to remark of his own experience with Zelda), and as she "loves" Dick
Diver himself, there is a sense of some kind of emotional or moral disease
beneath the enchantment, and the cleverness, and all the loveliness and charm
of the Dick Diver world that deepens and intensifies. But even before we know
precisely what this unhealth or illusion actually might be, there is strong
emphasis on precisely those qualities which foreshadow events to come.

     Part of this emphasis is achieved by the terms in which the characters
are described either through Rosemary's point of view, the objective
commentary of Fitzgerald as author, or "symbolic action" in which apparently
insignificant details refer to definitive qualities or roles. An example of
the latter method is the scene in which Nicole Diver, having arranged to meet
Dick for a love-assignation, goes "shopping" with Rosemary, who is herself in
love with the "perfect" young psychiatrist. As Nicole "buys things" with
complete carelessness and a kind of wild "acquisitive impulse," what emerges
is the portrait of a woman whose personal identity is defined primarily by her
role as consumer, and this is indeed not only a basic role for Nicole Diver,
but for the "Fitzgerald Woman" as a type.

The 'Realist.'

     Just as Nicole's role as consumer, as user, is foreshadowed by the early
scenes of the book, so too Tommy Barban's direct and ruthless drive to power
is defined both through Rosemary's point of view, and dramatic referral, in
which comments made in one context actually define an important quality set
up in another. For Tommy, as we first meet him (through Rosemary's
impressions), is "unmistakably Latin," is lean, hard, practical,
self-contained in his own appetites and own desires. There is little of the
glow of Idealism that surrounds Dick Diver (as it does with the Fitzgerald
Hero in general); he gives the impression of "bunched force," a kind of
ferocity and will, and is somehow "less civilized" than the others.

     Tommy, indeed, "likes" the Divers, "especially her" - and yet after being
with Nicole and Dick, some inner pressure within himself forces him to "go to
war." Certainly there is violence here (violence and Will define Tommy as the
Ideal of Service defines Dick); and even more than violence, an impatience
with any moral or intellectual idealism whatsoever. He is a mercenary soldier,
and-as he explains to the hapless Albert McKisco, a rather ineffectual
American "intellectual" with whom he later fights a "duel" to protect the
Divers from scandal - "my business is to kill people."

     There is a simplicity, and force, and stubborn stupidity about Tommy
which indeed make up an impressive whole, for these qualities are themselves
subordinated to the assertion of Will and appetite. And as he "protects" the
Divers, as he serves as their "watch-dog," one feels that he is serving not
them, but himself. Such is, of course, the case, for it is Tommy Barban who
"takes" Nicole after she has consumed her husband and returned to "health";
it is Tommy who finally breaks the marriage he so forcefully "protects"
early in the book. And in this connection, the remark of Dick Diver in quite
another context, serves not only to define Tommy's role, but the nature of his
own marriage as well. Refusing a screen test that Rosemary had arranged in a
burst of adolescent enthusiasm, Dick remarks: "The strongest guard is placed
at the gateway to nothing . . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is
too shameful to be divulged."

A Spiritual Vacuum.

     By the end of Book I, at any rate, Rosemary - and the reader - has indeed
been initiated into the moral and spiritual vacuum which exists beneath the
surface of the "enchanted" Dick Diver world. Abe North, for example, the
composer who after a period of creative genius has degenerated into an
alcoholic failure, serves as counterpoint to Dick himself; both men are
sensitive, noble, "fine," and flawed by a fatal weakness or inability to focus
their virtues. Like Abe North, Dick Diver has exhausted his own talents on
trivialities, has wasted his own disciplined will and education so that the
result is not "work," but rather self-indulgence to an Ideal which is itself a
triviality. It is significant that "Abe's "musical score" and Dick's
"scientific book" are placed in the same category: they are both real labors
that have been dissipated and finally destroyed by devotion to the same sort
of "meretricious beauty" that turned the virtues of Jay Gatsby into a pathetic
dream, and the intellectual and imaginative richness of Amory Blaine into a
St. Vitus dance of perpetual adolescence.

     Rosemary Hoyt, of course, later in the book "grows out" of her love for
Dick; possessed of a firm, disciplined, and unwavering Will-to-reality, she
develops into a woman, and for this reason can offer nothing to Dick Diver,
who persists in replacing his own manhood with a role of his own creation-a
role in which "perfection" and "youthfulness" and the Ideal of service
actually serve as a kind of "enchanted circle" in which Dick attempts to avoid
the challenge of reality.

A Retreat From Reality.

     So too does Nicole "outgrow" her husband; still requiring direction and
will in her man, she finds that Dick is, after all, so fully devoted to his
own nobility as a physician-father that he can be nothing else. And so Dick
Diver sinks further and further into a morass of desperation and
"demoralized" nobility; because he refuses to face the facts of his own decay,
there is total failure of that Idealism which he had erected as a bulwark
against futility. And in this connection, one might note that Dick's comments
on World War I as the destruction of an entire value-structure, has much to do
with his own "retreat" from reality itself.

     Dick's "Idealism," at any rate, finally sinks from the weight of its own
impossibilities, and the final result represents something more than the decay
of a single individual or the break up of a single marriage. For in the story
of Dick Diver we have still another dramatization of a system in which men
become incapable of growing past an Ideal which is itself based upon a waste
of original power, or rather the distortion of such power through a kind of
perpetual adolescence. And this, of course, is the "story" which F. Scott
Fitzgerald dramatized in his novels - and in so much of his own life.

Essay Questions And Answers, Tender Is The Night

     1. Dick Diver has been called a "tragic child." Discuss the meaning of
this phrase, and its application to Tender is the Night.

     Answer: The very phrase "tragic child" is, in a basic sense, a
contradiction in terms, and this to no small extent points up a paradox in
the role of Dick Diver himself. For the Tragic Hero is by general definition
a man great enough, and possessed of courage enough, to confront the
necessary consequences of his own actions, and the reality upon which these
actions are based. For Dick Diver, however, neither consequences nor reality
are confronted at all; Dick, indeed, uses his very virtues and talents not
to shape the real world, but rather to avoid it-to build an Ideal which itself
serves as a kind of moral and emotional wish-fulfillment.

     The fact that Dick is motivated by wish-fulfillment rather than choice of
action is something more than a "Tragic Flaw"; it is a measure of his
incapacity to reach any tragic dimension whatsoever. His vision of reality, in
short, is less "flawed" by error, than it is filtered through - and distorted
by - a refusal to commit himself to any relationship not based upon the Role
which he has created for himself. In this sense he is indeed a "child," or at
least a perpetual adolescent, and the lack of manliness and substance so basic
to Dick as a protagonist is at best part of a larger "tragedy": the tragedy of
an entire culture devoted to the substitution of Romance for reality, and of
wish-fulfillment or impulse for choice.

     2. How does Tender is the Night represent an advance in narrative
structure when compared to a novel like This Side of Paradise?

     Answer: This Side of Paradise, the first of Fitzgerald's novels, is a
brilliant but episodic work by a very young writer who too often sacrifices
unity of effect and structure for a kind of aesthetic self-indulgence: that
is, a kind of "storytelling" in which the author too often merely demonstrates
his own cleverness with "smart" but irrelevant asides, observations, and
episodes. In his first novel, moreover, Fitzgerald himself seems too "close"
to his material; he both mocks and rhapsodizes over his own characters, and
the result is a confused judgment - and a confused reaction on the part of the
reader.

     With Tender is the Night, however, Fitzgerald subordinates episode to
total drama, and succeeds-as in The Great Gatsby-in making the drama itself
a symbol of wider moral and social meaning. There is far less random
"cleverness" than in This Side of Paradise; the cleverness itself, in other
words, is subordinated to the purpose and meaning of the drama. By
maintaining a certain objectivity, moreover, Fitzgerald avoids intruding
into his own narrative. His use of Rosemary Hoyt's point of view, for example,
serves at once to introduce the characters, to define Rosemary herself, and to
provide a dimension of irony to the subsequent dramatic development.

     3. Discuss Tommy Barban as a "Hero of the Moral Wasteland."

     Answer: Like Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, Tommy Barban is a man
completely without Ideals; his only moral "code," indeed, is one of calculated
self-interest, and the imposition of his own will in order to achieve the
object of his own desires or appetites. A mercenary soldier whose "business is
to kill," Tommy is a creature of violence-without-meaning; even his political
"ideology" (if such a word can be applied to Tommy at all) is simply a matter
of self-interest. So too Tommy's "protection" of Dick Diver and Nicole is a
matter of calculation; understanding that Nicole "needs" Dick so long as she
is ill, he also understands that Nicole will be ripe for the taking when
Dick's "services" are no longer required.

     4. What Is Dick Diver's "Great betrayal"?

     Answer: The great betrayal made by Dick Diver-the fatal action (or
avoidance of action) which in a sense creates his own destruction-is the fact
that he violates the commitments and ethics of real work for the sake of a
false or romanticised "Ideal" of self-sacrifice. Like Jay Gatsby, who
subordinates all ethics in pursuit of his Golden Girl, or like Amory Blaine
(in This Side of Paradise) who subordinates consummation to adolescent
romance, Dick Diver subordinates his own identity as a physician and a worker
to a kind of "charm" and "service" which is at once false and
self-perpetuating. Scorning real work and real life as somehow too "small" for
his own dreams, Dick ultimately fails as a physician and as a person-despite
the fact that he is, in all respects, a "purer" individual than are the
masters and manipulators of the moral wasteland-people like Tommy Barban,
"Baby" Warren, or Nicole herself.