Beneath The Jazz Myth

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) became the spokesman and chronicler of the seemingly prosperous 1920s, known as "The Jazz Age", with the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one employs the Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic and the Imaginary to analyze Fitzgerald's sense of insecurity in the 1920s. The focus is on Fitzgerald's personal trauma. Through the analysis of the patterning of failure in his works, Fitzgerald's anxiety is unveiled as a symptom of his confusion between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In effect, Fitzgerald's writings, functioning as the Name-of-the-Father, bridge the gap between the Imaginary and Symbolic, and bring peace to his psychosis.Chapter two locates Fitzgerald's sense of insecurity in the literary canon. My argument is that the insecurity in Fitzgerald's works signals the inner anxiety of American literature under the hegemony of the European tradition. American literature of the 1920s, with Fitzgerald as the representative case, can be viewed not as modernism but as transmodernism, which delineates the transitional progress from the traditional writing to the modernist one, 'and bridges traditional realism and high modernism. In this respect, Fitzgerald's works in the 1920s, especially The great Gatsby, is the very example to illustrate the characteristics and development of transmodernism. Neither embracing the past in a decidedly unmodernist nostalgia nor celebrating the profusion of the present uncritically, transmodemism rather registers the literary specificity of the moment.Chapter three studies the social elements in constructing the sense of insecurity in Fitzgerald's works. Fundamentally, it is the representation of the sense of insecurity that prevailed in the 1920s social milieu. Guided by Macherey's theory that what the text says is in fact what it does not say, a close reading of Fitzgerald's works of the 1920s discloses the numerous tensions underlying the superficially glamorous society. The golden age of the Roaring Twenties is virtually constituted through Fitzgerald's transmodern discourse. In the time of profound transformation, anxiety, as represented in Fitzgerald's works, is a mixture of personal, literary and social insecurity. In this sense, Fitzgerald's works of the 1920s register the conflicts and paradoxes of American society, between center and periphery, middlebrow and highbrow, past and present in a dialectic tension, and reveal the decade as a time of confronting long-lasting social problems, fears, and anxieties that have nagged the national consciousness for decades.