Taryn Norman
Gothic Temporalities and Spectral Identities in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
By Taryn Norman, The University of Tennessee
When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (1925), he said he “selected the stuff to fit a
given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551), and, yet, while the novel is littered with spectral
metaphors and other Gothic conventions, it has largely been ignored in terms of its relationship
to the Gothic. Exploring Fitzgerald’s novel and its relationship to the Gothic also produces a
new point of connection to the work of William Faulkner, who has already frequently been
discussed as a Southern Gothic writer. In the opening pages of Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
Quentin Compson, “too young to deserve yet to be a ghost,” is nevertheless described as “a
ghost…since he was born and bred in the deep South” (my emphasis 4). However, when placed
alongside The Great Gatsby, Absalom, Absalom! can escape the restricting confines of the
Southern Gothic and instead be read in context of a larger body of works that employ Gothic
conventions and language; thus, we can shed new light on The Great Gatsby and its “new world,
material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously
about” (Fitzgerald 161).
This paper focuses upon Faulkner’s and Fitzgerald’s revised version of the ghost that
more adequately represents the conditions of modernity.
This ghost disrupts the linear and
teleological drive toward progress in order to bring to light repressed or forgotten histories,
while simultaneously its liminality and uncanniness problematizes this narrativization of history.
Haunting not only Faulkner’s and Fitzgerald’s works but a strain of Gothic Modernism that
encompasses both American and British canonical and popular Modernist novels, this revised
version of the ghost assumes a paradoxical role in such works that gets at the very heart of the
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Taryn Norman
Modernist project’s dilemma: on the one hand, the ghost serves to more adequately represent
reality, while, on the other hand, it undercuts and draws attention to the very impossibility of
achieving this realist impulse.
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