The Great Gatsby 읽기 39 - 114:6 ~ 118:8

[yum]

I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark here in front: only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

indefinite, invisible : 접두사 in을 붙여서 불가능한 세계가 현실에 나타난 것처럼 느끼게 한다.

in an invisible glass : 보이지 않는 거울을 보면서 화장을 하고 있으므로 이들은 자기의 모습을 제대로 볼 수 없게 되어 있다.

“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big bootlegger?”

“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.

“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.”

“Not Gatsby,” I said shortly.

He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under his feet.

crunch : 톰이 으드득거리는 것처럼 들린다.

“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.”

- menagerie : (동물 쇼 등을 위해 모아 놓은) 야생 동물들. 130:11의 glass와 합해져서 glass menagerie 가 되는데 이는 테네시 윌리엄스의 연극 『유리동물원(The Glass Menagerie)』 제목이기도 하다. 이 연극의 해설자이자 주인공이 Tom이다.

A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar.

“At least they’re more interesting than the people we know,” she said with an effort.

“You didn’t look so interested.”

“Well, I was.”

Tom laughed and turned to me.

“Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?”

- 초고와 Trimalchio에는 Did you see Daisy’s face when that girl wanted her to put her to bed?

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

데이지는 톰이 말하는 것이 이치에 맞지 않는다고 여기고 대답 대신 노래를 하고 있다.

- it had never had before and would never have again : 데이지의 목소리에 대한 묘사와 유사하다. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. (11:18-22)

contralto :

https://youtu.be/W8jbb8tioqM?si=Al8C1aJdVcozzl2v

https://youtu.be/SCtW1RucS-w?si=c5XkMq9fDv2iZuZX

“Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said suddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited.

They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.”

“I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted Tom. “And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.”

“I can tell you right now,” she answered. “He owned some drug stores, a lot of drug stores. He built them up himself.”

The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.

“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.

Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where “Three o’Clock in the Morning,” a neat, sad little waltz of that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.

- Three O’clock in the Morning : 줄리언 로블리도(Julian Robledo)가 작곡하고 시어도러 모스(Theodora Morse, 필명 도로시 테리 스 Dorothy Terriss)가 작사한 굿나잇 왈츠다. 폴 화이트먼(Paul Whiteman)과 그의 오케스트라가 1922년에 녹음하여 대히트를 기록했다. 이 곡은 사랑하는 연인이 온밤을 함께 춤추고 이제 먼 동이 오는 시각, 오직 한 곡만 더 남겨 둔 상황에서 애잔하게 느껴지는 안타까운 연인의 마음을 묘사하고 있다.

https://youtu.be/AGQJnCAmuXE?si=kTcR49xA7827ImlQ

- Perhaps some unbelievable guest ~ : 데이지와 개츠비가 만난 이후 지나간 5년의 시간이 한 여자와의 만남으로 날아가버릴 수도 있다는 것은 데이지의 심정을 암시하고 있다. 개츠비의 저택에서 흘러나오는 음악이 데이지를 다시 들어가게 만들 듯하다는 것은 데이지에게 뭔지 모를 불안, 자기만 바라보는 개츠비가 다른 여자에게로 돌아서버릴 수도 있다는 생각이 들었다는 것을 반증한다. 데이지가 이 웨스트 에그의 사람들에게 질렸음에도 불구하고 관계를 단절하지 않고 개츠비와의 관계를 계속해서 이어가는 이유를 여기에서 볼 수 있다.

I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished in the guest rooms overhead. When he came down the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyes were bright and tired.

“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.

“Of course she did.”

“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”

He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.”

“You mean about the dance?”

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house–just as if it were five years ago.

- four years : 피츠제럴드는 four years로 섰으나 톰과의 결혼생활은 4년이 아니라 3년으로 보아야 할 것이다.

“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours—-”

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously.

“Why of course you can!”

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”

He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...

...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.

They stopped here and turned toward each other.

Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year.

The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees–he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

pap : A woman's breast or nipple.

pap of the world : 이 소설의 마지막에 a fresh, green breast of the new world(217:22)와 비슷한 구절. Myrtle의 왼쪽 젖가슴이 훼손된 상태로 죽는다: they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath.(165:22-24)

F. Scott Fitzgerald here picks up the concern with capacity for wonder introduced in the previous chapter. Here he makes explicit the childlike quality of innocent vision which must accompany it. In Gatsby’s eyes the city streets become trees, transformed into a green world by means of imagination and intense feeling. Gatsby feels he can climb those trees, and at their top he can suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder (p. 107).

The nurturing breast that is figured here as the pap of life is echoed at the end of the book in the image of the fresh, green breast of the new world ( Chapter 9 , p. 171). In between these moments of vision, one of Myrtle Wilson’s breasts is mutilated in an automobile accident. F. Scott Fitzgerald contrasts the capacity of metaphor to create a visionary reality with a brutal, physical reality that constantly threatens to undermine the power of the vision. The possibility of sustaining a vision that might redeem the world from cruelty and suffering is a major concern in the narrative.

F. 스콧 피츠제럴드는 이 책에서 앞 장에서 소개된 경이로움의 능력에 대한 관심을 이어갑니다. 그는 이 책에서 그와 함께 나타나는 순진한 비전의 아이 같은 특성을 명확히 드러냅니다. 개츠비의 눈에 도시의 거리는 나무가 되고, 상상력과 강렬한 감정을 통해 푸른 세상으로 변모합니다. 개츠비는 그 나무들을 오를 수 있다고 느끼고, 그 꼭대기에 오르면 삶의 젖을 빨고, 비교할 수 없는 경이로움의 젖을 꿀꺽 삼킬 수 있다고 느낍니다(107쪽).

여기서 삶의 젖으로 묘사되는 양육하는 젖가슴은 책의 마지막 부분에서 새로운 세상의 신선하고 푸른 젖가슴 이미지로 반영됩니다(9장, 171쪽). 이러한 비전의 순간들 사이에서 머틀 윌슨의 젖가슴 중 하나가 자동차 사고로 훼손됩니다. F. 스콧 피츠제럴드는 환상적 현실을 창조하는 은유의 능력과 비전의 힘을 끊임없이 약화시키려 위협하는 잔혹하고 물리적인 현실을 대조합니다. 세상을 잔혹함과 고통으로부터 구원할 수 있는 비전을 지속할 가능성은 이야기에서 중요한 관심사입니다.

https://www.yorknotes.com/alevel/english-literature/the-great-gatsby-yna/study/the-text/01060100_chapter-6

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

- forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath : 데이지는 인간이고 개츠비의 꿈은 이상적이므로 데이지와의 만남은 파국에 이를 수 밖에 없음이 암시되어 있다.

- his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. : 이 대목에는 데이지와 접촉[kiss]이 개츠비에게 어떤 변화를 불러오게 될지에 대한 암시가 담겨 있다. 말로 표현할 수 없는(영원한? 초월적인?) 개츠비의 비전들이 데이지의 금세 상하게 될(유한의?) 숨결과 결 합하는 순간, 이로써 개츠비의 마음은 더 이상 신의 마음처럼 즐겁게 ‘뛰어놀지’(romp) 않을 것이라 표현되고 있다. 개츠비로서 는 데이지와의 접촉을 통해 세속의 여성을 통한 기쁨과 환희를 얻는다는 측면에서는 성취이지만 그가 하늘의 마음을 잃고, 표현할 수 없는 어떤 비전을 상실한다는 점에서는 희생일 수 있을 것이다.

- incarnation : 라틴어 incarnatio ‘육체 속에 들어감’, 즉 ‘육화(肉化)’를 의미.

이 단어는 주로 신학적 맥락에서 사용되었으며, 특히 기독교에서 신이 인간의 육체를 입고 세상에 나타나는 것, 즉 예수 그리스도의 성육신(Incarnation)을 가리키는 말로 많이 사용됨.

개츠비가 데이지와 키스를 함으로써 하나님의 마음을 가진 개츠비는 완전한 인간으로 화한다[incarnation]. 개츠비를 예수로 보고 있다.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something–an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

- his appalling sentimentality : 데이지는 개츠비가 사는 West Egg에 appalled 되었고 닉은 개츠비에게 appalled되었다: She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village– appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing.

닉이 기억 속에서 길어올리고자 한 것은 이데아에 대한 기억으로 볼 수 있다.

이데아론은 플라톤이 처음 주장한 형이상학 이론이다. 플라톤에 따르면, 이데아론에서 이데아는 현상 세계 밖의 세상이며 이데아는 모든 사물의 원인이자 본질이다. 예를 들면 인간의 이데아는 현실 세계의 인간에 대한 원인으로, 인간의 이데아가 있기 때문에 현상 세계에 인간이 실재하는 것을 들 수 있다. 또한, 중요한 것은 현상 세계에서 모든 것들은 낡고 사라지는 것에 반해, 이데아는 시간이 흘러도 그 모습을 변치 않으며 현상 세계의 사물들이 궁극적으로 되고자 하는 것이 이데아라는 점이다. 이데아론에서 이데아는 오로지 인간의 이성으로만 알 수 있으며, 원래 인간이 있던 곳이다. 그런데 플라톤은 인간이 현실세계로 오면서 레테의 강을 건너게 되어 이데아 세계에 대한 기억을 상실하여 이데아를 기억해 내지 못한다고 주장한다. (위키백과)

개츠비를 신 혹은 이데아의 육화로 본다. 영원한 존재가 데이지와 같은 perishable breath를 가진 인간의 세계에 성육신하여 그 인간을 위해 죽는 존재.