Tender is the Night Read Online Free PDF

(the drawers
are
opaque). At one level the genital logic accords with Dick’s phallic subordination to the bad father. The daughter approves the emasculation, since it is she who sews the trick costume. Her needlework – in all probability Dick’s conception – is part of a treatment which enables her to assure Rosemary that she is ‘a mean, hard woman’. As a bonus, this particularly ‘invidious comparison’ captures the child whose Hollywood credentials commit her economically to the sphere of reproduction. With a ‘bubble’ of ‘delight’ Rosemary is initiated into the group and into Dick’s love. Accumulation rules. However, ‘in reality a qualitative change had already set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.’ It
is
apparent to Fitzgerald, for whom the ‘pansy’s trick’ is capable of double articulation astwo plots. Read from within the imperatives of reproduction, Dick transgresses the bounds of phallic sexuality through a stage-managed and ‘spectacular’ multiplication of his own gender. He woos and wins a very different Daddy’s girl by establishing a disintegrative selfhood. Fitzgerald’s point about the ‘furthermost evolution of a class’ refers to the moment at which a class becomes conscious of the need to assume alternative forms of behaviour, sexuality, spending and finance. Their ‘bargain with the gods’ is ‘desperate’ because transition is awkward. In this instance Nicole will make it, Dick won’t. For Dr Diver ‘gods’ will always, in the last analysis, wear ‘finely cut clerical clothes’. For Nicole the ‘gods’ will increasingly become the mass audience in the cheaper seats whose desires her fashions and her monies will seek to renew and control.
    Though the demise of a father-centred phallocentrism – with its attendant etiquette and economics – looks complete, it is neither easy nor radical. What Fitzgerald bears witness to via his semantic sub-plot or sub-articulation is a shift in the administration of power rather than the overthrow of that power. Dick’s homosexual play leads, through the pun on ‘gods’ (theological and theatrical), to the world of the spectacle. Fitzgerald explores what is in effect a major economic transition. Since in market terms so much of that transition focuses on the redistribution of the human body (particularly the body of the female), it is perhaps unsurprising that Fitzgerald should approach the economic through the sexual.
    I would reiterate that the body in question belongs to a Daddy’s girl. Incest is the constellation of difficulty upon which
Tender is the Night
turns. Devereux Warren’s crime comprises a plot of considerable complexity and precipitates particular character groupings in order to realize the fullness of that complexity. Fitzgerald marries Dick to Nicole to explore accumulation and supplies him with Rosemary as an entrée to the sphere of reproduction. Dick’s affections shift between Daddys’ girls to externalize the contradictory nature of Warren’s incest. At one level the father refuses to exchange his child beyond the family; at another and opposed level he denies both the differentiation of social roles and the familial organization deriving from the incest prohibition – that is to say, Warren’s sexualenergy seeks unrealized relations and forms. The plot latent in the sexual/economic overlap thickens. Accumulation stores money; reproduction must create new needs and discover new markets. Late capitalism builds into each of us its own realm of desires lacking adequate objects, the better to pre-sell those objects.
    Rosemary markets desire. A product of the culture industry, she has at least two fathers, too many selves and absolutely no trauma about it. By responding, Dr Diver shifts allegiance from the integrating interior (the last territory