Tender is the Night (3 page)

The net effect of centralization was an increasing rationalization of resources, and with it fresh fears of an excess capacity. To ensure continuous and full use of their accumulations firms had to move into new markets and develop new lines. Each expansion put greater strain on the running of production, and a managerial
revolution, coupled with the multiplication of national distribution systems, simply fuelled the cause of standardized and efficient administration.

By the 1920s ‘administration' was gargantuan in ambition: as scientific management and technological innovation guaranteed that expanding and incorporating capital could produce cheaply, advertising sought to monitor and create market needs. Indeed, as early as 1843 one New York copywriter claimed:

Advertising has to deal with the greatest principles underlying the relation of man to man … It is the medium of communication between the world's greatest forces – demand and supply. It is a more powerful element in human progress than steam or electricity. (Quoted by Frank Presbrey 341).

By 1920 it was plain that only by controlling desire could corporate capital reproduce itself. As Stuart Ewen puts it, the ‘captain of industry' had to become the ‘captain of consciousness' if his accumulations were to survive; between 1900 and 1930 national advertising revenues increased thirteenfold.

Statistics can indicate the quantity of change but miss the qualitative shift. What one witnesses between 1900 and 1930 is a shift in economic emphasis from ‘accumulation' to ‘reproduction' characteristic of the age of late capitalism (Mandel 245). By 1900 the accumulated capital existed; the real issue was reproduction – how to produce sufficient profit to support that accumulation. Neither Taylor's time and motion studies nor Ford's flow production in and of themselves offer adequate protection, because high productivity can yield the necessary profit only if the markets are primed to consume what has been produced.

Arguably, consumers are the most important product of late capitalism: they are the primary machine without which ‘the very play time of the people' could not be ‘run … into certain moulds' (Lynd 491):

Consumption is the name given to the new doctrine; and it is admitted today to be the greatest idea that America has given to the world; the idea that the workmen and masses be looked upon not simply as workers and producers, but as consumers … Pay them more, sell them more, prosper
more is the equation. (Christine Frederick,
Selling Mrs Consumer
(1929), quoted by Ewen 22)

In the words of Paula Fass, analysing collegiate youth in the twenties, ‘the big sell had become synonymous with America's contribution to Western Civilization' (Fass 257). Selling required high levels of advertising and credit.

All this may seem some distance from the ‘richly incrusted' niceties of Dick Diver's mannered spaces. Although his quasi Victorian interiors at the Villa Diana and the clinic certainly manifest conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, they cannot guarantee a high turn-over in consumption, and positively militate against a truly mass market for the items that they contain. Those items are ‘solid', even as the manners that surround them are ‘solid' (so scrupulously learned as to appear innate). What capital increasingly needs after 1900 is a highly mobile, highly reproducible and highly controllable system of manners. That is to say, fashion must supplant manners: where taste once stood, style must stand.

Manners and taste are cumulative and integrative; indeed the selfhood that they realize is its own ultimate possession. Fashions and styles are equally an extension of capital, but of capital focused on the sphere of reproduction. Fashion is always disintegrative; it aims to give us several selves, thereby providing capital with a diversification of markets.

The new ‘science' of advertising invested heavily in social insecurity. Consumers of the twenties were taught to denigrate their own bodies: in 1920 Listerene was just another general antiseptic – with the help of ‘halitosis' (exhumed from an old medical dictionary) and a story line (‘He never knew why') the copywriters Feasley and Seagrove invented a new anxiety and with it a new habit. Between 1921 and 1929 Listerene's ‘virtues' spread panic through pore and orifice: the public learned of its capacities as a dandruff, cold and sore-throat cure, astringent, deodorant and douche. ‘Bromodosis' (sweaty feet), ‘office hips', ‘accelerator toe', ‘vacation knees', ‘ashtray breath', and ‘spoon-fed face' may be dated diseases, but the sustained economic assault on the consumer's ‘integrity' is far from over, and its direction is ever inwards – witness vaginal deodorants
and suppository selling. The problem lies in the finances of the corporate body and not in the sweetness of the bodies on the street. Likewise, the solution is corporate: consumers must forget their deficient ‘self' and purchase the selves made available by the business community.

One way of focusing the interconnected histories of self and capital is to present their liaison in schematic form:

Tender is the Night
straddles the transition from classical imperialism to late capitalism largely by way of the incest that lies at its narrative core. Witness how the incest victim is ‘cured': her cure is unconventional, she simply moves towards an alternative mode of selfhood, lodged in a modified economic reality. She negates the incest trauma by ignoring it. The ‘cord' can be ‘cut … forever' (324) because Nicole appreciates herself as a new species of consumer, one to whom accumulations are no longer of primary relevance. Consequently, her interior and its old environs – cumulative, private, dense and supported by an etiquette equally weighted with ‘interpretation or qualification' (320) – can be forgotten. Indeed, amnesia is obligatory. The father-centred world must give way to brand name and movie still if grandfather's capital (the capital of classical imperialism) is to adapt and counter the inertia of excess capacity. For Barban she crosses herself with Chanel Sixteen and hopes to resemble ‘the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children' (312); with Barban she stands ‘black and white and metallic against the [Mediterranean] sky' (336), an apt study for the movies. Fitzgerald names brands to point to a transition that was merely latent in Nicole's life with Dick. The brand name and the tourist spot – no matter how exclusive – prompt rapid translation
from word to material image, the better to speed consumption. Any associative pattern latent in the name has been pre-arrayed there by advertising. In contradistinction, the psychiatrist's phrase or any item beneath the Divers' beach umbrella emanates density and stasis. Gausse's beach is a commodity, but it is a commodity manufactured by Dick, during the early twenties, which might have been modelled on an orchid. Veblen would have understood the doctor's tireless application of the rake (302); like any rare hybrid, Gausse's sand denotes that key to ‘good breeding', ‘a substantial and patent waste of time'. However, by 1928 the leisured devotions due to ‘a bright tan prayer rug of a beach' (11) are no longer observed. The sand serves a different expenditure and signals an alternative form of wealth. When Dick and Nicole bought ‘sailor trunks and sweaters' in Nice backstreets (302), they did not intend to create fashion. Paris couturiers copied the style: Fitzgerald does not need to tell us that
haute couture
pirated from
Vogue
or
Vanity Fair
became a market leader – the busy presence of an Associated Press photographer on the steps of Gausse's hotel indicates that the new users are more interested in image and spectacle than in etiquette. With beach umbrellas and pneumatic rubber horses, those ‘new things' purchased ‘from the first burst of luxury manufacturing after the War' (27), the Divers make their version of a Victorian resort and so manage temporarily to deny the very purpose of that wave of manufacture. They achieve ‘absolute immobility' (27) on the sand, where the future health of their capital stipulates absolute mobility. The adroit instillation of cumulative nuance into necessarily transitory luxury items is an archaic trait that the Warrens cannot afford. Equine inflatables are not and should not be Jamesian porcelains. At the novel's close Dick quits the beach that is no longer his kind of artifact. Nicole, for all her recognition that it now serves ‘the tastes of the tasteless' (301), stays, presumably to be photographed by the Associated Press.

Each Diver accessory is a potential meeting-point between the two forms of economic authority which I have allegorized in shorthand as accumulation and reproduction. The meaning of the sweater or the umbrella depends upon who is economic master. Mastery involves a conflict whose history constitutes the texture of
the object. Fitzgerald has an eye for the detail that retains the tracery of this struggle; he registers the economic latencies which divide objects as an archaeology lying at the very surface of things. At first glance Gausse's beach is easily consumable, but the image is fissured: as a ‘prayer rug', it summons ceremonies whose form Veblen might have declared typical of leisure in the 1890s; as a tanning mat, it services the body beautiful – that curious site of narcissism and self-denigration that encourages tourists to replace their own bodies with commodity selves.

What passes on the beach (30), like the beach itself, is a struggle between forms of power. One incident may be treated as typical: Dick emerges from the dressing tent in transparent black lace drawers,
pour épater la nouvelle bourgeoisie
. His impulse is territorially effective; McKisco (one of the untanned among the pebbles) asserts his gender and insults the gender of his companions, while the knowing joke affirms the unity of the Diver entourage by releasing ‘a nursery-like peace and good will'. In fairy stories frogs turn into princes at the drop of a kiss; Dick's transformation is only slightly less spectacular. Fitzgerald marks its importance by insisting, ‘At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class.' As with incest, so with homosexuality: sexual preference in
Tender is the Night
should be read within an economic context. Dick, the keeper of accumulation's daughter, appears to reveal his own phallus (the drawers
seem
transparent) by performing the absence of that member (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 as
two 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 sexual
energy 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.