Passing for White in The Great Gatsby: A Spectroscopic Analysis of Jordan Baker

-- By Tom Phillips and Lucie Hopkins 

This is an edited version of our article published in The Explicator, Vol. 76 No. 3, November 2018. 

The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has puzzled readers for nearly a century.  She is glamorous and opaque, her “pleasant contemptuous expression” (23) so polished it deflects interpretation and critical analysis.  However, a close reading focused on Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Baker puts her at the center of the novel's concern with identity. Amid the racial and sexual upheavals of the 20s, she may be Gatsby’s most successful imposter -- a light-skinned, mixed-race person “passing for white.”

Such suspicions were directed at Gatsby himself by Carlyle V. Thompson in a 2000 essay, “Was Gatsby Black?”-- an argument quickly dismissed for insufficient textual evidence (Manus). In Jordan’s case evidence runs throughout the text, obscured by her proximity to Daisy and Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s deceptive style, in which significant detail can “pass” as merely decorative.

Hip-Hop Round-trip: London to NY

"Blak Whyte Gray"
Boy Blue:  Michael "Mikey J" Asante, Creative Direction and Music; Kenrick "H2O" Sandy, Choreography
Lincoln Center White Light Festival 
November 16, 2018

-- By Tom Phillips 

"Whyte" 

Members of Boy Blue held a post-performance chat last night after the US premiere of "Blak Whyte Gray," and it was a shock to hear their British accents. Their intense and acrobatic hip-hop dancing was straight from the streets of New York -- having made a round trip from east London.

Flipping the usual progression from darkness to light, this young British troupe gives us a three-part journey of liberation that starts with "Whyte" and ends with "Blak." The progress is upward, from a kind of enslavement to a celebration of strength and freedom.  But the opening depiction of present-day slavery seemed the most relevant to an American audience.

20th Century Unlimited: Beckett and Warhol in NY

"Waiting for Godot"
By Samuel Beckett, directed by Garry Hynes   
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, Lincoln Center, New York 
November 5, 2018 

"Andy Warhol -- From A to B and Back Again"
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 
Opening November 12, 2018

Aaron Monaghan, Marty Rea 

In the mid-Twentieth Century, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” seemed like an end game. Two vagabonds meet daily by a tree, and hope for a deliverance that never comes. In Act One they decide to hang themselves, but can’t decide on the best method:

ESTRAGON:  Use your intelligence, can’t you?                        
Vladimir uses his intelligence. 
VLADIMIR: (finally) I remain in the dark.

Diversion arrives in the form of a master and slave, but their journey also appears to be heading nowhere. Master Pozzo torments his lackey Lucky, who babbles theological gibberish. Pozzo goes blind as they exit in Act Two.  Vladimir and Estragon continue waiting.

Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people say things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

Pinker's Paradise

-- By Tom Phillips

Steven Pinker 

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now."  Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.

There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt.  In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s.  But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.

Mobbed Up at the White House

AKA Stormy Daniels, on CBS "60 Minutes"

-- By Tom Phillips 

“That’s a beautiful little girl.  It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”  

With that quote from a thug in Las Vegas parking lot, Stephanie Clifford parted the curtains on the Trump White House and the family business.  It took a porn star, a businesswoman who understands how things are done, to reveal what we’re living with and how difficult it may be to extricate ourselves.  America, these people are mobbed up.  

The Intense Now

-- By Tom Phillips 

Paris, May 1968

“In the Intense Now” is a pastiche of home movies, travelogues and documentaries, from 1968 and the time just before that climactic year. It includes snips and clips of revolutionary struggles in France, Czechoslovakia, China and Brazil, with a moody voice-over by a Brazilian film-maker, Joao Moreira Salles, who refrains from trying to pull it all together.  It is diffuse, digressive, and at least a half-hour too long, but I’m glad I saw it, because the heart of the film is a clash between two charismatic geniuses – “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student uprising that convulsed France in May 1968, and General Charles de Gaulle, President of the Republic, the great preserver of bourgeois order. The outcome is foreordained; the struggle is elemental, ecstatic, elegaic.

President Oprah!

-- by Tom Phillips

I'm not an Oprah fan.  I didn't see her speech to the Golden Globes, just a clip of her tearful peroration.  She strikes me as a complex lady with a complicated life, who nonetheless is able to project a simple, powerful image through the media -- an image that speaks to the American value of self-reliance, and at the same time to the universal value of compassion, the virtue so conspicuously missing from today's White House. 

So: What other Democrat could beat Donald Trump at his own game?  Donald vs. Oprah! would be the ultimate talk show -- image vs. image, self-styled genius vs. self-made woman.  Brashness and bullshit vs. tears and guts.  Combover vs. hairstyle. 

And what's wrong with having a celebrity president?   Look at the present day -- a celebrity president tweets up a circus, entertaining the masses with imaginary battles against Black football players and a sinister Asian clown. Meanwhile a typical Republican administration goes about its business: taking from the poor to help the rich, giving business and the military free rein, handing out favors to wealthy donors. 

Under President Oprah!, the chief could entertain us with stirring speeches, celebrity feuds and friendships, must-read books and crash diets, while a typical Democratic administration could go about its business: taxing the rich to help the poor, reining in business and the military, and of course, handing out favors to wealthy donors. 

Don't get me wrong.  I voted for Bernie, I love Elizabeth Warren.  But in this age the President of the United States is willy-nilly the world's leading celebrity.  Why not go for someone with experience, and let Chuck and Nancy handle the politics?

Make sense?   


--  Copyright 2018 by Tom Phillips