Green-Lighting Gatsby: Austere Modernisms, Exuberant Avant-Gardes, and their Orgastic Futures

‘Inflation’ has been associated, by modernist artists and scholars alike, with a crisis of faith in representation, with exuberance and excess, and with the relativisation and loss of all value. Ezra Pound famously denounced ‘superfluous’ words and later described inflation as ‘a superfluity of paper money in relation to available goods’, deploying anti-inflationary rhetoric in both literary and economic spheres, while Hans Richter’s short film Inflation (1927) sounds cautionary notes about the dangers of monetary abstraction and runaway inflation, despite simultaneously revelling in the experimental possibilities of avant-garde cinema. Complicating these examples, we offer a fresh interpretation of the elusive ‘green light’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), a novel that holds the exuberance of the jazz age and the spatio-temporal blurriness of its Impressionism in tension with the ‘deflationary’ impacts of the crashes it thematises and attempts to contain. Although the green light has previously been conceived as a double-edged figure for the excesses of money, desire, and a doomed American Dream, we understand it as also harbouring the generative, experimental, and pro-social nature of public credit, which underpins the narrative’s modernist decentring of Gatsby’s fatalism. Rejecting what we describe as the private money paradigm that has shaped the novel’s critical reception in favour of an understanding of money’s irreducible publicness, we affirm the ‘orgastic’ energies that would become newly legible in The Great Gatsby during World War II when the U.S. government printed the book en masse for G.I.s, redeeming Fitzgerald’s initial commercial failure via an act of large-scale public provisioning.