Switchability on the Micro Scale [00:10:30]

Today I wanted to concentrate, because we haven't read so far into the novel, I wanted to concentrate on switchability or reversibility as a relatively small scale phenomenon. Not so much looking at the narrative form as reversible, but looking at very minute details within the novel that are reversible.

So the order of appearance of adjectives can be seen as reversible. This is just one example.

"Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shown in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful."

Those adjectives don't usually go together. Usually they are not seen in such close proximity, "hard,"

and "lovely," and "pitiful." And just to have those three adjectives, they are lined up in that particular way, generates kind of a mini narrative. This is one way in which the order of appearance of

adjectives is a case of a kind of a mini narrativization of a description, even though it seems to be just descriptive. Nonetheless, there’s an implicit narrative suggests that by that order of appearance, and the narrative would be different if we were to reverse the order. If her face were pitiful and lovely and hard it would be a different narrative.

Fitzgerald's not going to let those adjectives go, as you will see. So right here, we also have this additional image that her shoulders and back are ruddy and orange brown, and there's a string of creamy pearls around her neck. When Fitzgerald comes back to this detail, he does something else for that detail. This is him revising himself all the time, revising his mini narrative all the time.

"Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland." Her brown back hanging from the pearls. Before it was pearls hanging around her neck. All of a sudden there's a reversible relation between the actor and the appendage, so it is her brown back that is hanging from the pearls. This suggests that the pearls are the more important of the two, that maybe money is the more important of the two. This is the persistent question:

whether the money is more important than human beings, or vice versa.

Once again, this is more than -- in fact, more than just a mini narrative, but a kind of global vision of the world, a vision of the relation in between humanity and economy is suggested by the very, very micro detail of the reversible relation between "back" and "pearls." So I would say that reversibility is really the key player all through the novel. Operation off scales operates between adjectives, operate between different books, the three main books of the novel. And they operate on the shape of Dick Diver's career. So very, very important concept.

Just to give you one more example of a very local micro instance of switchability or reversibility has to do with the transitive relation between proper names and active verbs. We know that there's a character in a novel called Dick Diver. And here's Rosemary, the actress, talking about what she does and what she has to do. She has a fever, but because the set is very expensive, they just have to shoot.

So this is what she has to do. She has to dive into the water for that episode.

"One day I happened to have the grippe and didn't know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. It was a very expensive set, so I had to dive and dive and dive all morning."

Obviously, it's not a trivial or unconnected detail in a novel where the protagonist is called Dick Diver. That there should be someone else diving and diving and diving, because of her discipline as an actress. I think that right then and there, the question opens up: who is more capable of a kind of sustainable performance? It seems that just the repetition of those three words, "dive and dive and dive all morning" suggest that Rosemary is probably going to be an actress who will have a long career because she's so disciplined and just hardworking that if she has to do something she would do it. So the question then, because she seems to have such a sustainable career, sustainable performance, whether Dick Diver is capable of that sustainable performance, the person who has that proper name, whether he can actually live up to the promise of his name, Dick Diver.

Chapter 5: “Hard” and “Pitiful” [00:16:29]

I want now to zero-in on those two adjectives, "hard" and "pitiful," and look at the way Fitzgerald really spins out a whole narrative. Maybe the whole novel is based on the interplay between those two adjectives. Let's look at what the hard Nicole does. And what comes through, what kind of story emerges when we go along the axis of Nicole as a hard person. This is what she says to Rosemary just talking casually about the beach and so on, and about the tourists.

“‘Well, I have felt there were too many people on the beach this summer,’ Nicole admitted.

‘Our beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile.’ She considered, and then lowering her voice out of range of the trio of nannies who sat back under another umbrella. ‘Still, they’re preferable to those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t the sea blue? Isn’t the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose red?’” Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.”

This is a great demonstration of a hard person -- without this person actually lifting a finger to do a thing. It's just the way her mind works. It is her tone of voice, it is the way she thinks about nannies, people in her employ. The way she thinks about people who don't have to cling to the beach that she does. It's really the speech pattern and the tone of voice of someone who's never not been on the top of the world, as she looks down on everyone, and just putting them in the places.

This is the hard Nicole. It actually gives another meaning to her back hanging from the string of pearls. That may be, really, this is what the real Nicole is. It is the fact that she is hanging from the string of pearls. That they will always be a string of pearls for her to hang from that she can afford to look at the world in this way, look at other people in this way, and speak in that particular tone of voice that signals to Rosemary-- it takes about two seconds for Rosemary to know what kind of a person she is dealing with. So she casts a summary of what a person is without recourse to any action. And in fact, Nicole doesn't really act until the very end of the novel. And even then it's not even especially hard kind of action, although that's debatable.

But as is the case with Fitzgerald, the word "hard” is not allowed to stand alone, because we can't forget that in fact, there were three adjectives, "hard," and "lovely" and "pitiful." That kind of permutation, it's like a dance, a dance of adjectives, will keep coming up again. Just a few pages later, now the description of Nicole, her face at different times, the "hard" as to be in quotation marks. "Her face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that looked from her green eyes." It seems that those adjectives are really ingrained in Fitzgerald's mind. That he cannot think about Nicole without using that trio, "lovely," as well as – or maybe just a duo of two adjectives. They are the two poles of the spectrum on which she shadows back and forth.

Because "pitiful" is so much a companion to the adjective, "hard." Let's look at one instance of the pitiful Nicole, and see whether or not there is an organic connection between the "pitiful" Nicole and the "hard" Nicole. We have to go back earlier, so we have to go back to-- well go forward to book two, which is backward in time. Go back to 1917 when she was a patient, and Dick Diver was about to-- well actually, he had not even agreed to do anything for her. He was just someone who had been consulted about her. She was writing to him when she was in this mental institution.

"Dear Captain Diver, I write to you because there's no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if this farcicle"-- misspelled by Nicole—

"if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you. The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. My family have shamefully neglected me, there’s no use asking them for help or pity. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time pretending that what is the matter with my head is curable."

This is the absolute low point for Nicole. She is by herself. Her family isn’t there, she’s in the hands of strangers who are paid to take care of her. And here, who is this person who seems to have his whole life full of promise ahead of him, completely healthy, about to be launching this great career.

In one sense it is Nicole at her most abject. That this is someone who really has no future to look forward to. Has really no hope, really, has nothing that she can claim. Except that given the fact that we have seen the hard Nicole, I think that we should also be alert a little bit to the suggestion of hardness, even in this moment when Nicole is most object. And I think that, in fact, that misspelled word, "farcicle," points to a different linguistic usage. Some reason he uses the word "farcicle,"

actually, is more in command of the faculties than is suggested by the profession of abjection.

Likewise, it is simply "ruining my health and wasting my time." Someone who would use the phrase

"waste my time" has a different sense of herself than is suggested by the profession of abjection. So right there, even though it is the pitiful Nicole who is in the foreground, an element of hardness is never not on the horizon. I think that it is really that combination that Fitzgerald wants us to see that she's completely switchable. The distance between hardness and pitifulness is tiny. She can just go back and forth, it takes one second for her to switch from one to the other.

One more instance of the pitiful Nicole. This one is very late in her life, so this is in the present for her.

“Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. ‘It’s you!’ she cried, ‘it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world – with your spread of red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you – I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity.’”

The word "pity" is foregrounded. But once again, even though this is Nicole out of her mind, Nicole totally out of control, Nicole gone crazy again, and therefore, she has to be medicalized. Nicole is a candidate for medicalization. But even though she's a candidate for medicalization, she's also quite aggressive, as well as we can see. She's not so defenseless as not to be able to say some pretty wounding things to whoever would listen to her.

Once again we have that combination, the pitifulness in the foreground, but hardness is always lurking very, very close to the front, actually, in the background. It's because of that, I think, it's because the distance between the two switchable platforms is such a small distance, that I think that the technique of montage is especially helpful to Fitzgerald.