Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - Zoltán Simon: The Image of Technology in Selected American Novels of the 1920's

central symbols of the novel, however, cannot be overlooked in any discussion of technology and The Great Gatsby. Conceived in Eliot's newly established framework of wasteland imagery, the infamous "valley of ashes," a modern, man-made, industrial wasteland, stretching between West Egg and New York City, is thus described in the opening of Chapter Two of the novel: About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile so as to shrink away from a desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes —a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (21) Critics have since identified the original of this "valley of ashes" as the Corona dumps, a swampy area in the borough of Queens filled with ashes from coal-burning factories and the garbage of the city in the 1920s. (Cf. Matthew J. Bruccoli's "Note on Geography" on page 21 1 of the Cambridge edition of The Great Gatsby .) This repugnant landscape, "modern city at its ugliest" (Pilot 224) as Leo Marx called it, is presented in the novel clearly as the product of modern industrial and urban existence. Industrial and urban waste becomes symbolic of moral corruption and spiritual barrenness. Significantly, Fitzgerald first evokes his version of the wasteland by agricultural metaphors ("fantastic farm," "grotesque gardens"), where the adjectives signal the inappropriateness of such rural, or pastoral imagery. The garden is transformed, then, in the same sentence, into the image of a city with houses and chimneys and men moving "dimly and already crumbling in the powdery air" (21). This passage, an excellent illustration of the intrusion of the machine —as symbolizing industry, technology, or the city —into the pastoral garden (to use the central metaphor of Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden) also indicates Fitzgerald's awareness of the potentially dismal consequences of urban and technological civilization allowed to go awry. 58

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