Preface

The Great Gatsby is a manual for spiritual development. It is not a unique text, for many American modernist novels of canonical stature are similarly grounded in the occult. Fitzgerald was a follower of A. R. Orage who not only taught the Gurdjieff Work (the Fourth Way) but organized a vast literary network to further its goals. Orage infiltrated the entire New York publishing industry on every level in the 1920s and 1930s—from pulp magazines to Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. Research indicates that he even controlled who won the Pulitzer Prize.

The chief reason that this occult literary tendency has remained in the shadows is that the arbiter of the movement has been poorly understood and critically neglected. The Great Gatsby belongs to a genre of the novel invented by Carl Van Vechten, the emblematic novel. Van Vechten’s novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) was the model for The Great Gatsby and for many other modern masterpieces. The Blind Bow-Boy is still in print. However, the annotated reprint from MHRA Critical Texts (Volume 62, 2018) continues the reductive portrayal of Van Vechten as a minor writer and an eccentric. The Great Gatsby closely followed what Van Vechten laid down in his ur-emblematic novel, and Fitzgerald made few departures from Van Vechten’s format. The Great Gatsby is, like The Blind Bow-Boy, a roman-a-clef, and Carl Van Vechten is a minor (and markedly inexplicable) character in The Great Gatsby.

My annotated presentation of Fitzgerald’s novel performs three functions, reading the code, revealing the Tarot cards, and revealing the alchemical emblems. Since Oragean-modernist emblematic novels are all written using the same phonetic-syllabic code, the alchemical cabala, I have decoded the novel and presented a running account of the coded subtext in footnotes. The words that I have decrypted are presented in italics. For instance, where Fitzgerald has taken up an entire paragraph of prose narrative to render the coded word Tarot, the footnote simply reads Tarot. I have presented a breakdown of the coded names in Appendix 1. Emblematic novels are projections of graphic materials—the Tarot, alchemical emblems, and fine-art paintings and photographs, and Greek myths portrayed on vases and in frescoes. The emblems that Fitzgerald used in The Great Gatsby are in Appendix 2. Familiarity with emblematic novels raises many questions. It is by no means obvious how the emblems and the esoteric materials correspond to the surface narrative. P. D. Ouspensky’s book on the Tarot presents a scheme for randomly laying out the entire 78-card deck of Tarot cards. At least one emblematic novel was written in this way, Marjorie Kinnan’s The Source. The Great Gatsby does not employ all the Tarot Cards, and the cards that were used are used more than once, in the upright and reversed positions. It would be possible to write the novel from a spread of the Tarot cards, or by choosing cards after the writing was completed: this is a significant unknown. As Ouspensky is, like Van Vechten, a minor character in Fitzgerald's novel, his presence suggests that his schematic played a role in the construction of the novel, which is why Ouspensky’s design for the spread is presented in Appendix 3.

My annotations also address the question of authorship. Some of the Oragean writings are known to be the products of committees. There is some internal evidence in The Great Gatsby that Fitzgerald worked with a committee. Based on the names of people found in the novel, the committee would have consisted of Carl Van Vechten, Muriel Draper, Jean Toomer, Thyra Samter Winslow, Zora Neale Hurston, and e. e. cummings. Within the novel, Zora Neale Hurston is identified by Fitzgerald as having had some relationship to the code used in his novel. Hurston is named in code in connection with the cabala code in other emblematic novels, and she is a character in several of those novels. Hurston either edited the code in Fitzgerald’s code or coded it herself. Of course, these assertions seem extreme, but the entire Oragean project is a far cry from anything that we have been taught to expect. My book on the emblematic novel, The Emblematic Novel: esoteric realism in the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation (2023) was published long before I connected Fitzgerald to the New York Gurdjieffians. Thus, I had the advantage of my own close reading of Fitzgerald’s model to guide my study of The Great Gatsby. It was only by having had that advantage that I was able to understand what Fitzgerald had written. Therefore, I suggest that my book, The Emblematic Novel, be employed as a companion to this annotated Gatsby to further the appreciation of Fitzgerald's novel. The literary portion of the Oragean project in which F. Scott Fitzgerald participated is described in my book, Oragean Modernism: a lost literary movement, 1924-1953 (2013). However, at the time I wrote Oragean Modernism I little suspected that Fitzgerald was an esotericist. The Orageans also executed an esoteric historical drama with social motives that are hinted at in Gatsby, and that project is described in my book, Notes on Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison: Objective Art, Alchemical Cabala, Roman à Clef, Modern Civil Messiahs, Ancient Egypt, and Pseudo-Communism (2017).

My interest in The Great Gatsby was aroused by the re-emergence of the question of Jay Gatsby’s race at the centennial year of the novel’s publication.1 When I looked at the novel, I realized that it was an esoteric, emblematic novel. The racial element of the novel is now made even more indeterminate by placing Fitzgerald’s novel in the Oragean camp. One hundred years of misunderstandings will not be resolved by merely unveiling the esoteric subtext.