LOST SOULS OF THE ‘JAZZ AGE’ - REVISITING F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922)
Journal Title: International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) - Year 2017, Vol 7, Issue 1
Abstract
The melding of fact and fiction involves the writer both as a realist and a visionary. The writer must become that paradox, of seeing the ordinary with a conscious insight thus creating a vision linked with a larger meaning. This is how history reaches its culmination in the services of art, when experiences look to literature for their ideal. A sort of order is imposed on the jumbled experience of the writer. It is an ordering of the material of life into the material of art. Fiction becomes a celebration of this achievement- the creation of fiction from friction. F. Scot Fitzgerald, who has himself, invented the term ‘The Jazz Age’, as an individual and an artist with his relentless observation of time has brilliantly recorded it in his works. But his novels don’t stop just at this but proceed to open up windows that show a vision encapsulating an eternal universal truth. The Beautiful and Damned (1922) has been set in the year 1920-22. This was just after the war and the pent up energy of youth was gushing forward to be spent and misspent. It presents the lives and philosophies of the Eastern rich when the Jazz Age had just begun its rise. The novel represents an expression of this rebelliousness of youth that ended up desperate and degraded. It shows how the young people of the “lost generation” of the 20’s glowed “beautifully” in a mirage which they mistook as their universe and were ultimately “damned.” An illusion was taken to be the reality and so, the very basis of their perception was distorted. The paper focuses on how history in the hands of Fitzgerald ceases to be just a bland recital of dates and events but acquires a greater significance by becoming a matter of interpretation that reveals a moral permanence.
Authors and Affiliations
MADHAVI GODAVARTHY
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