Tender is the Night Read Online Free Page B

‘solid’ (so scrupulously learned as to appear innate). What capital increasingly needs after 1900 is a highly mobile, highly reproducible and highly controllable system of manners. That is to say, fashion must supplant manners: where taste once stood, style must stand.
    Manners and taste are cumulative and integrative; indeed the selfhood that they realize is its own ultimate possession. Fashions and styles are equally an extension of capital, but of capital focused on the sphere of reproduction. Fashion is always disintegrative; it aims to give us several selves, thereby providing capital with a diversification of markets.
    The new ‘science’ of advertising invested heavily in social insecurity. Consumers of the twenties were taught to denigrate their own bodies: in 1920 Listerene was just another general antiseptic – with the help of ‘halitosis’ (exhumed from an old medical dictionary) and a story line (‘He never knew why’) the copywriters Feasley and Seagrove invented a new anxiety and with it a new habit. Between 1921 and 1929 Listerene’s ‘virtues’ spread panic through pore and orifice: the public learned of its capacities as a dandruff, cold and sore-throat cure, astringent, deodorant and douche. ‘Bromodosis’ (sweaty feet), ‘office hips’, ‘accelerator toe’, ‘vacation knees’, ‘ashtray breath’, and ‘spoon-fed face’ may be dated diseases, but the sustained economic assault on the consumer’s ‘integrity’ is far from over, and its direction is ever inwards – witness vaginal deodorantsand suppository selling. The problem lies in the finances of the corporate body and not in the sweetness of the bodies on the street. Likewise, the solution is corporate: consumers must forget their deficient ‘self’ and purchase the selves made available by the business community.
    One way of focusing the interconnected histories of self and capital is to present their liaison in schematic form:
Sphere of accumulation
Sphere of reproduction
Inertia of capital (‘emulation’)
High turn-over of capital (mass market)
Leisure class
Culture industry
Manners
Fashion
Integrative selfhood
Disintegrative selfhood
(A drawing-room)
(Hollywood)
    Tender is the Night
straddles the transition from classical imperialism to late capitalism largely by way of the incest that lies at its narrative core. Witness how the incest victim is ‘cured’: her cure is unconventional, she simply moves towards an alternative mode of selfhood, lodged in a modified economic reality. She negates the incest trauma by ignoring it. The ‘cord’ can be ‘cut … forever’ (324) because Nicole appreciates herself as a new species of consumer, one to whom accumulations are no longer of primary relevance. Consequently, her interior and its old environs – cumulative, private, dense and supported by an etiquette equally weighted with ‘interpretation or qualification’ (320) – can be forgotten. Indeed, amnesia is obligatory. The father-centred world must give way to brand name and movie still if grandfather’s capital (the capital of classical imperialism) is to adapt and counter the inertia of excess capacity. For Barban she crosses herself with Chanel Sixteen and hopes to resemble ‘the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children’ (312); with Barban she stands ‘black and white and metallic against the [Mediterranean] sky’ (336), an apt study for the movies. Fitzgerald names brands to point to a transition that was merely latent in Nicole’s life with Dick. The brand name and the tourist spot – no matter how exclusive – prompt rapid translationfrom word to material image, the better to speed consumption. Any associative pattern latent in the name has been pre-arrayed there by advertising. In contradistinction, the psychiatrist’s phrase or