Caught in the wrong story: psychoanalysis and narrative structure in Tender Is the Night.(Critical Essay)

 
    "We thought maybe you were in the plot," said Mrs. McKisco ... 
    "The plot?" inquired Rosemary, half understanding. "Is there a 
  plot?" 
    "My dear, we don't know," said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive 
  stout woman's chuckle. "We're not in it. We're the gallery." (1) 

Fitzgerald and the Hotbed of Psychoanalysis

It would seem an understatement to remark, as Freud once did, that "incest is not a rare occurrence even in our society" (Totem and Taboo, 901). Incest is, in fact, the event that therapists expect to hear about perhaps more than any other; it is a crucial plot point in their master-narratives of human life. For example, Freud's own early Studies on Hysteria, written with Josef Breuer, features five case histories in which the eponymous pathology arises out of forbidden father-daughter contact: Fraulein Anna O. (Breuer's patient), Miss Lucy R., Katharina _____, Fraulein Elisabeth von R., and Fraulein Rosalia H.

Psychoanalytic story-space is notably dramatized in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night. This book, which the author expected to be his masterwork, centers on incest as a site of narrative reorganization: Fitzgerald's Nicole Warren Diver has an adolescent sexual liaison with her father, and the stories she tells herself (and consequently that others tell themselves) about this event represent ruptures in psyche and life-story. Repairing or bridging those ruptures gave Fitzgerald the opportunity to offer comment on psychoanalysis and its theories of incest and mental disorder while experimenting with narrative form in ways that he hoped would prove revolutionary. First psychoanalysis writes a script about love in which the characters Dick and Nicole fuse into Dicole. Soon, however, human reality--personality, the narrative drive of time as opposed to Nicole's inability to move forward--ruptures the fantasy and the neonomism. To Fitzgerald, Freud provides a plot template that explains character motivation and, on an even deeper level, creates a thematic architecture of loss and destruction that holds up the novel as a whole.

Several critics have analyzed Freudian theories of incest as models for Tender's content (see Pamela A. Boker, Mary E. Burton, Richard Godden, E. W. Pitcher, and Robert Wexelblatt in Works Cited). The time is perhaps ripe for an investigation into the ways Freud's storytelling form and structure influenced Fitzgerald's attempts to express that content. While working on Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald claimed that he was writing "something really NEW in form, idea, structure--the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn't find" (Kuehl and Bryer, 104), and in 1925 he felt he had achieved some measure of success: "The novel progresses slowly but brilliantly" (Correspondence, 182). With these claims, he grouped himself with authors openly investigating the authentic representation of the psyche and of individual difference among psyches--modernists who experimented with radically new narrative voices and styles. Although Tender is Fitzgerald's most experimental novel, its form is not as radically new as, say, the prose of Stein's Tender Buttons. But it does weave back and forth in time and point of view, and its architecture is a Freudian triptych, with each section offering not only a major plot movement but also a shift in principal point of view. Book I follows "Daddy's Girl," a nubile actress named Rosemary Hoyt, as she meets the shimmering Divers on the Riviera; the section ends when Rosemary witnesses Nicole's breakdown in the bathroom. Next we jump back in time to Dick's meeting with Nicole at the Lausanne sanatorium, and we watch through his eyes as their relationship grows and falls apart. The dying off is completed in Book 3, which shows Dick's affair with Rosemary and ends with a more distant point of view, Dick being relegated to life as an obscure country doctor. Most of these events come about directly because Papa Warren slept with his younger daughter.

Tender Is the Night stretches over a classic Freudian framework of cause, effect, and blame centered on the incest issue. Dick first rises and then dives because of his relationship to the former Nicole Warren; Nicole is both damaged and damaging because of what she has done with her father. She is a daughter, in Freud's words, "detained" at an early stage "in the course of development through which the individual must pass"; therefore she has never "overcome the parental authority and never, or very imperfectly, withdraw[n her] affection from" her father (Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex, 618). She might not at first seem to fit Freud's schema, as she is a passionate lover rather than a cold and "sexually anesthetic" (Sex, 618) wife; but in fact she is passionate precisely because she sees her father in Dick, whose name provides a not-so-sly wink at the part of the father he most compellingly represents. Fitzgerald also examines the dangers of the doctor-patient relationship (transference-love) inherent in the process: Dick first enters the Warren when Nicole is his patient, and when he enters her life story as a father figure he destroys his own tale in order to keep hers suspended in thematic repetition.

Warren himself is the only character who describes "the awful story" of what happened with Nicole: