The ordeal of civility
Resentment is not only a feeling. The sociologist described a machine that produces it.
Cuddihy’s idea
Modern middle-class society runs on a code of : self-control, quiet voices, good manners, a public face kept apart from private feelings. People born into the code do not notice it. They breathe it.
A newcomer who was not raised in the code must learn it, like a foreign language, and perform it every day under the eyes of people who know it from birth. Cuddihy calls this the . It brings shame: shame at one’s own clumsiness, and shame at one’s parents, who still speak and behave in the old way.
Cuddihy’s own case was the Jews of 19th-century Europe, newly allowed into bourgeois society. He argued that thinkers such as Marx and Freud answered the ordeal with a hidden counterattack. They civility. Under the polite surface, Marx found class interest and Freud found the animal desires of the id. The ordeal produces resentment; unmasking is resentment’s revenge.
The ordeal in both novels
| Cuddihy’s stage | Duroy | Gatsby |
|---|---|---|
| The ordeal | He goes to his first dinner at the Forestiers’ in a rented evening suit. He cannot write; Madeleine Forestier writes his first article for him. | The parties, the pink suit, the phrase “old sport”: his performance is always a little too much. |
| Shame of origin | After his marriage he takes Madeleine to meet his parents at Canteleu. The visit embarrasses everyone. | He rejects his parents completely. His father appears only after his death. |
| The new name | Duroy becomes Du Roy de Cantel. | Gatz becomes Gatsby. |
| Answer to the code | He unmasks it. He learns that the runs on desire and money: his employer Walter makes a fortune from secret on Morocco. Duroy uses what he learns. This is Cuddihy’s pattern, and it wins. | He believes it. To him the code is real, and Daisy is its holy object. He never unmasks it, so he is unmasked himself, by Tom at . |
| Who exposes whom | No one exposes Duroy. He exposes everyone else. | Tom, born inside the code, sees through Gatsby at once. |
Where the resentment points
In Bel-Ami the resentment belongs to the outsider. It is Cuddihy’s resentment: learn the code, then expose it as a racket and take the prize.
In The Great Gatsby the resentment points the other way. Gatsby has very little of it. Tom has plenty: his contempt is the insider’s defence of the code against an intruder.
Marx in the mouth of a mob boss
Gatsby’s money comes through Wolfshiem, the gangster. Gatsby wants the respectable world to accept him; he never asks whether that world is any cleaner than he is. A modern film asks that question for him.
Robert De Niro plays both New York bosses in the film, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. In this clip one mobster attacks the other for wanting to join respectable WASP society, when he is a gangster himself and the respectable society is made of far bigger gangsters than either of them.
This is Cuddihy’s pattern exactly. A man ashamed of being a thug who got rich does not try to pass any more. He unmasks instead: the government and the old Protestant majority are the real gangsters, only hypocritical about it. It is Marx’s argument about class interest under polite manners, spoken by an Italian mob boss. Duroy reaches the same conclusion about Paris and uses it to win. Gatsby never reaches it, and loses.
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