A Deleuzian Analysis of Capitalism in Scott Fitzgerald’s Novels

Abstract

This paper analyzes Scott Fitzgerald’s novels in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism. While Deleuze and Guattari’s capitalist social machine is a break from Marxism, it decodes the traditions that define subjective desires or concepts like beauty and ethics. Under capitalism, subjective desire arises as a capitalist desire and reproduces the capitalist power. In his novels, Fitzgerald addresses the idea of the American dream in a similar way. His characters often embody the contradictions of American experience such as success and failure, dream and nightmare, illusion and disillusionment. This paper critically analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of desire within Marx’s work and the role of the American dream in a capitalist system as a sort of antiproduction. It seeks to illustrate how the concept of love in Fitzgerald’s novels is tied to the idea of money and how their connection delineates, in the same way, the commodification of the desire that Deleuze traces in his reading of Marx. Accordingly, this paper also argues that similar to philosophy, fiction can be employed to provide a better understanding of our represented world.

Keywords

• capitalism
• american dream
• deleuze
• desire
• fitzgerald