Introduction

Abstract

The earlier version of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, entitled Trimalchio hints that there is something emblematic in the perennial mistrust and fascination with new money.¹ A former slave now rich, famous for his distasteful extravagance at a long, eventful banquet, Petronius’s Trimalchio convincingly exemplifies ostentation, excess, and ridicule.² That almost two thousand years lie between Petronius’s prototype and Fitzgerald’s legendary character is in itself telling: it bears witness to the modernity of the figure. Yet, what does it mean to say that what is true for Petronius’s upstart is still true for Jay Gatsby? While we are all familiar with status anxiety and know that each society produces its own values, criteria of distinction, and outsiders, we do not necessarily understand the mechanism at work in these phenomena. In Western societies, where class distinctions have been supposedly abolished, the constant creation of new distinctions and the innovative ways of separating the wheat from the chaff is all the more unsettling. In his 1960s’ fresco, Georges Perec transforms the modern-day Trimalchios into avid young characters defined by their unquenchable desire to possess and their “mimetic excess.”³ Awkward pioneers of consumer society, they are eternally “condemned to conquer: they could get rich; they could not do away with their humble past.”⁴