This article explores thematic parallels between The Great Gatsby, Joyce’s Ulysses, and myths like the Land of Cockaigne. It examines motifs of abundance, identity, and longing, reflecting on how literature reinterprets recurring myths of paradise, excess, and the sea. The essay connects Gatsby’s parties to ancient banquets and discusses how these works mirror and refract each other, creating a literary hall of mirrors around the quest for fulfillment and the hyperreal.
“I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited— they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.” — The Great Gatsby [1]
On July 5th 1922, Edmund Wilson finally stopped pressing his discovery of Ulysses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and published a three-page review of the book in New Republic. [2] I mention the date because it was the exact same day that appears in The Great Gatsby: July 5th 1922 — the day after Independence Day. [3] It was also the day that the League of Nations had issued what became known as the ‘Nansen Passport’ — an emergency measure intended to fast-track refugees. This ‘passport to paradise’ became an internationally recognized document permitting Russian Jewish immigrants to cross borders and find freedom as the chaos of the Russian Civil War had brewed into outright aggression against ethnic minorities. In the novel the date marks the day that Nick Carraway records the arrivals and departures of Gatsby’s guests from the house that summer:
“Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922’. But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.” [4]
As Scott devoted a total of three-pages to listing the names of Gatsby’s guests, it’s reasonable to assume that he was attaching some greater significance to those he included. None of the names mentioned feature in any previous chapter, or reappear at any later stage in the book. We have already been told that few of those turning up at Gatsby’s house that summer had actually been invited; “They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door … came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.” [5] The schedule reads like the passenger manifest of a ship docking at Ellis or Blackwell Island. From even the most casual read of the names, there are a couple of things that seem fairly obvious: the first of the names resemble those of land creatures and sea creatures, whilst the remaining groups feature an unusually high quota of Irish, Dutch and Jewish names. In the first version of the novel, Nick had already speculated that Gatsby may have originated from the Lower East Side of New York — a district in Manhattan dominated by German and Russian immigrants. Whilst the names of the creatures in Nick’s schedule recall the mythology of The Ark, an earlier reference to an ‘amusement park’ brings it more in line with images like those of ‘The Land of Cocagne’ in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio.[6] This medieval myth described a hedonistic Utopia, a land of plenty. All those who set foot on its lands could look forward to a life of excess and pure indulgence. All the usual rules and codes of civilisation didn’t apply here, and the traditional ranks and status that typically defined social order were systematically inverted — often violently:
Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. [7]
In the book by Collodi, the boys are ferried to the Land of Cocagne in coaches. In Fitzgerald’s novel, it is Gatsby’s Rolls Royce touring car and his station wagon that ship them in. [8] Describing il Paese di Cuccagna (the Land of Cockaigne) in an essay on the Gastronomic Utopias of the folk-tale, Luisa Del Giudice writes if you were to travel for seven months, four by sea and three by land, you would arrive at a gate. Once at the gate you must promise to obey the rules of the land: and there rules are that there are no rules. You mustn’t speak of work, only of “eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and dancing”. The rivers here flow with milk and honey, “food falls like manna from heaven” and “a large palace of pleasure” offers the infinite pleasures of the flesh. For Del Giudice, the story of Cocagne “represents one of the most persistent desires for a return to a terrestrial Paradise Lost. The archetypal pattern of humankind’s harmony with the divine and nature, followed by transgression and fall from grace.” [9] What Piero Camporesi calls the “collective dream of the hungry masses” is locked in an unending binary: the Land of Plenty must have its necessary, life-giving opposite: the Land of Want — the Valley of Ashes.
Drawing on images of the Empire forged by author, Jean Luis Borge in which cartographers have constructed a map so detailed that it ends up covering exactly the same volume of territory on paper as it does on land, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes a world that is both over stimulated and over simulated, a world in which the image has lost any connection it might once have had with the real: it is a real without origin — a ‘hyperreal’. It is in fact, much the same binary that Camporesi speaks of. Something has been lost. Something is being wanted. “What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it.” [10] Or as Luisa Del Giudice explains in her own account of the Cocagne myth, “utopian visions hold up a mirror reflecting that which the utopianist’s society lacks and desires.” The ‘hyperreal’ that Baudrillard speaks of, “retains all the features” of its source but it is nothing more than its “scaled-down refraction” — just as Gatsby’s fairytale mansion is nothing more than a “factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”. [11] Cocagne becomes not so much a u-topia and a “poli-topia”. It was everywhere and nowhere: “For Goethe it seems to have been Italy; for the Lithuanians it was Hungary; to immigrants it was America.” [12]
The message is depressingly simple: Capitalism is driven by want, and it’s a craving that must never be completely satisfied by those overseeing production. A condition that arises from want must remain rooted and abstracted in want. For the masses at least, success must never be allowed to be completely real. Only hyperreal. For Luisa Del Giudice, the Land of Cocagne is an “Imagined State” — a powerful metaphor for abundance — that will survive as long as deprivations continue. Cocagne’s power as a symbol “rests firmly in its ability to imagine, and thereby construct, an alternative social order … a dream of social change and escape.” [13] By 1900, the folk tale was being revisited by German novelist, Heinrich Mann. His naturalistic novel, In the Land of Cockaigne portrayed the decadence of high society and the cheap and shallow ambition of its nouveau-riche.
By 1922 the tale was being revisited again, this time in its more customary pejorative and derisive sense in the press columns of Conservative America. Anarchy was sweeping through Europe and the whole civil fabric of society (and immigration centres) was being subjected to enormous stress. A few years later the Ukrainian economist Ludwig von Mises, championing the virtues of classical liberalism, used it as part of a double-barrelled criticism of both Capitalism and Communism. In a Socialistic community, the practically limitless increase in production that would take place would determine to turn “burden into a pleasure”. Pleasure would thus become all that was necessary of life: “where a superfluity of all goods abounds and work is pleasure, it is doubtless, an easy matter to establish a land of Cockaigne.” [14]
Philadelphian historian, Claude de la Roche-Francis, nephew of the Marquis Percy de al Roche, one time household chamberlain to Pope Pius X in Rome, provided an impressive account of the role played by feasting and extravagance in the myths, legends and allegories presented in literature over the centuries. In The Ceremonial History and Literature of the Banquet, the author explains how the holy books of all nations, whether they were in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Palli, Zend, Copt, Greek, Runic, Arabic, Chinese, had all had food and feasting play an integral part in some rule of life or code of ethics. Homer in the Iliad placed a good deal of weight on feasts and Ulysses, Phoenix and Ajax are urged to seek peace with their enemies by arranging a banquet. In The Odyssey, Ulysses attends another feast in disguise as part of his plot to win back Penelope, his faithful wife. His account also draws on the stories of Trimalchio in The Satyricon and the Land of Cocagne. [15] In The Great Gatsby, whose original working title was ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’, Fitzgerald frames the famous parties in this same age-old tradition:
“Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York … At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvass and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from the other.” [16]
If we can learn anything from Roche-Francis’s Ceremonial History and Literature of the Banquet it’s that all efforts to anchor the source of Fitzgerald’s imagery in one, inviolable source is likely to be a completely futile endeavour. One myth leads to another myth. Influence can be rather like catching half a glimpse of a face in a reflection: those dusty streaks of light bouncing off glass, misshapen by shadows and refracted through a prism of your own unique construction. It would be like looking through the “labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns” on Gatsby’s cream-coloured Rolls Royce, layer upon layer of glass that repeated and distorted things as light passed through them. [17] The novelist, Umberto Eco, summed it up rather better in his postscript to The Name of the Rose: “I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. Homer knew this, and Ariosto knew this, not to mention Rabelais and Cervantes.” [18] By the mid-1930s, Fitzgerald knew this too, writing rather perceptively in his notebooks that the “two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—the charm of women and the courage of men.” [19]
As peculiar as it might seem, some critics have already perceived Homeric values in Collodi’s Pinocchio tale. In these he is seen as a ‘Dantean Ulysses’ bravely facing adventure in pursuit of experience and reward, journeying to hell, being presented with temptation and then rising like a phoenix from the ashes of his own disastrous folly. Pinocchio is not real in the same way that Gatsby is not real. He has no authentic centre, no identity that is flesh and blood. Like so many of those seeking refuge on America’s shores, as soon as he sets foot on terra-firma he’s without past and denied a future, cut adrift in the cultural Diaspora — neither absolutely nothing nor nothing absolutely.
In the review of Ulysses published by the New Republic on July 5th 1922, Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson is quick to draw attention to its retelling of Homer’s Odyssey and the book’s Rabelaisian and Satyricon qualities. Ulysses is indeed another name for Odysseus. There is nothing of a secret in it. Joyce had been fairly on the level when it came to telling an ancient epic tale in the most realistic and naturalistic of ways. If Homer had written The Odyssey today this is how it might have been; two men living in Dublin, one of Jewish heritage trying to find and express their own identity in a way that corresponds to the sections of Homers Odyssey and in such a way that thwarts, subverts and challenges the moral and literary expectations and standards of the day. In terms of mythologies, the whole thing — Joyce’s Ulysses and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby — has a bit of an ‘infinity mirror’ thing going on: Gatsby is inspired by The Satyricon, Ulysses is inspired by The Odyssey, The Odyssey is inspired by The Satyricon and Ulysses inspires Scott to write Gatsby. As far as comparative literature is concerned it’s a bit of a hall of mirrors. For a more comprehensive exploration of the influence of Petronius’s Satyricon on Joyce’s Ulysses, I’d recommend reading James Joyce’s Roman Prototype by J.F. Killen which is full of impressive insight, and goes into astonishing detail about the shared ancestry of Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey. [20] According to Killen, Petronius was known to Joyce’s Dublin contemporaries. An edition of the Cena Trimialchionis had been published in Dublin and London in 1905 by M. J. (Petronius) Ryan. He also notes at least one open allusion in Joyce’s novel to an episode in the Satyricon, the story of the faithless Widow of Ephesus. [21]
If there’s one thing that each of the three works has in common, both in terms of their imagery and their themes, it’s the sea. At the heart of Homer’s epic, is a journey of discovery. On the one hand the Ocean represents the gulf between the power of men and the power of Gods, and on the other it represents the means that men might use to unlock their inner potential. In Gatsby you can almost smell the brine, whether it’s his outstretched hand reaching out at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the picture of a young James Gatz clam-diving at Lake Superior, a storm-tossed rescue of Dan Cody’s boat, or the sultry, settled calm of the Long Island Sound — “that most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere.” [22] Like Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, all the central action takes place on an island. The sea has the power to wreck things, revive things and change things. When rough it can cause mass devastation and when calm it can support the smoothest journey to success. Its isolation can bring people together and also tear them apart. It’s as much a home to the lumpish sea-beast Caliban, a slave, as it is to the resourceful, freedom-seeking spirit Ariel. [23] In one story there is the great Prospero, a master sorcerer capable of producing the most astonishing illusions, can enforce slavery or offer freedom and in the other story is the no less Great Gatsby — a “regular Belasco” who can conjure up the most consummate, enchanting spectacles. Both of them are exiles and both of them tell great whopping lies. Despite this, both works are tales of redemption snatched from the jaws of a beautiful but flawed dream.
Alan Sargeant 2025
[1] TGG, pp.60-62
[2] The New Republic was founded by wartime propagandist and intelligence man Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl and Herbert Croly. The magazine enjoyed both the patronage and the cash of women’s suffrage activist, Dorothy Payne Whitney.
[3] This is the day after Independence Day. I am aware that the date 5th July 1921 appears in the collection of galley proofs that make up James L. W. West III Trimalchio book but it seems to be a typo. The same book has already told us that the action takes place five years after Gatsby and Daisy first met in October 1917. That would be 1922. It was the year that Fitzgerald began to conceive the novel.
[4] TGG, pp.60-62
[5] TGG, p.43
[6] The Story of a Puppet: The Adventures of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi, T. Fisher Unwin p.166, pp. 172-173. In the 1940 Disney production of Pinocchio, The Land of Cokagne (also known as the Land of Boobies in the novel) became ‘Pleasure Island’. Collodi’s novel was published in America in 1892 by Cassell Publishing Company in New York. The novel’s author Carlo Collodi was a strongly opinionated radical patriot. The novel can in some ways be seen as an allegory about one boy’s pursuit of a national identity.
[7] TGG, p.43
[8] TGG, p.41
[9] ‘Mountains of Cheese and Rivers of Wine: Paesi di Cuccagna and Other Gastronomic Utopias’, Luisa Del Giudice, Imagined States, Utah State University Press, 2001, pp.11-12
[10] Simulations, Jean Baudrillard, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, Semiotext(e), 1983, pp.1-3, p.44
[11] TGG, p.11
[12] ‘Mountains of Cheese and Rivers of Wine: Paesi di Cuccagna and Other Gastronomic Utopias’, Luisa Del Giudice, Imagined States, Utah State University Press, 2001, pp.43-44
[13] Ibid, p.13
[14] Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition, Ludwig von Mises, Cobden Press, 1985 (published originally 1927), p.16
[15] The Ceremonial History and Literature of the Banquet, Claude de la Roche-Francis, Banquest in literature Philadelphia Times, August 28, 1898, p.18
[16] TGG, pp. 41-42
[17] TGG, p.77
[18] Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1984, pp. 19-20,
[19] The Crack Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Edmund Wilson, James Laughlin, 1945, p. 180
[20] James Joyce’s Roman Prototype, J. F. Killeen, Comparative Literature , Summer, 1957, Vol. 9, No. 3, Duke University Press, pp. 193-203
[21] Ibid, p.199
[22] TGG, p.10
[23] The name has an interesting etymology. In some Hebrew texts it can mean ‘spirit of the water’ and in others it is another name for Jerusalem.