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A more [[complex ]] [[literary ]] [[case ]] of this minimal [[difference ]] is provided by the editorial fate of [[Tender Is the Night]], Francis Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the sad story of the disintegrating [[marriage ]] between Nicole Warren, the rich American heiress, a [[schizophrenic ]] [[victim ]] of [[incest]], and Richard Diver, a young brilliant [[psychiatrist ]] who treated her in Switzerland. In the first edition, the novel begins years later at the Divers' villa on the [[French ]] Riviera where the couple lives a glamorous [[life]]; the story is told from the perspective of Rosemary, a young American movie actress who falls in [[love ]] with Dick, fascinated by the Divers' glitzy life style. Gradually, Rosemary gets hints of a dark underside of traumas and [[psychic ]] breakdowns beneath the surface of the glamorous [[social ]] life. At this point, the story moves back into how Dick encountered Nicole, how they got [[married ]] in spite of her [[family]]'s doubts, etc.; after this interlude, the story returns to the [[present]], continuing the description of the gradual falling apart of Nicole's and Dick's marriage (Dick's desperate affair with Rosemary, etc., up to one of the most depressive and hopeless endings in modern [[literature]]). However, for the novel's second edition (the first printing was a failure), Fitzgerald tried to improve it by rearranging the [[material ]] in [[chronological ]] [[order]]: now, the novel begins in 1919 Zurich, with Dick as a young doctor called by a friend psychiatrist to take over the difficult case of Nicole.<ref>For a condensed [[overview ]] of the problem of the two versions of Tender Is the Night, see Malcolm Cowley's "Introduction" to the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth [[1948]]).</ref>

Why is none of the two versions [[satisfying]]? Obviously, the first one is the more adequate one, not only for purely dramatic-[[narrative ]] reasons (it first creates the enigma - what is the [[secret ]] behind the glitzy surface of the Divers' marriage? - and then, after arousing the reader's interest, it proceeds to give the answer). Rosemary's [[external ]] point of view, fascinated by the [[ideal]](ized) couple of Dick and Nicole, is not simply external. Rather, it embodies the [[gaze ]] of the social "big [[Other]]," the [[Ego-Ideal]], for which Dick enacts the life of a happy husband who tries to charm everybody around him, i.e., this external gaze is [[internal ]] to Dick, part of his immanent [[subjective ]] [[identity ]] - he leads his life in order to [[satisfy ]] this gaze. What this implies, furthermore, is that Dick's fate cannot be accounted for in the [[terms ]] of the immanent deployment of a flawed [[character]]: to present Dick's sad fate in this way (i.e., in the mode of a linear narrative) is a lie, an [[ideological ]] mystification that transposes the external network of social relations into inherent [[psychological ]] features. One is even tempted to say that the flashback chapter on the [[prehistory ]] of Dick's and Nicole's marriage, far from providing a truthful account of the [[reality ]] beneath the [[false ]] glitzy [[appearance]], is a [[retroactive ]] [[fantasy]], a kind of a narrative version of what, in the [[history ]] of [[capitalism]], functions as the [[myth ]] of "primordial accumulation." 4 In other [[words]], there is no direct immanent line of [[development ]] from the prehistory to the glitzy story proper: the jump is irreducible here, a different dimensions intervenes.

The enigma is thus: why was Fitzgerald not [[satisfied ]] with the first version? Why did he replace it with the clearly less satisfying linear narrative? Upon a closer look, it is easy to discern also the limitations of the first version: the flashback after the first part sticks out: while the jump from the present (French Riviera in 1929) to the [[past ]] (Zurich in 1919) is convincing, the [[return ]] to the present "doesn't [[work]]," is not artistically fully justified. The only consistent answer is therefore: because the only way to remain faithful to the artistic [[truth ]] is to "bite the bullet" and admit defeat, i.e., to circumscribe the gap itself by way of presenting both versions. 5 In other words, the two versions are not consecutive, they should be red structurally (synchronously), like the two maps of the same village in the example from Levi-[[Strauss ]] (developed in detail later). In short, what we [[encounter ]] here is the function of [[parallax ]] at its purest: the gap between the two versions is irreducible, it is the "truth" of both of [[them]], the [[traumatic ]] core around which they circulate, there is no way to resolve the tension, to find a "proper" solution. What first appears as a merely [[formal ]] narrative deadlock (how, in what order, to tell the story), thus signals a more radical deadlock that pertains to the social [[content ]] itself. Fitzgerald's narrative failure and oscillation between the two versions tells us something [[about ]] the [[social reality ]] itself, about a certain gap that is stricto sensu a fundamental social fact. The "tickling [[object]]" is here the [[absent ]] [[Cause]], the unfathomable X that undermines every narrative solution.<ref><u>[[The Parallax View]]</u></ref></blockquote>