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Reading It Again

The Great GatsbyTo be sure, it was only a coin­ci­dence, but the week of March 7th — the week of the recent finan­cial chaos — was also the week that marked the one-hun­dredth anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by.  Towards the end of the book, Nick Car­raway, the book’s nar­ra­tor says: “They were care­less peo­ple, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and then retreat­ed back into their mon­ey or their vast care­less­ness, or what­ev­er it was that kept them togeth­er, and let oth­er peo­ple clean up the mess they had made.”

That seemed very much like a sum­ma­ry of the finan­cial chaos, and its cause. I do won­der who will clean up the cur­rent mess.

Moby DickRead­ing about The Great Gats­by made me think of anoth­er Amer­i­can clas­sic, Moby Dick, by Her­man Melville.  What is the con­nec­tion?  Cap­tain Ahab, like Gats­by, is also dri­ven to achieve the unat­tain­able — the killing of the great white whale — and in that pur­suit also wreaks hav­oc and destruction.

That these two nov­els, so utter­ly dif­fer­ent — both real con­tenders for “The Great Amer­i­can Nov­el” — should touch on such sim­i­lar themes struck me. It sug­gests that the pur­suit of the Amer­i­can dream — that one can achieve any­thing if only one tries — car­ries the seeds of self-destruction.

The books shared anoth­er sim­i­lar­i­ty. When first pub­lished, both books were negat­ed by crit­ics, only to be res­ur­rect­ed — after their authors died — as great works of lit­er­a­ture. That meant that nei­ther author had any notion how their books would come to be revered.

Did both die think­ing them­selves failures?

 One crit­ic I read — reflect­ing on The Great Gats­by — com­ments on how mod­ern a sto­ry it is with issues of race, sex, mon­ey, greed, addic­tion, and the gen­er­al exces­sive aspects of our lives. Yet, the same crit­ic inter­est­ing­ly sug­gest­ed that the book is one of our cul­tur­al uni­fiers, in so far as it holds its niche as an almost uni­ver­sal high school read­ing require­ment. I can­not imag­ine how young peo­ple today relate to the book.

I think I’ve read the book four dif­fer­ent times in my life, and each read­ing brings forth a dif­fer­ent reac­tion. I don’t know when I first read it. Per­haps it was in high school, and I don’t ful­ly recall my reac­tion oth­er than I liked it. But a few years ago, I read it for the third time and was put off by its flam­boy­ant lan­guage and syn­tax. This time — the fourth time — I was tak­en by how mod­ern it all was, how rel­e­vant for today. As for the dic­tion — if you will — it was all one with the wild world the nov­el depicts. I took plea­sure in it.

[One def­i­n­i­tion of great works of art is that such cre­ations are always rel­e­vant to the time they’re being first expe­ri­enced, not just the time when they were created.]

Fitzger­ald him­self had a com­plex life, ear­ly wild suc­cess, a trag­ic mar­riage, a decline into Hol­ly­wood alco­holism, and then posthu­mous fame. A dif­fer­ent kind of “Amer­i­can dream.” Or maybe nightmare.

Regard­less, it’s all there in The Great Gatsby.

2 thoughts on “Reading It Again”

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