I began this blog, partly, in order to write periodically about literature, mainly because I have two degrees in literature, a B.A. from UCLA and an M.A. from San Jose State. In graduate school I took ten classes in total, almost half of them in Creative Writing (I took four creative writing courses, three in poetry, one nonfiction, and I took two courses from the director of the Creative Writing program which were hybrid: with both analytical assignments and creative). 

This comes from someone who has taught english in the Cal State system, at the community college level, in high school, and most recently at UC Berkeley Extension. I am deeply ambivalent about higher education on the whole and think that it took a turn for the worse somewhere between my B.A., which I completed in 1997, and my M.A. which I finished in 2012. I was one of the fortunate few who can say I studied in a world class english department before that turn, so I have an inkling about what a solid liberal education could look like (one of the reasons I went back to school was to try to fill in the gaps my twenty year old self ignored, shied away from or was just too overwhelmed to cope with at the time). 

As an undergrad I wrote my capstone thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the idea of Carnival (i.e. the festive season, in Christian liturgy, that leads up to Lent) in conflict with Lent (the period of asceticism observed by Christians leading up to Easter and the Resurrection) in the novel Tender is the Night. Not realizing it at the time, my professor's career had, in part, been built upon this very idea. My work was sloppy and haphazard. I have no idea how I came up with the idea, but I noticed the Carnival motif in Fitzgerald's oeuvre. He was a Catholic, and he was concerned with the cycles of not only the natural world but with Time (capital 't') in general. He was concerned, I believe, with Christian Ritual and tradition. 

If I had delved a bit more deeply, I would have discovered that other modern writers had the same concerns (these concerns were trending at the time, and in many ways they still are). I knew that in 1918 Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, which argues that civilizations are structured in cycles and that the West was in the stage of protracted decline. T.S. Eliot published "The Waste Land" in 1922, and that poem, both pessimistic and Conservative, exudes a longing for a lost world. Then came Gatsby, in 1925, which draws on Eliot's poem and ends with a beautiful and elegiac evocation of not only Jay Gatsby, the man, but of the conundrum of time:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I got a B minus in that capstone seminar. 

Looking back, the things that interested me most about literature had to do with what critics wrote about that literature. In other words, I was not being trained to appreciate art or literature in and of itself but rather to place something like a grid over what I read, which really could have been anything, and to chop what I read up into pieces through analysis. This, I believe, is a lot less about making the world a better place (one thing I think studying literature with a mentor or a group of friends has the potential to do) and much more to do with teaching people privileged with the opportunity to make themselves look good, generally. I was partly being trained, or I was training myself, in the art of shaping an image of 'me,' whatever that was, which I would then, potentially, parlay into something greater than 'me'. I was being asked to grow, but was I being asked to grow in the right direction?

Which gets me back the novel The Great Gatsby and the character of Jay Gatsby because, as I mention in my previous blog post about the figure, Gatsby is a self-made man, a figure constructed over time to be perceived as glamorous, wealthy, intelligent, smart and while he is all of these things, he can only be seen as such because of something not these things. All that he has gained has been on the back of illicit financial dealings: bootlegging and gambling to be specific. 

So the book is one of paradox and parallels. On the one hand we have the corruption of blue-blood American wealth, depicted in Tom Buchanan, a wealthy yet dangerously violent man who has no regard for other people, while on the other hand we have the possibility for renewal and growth, seen in Gatsby, who has positioned himself thusly based on other peoples attraction to vice. On one hand we have the green light of an "orgastic future" balanced, on the other hand (and on the other shore of a bay), by an obsessed man with a murky past. This is the brilliance of the book. 

I want to go a bit further and harken to what I mention in the previous post on the novel about the idea of image and economy. Jay Gatsby, self made, deceitful, beautiful, mysterious and all the rest, is, really, a man selling an image to the world: he exists as a card trick, a sleight of hand. It seems worthwhile to think about the many ways images work to structure and manage the economy we inhabit. It is common for academics to talk about 'spectacle' and the kind of economy and or politics 'spectacle' can undergird. 

And this last point gets me to the difference, I think, between higher education today and the higher education of the past, which was still based in the concept of character development (which exists at its foundation and the the inception of American higher public education) but also, eventually, on developing personalities (like Nick Caraway) and has become all about the shaping of self- image, which is exactly what dictates and holds sway in postsecondary education today. 

Campus life today revolves around empty terms like 'equity' and 'safe spaces.' Empty of critical thought and open discourse, or, in other words, the very foundations of democracy free thought seems anathema in today's academy. Sure, hewing to convention and orthodoxy have always been a fact: one thing a degree from a school like Princeton entails is the right job at a legacy firm on Wall Street (this is Nick Caraway's story). That that degree conferred might not be base on the qualifications inherent to the necessities or rigor the fields of study offered require underscores the overwhelming propensity of people to be swayed and lulled by image. We feel secure in the understanding, false as it is, that institutions function as they should. Nick Caraway, after all, is the honorable friend and temperate narrator of a key story about the turn in American history away from truth and discretion and towards something more like what we experience now. 

At the risk of being labeled reactionary (I might be) or Conservative (I value tradition but not the brutality of either the Neoconservatives or Neoliberalism), let me explain where I am going with my understanding of the phenomenon that is Gatsby. The book has been analyzed in a variety of ways that I find somewhat disingenuous. Theory has screwed the novel up. One theory, in particular, I think emblematizes the current state of affairs in higher education, and that theory holds that the novel and the novelist are eugenicist, akin to Hitler. 

This is Critical Race Theory as applied to the novel. Because we see Tom at the apex of society, surrounded by various, less powerful people descending in a hierarchy from Gatsby and Nick to the Greek machine shop owner with whose wife Tom is sleeping and next the Shylock-like Meyer Wolfsheim, who finances Gatsby in his illicit activities, and finally all the rest of the ethnic and racially lower castes in society, Fitzgerald himself is, it is argued, pointing out that the lower  on the hierarchy, the less worthy one becomes. If Tom represents White Supremacy, Gatsby can never best him, convince Daisy to leave him, or live in East Egg, because of Gatsby's proximity to an ethnic Jew. In other words, Buchanan represents the apex of a society governed for good reason by Anglo tradition.  

This interpretation of American culture as viewed through the lens of Race is premised on the notion that were things shaken up, if the old caste system were replaced by one based on 'equity,' where minority groups felt 'safe,' why then everything would be equal. I think it is a strange reading because Fitzgerald paints Tom Buchanan as a conspiring brute. The tragedy of the book is that Gatsby dies, that Gatsby never attains his desired goal. 

The Gatsby as eugenicist interpretation was replacing older more staid interpretations when I was in college (like reading the text in the way I attempted to in my seminar paper). That Critical Race Theory is mainstream in today's political and Corporate environment shows (me at least) that it really does not relate to 'equity' so much as it does to a replacement ideology, or what Wesley Yang calls the successor ideology, which creates a new kind of hierarchy, much more bureaucratic than what came before, as the number of institutional seats at the table continues to dwindle. Ideology basically serves as a tool of selection for who gets to sit at the table, as it did, for instance, under the Soviet hierarchy. Political correctness meant, in Soviet times, that one was versed in expressing the correct political views.

The second interpretation that serves to explain, in part, where academia has lost the plot, states that the text's meaning revolves around a homoerotic attraction between Nick Caraway and Jay Gatsby. This particular reading only serves to distract me when I think about what I like about The Great Gatsby. "Oh no," I think, "these characters are gay!" as if that has any real impact on the novel's outcome. In reality, Jay cannot have Daisy because he gets sent to the War, then he gets mixed up with shady businesspeople, and finally Tom Buchanan and his type simply are too Machiavellian to allow Jay and Daisy to be together. That they are not together has nothing to do with Jay Gatsby's sexual orientation. As with Critical Racy Theory, this type of Identity Politics based reading was coming in to vogue in the mid 90's in english departments.

Here I am trying to explain my interpretation of what Wesley Yang calls the successor ideology and which causes critics like Yang and James Lindsay to raise so much alarm. I want to be clear. Between teaching western civilization using the tools of western civilization based on a theory of aesthetics that is western (i.e. teaching books like Gatsby by acknowledging its obvious lineage, which relates to Greek and Christian myth) and teaching books like Gatsby as problematic because of its tradition, lineage and, by default, its aesthetic, I am  left with a great feelings of ambivalence.  

Critical Race Theory was pounded into my head beginning in fourth grade. Then I got to UCLA and realized that there was great power in seeing western art as normal and meaningful. I only want to acknowledge what I see as a rupture in history that occurred somewhere in the 20th Century. That I see that rupture as permanent and ongoing might make me a reactionary. My ambivalence towards tradition is complete. The first philosophy that took hold in me was existentialism: whatever you do, try to be the very best at whatever that thing is to you.

Finally, my favorite theoretical reading of The Great Gatsby, defines Jay Gatsby as a vampire. First seen at night, when the story opens, trembling as he looks across the bay towards East Egg and the famous green light, he thereafter appears and disappears almost mysteriously. Of course his marks are both Nick and Daisy. In this reading the book is satire. Nick celebrates the vampire who would sap the blood of America. 

 

 

"'Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her/ If you can bounce high, bounce for her too/ Till she cry, “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover / I must have you!'--Thomas Parke D’Invilliers" -- epigraph to The Great Gatsby, attributed to fictional poet.

Scott Fitzgerald, the story goes, wrote his classic novel The Great Gatsby in response to being jilted at Princeton by a young lady well above his caste. Ostensibly created to exorcise that green worm of envy, Gatsby, simply put, describes a lovelorn soldier, Jay Gatsby, home from war who moves into a house across a bay--and an economic divide--from that of a now married former girlfriend. He obsesses over this ex-girlfriend and attempts to woo her by throwing extravagant parties, inviting wealthy, stylish people in the hopes that she will show up and be duly impressed. 

On its face, the premise of Gatsby appears 'cringe.' A man too shy to approach his -ex, Daisy Buchanan, instead 'stalks' her. Daisy's cousin, Nick Caraway, narrates. He sits somewhere in the midwest, one year after events, and he extols the man who spent the summer previous using him to get to Daisy. In the telling, that man associates himself with known underworld crime bosses and has created an entire identity based on a series of lies and nefarious financial dealings. Self-made, wealthy beyond his dreams, Gatsby has created an image--a persona--in order to one day attain the object of his desire. 

Gatsby's real name, it turns out, is Jay Gatz, and he is a farm kid from North Dakota who migrated slowly east and learned to grift along the way. In Louisville where he met Daisy, a debutante, and consummated their affair, he trained in the Army. After serving in the Great War in Europe and returning circuitously by way of Oxford University, Gatsby has arrived  on a Long Island bay in a location called West Egg, which sits across from East Egg and  Daisy, who has married, unhappily, an American aristocrat, Tom Buchanan. 

This timeline--the timeline of Gatby's life and interaction with the other characters in the book--trickles out through Nick's narrative. Through it we come to regard in Gatsby a Dionysian energy that relates, in the simplest sense, to Great Myth. The book is perhaps as much an ode to Romanticism, or:

"These beauteous forms, 

Through a long absence, have not been to me 

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: 

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din 

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,  

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet."

This is from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," a canonized poem, in which the poet describes remembering a walking trip, five years past, to the ruins of Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley.  Much has been made of the ways the English Romantics wrote about grief, loss and death. 

For those unfamiliar with the terms Romanticism and Modernism, the former describes the period of time between the the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, while the latter describes the era beginning with the turn of the century and ending at about the Second World War. Arbitrary markers, yes, but useful in that they are defined by the distinct series of attributes related to art, architecture and literature of those specific time periods. Trends, if you will. 

Academics hold that the modern sense of the sublime relates directly to the earlier Romantic appreciation of Nature and represents a break, in the Arts, from that which came before. In other words, whereas before the Revolutionary fervor of the late 18th Century the sublime in Art was expected and appreciated, it was not foregrounded. By the early 20th Century, artists like Gertrude Stein began making an Art that made everything about the sublime. Their theory of Aesthetics was meant to be persuasive and it ignored certain aspects of life: the banality of politics and of the direct experience of things like war. 

In American letters, one notion of the sublime, when we talk about Art and artistes (and their coordinated efforts), relates to "the myth of (the) un-transacted destiny propose(d) as the spirit of the true America: the long suppressed...'deific' sensibility that is common to all." (Jeffrey Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem). Jay Gatsby does not suppress this deific sensibility and it attracts Nick to Jay. 

Of course, Gatsby exists first and foremost as image. Sure, he is fond of addressing people as, "old sport," and he pleads with Daisy to leave her marriage. But we get absolutely no sense of an inner life and the people who revel in their interactions with him reveal a variety of narratives that attribute to his murky past. 

He first appears in the book in the last two paragraphs of the first chapter on a warm summer night, standing at end of his lawn, on bay's edge looking across at the green light on the end of the dock that juts out in front of Daisy and Tom's mansion. Nick watches unobserved as Gatsby stretches his arms out towards the green light. 

"Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full  of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call  to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness." (18-19)

Fitzgerald returns to the green light--and the color green generally--as symbol. The light at the end of the dock anchors the book and forms the basis for teaching Gatsby to high school english students. What does the green light represent? Power? Wealth? Greed? Renewal? Spring? Rebirth?

Whatever it is, Fitzgerald points to the subconscious urges that undergird desire and he seems to argue that the energy that runs through Gatsby--the energy that makes it appear as if he is trembling when Nick watches him stretch his arms  towards the green light--is the same as the energy that drives, for instance, a daisy, forcing it from the earth and into bloom. In the western world, we call this energy, when seen in human form, Dionysian. It was the god Dionysus who was celebrated during Spring festivals in the ancient world. Fitzgerald's interpretation of this concept relates, consciously or not, from Ezra Pound, the fascist poet tried after World War II for treason.

In the aughts of the 20th Century, Pound put forth a theory of Aesthetics called imagism based on artistic expression shaped in its precision and sparseness from natural forms. A simple summation of Pound's Theory of Aesthetics goes like this: “Beauty is sexuality, and sexuality/Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility/Of the earth is economics,” which makes sense from an agrarian standpoint. 

One significant context of The Great Gatsby, though, is the world of high finance. Nick makes a living as a stock broker and Tom Buchanan and even Jay Gatsby, it could be argued, are part of the investment class. Buchanan comes from 'old money' while Gatsby possesses what is called 'new money.' He has hustled his way to wealth. 

The novel only became fashionable at the end of the Second World War when it was distributed to soldiers coming home from Europe. One suspicion I have is that this was done in order to dissuade those soldiers from attempting to take up with ex-girlfriends who had moved on during the war. After all, that is exactly Gatsby's story and the warning in his story is that, of course, he fails to attain Daisy, in the end, and is instead murdered in a case of mistaken identity abetted by Tom Buchanan.

What about finance makes the world Fitzgerald describes differ from that of Pound's world of fertility as economics? Here we arrive at the fulcrum of the text.