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.