F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the best writers who ever lived. The ultimate reason for the Fitzgerald revival, then, is that great writing will always find its permanent audience . . . every year people read Fitzgerald for the first time and are never quite the same after the exposure to his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.”
—Matthew J. Bruccoli, 2003
I regard Scott Fitzgerald as the most generous, and the most grateful of American writers. And The Great Gatsby still strikes me as the most perfectly crafted work of fiction to have come from America.—Tony Tanner, 1996
Scholar Ray B. Browne (1922–2009) wrote about popular culture and folk studies throughout his long, distinguished career. He believed in the significance of probing these disciplines, despite the academic snobbery he faced from others who felt researching how common people lived was beneath them or unimportant. To Browne, however, folk and popular culture were significant and had consequences for how people lived their lives and the ways they viewed themselves as citizens. He called folk studies, for example, “society’s way of life, the timeless and world-wide comparative attitudes toward the problems of life and those people’s ways of adjusting to and coping with those problems.” In the end, he felt that understanding culture might lead to people developing solutions “for the benefit of all society.” This lofty goal remained central to Browne’s work, as well as the generations of scholars who studied with him or have attempted to follow his teachings.[1]
What this book underscores, in the Browne tradition of popular culture studies, is that a work of art like Gatsby can have a transformative influence on people’s lives by serving as a tool for them to better comprehend themselves, the society around them, and their possible futures. Rather than dismiss Browne’s ideology as Pollyannaish, as some critics might, I concur with his rationale for the humanities when he states:
The humanities are those aspects of life that make us understand ourselves and our society. They are a philosophical attitude and an approach to thinking and behaving which interpret life in a human context. In other words, the humanities humanize life and living, make it more understandable and bearable and human.[2]
Given its omnipresence in the nation’s classrooms, educators in high schools, colleges, and universities obviously recognize the novel’s practicality across many central ideologies at the heart of good citizenship and social responsibility.
What is also increasingly clear is that in its long life, Gatsby moved beyond mere novel, or any kind of label one might place on it as a great book, to function as a part of American folklore. Furthermore, for better or worse, the mythic status of Scott and Zelda is included in this transformation: he the drunken (but angelic) genius; and she, his zany, madcap flapper wife. Like all powerful folklore narratives, there is a community aspect in the novel’s service to society and culture, which includes and extends beyond the common ideas and misperceptions of the book.
In other words, Gatsby’s place within American folklore is not dependent on readers or audiences understanding where the legend of Scott and Zelda weaves in and out of reality or that Gatsby was not throwing parties to demonstrate his wealth. Rather, the power of the book is conveyed through its central themes, which keep it fresh and evocative long after one would naturally expect it to lose its power. These topics run a broad gamut from the hero’s journey to the ethics of wealth and living a just life. The central theme, though, that turns Gatsby from important novel to part of the nation’s folklore is its personification of the American Dream.
Some folklorists might quibble with placing Gatsby within the folklore label, given that it is a more formal cultural production than the kinds of traditions or material culture that many scholars study, such as regional oral history or music. That point noted, however, I counter that over time the novel has taken on new meaning for contemporary audiences while simultaneously drawing us back to a vanishing era in American history, which can be mechanically reproduced in film and television but in reality becomes more distant by the moment. And, though this book concentrates on formal pieces of mass media to prove its thesis, an enterprising scholar could conduct the kind of oral history necessary to demonstrate Gatsby’s influence on a more intimate scale.
Generations of high school and college students have been assigned The Great Gatsby once or more in their educational experience for use as a text defining the American experience. If we assume that countless numbers of students actually read the novel or, conversely, were forced to sit listening to class discussions about it even if they did not, its symbols and ideas have found expression in popular culture. Perhaps it is too idealistic to believe that as a result Gatsby plays an important role in people’s worldviews, but I chart toward having confidence in people’s critical-thinking abilities. Scholar Richard M. Dorson explains:
A tale is not a dictated text with interlinear translation, but a living recitation delivered to a responsive audience for such cultural purposes as reinforcement of custom and taboo, release of aggressions through fantasy, pedagogical explanations of the natural world, and applications of pressures for conventional behavior.[3]
Although the novel could have disappeared as merely a relic of a bygone era, Gatsby now exemplifies Dorson’s thinking above. Taken as a whole, the text itself, the film versions, and other forms of mass communications that have used it as an inspiration have transformed Fitzgerald’s book into a living document that enables interested audiences to create, build, and strengthen their perspectives.
***
This book’s conclusion speaks to The Great Gatsby and its titular figure as something more deeply rooted than the typical literary work, or even those books under consideration as the fabled Great American Novel, to its place as a part of our national folklore or Americana. As I parse through this thinking, however, I am not exactly sure what Fitzgerald would have thought of such a claim. He meant Gatsby to be his literary masterpiece and to establish his place in the upper echelon of American writers, which it has done. He certainly knew Gatsby was a great book, despite mediocre sales (by his standards) and mixed critical reviews. Yet I am not sure any writer could imagine that a single work—particularly one of only about fifty thousand words—might have the kind of impact Fitzgerald’s novel has had on the nation.
The research that shores up the claim of Gatsby’s move into part of Americana reveals both its reach and influence over the course of the last ninety years. Granted, thousands of generic uses of the novel have filled mass communications outlets during that same period. These misappropriations, however shocking, do challenge our common understanding of the book. Yet, even then, what interesting company for a work of literature, particularly when Gatsby becomes a stand-in or filler for the American Dream and its corollary rags-to-riches narrative.
Fitzgerald’s novel and the American Dream work together in concert to keep both at the forefront of people’s minds. Anecdotally, I think it would be difficult to find someone who did not immediately have an image or impression pop into his or her mind when hearing the word “Gatsby.” Given the blockbuster expectations of the 2013 film, this influence will certainly solidify and spread. By creating marketing copy and campaigns to sell “classic” novels to new audiences, scholar Marjorie Garber says, publishers and others recreate and repackage texts that highlight “dilemmas with which the reader is tacitly invited to identify.”[4] This is at least in part the rationale for having rapper and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z score the 2013 film version of The Great Gatsby.
Jay Gatsby is a deeply flawed hero, like so many other antiheroes all the rage in contemporary popular culture, such as Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only murders bad guys, on the hit Showtime series Dexter, or Mad Men’s Don Draper, who possesses many Gatsby-esque traits, like changing his identity to create a new version of himself yet still not finding happiness or contentment. That this kind of fictional character is popular now, in an era dominated by massive societal upheaval brought on by terrorism, warfare, and economic instability, brings to light some ideas about our cultural mind-set.
America’s popular culture heroes often do not operate within a black-and-white code, like superheroes of the past. Instead, they acknowledge or are forced to operate within the gray spaces that exist in both day-to-day life and extraordinary situations. Some of this transformation reflects the vibrations radiating through history, for example, mirroring the rise and fall of individual politicians and larger political parties. As a result, the public is accustomed to looking for the fallibility in those we emulate, recognizing that those we place on a pedestal often have flaws that may be revealed upon greater scrutiny.
The current fascination with reality television and obsession with everything related to celebrity has also transformed what it means to be a hero. The line between hero and celebrity is blurry, at best. The idea of being celebrated outruns whatever it is that a person is being recognized for doing. Attaining the spotlight is more important than what one does in the glare. Reality television pulses through the broader culture, showing that every moment of a person’s life is up for scrutiny, criticism, and abuse. The medium also demonstrates that once in the spotlight, life becomes one enormous game show. Points are won and lost based on duplicity, deception, false fronts, and ill-begotten alliances against one’s enemies.
Amazingly, Gatsby fits into today’s cultural climate and may be used as a vehicle for understanding our moment in time, just as it has for decades. Writer William Voegeli discusses how the fictional character fits within contemporary thinking, explaining, “Gatsby is not Everyman. He is an American, and the struggle to fashion a life guided by practical wisdom in America faces special challenges that make his story even more poignant . . . something moral, the principles on which the American experiment is founded, and something material, the place where it unfolds.”[5] It is the commitment to their own sense of righteousness that drives many popular culture antiheroes. Like Gatsby, they live by a code that they are sure has justifiable ends, even if the means take them into areas outlawed by traditional society and laws.
Gatsby wears a mask with multiple consequences. Sometimes his mask enables him to get closer to his dream, while at other junctures his guise covers his fraudulent life and dubious focus on wealth. In contrast to Gatsby, Tom wears no mask. As a result, he seems a more “real” figure, stooping to the depths of a serial adulterer, elitist, and racist. Gatsby’s lies all seem to have meaning, while Tom’s lies just make him sinister.
Fitzgerald’s creation of two central figures of this magnitude breathes timelessness into the novel, because Americans love dreamers, even if they are ultimately revealed to be frauds, while simultaneously begrudgingly admiring powerful figures like Tom, even if they are shortsighted morons. I think many people would lump today’s corporate and business leaders, if not many politicians, into the latter camp.
Many similarities also exist between the 1920s and post-Vietnam and post-Watergate America, which makes the novel seem like a prediction. Scholar Thomas C. Foster compares Fitzgerald’s 1920s with today, explaining that each is filled with “a bunch of seedy people with challenged ethics” and “greed and corruption were rampant.”[6] Current readers can definitely relate to the sinister nature of business and the illegal world of gangsters in the pre-Depression era and find fingers of that time reaching into the days of the dot-com rise and crash and the Great Recession of 2008, which feels like it will never end. According to Foster, Fitzgerald “presents all this as a perversion of the American Dream, which traditionally has had to do with freedom, opportunity, space to build a life, but which has been replaced by grasping, win-at-all-costs materialism.”[7]
We know that Gatsby is doomed, because unforeseen (almost predestined) forces rise up to stamp down dreamers. Few people—real or fictional—get everything they want, even when it seems so close. From a lifetime of popular culture influences, from blood-splattered movies and television shows to the sensationalism of the news industry, today’s reader will recognize that Gatsby getting gunned down is more poignant than Fitzgerald could have ever imagined. One can almost visualize a similar scene today: a wealthy celebrity found murdered, the body of his stalker found nearby, dead of suicide. The resulting pictures would end up in a trashy tabloid and inevitably on the web in full-colored gruesomeness.
Fitzgerald’s immaculate insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries (and writers ever since).[8] It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. “Fitzgerald could sound the depths of Gatsby’s life because he himself could not conceive any other,” he explains. “Out of his own weariness and fascination with damnation he caught Gatsby’s damnation, caught it as only someone so profoundly attentive to Gatsby’s dream could have pierced to the self-lie behind it.”[9]
Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.
Even deeper, however, Fitzgerald understood the dual role of insider-outsider that enabled him to go deeply into the minds of his characters as they played out their goals and aspirations. The ability to capture Myrtle and Tom, for example, and then reveal how modern life could bring them together and eventually result in tragic consequences necessitated that Fitzgerald hold innate command of the people that inhabited the world in the 1920s.
Critic and biographer Arthur Mizener explains Fitzgerald’s important turn, saying, “His use of a narrator allowed Fitzgerald to keep clearly separated for the first time in his career the two sides of his nature, the middle-western Trimalchio and the spoiled priest who disapproved of but grudgingly admired him.”[10] Even more important, though, his characters had to have timelessness, too, the ability to transcend the age in which they were created and become akin to myths. As a result, Mizener contends, Gatsby himself could be an idealist and a brassy thug. Fitzgerald’s brilliance is in creating him with parts of both but still enabling the reader to view the character as more, as the kind of person who could embody the American Dream, even if it is fulfilled illegally.
Ironically, Fitzgerald himself, the literary wunderkind and global celebrity, seemed to become more American or realistic in some strange sense after the commercial failures of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. His overarching narrative arc changed from American success story to rags-to-riches-to-rags, which our national culture embraces, although he was not as poor as he remembered growing up and certainly had many advantages that others did not. The fall from grace, however, which began with the mediocre sales of Gatsby, changed Fitzgerald. Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.” Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in Esquire, later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in Advertisements for Myself (1959).[11]
Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”[12]
Much of Fitzgerald’s commitment to the American Dream for those who have studied his career is represented by two interrelated facts: first, he survived as a freelance writer; second, he built his career as the years went along to finance his mentally ill wife and provide his daughter with a first-rate education. Although Fitzgerald lived an exulted life in the early years, no one should overlook the hardship of the second half, particularly given his family responsibilities. “We should not forget that the publishing industry is a classic form of capitalism . . . a variety of gambling,” explains noted literature scholar James L. W. West III. “For the first half of his career, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a good horse to bet on; the only problem was that there weren’t all that many ways to wager.”[13]
Let’s be completely honest in our assessment, some part of Gatsby’s success as a classroom text is its length. American high school teachers and university faculty appreciated the combination of thematic power, lyrical writing, and its novella-like dimensions. Based on practicality, Fitzgerald’s novel could easily fit within a section or portion of a marking period or semester, thus providing teachers and instructors broad flexibility in using it as a required or secondary text. This ability, though hampered in today’s standards-driven K–12 education environment, has provided generations of teachers a text that is both enjoyable reading and manageable within the grading period.
Yet, in stark contrast to its diminutive size, Fitzgerald’s novel is overflowing with ideas and concepts that (again) make it almost perfect in a high school or college course. Simply put, there are not more than a handful of novels in the history of the English language that can be ably taught to ninth graders and advanced graduate students. The ubiquity of Gatsby, then, virtually guarantees its lasting impact on American culture and society. It is an übertext, one basically universal across age groups and the broader popular culture.
Writers provide readers with guideposts that help one understand what it is to navigate life’s uncertainties. Without literature, our quest for self-fulfillment or the American Dream not only is lonelier but also contains greater ambiguity. Great works, according to William Mark Roche, enable students to become lifelong learners. He explains, “Ideally, students are brought to the point where they learn not only an interpretation of a given work, but—far more important—also the strategies they must employ to interpret works as yet unread.”[14] When this synergy takes place, he comments, student and teacher/critic become one another’s “partner in conversation.”[15]
Literature, according to scholar Frank B. Farrell, “maintains a strong and fertile tension between its world-directed functions, in which it is bringing some truth of the world into view, and the internal functions through which its elements achieve a complex, self-maintaining order and connectedness, an aesthetic rightness.”[16] If one accepts Farrell’s conclusion, then the joy of reading Gatsby is intimately linked to it being used as a part of curricula now and in the future.
Teachers use Gatsby as a guide for addressing central themes and issues with their students. They also employ the novel as a guide for how one should aspire to write. Critic Clive James calls the author’s prose style “ravishing.” Further examination of that poetic nature, he believes, demonstrates the connection between Fitzgerald as a novelist and person, a mix of “anguish with its enchantment. . . . He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man.”[17]
It is fitting that John Updike, a writer often mentioned in the same breath as Fitzgerald for his luminous style, offers uncanny insight into Gatsby’s staying power, and thus, why readers will continue to value the novel:
The novel’s significant elements—Gatsby’s shimmering parties, the Buchanans’ opulently chaste household, the wilderness of ash heaps where Dr. Eckleburg’s giant eyes preside, the overripe torpidity of summer Manhattan, Wolfsheim and his world of crime, Tom and his burly wealth, the downtrodden and violent Wilsons, the apparition of pathetic Henry Gatz at the end—are carried to the point of caricature but with the reward of a penetrating vividness . . . as bright and plausibly implausible as a movie.[18]
Fitzgerald’s near-perfect depiction of Tom is one of the aspects of the novel that creates an enduring link between the book and contemporary America. As readers, we can identify with the portrayal of a rich man’s extravagance and his insistence of personal self-righteousness, despite wrongheaded thinking on just about every account, whether it is how the family should be structured, race, or morality.
As a matter of fact, one could argue that we expect this kind of irrationality from those in positions of power, particularly when they do not have to account for their authority or they surround themselves with lackeys that serve to insulate them from reality. As scholar Jonathan P. Fegley explains, “More Machiavellian than Platonic, Tom regards himself as the last standard-bearer of both Western civilization and the American family even as he engages in an adulterous affair with the wife of a garage mechanic he sees as being beneath any regard.”[19]
When Tom lashes out at Myrtle after a long day and night of drinking and partying, Fitzgerald shows the violence that can erupt between the classes. He strikes his mistress in a fit of rage and does not have to take responsibility for the pain he delivers because he controls the entire faux environment via his bankroll. Representing inherited wealth and the white race, Tom uses his hard body as a cruel lever to keep those beneath his contempt in their places. And, when that fails, as it does on that last fateful afternoon with George Wilson, Tom outsmarts the lesser man, deliberately pointing him to Gatsby in West Egg. He has no remorse for the act that later takes place.
Many corporate chief executive officers are a modern manifestation of the sanctimoniousness Fitzgerald embodies in Tom Buchanan. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Chris Hedges draws parallels between this kind of self-congratulating narrative and its consequences across culture, explaining:
Sadism dominates culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective.[20]
Moreover, Tom’s brand of elitism—equating wealth with the ability to discern the essence or truth at the heart of any issue or topic—drives modern political and business narratives. There is only opposition in this environment, a basic “us” versus “them” setting that eliminates common ground. One sees this mode of thinking unfold in any number of venues, from the way advertisers market “organic” or “natural” foods to the political battles over scientific issues like global warming and theories of evolution.
Another central facet is that the harsh, realistic portrayal of the wealthy and the ends they will go to retain their status remains significant in class relations today. Tom and Daisy, according to scholar David Minter, “have been born into that world and have no intention of relinquishing their hold on it.”[21] In their eyes, no boundaries or limitations exist when it comes to protecting their sacred wealth, or as Minter explains, “The very rich of the twenties were set apart by their determination to claim as their own the rights of casual indifference to the consequences of their action . . . they became expert in protecting themselves from the competition of those who tried it.”[22] Certainly, Fitzgerald sensed the deep schism wealth caused in his own time. His astute writing on the subject, then, gains power in its relevancy for generations of readers.
In a short piece published prior to the release of the 2013 remake of Gatsby, Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio admitted to not connecting with the novel while in high school. He explains, “It was a world I didn’t quite understand, had never been exposed to and didn’t connect with.” In preparing to star as the famous character, however, the actor read it about twenty-five times over four years. After rethinking the book, he noted that it is “quite beautiful and tragic at the same time” and that he found “a direct correlation between Gatsby and America today and the financial crisis we’re now going through.”[23] Although not typical, DiCaprio’s use of the novel to spark his own creativity demonstrates its importance.
DiCaprio’s experience with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece over time is enlightening and might provide clues to how the novel is resituated within popular culture and academic studies on the heels of the Baz Luhrmann–directed film. If the film is as popular over the long run as critics and audiences expect, then the film and novel will work together, creating a kind of collaborative connection in which the success of one drives the other and vice versa. For instance, what high school or college student won’t see the film on DVD or online rental when the novel is used in the classroom? Just like the book driving sales of CliffsNotes versions for shortcutting the actual reading, the film will open an entirely new audience to the topics it weighs.
The changes Luhrmann and the actors made while filming might launch a new avenue of study for teachers who hope to engage their students. According to the director, with DiCaprio as lead, “Gatsby moves from being the most charismatic, charming and attractive man to someone who is obsessive, dark and complex.”[24] One does not have to hold a doctorate in English to see how this change in the film stands apart from what resides on the pages of Fitzgerald’s novel.
For a more dramatic example of the transformation from page to screen, one can look to the scene where Gatsby confronts Tom Buchanan in the suite at the Plaza Hotel. Via Luhrmann and DiCaprio, Gatsby lunges at the man, grabbing him by the shirt with both hands, and then cocking his fist and shouting in his face in anger. Gatsby, here, loses control and is filled with rage. Fitzgerald’s version, in contrast, has Gatsby virtually speechless as he realizes that his dream is destroyed. Tom’s victory over the man leaves Daisy shaken, which leads to her driving the car that will eventually kill Myrtle Wilson and ultimately Gatsby, too. It is arguably the penultimate scene in the novel, but is not violent. One can already hear the debates taking place in classrooms across the nation regarding this scene, attempting to determine which is stronger and more appropriate, which may just speak to the age each was produced in more than anything else.
DiCaprio’s ability to link the 1920s with today’s economic challenges also indicates the novel’s timelessness and use as a way of interpreting the present day. Certainly, the over-the-top depiction of Gatsby’s life in the new film is going to cause many viewers to think about similar stories they have heard about rich businessmen and celebrities in the new millennium, whether the young millionaires in the technology sector or the old-school titans at the head of venture capital firms or investment banking units.
The simple fact that one of the central themes in Gatsby revolves around wealth and the place of money in one’s life adds to the novel’s legacy for later generations. Gatsby holds immaculate parties in a cavernous mansion filled with celebrities, endless supplies of food and alcohol (in the midst of Prohibition), and riotous music and dancing. He does so in hopes that Daisy will wander by and marvel at the spectacle. She and Tom, however, are ensconced in their own modern-day castle across the bay. He is off riding horses or gallivanting in New York City with his mistress, while she is cooped up, wondering exactly what it is people do with their free time, what it is that they plan.
Since the novel basically pits two megarich white men against one another in a struggle over a woman, who while beautiful, does not seem all that attractive as a person, some contemporary readers might wonder why anyone necessarily cares in today’s world. William Voegeli answers the call, centering the power of the book on this morality play in Nick’s mind, explaining, “The moral drama of The Great Gatsby involves coming to our own judgment about why Gatsby is fundamentally admirable for Nick, while Tom is fundamentally contemptible.”[25] Fitzgerald’s ability to keep the reader interested is important when looking at the issue, since both men have bad sides, ranging from adultery to law breaking, and ultimately both prove to be liars and manipulators of the first order.
The idea of why we care as individual readers and as a nation is a kind of mixture of these many threads, running from our love affair with nostalgia and depictions of the past through our fascination with wealth and power to the ambiguity about the title character as he pursues a warped American Dream. The great Alfred Kazin is one of the few literary critics bold enough to attempt to define the novel’s power over contemporary readers. In Fitzgerald’s writing, he sees “a moment’s intimation and penetration; and as Gatsby’s disillusion becomes felt at the end, it strikes like a chime through the mind.”[26] What Gatsby does for us as readers is to present situations that we can understand and relate to, regardless of the era we inhabit. As a result, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is not diminished by time, but instead, empowered by its lasting vitality and appeal to the ideas and tenets that reside at the heart of what it means to be human.
Historian Jim Cullen finds that Gatsby is powered by Fitzgerald’s sophisticated understanding of these factors as they express themselves in the American Dream: “What makes the American Dream American is not that our dreams are any better, worse, or more interesting than anyone else’s, but that we live in a country constituted of dreams, whose very justification continues to rest on it being a place where one can, for better and worse, pursue distant goals.”[27] Although no literary critic, DiCaprio pointed to the fiber of Gatsby that we can all attach to, that sense of beauty and tragedy that not only makes the novel important, but for many people marks life itself.
***
The Great Gatsby represents a kind of magic—no matter how many times it is read, the reader uncovers, discovers, or is led to some new image, thought, or understanding. According to historian Cullen, Fitzgerald’s ideas about duality fuel the novel’s staying power as a tool for developing critical-thinking skills and understanding the American Dream on a deeper level:
The problem with the American Dream . . . is not exactly that it’s corrupt or vain. Indeed, the great paradox of The Great Gatsby is that even as Gatsby pursues his dream through instruments of fraud and adultery there is a deeply compelling purity about his ambition, especially given the smug pieties of those around him . . . any American Dream is finally too incomplete a vessel to contain longings that elude human expression or comprehension.[28]
The book’s enduring brilliance, then, is in Fitzgerald’s ability to pack all of America and the American Dream as its unifying ideology in this slim volume, as if each new visit bequeaths a shiny new additional prize. In this light, the novel is more like the greatest movie ever filmed because it never fails to astonish or seem as fresh as when one first cracked the spine.
What remains to be seen is whether the new film propels Gatsby back into the national consciousness for more than a veritable nanosecond in the great American hype machine of marketing, publicity, and advertising that we realize serves the popular culture engine in the Internet era. This is the blockbuster age, for goodness’ sake, so the blip that the movie causes as it ripples through the Twitterverse and Google search algorithms may peak and fall pretty quickly, whether it is ultimately judged a flop or a global hit.
If one thinks back to the hype surrounding the slew of big-ticket movies that turned
into megablockbusters, say, any of the recent super-
hero flicks, such as The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises, the narrative arc of prerelease marketing, launch, postrelease gross revenue expectation,
which is later revived briefly for DVD/Blu-ray sale and then award season/possibly
Academy Award nomination, defines the lifeline of most films. This cycle happens so
quickly in the technology age that it flits within the wider canvas of life, taking
up a moment’s notice before it slips off the screen forever.
As a culture connoisseur, John Updike realized the way film bested the page, which must have been a crushing conclusion for a writer whose best work never received good movie treatment. He explains, “Even a very lame movie tends to crush a book. When I try to think of The Great Gatsby, I get Robert Redford in a white suit . . . Mia Farrow in a floppy pastel hat, or Alan Ladd floating dead in an endless swimming pool, before I recover, via Fitzgerald’s delicate phrasing . . . the hair in the gangster Wolfsheim’s nostrils.”[29] The validity of Updike’s feeling is being played out with the new film version of Gatsby, which will probably result in Leonardo DiCaprio replacing Redford as the vision of the character in the mind’s eye of generations of new and future readers.
Since the film has already done well in the U.S. market, streaking past the $100 million mark after two weeks, one might also consider if the movie’s greater long-term consequence will be in how it is used in conjunction with the novel as a teaching tool. Also, its global bearing might also be of great interest, since the nations around the world who have bought into the Gatsby craze may use the film as a barometer of assessing the United States.
Yet, from one perspective, it would be great if the film generates new and interesting questions about the nation and the American Dream. According to Roche, the power of a novel like Gatsby resides in the queries that are generated as a result of reading. He explains, “If literature and literary criticism are no longer anchored in the idea that the object of interpretation and evaluation is to garner a window onto an ideal sphere, why should we continue the enterprise?”[30] Deep in my gut, I know that Fitzgerald’s novels and many others matter as readers continue the journey toward greater understanding of themselves and society.
Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel is a biography of The Great Gatsby that examines how Fitzgerald’s slim work grew in both critical stature and sales to become one of the most significant achievements in twentieth-century fiction. More importantly, I introduce the idea of meta-Gatsby, the manifestation of its enduring influence, which demonstrates—in part—why I feel that the book is the Great American Novel. My hope is that by reading this book, others will better comprehend what makes Gatsby great and, more importantly, how the novel helps us make sense of our own lives and times.
Ray B. Browne, “Folk Cultures and the Humanities,” in Rejuvenating the Humanities, ed. Ray B. Browne and Marshall Fishwick (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), 24.
Ray B. Browne, “Redefining the Humanities,” in Eye on the Future: Popular Culture Scholarship into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marilyn F. Motz et al. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 249.
Richard M. Dorson, ed. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21.
Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 174.
William Voegeli, “Gatsby and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Claremont Review of Books, 2003, 71.
Thomas C. Foster, Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America (New York: Harper, 2011), 146.
Foster, Twenty-Five Books, 146.
Alfred Kazin and Ted Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 122.
Kazin and Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America, 122.
Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 185.
Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 82.
Malcolm Cowley, “Dear Scottie, Zelda and Max,” review of The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull, New York Times, October 20, 1963, 272.
James L. W. West III, “Fitzgerald’s Posthumous Literary Career,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 28 (1997): 95.
Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 258.
Roche, Why Literature Matters, 258.
Frank B. Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 19.
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: Norton, 2007), 219.
John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (New York: Random House, 1999), 547.
Jonathan P. Fegley, “‘If I Couldn’t Be Perfect I Wouldn’t Be Anything’: Teaching Becoming and Being in The Great Gatsby,” in Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 130.
Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009), 92.
David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114.
Minter, Cultural History, 114.
Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Great American Dreamer,” MailOnline (U.K.), April 20, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2311016/The-Great-Gatsby-Has-Moulin-Rouge-director-Baz-Luhrmann-created-starriest-glitziest-Greatest-Gatsby-all.html?ito=feeds-newsxml (accessed April 21, 2013).
Quoted in Andrew Wilson, “Has the Moulin Rouge Director Created the Starriest, Glitziest, Greatest Gatsby of All?” MailOnline (U.K.), April 20, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2311016/The-Great-Gatsby-Has-Moulin-Rouge-director-Baz-Luhrmann-created-starriest-glitziest-Greatest-Gatsby-all.html?ito=feeds-newsxml (accessed April 21, 2013).
Voegeli, “Gatsby,” 70.
Kazin and Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America, 122.
Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 182.
Cullen, The American Dream, 182.
John Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1991), 37.
Roche, Why Literature Matters, 259.