Kill Your Idols: "The Great Gatsby"

Fiction seems littered with authors uncomfortable in their contemporary culture, expressing kind of an existential angst that flows from examining life so closely, I think. With Fitzgerald it seems more a prescient feeling of something amiss, an emptiness, rather than any clear insight. Norman Mailer was similar in that respect, I think. Uncomfortable but unsure. A few years before Gatsby, Sinclair Lewis, however, had been much more sure-footed, if less nuanced, with his social critique in Babbitt. More recently, Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Man in Full speak from a much more morally authoritative point of view.

Generally, I like my contemporary social commentary as an exploration or examination more than I like it served up to me as a moral absolute.

 

Like Bubbler, I read this one time -- in my high school American Lit class -- and was bored with it. Without looking it up, the only detail I seem to remember is a car chase or car ride and somebody dying.

Sorry, folks.

However, I do like the "Kill Your Idols" reference, Dick. That's a great book by Jim DeRogatis -- hilarious reading if you like rock.

But yeah, I might not have dug DeRogatis as much in high school.

 

No discussion of Gatsby is complete without first playing this alleged lost Nintendo game from Japan

http://greatgatsbygame.com/

 

Trailer for the upcoming movie:

 

Not bad, but certainly not a lost game. It came out in 2011 as a web-based simulation of an NES game.

 

True...I was referring to the story that some guy found it in a garage sale and converted it.

 

I'd agree with your last paragraph there, wholly. I've never thought well of Fitzgerald the man; he strikes me as someone more or less in the midst of things, incredibly insightful but personally deaf to his own insight, a nervous gossip, the smartest child in the room grown old, who used the grown-up addiction of alcohol to address the various shambles in his life. He reminds me of Lily Bart, actually, from The House of Mirth. She had a kind of integrity about her, but she was ultimately a fool in the social community. Wharton was the social critic, or Dreiser, Sinclair, others.

Fitzgerald the writer was great plotter, though, who knew how to set a scene, populate that scene, and move around it setting up various intrigues. He introduces the proverbial gun, the gun satisfactorily goes off, and there's a toss off line of wit or insight in there to boot. His books are actually, honest-to-God poignant in an "oh, shit, that's telling" kind of way.

 

This nails it, and I've been meaning to talk about this at some point on the thread. He drops insightful sentences about human nature the way that I drop a Skittle out of a bag by accident. So seamless and seemingly effortless. I'll dig up some examples in a while, because my copy is full of highlights and margin notes about this kind of thing, but at least every four or five pages, he stops you in your tracks with a line that makes you say, "That's it! That's exactly it!"

The man, honestly, did not write awkward sentences. Almost every single one is pristine. It's why Jonathan Franzen will never be F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

This is one of the problems with issue-driven, tunnel-vision schools of criticism.
All of the characters are bad people, regardless of sex. Why does it make you uncomfortable that the women are bad people if you realize the larger context: everyone in the novel is a bad person.
I guess Nick is the exception.

Why would you consider it as a possible comment on women given the larger context of the novel?

 

Because the women are like walking stereotypes of the parade of horribles potentially brought on by women's suffrage and other newfound freedoms. Example: Daisy treating her child as a trinket, and nothing else. Women's liberation makes women into terrible mothers!

But your point is well-taken. The men are bad people in the novel, as well, and, other than the time it was written in and perhaps some very faint subtext, there is nothing in the novel that explicitly ties society's difficulties to the women's liberation movement.

 

That's my point. And it's not meant as an attack on you but on agenda-driven literary criticism.

 

Hell, attack away. These threads are meant to be wannabe graduate school classrooms.

Ultimately, I probably end up dropping the feminist critique, mostly because of the points you raise. But I thought it was worth at least exploring.