the great gatsby (f scott fitzgerald)

Did I appreciate the quality of the writing when I first read Gatsby? When did I first read Gatsby? Who knows. A readily digestible classic, no doubt it is read by many who are, as I was, too young and gauche to really appreciate what the writer is up to. We sense that authorial brilliance, without in any way processing it, caught up as we are in images of shirts, parties and an apparently neo-romantic narrative which isn’t actually very romantic at all. 

The danger of creating myths is that the myths out-run the authorial intention. Of course, storytellers are in the business of creating myths. Myths convey immortality, on the characters and their parent, the author. Some writers write for money, but others write in order to join the pantheon of myth makers, their eye on the aftermath, rather than today’s battle. It’s the curious nature of the art of writing that it’s greatest rewards are to be found in a post-materialist state, also known as death. Perhaps the same might be said of saints and terrorists, but posthumous vocations are few and far between, and the exhaustive, passive process of writing has none of the temporal heroism enjoyed by the saint or the terrorist. 

Fitzgerald succeeded in joining this pantheon, above all with his creation of Gatsby, a riddle enshrined in an enigma discovered on the sole of Nick Carraway’s shoe. Gatsby is a bootlegger, a fake, a loser. He is also, briefly, incredibly wealthy, and a man whose dubious taste is redeemed by his indifference, and the fact his bad taste is, in the true American style, a bigger, brasher bad taste than anyone else’s. Under the cloak of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose, the dubious taste of his character morphs into a kind of apogee of everything the world ever aspired to, even though the author himself makes it abundantly clear that Gatsby’s aspiration is the only thing of any real value. The achievement of fame, fortune and a truckload of monogrammed shirts proves meaningless and empty. He even has Gatsby himself recognise this, with the unwitting playboy turning his back on his riches, which were only a means to woo the woman he fell for, a means to keep an unsustainable dream alive. 

All of which means that in the end, Gatsby is a paradoxical novel, famous for celebrating the things it is questioning. Those things being the cult of the individual, the rampant march of capital, the joys of conspicuous consumption. The cult of Gatsby is the cult of a myth, a man whose funeral no-one attends, a man whose reputation is trashed even as his coffin is being lowered into the grave. A soul who is trashed in the contemporary world of the novel, only to be redeemed, posthumously, by the sublime craft of his creator.