Living in Gatsby’s world We’re still fixated on self-creation

The study hall in my high school was a large open area with beige desks lined in a row. Fluorescent lights dumbly hummed over the linoleum floors and trapped me in between. I mostly put my head on the desk, but occasionally, I’d read for pleasure, and one clear memory amidst the wasted days sticks out: reading The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of American opulence, nostalgia, and the dream of self-determination, which turns 100 years old today.

It’s not the act of reading I remember so much as an image and a feeling: a bald history teacher, who had seen me wearing an Anti-Flag T-shirt some weeks earlier and had since tried to become “buddy buddy” with me, now standing above me, looking down. I had the novel on my desk.

“Gatsby?”

I looked up: “Huh?” 

“That novel has the best opening paragraph in all of American literature.”

I wanted him to go away.

“In my younger…”, he began, looming over me, looking directly at me.

I was dismayed. What was happening? At first, when he got to the phrase “my father gave me some advice”, I thought that he was telling me about his own father, but as he continued, I realised that he was, in fact, quoting the aforementioned “best opening paragraph in all of American literature” from memory. I nodded, and he explained to me how important the concept of privilege was.

Gatsby lives on in the American consciousness in precisely this way: it is a high-school novel; a novel one is forced to read at a time in one’s life when one cares more about literally everything in the world other than classwork; and a novel one remembers very little of. It’s a novel about the terror of nostalgic longing, and the American Dream — the romantic delusion that you can become whoever you want, through sheer force of will — but it masks itself in our collective memory as a high-school meme.

My friend Kevin, who teaches high school in Dallas, has his students spend 10 minutes at the outset of each class reading silently. He gives them a list of books they can choose from, and he tells me that all the girls pick Gatsby. It’s nice to know that somewhere in at least one American high school, students are still reading novels. Kevin and I have an ongoing riff, based on a conversation he’d overheard between two students on the day of a quiz, during which one student asked another what The Great Gatsby was all about, and the student replied, “it’s about this guy named Big Joe Gatsby”.

Over the phone, we concocted a scheme: he would ask his 12th-graders to write answers to the question: “How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t read it?” Here are some of the answers:

“Gatsby is an interesting book with a rich + mysterious theme to it involving mostly Gatsby in that category.” “I would describe Gatsby as one guy crashing out and yearning for a married woman over 100 pages.” “This book is about wealth in society, new money and old money.” 

Others identified the feeling of regret: “The Great Gatsby is a book full of the idea of ‘but what if they had just done this?’ As you read [it], you constantly find yourself in the position of asking, ‘But it’s so simple, just do it’.”

Each of these contains hints of the double-motion of Gatsby in America: a hazy intuition of the classic American fascinations — wealth, envy, complicated romantic entanglement — and a barely literate initial engagement that degrades them over time into their simplest, most flippant form.  

In 2013, two years after I graduated high school, a new major motion picture version of The Great Gatsby showed at the theatre in my hometown in Ohio. It was the first movie I knew of that had 3D effects. I took pills and went to see it: something with the water — green light — wealth — romance; I remember money flying out of the screen into my eyes. The experience felt profoundly a-literary but also profoundly American — Gatsby no longer as novel, but as parodic, garish gluttony; seductive displays of wealth and a “conversation about privilege”.

In a culture oversaturated with discussions about privilege, some of the more obvious social “insights” of the novel fall flat today, but there are moments of phenomenological acuity, psychological precision, and descriptive defamiliarisation — making the familiar strange to reveal it anew. These work to create a compelling portrait not so much of a country warped by wealth, but of a man possessed by nostalgia, and the dream of making and remaking himself.

Jay Gatsby is nostalgic in a limerent, romantic way; he builds wealth, constructs his own identity, and turns his life into a performance for a memory. But when the fantasy becomes reality, in the face of Daisy, it crumbles. The real breaks through the dream, and Gatsby cracks.

Formally, the novel is less boring than I’d expected when I reread it recently. It produces textual nostalgia in the reader through its formal structure: Nick Carraway tells the story from the future, wistfully looking back on the time of the novel. Thus, as the scholar Niklas Salmose has noted, the reader experiences a kind of phenomenological nostalgia as he reads, which is part of the novel’s genius.

Like America, Gatsby is, in the words of the critic Gautam Kundu, “made gorgeous by the magic touch of a romantic imagination that nevertheless moves inexorably toward eventual disintegration and dissolution”; and yet we can’t help but be emotionally drawn into it, even as we stand at a semi-distance and watch with horror.

Still, cultured people’s relationship with the novel borders on ironic, which is understandable. In 2014, my friend Adam Humphreys, a filmmaker, directed a six-minute film titled Baseball that also centres around a recitation of the first paragraph of Gatsby from memory. The protagonist, played by novelist Zachary German, is having an affair while his girlfriend is out of town. He is at his mistress’s apartment when his girlfriend calls and asks him to read the beginning of Gatsby, which she’d left on the bedside table — “Read from the beginning,” she commands him. “The part you always say.” After fumbling around at his mistress’s bookshelf, he can’t find a copy of Gatsby, so he stands upright and tries to recite it, pretending to read.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” he begins, “my father offered me some advice that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since.” The camera switches from the mistress’s apartment to his girlfriend. “He told me there would be times in life when I would feel compelled to judge the actions of those around me, but that I should always remember that not everyone has had all of the advantages that I have had.”

He takes a long pause; his girlfriend starts silently crying. “He told me that human goodness was not distributed equally, and that it would be unfair to act as though the alternative was true.” The camera pans to Singaporean baseball on TV. “This, giving the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man, has led me to a number of worthwhile moments.”

Today, I searched “Gatsby” in my Gmail inbox, and found: an interview with me that never came out, from 2013, in which the interviewer says that his roommate read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love after “having not read any fiction since The Great Gatsby when we were 16”; nine unopened emails from a rare bookseller; the word “Gatsby” in the Substack of a person whose name I don’t recognise and which I don’t remember subscribing to; The Great Gatsby on a list of Michael Clune’s “25 best American novels”; an email I forwarded to my now-dead friend Russell, who used to write college papers for a now-dead guy named Lucas, who I vaguely knew from Twitter, and for whom I edited the papers in 2015, for money; a screenshot of a one-star review of an apartment building called “Gatsby on Ross”, which ends, “The real Gatsby would be ashamed and horrified”.

“The real Gatsby” made me smile: Gatsby, the commodified literary object; Gatsby, clichéd symbol of wealth; Gatsby, phantom high-school impression; Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio; Gatsby, like all things in America, reduced to two opposites, always in tension with each other but unified in destroying every part of the culture they touch — worship of money and conversations about privilege; Gatsby, Big Joe Gatsby. The Gatsby we forget is the Gatsby we should most remember: a man possessed by a fantasy or fixation because his life has become devoid of spiritual significance.

It’s been 100 years since the novel came out. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Reading the novel today produces, at least for me, a slightly unrelated nostalgia for a time when American literature was more serious and more ambitious. But Gatsby also offers a timely exhortation to those who, giving into this nostalgia, wish to return to a past mode: nostalgic yearning is disguised, impotent pride. Many remain crippled by a kind of longing for an idealised past that never really existed, one that was empty in much the same way as the present, as an excuse for living impotently within the nothingness of modernity.

The Great Gatsby was a failure when it came out, but it is still worth reading a century hence. Its bleak, cynical view of self-determination was unpalatable to American readers then, and, as evidenced by the way culture has preserved it as a butchered meme, may still be unpalatable now. But it feels eerily relevant to today. May it become more than a nostalgic memory.

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Jordan Castro is the author of The Novelist.

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