Is Gatsby 'Great'?

“By midnight the hilarity had increased.” It is relatively easy to dislike a Great American novel—whether out of disdain for everything remotely popular or American, or for the neurotic fixity with which critics dub a work ‘great’ and latch it with national prescience. Even today, one hundred years after its publication. 

Of course, the notion of the great national novel—and a notion is all it is—is a uniquely American invention. Whether we take French or Russian literature as examples, when we refer to ‘the greats’, we do so with less superlative language; we often speak in terms of novelists themselves and the greatness of their respective oeuvres. It has rightfully been dismissed as an infelicitous affair to superpose Anna Karenina as the ‘Great Russian novel’ or Sentimental Education as the ‘Great French novel’. The search for a singular in the American literary canon—one artefact in a diverse history of literary expression—is unique, certainly to the American degree. 

In fact, the connection between the American Dream and the Great American novel, as notions, reveals why such a thing as the Great American work of fiction does not exist. 

The vast majority of canonised classics in the American tradition, from Of Mice and Men to On the Road (i.e., the stuff taught in classrooms), are typically reduced to deconstructions of this hysterical frenzy called the American Dream, the inner mechanisms and contradictions of which, tragically, are beyond the scope of this article. Needless to say, this author is as cynical about them as the American novelists who penned its downfall throughout the Great American Century. The notion—which is what it is—of a national novel that successfully captures a national ethos is problematic for the same reason that extreme forms of nationalism are: the stuff that is left behind, dismissed, abandoned out of hand.

Unfortunately, canonisation always makes a fringe. It just so happens that — as time tells — art relegated to the fringes of the mainstream tends to be as good, if not better than the works originally exalted by the establishment. The notion of a national character, which ultimately capitalises on ideals of unity, consistency, homogeneity, etc., is a complete fiction: it doesn’t exist in any tangible way. National character, so to speak, is constantly in flux, never one and the same—so, novels supposedly microcosmic of the time and place of AMERICA (capitalised), then and there, are not regarded with the same relevance they once were. 

This is one reason why people don’t like The Great Gatsby anymore.

Gatsby has become irritatingly inescapable in the US national curriculum, more than anything out of tradition. And because it’s really, really thin. Personally, I have less qualms with the novel — and with the Fitzgeralds generally — since, as a Brit, I was never subjected to the patronising bilge of an AP English teacher spewing key quotes about decadence and national decline in the same classroom children are made to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily. There is something strangely grotesque about teaching Steinbeck, Morrison, and even Lost Generationers like Scott Fitzgerald in this pantomimic setting, where teachers are free to showcase ideological deception but must also deter students from developing meaningful opinions on the subject. I would even argue that such a setting discourages de facto engagement; adults relay stories of their disinterest in denser texts like Gatsby or A Streetcar Named Desire which they were forced to endure at the knowing age of fourteen, and relocating their importance in later life. A book like Gatsby is not shockingly dense whatsoever, but for a teenager with characteristically little interest in high modernism, the  literati of nostalgia, or the American Dream, it is. 

But this isn’t why the novel is so commonly derailed nowadays.

What seems to be the case — coming from a British undergrad who first read the novel only five years ago — is that Americans who study Gatsby in the classroom despise it the most, for the same reason I find objectively not-bad books and plays like Frankenstein and Romeo and Juliet insufferable, and then the general public appears to be vibrating away from it for other reasons. On a spurious deep dive into anti-Gatsby subReddits, the diagnosis revealed itself. People hate the characters—as they should—who are, for the most part, superficial and unchanging; they hate the anti-American substance—for less reactionary reasons than one might presume, overall conceding that Fitzgerald’s critiques actually don’t go far enough—and the overdone and indulgent theme of the American Dream. Need I state that Gatsby made this theme a convention? I certainly agree that the imagery and allusions are fairly obvious, which is perhaps why the novel is taught so widely at a high school level, whether that be the notorious green light, or Gatsby’s grin, or the associations of monopoly capitalism with religion, anticipating remarks by Hungarian critic Georgy Lukacs on market-worship. While I also respect most criticisms of Fitzgerald’s characterisation, especially of side characters, and the structural convenience he bakes into the final phase of the book’s plot, dismissing his writing as flawed because of the flaws of his characters is moronic. The novel is, no matter what the average American high schooler says, anything but boring. 

The late film critic Roger Ebert, who remains the only to have won a Pulitzer Prize, drew upon the famous final syntax of the novel when working; he revisited the novel frequently, but nothing so much as the closing words: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” You could accuse Ebert’s tastes of cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason. This novel invented several. In fact, it invented a type of narrative we often see regurgitated both beautifully (La Dolce Vita) and decidedly less so (Babylon), and anachronistically defines the way we conceive of the 1920s as a time. In many ways, it—as pointed out by Sarah Churchwell in her introduction to the Cambridge Centenary edition of the novel—relies on cliche and inherited imagery and stylistic operators, already anticipating the simulacral literature of postmodernity. Stephen Fry, who in the UK is practically famous for being well-read, has cited it as the best-written novel ever, in terms of prose; indeed, Fitzgerald’s prose style is what provides the reading experience with interest enough to obscure its narrative weaknesses. The prose tends to the novel’s flaws—which are swiftly forgotten by contemporary readers, like myself, who pick it up for pleasure rather than pedagogy. 

What is clear to me is that the novel certainly isn’t bad or boring. Perhaps it is not ‘great’, nor is it the Great American Novel of today, or even the post-war period when Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Thomas Wolfe were publishing to less commercial reception than Fitzgerald. 

Perhaps it is not the Great American Novel as teachers are instructed to preface it as—but why should that matter?

Image from Wikimedia Commons