Gatsby, A Bleak Outlook, and Unwarranted Optimism
In Maxine Hong Kingston's novel China Men, she mentions that Chinese immigrants called California "The Gold Mountain." (She also wrote a novel called The Woman Warrior which touches on Fa Mulan.) The thought was, to oversimplify, that one need only endure the trip to California, walk a bit, pick up a pocketful of gold nuggets, and be rich. The effort--the TRANSFORMATIVE effort--would be rewarded. There are many such immigrant narratives, and a few of them actually started to approach reality in a few generations. All of them, coupled with all of those Puritan and Romantic ideas bandied about for a few centuries, culminated in what has come loosely to be known as "the American Dream."
A little research into the phrase "American Dream" leads to this quotation from James Truslow Adams, written in 1931:
But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position... The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.
Before we went on a well earned break, I asked the American Literature classes to write an essay on Modernism and the symbols introduced at the beginning of chapter two of The Great Gatsby. Like most assignments you receive, particularly from me, it was a bit unfair. "Modernism" is a very complex concept and attaching meaning to symbols is a dicey enterprise at best. In successive blogs, posts, and zoom conferences I boiled the who thing down to the essence. While ten Modernists would define Modernism in at least twelve different ways, the intersecting Venn diagrams would all contain God is Dead and Life is Meaningless. The symbols--isolated in the text in a way which emphasizes them, following on the heals of Gatsby's plaintive reach towards the green light across the sound and crowding into Nick's debauched trip into the city of New York--are of a Valley of Ashes and the Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. I asked you to see the spiritual side of things, as we are wont to do in American Lit, indeed, in the preponderance of classes in this discipline. Were we in class, I would have drawn on the board, made charts and outlines, perhaps even sung some Dead Kennedys lyrics. You were stuck with a blog and a question.
Many of you, literally and figuratively, sought a spark: a spark of thought in Spark Notes.
You KNOW I approve of Spark Notes. (Please don't tell any of the other teachers. They would chide me.) They ARE helpful. Often, if we have some clue as to what is actually happening in a passage we can spend more time exploring the depth of it--which is what we all want to do.
But there are limits to Spark Notes.
They are written by English scholars at Ivy League institutions. It's cool to be an English scholar. It's cool to be an Ivy Leaguer. But you need to remember that the writers are just a few years older than you are and are reflections of their teachers.
You were smart, many of you, and consulted the essay which was most closely associated with the concepts I asked you to discuss. And you did a good job with the material, such as it is.
I will go ahead and say it, though: I have always had a hard time thinking about Fitzgerald's magnum opus as a critique on the American Dream, especially since the phrase itself was coined about a decade after the novel was written and Fitzgerald himself was a rich and privileged white guy who ran exclusively in circles populated by rich white guys.
But YOU sparked MY thoughts, and that's a happy benefit of this time of isolation.
Fitzgerald was, indeed, as I have said, a privileged white guy, but I have been perhaps too harsh on him. He is also sensitive and he has suffered loss. He sees, as many of you indicated, the ultimate meaninglessness of the great wealth around him, how all is dust, all is ash. In that way, the novel "as a critique on the American dream" intersects with the novel "as expressing the basic tenets of Modernism."
If you think back the Twain documentary we watched as 2020 was young, you may remember the words of one of the scholars featured. To paraphrase, the two dominant issues in American culture have always been "race and space." There's not much "race" in this novel--though I may point out a few passages which are quite telling. The novel ends (and, oh, what a beautiful, sublime ending it is) with a musing on space which seems only tangentially attached to the rest of the novel. It has its roots in the paragraphs we've focused on, though. America offers transformative space. Gatsby proves that a person can will himself or herself to become anything he or she can imagine. This is the myth and the dream. But is there meaning?
A little research into the phrase "American Dream" leads to this quotation from James Truslow Adams, written in 1931:
But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position... The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.
Before we went on a well earned break, I asked the American Literature classes to write an essay on Modernism and the symbols introduced at the beginning of chapter two of The Great Gatsby. Like most assignments you receive, particularly from me, it was a bit unfair. "Modernism" is a very complex concept and attaching meaning to symbols is a dicey enterprise at best. In successive blogs, posts, and zoom conferences I boiled the who thing down to the essence. While ten Modernists would define Modernism in at least twelve different ways, the intersecting Venn diagrams would all contain God is Dead and Life is Meaningless. The symbols--isolated in the text in a way which emphasizes them, following on the heals of Gatsby's plaintive reach towards the green light across the sound and crowding into Nick's debauched trip into the city of New York--are of a Valley of Ashes and the Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. I asked you to see the spiritual side of things, as we are wont to do in American Lit, indeed, in the preponderance of classes in this discipline. Were we in class, I would have drawn on the board, made charts and outlines, perhaps even sung some Dead Kennedys lyrics. You were stuck with a blog and a question.
Many of you, literally and figuratively, sought a spark: a spark of thought in Spark Notes.
You KNOW I approve of Spark Notes. (Please don't tell any of the other teachers. They would chide me.) They ARE helpful. Often, if we have some clue as to what is actually happening in a passage we can spend more time exploring the depth of it--which is what we all want to do.
But there are limits to Spark Notes.
They are written by English scholars at Ivy League institutions. It's cool to be an English scholar. It's cool to be an Ivy Leaguer. But you need to remember that the writers are just a few years older than you are and are reflections of their teachers.
You were smart, many of you, and consulted the essay which was most closely associated with the concepts I asked you to discuss. And you did a good job with the material, such as it is.
I will go ahead and say it, though: I have always had a hard time thinking about Fitzgerald's magnum opus as a critique on the American Dream, especially since the phrase itself was coined about a decade after the novel was written and Fitzgerald himself was a rich and privileged white guy who ran exclusively in circles populated by rich white guys.
But YOU sparked MY thoughts, and that's a happy benefit of this time of isolation.
Fitzgerald was, indeed, as I have said, a privileged white guy, but I have been perhaps too harsh on him. He is also sensitive and he has suffered loss. He sees, as many of you indicated, the ultimate meaninglessness of the great wealth around him, how all is dust, all is ash. In that way, the novel "as a critique on the American dream" intersects with the novel "as expressing the basic tenets of Modernism."
If you think back the Twain documentary we watched as 2020 was young, you may remember the words of one of the scholars featured. To paraphrase, the two dominant issues in American culture have always been "race and space." There's not much "race" in this novel--though I may point out a few passages which are quite telling. The novel ends (and, oh, what a beautiful, sublime ending it is) with a musing on space which seems only tangentially attached to the rest of the novel. It has its roots in the paragraphs we've focused on, though. America offers transformative space. Gatsby proves that a person can will himself or herself to become anything he or she can imagine. This is the myth and the dream. But is there meaning?
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