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| 1921
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it was amazing
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I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golde
I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golden timepiece that counts the heartbeats of life with impeccable precision to reveal the intricate innards of gears that must be adjusted to nearly impossible standards, the best classic stories make every word count, every word ricochet off each other towards an amalgamated effect of themes and ideas that make the small collections of words resonate far beyond the sum of their parts. And, like a cartoon watch, accurately assess the heartbeats of life. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party is such a story. Based on her own extravagant childhood home in Wellington, New Zealand, The Garden Party juxtaposes the frivolities and festivities of wealthy society with the harsh realism of death and destitution as symbolized in the poorer families living just outside the Sheridan’s garden gates. With a bold examination of class consciousness and a sharp critique of upper class snobbishness where their extravagant gates secure them from needing to feel empathy as much as securing their property, The Garden Party is an extraordinary piece that brilliantly balances the darkness and light of life into its tiny package of prose. Having recently finished Ali Smith’s Spring in which Katherine Mansfield figures prominently, with Smith having also provided an introduction to her collected stories, I was eager to give Mansfield a read. I’d long been fascinated by her tumultuous friendship and rivalry with Virginia Woolf and while Woolf may have said Mansfield ‘stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,’ she also admitted ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ As we plunge into the warm, idyllic days of summer, what better story to try than one which begins ‘And after all the weather was ideal.’ This is a powerhouse of a short story that lulls you into its depiction of warm, slow joy amidst the happy anticipation of a garden party before it abruptly bashes you into a wall of death and the cold insensitivity of the wealthy for the lower classes. The story places us alongside Laura as she navigates the day, from her empathy and idolization of the working class aiding in the set-up of the party to her confronting her own family about the crassness of holding a party so near a grieving family and later visiting the house containing the dead man to offer sweets and condolences. The latter section reminded me a bit of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel Little Women with the sisters sharing their Christmas meal with the impoverished family down the road, which is likely an inspiration for Mansfield as the other Sheridan siblings, Jose, Meg and Laurie, share names with Alcott’s characters. ‘If you're going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life.’ There is a sharp juxtaposition between classes present here, though Mansfield does well to remind us that distinctions are merely constructs enforced in order to oppress and depress those who do not hold power in order to retain control of it. While the happenings around the party are a celebration of beauty and life, we see how death is always creeping in and the two cannot be truly separated. Mr. Scott dies just outside the gate when thrown from a horse, but even the gate cannot keep the inevitably of death away, such as how, when singing a song to focus on how beautiful her voice is, Jose sings about death with lines like ‘this life is weary, hope comes to die’ which serve almost as foreshadowing. But best is the description of the wealthy cottages with the poorer homes, existing practically right on top of one another yet depicted as such opposites: ‘True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.’ The descriptions have you looking down your nose at them, so couched in the perspective of the Sheridan’s and their contemporaries. The juxtaposition is in everything, from the lushness and light of the garden party to the poorer homes always described in terms of darkness. While the Sheridan house is a world with trees ‘lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour,’ amidst ideal weather ‘without a cloud,’ the people at the Scott household are ‘a dark knot of people’ curling into a ‘gloomy passage’ or crowding a ‘wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp.’ Laura’s journey from the glow of the garden to the darkness of the Scott household seems like a journey into the underworld to see death firsthand and bestows an epic sense not unlike the Greek myths into the narrative. ‘People like that don't expect sacrifices from us,’ Mrs. Sheridan scoffs at Laura’s insistence their festivities are vulgar in light of Mr. Scott’s death, ‘and it's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now.’ Which is really the crux of this story–the working class must sacrifice everything to uphold the world of the rich but the rich will not lift a finger for them. To them the lives of those outside their circle ‘seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.’ Worse, they validate their inhospitality and insensitivity by assuming the worst, such as Jose insisting the Scott family are drunks and blaming drinking on the accident despite any evidence. For the Sheridan’s even the rose bushes ‘bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels’ which touches on the idea that wealth was a sign of god’s grace and divinely deserved while the poor suffer out of sin. But this cruelty only pushes Laura towards empathy and embarrassment and her hat, a symbol of frivolity is suddenly garish in the space of death. ‘Forgive my hat’ she says, meaning forgive my family, forgive my class, meaning Laura has had her eyes opened. ‘What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things.’ A quick story, but one full of power and crackling with social critiques and class consciousness. Written in 1922 as Mansfield was slowly succumbing to tuberculosis, The Garden Party continues to impress and is a marvelous little story. 5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jun 24, 2024
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Jun 24, 2024
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| 1948226243
| 9781948226240
| 1948226243
| 3.80
| 1,860
| 2015
| Nov 05, 2019
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it was amazing
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‘When a person lives through intense experiences, he has the illusion of understanding many things.’ Across a slow-burn intensity of nine stories in P
‘When a person lives through intense experiences, he has the illusion of understanding many things.’ Across a slow-burn intensity of nine stories in Paulina Flores premier story collection, Humiliation, is an examination of the way this illusion of understanding fades through time and retroactive examinations of life. Disillusionment, futility, and class oppression are central themes connecting these stories in a book that is as disquieting as it is beautiful. Marvelously translated by Megan McDowell (who has translated Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, and Lina Meruane among others) Flores’ prose is delivered as one of raw power and psychological probing that--despite avoidance of many frills--has a deeply emotional impact on the reader. While the themes are heavy, the book never bogs the reader down as the narratives are often delightfully sprinkled with humor and intrigue that will keep your attention even after closing the book. Flores builds tension and executes twists in stories about everyday reality that would make even seasoned high-stakes-mystery writers salivate. Often told from the perspective of children, Flores places the narrative in a place of extreme vulnerability that emphasizes the way we flounder to understand the hierarchies of societal and interpersonal relationships, particularly when those who are charged with caring for us are negligent or harmful. While slightly uneven, these stories form an extraordinarily impressive debut that examines the lasting damage done from the failures of men, the destruction of an authoritarian regime, self-defeating behavior, and the scars we carry through life. This translation for English-speaking audiences is timely, as it was released during a period of massive protests against neoliberalism in Chile that brought up the same themes of class and poverty that permeate these stories. The socio-political backdrop of these stories are the same issues that culminated in the protests, and the violence against protesters is systemic to the same power dynamics oppressing the characters, or coaching them into a self-defeating cycle of resignation, in Humiliation. While Pinochet is rarely mentioned directly in the book, the legacy of violence and neoliberalism that plagued Chile looms like a shadow over every paragraph. ‘They killed a lot of people,’ the narrator’s cousin says in Last Vacation when he expresses his interest in joining the military, ‘Under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Do you know who Pinochet was, even?’ She tells him the depressing truth that the commercials he sees about the pride of the Chilean military and legacy of patriotism is but propagated farce to dismiss their role in the mass executions under the former dictatorship that had left the country reeling and in ruins and reminds us of what (and who) is forgotten and shouldn’t be. While Pinochet is the focus in this statement, it also reflects that thousands died under him and they must not be forgotten. Flores’ stories concern youths growing up in the aftermath of this destruction and already inheriting the scars from the former generation’s failures. An understanding of this political landscape is not necessarily essential, but it is helpful in understanding the undercurrents of the collection as well as the logic behind the current Chilean protests. A CIA-backed junta stormed the Chilean capital to overthrow democratically-elected Socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11th, 1973 and placed Pinochet in power over a military dictatorship. Following a method political analyst and writer Naomi Klein terms the “Shock Doctrine of making sweeping economic reform in the face of major disaster or unrest, Pinochet’s implemented the largest neoliberal government experiment, privatizing every aspect of Chile such as schools and hospitals. His cabinet was staffed primarily of those educated in Milton Friedman’s Chicago School economics which pushed extreme capitalism, removed welfare spending and opened up major markets that US corporations were able to exploit. Workers rights all but disappeared and a massive class divide ensued. Anyone who spoke out was “disappeared”, any negative press was denounced as propaganda and removed, and mass executions became commonplace. While Pinochet is gone, the neoliberal legacy is still cancerous to the class divide. In 2019 studies, the top 10% in Chile make 26.5 times the average income and Chile has the largest income inequality of any OECD member countries. Roughly 50% of Chileans have a monthly income of $550 or less. These social conditions and the aftermath of authoritarian rule are foundations upon which Flores’ stories construct themselves. ‘My whole life I thought that Talcahuano was a tough place, but the truth was, it was just sad.’ There is a front of bravado and toughness to these stories that are built up if only to deconstruct and disillusion them over the course of a few pages. The settings are all barren and urban decay, towns ‘that no one liked: gloomy skies, factory soot that turned everything gray, and air that stank famously of fish.’ and the characters are all mostly resigned to fate or succumbing to the futility of fighting against it. In the opening story, winner of the Roberto Bolaño prize and from which the collection gets its name, we follow a young daughter named Sonia and her sister walk through the sweltering streets with their father on his way to hopefully find work. The father has been out of work for awhile, causing a massive rift in the family due to marital arguments and an overwhelming sense of defeat that keeps him distant from his daughters. Here, Sonia has found an agency looking for a model and convinces her dad to audition, convinced he is very handsome and it will boost his self-esteem. What results leaves him feeling humiliated and irrelevant and the story ends lingering on a precipice of total self-defeat that threatens to pull us all down into it. ‘Children don’t lie. But adults are the ones you believe.’ This uncomfortable agony of defeat lurks in every corner of the book. Flores dredges up raw feelings of powerlessness in her characters, which is doubly impactful through the eyes of the children in these stories who feel powerless to assuage the existential futility plaguing the adults in their lives. ‘Simona was sure that her father loved her,’ Flores writes in the titular story, ‘but she could also tell that something was making him feel lonely, and that all the love she could give him didn’t help.’ In stories such as Lucky Me--a 90 page novella with a wonderfully sustained tension and well executed. intricate, timeline weaving plot that hints at glorious novels this author could create in the future--Flores explores how the traumas of childhood are carried throughout all of life and the ways defeat is passed down through generations. It is incredibly tragic to see the juxtaposition of an innocent, caring and optimistic young girl with the sad, resigned adult she becomes as the narrative slowly creeps to a moment that is indicative as to how this change in her occured. In almost every story it is the failing of men that bring the family and those around them down with them. Through affairs, alcoholism, neglect, or just general inability to stand up in the onslaught of reality, Flores finds her characters reeling from the disillusionment of fathers, lovers or authority figures. Once learning that a janitor had assaulted a classmate, the narrator in Forgetting Freddy remarks how she ‘stopped believing in Santa Claus and started believing in rapists,’ which succinctly encompasses the loss of innocence and reaction to the shortcomings of men that afflict the world. And in each story Flores explores the social hierarchies and power dynamics that sow the soil for these issues. ‘Sacrifices, I told myself, and I went on with my life, a life that back then I thought belonged completely to me.’ The ways society corrals people into class standings creates a sort of Original Sin for the lower classes brought up in a system where even power over your own body and destiny is strangled by the long and numerous tentacles of capitalism. The story Last Vacation explores the hierarchy of social class and how a sense of class-saviorism from those who have financial mobility registers more like disdain for the lowest classes. The main character, Nico, is taken in for a summer from his often absentee addict mother by his middle-class aunt who believes she can save him through integration into middle-class company and mannerisms. However, a feeling of solidarity to his mother builds after an act of betrayal: embarrassed of his family, Nico claims his older cousin as his mother and instantly sinks into despair at having denied his mother. The story also looks at how resignation is socially coached into the poverty class, with Nico repeating a cycle of mediocrity and destitution he claims is due to his unwillingness to betray his mother again by trying to rise above his status but is also likely because of a learned behavior that he simply does not belong above his status. Only rarely in this collection do we see characters stand up and tear down the oppression around them, as we do in American Spirit, but even then there is a lingering sense that maybe doing so was out of line--the social structure has been so violently enforced for so long and rebelling so socially connotated with criminality and wrongdoing that people simply cannot bring themselves to do anything outside the status quo. For those oppressed in society, figures such as Aunt Nana--a woman who lives her life totally in servitude of her family--are held in highest esteem because they can get through life in a subservient role without making waves. The theme of resignation and learned subservience is most bluntly examined in Laika. The shortest of the nine stories, it also lands the strongest punch in one quick blow to the gut. A young girl is sexually assaulted by an older boy--an authority figure at the camp she is attending. The girl is convinced this is romantic and the story plays out from her perspective as a willinging lover eager to please when in reality she is coerced in what is nothing short of sexual abuse. His status is used to overpower her and her willingness is exploited. The notion of the illusion of control and understanding is delivered on the hinge between the girl’s perspective and the discerning reader processing the information to see the vulgar truth lurking under the veil of seduction akin to the abuse and exploitation by the dominant class. Arguably the best story in the collection, however, is the third story, Telcahuano. Titling the story after the town--theruinous place we called home--offers both a localized feel but also one of universality as we are all in this nowhere town and their fates are our fates. While Humiliation won the Bolaño Prize, it is here that the spirit of Bolaño really seems to leap with joy across the pages in this tragicomedy of adolescents grappling with the conditions around them and beleaguered by a coming dread they can’t quite yet understand. The story follows a 14 year old boy and his friends over the course of one summer. They are “tough” boys who spend their days smoking cigarette butts and listening to The Smiths. They had stolen English dictionaries from their school to translate the lyrics into Spanish, charmed by the band's working-class rebelliousness. Morrissey had named the band the Smiths because it was one of the most common and unrefined last names in England, and he thought it was time to show the vulgar side of the world. Our eyes shone when we heard stories like this. We wanted to be like Morrissey. We felt just as common and just as superior.Inspired by punk music and fueled with a need to prove themselves in a collapsing world, they decide they will start a band like Morrissey did but first they need to get instruments to learn to play them. The devise a plan: they will train all summer to steal the musical equipment from the local church. Most charming in this story is their dedication to their goal. They decide they must train to be ninjas because ‘the only condition for becoming a ninja was that you had nothing to lose’ whereas a samurai was something you came into through family lineage. Ninjas are like them, they decide. However, the main character’s family life is decomposing in the background like a slowly collapsing society. His father has been long laid off of work and has no desire to find more but rather lay about with drink and dream of times irrevocably lost to the past and in the wake of his disillusionment with life the mother has packed up the sisters and moved away leaving the boy on his own for the summer. Plans to rise above and succeed are often sabotaged from within and the unexpected is always crouching in the shadows around any corner waiting to strike. The story, much like one from Bolaño, playfully builds toward an incredible and disastrous climax that is more entrenched in emotion than action which leaves everything forever altered. Dreams are dashed, hopes harden and lives drift apart on the unexpected currents of the future. The story is truly devastating and rewarding in ways only the best of literature can deliver. Paulina Flores has surely written herself into the Chilean literary canon with her debut collection and it has the power to resonate with people the whole world over. Winner of both the Circle of Art Critics Prize and the Municipal Literature Prize, this work was able to make a name for itself to inspire publishers to fund a translation that could bring it to English-speaking readers. It is a good reminder how art prizes have a responsibility in helping elevate voices that would otherwise be less likely to be heard, especially voices such as Flores that speak directly to the woes that capitalism and dictatorships can strew on a population that cause harm for generations to come. This is an important and incisive collection that sheds light on many socio-political struggles and the pains of humanity in a world where the ones we rely on are also those most likely to let us down. It is also utterly engaging and blissful to read. An incredible debut that promises a strong career to come. 4.5/5 Note: I was offered a free copy of this book for an honest review and it did not disappoint. ‘I went into debt to study, and I worked twelve hours a day and spent two more riding buses, and I did all the things that people do to achieve a certain well-being, and I got tired, I became a tired person...' ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Feb 13, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0743273567
| 9780743273565
| 0743273567
| 3.93
| 5,432,311
| Apr 10, 1925
| Apr 2018
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liked it
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I have a confession: I was a Great Gatsby hater. My bad, that was me amongst the crowd rolling my eyes, calling it overrated. Saying there are better n I have a confession: I was a Great Gatsby hater. My bad, that was me amongst the crowd rolling my eyes, calling it overrated. Saying there are better novels. Annoyed amidst all the movies and merch and endless stream of biographies and other media around the author and Zelda. To be fair, it is a book that exists almost more as easily identifiable marketing in the modern day than anything else and has its own fan culture around it, which made it something easy to scoff at when you are young and desperate to distinguish yourself as “well read” or at least more esoteric in your tastes. Which is rather embarrassing, I know, but hey, there were a lot of us and it was fun to join the crowd ready to find any flaw in Fitzgerald’s work and dismiss it wholesale. Then there was the realization that such behavior is precisely what society does to Gatsby in the novel. Enjoying the revelry of parties and frivolity, but quick to point a finger at him for bootlegging—*gasp* not a criminal who provides the illegal booze I have no qualms over drinking myself—shady companions, attempted homewrecking, or even the quickness of judgment to murder. Perhaps when we judge Gatsby, or a work like Gatsby, our judgements say more about ourselves than our targets of criticism. Is Gatsby a good person? Maybe, maybe not. But are any characters blameless? Certainly not. It is precisely through these cracks in the characters and the busted seams of their moral integrity that the real poignancy of the novel flows from. When the novel was selected as our community Big Read for this autumn I was admittedly a bit disappointed at first. Fitzgerald, however, wrote that ‘reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope,’ and while I cannot truly claim in my heart of hearts that I was desiring to cultivate hope, I at least returned to the novel I’d already read twice in high school and university classrooms with an aim for a fresh attitude reserving judgment. Besides, ‘life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall,’ so why not start my life with Gatsby anew in the autumn season? Forgive me, readers, but I have seen Gatsby in a new light. Let’s not get too excited here. I still don’t find it to be a favorite work because maybe Fitzgerald was onto something when he wrote that ‘no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,’ but it is a work I will now appreciate nonetheless. I might even applaud it if nobody is looking. First and foremost, the narrative framing is a masterful play of perceptions as Nick’s view of Gatsby—manipulating us into his circle and then reeling away in frustration—keeps him at a precision of proximity from the reader to cast him as a mythic figure just like Daisy’s simple dock light takes on airs of an ‘enchanted object’ at a certain distance. Furthermore, Fitzgerald crafts some of the most pitch perfect sentences in his pages. The way the line ‘so we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight’ sends you spiraling along with them or how we can feel the impulsivity of Gatsby’s parties pulsating where ‘in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.’ It is with good reason the following quote is so recognized in the Western Canon of literature and even a curmudgeon like myself can’t help but feel his prose pluck at my heartstrings: ‘Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning— It is an impetuous pursuit we can all likely recognize in the anxious regions of our own hearts. The Great Gatsby is a novel running headlong into desire and dreams that are ultimately dashed upon the shores of a reality ruled by class and the social maneuvers of self-preservation, and who amongst us cannot relate? How often do we yearn for something just beyond our reach, how often do our wildest dreams get barred by the gates of entrenched society? In this, can we see Gatsby as an empathetic figure with his enduring hope and unquenchable drive? Nick certainly does, at least early on: ‘If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away…it was an extraordinary gift of hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.’ Nick is initially so infatuated with Gatsby’s vision that he finds Gatsby’s unseemly sides to be ‘no matter.’ The question is, do we the readers find Gatsby noble in his pursuit to ‘recover some idea of himself,’ or do we see him adrift on a fool's errand to ‘repeat the past’? Ask yourself. Now let’s consider it together. In Gatsby we are forced to confront the fall of a person we may have liked, a person with qualities that made us want to be better ourselves, a person with a smile that ‘assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey,’ a person who’s life story was one that engendered hope a person can rise out of the social boxes they were born into. A person who, at a glance, is the epitome of the American Dream and all the opportunities it promises. We watch this hopeful arc come crashing down into a cacophony of scandal, something society sweeps under the rug to whisper and snicker about, something we gleefully fuel the destruction of in order to dance upon the wreckage and think ourselves above it all as long as we feel it trampled underfoot. Which, to be fair, isn’t unlike how it felt to roll my eyes at the book. In all of this we must ask ourselves: is Gatsby intended to be liked or condemned? When the heart is weighed and measured do we find the flaws tip the scale and, if so, is it from our perspective beyond the ruin of his life that makes us judge him in this way? Do his redeeming qualities and striving for his dreams endear him to us or, better yet, would we find his flaws charming had his goal succeeded towards “happily ever after?” Or, perhaps, is the question itself besides the point as we are all flawed and the ricochetting of individual lives, aspirations and dreams deferred in all their foibles and foolery are altogether meaningful enough without the need of moral judgment as a compass across the narrative. It’s so easy to cast a villain in a story as a method of clear dichotomy, but perhaps we have no need for a nearly defined antagonist when we are all ourselves both heroes and villains of our personal narratives in our own right. Often we find the greatest enemy is the self and look for external narratives to defer our acceptance of complicity. Let us turn our attention not to the narrative framing of The Great Gatsby, Which really lends magic to our journey through fascination and subsequent disillusionment. The disillusionment with Gatsby parallels the cast of characters' personal disillusionments with themselves, each other, or even the American dream itself once it's found out to be more myth than obtainable mission, impossible to pry away from the obdurate clutches of the Old Money men. Nick, in his free agent attachment to both Old and New monkey, makes for an ideal narrator for this tale. Nick assures us he is a quiet, open-minded observer and one must wonder if Nick sees the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg as a twin to himself. The infamous sign with its watchful eyes overlooking the Valley of Ashes are often debated as a symbol for god, capitalism, the moral and spiritual decay of society, a warning of judgment, or, simply—like most symbols—a vessel into which characters pour their own meaning in ways that reveal more about them and their anxieties than anything else. In a similar regard we find Nick’s narration of Gatsby’s story to be as much about assessing himself as it is a chronicle for of how his affection and disdain for Gatsby wax and wane. ‘All plots tend to move deathward,’ observes Don DeLillo in his National Book Award winning novel White Noise, and Nick’s narration of Gatsby—reflected upon in hindsight almost as a mockery of Gatsby’s own attempt to revive his past—affixes its aim towards the dramatic sequence of deaths near the novels end. How tragically fitting it is that a tale nudging a theme of the American dream would equate the life of a dream with mortal death. In a discussion on Fitzgerald’s revision process across multiple drafts of The Great Gatsby found in the essay The Craft of Revision: The Great Gatsby, critic Kenneth E. Eble shows how an early draft found Nick saying he could read Gatsby like a character where he was ‘reading the climaxes of all the stories only in a magazine’ Eble discusses Fitzgerald’s desire to cast Gatsby as a mythic figure—though expressed in a letter to a friend’s criticism of his draft that this ‘vagueness I can repair by making more pointed’ in order to find a better balance of Gatsby as flawed reality and a larger-than-life figure—and we see how Nick’s narration manipulates our distance to him to this effect. The closer to Gatsby we get, the more his flaws appear in stark contrast and the more ill-advised his dreams may seem. his pursuits seem to us. We see a similar effect in the green light at the end of Daisy and Tom’s dock. It is an ‘enchanted’ beacon of a dream when kept at a distance but the symbol collapses into mundanity up close when it reverts back to being a simple lightbulb. But in this we also get a read on Fitzgerald’s intentions to portray Gatsby not by his trail through life but the culmination of his climactic moments. Such is the dilemma of attaining our desires. Like a dog chasing a car, to catch our dreams is to cease the hopeful pursuit and assess our goal without the rosey lens of yearning and finally ask ourselves if such a pursuit was worthwhile or what to do with ourselves without that drive. Is the journey greater than the destination? And if all plots move deathward and the novel thematically addresses a disillusionment with the American Dream, what can we expect to find at the end of the rainbow? We feel this trepidation in the lead-up to Gatsby’s kiss with Daisy: ‘He knew that when he kissed this girl and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God…Then he kissed kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.’ Recalling Myrtle’s reminder that ‘you can’t live forever,’ all parties, loves, and life must come to an end and in sealing his lips to Daisy’s, Gatsby has signed the death certificate of his dreams. In her essary Disembodied Voices and Narrating Bodies in The Great Gatsby, professor Barbara Hochman addressss how ‘once Daisy is present, able to ‘put her arm through his,” ‘the colossal significance of [the green light has]...vanished forever’ The end is near…mortality has set in.’ ‘The incantation was complete,’ and thus the green light is returned to a lightbulb, Daisy is returned from a romanticized symbol of the past to heroically rescue from the imprisonment of a brute to the reality of an unhappily married wife of a despicable man, the veil of enchantment has crumpled and the magic has been snuffed out ‘Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.’ Yet, compelled by the inevitability of disaster afoot, the reader swaps out the narratorial drive of Gatsby’s pursuit for our own urge to see through the oncoming destruction. Like an inevitable trainwreck ensuing, we can’t tear our eyes from the page with Nick acting as our own eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg into this valley of soon-to-be ashes of the American Dream. With our focus on the ambitions of Gatsby, we can’t forget the ancillary cast. First there is, of course, Daisy and the easy interpretations of her reality being incongruous with Gatsby’s dreams. She is caught between her husband Tom and lover Gatsby and, as literary scholar Judith Fetterley lays out in her essay On the Politics of Literature , such a grappling for romantic control of a woman is indicative to the gendered undercurrent of American literature of the time in its own assessment of the American Dream. Daisy is ultimately symbolic of this dream and we have Tom as a symbol of Old Money and Gatsby as the flamboyant symbol of New Money—a class distinction symbolized in the geographical divide of West and East Egg—essentially quarreling for control over culture. As Fetterley writes: ‘[T]he background for the experience of disillusionment and betrayal revealed in the novel is the discovery of America, and Daisy's failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who “discovered" it. America is female; to be American is male.’ Gatsby and his pink suit are an affront to the “traditional” values Tom represents (his views on race can lead one to assume a present day Tom would be reposting bad-faith “white replacement theory” hot takes on his social media) and the fight for Daisy can be seen as a stand in for social scuffling. It opens opportunity for Fitzgerald’s scathing criticism of the old guard that refuses to relinquish cultural control to the idealism of the youths and Daisy and Tom washing their hands of responsibility like a jazz era Pontious Pilate reveals the true targets of condemnation in the text. ‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’ Those seeking similar literary investigations into criticisms against the carefree, responsibility avoidant nature of a ruling class whose wealth makes them feel they can adopt the heartless nature of Greek Gods to which the common citizen is a mere plaything or pawn would do well to read Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse which I personally feel addresses this topic more effectively. But we also have to consider Nick, our “open-minded” observer who is also not without blame. By nature of his banking career, Nick watches the struggles between new and old America, simply chronicling it while reaping the financial rewards from the faulty systems of society they constructed. If Nick feels judged by the eyes of the billboard doctor for his complicity, if can be enlarged to include his financial maneuvering of society toward profetizarían that is revealed to be dividing the nation and oppressing the working class, like George Wilson’s who’s life and wife are jusy amusements to rich men like Tom. The shots he fires the silence the story feel less villainous when viewed as a punching up at the heartlessness of the domineering classes. Once again we must consider that this isn’t a novel in which Gatsby being either a villain or a hero isn’t the question, but one in which we must confront our own flawed humanity and nature of our pursuits set against a backdrop of class, culture and inevitable outside judgement and ask ourselves what our own judgements say about us. I’ll (begrudgingly) admit this is a literary investigation I can respect and admire. I’m not too proud to say I was wrong to scoff, and one should remember the crowd of yay-sayers for Gatsby are just as numerous as my former naysayer peers. Sigourney Weaver adopted her first name as an allusion to the book for instance and each year some young, eager minds will be enchanted by the novel and find a joy in literature. That is a hope I can subscribe to, and while I still won’t rank The Great Gatsby high amongst my treasures novels, I highly appreciate the wealth of literary value to be found in the work and have enjoyed studying it and grappling with its themes. Is Gatsby a good person becomes an avenue to wonder, like Nick, am I even a good person and our our fast rebukes of Gatsby a projection against our own flawed nature. Do we love to watch a hero fall for the fall or the feeling of superiority, of watching another life brought to ruin to consider our own stable, superior, and safe? Love it or hate it (and either and totally understandable) The Great Gatsby is an enduring classic and I can finally admit that I not only understand why but can cheer it on as a worthwhile investigation into American culture. Read it if you have not, give it another chance if you have, and find a new spark in Fitzgerald’s treasured work. 3.5/5 ‘[A]s I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.’ ...more |
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Sep 24, 2011
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