Kill Your Idols: "The Great Gatsby"

I also disagree with Alma's implication that Fitzgerald is somehow less important because his social commentary is less developed or less integral to his work.

If anything, he is the greater artist for it. That art is greatest which exists for its own sake. In an example like 'Gatsby,' the social commentary serves the art. It would be less of an achievement if the opposite were true.

That's why Fitzgerald is a greater artist than Wharton, Dreiser or Sinclair.
Art can include social commentary, but when it is motivated by social commentary alone it becomes pedantic, even base.

 

"God sees everything" in 'Gatsby,' but can do nothing. God is helpless. A myopic observer. ('Moby Dick' is our great American novel of God and religion. 'Huckleberry Finn' is the great American novel of our original sin, slavery.)

Gatsby is about money and class and the illusions and truths of modern American social mobility. Also the central self-loathing contradiction in which every American hates the rich but wants desperately to be rich. And in which the newly wealthy - careless and smug and corrupt, ill-mannered and not very bright - believe they can reinvent themselves no matter the nature of their past, and no matter what the aristocracy of old money tells them.

Is Daisy a bad mother because she got the vote? Or is Daisy a bad mother because she's rich?

 

Good take. At this point in our history - about 150 years into our independence - the time was absolutely ripe to examine American classicism, as differentiated from European classicism. The American dream wasn't exactly a myth. Someone like Gatbsy could become rich (although he didn't come by it honestly, which is probably some commentary by itself by Fitzgerald). But the West Egg/East Egg-new money/old money dynamic basically means that even though upward mobility exists here in a way that it does not in Europe, people will always find a way to create class striations that exclude the newly successful.

Is it a flaw in the novel that essentially everyone (except Nick and arguably Gatsby) in it is a bad person? Or is it necessary, i.e. one of these cases in which rules (this one being the one against wooden/flat characters) are made to be broken?

 

Social mobility and the moral imperatives of money are also the themes of 'Kane,' so we've got that going for us, too.

I don't think of the characters in Gatsby as being 'types' or conveniences or wooden or flat. I think Fitzgerald's work is populated with people we recognize very quickly because of their social station, and whose behavior is familiar to us along a continuum from bad to good. People are all both of those of course, good and bad, depending on the circumstance and their opportunities to choose (to be) one or the other.

George Wilson is basically good, for example, but unsuccessful. Same for Henry Gatz. Poor, but (maybe) good.

Nick Carraway is poised between the one and the other as he tries to choose his future.

 

There's a chapter in Philip Roth's "I Married A Communist" that takes the position that social commentary, or ideology, cannot be included in art at all. I don't know if I agreed with Roth, but he sure made a compelling case.

 

Potemkin isn't art?

 

According to the hardhat-wearing Frenchmen at my graduate school deconstruction company, all art is a commentary on the society in which it arises. Sometimes even intentionally.

'Political' art makes the grave mistake of expecting that commentary to produce a result.

 

Is it really a mistake? I would argue that protest music in the '60s helped mobilize opposition to the draft. It may not have ended Vietnam any earlier, and it may not have been the only or even a primary cause, but I think that it, arguably, did produce some results in the long-term.

 

L'art pour l'art' is a crock.

 

I love a lot of the protest music of the 1960s, even though I was distant from it in time and remain distant from much of it in outlook.

However, I don't consider it art.

That is part of the difference. When your creative endeavor is primarily motivated to instruct or deliver a message, it isn't art, not matter how much artisanship is evident in it.

 

I disagree. Art is inspired, and rarely, if ever, spontaneous. There's no reason to believe passion or an ideology can't spark great art. Hell, Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel, right? Did he have motivation beyond that?

 

Patronage didn't stop with the visual arts. Bach, Mozart et al. were on the court dime.