Re-Re-reading The Great Gatsby (once again)

The Great Gatsby is by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here are my thoughts on it the previous time I re-read it.

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There aren’t many books that I’m happy to return to.

In many ways, I tentatively believe that it’s a sign of an empty mind to revisit any cultural product. I’m exaggerating, sure, because while I do acknowledge that looking at something twice (rather than looking at two things once) does permit deeper comprehension, understanding and analysis, I think the vast majority of repeated trips to the same source are often occurring due to a lack of interest in exploring more of what the world has to offer…

People talk about “comfort reads” or “comfort watches”. People revisit the same sitcom a hundred times, the same movie every year, the same song every day for a month until you get bored (I’m most frequently guilty of the third one). And often the things that get revisited are things that don’t deserve or reward additional thought. People return to “easy” texts. To relax. To be eased. And that’s what I disapprove of. I suppose.

So, well, yes, I recently reread The Great Gatsby for what is maybe the fifth time in my life.

I blogged well over a decade ago about rereading it, and in that post I expand at length on how much I’d fucking loved it. Of course I did. I’ve got a heart and a body and a soul and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s shortest masterpiece is a book that contains everything all of those things need to be satiated and satisfied…

The Great Gatsby is about love and about despair and about ideas and foolishness and pride.

It’s about the cruelty and carelessness of people who are able to be cruel and careless, and about, too, the lack of care exhibited by people who are able to sail, briefly, near them.

Nick Carraway may not be ultimately as careless with other people as Tom & Daisy Buchanan (the richest and most careless characters of the novel) are, but he cares about other people barely any more than they do… Nick, the narrator, feels no more guilt, no more shame, no more worry than these people…

In the world that we – and these characters – live in, a person does not need to be as actively hostile and toxic as the world’s most hostile and toxic people to be complicit in their acts…

I certainly know this, and perhaps that is because I have existed on the peripheries of Tom & Daisy Buchanan’s real life equivalents… I still do work at fancy parties like Jay Gatsby’s from time to time… I have been the person making sure the waiters aren’t dropping cocktails, and at early times I was the person carrying the cocktails, trying not to drop them…

Do I feel guilty reading The Great Gatsby, knowing how I’ve existed within – without subverting – the economies as depicted here in this book? Should I feel bad that I’ve worked to permit the excess here enjoyed by the affluent? Ummm… Let’s come back to that on another occasion.

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What I was surprised by in my rereading was how many elements of the novel I had mis-remembered, or not remembered at all…

For example, Tom Buchanan is explicitly a conspiracy theorist white supremacist. That was not something that had held in my mind since I last read The Great Gatsby, though maybe that was because the last time I read this (2015) it was before America had quite so explicitly reverted to large swathes of itself being openly racist all the time. I mean, obviously, we always knew that the bigotry was there, bubbling below the surface, but 10 years ago they used to try to dress it up a little bit, hide it away just a smidgen… NOT NOW!

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It’s a beautiful fucking novel…

It’s about everything.

It’s about love (I’ve said that), but it’s also about politics and about class and about the difference between class and money, which is something Americans famously love to deny is a thing.

Gatsby is a tragic figure, and I’d never quite grasped that so deeply before…

I hadn’t remembered how explicit it was that he was embedded in organised crime – I had remembered this VERY KEY DETAIL as being something merely hinted at, whereas in the text itself there’s no ambiguity whatsoever… Gatsby is a person benefiting financially from the repressive policies of prohibition (a doomed law that still exists in most global states now just for different – yet hugely popular and easily available – intoxicants).

What I’m doing here is just revealing how much of The Great Gatsby I forgot in between readings of it, which probably isn’t very interesting… I’ll stop.

I actually reread the book in order to have a conversation on camera about it with a friend for a new little literary podcast/web series project! That should be released in the next couple of weeks, I think, though it’s not really up to me as other people are involved… But, scottmanleyhadleyfans, do get yourselves ready for a little series of literary discussions where I do something I generally avoid: re-reading the canon and chatting about it to someone arriving at the text for the first time. It should be a lot of fun, though… We’ll see what happens…