Our culture is cyclical, of course, but less than a cycle (which would be a perfect circle, one assumes), I think it’s more like a nautilus, in that the frequency of the cycles has been increasing exponentially as history has progressed. Because I study literature, one of the cycles I see most often is the cycles of progressive and anti-progressive eras. Progressive eras (e.g. The Enlightenment, the Jazz Age, WWII, the 1970s, our modern technological era that is called, I guess, “The Information Age” or something) follow–and, more importantly, are directly followed by–anti-progressive eras (e.g. Romanticism, the Depression, the 1950s, the 1980s, the Tea Party and its insidious influence on what we will entertain on a national level), and while the progressive eras vary in their specific areas of progress (although they usually involve science in some way), the anti-progressive eras universally call for a reversion to the ideology of the patriarchy: championing the common man, suppression of women’s rights, valuing faith and intuition above science and logic (or at least seeing them as being equally valid), aesthetic preference for nature or natural motifs, etc. Obviously some progress is usually happening somewhere (like, scientists are always doing science), but cultural evaluation of progress waxes and wanes over the eras.
Our conception of the 1920s, as a culture, seems to be that it was a glamorous time of bootlegged liquor and fringed lingerie. The Great Gatsby has descriptions of things like those, of course, but it’s not about that. It just uses those things as analogs for the garish inauthenticity of the new rich. Because the end of the Victorian era was pretty concerned with aestheticism, Modernism is also still pretty concerned with aestheticism (at least The Lost Generation was in this Oscar Wildeian way), so the analogs manifest in this way, but in our era, we are concerned with inauthenticity regarding technology rather than, necessarily, wealth or aesthetics. We assume things are fake before we assume they are real, especially visual or aural things; we are suspicious of people and vendors we meet online because it is so easy to lie online; to combat all of this uncertainty about the outside world, we become very interested in knowing who we are and with sharing our authentic (or inauthentic, if you’re a Gatsby) selves with the world (where “the world” = “the internet”). We believe that dreams are achievable because we see people be successful who seem to be no different from us. We have vehicles for launching “average” people into success, and the internet and reality shows–which allow people all over the world to not only communicate with each other, but also directly determine each others’ success–allow the common man to act in capacities (e.g. pundit, critic, author) previously reserved for people actually qualified to hold those positions.
So we are afraid of not knowing anything about anything or anyone, despite the fact that all of the information seems to be readily available to us, and we are afraid of everyone knowing everything about us that we don’t want them to know; we are also afraid that no one will care to know the things about ourselves that we broadcast into the ether. In the same way that Gatsby bought gaudy stuff and threw ridiculous parties full of people who didn’t know him, we take pictures of our omelets and publish them on the internet and get a little bit sad when people we rarely see don’t click a little button that indicates that they have seen the picture and acknowledge that you are significant to them by clicking an image of a heart.
Last year, when we first read this book, we talked about what the American Dream had been in all the books we’d read that year. Although the specifics differ, several elements repeat across the novels and the eras in American history: to be loved, to be respected, to be financially secure. In Gatsby, of course, what he wants is the life he sees Daisy living. He wants Tom’s life, essentially, and Myrtle wants Daisy’s, but they can’t have those lives, so they die. I asked my students what the current American Dream is, and while I expected something more in keeping with the “wife, house, 2.5 kids, dog” adage, they almost universally indicated that they understood the American Dream to be fame and popularity. Granted, they’re in high school, so their values are maybe a little skewed towards things that are important to teenagers, but this also seems to be correct. Insane wealth is something that people certainly strive for, or dream of, or whatever, but I can’t imagine that that has ever not been the case for the majority of humans. And for the people who come to America from other places hoping for a better life, the American Dream is just not living in a village controlled by a drug cartel, and that’s cool. But for American-born people, the American dream these days, according to everything I’ve seen and heard and read these past 15 years, we seem to be pretty into fame and popularity. Even people who are already famous and rich, like Donald Trump, try to get more famous and popular by running for office or doing charity work or whatever. Some people are successful in these endeavors to the extent that they win an office or accomplish charitable works, but because they were already known for something else, this fame and popularity seems less authentic than their original fame. We become concerned with whether bands, companies, artists, etc, have “sold out,” and we feel (at least a little bit) personally betrayed when they do.
Gatsby is a good text for this modern culture (the post-housing-crisis, post-9/11, post-Jersey Shore culture of 2013) because it is a text of foreboding and transition. It is the deceptively lethargic, as we are deceptively sedentary. It champions authenticity as we champion authenticity. It’s sick of itself, as we seem to be a little sick of ourselves, now that the majority of the dangers seem to be rooted domestically and we can only turn our fear inward on ourselves and our neighbors. The beginning of the century shook us as WWI shook the beginning of the last century, and in the wake of those ideological unmoorings, we turned, as we had turned then, to decadence and diversion. We love Mad Men because Mad Men is exactly the same story but at the end of the wrong kind of cycle (although this still makes Don the odd man out).
Anyway, The Great Gatsby is not saying that champagne fountains are good. It’s saying that champagne fountains are bad. I just want to keep reiterating that for the next, like, month.
This piece was originally published in 2013 (it is unfortunately — and perhaps more now than ever — still relevant) on Tumblr.
