Why I Despise The Great Gatsby

[unrepentant progress]

What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. ... Scott Fitzgerald was, in his own words, “a moralist at heart.” He wanted to “preach at people,” and what he preached about most was the degeneracy of the wealthy. His concern, however, did not lie with the antisocial behaviors to which the rich are prone: acquiring their wealth through immoral means, say (Gatsby manipulates the American financial system and dies a martyr), or ignoring all plights from which they have the means to protect themselves. Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder. Fitzgerald despised the rich not for their iniquity per se but for the glamour of it—for, in H.L. Mencken’s words, “their glittering swinishness.” Yet Fitzgerald also longed to be a glittering swine himself, and acted like one anytime he could afford it. ... He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-­person sanctimonious.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/schulz-on-the-great-gatsby.html

[RainDog]

1. not the way I view the work at all

I didn't read the whole piece, but from what's here... Fitzgerald, to me, was also one of the tragic characters of the novel who knew, all too well, his own vices and the destruction in his own life.

The idea, to me, through the use of a narrator, through the lyrical language of loss... is that Fitzgerald is writing a "pre-mortem" for himself.

That said, there's no way I have any desire to see Baz Luhrman's take on this. He has exactly zero capacity for subtle and turns any real emotion into spectacle. blech.

[TexasTowelie]

2. I feel like I gave this film its due a few weeks ago in the Lounge:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018368836

[Bluenorthwest]

3. This article expresses Fitzgerald's view of the rich by quoting Mencken?

I don't agree with this writer at all, and I urge everyone who likes to quote snips of Mencken to go read longer passages of that writer and grasp the basic elitism in his works. Opposed to democracy.