Présentation art déco

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The Penguin Classics Edition

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F. Scott Fotzgerald

• Born September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minn.
• Scott was a distant relative of Francis Scott Key, the composer of the American national anthem.
• Enrolled in Princeton in 1913.
• Withdrew from school in 1917 to enter Officers Training school in the army
• He never made it to Europe to fight in the war, nor did he graduate from college.
• Instead, he fell in love…

Zelda Sayre

• She broke off their engagement shortly thereafter, unwilling to live on his small salary.
• Fitzgerald was made famous by his This Side of Paradise.
• In 1919 his earnings totaled $879; the following year, following the publication of This Side of Paradise, an instant success, his earnings increased to $18,000.
• Zelda then married him => In Gatsby, Jay Gatsby feels he needs wealth in order to win Daisy...

A hedonistic lifestyle

• They had a “rich life of endless parties.”
• The two had a very volatile relationship; both alcohol and domestic rows played a large part in their marriage.

“I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.”

• Zelda decided to become a professional ballet dancer, but her intense exercise lead to her decline in health (both mentally and physically).
• She spent the rest of her life in sanitariums. She died in a mental hospital that caught on fire.

The Great Gatsby

• The Great Gatsby, the third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925.

• It received great critical acclaim but only became a literary classic some 20 years after its initial release, in the years that followed the end of WW2.
• It is usually viewed as the writer’s best work.

The context

This novel proves to be a very perceptive observation of the Roaring Twenties => a contrastive picture of America in those days, a period which is marked by post-war economic progress and a great prosperity.

Liberation and Libation: A Toast to Freedom in the Roaring Twenties

• The author captures the frenzy and passion of American society, right in the middle of Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal
• Many famous bootleggers emerged during this age, such as Arnold Rothstein and Johnny Torrio (both working in New York) and Al Capone in Chicago. Arnold Rothstein was Fitzgerald’s real model for Gatsby's unscrupulous associate, Meyer Wolfshiem.

CRIME AND PROHIBITION

02

01

03

aka "The Brain"

AL CAPONE

Arnold rothstein

JOHNNY TORRIO

1882-1928American racketeer, crime boss, businessman, gambler in Jewish Mob in New York City

1882-1957American mobster who helped build the Chicago Outfit

1899-1947co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1925 to 1931

“The parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, and the morals were looser”.

Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

some like it hot (1959)

Starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon

The Great Gatbsy

• Fitzgerald shows the new faith people in America used to place in money and materialism then, but he also renders the anxiety and sorrow lurking behind their superficial world.

The Great Gatbsy

• The novel conveys the instability of the Twenties, presenting us with a world on the brink of breaking down, with a sense of general chaos and confusion about to happen.
• A mood of decadence and summer heat seem to combine to create the prevailing atmosphere in the book.

The Great Gatbsy

'the sun's getting hotter every year ...pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun - or wait a minute - it's just the opposite the sun's getting colder every year.'(124)

The Great Gatsby

• More than three years to complete the final version of The Great Gatsby (after the novel went through different stages and shapes).

• The author wanted to try original writing techniques and he claimed the novelty and uniqueness of his project.

“I want to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and 'intricately patterned'”.

F. S. Fitzgerald, letter to his publisher

The Great Gatbsy

• The Great Gatsby was thus made up of more than 200 drafts and many short stories.
• He used the story “Absolution” and to a larger extent the story “Winter Dreams” (written in 1922)

=> Dexter Green is a middle-class boy becomes rich but loses Judy Jones the rich girl, the romantically attractive heroine who motivated his ambitions in the first place – many of these themes will be expanded upon in The Great Gatsby.

A Scrambled Chronology

• All the action unfold during only one summer – that is, from mid-June to early September 1922.
• This summer is then the foundation from which Nick Carraway recreates retrospectively Gatsby's past life.
• There are a prologue and an epilogue that frame the events occurring within that interval of four months.
• These two key moments also correspond to the time of writing when Nick is back in the Mid-West and he thinks over his past experiences.

A Scrambled Chronology

• The tragic aspect of the plot is also increased due to the fact that the major events have all taken place before the action in the book actually begins.
• Every action then receives its meaning in retrospect.

A Few EXAMPLES

The crucial meeting with Dan Cody is only recounted in chapter 6.

It is not until the last chapter that we learn about Gatsby's boyhood through Mr. Gatz's testimony.

The crucial meeting with Dan Cody is only recounted in chapter 6.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Chapter 9

Finally Gatsby's admission into the mafia thanks to Wolfshiem is narrated in Chapter 9.

Gatsby's war experiences as well as his journey back to Louisville are told in chapter 8

The two versions are reported by Nick and they constitute three independent narratives in the book.

Chapter 9

Chapter 8

Chapters 4, 6, 8

The Jazz Age

• Fitzgerald to capture the atmosphere of confusion and the loss of values that is distinctive of the Jazz Age.
• Jazz Age coincided with Prohibition. Prohibition, or 'National Prohibition', refers to the period between 1919-1933 when alcohol was prohibited (with a few minor exceptions).
• => production, distribution, and sale of alcohol was illegal throughout the entire U.S. => speakeasies.

The Jazz Age

• The Jazz Age was a unique time because strong feminist sentiments were running through society. Feminism was a key element of the era.

• Flappers often wore gaudy jewelry and short hair. Feminism was not only confined to the dance floor of speakeasies.

THE JAZZ AGE

• Flappers have become an icon of the Jazz Age.
• Flappers is a term that refers to young, independent women who defied traditional norms by engaging in activities like smoking, drinking, dancing, and other shenanigans.
• Before the 1920s, these activities were acceptable only among men.

WOMEN at the Jazz Age

WOMEN at the Jazz Age

THE JAZZ AGE

• In 1920 women gained the right to vote under the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Jazz Age

• Popular musicians during this time included Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. In the decades that followed, Armstrong became famous for his trumpeting and his unique, raspy voice. Like Ellington and Armstrong, many jazz musicians during this time were African-Americans.

• The speakeasies of the day often afforded the opportunity for blacks and whites to mingle in an environment that was more racially tolerant than mainstream society.

The Great Gatsby

• The novel remarkably conveys the dizziness of the Twenties, reproducing in its construction something of the staccato rhythm of the Jazz Age. The author’s main concern was clearly with the sense of mood, the colours, tones and rhythms associated with the period, and his prose displays all his descriptive skills (including synesthesia like in “yellow cocktail music”) to evoke this past.

Nick's mediation as a narrator

• Fitzgerald's chief innovation in The Great Gatsby is to introduce a first person narrator and protagonist whose consciousness always reorganizes and filters the past events (Henry James, Joseph Conrad).
• A homodiegetic narrator => he participates into the story he tells.
• There is a permanent internal focalization since events are seen exclusively from his point of view. Nick Carraway is a peripheral narrator, at the margin of events, someone who's always on the outside looking in.
• A filtering voice

Nick's mediation as a narrator

• “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (37)

A Moral Perspective

• Thomas Hanzo rightly writes that he gives a moral perspective on the unfolding action:

“formally and most significantly, through the personal history of a young American provincial whose moral intelligence is the proper source of our understanding and whose career, in the passage from innocence to revaluation, dramatizes the possibility and mode of a moral sanction in contemporary America.” (Thomas A. Hanzo. “The Theme and the Narrator of The Great Gatsby”. Modern Fiction Studies 2, Winter 1956-57: 190.)

A Moral Perspective

• ‘I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter' (187).

The General Function of Geography

• In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald recreates the period of the Roaring Twenties by showing the division of society. Geography and location play a crucial part in this process, in drawing associations between characters and places, helping to establish their social background, showing social stratification.
• Eastern America (mostly signified by "East Egg”) standing for prosperity and wealth of the Jazz Age. The East has a closer connection to Europe and is ruled by European values and qualities. The Easterners (like Tom and Daisy) are first depicted as well-educated, knowledgeable, open-minded and sophisticated people

The General Function of Geography

• The West is home to more traditional values (typical American values) such as living on one’s own, not needing anyone else and being self-supporting. The West is described as the country of “wide lawns and friendly trees”, prairies and “lost Swede towns”. Agriculture and farming is the major economic factor and the landscape is marked by long wheat and corn fields.

Settings

• There are basically three main setting within the novel: East Egg, West Egg and "the Valley of Ashes".

• East Egg and West Egg are used as obvious metaphors for the East and the Middle West. They are described as being dissimilar "in every particular except shape and size". The two eggs seem very different but they both lack morality.

Social Determinism

• Gatsby tries to chase the American Dream, yet his notion of the American dream is doomed from the start because he attempts to buy his way into a society that will never admit him => the title is ironic.

The Valley of Ashes

• The land of the have-nots in the Valley of Ashes, the spatial transition between the East and the West, some intermediate area that joins the worlds of the Eggs to Manhattan.

• The Valley of Ashes (this land of smoke stacks and ash-men) stands in striking comparison with Gatsby's lavish and showy parties of live music and champagne.

The Valley of Ashes

• Dark and lifeless, as if burnt to the ground – as a result of fire, ashes symbolically stand for destruction and death.

• The Valley also represents the social and moral decay and corruption of America. It is also symbolic of the "underbelly" of the American Dream.

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

• Poem published in 1922 by T.S. Eliot (that is, three years before The Great Gatsby), and the modernist image of Dr T. J. Eckleburg, the gigantic billboard in the Valley of Ashes.

• The two modernist works share a same pessimistic view of modern society. Eliot sees the renewal of life doomed from the beginning (as in the end it will die anyway).

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

• In The Waste Land Eliot enters into the barren land and describes how the roots “clutch” infertile ground, desperately trying to derive something out of nothing.

• The sterile valley of ashes is alike with its “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” Both descriptions suggest that no life forms can ever exist in this harsh environment and that the waste lands offer no promises.

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

• Here are the first lines of The Waste Land that clearly thematize sterility and decay:

“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. /Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers. […]What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow /Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.”

The Billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg

• Symbolize both social and moral conscience.
• Second most outstanding image // the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.
• Second most remarkable pair of eyes in the novel // party-going "Owl-eyes"

The Billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg

"The eyes of T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic - their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose." (26)

The Billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg

A "watchful vigil", "persistent stare" (27)Moral corruption in the valley of American ashes => George Wilson telling Myrtle that she can't fool God (152).

Possible readings:1 - God is everywhere

• The enigmatic eyes = a spiritual power = the eyes of God
• Symbols of a God that is all-seeing, ever-present and omniscient.
• Despite 1920s America's moral decay, the eyes of God still watching.
• Eyes = absence of traditional spirituality in the lives of characters => society
• Implicit call to action => reconnecting with a lost spiritual connection.

Possible readings:2 - God replaced by capitalism

• Spiritualited supplanted by materialism.
• Religion = only an old and washed-out billboard.
• God reduced to a mere advertisement.

Possible readings:3 - Nick's eyes

• The only character in the story who knows what is really going on.
• Other characters as blind as Tiresias the blind prophet and main figure in Eliot's The Waste Land.

Possible readings:3 - Nick's eyes

"These monstrous eyes are the novel's major symbol. The book's chief characters are blind, and they behave blindly. Gatsby does not see Daisy's vicious emptiness, and Daisy, deluded, thinks she will reward her gold-hatted lover until he tries to force from her an affirmation she is too weak to make. Tom is blind to his hypocrisy; with a short deft movement" he breaks Myrtle's nose for daring to mention the name of the wife she is helping him to deceive. Before her death, Myrtle mistakes Jordan for Daisy. Just as she had always mistaken Tom for salvation from the ash-heap, she blindly rushes for his car in her need to escape her lately informed husband, and is struck down. ... =>

Possible readings:3 - Nick's eyes

" Moreover, Daisy is driving the car; and the man with her is Gatsby, not Tom. The final act of blindness is specifically associated with Dr. Eckleburg's eyes. Wilson sees them as a sign of righteous judgment and righteously proceeds to work God's judgment on earth. He kills Gatsby, but Gatsby is the wrong man. In the whole novel, only Nick sees. And his vision comes slowly, in the act of writing the book." (Charles Thomas Samuel, "The Greatness of Gatsby" in The Massachusetts Review, VII (Autumn 1966), 783-794)

Owl Eyes

• A man "with enormous owl-eyed glasses" (chapter 3)

• Metonymically connected to the act of perception

Owl Eyes and Gatsby's books

" Absolutely real - have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they're absolutely real...It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too - didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?" (47)=> what Gatsby presents to the world is a mere façade.=> the uncut books suggest that Gatsby is a fraud

Owl Eyes

• More a symbol than a full-blown character
• Able to see through the façade of social life.
• Doubts Gatsby and investigates about him, going beyond appearances.

Owl Eyes and Gatsby's books

" See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What throughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too - didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?" (47)=> if you alter one tiny element, the rest will collapse""if one brick was removed the whole library was liable => also announces ill omens of death.

Owl Eyes and Gatsby's books

" The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions. The illusions seem more real than the reality itself. Embodied in the subordinate characters in the novel, they threaten to invade the whole of the picture. One the other hand, the reality is embodied in Gatsby; and as opposed to the hard, tangible illusions, the reality is a thing of the spirit, a promise rather than the possession of a vision, a faith in the half-glimpsed, but hardly understood possibilities of life. In Gatsby's America, the reality is undefined to itself. It is inarticulate and frustrated." (Marius Bewley, "Scott Fitzgerald's Criticism of America")

Meaningful Colours

• Fitzgerald uses colours to a symbolic purpose.

• The "single green light" on Daisy's dock that Gatsby gazes pensively at from his own house across the water represents the "unattainable dream," the "dream [that] must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it".

• The green light also represents the hazy future, the future that is forever elusive, as Nick claims in the last page of the novel: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – to-morrow we will run farther, stretch out our arms farther…."

Meaningful Colours

• Daniel Schneider sums up the values associated with the green colour:

“We are all familiar with "the green light" at the end of Daisy's dock—that symbol of the "orgiastic future," the limitless promise of the dream Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragic end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow—symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the dream and ultimately destroys it.” (Daniel J. Schneider. Color-Symbolism in The Great Gatsby. University Review (formerly University of Kansas City Review), XXXI (Autumn 1964): 13-18.

Meaningful Colours

• The colour blue mainly represents Gatsby's illusions or alternatives to reality, his romantic dreams of unreality. The color blue is present around Gatsby more so than any other character:
• His gardens are blue,
• his chauffeur wears blue,
• the water separating him from Daisy is his "blue lawn" (9.150), mingled with the "blue smoke of brittle leaves" in his yard.

Meaningful Colours

• Daniel J. Schneider:

• The central conflict of The Great Gatsby, announced by Nick in the fourth paragraph of the book, is the conflict between Gatsby's dream and the sordid reality—the foul dust which floats "in the wake of his dreams." Gatsby, Nick tells us, "turned out all right in the end"; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of greatness, an attainment "commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder." What does not turn out all right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted universe is exposed as a world of wholesale corruption and predatory violence, and Nick returns to the Midwest in disgust.

Meaningful Colours

• Gold is the traditional "old money and is constantly associated with the “East Egg” characters – Jordan's "slender golden arms" or Daisy the "golden girl".
• Conversely, yellow is false gold, like in the "yellow cocktail music" that can be heard at Gatsby's party or Gatsby's car that is the symbol of his vain desire to enter New York's upper society.
• White means innocence and is mainly associated with Daisy – her clothes, the rooms in her house, or the adjectives regularly used to describe her (her "white neck," "white girlhood," the king's daughter "high in a white palace", etc.).

The American Dream

• The Great Gatsby is much about the corruption of the American dream, showing how the unrepressed craving for easy money and wild pleasure has finally replaced more honorable ends.

• Fitzgerald depicts the 1920s as an age of relaxed or even corrupted social and moral values, exposing its greed, its cynicism and superficial pursuit of pleasure.

• If the American dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness, the 1920s did corrupt this dream, especially on the East Coast.

The American Dream

“We recognize that the great achievement of this novel is that it manages, while poetically evoking a sense of the goodness of that early dream [the American dream], to offer the most damaging criticism of it in American literature. The astonishing thing is that the criticism—if indictment wouldn’t be the better word—manages to be part of the tribute. Gatsby, the “mythic” embodiment of the American dream, is shown to us in all his immature romanticism. His insecure grasp of social and human values, his lack of critical intelligence and self-knowledge, his blindness to the pitfalls that surround him in American society, his compulsive optimism, are realized in the text with rare assurance and understanding. And yet the very grounding of these deficiencies is Gatsby’s goodness and faith in life, his compelling desire to realize all the possibilities of existence, his belief that we can have an Earthly Paradise populated by Buchanans. A great part of Fitzgerald’s achievement is that he suggests effectively that these terrifying deficiencies are not so much the private deficiencies of Gatsby, but are deficiencies inherent in contemporary manifestations of the American vision itself.” (Marius Bewley, “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America”)

The American Dream

• Among Nick’s acquaintances only Gatsby has the courage to dream of making a completely different future for himself even if his dream does not come true in the end. His failure may suggest that it is impossible for anyone to deny their past so absolutely.

• Conversely, Tom and Daisy as well as other members of the upper class, betray America’s democratic ideals by maintaining a firm class structure that rejects newcomers like Gatsby.

The American Dream

• Barbara Will in her article “The Great Gatsby and the Obscene Word” also cites the power of Nick’s “lyrical paragraphs” to present Gatsby’s fate as an “allegory for the course of the American nation and for the struggles and dreams of its citizens” (25).

The American Dream

"Americans (Fitzgerald included) tend to perceive the American dream as a promise of freedom—freedom from persecution and unjust hostility as well as the freedom to advance and achieve success. Part of that dream is that all, not just the privileged few, share in this promise. However, Fitzgerald indicates through the language of the text (Nick’s language) that our ideology is “marred” by our “obvious suppressions” to the point that even though we are united, we are still quite separate and emotionally isolated from each other. One example of this is the oxymoron Nick uses to describe Daisy and Tom as “two old friends whom [he] scarcely knew at all”. We hold unity in the highest esteem, but we are divided by our ambitions and are willing to oppress others to achieve our individual goals, even though our nation’s founding principles seem to suggest that we would—or should—want to do otherwise." (ibid.)

The American Dream

• Nick thinks that everyone like Gatsby chases after their dream, believes that one day it will come true, we will achieve it—and all the while, we're "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into our past"

Chapter IX: Achieving Greatness?

• The last chapter of the novel => creates a feeling of finality and conclusiveness for the reader => "the party was over".

• Nick is writing two years after the events of 1922! => retrospective eye => unwelcoming, even hostile East.

• Despite the negative aspects of Gatsby's character, he achieves a form of "greatness".

• A process of erasure => graffiti => Gatsby fit to stand for America itself => obscenity must be erased.

Chapter IX: Nick's Epiphany

• Gatsby's fate assumes mythic dimensions => powerful metaphor for post-World-War-I America:

• "For Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, 'the American dream.'" (Lionel Trilling "F. Scott Fitzgerald" in "The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., London: Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited, 1951, 17).

Chapter IX: Nick's Epiphany

• "Only Nick and Gatsby count. For Gatsby, with all his absurdities and his short, sad, pathetic life, is still valuable; in Nick's parting words to him: "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." Nick, who in his way is as much of this world as Daisy is in hers, still sees, obscurely, the significance of Gatsby. And although he knows that the content of Gatsby's dream is corrupt, he senses that its form is pristine. For, in his own fumbling, often gross way, Gatsby was obsessed with the wonder of human life and driven by the search to make that wonder actual. It is the same urge that motivates visionaries and prophets, the urge to make the facts of life measure up to the splendors of the human imagination, but it is utterly pathetic in Gatsby's case because he is trying to do it so subjectively and so uncouthly, and with dollar bills. Still Nick's obscure instinct that Gatsby is essentially all right is sound. It often seems as if the novel is about the contrast between the two, but the bond between them reveals that they are not opposites but rather complements, opposed together, to all the other characters in the novel."
• (John Henry Raleigh, "F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: Legendary Bases and Allegorical Significances.)

The Great Gatsby as a Jeremiad

• A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall.

• Named after the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, and comes from Biblical works attributed to him, the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations.

• The Book of Jeremiah prophesies the coming downfall of the Kingdom of Judah, and asserts that this is because its rulers have broken the covenant with the Lord.

• The term jeremiad is applied to moralistic texts that denounce a society for its wickedness, and prophesy its downfall.

The Great Gatsby as a Jeremiad

• "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - ... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (170/171)

The Great Gatsby as a Jeremiad

• "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - ... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (170/171)

DID YOU KNOW...

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