There is also a continuum between linear thinking, and non-linear thinking. Both can in large measure be abstract, but characterized in the first case by a smooth, clearly intelligible movement, and in the latter case better seen, perhaps, as a series of glimpses into some as-yet unnamed, larger, hidden truth.
I watched the newest Great Gatsby last weekend. I read the book many years ago, and saw the Robert Redford version, made some time back in the 70’s. Given several decades of what I hope has been emotional growth, my impressions were quite different this time.
It is quite easy to take Nick Carraway at his word, to occupy his world, one in which Gatsby’s fidelity somehow shines like a beacon in a world befogged by naked greed and self interest and dishonesty.
This is, however, a mistake in my view. This is what I now see as interesting about this book. We are given a perspective that is skewed, one which the author himself likely did not agree with. We are tacitly invited to see with our own eyes, if we so choose: to see behind the lies he has very intentionally planted.
Consider Carraway’s first meeting with Gatsby (real name Gatz). Gatsby smiles on his account like he is the only person in the world who will ever understand him (or something like that). He gives him hope. But we know that his interest in Carroway was as a means of getting to Daisy. He was, even then, purely self interested.
We know that the stories he tells Carroway in his car on the way to the speakeasy are lies. He did not really attend Oxford, did not really come from old money, and we have to seriously question his alleged battle prowess. It is more than likely that he bought the meager award–from Montenegro, if memory serves–that he shows Carroway.
We know that “Old Sport” is an affectation, one delivered with the studied care of an actor, and completely insincere. Nothing about Gatsby is real.
And we need to factor in as well who Nick is: an aspiring writer who has abandoned his own dreams for the dull world of bond trading. He is someone who is unrooted, alone, and open to any and all sorts of influence by anyone who appears to have figured life out.
On Carraway’s account, Gatsby somehow thought that his patron’s family had “cheated” him out of his inheritance, the claim to which he could only make as a result of having served as a shipmate for the man whose fortune it was.
And we find out that he is a gangster, hanging out with at least one man who wears a human molar–presumably extracted without anesthetic from an unwilling victim–as a prize and a warning.
When Gatsby loses his affected calm with Daisy’s husband, they all see that he is quite capable of murder. Given his chosen livelihood, and his service in WW1, there is then no reason to think he has not in fact killed people. We see at one point also his anger while in the mansion with Daisy and Nick, both of whom fail to extract the hidden knowledge then offered them.
We are told that Gatsby moved into his mansion, and threw his parties, just for Daisy. But when she asks him to run away with her–abandoning, by the way, her daughter–he says no. Why? If she was the point, then this should have thrilled him to no end. He could have liquidated his holdings somehow, and they could have lived well.
Why does he refuse? Simple: she was only PART of the plan. The plan was to be God. The plan was to rise to the stratosphere through lies and corruption, theft, and violence. This is the part Carroway misses, although all the evidence is in front of him.
Daisy, as he notes, was an unexpected distraction. So he decides to kill multiple birds with one stone. He throws the parties in large measure to emphasize his own importance. Yes, he does have feelings for Daisy, but only to the extent that he has not yet checked her off his list.
And we need to be clear that he was almost certainly her first sexual partner. All women from what I can tell will always have special feelings for that man, if he treats her well.
But what does Gatsby do when he leaves her to go to war? He more or less abandons her. She has no idea if he is alive or dead, because he doesn’t write to her. Understandably, she loses hope, then takes up a good offer from a rich, well respected man. When he does write it, it is after such an interval that he should have known that she may well have moved on. He wounds her with the letter, then abandons her again for a number of years.
And as we find in the hotel in Manhattan, she has in fact experienced feelings of love for her polo player. Her principle objection to him is his womanizing.
Gatsby refuses to accept her diluted professions of love, though. His vanity compels him to demand of her that she tell Tom to his face that she NEVER loved him. As she says, this is too much. And it is too much. Gatsby is already in the process of becoming a very controlling lover, of the sort that gangsters, I assume, normally are. They simply take what works at “work” and bring it home. Everything and everyone in its place is the goal. And who determines that place? He does. Redoing the landscaping is just the start. Yes, he tells her she can have what she wants, but is that not how such relationships always start?
The truth of the matter is that despite his cheating, Daisy is almost certainly going to be happier in the long run with her husband. It is interesting in the hotel room that-despite the fact that he clearly is a bully in some ways–Tom is the one who keeps his cool, and Gatz is the who loses it. In that oneupsmanship contest, Tom wins.
Tom’s philandering is wrong, but it is Gatz who lives by the sword–in reality–and who dies by the sword. It is Gatz who engineers the entire situation in which Tom’s lover is killed. He asked too much of Daisy, and in my view did so as an element in his social climbing. He wanted to best someone who considered himself his social superior to his face, and Daisy was just a pawn in this scheme.
We are supposed to view this novel as a critique in some respects of the “American Dream”, but in my view the American Dream is oriented around middle class living, solid moral values, sobriety, loyalty, and family. None of these are on display. You can’t take a distorted picture of one aspect of a large society, and use it to condemn in broad stroke the entirety of that society (although of course this is done daily in our allegedly best schools, most of which would be shut down if the same analytical rigor and concern with concrete outcomes were used in the Humanities as characterizes most sciences).
There can be little doubt that Daisy felt a profusion of emotions: guilt at killing Myrtle, guilt at abandoning Gatz, but also relief at having avoided abandoning everything only to become embroiled with a gangster whose entire life is a lie. Can we doubt that he lied to her when he seduced her in Louisville about who he really was? As we were told, the uniforms acted both as equalizers and as social camouflage. We can, I think, feel quite certain he did not tell her he had abandoned a poor family in the northern plains.
There is, however, interesting social commentary about TODAY in this movie. Why did Jay-Z become the Executive Producer (in my understanding, this amounts to “financial backer”) for this movie?
What I would assume is that he saw this movie very differently. His own path to stardom also went through a very sordid period, when he sold drugs to start his career. In some respects, this is not fundamentally worse than the ways in which many prominent families gained their own wealth. Joe Kennedy, as one obvious example, was more or less a gangster, and even if you go back to the English aristocracy, most of them if you go back far enough can trace back to someone who seized power through violence.
James Gatz became Jay Gatsby, and Shawn Knowles-Carter became Jay-Z. The latter must see in this story a tragedy of a different sort: someone like him came very close to realizing his dream, but had it taken from him by an abusive racist. He had the dream, and the drive, but rich white people lied and cheated him out of it, and never had the decency even to look back.
And what of the parties? I was told I had to see this movie to see Baz Luhrman’s over the top parties. Within the world of Jay-Z, are parties like this not the acme of having “made it”? Are there not dominant currents within America even today which view the lifestyles of the rich and famous as somehow models to aspire to?
We have to understand that the decision to seek power and money by any means necessary almost inevitably means casting aside what might be–and frankly are, by my ideological enemies–called “bourgeois” values.
Why were Jay-Z and Beyonce (who I now cannot see as anything but a very attractive and talented slut) so comfortable in Cuba? Why did they go there in the first place? Because they don’t reject the life of Tom and Daisy Buchanon in principle: they merely think that THEY and theirs should be in their place. Cuban Communists have done nothing but recreate a feudal system in which the common people have no legal rights, and their social superiors have the power of life and death over them.
In this, they take what they no doubt call the logic of Capitalism FAR beyond anything that has ever been created in America or any other nation which has attained a high standard of living through free markets and a functioning system of property rights. Their entire project–and here I intend that of Obama and his minions, with Knowles-Carter merely being a supporter and member–is retrograde. It is intended not to further social justice, or increase the meaningful protection of human rights. Like the project of Gatz, their goal is to punish the successful, and take their places.
The French–who despite their many failings I will grant the ability to turn a phrase–say that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. They know this, because they have been attempting utopian projects since at least 1789, and none of them have lived up to their alleged potential. And even before that, there had been many revolts, many changes in the monarchy, many ideas, many dreams crushed.
We live, today, in a world in which two pop stars were granted–directly or indirectly by the President himself–a vision of a future beyond freedom and dignity. And they liked it. Jay-Z’s capacity for the exercise of reason is exactly what one would expect, and filled with hatred:
You’re an idiot, baby, you should become a student
Oh, you gonna learn today
Where the fuck have you been
The world’s under new management
As Pitbull put it, and I’m paraphrasing: don’t forget where you came from, and that half of both our families dropped bricks. It’s the freedom that we rhyme for. It’s the freedom that we die for.
What do drug dealers do? They contribute to the on-going subjugation of their people in order that they, the few, can rise. In Pitbull’s case he remembers this. In Jay-Z’s case, he wants to pretend that he has somehow earned his position. He has not. He hooked up with a man every bit as dirty as he is. That is all he has done.
Which brings me to the Lollards. Did you know that in 14th Century England reading the Bible in English was a capital crime? That it was heresy? That the principle constituent of a wide-spread illegal movement was the secret and very dangerous reading of the Bible in the vernacular?
Can anyone really say that Obama’s efforts to control the press–and to suppress by any means necessary the revelation of illegal orders that he has given those under him–is really that different than the efforts of the medieval Catholic Church to suppress dissent? He can’t burn people at the stake, but he can and has ended careers.
Those in power always want only those narratives in the public domain which support the continuation of their own power. As Voltaire apparently put it: if you want to know who holds the power, simply look at who you are not allowed to criticize. That is why our own system was so revolutionary, so different from anything attempted in human history.
We protect dissent BY LAW. We protect the right to effective self defense against government overreach BY LAW. We put into place all sorts of protections against EXACTLY those abuses that had characterized all systems before them. Why does the Fifth Amendment exist? Simple: it was very common for most of history to extract confessions by torture. If no person can be made to implicate themselves, then that sort of coercion cannot be used.
Why does the Fourth Amendment exist? Because any government that can go anywhere and do anything it wants is BY THAT FACT ALONE abusive. The extent of the abuse–which by the way has grown considerable–is not the issue. That power, once granted, will grow by leaps and bounds. It is in the nature of power to want to consolidate and expand it.
Obama is not unique in any way. He is fully congruent with any number of other power mongers which litter the pages of history. What is unique in modern American history is the extent to which he has more or less openly corrupted the spirit and letter of the laws that had people like him in mind. Obama is the reason for our Constitution. That is why he hates it so much, and hates those who read it, and value it.