Jim Winter wrote:
> Actually, I'd never read about MacDonald's views on
GATSBY, beyond
> that it was his favorite novel. I know BLACK MONEY
was a retelling
> of GATSBY.
>
> But here's a thought about GATSBY that makes me
wonder if it
> originated with MacDonald. A few years ago, a
professor wrote a
> paper suggesting that Jay Gatsby was trying to pass
as a white man.
> The plot of BLACK MONEY almost suggests that
MacDonald had picked up
> on the idea 30 years earlier. I wished I'd read
GATSBY before I'd
> heard that, because it was in the back of my mind
when I finally did,
> both from that article and BLACK MONEY. Still, it's
an intriguing
> debate, and there's nothing in GATSBY to suggest it
wasn't possible.
And there's nothing to suggest it was. Fitzgerald is one of
the great voices of the early 20th century because of what he
leaves unsaid, true, but this sounds to me like someone on a
tenure track reading something into the text, as opposed to
trying to pull it out. Gatsby is clearly a parvenue, that
much is painfully clear, and the novel lays it out vividly
that no matter how much new money he illegally makes, he's
still "new money" and will never be able to truly enter
Daisy's world any more than I can sprout wings and fly.
I think the deeper question about Gatsby is whether
Fitzgerald identified more with the viewpoint of Nick
Carraway or with the viewpoint of Jay Gatsby himself.
Fitzgerald was himself a parvenue who went out and "made it
big" in order to win his own Daisy, his wife Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald. A social climber by nature, and an alcoholic by
long practice, Fitzgerald opened up both the world of the
"cruel rich" and of jazz age party excess ("jazz age" being a
term Fitzgerald himself coined) for people who might never
have had an inkling of what they were like otherwise. I think
he did a bang-up job of showing how he himself (a good
Catholic boy from the Midwest) was both attracted and
repelled by both these aspects of 1920s America.
Oh, and let me repeat for emphasis, I don't see the "black
guy trying to pass" any more than I see a potentially drunken
gay encounter for Nick after the party scene in the apartment
where he helps the other drunk guy home.
A great novel, regardless.
All the Best-
Brian Thornton
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