The Great Gatsby at 100
No matter what we do in our lives, literature, like all of the arts, makes us better and more well-rounded people. Whether it is music, literature, the opera, painting, television, or film, familiarity with the arts is important. Last summer, the late Pope Francis wrote a letter to seminarians about the role that literature can play in their formation. While the letter was addressed to men studying for the priesthood, much that he proposed can be applied to anyone who engages with literature. In his letter, Pope Francis wrote that literature can stimulate “a great spiritual openness to hearing the Voice that speaks through many voices.” All forms of art are acts of creation and, on a small scale, the artist is participating in an act of creation that is ultimately an act of God, the Creator of all things.
This is why art, by its very nature, should always reflect the Divine, the “Voice” of God. The melody of classical music, the meter of poetry, the structure of a sentence can express truths only if they are harmonious. Melody, meter, and structure all ensure that whatever the form of art, it is harmonious with the order and structure of creation. As far as form and structure are concerned, The Great Gatsby (published one hundred years ago in 1925) is a very well-written novel. The narrative itself does a fine job in depicting the libertine period of the Roaring Twenties which the novel’s author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, described as an orgiastic carnival.
However, anyone who attempts to live their lives according to traditional, Christian morality might ask himself what value or lesson he can gain by reading a novel about self-indulgent characters who use others for their own advancement and pleasure-seeking. But in this question, we find the answer. I like to consider The Great Gatsby to be the via negativa of Catholic literature. In Catholic theology, the premise of the via negativa is that, because God is beyond our human comprehension, sometimes it is easier for us to say what He is not rather than what He is. When we say that God is infinite, we are saying that He does not have a beginning or end. When we say that God is immutable, we are saying that He does not change.
The Great Gatsby is the via negativa of Catholic literature because there is nothing Catholic about it, and this is the point of the novel. It shows us what happens when faith in God and traditional morality are sidelined. In many ways, the trajectory of Fitzgerald’s own life mirrored the tragic path of the characters in his novel.
One of the images that presents itself in subtle and overt ways in the novel is that of a carnival or amusement park. In fact, this was an image that Fitzgerald used on multiple occasions in his writing career. In an earlier short story entitled “Absolution,” a midwestern priest gives advice to a young boy who lies to him in the confessional (this short story and the young boy were originally meant to serve as something of a preface to The Great Gatsby). The priest encourages the boy to visit an amusement park but advises that he should only observe the noise and lights from a distance. In The Great Gatsby itself, Nick (the novel’s protagonist) returns home late one evening to find every light in Gatsby’s mansion lit up like a carnival. Gatsby wants Nick to know that he is awake, anxiously awaiting word from Nick that he is willing to broker an adulterous liaison with Daisy Buchanan. Nick notes that Gatsby’s mansion is lit up like The World’s Fair and Gatsby suggests that they take a drive to Coney Island.
Fitzgerald often looked back on the decade of the Roaring Twenties itself as a “carnival.” Writing three years before his untimely death at the age of forty-four, he stated, “I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.” Although this permissive, licentious age had a deleterious effect on his health (due to alcoholism) and his relationships (especially with his wife Zelda), he stated that he never regretted the libertine period which The Great Gatsby personified.
Gertrude Stein referred to Fitzgerald’s generation as the “Lost Generation” due to their aimlessness and their willingness to drink themselves to death. This was the essence of the “carnival.” A shell-shocked, lost generation, recovering from the dull, gray trench warfare of World War I (think of the Valley of Ashes between Long Island and Manhattan in The Great Gatsby) sought escape and distraction by anesthetizing itself with alcoholic binges and parties. However, at the same time that it was attempting to escape and dull its senses, this generation also desired to feel something. Hence, the emergence of the loud music and bright lights of the Jazz Age
Even before we begin reading The Great Gatsby, the carnival literally exists at the fore. The novel’s dustjacket (probably the most famous dustjacket in history) was designed by Francis Cugat, and in the foreground of the design can be found the bright lights of a frenetic amusement park. Above all of this is the face of a flapper, overseeing the frivolity of the carnival like the all-seeing eye of God. What is notable is an elongated green tear (reminiscent of the green light that Gatsby sees at the end of Daisy’s dock) that is streaming down the flapper’s face toward the carnival below. This is another salient reminder that the aspirational hope and envy in consumerism and wealth ultimately end in tragedy.
The conclusion of The Great Gatsby along with Fitzgerald’s own biography is a reminder that the carnival will not last forever. The lights will eventually go out and the music will stop. In his own life, mirroring Gatsby’s idolization of Daisy, Fitzgerald idolized his wife, Zelda. He even traded his early, fervent Catholicism for a faith in Zelda when, before they were married, he noted that he was no longer a Catholic with the words: “Zelda’s the only God I have left now.” The problem with this, as with so many other modern examples of idolization, is that Fitzgerald held Zelda to the standards of a god. But, since human beings are imperfect and fallible, doing so always leads to disappointment.
Saint Augustine of Hippo’s experience was the opposite of Fitzgerald’s. He began his life distanced from the Catholic faith, finding pleasure in sin. His mother, Saint Monica, hoped and prayed that he would become a Christian. Meanwhile, he engaged in what he called “shadowy loves.” In his youth he recalled stealing pears from an orchard, not because of hunger, but for the sake of stealing. He engaged in sins of the flesh, even having a son out of wedlock. But he eventually came to realize that the Christian faith was the true faith and he accepted baptism.
Augustine’s sinful lifestyle was the result of a restlessness in his heart. This restlessness and sinfulness were the downfall and tragedy of the Lost Generation which was unable to confront life’s challenges in a healthy, constructive manner. Augustine reminds us that it is only in finding God and in having a relationship with him, that our hearts can find true contentment. Augustine’s most famous line from his Confessions is: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord.”
Meanwhile, the final line of The Great Gatsby (“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”) indicates a tension and resistance characterized by a Pelagian desire to forge our own way against the guidance and promptings of the Holy Spirit. The Great Gatsby is a cautionary tale that warns us about the dangers of consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and the pursuit of selfish desires. It is an American tragedy that ends without redemption or reason for hope.
In many ways, the novel mirrored Fitzgerald’s own tragic ending. It is obvious that his Catholic faith, which he abandoned, did inform his understanding of morality, even though he was never able to live up to the demands of this morality. He is pointing out in his novel that a sinful lifestyle, which places God and morality to the periphery, leads to one’s downfall.
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Cumaean Sibyl leads Aeneas into the underworld, and the cautionary words of the Sibyl to Aeneas could easily be applied to Fitzgerald’s greatest novel: “The descent to the Underworld is easy … but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air–there the struggle, there the labor lies.” It is faith in God that helps us in this moral struggle. All things are possible with God, even conquering sin and death, if we only place our trust in him.
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