[Eli Park Sorensen] The belatedness of ‘The Great Gatsby’

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel “The Great Gatsby” (1925) recounts the story of a poor farm boy named Jimmy Gatz, who falls in love with a beautiful girl from a wealthy family, Daisy Fay.

Gatz pretends that his own background is similar to Daisy’s, and she promises to wait for him until after the war. In 1919, however, she marries Tom Buchanan, a man from an aristocratic family. 

The book begins around 1922 ― told in first-person by Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin ― at a time when Gatz has transformed himself into the elegant and charming Jay Gatsby, and acquired an enormous fortune, albeit through shady business activities, in order to win Daisy back.

As the novel progresses, it becomes more and more evident that the love story will end in tragedy ― Daisy not being the person Gatsby thought she was, and Gatsby, of course, being exposed as a fraud. Gatsby is eventually murdered in his own swimming pool; Daisy and Tom continue their careless, wealthy lifestyle; while Nick ― disgusted and disillusioned ― moves back to Minnesota.

According to the novelist Jay McInerney, “The Great Gatsby” is more than simply an American classic.

“It’s become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth,” he writes, “the Rosetta stone of the American dream” ― and thus, as relevant as ever.

Over the years, several attempts have been made to adapt Fitzgerald’s novel for the big screen. Baz Luhrmann’s recent, and highly anticipated cinematic interpretation of one of the 20th century’s most haunting tales of dreams, greed and lost illusions shares at least one thing with its predecessors: a somewhat mixed critical reception, to put it mildly.

According to the critic Alsono Duralde, Fitzgerald’s novel is “an immortal American tragedy, but the story’s impact gets completely buried in Luhrmann’s flash and dazzle.” Another critic, Joe Morgenstern, calls Luhrmann’s treatment “a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.” A little later he adds, witheringly; the film is “a spectacle in search of a soul.”

Finally, The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw acidly remarks that the film is “bombastic and excessive, like a 144-minute trailer for itself, at once pedantic and yet unreflective.”

And so the reviews mercilessly continue. What most have in common is a strong aversion for what one could call the film’s post-modernization of Fitzgerald’s narrative ― rap music, 3-D effects, swirling camera movements, loud and gigantic party scenes ― flash, dazzle, noise, furor, excessiveness; all at the expense of the subtleness and sophistication that one allegedly finds in the original text.

Luhrmann’s ambitious, big-budget adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” is in other words a boisterous failure ― a betrayal, a misinterpretation, at least to the majority of film critics.

Yet, one might ask what exactly Luhrmann’s updated version betrays; and, more specifically, what was there in the original story which apparently is missing in Luhrmann’s film?

Is it simply that one should generally avoid modernizing a classic (e.g. replace the jazz of the early twenties with contemporary music), and instead faithfully preserve the aura of the work’s own time? Or do these critical reactions reflect the ― almost blasphemous ― belief that the vision of Fitzgerald’s work has become unrecognizable to the extent that it can no longer be translated into the present?

Numerous critics assure us that the latter is not the case.

“As Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic bursts onto our screens,” the literary scholar Sarah Churchwell argues, “it’s not hard to see why this cautionary tale of the decadent downside of the American dream has returned to haunt us.”

To Churchwell, “The Great Gatsby” is a book about the pursuit and betrayal of ideals, the corruption of dreams; Gatsby “epitomizes the self-made man. But Gatsby is also unmade by his faith in America’s myths and lies: that meritocracy is real, that you can make yourself into whatever you want to be, that with money, anything is possible.”

Both Sarah Churchwell and Jay McInerney provide explanations why cinematic adaptations of Fitzgerald’s story have always failed. McInerney suggests that the actual story of Fitzgerald’s novel is somewhat thin, perhaps even banal and melodramatic ― while the real magic of the book consists in the subtle use of language, and above all the sympathetic voice of the narrator, Nick Carraway.

Without the voice and language of the narrator, McInerney writes, the experience of “The Great Gatsby” is a bit like reading Bob Dylan’s lyrics without music.

In a similar vein, Churchwell argues that Fitzgerald’s book is essentially about imagination’s superiority over reality ― Gatsby projecting fantasies on to Daisy, while Nick projects his fantasies on to Gatsby. Language, voice, imagination: the essentials of the novel form, less the genre of film.

And yet the failures to translate Fitzgerald’s classic into the present may also relate to a more profound problem ― the seed of which is already there in the original work. It is worth recalling here that when “The Great Gatsby” came out in 1925, it received a somewhat hostile reception ― several critics seeing it is as little more than a superficial tale about partying, amusement, tomfoolery; a novel empty at its core (words ironically echoing today’s critical responses to Luhrmann’s film).

Fitzgerald himself complained that the novel had been grossly misunderstood by his contemporaries. Only later ― in fact after Fitzgerald’s early death some 15 years following the novel’s first publication ― did “The Great Gatsby” find its audience.

The belated understanding of “The Great Gatsby” is at the same time one of the main themes of the book itself. Told retrospectively by Nick Carraway, at a moment when he belatedly has left the East Coast and returned to Minnesota, the story is essentially a reflection on belatedness, the “too late.”

Gatsby is a tragic figure of belatedness desperately trying to catch up with lost time. Having reinvented himself in order to return to Daisy, as a worthy husband, Gatsby believes it is possible to start all over again ― and thus that it is possible to cancel out the intervening years.

If this is not what the American dream means, Gatsby reasons, what does it mean? Although Gatsby amasses his colossal fortune via illegal methods, there is a notion of purity ― pure love ― at the heart of his endeavors: all his actions ― his crime syndicate and fraudulent persona ― are only means by which he attempts to become worthy of true love.

What eventually brings him down is not the fraud or the crimes, but rather this untainted (some would say delusional ― Luhrmann’s film indicates war trauma) notion of pure love to which Gatsby stays faithful right until the end ― and which in Nick’s eyes makes him the “great” Gatsby.

With Baz Luhrmann’s post-modern spectacle, we once again try to work our back to “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald’s original vision. And, now as before, we fail; we fail because it would always already have been too late ― as it was for Gatsby himself.

This is indeed what the figure of Gatsby embodies. Gatsby’s belatedness ― the discrepancy that separates his pure ideal of the past from his self-made but fraudulent identity of the present ― thus ironically echoes our belated situation today as we reach out for the novel’s vision.

The road back to “The Great Gatsby”’s vision of purity, the novel’s desperate attempt to preserve an authentic moment, a lodestar, in a world of superficiality, greed and excess ― has arguably become stranger, and more unrecognizable, to us than ever before.

Every time Fitzgerald’s original vision is given new life on the screen, in the theatres ― or every time we try to reinvent ourselves as Gatsby ― the character’s belatedness becomes a little more accentuated. Perhaps that explains why Luhrmann’s film almost seems like a revenge on the original, an deafening, hypnotizing act of exorcism; as if, once and for all, to rid the present of the current that carries us back, “ceaselessly into the past,” as the last line of “The Great Gatsby” goes. 

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.