huuuuh. I'm terribly fond of Hemingway, but putting him in conversation with people? Probably other war writers of the same era, or (this is a personal interest) journalist writers. I tend to think of The Sun Also Rises in conversation with A Farewell to Arms. Both have narrators who are exceedingly empty centers, so to speak -- no personal histories, no description of their personal feelings and reactions. Poor Jake. What do we think of Brett? Hemingway's women are worth a book or ten in and of themselves -- I feel that his men tend to be more straightforward, though certainly no less emotional messes.
Nick in GG is much less of an empty center; he gives us much of his personal history, at least in bare bones. But he is essentially an empty PERSON, if that makes sense. He tells us vaguely of some entanglement back home, but he doesn't care about her and neither do we. No attachment to family. No particular attachment to anyone in the story. As a matter of fact, the most interesting thing about Nick is how he is affected by Gatsby, with love and loathing and admiration and worry. Gatsby is sort of like a magician, The Great Gatsby, in his vain attempts to transform not only himself but other people (and perhaps his more successful attempts at shady business dealings).
But what I want to come back to is narrative voice, and reliability. I don't know if this is terribly high school, but there's always the question of the unreliable narrator. Nick -- my god, how much more unreliable could you get, when you have a narrator who says he is one of the few honest people he has ever known? And yet, in spite of these wildly red flags, I have some faith in Nick. I have some faith in Jake as well, with his spare style.
Putting these two in conversation with each other, I think the extreme focus on the details of everyday life in an effort to fill the void of modern life is a great comparison. Gatsby's obsession with material objects -- say, the books in the library, cutting the grass, even Daisy herself becoming a thing to give life purpose -- and Jake's careful description of fishing in Spain, each meal, the bulls.
One could, though one would not have to, relate this to Eliot's broken voice in The Wasteland, which intrudes details of very sordid/mundane life into... well, whatever you want to call the rest of it.
GG offers tons of opportunity for the committee to quiz us (what color is the car? how does Wilson find out about the affair? etc.), but I'd guess that given our people, nobody will really be quizzing us on 20th century novels.
I didn't get a chance to re-read Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but I did teach Gatsby the past two years. The color of the car? Man, that's a question I would never ask my high school students, but it's SUCH a high school question. And I've forgotten anyway. Two personal favorite scenes: Owl-Eyes in the library and Daisy contemplating what to do. Daisy of course is straight out of The Waste Land -- that bizarre bourgeois woman (?) who demands to know what the man (?) is thinking. (At least she is for that scene.) I recall Gatsby seeming more and more pathetic and sad every time I read it. Should we think about the novel as having regional concerns? What if one were asked about race in Gatsby? How about Wolfsheim and Rosedale -- are these different treatments or symptoms of an anterior cause?
I spent most of the last week working on Faulkner, which I read for the first time. So Thomas Sutpen went to Haiti to gain some kind of status (inclusive of money and a respectable family), but the "mistake" he made was that his wife turned out to be part African, a fact only discovered upon the birth of his son Charles Bon, whose blackness was undeniably legible, and who ruined everything by becoming the boy who shows up at Sutpen's with no one to turn him away to the back door, instigating and incestuous affair with his white half-sister. Am I crazy, or does this novel contain every pertinent critical strain of the last twenty years in spades? We could read this in dialogue with CLR James, Du Bois ... quite possibly almost everyone on the list. Du Bois was especially present for me, insofar as both he and Faulkner are dealing with the pragmatics of manumission. Both Du Bois and Sutpen have moments of self-awareness tied up with race, although Faulkner gives Sutpen a class angle as well: it is the slave that tells the young Sutpen to go around to the back door.
Once again we have this issue of "aping," which struck me in Jacobs: Henry apes Charles. So there's that.
Southern women also seem of great archetypal importance. Ladies turn into ghosts who tell endless stories. Virginity is inalienably tied to incest. Women can either be ladies, whores, or slaves. Finally, "I became all polymath love's andrognynous advocate." Yep.
Finally, this seems to be a novel of abscences and repudiations. Names go unsaid, events go un-narrated (or their narration is delayed), and the main events of the novel are structured around Sutpen's repudiation of his first wife and Henry's subsequent repudiation of his father precisely for that first repudiation.
2 Comments:
huuuuh. I'm terribly fond of Hemingway, but putting him in conversation with people? Probably other war writers of the same era, or (this is a personal interest) journalist writers. I tend to think of The Sun Also Rises in conversation with A Farewell to Arms. Both have narrators who are exceedingly empty centers, so to speak -- no personal histories, no description of their personal feelings and reactions. Poor Jake. What do we think of Brett? Hemingway's women are worth a book or ten in and of themselves -- I feel that his men tend to be more straightforward, though certainly no less emotional messes.
Nick in GG is much less of an empty center; he gives us much of his personal history, at least in bare bones. But he is essentially an empty PERSON, if that makes sense. He tells us vaguely of some entanglement back home, but he doesn't care about her and neither do we. No attachment to family. No particular attachment to anyone in the story. As a matter of fact, the most interesting thing about Nick is how he is affected by Gatsby, with love and loathing and admiration and worry. Gatsby is sort of like a magician, The Great Gatsby, in his vain attempts to transform not only himself but other people (and perhaps his more successful attempts at shady business dealings).
But what I want to come back to is narrative voice, and reliability. I don't know if this is terribly high school, but there's always the question of the unreliable narrator. Nick -- my god, how much more unreliable could you get, when you have a narrator who says he is one of the few honest people he has ever known? And yet, in spite of these wildly red flags, I have some faith in Nick. I have some faith in Jake as well, with his spare style.
Putting these two in conversation with each other, I think the extreme focus on the details of everyday life in an effort to fill the void of modern life is a great comparison. Gatsby's obsession with material objects -- say, the books in the library, cutting the grass, even Daisy herself becoming a thing to give life purpose -- and Jake's careful description of fishing in Spain, each meal, the bulls.
One could, though one would not have to, relate this to Eliot's broken voice in The Wasteland, which intrudes details of very sordid/mundane life into... well, whatever you want to call the rest of it.
GG offers tons of opportunity for the committee to quiz us (what color is the car? how does Wilson find out about the affair? etc.), but I'd guess that given our people, nobody will really be quizzing us on 20th century novels.
I didn't get a chance to re-read Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but I did teach Gatsby the past two years. The color of the car? Man, that's a question I would never ask my high school students, but it's SUCH a high school question. And I've forgotten anyway. Two personal favorite scenes: Owl-Eyes in the library and Daisy contemplating what to do. Daisy of course is straight out of The Waste Land -- that bizarre bourgeois woman (?) who demands to know what the man (?) is thinking. (At least she is for that scene.) I recall Gatsby seeming more and more pathetic and sad every time I read it. Should we think about the novel as having regional concerns? What if one were asked about race in Gatsby? How about Wolfsheim and Rosedale -- are these different treatments or symptoms of an anterior cause?
I spent most of the last week working on Faulkner, which I read for the first time. So Thomas Sutpen went to Haiti to gain some kind of status (inclusive of money and a respectable family), but the "mistake" he made was that his wife turned out to be part African, a fact only discovered upon the birth of his son Charles Bon, whose blackness was undeniably legible, and who ruined everything by becoming the boy who shows up at Sutpen's with no one to turn him away to the back door, instigating and incestuous affair with his white half-sister. Am I crazy, or does this novel contain every pertinent critical strain of the last twenty years in spades? We could read this in dialogue with CLR James, Du Bois ... quite possibly almost everyone on the list. Du Bois was especially present for me, insofar as both he and Faulkner are dealing with the pragmatics of manumission. Both Du Bois and Sutpen have moments of self-awareness tied up with race, although Faulkner gives Sutpen a class angle as well: it is the slave that tells the young Sutpen to go around to the back door.
Once again we have this issue of "aping," which struck me in Jacobs: Henry apes Charles. So there's that.
Southern women also seem of great archetypal importance. Ladies turn into ghosts who tell endless stories. Virginity is inalienably tied to incest. Women can either be ladies, whores, or slaves. Finally, "I became all polymath love's andrognynous advocate." Yep.
Finally, this seems to be a novel of abscences and repudiations. Names go unsaid, events go un-narrated (or their narration is delayed), and the main events of the novel are structured around Sutpen's repudiation of his first wife and Henry's subsequent repudiation of his father precisely for that first repudiation.
I don't hate the Am Lit reading list! I don't!
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