The Great Gatsby

            The Enigma of The Great Gatsby!                

I watched the film ‘The Great Gatsby’ over the weekend. I was driven by an irresistible urge to relive GATSBY whom I had encountered in the eponymous novel in my postgraduate course. He had left an indelible mark on my mind and I savored him on my treasured list of classical characters that live in my thoughts. ‘No one can doubt that the legend(Gatsby) engaged the imagination of the author more deeply than the society in which the legend is played out’. Scott Fitzgerald came into his own with his book ‘This Side of Paradise,’ but he became a critically acclaimed author only with the publication of this book. A book of the Jazz Age,  the roaring twenties (1920s) , written by an author of the ‘Lost Generation,’ it has lived up to all its tags and has gained fame and widespread appeal with time.  It stands true for contemporary India and many other nations in the third world. An age of pleasure orgies, flamboyant display of wealth, singing and dancing , as if eradicating the conventionalities and moralities of the past which had culminated in World war I, a repercussion beyond human comprehension. A world gone berserk on a mindless spree. A study of the milieu and moment of the novel centers the hero and the ambience in the mind of the reader.

The Great Gatsby does not deal with an imaginary space of fetish materialism but is very much rooted geographically in Long Island district of New York.   It was home to the rich immersed in hedonistic life styles , a psychedelic  indulgence of senses,  in the  excess that they had garnered through a thriving economy and prohibition era of the 1920s. Akin to the world today of guns and extortion, black money and power axis.  In that era, Fitzgerald imagined a Great Gatsby , not because his was a rags-to-riches story but that in poor dwellings, he dreamt of himself as ‘a son of God’ . ‘For Gatsby , life with all its absurdities , shortfalls and sadness  is still valuable. He is obsessed with the wonder of human life and driven by the search to make that wonder a reality. An urge that drives prophets and visionaries of this world to make the facts of life measure up to the splendors of human imagination. In the day-to-day realities of existence nothing or nobody is to blame, people are what they are and life is what it is. At this level most people don’t count, they are just refined animals living out a mundane existence, the Tom Buchanans,  the Jordan Bakers, the Daisy Fays.  Only Nick and Gatsby count. Nick tells him so in his last exchange, ‘You are worth than the whole bunch put together’. Nick who is as much of this world as Daisy is in hers, still sees , obsucurely , the significance of Gatsby. He can see that  the content of Gatsby’s dream is corrupt but he senses that its form is pristine’. 

Nick is the narrator of the book. He is within and without as he profoundly defines himself in the movie too. Fitzgerald used the Conradian device to the hilt, by having Nick use the letter ‘I’ and brilliantly perceiving characters and situations through his eyes ironically. The narrator( Nick)  has two styles of narration.  In one, he describes in detail what happens, and in the other he debates, fills in the background detail, muses and summarizes. He is a bond salesman, from the Midwest with his education from Yale and a sound philosophy rooted in values from his rich father. His cottage is set between two large mansions on Long Island, one of which is owned by the mysterious, young  Gatsby, who gives huge parties each week-end, and people come in uninvited in overflowing buggies -  politicians, celebrities, secret agents, actors, extortionists…….  .   A rich married couple, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, friends of Nick, live on an estate opposite the bay, marked by a green light at the end of the dock. Tom is engaged in a sordid liaison with the wife of George Wilson,  the owner of a local garage in the valley of ashes, where the rich dump all their industrial grey waste . Daisy has everything but her husband’s love and is unhappy.   Gatsby wants to take the relationship between him and Daisy five years back, when they were lovers. The book ends in an act of betrayal and ingratitude on the part of Buchanans and Gatsby’s former friends and business associates, and finally Nick concludes that the bootlegger Gatsby, embodied something more genuine and on the whole less depraved than the parasites he entertained, or the so- called aristocratic Buchanans, who run away sheltered by their money and dead conscience. The writer means us to be wholly on the hero’s side, to believe that without Gatsby’s extreme idealism, life is simply a mundane unlivable reality.

The entire fairy tale atmosphere in the background of the Long Island sets the scene for the tragedy in the end. The very first introduction to Gatsby’s mansion and persona is that of a glittering caravanserai, the towers lighted from bottom to the top like a world fair. The symbolic implication of the green light at the end of Daisy’s estate which has a colossal significance for Gatsby is indicative of the green pastures and the desperation for the green card, which drove people in droves, to acquire the ‘American Dream’.  The enormous eyes of Doctor T.J Eckleburg, on a billboard are always watching – ‘God sees all’ as Wilson says ; the moralistic strings of the story.

On an allegorical level , Nick is reason, reality, experience, history, like Wordsworth listening to the sad music of humanity whereas Gatsby is imagination, dream , eternity , like William Blake seeing angels in the sun. Nick sees the tragic, can never be hurt, is a moralist but then he can neither be happy. Gatsby transforms it by the power of his imagination – radical and apocalyptic. Gatsby is hopelessly out of time, and pursues the green light.  He can touch realms of ecstasy - a radical to the core.

Gatsby’s foray into immense wealth comes about through dubious means of bootlegging and his association with shifty characters like Dan Cody and Meyer Wolfsheim(played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie).  The reason he projects himself larger than himself in epic proportions is a ploy to buy respectability, in the form of his yellow buggie, an Oxford Man, parties and the poise of a thorough gentleman. A phrase from the book – ‘he had a platonic conception of himself’ points to his dual character of criminal wealth and respectability.

Amitabh Bachchan and his part in the movie takes us to the Indian Gatsby’s  of today who have acquired their fortunes through grabbing mines, forests and water , exploiting the poor and tapping into the aspirations of the middle class for amassing great turnovers. The luxury-goods market in India has expanded to $ 8.21 billion this year. Studio Creo sells ceiling fans and mattresses priced upward from 2 lakhs. Items of necessity have become luxury goods to acquiesce the pure luxury-living demands of the nouveau riche to lend them a worth in the  eyes of  their so called friends, which makes them worthy in themselves.  People want to own the idea of luxury. They have forgotten the essence of what made Gatsby, ‘The Great Gatsby’ – his pristine vision and genuineness. He is ready to sacrifice himself and his fancy world for the safety and well being of others. After the reader finishes the book or the movie ends our hearts feel heavy and we are filled with despondency for the Great Gatsby himself.

Baz Luhrmann and his design/vision mate Catherine Martin packaged the movie in a radical display of opulence, an aesthetic which seems sublime . This sublimity is blinding the population to its vulgarity of greed, superficiality, envy, selfisness and a pursuit of happiness in indulgence of sensual desires. This is what we are ; the truth stares us in our face. Don’t be dazzled by the veneer – go look for the darkness beneath!

‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’!