Gatsby
Sunday, June 02, 2013
11:50 PM
A Point Of View: Gatsby and the way we live now
Continue reading the main storyThe doors of perception (John Gray)Tom Ripley and a talent for evil
(JG)Leaving Gormenghast (JG)Ghosts in the material world (JG)F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby was
able to invent himself because he lived in an age of illusion. Does the novel say something about the
way we live now, asks John Gray.(Spoiler alert: Key plot details revealed below)Not long before he
died, a celebrated conjuror, whose beautifully simple yet seemingly impossible tricks had earned
him the baffled admiration of his fellow magicians, was asked if there was anything he still wanted.
He replied, "I wish somebody could fool me one more time."The magician's confession came back
into my mind when, a few months ago, I re-read The Great Gatsby. Scott Fitzgerald's novel - now in
cinemas again - about a magnetically attractive millionaire, can be read as a story of the Jazz Age and
a comment on the corruption of the American dream.Continue reading the main story
Find out more
A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays 08:50
BSTJohn Gray is a political philosopher and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global
CapitalismListen to A Point of View on the iPlayerBBC Podcasts - A Point of ViewIt's also a tangled,
and finally tragic, love story. Using the traumas of the "Lost Generation" that emerged disillusioned
from World War I, Fitzgerald distils a picture of how American hopes of making a new start in history
were derailed by a culture whose energy was spun off from crime and fraud.Yet I believe the unique
quality of the book lies in its exploration of a more universal theme. A form of make-believe is the
basis of society, and periods of extreme unreality like the Roaring Twenties have recurred
throughout history.When reality breaks in, it's an interlude between different versions of make-
believe. If Gatsby's story resonates so strongly with us as the new film of the book suggests, it's
because we find ourselves in just such an interlude at the present time.The most obvious fact about
Gatsby is that everyone knew he was a fake. While his friend Nick Carraway, who tells the story,
wanted always to give Gatsby the benefit of the doubt, an aura of dissimulation surrounded the
young tycoon from the start.According to Carraway, Jay Gatsby - the more glamorous name adopted
by James Gatz at the age of 17 - "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself". Gatz's parents
were poor farming people and he'd never really accepted them as his family.Like many before him
and since, Gatsby was a self-invented personality. Where he differed from other self-invented
figures was that the identity he invented for himself was a perfect embodiment of the fantastic
world around him.A tale for our times? The 2013 film version"A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun
itself out in his brain," Carraway notes - a universe that encompassed not just the lavish parties that
Gatsby laid on, but a multitude of glittering possibilities far removed from the bootlegging and
gangsterism that were the true source of his wealth.Gatsby yearned to make these squalid realities
unreal, and so establish as an accepted fact the image he had created of himself. His wealthy friends
knew he was a fraud and were drawn to him for that very reason. Entranced by what Carraway
described as Gatsby's "extraordinary gift for hope", they too wanted to make reality unreal.Continue
reading the main story
F Scott Fitzgerald
Born in Minnesota in 1896Four novels published in his lifetime - This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful
and The Damned, The Great Gatsby and Tender is The NightA fifth, unfinished novel - The Love of
the Last Tycoon - published posthumously in 1941Also wrote short storiesDied in 1940How real is
The Great Gatsby's playboy island?If everyone knew he was a fake and still believed in him, Gatsby
must have been a rather special kind of fake.When you study the history of forgery in the arts, you'll
find that what distinguishes the forged work from the genuine article isn't the skill with which the
original has been copied. Some fake paintings are so good that they contain the artist's distinctive
defects.Displaying these imperfections, these are the perfect fakes. There's nothing in a fake of this
kind that distinguishes it from a painting by the artist himself. Yet the fake is still a fake, since the
story of how it was made is false. What makes fake art is not any features of the art itself but the
history of its production.The wealthy people that flocked around Gatsby colluded with him in his
fakery because, like him, they wanted to forget how their wealth had been made.Fitzgerald's Jazz
Age was a time when the borderlines between the fortunes of the elite and the spoils of organised
crime were blurred and shifting. Prohibition helped create some of the great figures of the time and
later.It's been claimed that the businessman and American ambassador to Britain Joseph P Kennedy
used wealth he amassed from bootlegging to fund the political careers of his sons John and Robert
Kennedy. The legitimate part of his fortune came from investing in Hollywood films - one of the mass
media that together with radio shaped America in the 1920s.Bank customers queue to withdraw
their savings in 1929...Easy money flowed from artificially low interest rates engineered by the
Federal Reserve Bank in order to lift the US out of recession at the start of the decade. Powered by
reckless borrowing and shady practices, the soaring stock market seemed to defy gravity until it
crashed to earth in 1929.Continue reading the main story
