soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2012-12-16 08:55 am
sophia_sol) wrote2012-12-16 08:55 am
The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald) and unlikeable characters
Last night I accidentally wrote a mini-essay on why I hate The Great Gatsby on my tumblr. WHOOPS. So I am reposting it here since DW is my primary journalling location!
John & Hank Green's youtube channel Crash Course is doing a series on literature, by John Green. And the most recent video from Crash Course Literature was about The Great Gatsby.
I’ve been rereading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for the tumblr-based Jonathan Strange book club I’m hypothetically taking part in, and reading some other people’s thoughts about JS&MN has confirmed something for me.
See, all of what John Green says in this video about The Great Gatsby is perfectly true! And all of that is valuable stuff to have in a book! Except that the book is SO SO BORING.
John Green talks as if the only thing people who hate TGG hate about it is that its characters are pretty unilaterally unpleasant. Nope. As other people perspicaciously pointed out, JS&MN is full of characters who are terrible human beings (or other kinds of beings), and yet that book is riveting where TGG is stultifyingly boring. I mean, I don’t like the characters in TGG, yeah, and I used to think that’s why I didn’t like it, but I’ve changed my mind. I bet it’d be perfectly possible for someone to write a story about those people and for me to find it interesting. JS&MN is proof that you can have unpleasant people and STILL HAVE AN INTERESTING BOOK! TGG is stultifyingly boring because it is a book that is so in love with its pretentious meaningfulness that it forgot to have any other content. YOU CAN HAVE BOTH. I mean, as I will be saying on my tumblr in a few days (....I mostly post on tumblr through my queue, okay?) about Verity’s Teen Wolf fic about butts, it is both utterly hilarious and actually quite thinky! Having the combination of meaningful thoughts and enjoyable content MAKES BOTH PARTS BETTER FOR THE ASSOCIATION.
It’s like how bread is usually acknowledged to be boring on its own (look, I will happily eat good bread with nothing on it just for the joy of the bread, but I also admit I’m unusual.) and cheese is nasty on its own (there are some people who will happily eat good cheese with nothing else, but they’re unusual too), but if you put them together and fry the whole thing in butter it becomes DELICIOUS. And you might eat the sandwich by itself, or you might choose to add the pickles of likeable characters, or you might prefer to add the ketchup of intricate plotting, or you might even best like to pair it with the raspberry jam of steamy romance! But most people will not appreciate eating nothing but the dry bread on its own.
Sorry, my metaphor might have gotten away with me there. I just have a lot of feels about how awful The Great Gatsby is, gdi, and how it is my least favourite of all the things I have ever had to read for a class and that includes the entirety of The History Of The Peloponnesian War which I fell asleep once while reading.
(maybe I would have a new least favourite if I’d actually done all the readings for my 3rd year lit course in university, because I had some fairly divergent opinions from my prof on what makes for good literature, but you know, The Great Gatsby might still have given those books a pretty strong run for their money.)
(also that lit class gives me another example to add to this conversation: Wuthering Heights. MY GOD EVERYONE IN THAT BOOK IS AN AWFUL HUMAN BEING, but it is so very compelling anyways. I mean yeah, I got distracted halfway through and never finished, but I do that even with books I adore in every single way (cf: HMS Surprise by Patrick O’Brian, and how it took me a year and a half to read….), so it’s not like that’s a comment on the quality of the book’s compellingness)
John & Hank Green's youtube channel Crash Course is doing a series on literature, by John Green. And the most recent video from Crash Course Literature was about The Great Gatsby.
I’ve been rereading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for the tumblr-based Jonathan Strange book club I’m hypothetically taking part in, and reading some other people’s thoughts about JS&MN has confirmed something for me.
See, all of what John Green says in this video about The Great Gatsby is perfectly true! And all of that is valuable stuff to have in a book! Except that the book is SO SO BORING.
John Green talks as if the only thing people who hate TGG hate about it is that its characters are pretty unilaterally unpleasant. Nope. As other people perspicaciously pointed out, JS&MN is full of characters who are terrible human beings (or other kinds of beings), and yet that book is riveting where TGG is stultifyingly boring. I mean, I don’t like the characters in TGG, yeah, and I used to think that’s why I didn’t like it, but I’ve changed my mind. I bet it’d be perfectly possible for someone to write a story about those people and for me to find it interesting. JS&MN is proof that you can have unpleasant people and STILL HAVE AN INTERESTING BOOK! TGG is stultifyingly boring because it is a book that is so in love with its pretentious meaningfulness that it forgot to have any other content. YOU CAN HAVE BOTH. I mean, as I will be saying on my tumblr in a few days (....I mostly post on tumblr through my queue, okay?) about Verity’s Teen Wolf fic about butts, it is both utterly hilarious and actually quite thinky! Having the combination of meaningful thoughts and enjoyable content MAKES BOTH PARTS BETTER FOR THE ASSOCIATION.
It’s like how bread is usually acknowledged to be boring on its own (look, I will happily eat good bread with nothing on it just for the joy of the bread, but I also admit I’m unusual.) and cheese is nasty on its own (there are some people who will happily eat good cheese with nothing else, but they’re unusual too), but if you put them together and fry the whole thing in butter it becomes DELICIOUS. And you might eat the sandwich by itself, or you might choose to add the pickles of likeable characters, or you might prefer to add the ketchup of intricate plotting, or you might even best like to pair it with the raspberry jam of steamy romance! But most people will not appreciate eating nothing but the dry bread on its own.
Sorry, my metaphor might have gotten away with me there. I just have a lot of feels about how awful The Great Gatsby is, gdi, and how it is my least favourite of all the things I have ever had to read for a class and that includes the entirety of The History Of The Peloponnesian War which I fell asleep once while reading.
(maybe I would have a new least favourite if I’d actually done all the readings for my 3rd year lit course in university, because I had some fairly divergent opinions from my prof on what makes for good literature, but you know, The Great Gatsby might still have given those books a pretty strong run for their money.)
(also that lit class gives me another example to add to this conversation: Wuthering Heights. MY GOD EVERYONE IN THAT BOOK IS AN AWFUL HUMAN BEING, but it is so very compelling anyways. I mean yeah, I got distracted halfway through and never finished, but I do that even with books I adore in every single way (cf: HMS Surprise by Patrick O’Brian, and how it took me a year and a half to read….), so it’s not like that’s a comment on the quality of the book’s compellingness)
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NOTHING THAT YOU HAVE JUST SAID HERE MAKES SENSE TO ME. :O CHEESE EATERS ARE UNUSUAL? WE FREQUENTLY HAVE A CHEESE COURSE AT DINNER.
CHEESE IS GLORIOUS.
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Look I was writing this late at night and very quickly and I just...FORGOT THAT MOST PEOPLE ARE WEIRDLY IN LOVE WITH CHEESE. IT IS JUST SO OUTSIDE OF MY PERSPECTIVE OF A SENSIBLE WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD.
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(I have managed to acquire a couple of uncut books since then, but I can't bring myself to read them. It couldn't possibly be as good as I've imagined, and if it was that good, where would I find another--?)
And I agree with you on Wuthering Heights, too. I couldn't stop reading but while I was reading I hated literally everything. I got through it by pretending that Misselthwaite Manor was just over the hill, and at any point, Colin or Mary could bust in and smack some proper magic, and maybe even some common sense, into the characters.
(Possibly the most frustrating book I ever read for school, though: The Scarlet Letter. Boring, far too long, everyone in the book is an awful person and also playing monkey-in-the-middle with the Idiot Ball and yet somehow I cared about all the characters anyway. I just wanted them to rise in rebellion against Hawthorne and go find a better author. You could see how he had very carefully ruined what might very well have been a ripping good yarn.)
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I think my main problem with it, though, was it was this long brick of a novel whose entire overly-Gothic plot could have been solved with a happy ending if at any point, any two of the main characters had actually talked to each other, and Hawthorne didn't sell me on any compelling reason why these particular characters wouldn't have talked to each other, except for plot necessity, because they were capable of being honest with each other about things that didn't require silence for plot reasons. Maybe at the time people weren't as burnt out on "just talk to each other already!" stories as I was, except that's not true because there were a ton of other Gothic novels written around that time that had the same issue, they were just also... fun.
(In my less charitable moments - and I may have written an essay along these lines in 10th grade, actually - I think of the Scarlet Letter as fitting in the category of those novels that ought to be genre novels, but because they're written by "mainstream" authors and aren't marketed to genre readers, they break out into major critical success. Even though judged by genre standards, they aren't particularly outstanding.)
(Wow apparently I still have a lot of FEELINGS about a novel I haven't read in 20 years. It was the first one I ever felt passionately enough to write fix-it fanfic for, though, before I even really knew what fanfic was.)
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The bits of the book that stuck with me were the stupid eyes of Eckleburg because I got frustrated with my teacher harping on about them, and Gatsby floating dead in the pool at the end. Also Daisy crying over all of Gasby's shirts because seriously. I didn't remember the detail about Gatsby's library of uncut books, but that's a really great and lovely detail! One of the books I used for my undergrad thesis research was a book from the era of cut-it-yourself pages and still had one uncut page left in it for some reason. It was REALLY NEAT to come across, and I was glad I didn't need anything from between those pages because it would have felt like desecrating a library book to have cut it!
omfg, though, COLIN OR MARY BUSTING INTO WUTHERING HEIGHTS, YES PLEASE.
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And Colin + Mary + Dickon is basically Linton + Cathy + Hareton (abusive childhoods and all) only with at least a tiny smidge of common sense and human compassion and a proper dose of hope. And a concept of love that is expansive rather than possessive. (I think I re-read Secret Garden about three times while we were supposed to be studying Wuthering Heights.)
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and omfg you are RIGHT about Colin-Mary-Dickon and Linton-Cathy-Hareton OOOOOOOH! I will have to go and think about that some more. I would never have made that connection myself!
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I did read The Great Gatsby (I SWEAR. I REALLY DID) four years ago or so, only I actually remember nothing about it because 1) that was a while ago and 2)I forget the contents of books literally the minute I put them down. If a book really makes an impression on me I might remember all of the characters' names. I really wish this were something I could improve on or practice but I'm not sure how...
Anyway, I remember being bored by The Great Gatsby, but fighting my way through it anyway because my Latin teacher, whom I looked up to a great deal, had recommended it to me-- I was making a list of books to read, and he took my notebook and added it to the list, so I read it all the while trying to figure out what he had been trying to communicate to me by telling me to read this book, and COULD NOT FIGURE IT OUT. Then when John Green started the book club thing with it I started reading it again, didn't get far but did get a laugh out of the sudden realization provided by the very first sentence in the book: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
HAHAHAHA. Nicely done, Mr. S-- not sure how I could have failed to capture the meaning of that particular book recommendation, but then I suppose our past selves are always a mystery to our present ones.
Still doesn't make me want to re-read it, though...
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I read the Great Gatsby SIX years ago, so the details are PRETTY FUZZY for me too! I also have the tragic problem of being unable to remember books I read moments later. It's why I keep my List of Books Read, where I write down my thoughts after reading books, so that I can REMEMBER in the future what I thought of them.....
I'm a little tempted to reread Great Gatsby, just to see whether my opinion of it HAS changed in the intervening years, but mostly I'm just like WHY SUBJECT MYSELF TO THAT when I have such a long list of REALLY EXCELLENT books that I want to read?
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It was an honors track class, and it was full of smart, inquisitive, stubborn, difficult people. And our teacher contributed two things to the class- enthusiasm for the books, and a complete inability to exert any control over the classroom discussion. The result was that we'd read whatever the reading was for the night before, and then come into class and brawl over it for an hour while our teacher stepped back and let us argue. It was one of the most intellectually exciting environments I've ever been in, and the things my classmates taught me about TGG, the differences in the ways we understood its themes and its characters and their motivations is central to my affection for the book.
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Your English class, though, sounds like a fantastic experience! Alas, my experience was of being the sole student who cared about English class in a room full of people who would rather have been anywhere else. Ah well.
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I can't remember why I disliked Gatsby, but it wasn't the characters, and I did like the style to some degree. I am fairly excited for the sparkly Baz Luhrmann treatment, though.
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ANYWAYS my metaphor was possibly strained and possibly makes no sense, what can I say, it was late at night and I got carried away.....
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