Why you all should read The Great Gatsby

One of the things I am most embarrassed about in my 'English career' is misquoting the last line of The Great Gatsby in my finals. I realised my mistake as soon as the infamous bellow of “Stop writing” echoed through Caedmon Hall. But it was too late. Scribbling it out would have risked certain disqualification. So I left it. 

Big mistake. Despite graduating over five years ago, it's something that continues to haunt me. Why? Because in my mind, misquoting The Great Gatsby is like misquoting The Bible. And nobody would ever dare do that... would they?

Lots of you will have read The Great Gatsby, and lots of you will have not. Some of you will have advocated The Great Gatsby to others, some of you will have been advocated at.  But for a long time, I didn’t really understand the appeal of this book: yes, it’s got some nice similes, and there’s a jolly tragic love plot, but I wasn’t quite sure I liked it. Of course, this may have been due to initially reading it as part of my A Level English Literature, which was a thoroughly traumatic experience in itself thanks to Mr G’s heinous armpits (his shirts were actually stained green, and he was evicted to a portakabin outside of the main building when I was in Year 13, presumably to give the English Corridor a chance to air). But after a few years of growing up and reading it for the third time, I think I came to the conclusion that it’s a bloody good book.

A quick search on Google will give you a number of superficial reasons to read the “Greatest American Novel of All Time”. My favourite examples include:

“The story takes place in East Egg and West Egg, Long Island. I know I would like to live in a town named after my favorite breakfast food.”

“It's actually a fairly quick read.”

“Fans of weepy romances like Titanic and The Notebook will eat this up.”

“You will automatically look way more intelligent when you understand references to Gatsby or Daisy Buchanan.”

For anyone that has read Gatsby, I hope these suggestions have caused your stomach to machinate just like mine currently is. These are not good reasons to read any book. If we all went around choosing our fiction on the criteria of breakfast foods we liked, I’m sure sales of ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Coco Pops’ would flourish, but the quality of the discussion surrounding literature would quickly expire.

But the reason that I hear most people give for reading a book, particularly classics, is because they “feel they should”. Nobody should ever read a book because they are pressured into it, whether that be by the guardians of the literary canon, the relentless protestations of a friend or a sense of self-imposed guilt. I am quite proud of the fact that I have never read 1984. And I have no idea what happens in Anthony and Cleopatra or Julius Caesar. Or most of Dickens. Apparently, as an English Teacher, I should have read these classics. But I haven’t, because I don’t want to.

I  know what you’re thinking. I’m a terrible hypocrite. I’m saying people shouldn’t be forced to read books, whilst trying to persuade you to read one. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m going to give you a good reason to consider reading Gatsby. And if you still don’t want to, you don’t have to. So here goes:

My pupils often ask me why I always choose such depressing books to teach them. They have a point. Last school year, my text choices included We Need to Talk About Kevin (school shootings and devil children), Sylvia Plath’s poetry (yes, the one who put her head in the oven), a Victorian Gothic novella (involving a child possessed by the devil), 2 x Death of a Salesman (the clue is in the title), Jane Eyre (which deserves a blog post of its own in terms of the ‘heroine’ succumbing to a patriarchal society) and even The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (which, as I taught my Year 8, has a pretty unsettling ending since the child is left merely appeased by the gift of a dog, following the revelation that all adults are untrustworthy). These titles lead to a death count of nearly thirty (including a suicide rate of over five), the abuse of numerous children and the demise of one dog with a pitchfork.

My standard response to this query has generally been that depressing books are more interesting. I’ve never been one for a happy ending, and I managed to write an entire dissertation on why the climax of the Harry Potter series was abysmal, and all the best children’s books end horribly. To me, depressing books usually feature much more complexity in terms of character, plot and idea than a sugary-sweet tale could ever dream of delivering.

So where does Gatsby figure in all of this? Well, my initial interpretation of the book was that it too fitted into the ‘depressing’ category. It’s a critique of everything that was wrong with 1920’s America: on a basic level, it tracks the end of the American Dream and features a cast of shallow, dishonest and unfaithful characters. Oh, and there are also three pretty bloody deaths.

But in teaching Gatsby earlier in the year, I rediscovered my favourite line from the novel. Even those of you who have studied it would never be able to guess it - it’s not one of the big guns, but a phrase of such simplicity that it makes me quiver a little every time I read it (English geek, I know): at the end of the first chapter, we get a glimpse of the eponymous hero, who is described as “regarding the silver pepper of the stars”. 

I’ve always liked the delicacy of this phrase, and Fitzgerald’s verb-choices are an eternal pleasure to examine, but this quotation is more than just something to be analysed on a linguistic level. It captures what the whole novel is about. You see, from the midst of a darkly corrupt and pessimistic world comes an image about our capacity to look for more, to consider our place in the world, and (here comes one of the aforementioned big guns) to “dream”. 

The word “dream” gets a bit of a bad press these days. We most regularly hear it in relation to contestants on the X Factor, whose “dream” it is to be as big as Beyoncé. Considering that most of these statements are followed by an audition consisting of noises akin to what can only be described as the mating call of a badger, their “dreams” seem largely laughable. Furthermore, when we describe a person as “dreamy” it’s not usually a good thing - it's all just a bit airy fairy - and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “It’s my dream to work in accountancy”. In short, the word has become a little OTT.

But behind this weighty word is a simple and positive sentiment.  Surely it’s a good thing to want more for ourselves? Of course, we have to be realistic, and that’s where Jay Gatsby makes a bit of a hash of it all, but despite this, F. Scott Fitzgerald concludes that there is something “gorgeous” about a capacity to dream. You see, in a pessimistic world, it’s easy to be drawn into being pessimistic ourselves. To moan about our jobs, our love-lives and the quality of television on a Tuesday night (which is terrible since the Bake Off ended). But maybe, just maybe, we should all spend a little more time regarding the silver pepper of the stars.

So, in conclusion: you should not (re)read The Great Gatsby because I say you should. You should read The Great Gatsby to salvage some of the reputation of dreams. You should read Gatsby to see that there is the possibility of light in a dark world. And, most importantly, you should read The Great Gatsby if you’ve ever had the inkling of dream yourself.

p.s. The latest film of Gatsby, featuring Leonardo di Caprio and directed by Baz Luhrmann, is due for release in May. So if you are going to read it, please do it before then. As amazing as  Luhrmann's adaptations can be, I sense that this one isn't going to be particularly subtle...

Why 3021 characters are better than 140

I read something today. Something that caused me to take the momentous decision to start a blog. 

That something was a relatively simple idea, but something that I think is easily forgotten in our modern world:

“People are capable of revealing rich patterns of thought and feeling through language.” 

Now of course, you probably all knew that, unless you are emotionally stunted in some way. But it really got me thinking about how little I use language to its full capabilities. And as an English Teacher, that worried me.

I have, for some time, possessed a hatred of Twitter, and those of you who know me relatively well have probably realised I’m pretty useless at replying to text messages. I have previously blamed this on the useless heap of crap the Orange Shop (or is it now EE?) insist on calling a phone. Other excuses have been a lack of time, my general derision for people that spend their lives refreshing a screen for the latest sneak-peak into Giles Coren or Grace Dent’s life, along with those of you who refer to things that happened “on Twitter” as if it was the real world. But today, I hit on the real reason. It’s the limited length; that horrendous pressure to say something witty / life-affirming / sufficiently impressive in only 140 characters.

Now I know this isn’t ground-breaking, but it turns out that our world is full of limitations on language, and I didn’t even notice it happening. Everything has got shorter – we don’t write letters, we email; we don’t email, we text; we don’t text, we tweet. I realise that this isn’t exactly how it works, but that list does capture a general chain of (d?)evolution over the last fifteen or so years. On top of this, newspapers are physically smaller (The Independent even shortened its bloody name to ‘i’), my school reports are limited to 160 characters (in which you must comment on a pupil’s entire term of work), and even the blessed BBC offers news snippets between programmes for those of us that won’t engage in a full news item (I sound snide, but I’m one of them). 

Whereas some folks claim this is to do with the short attention spans of the younger generation, I think this is doing all of us a disservice. The teenagers I know (admittedly, they are all terribly middle class and pay for their education) are perfectly capable of sitting and concentrating in a 90 minute lesson. Furthermore, they will all sit and read a book for 45 minutes in a library class. And I regularly see less privileged children out and about, fully engaged in an activity for more than a minute at a time (even if that is the persistent tormenting of a Chinese man on the bus, like I witnessed last week).

The problem is that we have lowered our expectations of ourselves when it comes to language. We’re too willing to accept the shortened version, whether that’s for genuine time constraints or just pure laziness. But what I’m saying is that we need to make more time for words – not just to read something longer than a 'Daily Mail Online' article every so often (I know you do it, we all do), but to use more words to express ourselves. And by this I don’t just mean verbally, but on the page / screen. This is the important part. By limiting yourself to 140 characters, you’re essentially limiting your emotions to about thirty words.  

You see, if I’d written this post as a tweet, I probably would have come across as either angry, bitter or saddened. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll realise I’m all three. And possibly slightly optimistic that, by setting an example through this blog, I can encourage other people to spend a little more time each day using language to its full potential.