dappled shade

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is the perfect English-curriculum high school book. It's oozing symbolism (with varying degrees of obscurity) and dwells on humanity's innate corruption. In other words, The Great Gatsby gives English teachers plenty to talk about and school boards a warm and fuzzy feeling that they are preparing students for the real and nasty world out there.

It almost goes without saying that The Great Gatsby is also well written and has genuine value. Among other things, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, examines how the very rich and selfish can cause terrible events to occur to the people around them. In a society which prides itself on equality, this is a point worth considering. If wealth allows people to dodge culpability, then an equal society does not exist.

The problem with The Great Gatsby is that I don't like it very much. I didn't like it in high school, and I've re-read it twice recently and I still don't like it. I can see it's well-written and well-constructed, it's clever and the author presents ideas that are worth considering. I think where it falls flat with me, though, is that the characters are just not likable.

I mentioned above that Fitzgerald examines how the rich can avoid blame for their actions. People from all economic backgrounds, though, are fairly unlikable in this book. They're selfish, short sighted, petty and narrow minded. Money doesn't make people objectionable in this book; it just gives them more power to be objectionable.

A few of the characters have redeeming features, but the timing and presentation of these more positive characteristics tends to be too little, too late. Gatsby is the obvious example. At least arguably, he does redeem himself, but it's fairly far on in the book before this is revealed. The reader is left flailing through the book, trying to latch onto a character who can represent what is good in a sea of characters who represent what is wrong.

How much this will bother readers, of course, depends on what they think of people in general. A misanthrope would probably think this book is spot on, though would perhaps consider Gatsby's more positive characteristics exaggerated.

Without hesitation, I recommend The Great Gatsby to all misanthropes. To everyone else, it's an interesting read and a very well constructed book.

Beowulf

Beowulf is an odd story. I can't make up my mind if it seems like a really odd story because I'm female (and to put it mildly, this is a story of manly men doing manly things) or because the culture is so unknown to me.

I read Beowulf for the first time while I was in college. As far as I can tell, the reason people read Beowulf as widely as they do is because Tolkein talked about it, and most (male) academics are geeks at heart who loved Lord of the Rings (the female academics are geeks, too; they just read Jane Austen instead).

In the story, Beowulf kills Grendal, Grendal's mother and a dragon — all creatures that are not human. So, yes, I get the bit in Beowulf about the enemy being a non-human villain which can be slain without remorse. It neatly ties up people's abiding interest in violence and death, without any moral complications as the creatures which are being killed represent evil.

What seems odder to me is the exaltation of the warrior class. It is clear at the end, after Beowulf dies, that lacking his protection, the country he ruled is going to fail and be overrun. The options for a country seemed to either be strong enough to hold others at bay, or for the inhabitants to be murdered and enslaved.

As long as warriors rule, war will always be present. And as long as war is present, warriors will always need to rule. The people in Beowulf were unable to break this cycle (I suspect it wouldn't even have occured to the ruling warrior class to try). The best they could do was to find a strong leader and shelter behind him.

The treatment of the hero, actually, seems a lot like an action movie to me. The main hero is a strong man who establishes order and protects the weak. In Beowulf, the main hero also has lesser heros at his side who are not as strong. A hero can die a heroic death but a hero is never crippled by the loss of a limb or a blow to the head. In other words, a hero is never weak; he's either strong or gloriously dead.

Action movies are notoriously aimed at men. Perhaps the similarity beteen Beowulf and action movies (i.e. the glorification of a super-alpha male through violence) is one of the reasons the story seemed so strange to me.

While violence is certainly an important part of a modern government (though it's referred to as "defense" now), we idealize violence in war and the violent less. It may in part be our methods. In Beowulf, a warrior killed his opponent on the field of battle in hand-to-hand combat, he didn't bomb a house and accidentally kill school children. There is something admirable about defeating an opponent in combat face to face; it's hard to make the same argument for bombing people.

If you're a Tolkein fan, you should certainly read this story.  Even if you're not, it's worth reading, if only for the story of defeating evil incarnate in the form of Grendal, Grendal's mother and the dragon.