Oct 05, 2008 - 04:05:20 CDT
My daughter Catherine called me about 10 days ago to announce that she had read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." She is still young enough to belong to the "guess what?" school of conversation, so it took some time for me to prove that I was never going to guess right and that she may as well just report the news.At the suggestion of her language arts teacher (what used to be called English), she had been trying to read Jane Austen's "Emma." But she "couldn't get into Emma," so she picked up "The Great Gatsby" instead. She had read it in a single night - I hope under the covers, with a flashlight -and it had immediately catapulted into the best book she had ever read. If her experience is anything like mine, it will not be able to hold that position very long.
"The Great Gatsby" is a great novel, but it also is primarily an adolescent's book, which shines brightest for those who are just leaving the chrysalis. It gets at two extraordinarily important themes at the heart of adolescence.
n Some of the people we will meet in life are not just "what they are." We all construct our personalities to a certain degree, and create a mask that we present to the world, but some people do this with special gusto. Such individuals fascinate us. We gravitate towards them like a moth to the flame. The persona they create has a sort of defiant brittleness about it, and they cling to that persona, that character armor, with such fierceness that it often winds up hurting others and hurting themselves. A great humanities text like Gatsby, by brilliant focused simplification of a very complex issue, allows us to process this phenomenon in a highly agreeable way. That's what the humanities do. That's why we need literature.
Jay Gatsby, it turns out, began his life as James Gatz from North Dakota, who at the age of 17 shed his identity as the son of a marginal farmer, and, with the help of a temporary mentor, re-constructed himself as the great Gatsby.
Any adolescent trying to figure out how to navigate the fractured dissimulations of the adult world needs to process the problem of fashioning a "face to meet the faces that you meet," as T.S. Eliot (that other adolescent favorite) put it. I can imagine my daughter reading the novel alone in her room (we always read alone) and experiencing wanderings of the soul she has never known before. I can imagine her feeling exhilarated but also somehow a little guilty as she looks up from the text and tries to come to terms with Fitzgerald. And herself. And life.
n "The Great Gatsby" also belongs to the "burning the candle at both ends as we dance recklessly against the fact of death and mediocrity" school of literature. For an adolescent, life is at the same time breathtakingly exciting and - as we look around at the odd way adults behave - routine, unpoetic, habit-bound, boring. When we face the first great disillusionments of our lives - and there are many - we have to decide whether we are going to shrug our shoulders and get on with life in a dogged and accepting way, or find some mad, heroic way to thwart the malaise. Here is a characteristic sentence from Fitzgerald, who coined the phrase "The Jazz Age": "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."
Adolescents love the idea of Higher Law. Adults eventually come to realize it is hard enough to comply with the regular laws of life, much less higher laws. Our vital, questing, questioning children despise that in us. As they should.
It moves me to tears to think that my daughter is beginning to hack her way through the great texts with a mingled sense of mystery and perplexity.
I can imagine life without pizza - though I would be really sorry - but I cannot imagine life without great works of literature to divert us, delight us, disturb us, de-center us, and demand of us that we do the hard work of being authentic.
About the time of her 14th birthday in August, I wrote Catherine a letter straight out of First Corinthians 13:11, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
For a variety of reasons, I try to write her a couple of old-fashioned hand-written letters per week. In this letter, I strongly urged her to begin reading the great books, made the best case for serious literature that a 14-year-old was likely to listen through, and offered several incentives for her to read such books with passionate commitment. I made a short list of the sorts of texts I had in mind: "Huck Finn," "Robinson Crusoe," "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "Gulliver's Travels," "My Antonia." I did not think to put F. Scott Fitzgerald on the list. I had not read "The Great Gatsby" in 30 years.
I love our children's capacity to surprise us.
What does "The Great Gatsby" mean to a 14-year-old who is just beginning to understand that in the adult world there is a set of dynamics that she didn't even know existed two years ago?
As she makes the slow chemical metamorphosis from girl to young woman, from child to adult, from innocence to experience, she must have so much on her mind that nobody else - perhaps especially not her parents - can help her understand.
I reread "The Great Gatsby" last week, because the greatest gift we can give to a fellow reader is to read the same book on parallel runways. I found it a little thin in middle age, but I recognized its greatness and on every page I could almost, just about see my daughter tiptoeing like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in Oz. In those alone but not lonely hours, she was over the rainbow and she was looking at the world through a lens she has never worn before.
She tells me that her class will be reading Dickens' "Great Expectations" later in the semester and Homer's "Odyssey" in about a month. Can there be anything more wonderful than that? That alone justifies public education. "Great Expectations" is one of my top five novels in the world, and Dickens is my number one author.
Better that her language arts teacher get her started on that than that her papa ruin the possibility of Dickens by over-selling him at the outset. I very much hope she reads the "Odyssey" in a prose translation, because you have to come to terms with it as a story before you are even half-ready to spend the rest of your life dancing with it as one of the world's four or five greatest poems and works of art.
Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to John Adams: "I cannot live without books." Right as always.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He also is the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
Comments are reviewed for taste, tone and language before posting.
Some comments may be used in the Tribune's print edition.