Gatsby as Marx Sees Him

 

Literature classes in these times are endlessly complicated, indeed rendered pointless, by our refusal to see the  religious context of Western (or Eastern) culture. All great art deals with ultimate questions, which means that all great art is necessarily religious. Unless we are prepared to go there, we cannot understand great art.

Yet instead, at all academic levels, we go down interpretive rabbit holes leading nowhere: Freudian interpretations, Jungian interpretations, Marxist interpretations, feminist interpretations, structuralist interpretations, deconstructions, and other such meaningless races with our tails.

A student in China was asked by his English literature teacher to interpret a segment from the film “The Great Gatsby.” I can’t show the entire sequence here, for copyright reasons; but I attach roughly the second half of it from YouTube.

It shows Nick, the narrator, on his way by train with friend Tom, who is wealthy, to a lunch at Tom’s apartment in the “golden city” of New York, coming from the exurbs of Long Island. But Tom has them jump off the train in an intermediate “valley of ashes,” a “dumping ground” for the coal dust from the metropolis. The scene is presided over, as in the book, by an old billboard advertising a long-gone oculist, two huge eyes. Tom takes Nick to a garage, where he meets Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, made up and dressed in red. Tom arranges a rendez-vous that afternoon in his Manhattan apartment, almost under the eyes of Myrtle’s mechanic husband, and urges Myrtle, despite Nick’s protestations, to bring along a sister for Nick.

And my student was dutifully trying to make sense of it in Marxist terms: the valley of ashes was the working class, exploited by the rich capitalists. The huge eyes were the eyes of capitalism. He felt there was some special significance to a brief scene in which a boy in the valley was feeding a dog a bun; then at the end of the sequence, a Scotty was feeding on red velvet cushions. These were images, he felt, of the working and upper classes. His teacher had made the cuts to end with the Scotty, suggesting it was supposed to be a kind of summation of the scene.

But he was well aware that things were just not fitting together. What point, then, was the clip trying to make? 

It did seem as though rich Tom was doing wrong by working-class Myrtle’s husband, for his pleasure. But if so, he was equally betraying his wife, who was upper class like him. Because he was rich, he could do as he wanted? But then, it seems, so could working-class Myrtle; while Tom’s rich wife was helpless. 

So where was he supposed to go from there?

It was all immediately sensible in Christian terms. The “golden city,” a term used in the narration, is the New Jerusalem, a Biblical image of heaven. It is our rightful destination; but we are led astray, as Nick is by Tom, into carnal pleasures. This takes us to some dark valley: a “dumping ground,” the phrase used in the movie’s narration. This actually translates to Hebrew as Gehenna, that is, to use the Anglo-Saxon word, “Hell.” 

The eyes of the oculist on the billboard are the all-seeing eyes of God, of conscience. The narration, clubbing us over the head with it, actually says “like the eyes of God.” 

“But God doesn’t exist,” the student protests weakly. “He can’t do anything.” 

Doesn’t matter. You cannot impose your own beliefs on the text. You have to go with what it is saying. 

Identifying these fictional eyes as the eyes of capitalism does not work. Capitalism is just an abstract concept, not some entity that can think, observe, or judge. Moreover, an out-of-business oculist is not a capitalist except in an incidental sense. You could have chosen better if you’d wanted a symbol of capitalism. If this is capitalism, it is now, by implication, out of business: the vision of hell we see is socialism. 

Interpreting the dark valley as the realm of the working class also leads to the awkward conclusion that the poor are poor because they have sinned, done wrong—for this is also clearly the place of temptation, from the point of view of the narrator, Nick. And the soundtrack sings “let’s misbehave,” over a closeup of his face looking perturbed. Not a proper Marxist message, then, let alone a Christian message: the rich deserve to be rich, because of their higher morality, and the poor deserve to be poor.

This place, the valley of ashes, is not primarily where manual labour is done. There are images of men swinging picks, which happens to be a form of manual labour. In the book, the relevant passage is “the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.” Sounds more symbolic than a description of the real life of an average working man. This is not productive labour: Sisyphean labour, that accomplishes nothing visible, as in the classical concept of Tantalus, the Greek Hell.

As to the two dogs: granted that the first dog is a working-class dog, and the second is an upper-class dog--what point is being made? That the poor are kind to dogs—and so are the rich? The only visible contrast is that the poor dog eats standing in the street, and being petted, while the rich dog is shown alone, and on velvet cushions. Does this suggest that the rich have it better than the poor?

What difference does it make to a dog whether he is eating on velvet cushions? Probably none. 

The point, I assume, is either that we too should not care whether we are rich and high in social status or poor; or else that dogs do not face moral issues. In contrast to us.

Either works well as a Christian message. Neither works well as a Marxist message.