The Toilet Roll Archives (6): Gatsby, 'Fake News' and COVID19
Gatsby, 'Fake News' and COVID-19.
Happy bank hols u funky bunch. I’m uploading another one of these bad bois in order to try and feel somewhat productive to counteract the fact that, today, I have essentially just become an extra part of the sofa. I’m also on my fifth episode of Sherlock writing this and I have no intention of stopping any time soon (I know; I’m a bit late to the party but how good?!?)
It’s day 28 of quarantine. This means it is also day number something of having not washed my hair and mindlessly scrolling through Tik Tok because FOMO got the better of me so I jumped on the bandwagon and I can safely say I have never known true fulfilment until I saw dogs dancing on repeat for fifteen seconds at a time.
My flatmates are playing on their Xbox, a concept which I have never been able to grasp because my brain and fingers don’t co-ordinate well together :D . Like, if I try and play one of those car racing games, I forget to tap buttons and steer the wheel with the remote, as if it’s going to be of any use; maybe it’s down to a lack of interest in the whole thing. Maybe I’m just an idiot. Idk.
Anyways, I’ve had a lot of time to spare since work ‘shut down’ for the long weekend. And, rather than trying to attempt to get any better at playing computer games, on Friday evening, I picked up The Great Gatsby once again since it’s small and familiar and makes for a really good, quick read. It’s also a great film – Baz n Leo, I <3 u xo
Quick plot outline ft no spoilers: set on Long Island and New York City, TGG is narrated by 29-year-old Midwesterner Nick Carraway, who ventures East in the summer of 1922 and reconnects with his cousin, Southern Debutante, Daisy. Daisy is married to the staggeringly wealthy and staggeringly dickhead-y Tom Buchanan – who also happens to be a former classmate of Yale grad Carraway (small worlds, these fictional masterpieces, eh?) Nick becomes friendly with his mysterious millionaire neighbour, Jay Gatsby. And it’s Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy which fuels this tale of longing and loss, of dreams and disillusion.
The story is pretty much encoded in the DNA at the very centre of US nationalism. It’s usually read as ‘The Great American Story’ – I took a few modules on American literature at uni and it’s quite possibly my most favourite genre to read, simply because each book, in its own way, builds on the building of an entire nation and nearly always features the self-made success story of a “Mr. Nobody From Nowhere.” It’s the ‘American Dream’ stuff you all talked on about at GCSE in Of Mice and Men, throwing in some rabbits and symbolic red dresses for good measure. Twain, Emerson, Dreiser: men who are all kinds of problematic, all kinds of spectacular. Proper interesting.
TGG is kind of a US national scripture embodying reinvention, development and spirit. It’s full of flappers and faux philosophers and frivolity and it’s pretty epic; the party scenes in the film demonstrate such carnage accurately. However, F Scott Fitzgerald (author) brushes these aside as trivial decoration when uncovering the human flaw in worshiping acquisition, making apparent the emptiness of wealth. I guess it’s the age-old question: would you rather millions or mates? *perhaps a good WYR for insta-story tomorrow????
I guess it’s these questions which makes TGG so good to read. Obvs there’s the magnificent writing. So many sentences seize upon unexpected detail to inspire vivid, poetic imagery. Like, when Carraway describes the parties in Gatsby’s “blue gardens,” he talks about people coming and going “like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” K, sometimes it’s a bit vague and abstract and la-di-da – but so are the characters we’re reading about!
And then there are the odd little situations that Fitzgerald has a knack for inventing and presenting without them seeming in any way shape or form invented: Gatsby, for instance, showing off his nouveau wealth by heaping his dozens and dozens of fine shirts on a bed and Daisy Buchanan breaking down, crying over them "because I've never seen such…such beautiful shirts before." It's one of his patented scenes, telling you more about the psychology of these two characters than another writer's paragraphs of description could.
I mean, we could always revise this part of the book Corona-style. Imagine this: Daisy sobs uncontrollably at the sight of Jay Gatsby’s piles of expensive English face masks. “They’re such beautiful face masks,” she sobs, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such…such beautiful face masks before.”
The point I want you to keep in mind is this: TGG reads with the inevitability of allegory but it still manages to surprise you at every and turn.
It’s fab. I just finished it this morning and I fell in love with it all over again. But let’s try and place Gatsby in COVID-19 (if we can?) Lol, my example just above is pathetic, really. I don’t want to try and literally revise the contents of the book, necessarily. Instead, I want to take a look at its author.
I was scrolling mindlessly on Twitter (taking a quick break from Tik Tok) when I saw people sharing a letter from big man Fitz himself, written while he was under quarantine during the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1920.
The words write like a letter of hope sent a hundred years into the future. It’s a one-hundred-year-old version of the twitter feed I see before me – from dark jokes about stocking up on all the alcohol your cupboard can hold in self-isolative intoxication to the influencer-style promise that ‘we can do this. Together. (*cue Gal Gadot singing ‘Imagine’). Jokes aside, it all seems pretty relevant, right?
Erm, maybe not. Surprise: the letter wasn't written by Fitzgerald, nor was it produced in 1920. The parody letter in fact first appeared a week ago on some humorous, satirical website.
Taken out of context, it's easy to see how this letter could be believed as the real thing, with its writerly flourishes like the noise of "fallen leaves tussling against a trash can" ringing "like jazz to my ears". It seems to be a product of praise, with regards to how modern technology can connect us with those in the past who have already lived through strange times and similar(ish) circumstances.
Anyways, this fake letter going viral poses an interesting question about what makes fake news harmful. Forwarded notes with untruths about 5G conspiracies and borders closing and home remedy cures to Corona are obviously unhelpful in keeping people informed but, despite not being written by Fitz himself, this faux-Fitz letter can offer hope to people who want to believe there is something on the other side of the darkness.
It very much speaks to the strangeness of these times; there’s barely any distraction so for this parody to garner so much attention shows people’s yearning for an answer from someone from the past, someone who’s made it through something like this before. Someone we can lean on and learn from. There's hope and promise in the idea of inevitability, right?
Even though it wasn’t an actual letter from Fitzgerald, the sentiment rings true. We could all benefit from the relentlessly optimistic outlook this letter holds. It’s about having faith in the long-time idea that good triumphs over evil, happily ever afters, peace and love win in the end…all that good stuff. Think about all the stories, fables and allegories we have been presented with. More often than not, they feature a promising ending of peaceful continuation and happiness, with lessons to be learned and taken forward.
The past couple of weeks have seen the building of collective optimism as people place their faith in the idea that we will come out of this whole thing more compassionate, caring and aware of our commonalities. Perhaps just that we will come out of it at all.
Fitzgerald’s letter is a fable need to believe; his “single strain of light” is a mantra that, like the real Fitzgerald’s beautiful conclusion to TGG with the “green light at the end of Daisy’s dock,” provides hope for the future. It doesn’t really matter that it comes from 2020 as opposed to 1920. Wisdom from the past doesn’t necessarily correlate to inevitable hope for the future. Not always. Sure, it might be ‘fake news’ to an extent, but that doesn’t take away the message and the undertones the letter conveys. As important as a source can be sometimes, in certain contexts, sometimes we’ve just got to work with what we’ve got. It’s the words on the page that people take in. It’s the message that is worth sharing, not the background. Words give us hope, not patterns in history.
Random one, I know. Am considering also revising many stories in the face of COVID-19. Imagine Hogwarts under lockdown?
So there we have it. Day 28, over and out (*mock salute) See you...well...whenever! Keep safe and all the love as per. xoxo
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