‘Hasn’t got any name’: Aesthetics, African Americans and Policemen in The Great Gatsby

Abstract

In the final years of the last century, a Guide to Gatsby criticism concluded that ‘it is difficult to imagine a time when there will not be readers and critics who will want to take the road to West Egg, past the valley of ashes, to Gatsby’s blue lawn and to the compelling vision of the fresh, green breast of the new world’ (Tredell (1997), 166). As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are still plenty of readers and critics taking the Gatsby road, even though they are likely to be aware, or to discover, that it is a highway with many hazards, perplexing forks and misleading or absent signposts. Gatsby certainly remains a canonical text, in the sense that it is still widely taught, written about, discussed, quoted and used as a benchmark — to claim that a novel is an up-to-date version of Gatsby endows it with instant charisma. A vast critical, pedagogic and publishing industry rests on this slender work which hardly seemed set for canonical status in Fitzgerald’s lifetime — eight copies still languished unpurchased in the publisher’s warehouse at the time of his death in 1940. Its canonical standing has recently been confirmed by the publication, in the Modern Language of America’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature’ series, of Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2009) which collects essays from twenty-four contributors on topics which include ‘Teaching The Great Gatsby in the Context of World War I’, ‘Using a Heraclitean Approach in Teaching The Great Gatsby’, ‘Teaching the Medieval in The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Using Music to Teach The Great Gatsby’.