How and why to compare incomparables: The Great Gatsby and La Règle du jeu

Abstract

Abstract Comparing The Great Gatsby with any of its adaptations invariably promotes the novel over its derivatives and is far less fertile than putting it alongside Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu. During the interwar period, these incomparable masterpieces exhibit strikingly similar plots to address the moral decline of the upper class. Renoir directly borrowed this template from Musset’s 1833 Les Caprices de Marianne, a hallmark of Romanticism. The competing forces of romantic desire, aristocratic values, and aesthetic modernism make these works comparably difficult to classify. The article introduces Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which had already been compared to The Great Gatsby and was also filmed at the outset of WWII. Watching Welles’ film beside Renoir’s confirms André Bazin’s view that cinema became modern at just this moment, by taking on a role comparable to that commanded by post-WWI American novels like Fitzgerald’s. And examining Renoir beside Fitzgerald highlights the styles and strategies of both masterpieces as they pursued a large public and an authentic social critique. The article concludes by enumerating reasons and ways to compare ‘original’ works that bear similarities, whether mythic and universal or historical and particular.