If You Built the Gun, Fire It!

The Great GatsbyㆍAnton ChekhovㆍHaruki Murakami

A famous Japanese writer once had one of his characters say,

If you’ve read The Great Gatsby three times or more, you can be my friend.

But I’ve decided not to finish the novel. On purpose.
And I’m still not sure whether it’s a good idea to write about it.

Excerpts from «The Great Gatsby» (1925)

1.

for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

2.

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.”

…

“After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. ‘—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’

There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.

3.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Reading a passage like No. 3 is extremely irritating. When I read it, what happens inside my head is roughly this:

1. An object is given (the valley of ashes.)

2. Then an attribute of that object is given (ashes grow there like wheat.)

3. Then I have to figure out how that attribute constitutes the object.

   (What does it even mean for ashes to grow like wheat, and what does that have to do with the valley of ashes?)

Toward the end, that suspicion is almost resolved.

(Ah, I think. So there are cars and people there, and the ashes are covering them.)

But then, at the very end, another unresolved task is assigned to me. What does it mean, physically and symbolically, that their “obscure operations” are screened from sight?

That will have to be resolved in the next paragraph. And the next paragraph will assign its own task, while also connecting multidimensionally with other parts of the novel and performing its own function within them.

By the time I read No. 3, I begin to dimly realize that something similar has already been repeated many times. For instance, in No. 2, the phrase “self-sufficiency” is given. But the word does not seem self-sufficient in itself. It is not entirely clear what it means for Miss Baker to be “self-sufficient.” What I know is that the narrator describes her as “self-sufficient” because she is balancing an object on her head while paying almost no attention to him — or pretending not to pay attention to him.

A similar word, “complacency,” appears again a few paragraphs later. This time, it appears in the scene where Tom is speaking with confidence about civilization and race. The two words are not the same, but they are not completely unrelated either. So each time those words appear, I have to update my sense of what kind of feeling has been newly assigned to them.

When reading No. 2, the task is not limited to No. 2 alone. Gatsby’s existence, the white supremacist book, and the symbolic significance of the narrator immediately dismissing Daisy’s whispering as “gossip” are all already in motion at the same time. In fact, all of this unfolds on top of the track laid down in No. 1, in a self-similar form that is both independent and dependent, both content and form at the same time. All of this is narrated through the mind of the narrator.

And that narrator says, “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”

To me, this feels like an underline deliberately drawn by the author. It is extremely blatant. To think that “reserving judgment gives one hope” is itself not a suspension of judgment. The contradiction is clumsily exposed in the very next sentence. And as long as the contents of the work are filtered through the narrator’s narration, the reader has no choice but to place everything on the largest track of all: how reserved is this narration, really?

Very cunningly, the author uses a highly elaborate rhetorical technique. More precisely, the intensity and length of description fluctuate wildly. And the scenes that are described at excessive length greatly amplify my suspicion. It is as if someone fires a very loud gunshot, making me focus on the trajectory of that bullet, while I am struck by another bullet — one that had already been fired, or will be fired later, from another direction and at another speed.

My guess is that the aesthetic pleasure of this novel comes from holding and tracing that dense web of meanings and connections inside one’s head. To use an analogy, it is like watching Optimus Prime’s transformation scene in slow motion, over and over again. At first, you do not understand it. But then you begin to wonder: when the arm becomes a wheel, what are the legs doing? How does this physically make sense? And you find it fascinating.

But the essential difference lies in the novel’s own internal contradiction.

“If you’ve read The Great Gatsby three times or more, you can be my friend” feels like a kind of elitism: only those who can hold that intricate multi-layered complexity in their heads and savor it aesthetically are allowed in. At the same time, it also feels like a sense of kinship with “slightly inadequate human beings” — human beings who cannot think about the design flaw, or who have decided not to think about it; human beings who believe they are reserving judgment precisely by failing to reserve judgment.

After all, as long as we are born human.

As long as we are standing on the track of No. 1, we cannot help being a little inadequate.