See Daisy Drive. See Jay Swim. Look Out, Jay!

Roger Ebert  pointed out the “obscenity” of a retelling of The Great Gatsby by Margaret Tarner, a book which is presumably intended for struggling high school readers.

Ebert points out the contrast between Fitzgerald’s original novel and Ms. Tarner’s “retelling” most effectively when he contrasts the endings of each work.

Fitzgerald:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Tarner:

Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.
Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby’s dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn’t he?

I’ve had the opportunity to teach Gatsby each of the past two years and have come to appreciate it more each time I’ve read it. My students teased me this year because every day I would come to class earnestly proclaiming one sentence or another as “the finest piece of writing you’ll ever come across.”

It’s a beautiful, moving, complex text which can transform a reader. You know, what literature should do. Ebert is right that Gatsby is accessible to high school students and that they deserve the opportunity to read and experience the original text. Boiling down art to a means to transmit plot and low-level vocabulary not only destroys the art, but damages the reader.

No teacher should have such little faith in her students as to teach this text.

I disagree with Ebert, however, when he uses this text as evidence of a collapsed American educational system. He writes:

What depresses me is what this Macmillan Reader edition says about our American educational system. Any high school student who cannot read The Great Gatsby in the original cannot read. That student has been sold a bill of goods. We know that teachers at the college level complain that many of their students cannot read and write competently. If this is an example of a book they are assigned, can they be blamed?

It’s too easy to blame the educational system alone.   As pressure mounts to increase graduation rates without maintaining intellectual and academic growth and as the federal government and business interests demand education focused less on ideas and more on “marketable skills” and “proficiency,” we’ll see more pressure to lower the bar, even as low as this:

“My name is Nick Carraway. I was born in a big city in the Middle West.”

In his essay Dehumanized, Mark Slouka persuasively argues that education our education system has become almost entirely focused on commerce at the expense of ideas:

Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy. And what of our political perch, you ask, whether legitimate or no? Thank you for your question. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity.

Is it any wonder that, in a climate like the one Slouka correctly describes, books like retellings of classic novels are finding their way into classrooms? That a cursory look at the plot suffices?

Teaching literature is difficult in a culture increasingly dominated by short attention span entertainment. It’s even more difficult when those who teach literature are told it has limited value in the marketplace or on standardized test scores.