Revisiting Gatsby [A&C]
The unforeseen
beauty of public domain reworks
The Brown Daily Herald
By AJ Wu
December 6, 2023
| 11:16pm EST
The Great Gatsby entered the public domain
in 2021. The air tasted the same. The clocks chimed no differently. The eyes of
T.J. Eckleburg remained unblinking. But the world as we—those of us exposed to
The Great Gatsby in a high school English class—knew it was forever changed.
Along with its
newfound availability on Project Gutenberg, The Great Gatsby’s release into the
public domain also came with many creative adaptations. During quarantine,
documentary filmmaker Ben Crew embarked on a project to distract himself from
the looming chaos of the global pandemic and the 24/7 news cycle covering “what
was happening in D.C.” He emerged from lockdown with a 104-page script for a
Muppets adaptation of The Great Gatsby. The work—which introduces a magnificent
portrayal of Gatsby from our favorite green frog, as well as Nick Carraway’s
constant internal monologuing confusing his muppet co-stars—brings delicious
charm and extravagant musical numbers to Fitzgerald’s original work. It quickly
picked up a dedicated fanbase, which produced a fan-made poster and a Subreddit
committed to launching the project.
Gatsby Great
The—the text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with the words
rearranged in alphabetical order by artist Ryland Stalder—is another inspired
remix. While it does not make much sense narratively, it does shed light on the
novel’s preoccupations—like a giant word cloud, it gets us both a little
farther away from the plot and closer to the core of the novel and how it makes
us feel and what it inspires us to think about. The alphabetical reading
provides new and uncanny strings of words such as “dazed dazzling dead” and
“loneliness, lonely lonely Long.” When stripped away of all narrative context,
these amusing but thought-provoking strings retain and amplify the emotional
core of The Great Gatsby. They describe in a way different from other formats
the idea that extravagance is ephemeral and how loneliness becomes unbearably
long.
F. Scott
Fitzgerald was buried in Rockville, Maryland, where I grew up. His grave is
almost visible from the window of my tenth-grade English classroom. When
Fitzgerald died at 44, having suffered from alcoholism and a series of three
heart attacks, his books were all out of print and he believed himself fated to
fade into literary obscurity. He requested “the cheapest funeral” possible and
was buried where his father had lived—in Rockville, allegedly because he had
made no plans to be buried anywhere else.
While Fitzgerald
may have been mostly apathetic about his relationship with Rockville, Rockville
is decidedly more eager to claim Fitzgerald. Every fall, my hometown hosts the
F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, a three- to four-day event. The festival
offers writing workshops and talks on Fitzgerald scholarship, celebrates
literary guests of honor—past honorees include Richard Powers and Barbara
Kingsolver—and winners of various sponsored short story contests read from
their stories.
Almost
immediately after Gatsby’s copyright was lifted, a podcast I’ve been a
long-time fan of, Planet Money, released a four-hour episode consisting of a
full reading of the novel by their cast of journalists and economists. The
episode is simply captioned: “All of it.” I listened, bemused but appreciative
of an easily accessible audiobook version. Other forthcoming adaptations of the
text include a Broadway musical headed by Florence Welch of Florence + the
Machine and a graphic novel first published in Australia in 2007 and now
finally releasable in the US over a decade later. Following predecessors such
as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the novel has also been turned into The
Great Gatsby Undead—a ghoulish retelling by Kristen Briggs where Gatsby is a
vampire. One of my personal favorites is The Great Gatsby: But Nick Has
Scoliosis, which is The Great Gatsby verbatim except for a sentence added in
haphazardly every chapter that references Nick having scoliosis.
Not all
adaptations, however, are created equal. Nick, a prequel by Michael Farris
Smith that fabricates a backstory for the novel’s least interesting character,
Nick Carraway, misses the mark entirely on why The Great Gatsby is compelling
to begin with. It’s a perfectly fine novel about a World War I soldier, his
struggle with PTSD, and a tragic love affair, but I can’t help wondering what
the point of its attachment to Gatsby is other than as a substitute for
developing characters and stories compelling enough for people to care about on
their own. A YA author I can’t stand and have had a private vendetta against
since middle school recently released a queer retelling of The Great Gatsby
that focuses on a romance between Nick and Gatsby. I was moderately put off and
complained to a friend, “You can just write YA! You can just write that! It
doesn’t need to be about Nick and Gatsby.” I like a good queer romance but
found it a poorly executed choice tonally that stripped away a lot of the
weight of the original novel’s messaging about the American Dream, unrequited
love, and temporality. It doesn’t add to Gatsby in any direction except
laterally.
Muppet Gatsby
and Scoliosis Gatsby don’t take themselves nearly as seriously, which may be
why I find them so enjoyable while reading other Gatsby retellings makes me
wonder if attempting to earnestly follow Fitzgerald is a doomed effort.
Imitations of Gatsby that clearly wish to repackage the themes of the original
but inevitably fall short only invite comparison to the original novel in a way
that is unhelpful and uncharitable to the authors of these retellings.
Halfway through
The Great Gatsby, Nick warns Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past.” To which
Gatsby responds incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
The futility of repeating the past (and rewriting what’s already been written)
may be a message that has evaded some Gatsby re-tellers.
I think some of
my hesitation to accept certain self-serious Gatsby retellings stems from a
reluctance to fully recognize them as substantial and separate them from the
likes of fanfiction relegated to AO3 and FanFiction.net. I have, however, had
reason to re-evaluate this outlook on a few occasions. One of my more eccentric
English teachers was notorious for publishing an overwhelming amount of
Shakespeare fanfiction, including a modern Macbeth retelling about two teens,
Mackenzie and Beth (their ship name is Macbeth). Sitting in her classes on how
stories change in relation to their time and place (and hearing about her
heated argument with her publisher about whether Ophelia’s skirt should be
longer on the cover of her YA Hamlet novel) was one of the first times I
considered that both thematically compliant as well as wildly divergent
retellings of classic stories could have merit on their own.
Adaptations of
other widely read classics by Shakespeare and Jane Austen are now prevalent to
the point that some of the most iconic examples—10 Things I Hate About You,
Clueless, West Side Story—have escaped the orbit of the original and left their
own lasting cultural impacts. I can only anticipate that as more creators take
advantage of The Great Gatsby’s availability, the quality of Gatsby retellings
will also continue to stretch towards similar heights.
Ultimately,
there’s something pretty lovely about caring about stories and endeavoring to
create upon their foundations. The original Jay Gatsby might’ve died with the
Roaring Twenties, but Kermit-as-Gatsby (and his numerous brethren) will carry
on and change with the times to be what we may or may not need them to be.