A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?” I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory. My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own titles. But this one seemed sufficiently troublesome to warrant criticism. I wrote:
You would think someone at the WSJ would know that enough about literature to know that The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. If you grant the title its premises, the question should be “Did Someone Write a ‘Gatsby’ in 2004 and If So Who Was He or She and What Was the Title of It?” But that’s not quite right.
The WSJ‘s infuriating decision to publish the titles of books in quotation marks means that we’re not even sure whether the current crisis will be producing a novel affectionately called Gatsby or a fictional Jew with class insecurities who meets an untimely end. Because we have umpteen examples of the latter—Curb Your Enthusiasm may even be a Gatsby-in-progress. Tune in next season to find out!
But even that’s not quite right. Given that The Great Gatsby preceded the financial crisis by more than half a decade, maybe the author wants to claim that Fitzgerald’s slim volume caused the Great Depression. In which case we must discover and burn all copies of the mysterious 2004 novel or unwrite the fictional Jew. Obama said we all needed to chip in. This is how we, as literary scholars, can do our part!
Then I started reading the text itself. The mention of Louis Adamic seemed promising, and the rest of the article built what I took to be a fairly solid case until the last few paragraphs:
John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” made the Joad family’s flight from the dust bowl into an emblem of people coming together to remake their world. A similar image was implicit in the very title of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s documentary book “An American Exodus.” Even works of light entertainment like the massively popular “Gone With the Wind” or John Ford’s landmark Western “Stagecoach” were in keeping with the prevailing message of the times. All these works told of epic journeys in which a group of people overcame destructive competition in their discovery of a common destiny. Each called for Americans to act collectively to remake a democratic society where opportunity would be open to all.
In effect, such declarations helped lay the cultural groundwork for the New Deal, providing the ideological infrastructure for the new governmental institutions created during the ‘30s.
My response?
If there’s one thing I learned writing my dissertation, it’s that you can’t throw words like “ideology” around like that—especially not when you’re claiming that a book published in 1939 laid the groundwork for the policies that were curtailed in 1939 by “Dr. Win-the-War.” If I’d tried to end-around history like that I would’ve—I don’t know what would’ve happened to me, actually, because I’d learned early in my graduate career to avoid situations in which I could be browbeaten by “the fact, man, the irrefragable fact!”
I continued blustering on—scrolling back up the article, snipping the bits that confirmed my claim of sloppy historicism and snarking mightily upon them—until I returned to those final paragraphs and hit the byline:
Sean McCann, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author of “A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government.”
At first I thought I’d been pranked. Then I realized I’d done it to myself: I’d read the article about as uncharitably as it could be read. I’d clipped the sections suggestive of causality . . . and ignored all those that spoke directly to the notion that the cultural output of the ‘30s reflected a growing disenchantment with the vision of social mobility that’d been aggressively asserted in the ‘20s. See Sean’s article for all the details.
Me? I’m off to go where they send half-cocked purveyors of online opinion when they misbehave: to The Corner. (Dunce cap not optional.)
(x-posted.)
I think you're a little hard on yourself. If the byline had read Debbie Schlussel, the words would be the same. I enjoyed the article when I read it and more after reding your post. I agree with your basic point that a generous reading teaches more and makes life a little easier to live, but critical thinking is the bedrock of that generosity. For example, there was no mention of all the Busby Berkley musicals or the Goldigger series in the movie references and there was an anachronistic feel to the piece in the sense that Gatsby was written on the way up and Grapes of Wrath on the way down. A little editing would have made the point McCann made a little clearer. But his use of words like myth, rhetoric and idea in reference to social mobility are pretty clear indicators of McCanns view of the reality of that mobility. Maybe he had to sneak it all past John Galt, social criticism editor at WSJ.
Posted by: drip | Saturday, 07 March 2009 at 06:02 AM
Scott,
I haven't read all of your post, so I may be missing something important you say later, but Gatsby is a Lutheran.
And while we're pretending fictional characters are real people, where does Tom's family's money come from?
Posted by: bianca steele | Saturday, 07 March 2009 at 09:54 AM
Seems to me there are a few different lessons one could take from this experiment/experience:
1) Yes, the whole generous reading thing, blah, blah, blah, but more pragmatically:
2) Ignore titles, or at least set them to one side, this one clearly having been chosen by an editor who simply picked the most recognizable literary name in the article and framed as a pointed presentatstic question (also comes with fetching file photo of Robert Redford).
3) Read the article before you begin critiquing it. As you say, if you hadn't been looking for examples, the structure of the actual article would have pointed you in a different direction. (Here I think I'm think I'm disagreeing with drip and agreeing with you the second that the point about Gatsby in the actual article was that it dealt with social and economic contraditions which would only be fully exposed later.)
4)Read the byline first. You know, just to make sure it's not someone you know. About the only way this could have been better is if it had been wirtten by your actual advisor.
It's good you share these cautionary tales with us.
Posted by: JPool | Saturday, 07 March 2009 at 11:01 AM
I just came across this post, months after publishing the offending article. I think Scott's complaints are completely fair and very much appreciate the generosity shown here. Yes, it's true that writers of op-eds don't get to choose their titles--and don't have full control over their content even--and, yes, it's very hard to get the WSJ to let you say anything very pointed or specific about, e.g., the myth of social mobility in the U.S.
Posted by: Sean McCann | Thursday, 07 May 2009 at 09:06 AM