Fitzgerald's Use Of Hyper-Reality In The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was known for shedding light on the shallow authors of his time period. One of the reasons that The Great Gatsby went down as an American classic was because he was so blunt in depicting American culture during his time period. A significant technique he utilized in the making of this novel was using a compelling love triangle in order to reel in his readers, yet using the married couple, Tom and Daisy Buchannan, as a symbol for Americans in the twenties. When referring to this couple, Fitzgerald often liked to acquaint to his depiction of what society was like, on the surface. Many readers, professors, critics, and scholars such as Greenberg praised this technique because it portrayed actual skill in the art of expression.

A key illustration of this was seen when he says, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”(Fitzgerald 1925) Within this, we are able to see how Fitzgerald uses this couple to paint American society; in the twenties, people solely made a mess of society and morale, and instead of dealing with it, they’d just hid behind their money and disregard. Basically, to Fitzgerald, people were reckless and morally questionable.
Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is an exemplary emblem of a postmodern novel and represents the deviation from modern to postmodern literature. Marc C. Conner addresses the fact that postmodern literature was strongly keen towards apocalyptic themes because, again, society tends to find outlets in order to escape our realities. This novel focuses on “limited social structures, the preservation of the individual, the strengthening of the community, and the restoration of ethical relations.” Pynchon’s dexterity in manipulating the common postmodern novel served as a significant contrast to contemporary literature because it got readers to respond disturbingly. Rarely do novels challenge the reader to look internally and self preserve, rarely do we encourage ethical relations because a censorious society, our society, simply rescinds sentiment, morale, and emotion. Ultimately, contrasts are meant to bring to light that which the idea opposes, so Pynchon’s novels was so refreshingly distinct from the novels that we’re all used to today that it disturbed its audience before it came to impact us. Conner’s thorough analysis of Pynchon’s novel allows us to approach the text not like a reader, but as a critic.
In addition to these components, Nico Wilterdink asserts a philosophical approach to the decline of literature in America. This theory consists of the fact that firstly, we no longer hold a tangible idea of our own realities because we’ve gotten lost in futuristic realities and interpreting the realities of the past. Examples of this can be found in today’s society through the novels that young adults are mostly interested in, the novels that make it into movies because their popularity has promised the market money, and the recurring themes in these mediums pursued in order to appeal to society. Such novels consist of the sci-fi, post-apocalyptic Hunger Games series, the post-apocalyptic Divergent series, and even the romanticizing of the 1920’s in the newest version of The Great Gatsby. Furthermore, he argues that self-identity was played with through themes in the 19th century, and that because of this introduction, the relation between Westerners and identity has accelerated, if not been improved. (Wilterdink 2002) However, this indication is respective and in context to the identity of that century. Identity, like modernism, and literature evolves into many different forms as different societies change. Therefore, to claim that the identity in the 19th century has sped along our understanding of our identities today is an overstatement because society has drastically evolved.
Identity is a highly controversial topic when it comes to these different scholars. Wilterdink stand by the presumption that although reality is ambiguous to us contemporary millenials, identity is well attained. Amanda Bigler supports this when she states, “When presented with many separate cultural influences, one’s own identity becomes more precise: The more choices to identify with, the more unique the personal identity.” (Bigler 2014) Bigler basically suggests that by culturally diffusing, one is able to identify themselves with a larger variety of identities. I strongly disagree with this because this merely romanticizes the phenomenon of cultural diffusion in relation to the reality of our national, even personal, identities; that by approaching culture differently we somehow get an accurate and positive depiction of who we are. However, we get lost in mere desire and never form our own individual characters. Bigler furthers this by tying the role that technology has also had in the loss of our national identity and how these imperative considerations have affected literature. She argues that technology has developed this idea that identity holds many definitions; that its fundamental understanding evolves through the different ways that contemporary writers express cultural distinctiveness.
Madelena Gonzalez develops the philosophical aspect of realism and how it has been translated into the decline of literature.

Her analysis of the metaphysics behind literature derived from Jean Baudrillard who proposed that reality has become an artifice in reality. His precise term for this occurrence is called hyper-reality and consists of society using motifs and signs in order to coincide for what is real, basically, that reality falls far from the understanding of Americans due to the “information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world”. Gonzalez uses this idea to make the argument that in literature we have lost our grasp with verity and reality; we’ve lost this perception by trying to recreate our pasts and never creating our "now". Moreover, we’re so obsessed with explaining the theories of our ancestors that we’ve created a “perverted” culture of intertextuality. Gonzalez’s most substantial argument stands in that the novel has lost its credibility today because contemporary authors seek to recreate and call the results “postmodernism”, hence, intertextuality. This theme has also been a recurrent one that seems to be the most compelling: people are tired of the same ideas bouncing from one generation to the next, tired of cliché themes, and tired of seeing the same thing in novels. She also portrays technology’s role in this issue with evidence of its threat to the future of the novel; basically, she argues that literature entirely is at risk because all technology does is create an epidemic that destroys present day aesthetic and ideas of the

real.

The 1920’s serves as a perfect age for the comparison of literary pop culture. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, although foes, were both pieces in the game of intellectual competition in The Roaring Twenties. Looking back and analyzing this historical era, we are able to recognize that we don’t possess such high stress in literature anymore. Scholars have attributed this decline in literary culture to America’s overwhelming dependency on technology, to our oblivion towards reality as a result of the Post- Cold War Era, to a complete deficit of “novelistic thought” and originality, to intertextuality that has caused our nation to no longer produce anything authentic but re-create that which has already been proposed, to a containment in our liberalist society that has ebbed socialism in every corner and aspect of America, and lastly, to this “loss generation’s” failure to produce anything of real quality or value.
In conclusion, American literature is simply the sea that postmodernism has rippled out into. Our novels and poems suffer simply because our society has suffered from a drastic shift in value and moral principle; a shift that used to be about illustrating the present in such a creative way that the art has resonated and become ephemeral to a current mindset of merely exploring perspectives and experimenting with the future. Postmodernism has distressed American literature because we have assimilated to a censorial idealistic society that no longer embraces raw thought and sentiment, but values technological dependency and polishing up of dusty theories and concepts. The fate of the novel, tragically, is coming to an end.