The Great Gatsby

from Anthony Clarvoe's introductory notes:



  This project started because, on rereading The Great Gatsby at the suggestion of Kip Gould, Publisher of Broadway Play Publishing Inc, [because it had just come into the public domain] I said, "This is a story about white fragility"...

  The Great Gatsby is about a hundred years old.... Only in the last fifty years or so, with the widespread availability of the resources of critical race, gender, queer, and postcolonialist theory have the truths hidden in plain sight in the story, and whirling around it, become visible and available to us....

  My family was not the intended audience for The Great Gatsby. There were, and are, many Valleys of Ashes in this country. Fitzgerald described them as scenes of grotesquery and peopled them with caricatures. To my family, they were home and workplace.

  The novel was written at a time when Jews, Slavs, and Italians-my family-were classed as "Mediterranean", a kind of mixed race between Nordics-northern Europeans, the "real Americans" -and Africans....

  The erotics of the story also deserve franker exploration than probably happened when you read it in high school. The spectrum and fluidity of desire and presentation that are expressed, or at least readily inferred, are remarkable and relevant....