On Friday, April 1, 2022, Grove City College’s Student Government Association hosted this year’s Gala event, revived after last year’s slew of Covid cancellations. The theme of this year’s event was “Gala at Gatsby’s.” The theme recalled the Jazz-Age parties of the 1920s and, according to GCC’s student newspaper, The Collegian, represented an attempt to make up for 2020’s canceled Jazz-Age-themed prom dances.
The gala’s placement on April Fool’s day befitted the occasion: that a Christian college priding itself on thoughtful engagement with culture should throw a Gatsby-themed party indeed bears irony. In fact, any “Gatsby-themed” parties are ironic. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald calls attention to the gaudy emptiness of Gatsby’s celebrations. These celebrations of decadence are precisely what current fans of the “Jazz Age” aesthetic strive to recreate.
The craze of Jazz-Age parties predates GCC’s Gala. In a piece for The Atlantic several years ago, writer Zachary Seward mused that the ironic trend of Gatsby-parties resembles “throwing a Lolita-themed children’s birthday party.”
We twentieth-century readers have been told that Fitzgerald and his fellow modernists critique the American dream. But we must not forget the substance of Gatsby’s dream: Gatsby does not merely yearn after money or success. Rather, Gatsby yearns to touch the transcendent through “vulgar” means.
The novel, as such, is not primarily a critique of capitalism itself but of a certain transcendental materialism. As critic Kermit Moyer notes, Gatsby’s dream holds a “fatal materiality” at its core. Gatsby utilizes people and luxuries alike as “starting place[s]” from which to “climb” to “a secret place above the trees” where he might “suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”
Gatsby’s longing for the transcendent affects how he sees himself, other people, and even dock lights blinking across the bay. Gatsby images the self-made, successful man of modernity: he “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God…and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Vulgar beauty figures in Daisy, as in Gatsby’s lurid house and cream-colored car that “mirrored a dozen suns.”
Yet these “enchanted objects” of Gatsby’s fail: he cannot climb to the stars through them. Daisy’s artificiality disappoints the “colossal vitality of [Gatsby’s] illusion,” and she leaves him alone, gazing upwards, “watching over nothing.” The dazzling car destroys lives, and it leaves Gatsby dead in his own pool, surrounded by his “thin red circle” of blood, looking up at a world “material without being real.”
Here, then, is where Gatsby’s pursuit finishes: materiality unwound from reality. A “grotesque” and “ashen” world, Fitzgerald holds, flashes at the end of Gatsby’s desire for the transcendent through the vulgar. Gatsby twists a good desire — to be like God — with gaudiness.
Our generation, likewise, confuses the gaudy and godly, seeking, through luxurious brands and Hollywood figures, a sense of that “pap of life.” Are we looking for sustenance in our parties and fineries, our influencers and their dramatized lives? Do we search, in the tales of this year’s Oscars ceremony or the delights of the latest Apple product, for Gatsby’s “incomparable milk of wonder?”
When Baz Luhrmann’s modern film adaption came out in 2013, Prada and similar brands threw Gatsby parties, and Brooks Brothers created advertisements based off Gatsby. Several years before, students at Princeton University threw a $20,0000 Gatsby-themed party. Fitzgerald, famously, dropped out of Princeton, which he described in This Side of Paradise as “the pleasantest country club in America.” While attending this “country club,” Fitzgerald failed multiple math and science courses and reportedly disdained even some of his English classes and professors.
The Princeton party, like the Prada and Brooks Brothers connections, serves as a paradigm, reflecting our broader cultural spirit towards Gatsby: we celebrate vulgar decadence through the forms Fitzgerald used to critique vulgar decadence. We testify, thus, that we have not read well. Our failure to recognize what Fitzgerald truly warns of — or our failure to care — allows our mimicry. With the name of Gatbsy himself, we mimic the same gaudiness that The Great Gatsby strove to disparage.
The Gala at Gatsby’s was an event hosted by the Student Government Association. Granted, it was a one-time dance at a college and a mechanism for communal celebration. It was not meant as a culture-wide statement of contemporary values. Attendees of the event committed no wrong in attending and enjoying themselves.
Still, we must maintain, with Fitzgerald, that the ironic fact of the event pronounces something. As Fitzgerald would hold, the ironic event indicates our instinct for and indebtedness to gaudy decadence. That we would, for a party, readily embrace the trappings of Jazz Age decadence without second thought signifies that we have forgotten the destructions detailed in The Great Gatsby.
The ironic Gala ought to serve as a reminder of Fitzgerald’s warnings and our tendencies towards the two-dimensional, the “material without being real.” Perhaps we ought to set aside gaudy internet gods and other decadent distractions and re-investigate the other great books of American literature, asking, along the way, what lessons we might learn, little though they may be.
