Learning Gatsby From My Students

“He most honors my style,” Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” The best thing about teaching is not merely the company of young minds, but the opportunity to be instructed by them. In my class at the Ohio State University on The Great Gatsby and the art of criticism, I have repeatedly (and, I’m afraid, rather tiresomely) denounced the the commonplace interpretation, advanced by nearly every English teacher across the dark fields of this republic, that the novel dramatizes the conflict between old money versus new money. The phrases themselves, I like to point out, do not appear—nothing like the phrases themselves appear—anywhere in Fitzgerald’s text. When one of my impertinent students repeated my claim in another class in which Gatsby is assigned, the professor (my colleague) sputtered, “We don’t believe in the fallacy of authorial intent.” (He clearly meant that he does believe in the intentional fallacy, even if the variant in which he believes is a vulgar misrepresentation of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s actual views.)