Monday, 3 December 2018

The Accidental Royalist

I'm currently on maternity leave, and one of the (many) things they don't tell you about this period is that you'll have both no time to yourself and lots of time. Some days I don't stop; other days, when the baby is really sleepy (like now) you find yourself at home with lots of time on your hands!

It was on one of these afternoons a few weeks ago that I was approached by the Press Association to comment on the use of a passage from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as part of a 'Royal Wedding' that I'd only vaguely heard about. Apparently Princess Eugenie was getting married!

My first instinct was to be critical; to undermine the choice of the passage with irony.
The context of the passage is interesting because it is describing the first meeting between Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby, early on in the novel (so it does not occur between the lovers Jay and Daisy). Nick has been invited to a party thrown by the mysterious Gatsby, and doesn't therefore recognise him when he announces himself. So when Gatsby smiles 'understandingly, much more than understandingly', this is in the context of social awkwardness, trying to put Nick at ease for making the mistake of not having recognised or acknowledged his host. All of the impressions of Gatsby's smile are Nick's own, as are the majority of the impressions of the narrative as a whole, and the idealistic reading of this smile has more to say about Nick than it does about Gatsby. 

From 'Precisely' onwards, however, Nick collects himself and realises perhaps that it has been foolish to read so much into a smile; there is a sense, too, that he does not wish to be taken in by this nouveau riche stranger, and so he uses class-based commentary to belittle Gatsby within his own thoughts ('elegant young roughneck', and an 'elaborate formality of speech' which 'just missed being absurd'). Then we are told that Nick had already noticed Gatsby, not knowing who he was, and had already thought that he had been 'picking his words with care'. All of these subtle comments suggest that Gatsby is trying too hard to be part of the elite group that he has suddenly entered, and that he doesn't quite belong.

I'm not a fan of the royal family and so don't know much about Eugenie's partner, but it strikes me as a little strange that a passage that points to Gatsby's arriviste qualities, and puts them (at least towards the end) in a less than favourable light, should be used in the wedding service. The sense that Gatsby doesn't belong within the gilded worlds of West Egg and East Egg underlines Nick's characterisation of him here, and it is therefore strange that possible parallels with the royal family and outsiders might not have been noticed before selecting the passage. It's also a passage about self-perception, and about how one might wish to be seen in another's eyes.

Then again, when I tried to think about it more kindly, I realised that The Great Gatsby is one of those novels that people often read for the beauty of its language, and if we read this passage out of context it can be seen as a gorgeous description of unspoken communication between two people, which is why (I imagine) it was chosen. That this is between two strangers who each have their own agendas is, however, slightly difficult to ignore and therefore strikes an odd note. I also wonder why the decision was made to include the section after 'Precisely', unless there is a hidden humour here about the relationship between Eugenie and her partner -- perhaps she sees him as her 'elegant young rough-neck?' -- that people who don't know the couple wouldn't get.

The main result of this comment was that I -- the daughter of an Irish Republican -- ended up being quoted in, among others, the Sunday Mail, and becoming an accidental royalist. Sorry, Mum!

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