The Great Gatsby turns 100: How old is our mass-cultural crisis?

Since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, roughly 160 million books have been published, with about 2 million more titles being added every year – and yet, of all those books, few are as recognisable, or as endlessly appropriated, as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. A novel which, on the 10th of April 2025, celebrated its 100th birthday. 

The centenary fanfare thus far, has focused either on the fact of Gatsby being misunderstood, or the ways in which it still feels relevant to us (an invariable cliché about so-called classics). 

But what I’m more interested in is this: what does our obsession with Gatsby mean? How does the novel’s endless popularisation alter the way that we relate to it – and what does that say about how mass culture obstructs our relationship to concepts in general?

Just how obsessed are we?

For all those 2 million books published each year, only a fraction of those are novels, and of that, only a small percentage (less than 220 thousand) are considered ‘literary fiction’ – that is, ‘serious’ fiction, without a distinct genre. Most novels in this category – in which Gatsby surely falls – don’t even sell enough copies for their authors to make a living. 

According to the last major report, only 19% of writers in the U.K. can afford to write full-time. Since it is much easier to sell copies in genres like fantasy or romance (or these days, dragon-smut), we can assume that the proportion of full-time literary fiction writers is even lower than that. 

Since the market for literary fiction is so small, the writers that succeed there often rely on literary prizes. That’s partly for the prize money, and partly because slapping a prize-winner or prize-shortlisted sticker on a book does a lot to boost sales. 

But even the most prize winning of prize winning novels pales in comparison to Gatsby. 

The most decorated contemporary novel I can think of is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which not only won the Booker in its year of release (aside from the Nobel prize, probably the most prestigious thing a writer can win) but went on to win the ‘Booker of Bookers’ as well as the ‘Best of the Booker.’ It has sold over 1 million copies and been adapted for film and television three times. All in all, beyond the most distant dreams of any writer of literary fiction.

I say the above in order to put the following in perspective:

Gatsby has sold over 25 million copies – and the sales figures aren’t the half of it. 

Here is a list of just some of the things we have done with Gatsby:

• At least five film adaptations, of which the Jack Clayton/Robert Redford (1974) and Baz Luhrman/Leonardo DiCaprio (2013) versions are undoubtedly the best known. 
• A Broadway musical.
• A different musical. 
• An immersive West End stage adaptation. 
• A novel about Nick Carraway (Nick by Michael Farris Smith).
• A novel where Gatsby is a woman and Daisy (Danny) is a man (Gatsby by Jane Crowther). 
• A novel where Gatsby has a younger sister, Greta (The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler). 
• A documentary arguing that Fitzgerald gathered the core material for the novel in Connecticut (Gatsby in Connecticut, which, by the way, is pretty good). 
• 100 years of scholarship. 
• An economic theory. 
• The themes of countless 21st birthday parties. 
• Perhaps most remarkably, from my home city of Cape Town, a monumental sandwich. 

This is all aside from the fanfare specific to Gatsby’s centenary. Naturally, there is a gorgeous centennial edition by the Cambridge University Press – who produce nearly all of the scholarly editions of Fitzgerald’s work, and which I will be purchasing – and a beautiful project by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, where a different American author reads each chapter (chapter 1 is Jonathan Franzen). But perhaps most impressively – the top of the Empire State Building was lit up in green. 

All this is to say that Gatsby has been insanely, excessively, incomprehensibly adapted and interpreted. Perhaps only Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings can claim to have had more attention. And yet – what does any of this have to do with the actual words in the novel?

Interpretation and reinterpretation 

The short answer is that we have come very far from those words. 

This is what traditional publications have focused on so far: that our attempts to emulate, to have 1920s themed parties and put feathers in our hair and calls ourselves flappers – are basically ironic. Ironic because so much of The Great Gatsby is about the corruption of the upper crust. As one of my favourite passages goes:

‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’

Consequently, the following Fitzgerald quote has been bandied about:

‘No one had the slightest idea what the book was about.’ 

But you’ve heard all of that already – and my view, after having spent a good few years in the Fitzgerald scholarship, is that a simplistic corruption tale was not at all what the novel was getting at. 

The most compelling analysis I’ve read as to the true meaning of Gatsby (if indeed a novel does have a true meaning) is by Bernard R. Tanner in his monograph Joycean Elements in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

Tanner argues that Gatsby has be to understood formally, in connection to Ulysses and the Bible and Modernism and techniques like pastiche and doubling. 

If that interests you, you should read Tanner – but that’s not what this piece is about. Except to say that most of the writing claiming that we have Gatsby wrong, gets Gatsby wrong, too – and that what this points us towards is a question about how reality and media work.

Reality Hunger

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s In the Land of the Cyclops (incidentally, the only collection of his essays that have been translated into English) he considers the effect of over-saturation on our relationship to reality. 

In particular, when he talks about David Shields’ book, Reality Hunger, he argues that our society is so inundated with representations that we can now only relate to the idea of things, rather than to the things themselves. 

We see so many images of war, for example – every day there is a new headline about Ukraine or Palestine or Sudan – that even the most violent representations lose their force. We are able to dispassionately watch live streams of military aircraft as they deposit their bombs upon nondescript buildings where people live. These days, we will find an accompanying iPhone video taken by a soldier beneath the helicopter, and posted to TikTok. 

What we are seeing when we look at these things is the idea of a war (hardly even a war in Ukraine, more a war in general) and not the war itself. 

To be clear, this is not a new idea, and goes back at least as far as Jacques Lacan – who, in Écrits, writes about the imago: that we relate to the idea of something, not the thing itself. 

But what Knausgaard does is point out how profound this distance has become since the advent of modern media forms. Just think about how many more images the average person sees today than she did in 1955. 

This distance – between thing and idea, furthered by there being so many offspring of the idea in between us and the thing – is why it has become so difficult to connect to the actual text of Gatsby. The representations of it are profligate. 

We have moved further and further from the words, or from what Fitzgerald may have originally intended. Part of this process is what Jacques Derrida calls ‘iterability’ – essentially a sophisticated version of the idea that, once a person says something, their words can be taken out of context. 

As soon as text is in the world (and when we talk about Derrida and texts, we mean anything that can be ‘read,’ and so, almost anything) pieces of it can be separated from the whole and spoken about as pieces in their own right, and connected to different, originally unrelated, things. Since Pavlov did his famous experiment, for example, we've had many cartoons about trained dogs. And cats for that matter.

But when this iteration happens with something long and complex, like a novel, only certain parts will be remembered and discussed and circulated within public consciousness. With Gatsby, it is ‘the green light’ which New York memorialises and not Meyer Wolfsheim’s cufflinks made of human molars. (As it happens, though I have no idea why you’d want to, you can get even the latter on Etsy). 

With each new discussion of an element of Gatsby, picked out from the whole – and with each new interpretation and adaptation, and with each interpretation and adaption becoming more and more numerous (especially since the expiration of the Gatsby copyright in 2021) – the ‘idea’ of Gatsby calcifies, and it becomes harder and harder not to butt up against it when we try to connect to the novel. There is an institution between us and the words on the page. Yes, this happens, to some extent, with all ‘classics’ – but Gatsby is the ur-case.

So what?

The result of this distance between us and the text, is that the accepted meaning of Gatsby becomes vaguer and vaguer – approaching what is sometimes termed an ‘empty signifier.’ 

Clichés, and ‘dead language’ in general, are empty signifiers. When something has been used (or iterated) too many times it comes to mean almost nothing. It becomes colourless, shapeless, disconnected from the intended communication. If I begin a story with the phrase, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ most readers will fail to imagine a night, and if they do, that it is especially dark, or that there is a storm.

Since the meaning of these concepts is thus worn thin, it becomes easier and easier to make them mean whatever we would like them to mean. This is one reason that it is popular to talk every year about why Gatsby or 1984 or Shakespeare speaks to our present historical moment. (Of course, great artworks do have lasting things to say, but this is a benefit which, paradoxically, it is harder to find the more we talk about it.)

This erosion of meaning doesn’t only have implications for Fitzgerald’s legacy. This has implications for the way that we, as a society, relate to almost anything (at least anything that can be called a text). 

Too much damn stuff

There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of other blog posts written about The Great Gatsby. That’s not to mention an entire realm of literary scholarship, review – and the adaptions we’ve already discussed. 

All this Gatsby ‘stuff’ (to use a deliberately vague term) which is between us and the novel, is only going to become more impenetrable as AI continues to develop. 

We’ve already seen everything that can become ‘Ghiblified’ and everything that can become a Wes Anderson film. So, too, can I ask ChatGPT or Claude or Bard or Grok for a passage about frozen oven pizza in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald (granted, it’s not that good at actual writing). Or, I can ask for the '1920s aesthetic,' or the style of a Baz Luhrman film. 

The concern here isn't the displeasure of literary purists (though there is that) but the potential fate of any and every concept. 

This meaning-deadening has already happened in politics – we can no longer meaningfully relate to the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing. We are living in a culture that cannibalises itself – whether because it is bored, or because it needs to pay the bills. The easier it becomes to hang concepts like ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ in a gallery of machine-generated memes, the harder it becomes to have a rigorous and genuine engagement with them. 

Final thoughts

But the good news – for all that the powers that be want to put the machines in our brains – our minds are, for the moment, still intact. It is possible, if difficult, to approach even the most over-iterated text with fresh eyes – if we are willing to offer the text a real commitment. 

Why not reread The Great Gatsby this weekend? The old dog may yet surprise you.