Fitzgerald

we're gonna be talking about f scott Fitzgerald the 1920s tell me some things about f scott Fitzgerald a couple ago already mentioned he's concerned with things like wealth with Fame with what else social rank social class yes the look good the loss of morals exactly the sense of a loss of morality a loss of faith this sense of being a lost generation after the war and sort of having to figure out what life is all about completely anew so those are things that we're gonna see in the novel we're going to have to Fitzgerald only lived to be about 44 years old he was strikingly handsome figure as you can see his works became popular overnight and so he really lived a life in the limelight he published this side of paradise the novel we looked at here in 1920 then the beautiful and Damned notice the person was when he was only 24 years old so the beautiful of the Damned the Great Gatsby Tender is the night The Last Tycoon he spent much of the last decade of his life working in Hollywood on film scripts and he still has a kind of cultural significance this is a bar in Paris that is dedicated to F scott Fitzgerald has this photograph when you first walked in its parent leave his favorite bar when he was there in Paris and at the time he was on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post that was like the leading popular magazine at the time so he had a kind of prominence that I can't think of any contemporary writer who has not any contemporary novels too you know it's just constantly on television and appearing in the popular media in this way they rally hey DJ hey Rowley okay maybe they're a few pieces but not many know this side of paradise is a coming-of-age novel a Marie Blaine is his hero it's highly Alma my graphical and so it parallels his own history at Princeton Buenos to Princeton then he goes off to war then he comes back to Princeton and that makes it sound like Det nothing much happens but in fact all sorts of things happen to people around him that help fake them his mother dies for example his mentor Monsignor Darcy Dodds several friends died and one business years altogether nobody knows what happens to him the girl he loves dumps him to marry a rich man she doesn't love that was really happening to Fitzgerald at the time he was very interested in Zelda Zelda dumped him because this rich guy proposed marriage to her and she said okay goodbye F Scott yeah but then that didn't work out and the end zone that ended up getting back together and married but that's after the ball ends anyway another girl is very interested in him and he and her until she turns out to be completely crazy and drives his car off a cliff I mean really like suicidal crazy not just sort of a little so anyway you have a lot of difficulties when he submitted the novel wrote to his publisher that the title comes from lines of Rupert Brookes well this side of paradise there's little comfort in the lies and another epigraph is from Oscar Wilde experiences the name so many people give to their mistakes now I want you to think about those models for a minute what they say this side paradise there's little comfort in the wise that's here experiences the main people give to their mistakes say more about that contrast what kind of contrast well what's the first one saying this side of paradise there's little comfort in the wise that's an odd phrase right what does he mean there's little comfort of the lies good yes experience is the name you give to your mistakes and so what are you doing you call yourself wise when you've had experience but the fact is you aren't really wise a little comfort in that mostly you've just screwed up a lot and so one way of reading this novel is ah Avery grows up Avery gets wise but another way of looking at it is Avery makes a lot of mistakes a lot of bad things happen around him it changes it is that wisdom or is that just the name he's giving to his mistakes if you want to focus on a contrast maybe that's what you have in mind is it wisdom or is it just a bunch of mistakes that we've experienced there's an old joke somebody says hey you seem to be so smart so wise why fix how did you get to be so wise as it well from experience and I said where do you get experience no point trying to recover it's not gonna be funny now but anyway he basically says yeah you see be so wise so how do you get wisdom he said wisdom comes from good judgment how do you your judgment from experience how do you get experience bad choice that's the way it's supposed to go well yeah what you call wisdom is often just a series of bad judgments and maybe you've learned something maybe not so I think the point is really it's meant to be into open question whether a Murray Blane is accruing wisdom through the series of experiences but whether he's just changing and yeah it just causes mistakes experience and calls that wisdom but really there's not much wisdom to it at all it's just stuff to happen so at one point Avery is talking in this case he's talking to various friends of his at princeton about the war and about pacifism whether it's legitimate to go to war it's on the occasion basically at the outbreak of world war one and he says i get to at the end all the logic about non-resistance that in the arguments of some of his friends for passing ism and they're like an excluded middle stands the huge specter of man as he is and always willing so in this case Andy it's not really a point about pacifism nor the legitimacy of war or anything like that that really is the crucial issue it's that it forces you to face like any other moral issue by the end of the novel forces you to face a basic question of basic divide something about the nature of human beings ourselves he says the specter stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoy and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche's now what on earth is he talking what love no necessity of Tolstoy and what logical necessity now the next slide won't help Tolstoy war in peace Anna Karenina actually we've gotten read Tolstoy but we want to dust yes very similar themes very similar writer what in the end is the solution for the steel strike exactly you need God to have morals so on the one side you've got this sort of question about pacifism war really about any other moral question depending on religion depending on God and so Dostoyevsky Tolstoy will say in the end you can't make sense of these questions without God without religion and yet on the other hand this argument of nature's and what's Nietzsche's decision well yeah there's no morality in a way they agree don't they it's just that basically they're both saying yeah without God there no there's no absolute morality and so Tolstoy Dostoyevsky say so we need God and Nietzsche says so that was morality but he sees this as more as an opposition because pulse toy and Dostoyevsky are saying on the one hand yes to God and yes to morality Nietzsche is saying no to both but is saying nevertheless you can define values yourself right here is what my conscience says he tells us that all values would be determined to Frank you are to become the person you are and so we get this ideal of authenticity just be the person you are live the way you want to live don't look to some external standard and so the question really here is if I'm trying to figure out how to live my life and what my obligations are do I look outside myself to God or to something else or do I look inside myself as Nietzsche says so it's really - I looked upside or do I look inside that's the dilemma and it's something that well this Fitzgerald take a something is there any religious conversion this novel does amery in the end say oh the Monsignor now that he's dead I realized he had all the wisdom yes I should follow the Munsey I'm going to send no just right so he doesn't take that all trip but does he say then well uh huh I looked inside I see all this value now I understand as well see he looks inside but he's not sure what he finds anyway we'll come back to that if only he thinks we can learn so look on evil as evil whether it's clothed in fell from and not near my deficits then maybe would understand so here's his first attempt to try to understand morality and try to think his way through this problem he says I don't know what good and evil are exactly but suppose we understood evil maybe if we took an extreme right we looked at evil and so on as evil we said what's the absence of virtue the ever absence of good maybe then we'd understand well does anything in the novel appear as this absolute absence of good and you haven't read the whole novel so that's an unfair question but really no ok the evils of the 20th century you might say lemons purges the Red Terror Stalin's purges Hitler the Holocaust and so all of that is set to come none of that's happened so he looks around for something that he finds absolutely evil but he can recognize as evil he doesn't actually find that and so he's puzzled well he does then with many of his friends go off to war and he's saying is he's about to meet Prince and he's wandering around the campus that evening sees the lights reflecting on the pond he says what we leave here is more than this class it's the whole heritage of you we're just one generation we're breaking all the links that seem to find us here so he's seeing the war as breaking all the links breaking all the links not just in the sense that they have to leave Princeton New Jersey and go off to Europe to fight but in the sense that he sees the war as breaking with the past the war is some help dividing everybody who experiences it from their whole heritage for everything about their upbringing their society about the past yeah all right good question to what extent is this the character and to what extent is it Fitzgerald himself he is writing this keep in mind when he's in his early 20s and so this these experiences are very stretching his mind and the things that happened to a memory are things that happen to him it's very easy to see who's who and to trace the connections so it's very autobiographical that makes it tempting to just identify them on the other hand is that fair after all he's describing Avery's states of mind even by the end of the novel are they his states of mind this maybe Fitzgerald knew came back saying I was kind of a fool wasn't I headed here is how I got to be where I am and you see some snippets so even if this is what Fitzgerald was thinking at the time is it what he thinks now maybe not imagine that you've graduated from UT and you're writing a story about your development here at UT and you describe your state of mind is a freshman is that something you're going to endorse as a senior I mean maybe maybe you'll say yeah you know what UC taught me I'm okay the way I am I should be the person I am I read that thing and each of my freshman year just said well Barrett it okay and so yeah maybe you're just the same and you endorse every feeling you had as a freshman or maybe you look back and you think well here's how it seemed to me at the time so I think all that we can safely say is this is how it seemed to the character and I'm sure to Fitzgerald at the time this is what he was feeling I'm pretty sure as he was going off to war in 1920 is he now saying yeah it really did that's Wesley and that's something we need to think about as we go through and see whether by the end he's endorsing these various spots along the way now there's another philosophical reference which i think is nice he says here here Heraclitus did you find in fire and shifting things the prophecy you hold down the date years this midnight my desire will see shadow the embers hurled in flame the splendor and sadness of the world great writing but Heraclitus who is hammer clatters no he's not the Greek god and he's upper Tilly's right this is none other than named Hercules no why does he come to me no something like that here Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher before Socrates one of the first Greek philosophers who is most famous for his saying that you can't step in the same river twice now what does he mean you might think I can refute it I go down to the Colorado River dip my toe in so much for that Heraclitus um his point is it's different right the water is flowing the whole time and so you dip your toe in you dip your toe in again it's two different what in fact some people have said actually you can't even dip your toe in the first time to the same river because the water is flowing as you do it right the water is constantly changing the river is constantly changing Hera places point is that the world is constantly changing that's why it talks about fire about shifting things like rivers the point is that the world is constantly changing nothing is really constant and so as he's departing Princeton as he's leaving for the war he looks and he's saying this is breaking all my ties to the past but then again the world is constantly changing Heraclitus you were right the world is shifting and so he's thinking at first yes I'm come up from the past but hey the world is constantly changing in fact this sort of changed this disruption is really the nature of the world that's the way it is and so his first thought is he looks at the world says splendor yes but also sadness a world that in every moment is shifting it's changing and so they're constantly losing everything that is really in every moment you're becoming a new person everything around you is becoming new exciting yes the splendor of the embers that flash but that are gone the whole world is certain you might say as you experience her plight has had this view there are a few other Western philosophers have had this view mostly this is the view that you find in Buddhism this is the dominant Buddhist view of the world things last as long as one thought every object is really momentary the world is constantly changing constantly fitness so if you want to see people really develop this idea we have fragments of Heraclitus but in Buddhist philosophy you see a great deal of development in any case by the time you get to the final chapter Avery is that a nervous Fitzgerald is with his wife Zelda by the way you see him talking about a loss of faith a loss of faith of the heirs of promise here is I think how Elliot and Yates are different from Fitzgerald even though there were a lot of similarities we've got yes the sense of a loss of faith in all of them but it fits Jerry he sees himself as the heir of progress he doesn't give up on that enlightenment idea of progress we've talked about that commitment to truth and knowledge to reason and ultimately to progress and he's willing to cling to them he sees progress is something that he is the heir of there's a sense in which in the United States in the 1920s he feels like what I'm a very lucky guy Here I am at prints 1920 or really during the war years a little bit before that era prosperity that was just gone but he still says look I realize I'm the heir to a great civilization a lot has been given to me and I'm not rejecting it I'm not saying it's all dead I'm giving nothing but a bunch of broken images no he says I've been given something very valuable and wonderful but I also have lost any faith in its that you might say the ideas that went behind it I don't have I have the system that produces prosperity and progress around me but I'm no longer in a position to understand it didn't I wasn't left the ideas I wasn't told how it works sort of I was given this great gift but I wasn't given the manual so he feels this sense of moral drift and he does this little question and answer with himself where are you drifting don't ask me don't you care whether I don't normal suicide have you no interest left No or virtue to lose he was wrong about that but just as a cooling pot gives off heat so all through youth and adolescence we all calories of virtue that's what's called ingenuous another Rick cleverness really the idea is what it makes you appear clever and cool and with it when you're dumb basically giving off calories a perch okay you're probably brought up to be pretty virtuous by your parents and then you're subject to all these other influences and you start giving off calories approaching ie yeah suppose suppose you want to act cool how do you do you go to the PC Alan study what do you do do I quote help old ladies across the street do you volunteer at the Red Cross or at lunch decreased or something like that what do you do hang out with friends what else get shrunk giving off calories of virtue right that aren't like accumulating virtues are giving it away so feels like yeah I all right I've lost my innocence I think was brought up to be a pretty good person and I feel as if in trying to be cool and trying to be clever I've been sort of losing it all the way along so are you corrupt I think so I'm not sure I'm not sure about good and evil at all so at a certain point in the novel every admit I don't understand good and evil at all I've been given this great gift I don't help them the user's manual I don't know how to really understand how it works I don't understand what good and evil or what I ought to do I don't know what virtue is I really have no idea about any of this anymore how should I look my life I have no idea and he said I love this line I don't want to repeat my innocence I want the pleasure of losing it again so it's not like only I could go back to my spouse my ways that's not the Kipling yes Scott stop giving off those characters no calories go back to the one word said no I look I'd like to be back there just so I can lose my innocence again so here's what he says Mia says there were no more Wiseman there were no more heroes in other words he's looking for somebody to say they've got it figured out they understand how it all works and what kind of life to leave you can't find them where are the Weisman Gary the hero's burnt holiday a good friend of this with some proof site as though he had never lived that's the friendly disappeared Monsignor his mentor was dead Avery had grown up to a thousand books a thousand blondes he listened eerily to people who pretended to know who knew nothing so he looks around and says who understands it who's got to figure it out who can I follow and imitate Aristotle that said here's how you become virtuous and somebody to imitate and imitate them start developing those habits in yourself and when they're second nature you've got virtue this is who I am I can't find anybody to imitate I don't find any wise men no heroes basically I have nobody who told her to nobody seems to know it life was a damn bubble a football game with everyone outside of the referee got rid of every one thing the referee would have been on his side maybe you've played in games like that I played on a philosophy departments softball team in graduate schools and it was just like that there was no umpire and so we got into big arguments I remember one time Jack a friend of mine had just long flyball and no actually it was great I'm totally screw up today I don't I was looking at too many pictures of Calvin Coolidge and uh it just destroys my brain anyway then yeah it was the other team the business school guy hit this long my drive hit up a post of a light post and we didn't know whether was fair foul it was intramural fields they didn't have foul lines marked so we got into this big oval and so the business school what do they do they negotiate so they said we'll call it a ground rule double and I thought that was gonna work out until Jack this guy friend of mine on our team suddenly said no good foul it's a strike if it's fair it's a homerun in neither cases in a double so the business school said fine it's awful rot and we lost that was all we always plenty be referring this website at we always lost the argument anyway he does near the end however fine something it's a hope of value he found something that he wanted that he had always wanted an always would one not to be admired since feared not to be loves the it made of self only but to be necessary to people to be indispensable and so he's thinking maybe really I've been trying to be cool try to be clever just cuz I want people to like me that's a kind of depressing thought Betty thinks well maybe I just want somebody to love me hence the girls who keep going crazy or dubbing me with any face wait maybe I could be essential to people and so he has this epiphany this sudden burst of insight I've opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Avery suddenly had permanently rejected an old ever grounded they were playing listless Lina's mind very few things matter and nothing matters very much on the contrary he felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security and so all of a sudden he says wait a minute something does hurt when somebody's life goes terribly wrong that's bad ok don't think about grand evils think about little evils think about when friends go through a difficult time when people have a rough time when they lose a sense of security when people lose everything he suddenly says wait there is such a thing as good things bad he distinguishes two types of people he calls them spiritually married and spiritually unmarried some take human nature as they find and some are always seeking new systems that will control or counteract human nature and so I think there's a deep political inside some people say human nature is what it is we have to deal with it others say no we can reshape up we can Ramona we can revise in any case it concludes this as an endless stream that went on the spear of the past brooding over a new generation that chosen youth from the bubblebum Jason world still federal maximum estates and half forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets here was a new generation shouting the old cries learning the old Creed's though our effort through a reverie of long days and months destined fighting to go out into that dirty great turmoil the following and pride a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success grown up to find all God's dead all wars fought all faiths in man shaken well again it's beautiful right but notice we don't only have the old gods dead all wars fought he was wrong about that one but notice this endless stream it goes on they should remind you of the ending of Gatsby no romantic mistakes dreams of dead Steve in other words what he separate the beginning there's little comfort in the wise experience at the name we give to our mistakes those mottos in effect he's alluding back to here it's not just us individually it's mankind to what is the experience and wisdom of mankind really it's just the record of our mistakes okay so there's in a certain sense where romantically uh oh here's our wisdom children we tell them our history and it's just one mistake after another and so he ends up saying actually we end up in this position we're all gods they all face in man shaken we look to history and just find a series of mistakes there was no God in his heart he knew so so much for the route of dust if skin Tolstoy for him his ideas were still in right there was ever the pain of memory the regret for his lost youth that the waters of dissolution but the deposit unsold responsibility and a love of life the faith story of old ambitions of unrealized dreams so notice something does survive and start forming the foundation we've got something left on a soul a sense of responsibility that look I can't just shake it off and just say hey whatever no it's up to me to define this to live my life in a way that is really mine which I can take responsibility but also a love of life this is good okay here's what's really bad death and here's something is really good life and maybe if you start there you can actually build something so there's a little bit of a sense of hope here that something is left we're not really left with complete confusion he looks around the system life is good maybe if I understand that I can go somewhere and so he concludes I know myself but that is all so think of that other alternative if he can't accept Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy he can't place any reliance on an external standard either a god or any wise men and heroes anything really didn't find outside himself to serve as a guide what about looking inside himself well he looks inside himself and says ok I got myself but that's all he hasn't yet been able to take the step of how to get from that to any kind of guy who's any kind of standard and so that's the problem but then all the leaves are eaten with really look inside yourself try to figure out what you value become the person you already so well ok I kind of understand now Who I am but so what I don't that doesn't help me ok I know that but that's all and so the task for Avery and for the reader I think really is to say well alright if that's it if you have to find the standard within yourself look inside yourself but not now what come to some self understanding great but what follows from that and I don't think he means it to be a simple question thing supposed to be a hard question right suppose you take Nietzsche's route and you say it's inside that's not actually much of a help because you're trying to figure out well that's a little problem right how do I live my life what kind of person do I want to be and so knowing what kind of person I am now doesn't really answer that yeah good excellent question how do you know who you are really I mean you look inside and some of that is just going to be the series of mistakes Eve your own mistakes or other people's mistakes that were handed on to you is wisdom right maybe you're not really that kind of person it's just that you've been raised to be that kind of person and so what about that past about that Harwich about what you are now it's something you want to embrace and say yes that's who I am that's part of my identity and what do you put aside and say no that's not gonna be part of my identity what are you embracing what do you reject out of the heritage you've been given that's really the problem he's left with he looks inside says okay I think I figured out who I am the requestors who I want to be and I don't know how to get from the first question Who I am to that second who I should want to be so exactly I think that's another form of this problem how do I know whether this is really me or whether it's just something I've been handed and it's not really ultimately encouraging mistakes or if you think that they're bad like because he starts out saying like well I can't trust a white so they just full of mistakes making it seem like almost negative but you say almost kind of seeing like you grow out of the mistakes then you find yourself I guess all right that's a great question is experience something that gives you wisdom or is it just a bunch of mistakes is he encouraging you to go out there and gain experience by making mistakes you'll learn from it that's one way to take this hey go out there and yeah you're gonna make a lot of mistakes but that's okay you live make mistakes gain the wisdom that comes from that or is he saying yeah the wisdom comes from that actually nothing much comes from that just a bunch of mistakes how do you take this happy I notice I'm pulling a teacher trick here she asked me a question I'm turning around and asking the rest of you the same question but actually I don't think my own take is becerril's not really giving us much of an answer that yeah okay good he does have some friends at print Princeton that really just sit in their rooms all the time and so you could say I mean I haven't talked about them because they're boring they don't do anything but you might think that's the alternative to be one of those people who just sits around doesn't make mistakes but also doesn't learn anything really just sits there and kind of in fact there's one guy who seems to be very smart at all Avery admires him but he really just sits around he doesn't do much of anything he reads he reads poetry but that's about it and so it's an interesting question whether he's kind of an ideal or whether he's the person you don't want to be like there's much that's admirable about that character but nobody I think reads the book and things oh I want to be that dude so so yeah I mean one way of looking at it is to say well what's really good Turner's going out there and making mistakes is that maybe but that doesn't seem like a very good alternative at all all right well I have a broader question for you why does this whole generation see itself as a lost generation in Europe you could say look here's why because most of the people I went to school with remount debt and indeed if you stop and think 4% of the population dead but that was concentrated among people of military agent specifically men of military age at least in the countries that weren't themselves battlegrounds like say Britain but if you think they will wait four percent of the population overall that might be like 8 percent of the male population and that might be like 24 percent of the military-age male population then you start thinking wait okay one out of four of the people you went to school with the people who you were friends with and so on are now dead alright that's pretty huge good that is a big impact in the United States it wasn't like we lost 117 thousand people in World War one that's a lot of people that's more than twice the number of lost in Vietnam that is well take the number of lost in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade and multiplied by what 16 or 17 to get that so it's a lot of people I don't mean to minimize but on the other hand it's not a huge percent the population it's not like everybody had lost many of their friends in the war not in the United States so why this sense of all God's dead oh you know faith shaken there were no more heroes no more Wiseman why that sort of reaction yeah was like Perrineau says that whenever something goes bad you look for someone to blame like I'm gonna say like the character for the author chilling the author for all their bad things oh nice okay good you look for somebody to blame and their way the problem in World War one is way harder than in world war ii world war ii by the end yes disastrous who do you blame Hitler right like most of you those videos oh I know who to blame yeah now maybe it wasn't just one guy but still you kind of know where to put the blame it's very easy there was an aggressor very clear who was doing bad things and so forth but World War one who's to blame you look and you say that was horrible and it's all wait whose fault maybe have real it príncipe guy who shot the Archduke but wait I mean shot one guy so it's hard to fix blame on any one person and that makes people that I think you're right they're looking for somebody to blame but there's no one person to blame not even some group of people in play so they end up thinking it's the whole thing right they blame the whole system the whole set of ideas everything basically and so it's this indeterminate sense of things have gone terribly wrong we've got to blame somebody who and we've lived

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 4,337

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author)

Id: HNBY3mAPA_o

Length: 33min 2sec (1982 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2013