Sic Transit Imperii Malum
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. . . . — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“No hugging, no learning.” — Larry David, on the formula for the situation comedy Seinfeld
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Besides being perhaps the most elegantly written novel authored by an American, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a masterful sociology of the American pathology, the clueless overconfidence that we know what we are doing and that whatever we do is just fine. Every character in Gatsby is both a concrete individual and an archetype. This is a difficult thing to pull off: perhaps only Melville, among American novelists, accomplished this as masterfully as Fitzgerald. Just as Myrtle is the archetype of the working-class American enamored of wealth and leisure, and Nick of middle-class aspiration and respectability, Tom and Daisy Buchanan represent the oblivion of the good and the right that complements “exceptional” genes, education, and old money. They leave a trail of destruction in their wake and greet it with a shrug at best and oblivion at worst. Tom and Daisy are “the best people” and they, like the potentate-in-exile in Palm Beach and his family and hangers-on, do…
