Did it seem to you that The Great Gatsby was especially difficult to read? It's a book that most American students encounter in high school. When I read it the first time, I certainly missed some of the nuances, but I didn't stumble over any of the words.
Even at the time, I noticed the particular beauty of its conclusion. After the whole doomed scenario has played out, Nick looks once again across the waters of the Sound:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Evocative. Poetic. Perfect. Too good, in fact, for the "intermediate level" readers of the Macmillan Reader edition of the novel, as "retold by Margaret Tarner."
Read her closing words:
Gatsby had believed in his dream. He had followed it and nearly made it come true.
Everybody has a dream. And, like Gatsby, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.
Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?
This is an obscenity. I can hardly bear to direct you to the full text of her edition, which begins, "My name is Nick Carraway. I was born in a big city in the Middle West."
That is an abbreviation of:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament."-- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No -- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
I learn that the Margaret Tarner "retelling" employs an Intermediate Level vocabulary of "about 1,600 basic words." Upper Level students can feast on 2,200 basic words.
There are so many things I want to say about this that even an Upper Level vocabulary may prove inadequate.
The first is: There is no purpose in "reading" The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald's novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby's lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald's style--in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.
I have not read the full Macmillan Reader edition, although it requires only 67 pages. Readers of the actual novel must have been dismayed to learn that this edition with its 1,600 words arrives at the conclusion: "But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?"
No possible reading of the book, however stupid, could possibly conclude that. One wonders if Margaret Tarner was elaborating after having read the novel at a Beginner Level ("about 300 basic words").
My name is Nick. This is my friend. His name is Jay. Jay has a big house. See his house.
What depresses me is what this Macmillan Reader edition says about our American educational system. Any high school student who cannot read The Great Gatsby in the original cannot read. That student has been sold a bill of goods. We know that teachers at the college level complain that many of their students cannot read and write competently. If this is an example of a book they are assigned, can they be blamed?
After a certain point, you teach yourself to read. You arrive at an unfamiliar word, and usually don't look it up. You sort of flow with it in the context, and in time it teaches itself to you. Consider Fitzgerald's big word "orgastic," which for years was incorrectly printed "orgiastic" because of an editing error. You've never seen it before. What, oh what, can it mean? No matter how it's spelled, it must have something to do with an orgasm, right? Am I correct in guessing that most high school students are familiar with that word?
I never read a simplified text of a novel in my life, and to the best of my knowledge neither did any other graduates of St. Mary's Grade School or Urbana High School -- not in school, anyway. The first book I read was Huckleberry Finn, and I got through it just fine, encountering hundreds of words I didn't know.
You can't become literate by being taught illiteracy, and you can't read The Great Gatsby without reading it. What would be the point? If there is a market for this book and schools prepared to assign it, a kid would be better off just cutting class and going to the school library. If there is one.
Was Jay Gatsby a success in life? (Choose one):
___ Yes, he got his dream.
___ No, he met some unpleasant people.
___ Words fail me.
Note 11 a.m. 7/6: Some readers say this is an edition for students of English as a second language. The web site didn't't make that clear. If it is, my question would be: Why not have ESL learners begin with Young Adult novels? Why not write books with a simplified vocabulary? Why eviscerate Fitzgerald? Why give a false impression of Jay Gatsby?
This is hideous. Having just finished Tender Is The Night--having just been immersed in Fitzgerald's dreamy language for a week--I can't imagine why anyone thought this was necessary. It reminds me of modern translations of the Bible that have none of the majesty and mystery of the King James Version--and thus offer me few reasons to read them.
Hey, maybe I'll rewrite some great books, too. Moby-Dick kinda sucked and could do with some editing. And did you ever try to read the Canterbury Tales? Sheesh.
I'm left feeling bad for Margaret Tarner, who probably has her own literary ambitions but must make trash for a living.
I wholeheartedly agree that this "adaptation" is a tragedy in every way. But sad to say, but these days many teachers consider it a victory if a student reads anything at all. Even if they can't or won't read Gatsby, or anything, the students know they will still graduate and likely still get into college, and at worst have to muddle through a couple of remedial classes before they get their business degree. A teacher who assigns may consider this the only way to expose their students to something remotely resembling actual literature. A pale shadow cast on the wall, perhaps, but something, I suppose. A tactical retreat in a losing battle, but without overhauling our educational system to require students actually learn something, there's little a lone teacher can do sometimes.
Thanks for this, and thanks for your righteous anger. I teach the novel to 11th-graders. This novel does not exist as some tale one can boil down to bare beams; Nick's language--full of contradictions, half-truths and evasions--captures the novel's ambiguities and the moral equivocations of its characters. One student this year complained, early on, that nothing had happened in the novel. Another student countered that he was missing the real fireworks; he said he'd never read a book that sounded like this one.
While you may disagree with the conclusion of the abridged version (that is, Gatsby was a success) -- and I disagree as well -- this is not a book for the average, fluent speaker of English. This is specifically for learners of English.
I've learned at least one language to an intermediate level through 'novels' such as this: short (60-100 page) abridged novels that are geared towards adult (or high-school-aged) learners of that language.
This says nothing about our educational system and everything about trying to make works accessible to those who might not have the vocabulary or English-language skills to tackle the original, in all its poetry and nuance. While I think simplifying the book to this extent makes it less than appealing to someone who might eventually want to tackle it in the original (once his language skills improve), this method has worked for me as an adult learner of another language.
Ebert: What's the point in trashing a great novel for that purpose?
I believe George Orwell coined a term for this that very nicely sums up what is happening here and in the American educational system and beyond.
Newspeak- deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state.
"It is a beautiful thing... the destruction of words."
Amen, good sir. Amen.
Is this a joke? The Great Gatsby is too tough a read for high schoolers? Good lord. One would think as time marches forward we'd be getting smarter as a nation. Clearly, that is not the case.
That is horrific. I remember reading the Great Gatsby in high school and wondering why teachers had kept this kind of wonderful book away from me for so long. It opened my eyes to how wonderful writing could be and set me off on a life-long love of good literature. It took the kid who liked to read but didn't always know what to read and saved him. It made me a reader. Not the kind of reader who has a trashy paperback spy novel on my bedside table, but the kind of reader who goes out looking for the risk of good writing to reap the benefits of the reward.
They say that parents are too involved in their kids' lives today, but any parent who doesn't question why their child is reading this just isn't paying any attention.
How many % have the literary bone? What do you say to Charles Lamb's Tales? I know many books like Faust (Murnau), War and Peace, and soon hopefully Don Quixote (Welles, if I can ferret subtitles), Les Miserables, through film. Mahabharata is tonnes long--I appreciated whatever Peter Brooks did to it.
When I read this, I can't help thinking, "The end of the world is nigh," but it's just more of the mundane dumbing down of our culture that's been escalating for most of my adult life. Thanks, Roger, for fighting the darkness.
The text and publication is stunningly sad. What is obscene is that it is offered for the classroom. What happened to Cliffnotes?
Given your love of Gatsby and your.... feelings towards the Bay Transformers series, I thought you'd get a kick out of this (apologies if you've already seen it).
http://www.cracked.com/blog/storyboards-from-michael-bays-the-great-gatsby/
Ebert: Oh, I'm tweeting this.
"employs an Intermediate Level vocabulary of about 1,600 basic words."
Maybe this book was intended for readers of English as a second language? I should look for some dumbed-down German books.
Doing this to any piece of literature is an obscenity. Recommending it to be read by students should be illegal.
That's worse than the edited Huck Finn.
Michiko Kakutani summed it up more eloquently than anyone ever could when the same was done to Huck Finn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html
To hell with reading, here's the video game version:
http://greatgatsbygame.com/
@Ebert -- Personally, I'd prefer an original novel geared towards learners, but your point was that this is what regular high-school students are learning in school.
It's not, and it's intellectually lazy to lambaste this book without looking at the audience for whom it was written.
Your point was that this was dumbing down schools.
It's not dumbing down schools. It's making a work accessible (again, we can agree that it's done in a bad way) to English-language learners. It's tough to be an adult or adolescent learner of a language and find work that is easy enough to read but also geared towards adults.
Do you know if any high schools are actually using this for regular-track students?
Ebert: Judging by the web site, the answer seems to be, yes, some are.
For a learner of English, what''s the point? Begin with young adult novels, things like that. Why eviscerate Fitzgerald?
"Authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. Tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people in this day of mash-ups, sampling and digital books — the attitude that all texts are fungible, that readers are entitled to alter as they please, that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned." - Michiko Kakutani
Dear God...I feel sick. Lord help us all.
Though I am an admittedly poor reader and I'm a huge fan of dumb things, I could never in a million years subject myself to a dumbed-down novel. This reminds me of the cover of a book I saw in the young adult section of a bookstore recently. It featured a photo of a very pale, Abercrombie and Fitch model-looking teen, gazing affectedly out a window. The title of the book was "Dracula." How very, very cynical.
If I ever encounter one of Hemingway's novels in an intellectual abortion edition like this, I'll buy every copy on the shelves and burn them in the parking lot. Apologies to Fitzgerald, but funds are limited for legitimate book burnings.
I never read the Great Gatsby in high school. I don't know why...I was in honors English and I guess that just wasn't part of the curriculum.
I am, coincidentally, reading it right now at 25. It was part of a challenge given to Nerdfighteria by our dear leader, John Green. I don't know if you know about him but his unfinished book, The Fault in Our Stars, was #1 on Amazon bestsellers list despite having a publishing date of May 1, 2012. You've also blogged about his brother Hank, who is our other dear leader, though you didn't really mention him specifically. He's the guy that made 2D glasses for his wife.
Anyway, the point is John does this thing every now and then where he tells us to read a book--usually a classic--and then he does a videoblog discussing it. It's like in school, but 900% more interesting. And right now, that book is The Great Gatsby. He has given us until the 13th to read the first 6 chapters, so he hasn't really talked about the book yet. Except for one thing--the rhythm. Well, two things--the epigraph and the rhythm. But he read the first sentence and you could truly feel the rhythm of Fitzgerald's writing. There is no rhythm in the dumbed down version of Gatsby, therefore, it has no business calling itself Gatsby. If you had posted this a week ago I just would have said, "Oh...that's sad. Typical coddling of school children."
But now that I have begun to feel the rhythm of The Great Gatsby, I'm outraged. It's a tragedy. These kids don't stand a chance at every being prolific readers when we spoon feed them bastardized versions of classics.
Here is John talking about Gatsby for reference. You can skip to 2:20 to just watch the Gatsby part.
http://dft.ba/-D-X
What the oversimplification of literature says about our educational system is that, in general, said system holds its wards in very little esteem; there is very little faith in the potential that students might have..."you are young, you are inexperienced and I, who am educated, will treat you as you can never achieve what I have achieved." It's very sad...
I wasn't treated as if my youth indicated stupidity, and I have, in turn, done the same with my children. I spoke to them, when they were younger, so that they would learn a broader vocabulary, a better manner in which to express themselves...this is considered arrogant by many teachers. On one particularly upsetting occasion, my oldest son wrote a very good essay on The Scarlet Letter and we were called in to the principal's office because his teacher contended he couldn't have written it himself...see: he didn't do work of such quality when asked to write in class, and -of course- this must mean that his parents must be the authors of said essay. After going back and forth for a while on how we managed such assignments (that is: write a rough draft, let me read it, I will comment, you take my comments and work through what you think is the next step, and so forth) his teacher said "well, how come he will write better for you than for me? I am his teacher!" and I replied, quite calmly, "because I expect more from him than you do."
Several times I've handed him the unabridged version of some literary work that has been chewed and digested for him in the "school version"...he appreciates good writing. By this I don't mean he is a good student, but he is a well-read, well-spoken, intelligent person who can carry on an adult conversation without interjecting "huh!" or "like" every other sentence.
Yes, just like translations of books are the product of the translator's interpretation of someone else's work, literature that has been masticated to prevent the teachers from having to delve into actual discourse with students is quite a revolting by-product of a sad, sad educational system. If we don't have more faith in our kids and start treating them as if they can learn whatever we offer them, we're going to be chewing at the ankles of culture and civilization.
Sorry...you have elicited a rant about something that is near and dear to my heart...we are moving out-of-state and the majority of our boxes are filled with books...actual books with actual pages with actual notes on the pages and actual dried leaves or flowers or scraps of paper in them. Education isn't about dispensing factoids and expecting children to sort of perform...it is about feeding innate curiosity and opening doors and windows and not allowing moroseness to take over...
Sigh...
High school-aged English learners often need such texts to help them complete the requirements of their courses. The original would be incomprehensible to a student with intermediate English proficiency. I agree; these versions are not literature, and some novels survive the process better than others. But they do give English learners at least an introduction to the books and their place in the culture. The alternative would be graduating from high school without any familiarity with Fitzgerald at all, and that's not a good option, either.
It's a mistake to use these books as more evidence for What's Wrong with the Schools.
Thanks, Roger, as ever, for holding out for the appreciation of novels and poems and films as they come.
I've seen similarly appalling re-editions of books in university bookstores, aimed directly for ESL students. Why bother is what I say.
Someone who wants to read will find her level and will always want to reach beyond it. We learn by getting at what we don't know, by accepting that an author's or director's world and lexicon are just beyond us, showing us a greater world over the hill or across the bay. We experience their work and we get there as well.
For once, today, I partly disagree with you Mr. Ebert. Not because I am not a fan of The Great Gatsby (I do not really like the book) but because of your analysis of the level of English.
I am a Francophone, born and raised in a city were 97% of people are unilingual Francophone. As I was going through high school, I read something similar to the Penguin books you are talking about. I read The Prince and the Pauper and Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hide. Why was it interesting to read? I could actually understand te story.
From there, I read all the classics, in their English original version. I went to McGill and studied science, but also wrote very long essays on many classics (including Pride and Prejudice and Heart of Darkness, two of my favourites) in English. I love litterature and I am still reading a lot.
However, I think that for many people, feeding them the original version of a very complex book, where you do not understand the story in the end, is so annoying and unpleasant that it cuts them forever from litterature.
I would compare it to reading the original version to the translation; I would love to read Don Quichotte in its original Spanish version, but my Spanish is not good enough to understand the words.
And what about all the great Russian writers? I studied Russian for a while, can understand a basic conversation but cannot fully appreciate the wonderful Russian writing of Anna Karenine.
What is better then? Read it translated in French (because Russian to French translation is much better than Russian to English) or read a Russian adapted version?
I think it is sad that some children/teenagers/adults can only read the adapted version of The Great Gatsby, because they do lose the beautiful phrasing of Fitzgerald. However, if they can start with that and then evolve to the real version of the book, it is very good.
Anyway, that is what I did with The Prince and the Pauper and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide.
Lisa
U R WAT U REED.... (sadly at times)
I remember in high school, one of the American Lit classes had to read Of Mice and Men, and most of the students I talked to used the Cliffs Notes. This is a book with 112 pages.
I still see plenty of Facebook profiles that say "I don't read," or encounter people in real life who say they don't read. Why? Why would anyone willingly remain ignorant like that? I started reading at age 4 and never stopped. I read difficult books and taught myself plenty of new words, which was unthinkable to some of my peers - I still remember the initial shame of using the word "crepuscular" in third grade conversation and being berated for using "smart people words." I read a lot of crap books as a kid, but I wouldn't trade what I learned and experienced for anything.
Full disclosure: I used Cliffs Notes for a couple of books in high school and college, but I usually went back and read them later, and was happy I did. I think simplified versions of books CAN be useful as a supplement to the text (I would never have navigated the complexity of King Lear without the modern English translation beside it), but to use it in lieu of the text is inexcusable, and the simplification should at least be written by someone who understands the book backwards and forwards. Can you imagine a simplified Cormac McCarthy novel?
This saddens me as an educator. This is precisely the type of thing I have to battle every day as a teacher. I work at an alternative school, so I get a lot of students who have dropped out of the public high school system and are just now (at age 17 or 18) getting serious about obtaining their diploma.
One of the things I always make clear in my class is that reading IS NOT just being able to correctly say aloud the words on the page. We must deconstruct the text together as a class. Reading is what goes on behind the eyes. In other words, how do we think critically about what it is we're reading? Building critical thinking skills is most important to me, not whether or not the vocabulary is too difficult for them. That kind of stuff (vocab building) comes with class discussion.
Part of becoming a good reader (aside from practicing) is being able to identify the things that confuse you. So, why dumb down the material and remove the elements that would get young learners asking questions.
All of these dumb-down versions of novels really gets under my skin. Standards and objectives for classes should not be easy or put students at ease; they should be clear and teachers should set them high with material that is going to push the students out of their comfort zone because it is there they learn the most.
One of the biggest reasons I think this may never work is because teachers themselves rarely want to go out of their comfort zone. Teachers would much rather teach the same boring materials with the same boring resources. I'm not saying I'm perfect, and I realize that since I don't have to deal with PTA and other things that stunt the teaching of public school teachers, but I don't even hesitate to teach things like O'Conner, Ellison, Hemingway, La Guin, T.C. Boyle, Updike, Cheever, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, et al. The point is not that I'm bragging (although I am proud of my students and what they accomplish when they take college placement exams and score off the charts on reading), but my point is that the material should be of a high quality so the students continually ask questions and build their critical thinking skills.
Sorry for the rant, Roger. I really appreciated your post, though. Especially since I'm going to be teaching Gatsby next year. I'll keep this bookmarked and share it with the students after we finish the novel.
A good friend of mine taught ESL for 11 years. She was constantly looking for new material for her classes, and found many, many books at the appropriate reading level. Young adult novels are particularly good for learning a new language, and it's a rich and varied genre. My mother taught remedial reading at both high school and college level, and she would try to find things that interested her students to motivate them, i.e. a motorcycle magazine for a high school boy who couldn't read, but loved to ride. Rewriting a classic is lazy teaching and intellectually vapid.
This is one of my favorite books and probably the only one I actually read all the way through in my high school English class. I recently bought a new copy of it just last week.
I don't understand how it is okay to "dumb down" any book. If you change someone's work you rob them of everything they went through in writing it. It's ridiculous to say the least.
I'm agreeing with Nicole Apostola. I teach English as a foreign language in Japan , mostly to adults. I give my students these type of novels by MacMillan and other publishers.
Why? Because most of them will never achieve the level of English ability to read the original, but mainly, for the hope that one or two may be motivated to work hard enough and long enough to read the original.
If your English vocabulary is low, the beautiful words that Roger quoted in his essay will not make any sense. You would spend an hour with a dictionary in your hand to get through one sentence. It is terribly demotivating. (I have had students who have tried this.)
These readers however, do help students improve their reading skills. I have a few students that have been reading readers that are almost at the native English speaker level. They need more practice first. They have gone from a low level to a much higher one. They like reading versions of famous English novels.
For native English speakers, I would definitely recommend the original novels, but, please, for English learners, let them be introduced to the wonderful stories before they are scared off by the wonderful English!
You can't learn to genuinely read by dumbing down the text any more than you can learn to talk by dumbing down speech. I know a lot of kids who were taught to speak with "Mushey bushey wushey!" and they sound like goddamn idiots later in life because they have no vocabulary. Nurturing a person's ignorance is not teaching them. It's just making them think they've learned something by dumbing down everything around so they'll feel smart. This is insulting, it's treating people like dumb animals who can never do better.
Poetry in prose is the cornerstone of writing. Sure, sometimes it's fun to strip it down to the bare minimum, see how little you can get away with, but poetry is essential to conveying the feeling as well as the events. Otherwise it's not a book, it's a wikipedia entry, if that.
Here's a great example of why prose matters: I could write "Bob hated Joe." or "Every time Bob looked at Joe he felt like insects had laid eggs in his heart." Both sentences get the job done, but one is better, and it is obvious which one is better.
That said, I do understand that some people have a hard time with books and genuinely want to learn to read well, and need something simple and straightforward just to prime their pump because they're not quite confident yet to hop in the word pool. However, there are tons of books written by very good writers who use a sparse, minimalistic prose. There's no need to eviscerate Gatsby.
Also, and maybe this is snobbish, but most books are not that goddamn hard to read. I don't think I ever had to stop and get a dictionary because I didn't understand a word, even when I was a dumb 13 year old. If you don't fully understand, do like I did: read slowly, let the images form in your head, and keep going. It's not that difficult.
I think this sort of simplification nonsense is born from trying to coddle people who hate reading and use every excuse in the world not to have to read. It hurts their eyes. It's too long. They can't understand this word or that word. Pfffft... bull.
If I was an english teacher, my motto would be "Read the book or don't, pussy."
@Ebert -- Which website is indicating that this is being used in high schools? (Not trying to be trollish, I'm genuinely not seeing it.)
Also, I would direct you to an interview with the woman herself, who discusses a bit about writing for the English-language learning audience:
http://www.macmillanreaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/MargaretTarnerInterviewTranscript2.pdf
It's obvious that she's writing for a particular audience. Your point was about a different audience. If you want to write about the dumbing-down of ESL learning, feel free. But to make out that the decline and fall of the American High School is due to one ESL text is a bit much.
To your point about YA novels, I think a lot of YA titles would be too long and too full of idioms to be useful to a language learner. (That is, everyone needs to learn some idioms, but it might be overwhelming for a learner.)
I should perhaps reiterate my great love for The Great Gatsby (though not all of the Fitzgerald oeuvre) and I think that the book could perhaps have retained more of the nuance of the novel without being more linguistically complicated.
Here's a question for a journalist to look into. THE GREAT GATSBY is in fact still under copyright. Why does the Fitzgerald estate allow this bastardization to occur?
Ebert : For a learner of English, what''s the point? Begin with young adult novels, things like that. Why eviscerate Fitzgerald?
I have students in my classes who are in their 50's and 60's. Why would I give them a Young Adult novel? It isn't age appropriate, that's why!
Let's give them a taste of the classics. They'll ask for more if they can understand them!
As for the question "Did it seem to you that The Great Gatsby was especially difficult to read?", no, it was not. However, when you take into account the books teenagers read and consider challenging nowadays, yes, it is difficult to read.
"I just finished the Twilight series."
"Oh wow. Those are big books."
"Yeah, I know. But I'm smart like that."
That was an actual conversation between two 16-17 year old girls that I overheard not too long ago. I've tried reading Twilight, and her writing is so dumbed down with absolutely no rhythm or poetry to it, I couldn't get past the first few pages. But reading it is considered a great literary feat by today's teenagers.
My oldest nephew at 16 doesn't read. I give him books every holiday and I think the only time he even tries to read them is when he's grounded. The younger one is 12, and I had to bribe him to get him to read--I'm pretty sure he had never read a book that wasn't from school. He wanted my old drumset and I gave it to him on the condition that he read 10 books and write me 10 book reports that we would then discuss. I gave him a specific list of books to choose from--some easy, some hard. Now, that same kid begs me to buy him books. He went from wanting to be a car mechanic to wanting to be an aerospace engineer. All because he read, and through reading learned to dream bigger.
Kids need to be taught to appreciate and truly understand books, not just read them.
Thank you for this. Although reading it to my husband (a Haverford College English and History graduate) resulted in him throwing an empty (fortunately plastic) bottle at me is disbelief, we join in our dismay and horror. We also are joined in our daily frustration- we are both high school teachers in what my husband calls this "post-literate" age. This is simply another example of the depressing direction in modern education, where we are told we need to "modify" our expectations to "meet the needs of the children": translation= dumb it down. I recently attended a conference where I was told that I needed to tell my students ahead of time what was on a test, then prepare 6 different versions of the test (using various testing formats), then allow the students to choose which test to take! I can only say that I am happy to be old enough that I will not live to see the world in which these children are our doctors, engineers, etc
I taught "The Great Gatsby" to my ESL students. The real Gatsby. And they loved it. And they understood it. I would refuse to insult their intelligence with this nonsense.
Some comments suggest that the point is simply to make the "work" accessible to second language learners. That makes no sense. The "work" is not being made accessible, it is being destroyed and replaced with something simplistic and wholly different than "The Great Gatsby". It is an utterly pointless exercise - and, is accurately described as "dumbing down" the work. Will an ESL student truly feel that she has read "The Great Gatsby" by reading this bastardization? Not if she is at all aware of what has been done. At best, we (and the education establishment) have sold her a bill of goods. We have devalued both her and Fitzgerald. Shame.
@Lisa
I think the discussion is mainly about English speaking American teenagers. Then again, though it may take longer, what better way to teach someone English than through the delicate phrasing of classic literature?
I read the simplified versions of classic books, but I read them when I was 8-12. Then I read the original version of the story. I already knew the basics of the story so I could enjoy the lyricism a bit more. But once you are a teenager you are more than capable of understanding the story and appreciating the lyricism of the original text and the same time. Handing a 15 year old student an abridged version of a text is like saying, "Your intelligence is comparable to that of a 10 year old, so just read this, take a test, and you can say you've read The Great Gatsby."
I'm just reading the Great Gatsby for the first time. The original version of course. If you can't be bothered reading the full version to pass your English class, why not just get the Coles'/Cliff's Notes?
If these really are just for those learning English as a second language, then I can't say I object all that much - although their abuse of the word 'learner' irritates me. They also have 'graded texts' of such classics as 'Jurassic Park' and 'The Princess Diaries', which somehow strike me as worse.
If, on the other hand, these are ever actually used in a school setting to teach literature to English speaking students, then I would recommend that school be torn down brick by brick and built again from scratch to remove any trace of such an abomination.
For me, the greater threat is from lazy teachers who make excessive use of DVDs in the classroom. As much as we all love movies, watching '10 Things I Hate About You' is a poor substitute for reading Shakespeare, and writing comparative essays on second rate romantic comedies is hardly what I would call 'Sociology'. My son had to suffer through that sort of nonsense all through high school - and this is in Canada, where we like to turn up our noses at your primitive American school system. He never once read a Shakespeare play in class until he took a couple of extra University-level English credits after grade 12.
I read 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' for grade 7. Mind you, that was in private school, but it's not like that made us any smarter.
One more thing to add...
This shows how fouled-up our education system is because I believe these kind of books are created so that young learners can have an easier time when it comes time to take a test and pass the class. A lot of teachers teach for grades instead of proficiency. These kinds of bastardizations of great novels don't aide in the teaching of skills...they're just another in a long line of fads that are introduced into the education system to get "results." The sooner we get rid of this idea that we have to teach for grades instead of skills we're going to continue to be left in the dust by other countries' education systems.
Yes, those books are aimed at adult learners of English as a Second Language, and are not intended for English-speaking high schools, nor should they be used as such. There are also 'beginner' and 'elementary' versions of novels such as Of Mice and Men. I too question the point of these books, but it isn't useful to give a 50-year-old beginner student (the average age in one of my classes) a copy of Superfudge. I think the point was just getting them to read something, anything, in English that would simply hold their attention besides magazine articles about travel. Perhaps they can work their way up the ladder and become fluent enough to take on the original in all its glory and grasp the language.
"Any high school student who cannot read 'The Great Gatsby' in the original cannot read."
Thank you so much for that, Mr. Ebert. You made my month!
As a former ESL teacher, it's pretty clear to me that this is for English Language Learners, as has been covered in the comments.
However, I resent the implication that YA Lit novels are at all "easier." Children's literature you could maybe get away with, but even then you have to grapple with sometimes heady vocabulary beyond the learner's grasp. ESL books are written specifically at a specific level for a certain reason. YA Lit books are not "easier" in any sense of the term, thus why ESL is its own genre.
Anyone who could suggest YA Lit as a replacement for an ESL lesson clearly hasn't read YA Lit in a long time. As a person with a graduate level degree in literature with a specialization in YA Lit, I resent the implication that YA novels are somehow "simpler" or "easier to digest." Sure, they're probably not Jonathan Franzen or Jhumpa Lahiri, but they're not ESL, either.
Does anybody know if the Cliffs Notes version of Margaret Tarner's rendering of The Great Gatsby is available?
What's that? I think I hear the sound of someone rolling beneath a certain gravestone in Rockville, Maryland.
I've told many of my students over the years that the last page or so of THE GREAT GATSBY might well be the most beautiful and poignant prose written in English in the 20th century. A half century after first encountering those words, I am still moved by a sense of reverence for what Fitzgerald conveyed in those words. So, for whatever the lesser purpose of this abridgment, Roger is right: there is something obscene going on here. It is not about the story except as that story finds its life in these words and none other. Anything else is barbarism.
By coincidence, I'm in the middle of re-reading Gatsby for the first time since high school (inspired, by the way, by Midnight in Paris -- I re-read A Moveable Feast right after watching the film).
The fact that this dumbed-down version of a classic novel -- of any novel, for that matter -- exists is outrageous. The fact that there's a demand for it is more so.
If students (intermediate, ESL, or otherwise) need help with the work, there's always Cliff's Notes. The study guides should give the same insight as the dumbed-down version of the novel, but at least they are not intended to be a substitute for reading the book itself (which is not to say that some students don't use them for just this purpose).
For foreign language students, a better idea: publish the book with the original English text on the left page and a full translation into the students native tongue on the right page. There the student could comprehend the story and better understand the poetry and word selection of the author.
You haven't read the book unless you've Read. The. Book.
I never read a simplified text of a novel in my life, and to the best of my knowledge neither did any other graduates of St. Mary's Grade School or Urbana High School -- not in school, anyway.
I'm guessing that final qualification means you read your fair share of Classic Comics:-)
Ebert: Classics Illustrated? I devoured them.
Nicole, I agree that certain allowances must be made for ESL students, but I was an ESL student and so are my children and lowering expectations is not going to be helpful in the long run. Not everyone is cut out to read, comprehend and discuss every literary work out there, true, but when a work is adapted to the point of excessive simplicity that merely conveys some very specific details of the story (for the sake of making it more accessible to a not-yet proficient level of readers) what is being compromised is the eventual proficiency in comprehension.
I am not saying hand East of Eden to someone too young to read it (books should come to us when we are ready for them), but don't hand them an abridged or adapted version of a novel and then expect to fulfill the goal of "introducing" them to an author's work. My oldest son had to read The Pearl for school...this led to independently choosing to read Of Mice and Men...and then to The Grapes of Wrath. He didn't read an adapted version of The Pearl, he read the actual novel...and it had an impact on him that led (at home) to an interesting discussion about this story. You can walk through just about any bookstore and find "comic book" versions of classics...is this really literature? Does it convey what the author was trying to communicate?
I read the original Great Gatsby in my English class at a German High School...
I would agree with some of the other comments on here about the book being abridged for ESL classes rather than for high school students. I've used similar texts teaching such classes, including abridged and simplified versions of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights; hopefully Shakespeare being adapted in this way doesn't stir you to even higher levels of outrage that Fitzgerald! You make the point that it would might be preferable for ESL students to learn the language through young adult books, tackling more serious literature later on in their education. The problem with that is that, simply, a lot of the students, some times most of them, don't want to be reading books written for children or teenagers (this is based on my experience of teaching ESL classes with adults). They want to work with adult material rather than, say, the harry potter books, because a) they feel condescended to or b) they want to get a start on adult reading material rather than wasting their time as they see it on children's books. The benefit to their english proficiency would be the same, but give an average adult ESL class the option of studying a respected classic of literature that they are familiar with, albeit in truncated form, or any young adult literature you might care to mention, and their interest is going to be with the former. These books mightn't be up to the aesthetic standards of the proper editions, but hey, at least there dealing with them in some capacity right? I can definitely put myself into their shoes at any rate; I've only started learning spanish, and when I eventually have the option of improving my reading comprehension through reading abridged books by say, Garcia Marquez or Borges, or by reading the Spanish language equivalent of Pippi Longstocking and Noddy, I know which option I'd prefer going for.
Scott Fitzgerald (or "F." as I prefer to think of him) wrote his daughter Scottie when she was thinking about taking a modern novel class her freshman year at Vassar, in 1940: "This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it comes so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like English Prose since 1800. Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal— and you know it." I think that says it all, don't you?
And I would say to @Lisa, with respect to the difficulties faced by readers for whom English isn't a first language, the thing is that the genius of Gatsby (or indeed any great novel) isn't in the plot, it's in the language and the treatment, so a simplified version doesn't help you understand the novel. It just helps you understand the actions - but not their meanings, or the reasons for the novel's greatness, which in this case are all in the prose. It's like a simplified version of Proust's A La Recherche for English readers - you've read something, but not only is it not Proust, it hasn't actually informed you as to what the novel is about in any meaningful sense. If "Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d’un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée du thé où j’avais laissé s’amollir un morceau de madeleine" is translated into "I ate some soggy cake from a spoon," would you say that it offers a worthwhile understanding of Proust?
I admit I don't really get the point of abridged versions of classics. An abridged version is a good way to tell you the PLOT of a classic, but the thing is: out of all the classics, old or modern, of world literature, how many can you name that have become classics because of their plot?
It is necessary to know the story of Romeo and Juliet, of course, but Shakespeare didn't invent that tale. Is Oliver Twist important because of the specific adventures the main character experiences?
I know a little bit of Japanese, and do you know what I read to practice? Manga for children (for young girls, actually -the easiest to read). When I want to read The Tale of Genji, I read a translation because a kid-level text in Japanese wouldn't really be much closer to the original than a full translation.
The last point, of course, is the particular choice of The Great Gatsby... It's not exactly Ulysses, is it?
Boy, that is sad.
I took a college class about novels before 1900 (I think that was the cut off date). Now some of THOSE could be tough, just because the language was so different. Roderick Random was personal hell for me. But even with Roderick I could get the gist of what was going on.
When I saw you talking about a dumbing down of The Great Gatsby; I assumed the original text might just be really difficult to understand.
Then I read the excerpts...
...
...
...
Just how STUPID do some of these publishers think we all are?
Oh and PS - it wasn't printed as "orgiastic" because of a printer's error, but because Edmund Wilson thought that must have been what Fitzgerald meant, and corrected it in his edition after Fitzgerald's death. The first edition of Gatsby correctly had "orgastic," which Perkins had queried and Fitzgerald had confirmed.
Ebert: I know. I didn't say it was a printer's error. I just didn't want to slow the flow by explaining the role of Wilson.
This reminds me of the "No Fear Shakespeare" editions that were sometimes used in high school - that is, editions with Shakespeare's text on the left and a "modern English translation" on the right. So Macbeth would say "No: This my hand will rather / the multitudinous seas incarnadine, / making the green one red," and the "translation" would say "I have so much blood on my hands that if I washed them in the ocean, the sea would turn red, instead of washing the blood off." Or something.
Which, okay, Shakespeare is harder than Fitzgerald, and one could say that this is basically just an edition where every line is glossed (like particularly difficult ones often are in footnotes). So, theoretically, you could read the original text and just look over at the "modern" English whenever you were stuck. But I hardly need to mention that many students just read the "translation" and were deluded into thinking they've read Shakespeare. A Shakespeare where Hamlet says stuff like "I'm not going to kill myself after all, because I'm afraid of what might happen after I die."
(Also, when I was much younger, in elementary school, I did read the "Great Illustrated Classics," which have a similar style and also pictures on every other page. Some of them there was absolutely no reason for me to not read in the original - Tom Sawyer comes to mind - but no way I was reading, say, Moby-Dick in third grade. And I did eventually read the original, and it's my favorite book, so no harm done I guess.)
Roger, pointing ESL students at Young Adult novels isn't necessarily a good thing -- the best of the YA writers don't dumb down the language, but try to interest the readers enough so that they stay with the story anyway.
-- Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizardps, although this DOES seem like it might be a particularly feckless distillation; if your gonna simplify the language at least get the general point across!
I’m not sure I agree with you here Roger.
As a ten-year-old kid growing up in a Quebec French-only town I read “L’enfance de David Copperfield”, which was a translated and simplified version of the first half of the “real thing”. Obviously, this version lacked most of Dickens’ wordsmithing artistry and a great chunk of the plot, although David’s adoption by his aunt in the final pages represented a satisfactory enough pay-off for me. Despite that version’s limitations, it introduced me to Dickens and kept enough of the plot and characters in place to make me want to read the whole novel, which I did in my twenties when my English became good enough.
This success led me to try reading “Captain Courageous” of which I had read a translated excerpt in French in a Grade 6 public school reader. I didn’t get very far because of all the boat and fishing vocabulary. Can’t win them all.
All this to say that “readers” should not be lumped together and trashed. Even if they must leave some of the author’s style behind, character and plot remain and accomplish one key objective, that is to make the reader aware of free, timeless cultural artefacts that will accompany him/her for a lifetime.
But I concur with your [implicit] point about the fact that the opening and closing sections should be left as untouched as possible.
(Sorry Lisa, didn't notice your post until now!)
I agree with Ebert that there is simply no justification, absolutely none, for simplified 're-writings' of great novels. Whatever the purpose of this uglification of Fitzgerald, it's inexcusable and anti-educational. I first read Gatsby (the real one, by Fitzgerald) in junior high. It wasn't assigned; I found it on the school library shelf. Did I understand everything in it? Of course not. That's why I read it again a couple years later, and it's why I've been reading it again every few years for my entire adult life. The more times you re-experience a great book, the better you will know it. The students who are subjected to the indescribable excrescence that is the subject of this post are being robbed of the opportunity to have that first experience of wonder, that feeling Keats described after his first reading of Chapman's Homer:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
(I wonder how many college graduates today would be knowledgable enough to say after reading this poem, "Hey, Keats is full of it. That wasn't Cortez, it was Balboa.")
Some years back, I read a memoir by Leslie MacFarlane, a Canadian-born writer who worked for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. This was the organization that produced fiction for children and teenagers as far back as the '20s and '30s. It was MacFarlane who originated The Hardy Boys series, writing the first several of the novels and serving as an editor on many subsequent ones.
MacFarlane wrote his memoir late in his life (the mid-70s, if I recall correctly)(and I probably don't), and I remember the story he told on himself at its end.
He told of meeting someone, engaging in conversation, and the subject of The Hardy Boys came up.
MacFarlane knew that his old books had been "updated" by Grosset & Dunlap over the years - after all, who in the 1970s would know what 'running boards' were - but his new friend had worse news for him.
It seems that G&D had taken it upon themselves to rewrite the earliest books in toto - to simplify them for the modern-day kid reader.
MacFarlane's new friend was taken aback by this. He'd recommended the Hardys to friends as the best books of their kind, but when he saw the rewrites, he hit the roof.
Once MacFarlane saw the rewrites himself, he was even more indignant. They may have been work for hire, and his name wasn't even on them, but Leslie MacFarlane was proud of the books he'd written, and his memoir concluded with a ringing denunciation of what Grosset & Dunlap had done to them.
So, as you can see, Roger, it isn't just the clasics that are paying for our lapses in education.
To avoid despair, may I take this time to once again commend to your attention the works of Jasper Fforde?
Mr. Fforde is from Wales, and has a gift for the English Language that is all his own.
His best-known books are the Thursday Next series, the sixth of which, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, is in stores now (unpaid endorsement).
Thursday Next is an agent for Jurisfiction, an agency of the British government which polices the world of books.
In Thursday's world, time-travel is commonplace (Thursday has a pet dodo), weird disputes break out between genres of fiction, and BookWorld is an actual location where tourists can take holidays with favorite characters (many of Ffordes's books have adverts in the back for such places).
If I haven't already convinced you to try Jasper Fforde, perhaps this little quote from one of the books might sway you a bit:
a Jurisfiction adjudication of the allowed number of usages of "had had" and "that that" in David Copperfield:
"You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not."
"So the problem with that other that that was that ...?"
"That that other-other that that had had approval."
(I wonder if your friend Mr. Nack might try reading this passage aloud for us. :-) )
The new book also contains a beautifully drawn map of Fiction Island, wher all the various genres can be found living side-by-side, however uneasily.
Anyway, this is Jasper Fforde and his fiction, and I'd say we deserve it.
Ebert: Man, I loved the Hardy Boys books. Also Buddy, Nancy Drew and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.
Roger, my wife teaches ESL at the college level for a major Virginia university and they NEVER use any of these "junior" editions. Students from China, Saudi Arabia, Italy - by the time they reach what is considered "intermediate" reading levels are already reading Fahrenheit 451.
Anyone who says this is for ESL students or would even use this with ESL students shouldn't be teaching any student anywhere.
When I saw the title, I thought this would be about the upcoming Baz Luhrmann adaptation, with Leo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. I hope Baz does the novel justice, even if Sydney Harbour is standing in for Long Island!
Rather than adulterating the original book, why not pick a different book more suited to the intended audience? I could recommend Willard Price's "Adventure" series, though those books are not exactly politically-correct by modern standards. I still remember Price's description of how African pygmies took out a charging elephant: a "modern" reader would see racism, size-ism and cruelty to animals, while the younger me just went "wow!"
I suspect this is not intended as a substitute for the real thing. I teach high school English--and The Great Gatsby is a book I always look forward to teaching. It takes my breath away, still, every time I teach it.
The district where I teach has a philosophy of putting students with learning disabilities--even those with significant challenges--into mainstream classes, often into a class with both a subject area teacher and a special ed teacher (this model is called co-teaching in our district). Perhaps in a co-taught class, with a student with *significant* learning challenges, one of these adaptations would be the most humane way to help a student feel he or she is accessing the curriculum along with his or her peers--or, at least, that's what it looks like to my eyes. Teaching literature is a tricky business: it's a tough thing to determine what is best for each human being sitting in your classroom.
Just a question for you as an author, how many times do you edit a given work? Or does it depend on the length of the work?
As an alumnus of the NY Public School system(1977-1989), I had to read Gatsby while attending a trade high school that trained airplane mechanics.
But we all identified the locations on Long Island Sound, Flushing, New York. . .
We understood the doctors eyes, the green light, the symbolism, the greatness.
What we could never have predicted was the dumbing down of education, en masse.
Waiting for Superman tells the tale well. . .
The "Education System" is not about educating students, who come in and out of the system within a few years, but of protecting the interests of bureaucrats (and teachers ARE education bureaucrats).
It's a broken system.
It needs to be fixed.
I can talk about competition until I'm blue in the face, or I can point out that neither the Obamas nor the Clintons would send their children to public school for good reason.
And the children get "readers" instead of real books.
I never read a simplified text of a novel in my life, and to the best of my knowledge neither did any other graduates of ... Urbana High School
I can think of a few boneheads from Urbana.
For all the internet malcontents struggling, as usual, to rebut this statement - reading a chopped up version of Fitzgerald is not reading Fitzgerald, it is not being familiar with it - if it is required to know Fitzgerald to graduate, they do not know Fitzgerald. Further, if one were attempting to learn English as a second language, what good is only teaching them the cruel, lowest forms of it?
Gatsby should be a goal for someone learning English - it is one of the finest authors of the language at the height of his powers, bending and owning the words with almost annoying ease. It's a high water mark for what beauty English can offer - no one in this country would accept the same adjustments being made to sports to let everyone get by: 40 yard football field, a T in baseball, lower the hoops, in NASCAR, the drivers will only have to turn left...
Oh wait, we already did that and it appeals, at large, to the bulk of the population that thinks Gatsby is challenging reading because they're state doesn't offer proper public education. Your marginalized children are having the finest tool of lower class outrage ever written taken from their hands.
If this is for ESL learners, then people who dream of America's promise are being cheated; that this is being done with the Great Gatsby is an irony of wounding potential.
I agree that the published word (especially fiction) should stand as is. People who can write and have published are always having people say, "I have a great idea for a book; and you could write it." Writing it -- in a way that other people will want to read it -- is what it's all about. Writing real literature is hard. The words selected, the imagery created, characters brought to life. You can't do that with 1600 words, and no public school student should be limited to that. Instead of wasting time re-writing things to make them more accessible, take kids on a field trip to their local library -- and let them have the adult card, not the one that limits them to juvenile lit. They'll be curious to check out the grown-up stuff, and learn to love books -- in their original form.
As a former editor in educational publishing, I can tell you that no book would have been rewritten into this "intermediate" level if the market did not DEMAND it (i.e., state boards of education must have required it). Why? Well, 15-20% of US students have IEPs (special ed Individual Education Plans) because they cannot achieve at the level of "typical" students.
I can guess that the state education boards wanted special ed students to be learning the same materials--the "classics"--as their typical classmates, both for self-esteem and also so that they could talk to their typical classmates about the books they are reading. Put in such a context, it makes sense.
While I do agree that the book's ending does not equate to the original, I'm not sure that should be the focus. For a student who has trouble reading, remembering what was read, or understanding what was read, these books provide a starting point.
I remember picking up a "simplified" version of Moby Dick and reading the first line:
"My name is Ishmaeal."
Good grief!! I drew a picture of a woman yesterday. I think I'll start selling it as a "Beginner Mona Lisa" Who's buying?
This is not about reading comprehension. If you are not ready to read the Great Gatsby, read other original books that are easier to comprehend. Eventually, you are going to have to take a leap and challenge yourself with more difficult books. However, reading a trashed or changed version of a masterpiece has as much of a point as looking at my Beginner Mona Lisa.
The point of reading, of learning to read at all, is to raise oneself up to be able to comprehend what writers--bad, indifferent, best--have had to say. This is not "translation"; this is evisceration. There is no virtue in reading a flayed/pared-down/boiled/beaten-to-death shadow of anyone's prose, and anyone--editor, teacher or publisher--who thinks otherwise needs to look for another line of work. (If that line of work involves learning how to smile and say "Do you want fries with that?", well, them's the breaks.) This is a travesty, an obscenity, and a vile blight on Macmillan's usually good name.
When I read Gatsby in high school, it quickly became my favorite book. One of the things I appreciated at the time was how deep it was, yet how easy it was to read. Fitzgerald communicated ideas as complex and subtle as the the other writers we studied (Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Henry James), but in a much more accessible way.
It's also very short (surely not more than 250 pages). I can't imagine why anyone thinks that it needs to be condensed in any way.
Hi Roger,
This is a fantastic rant against what sounds like a dreadfully-written book, but as you yourself have been made aware, it's for ELT (English Language Teaching) purposes.
This doesn't excuse the pitiful quality of the re-writing, but it helps to explain it to some extent. Some "ELT readers" are of very high quality, even abridged as much as this one is. I suppose you just get well-written readers and poorly-written ones, just as you would any other book. (Oxford University Press seems to produce the best ones.)
I can understand your sense of outrage at reading this, but I can assure you that no native English speaker would be given it to read (and especially study), unless there was a rather large mix-up in the classroom. Readers aren't made so that somebody can "read" a shorter version of the original novel, but rather purely to learn English in context (rather than from a textbook).
Keep writing and all the best.
Say, this gives me ideas. I want to teach my kids about the Holocaust, and I thought of having them watch "Schindler's List." Maybe I can go through it and re-dub all the big words, cut the really graphic scenes, and remove the cursing. That could work.
Or Altman. Altman has overlapping dialog. Confusing for a teenager. But, for the sake of exposing him to films that he might not give a second glance to, I'll re-master "MASH" so that you only hear one person talking at a time. He'll miss out on the bantering Altman STYLE, but at least he'll be watching it!
What a travesty...
I read the comments posted here with trepidation, as I am an English teacher. I teach middle grades (7/8) in southwestern Arizona and have many ELL students in my classes. Let me say right off the bat - YES I know there are teachers that are horrible and should not be in a classroom. I've taught alongside some of them. I've made sure my own children weren't in their classes. I also know that the increasing demands on public education from NCLB, the current administration, parents, etc. prevent many teachers from being the teachers they want to be.
Even understanding the reasons someone might teach dumbed-down literature... I am horrified at the evisceration of The Great Gatsby. It isn't even one of my favorite books; I hated it in high school, it seemed better in college, and as an adult I finally "get it". Even so It is the use of language that sets Fitzgerald apart, for me.That language is gone in the "revised" version. What would they do to Faulkner, one of my favorite writers?
I would have to agree with Mr. Ebert that students who can't tackle literature in it's original form should be reading something else. There are so many good YA novels that address all sorts of issues and are much more easily related to by middle and high school students. It would be better, in my opinion, (heresy coming up) to have them read it in their first language and let them respond in English.
I spent my early elementary school days,in Paris, learning in a second language (French). To this day, I would be better off reading Candide, or anyting else in an English translation. I'd love to be able to read some of my favorite poets in their original languages. I know I'm missing out on the beauty, subtlety, uniqueness of writing in the author's native tongue, but I think I'd miss even more if I tried to read a revised, simplified Voltaire.
Roger Ebert is so right. The Great Gatsvy is all about the way Fitzgerald uses words. It is poetry, beautiful poetry. I refuse to believe kids couldn't be taught to appreciate those words. We have such low epxectations for them anymore. I was too young when I first read The Great Gatsby, I know I didn't fully understand it, but it lit a spark.
Someone learning English may want to also learn English literary staples so that they have something to relate to others with.
On one hand, I do not necessarily agree with the choice of Fitzgerald for this, as it may require the kind of evisceration that we're deriding here, which reduces its score somewhat. But-- Gatsby scores highly for relatability. I am not sure that Young Adult books are as universally experienced as a smaller set of high school canon. I think Young Adult books go in and out of vogue and there will be generational gaps. Maybe some teachers of little ones could chime in.
I would like to discover which books have been read by how many people, rated by how broadly that book has got the demographics covered. For my own purposes!
To everybody who says "This is the only way that some people will appreciate Gatsby": There are some books that can be boiled down to their plots and still be compelling and worthwhile reading. The Great Gatsby is not one of them. Knowing the plot and characters of TGG is completely beside the point; the point of Gatsby is the language, the complexity of the relationships, the half-truths and unreliable narration.
Somebody who reads this book is going to be bored, just as bored as he or she would be trying to read an original that is above the reading level.
The debate is not whether, in the abstract, great works can be adapted for unskilled readers. The debate is whether this homeopathic edition of Gatsby preserves even a molecule of Gatsby-nature. Judging by Mr. Ebert's quotations, it does not.
Roger,
I've so wanted to engage in a conversation about our public education system on this blog. Surely, there are plenty of teachers who contribute here who can verify the incompetence of some of their colleagues, or parents who can verify that of one or two of their children's teachers.
I am taking on a new job as a school librarian, and so I can verify that there are some school systems in this country that continue to see their libraries as vital places of learning. But some of the classrooms I have observed and even worked and studied in have been dead as the quietest, stalest, dustiest libraries around.
Once, a few years ago, I substituted for an English teacher in an award-winning high school in rural Indiana. She was a veteran teacher who had apparently banked a great number of sick days and now decided to use them. Her students, several of whom had been taught by her previously, informed me that during that particular school year she was present perhaps two to three days a week. Fresh out of college and without a full-time position, I recognized my opportunity to get a lot of work.
As it turned out, I had to share this coveted opportunity with several other substitute teachers. I did, however, get called to work numerous times.
This teacher's students volunteered other things about her. How did she teach them? She had the students bring a book to class and read silently. These were eleventh- and twelfth-graders, enrolled in the Honors section of English for each grade. And there was one French class. All of the students were asked to teach themselves, by reading silently and taking computerized tests upon completion of each book. Did the students actually read these books? Silence. Oh, some of them said yes, sure, they read the books, because they found they actually enjoyed doing so; others were known quite widely to be simply faking it. The tests were straightforward and could be manipulated into passing scores with only the most elementary familiarity with the book being tested. The teacher, at various points in each grading period, could log on and print out the students' scores and use these as the basis for grade reports.
I was told other things, such as that the teacher "didn't seem to like her job at all," and that they, the students, felt "jipped." One young man said to me, "Next year's college. How am I supposed to be ready? You've got to know how to write papers and have discussions with professors." And all these kids were getting was silent reading, computerized tests, and in their other classes, worksheets, worksheets, worksheets. In the science classes I substitute taught, I always had stacks of worksheets to hand out, and the students claimed that's all they ever got - no laboratory experiments or even lectures - just daily worksheets, to be completed in small groups (and I don't think I have to tell you about the way they completed these worksheets in their groups, each group making sure that it had one of the "smart kids").
The same could be said for their history classes, and economics, and agriculture, and health, and "careers." The math classes required the teacher to do some lecturing, but I don't think I'm being too pompous when I report that the kids claimed to get a greater understanding of the material with me in front of the chalkboard (I refused to use their classroom's "Smart Board," which on every attempt at its use seemed pretty dumb to me) than their regular teacher.
This school, which I must remind you had won several awards from the state for its "rigorous curriculum" and its consistently meeting minimum test scores in reading and math, was not at all different from the several other school corporations I've worked in. The story is the same each time: At the elementary level, the kids are vigorously taught, up till about fourth grade. Then, the teachers will readily admit, students are ready to begin learning "on their own." The junior high classes are massive, with an average of 40 students stuffed into a small room and asked to complete worksheets in groups and, when finished with this, to "find something to keep busy." By the time high school rolls around, the students are accustomed to "teaching themselves" through silent reading, computerized tests, and "collaborative learning," which is simply working on worksheets and projects in small groups that are very loosely monitored by the teacher, that are often excused to do "research" in the library.
I know it is different elsewhere. And I know that yet elsewhere it is the same.
The dumbing down of THE GREAT GATSBY and HUCKLEBERRY FINN is merely a symptom of a great cancer eating away at our concept of public education in this country. What that cancer is, that is debatable. But we sense that the cancer is present, we have witnessed lives destroyed by it, and yet the medicine we have used, the standardized tests, the "technology in the classroom," the publishing companies such as Houghton Mifflin who seize on many teachers' concern for presenting information more clearly and unfortunate inclination to then allow a sheet of paper to do the heavy intellectual lifting, and the jargon of disconnected pundits in higher education (think "collaborative learning," "differentiated instruction," "professional development," "tracking," "whole language approach"), has only stunned us, frozen us, the human beings in the equation, the teachers and administrators and students and parents and community, while the molecular machinations of this cancer become more fine-tuned, stealthy and aggressive, and deeply imbedded in what was at one time, and perhaps will be once again, a brilliant design for our survival.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
To those saying it is not the mark of a failing educational system but rather an example of literature being made more accessible for the education of non-native English speakers I must say this is still a failure of the education system. If The Great Gatsby is too advanced in its language for intermediate ESL students then they should be reading works already written at their reading level until they achieve the necessary reading level to read the work as written.
I recall learning French many years ago. In my intermediate French classes we read Les Jeux Sont Faits and Au Revoir Les Enfants entirely unaltered and unabridged. The scripts were more or less at my reading level (though I recall struggling with the WWII school boy slang in Au Revoir Les Enfants and having to *gasp* learn the phrases from context) and were no less engaging or weighty because of their simpler language. I would have been appalled to have been handed Madame Bovary in the sort of mangled condition Gatsby has been reduced to.
Returning to my original point, even if this is intended for ESL students it is still a grave disservice to the students reading this work. ESL students are perfectly capable of understanding complex themes even if they don't have the language to express them. The final words "Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?" only go to show that not only was the language eviscerated but the concepts presented were truncated beyond all sense.
Mr.Ebert is right, there is no sense in this no matter the intended audience.
This is exactly the reason that I created the website: www.awaytoteach.net - It is, or should be, about the text - not the story (or themes, or symbols, etc.). The last page of The Great Gatsby is, in my opinion, the most beautiful collection of words ever assembled in English. This book (the new "translation") will simply convince students that Fitzgerald is a terrible writer - and that the story is simplistic and banal. I agree 100% with Roger Ebert, this book is an obscenity.
Mr. Ebert,
While I sympathize with your outrage and understand where it's coming from, I respectfully disagree with some of your conclusions. As someone with a developmentally challenged brother and who has (briefly) taught at vocational schools for students of varying level of ability who had been more-or-less abandoned academically, this kind of thing can serve a meaningful purpose. Kids who don't have much hope with the original text are being given a means to access it, even marginally, in a way that can potentially spark their interest and serve as a stepping stone to more challenging forms of learning.
I would use Baz Luhrmann's production of Romeo and Juliet in much the same way to help those kids access Shakespeare, who for most of them was simply too difficult, like you or me trying to suss out the color of a person's hair by being given a DNA molecule to look at. But the movie, with all of its spectacle and celebrity to engage them, made it possible for us to have meaningful discussions about the themes of the story, the nature of tragedy, and even the poetry of the language. Perhaps most importantly, it gave an extremely underprivileged group a chance to experience the feeling of success with academia, an essential factor of learning that those of us with the privilege of the facility to learn take for granted.
Please note that I'm not excusing the use of this in the place of the original as part of a standard curriculum. In that regard, this would be no better or worse than substituting the Cliff's Notes. But to blanket this as an affront to literature takes a very cynical viewpoint, without any appreciation for the new opportunity it creates for groups that could not reasonably hope to consume the original work.
Dan.
Ebert: The original work is the work. What benefit is there in consuming a fake?
I recently attended a performance of "Gatz" at The Public Theater in Manhattan; the cast of very talented actors performed the entire text of The Great Gatsby and it was fascinating! I had re-read the book before attending and realized again how different a book is depending on when we experience it (I read it in High School - I experienced it as an adult). The performance took several hours and three intermissions; the reading took a few hours - the time was well invested. The half hour it would take to read this bastardized version would have been time wasted.
What is your opinion of annotated literature?
I am shaking my head in disbelief, sadness and frustration that this is going on. Dumbing down ANY writing is NOT good. Reach high. Aim high. Read above your own understanding. THAT is how one learns and how one grows. NOT by simplifying.
It's not that simple is bad - you need simple language? Fine, read A Farewell to Arms then. It's the incredibly lossy compression that we're getting here. You lose all the nuance, all the glory, all the taste and smell and sound of the original.
This is not a translation at all. It is a novel ravished and left sobbing into the bolster (tip of the hat to S, J. Perelman). If one reads Fitzgerald's correspondence about the book, his goal was to write it the way it was written, not to tell this particular story.
It is a tragedy, a peculiarly American one, and very much of the time and place; stripping all this away to "Two young women were sitting on an enormous couch" turns it into nothing.
The description you give of these books sounds to me a lot like graded readers for speakers of other languages. As an English teacher living in Spain I have come across many graded readers which can be quite useful for the people who actually take the time to read them.
While I take your point that it seems something of a travesty to butcher Fitzgerald, or Dickens (yes, my English academy's library has your precious Dickens in graded readers), using exclusively young adult fiction is not the answer. Many of the students learning English here in Spain (and in the US and every other country) are adults. I would feel like an idiot handing Harry Potter to a 40 year old man.
Subject matter is vital when it comes to learning a language. If the student is not engaged in the material, he's hardly going to take anything away from it language-wise. I know this from personal experience when I was trying to quickly improve my Spanish 5 years ago when I first moved here and I bought (on someone's suggestions because of the simplicity of the language) Bridget Jones's Diary. Okay, I learned some new words and expressions, but I couldn't get through 60 pages because I hated hated hated the book.
Gatsby or Tale of Two Cities may not be about the story entirely (just like your old friend Gene Siskel used to say - it's not what it's about, but how it is about it), but if the learner is interested in the story, then the graded reader is serving its purpose.
As a Spanish speaker, I have often toyed with the idea of reading Cervantes in the original Spanish, but it's a daunting prospect. If I ever came across a graded reader, I might give it a shot only to come back to the full version later. Not everyone would, but then I actually think words matter like you do.
By the way, what about translations of Gatsby and other great works that rely very heavily on the prose style to convey meaning, mood and texture? I often wonder how students in Spain can read translated Shakespeare. Or Don Quixote translated into English for that matter. "What's the point?" I ask myself. Is that not similar?
Go Lisa!! Gatsby is probably my most favorite novel of all-time, and I totally understand the horror felt by many here. It is a beautiful book being reduced to its bones, and none of its flesh. But Lisa has an excellent point -- getting readers interested in reading when they cannot access the language in the originals is a part of the point of the revised readers. They are a stepping stone to moving on to the original, eventually. They are a bridge. Mr. Ebert, you keep commenting, "Why eviscerate Ftizgerald?" to this, and I would counter with, "Why *not*? Why not adapt any classic novel, for the purposes of helping second (and third, and fourth) language learners access interesting stories in English, with vocabulary and structures they can understand?"
That being said, I have been an ESL teacher for many years. Six years ago, I worked with advanced English language learners preparing to go to university, and guess what we read for our class novel one session? The Great Gatsby -- in its *original* form. It was not easy for them, but it was my job as the teacher to help make it accessible for them. Most were up to it. A few students would not give it a try, but those that did, and worked hard, understood it, loved the story and learned much from it. Did they love the language in it? Maybe, although it may not have been conscious -- I think that it stood as an example of what beautiful language can be and that they had an intuitive sense of the beauty of the book in English, however.
If I can be an intermediary here, I would be, but I think Lisa has already done the job. Hats off to her comment!
I remember reading the abridged version of "Moby Dick" translated in Korean during my elementary school years. I later read the full version(also translated in Korean) at my high school library, and I was surprised by how they butchered the original book while retaining the bone. They said that version was for boys and girls, but, boy, what a heck of a job it was. As they said, it is a tale of destructive obsession, but the novel is more than that - I especially liked the detailed depiction of how they worked in the industry of the past.
When I was a ESL learner during my high school years, there were many cases of this ghastly evisceration of the great literatures at bookstores, and I actually read one of them - "Great Expectations".
I instantly knew how much they abridged it(it was less than 70 pages - the horror! the horror! the horror!), and I went to the library and read the book. That was the time I was not good at reading in English, so I read the translated version, but I really enjoyed reading it. Whoever read that kind of dumb versions you are angry about, I hope they will get the interest in reading the real books, like I did.
I have not read two famous works by Mark Twain yet. I was too much acquainted with their abridged versions and the daily puppet plays on TV based on them during my childhood. But at least I have them now.
It seems unfair to implicate educators in this, as I'm quite sure the vast majority find the idea of dismantling Gatsby in this way to be abhorrent. It's frustrating when an awful idea like this becomes license to say "See how bad our education system is and how stupid our kids have become!" I read Gatsby and loved it in high school, I'm now a high school English teacher, and our kids still read it junior year.
Additionally, isn't the main issue here the fact that it is being presented as the actual book? Cliff's Notes have been around since 1958, and nobody seems to feel the same passion towards them. If it had a different cover and was called A Guide to the Great Gatsby would anyone care?
I remember as a child reading a "Young Readers" version of "Around the World in 80 Days," which appears to be from the same series you write about due to the similarity of the illustration. I remember being very confused by it, because it seemed to briefly mention important plot details as if they were nothing important, and dwell on tedious subplots such as an encounter on a train with a Mormon missionary.
I forgot about that book until reading your post. At the time, I didn't have a problem with the book, but thinking back on it, it isn't right at all. The reason that literature we regard as great is regarded as such is because of its language, not because of its story.
This isn't literature, it's prostitution.
You REALLY hit the nail on the head with this one, Roger. I have read many, many of your reviews and blogs, but never felt the impulse to respond, but this elucidation left me feeling like I had no choice but to thank you for stating what should be obvious. There is really no benefit to having children read a dumbed-down version of a literary classic. Now, if it were a work of historical nonfiction written in a somewhat difficult or obscure style, something like Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I can certainly see the merit of making a clearer, more palatable presentation available to those who seek to learn the history, but don't want to trudge through the stylistic difficulties. But Gatsby??? Please. It makes me feel kind of ill. It really does.
English is my second language. When I was learning it, I had some hard time trying to read "Gatsby" and some Fitzgerald's short stories. Then, i gave up on then for a while, improved my english a little, read some easier books and THEN went back and had a blast reading "The Great Gatsby". There's no point in offering a poor version of a good book for language students. They must read some other books and work hard to get to the real stuff...
"After a certain point, you teach yourself to read. You arrive at an unfamiliar word, and usually don't look it up. You sort of flow with it in the context, and in time it teaches itself to you."
You mean people don't do this?
I was never a "look it up" reader--pausing to find a dictionary and find a word's specific meaning always ruined the flow of whatever I was reading--and frankly, if the the word truly makes no sense within the context of the story, then the author was showing off, or using a word handily available at the time but now obscure (reading long old English novels will ensure you encounter this at some time or other.)
The idea of gutting The Great Gatsby to the point displayed in your examples is horrifying on many levels and inexcusable in terms of "well, it's for non-English readers". Just because English isn't their first language doesn't mean they are stupid or have no grasp of metaphor, imagery or style. They may not like the book, find its manners not to their taste, but that's not the same as taking a kitchen full of delicious ingredients and boiling them down to a starchy and tasteless paste, then serving it up as delicious, nutritious dinner.
How can anyone read/hear the last lines of The Great Gatsby--that summing up of America, her dreams, her delusions, the way her desire is dependent on living a lie told to the self--and come up with "Gatsby was a success. Wasn't he?" Dear God.
Lisa's points about translated literature are well taken and thoughtful--how much can I love Colette if I've only read her in English?--but there's a difference between translating a novel, by a writer who cares about transmitting not only the words but the soul and elbows of a work *, and strip mining said work like a Virginia coal face, leaving nothing but scorched dead earth and self-important puffery about how much you've "helped" the poor, dumb public.
*Dorothy Parker, from a book review.
Two words: Government regulation. The students who are unfamiliar with English need to read the simplified version of The Great Gatsby because somebody in charge decided that everyone in the school ought to read that book at the same time. This is what schools do, they shove you into a box and make you conform, even if learning real literature must be sacrificed in the process.
That's really sad. I did not like the Great Gatsby, mostly because I was forced to read it in English class, and that's never a good way to enjoy a book.
But I don't see the point of dumbing down the text this way. How can it retain any literary value when you remove all the evocative language.
And especially with Gatsby. From what I remember of the actual plot, it was extremely boring. So you're left with a boring plot told in boring language. Your poor schoolchildren forced to read this book will hate it immensely, and at the same time they'll learn nothing.
This is both an outrage and a literary sacrilege! I cannot believe anyone could find it within' themselves to do this! An author's turn of phrase is everything to his work! You cannot come along decades or centuries later and edit the piece, it's ... it's just plain wrong!
I read Shakespeare in high school, was it easy? No, but I managed to learn how to understand it, that's what school is all about. This is what teachers are for, to teach us to comprehend what doesn't immediately come natural to us. The Great Gatsby is a far cry from Shakespeare on the difficulty scale, Good Lord! What is wrong with this country anymore!?
There are a number of books that I've read for the language immersion experience. Sometimes that's because, unfortunately, I don't have large blocks of time to read at one setting, so I lose track of plot lines. Last night I thoroughly enjoyed the Le Carre novel I was reading, even while perfectly aware I had lost track of some of the character relationships. But that didn't adversely impact my enjoyment of his well-turned phrases. I've always considered the language to be the more enriching part of reading.
C wander, I agree with you and then some. I had to read this in high school, when I was a teenage boy bursting with energy, wanting to explore the world around me, test myself against it.
So here I had to read this novel about a character who didn't seem to *do* anything, didn't see things the simplistic way I did at that age, someone I couldn't see myself in at all. All I came away with after being forced to read Gatsby was that I never wanted to read any "great literature" again. I know, of course, that that was not the goal of the class. I loved to read then and I love to read now, but forcing me to read something like that sure didn't do what it was meant to.
Never *make* anyone read anything after junior high school. If they're learning English, assign texts at their level, as others have said above. But let them choose their own books if you want them to read. Otherwise, teach things of practical value for an English class - how to parse legalese, how to write persuasively, the messages embedded in advertising (you could spend a semester on the misuses of "deserve" alone)...something that won't instill a hatred of reading.
Ebert: Classics Illustrated? I devoured them.
Glad you brung that up. That was my introduction to westren litrature and that has remained that mostly. There is a Chinese saying that something is better than nothing.
When I graduated high school about six years ago, there was still an English teacher there teaching his students the NOVELIZATION of the film "Finding Forrester." A book written for the express purpose of duplicating, in a clunky way, every scene from a major studio film. And then, of course, I'm sure they watched the film...
Exactly. It's the writing style that 's memorable (here), not the actual tale being told.
That's why I like Lovecraft (on rare occasions). I have to read that S-L-O-W-L-Y because I can't rip through it, it takes too much effort to digest the style.
English is my second language. I'm pretty sure that most of my ability to speak and understand English came from reading novels (including The Great Gatsby). I'm also pretty sure that if I had only read books written in that kind of language my ability to speak English (and possibly to think in English) would have been... compromised.
I shudder to think what will happen when Ms. Tarner works her way around to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Why do I have the sinking feelin it will begin:
"It was April.
There were flowers.
Flowers are really nice, aren't they?"
I don't sympathize. Her willingness to corrupt not just the prose but the meaning of the novel is unforgivable.
Hi Roger,
School should first and foremost encourage rather than suppress learning. The quotes you used from this butchering of Gatsby are horrid and intellectually draining. My guess is that students would gather more from the Cliff Notes version of The Great Gatsby than from this thing.
The good news for the modern Kindle or iPad (or other) equipped youth is that so many of the classics are available if their original form at no cost. If the schools have not beat it out of them, kids will be able to find these treasures.
To address your response: "The original work is the work. What benefit is there in consuming a fake?"
To the underprivileged demographic that is unable (either through disability or environment) to consume the original, there are several benefits:
- Exposure to at least some of the ideas and concepts in the works (under the notion that "some" is better than "none")
- A chance to spark their interest in literature, and perhaps a stepping stone to eventually being able to consume the original work
- The opportunity to experience success in learning
Obviously it is better to consume the original, but that simply isn't an option for many of these kids, who either possess learning disabilities or are raised in underprivileged environemnts that make that level of reading comprehension inaccessible.
So, why must it be all or nothing? Is it somehow a Good Thing for access to art be restricted exclusively to those who can properly appreciate it? Can you conceive of positively no benefit to having a work of art explained to instead of consumed by someone who cannot consume it directly? For example, would you say that the visually impaired, who cannot fully appreciate the cinematography of a movie, shouldn't be offered descriptive video as an alternative?
Dan.
To quote Harold Bloom in "The Western Canon," who here is recommending that "Finnegan's Wake" (of all books!) not be kept from college students because of its aesthetic difficulties...
"'Finnegan's Wake,' Joyce's masterpiece, presents so many initial difficulties that one has to be anxious about its survival. I suspect that it will find company in Spenser's great poetic romance 'The Faerie Queene,' and that both works will be read, for the rest of time, by only a small band of enthusiastic specialists. That is a sadness, but we are moving toward a time when Faulker and Conrad may have to endure the same fate. One of my closest friends, a follower of Adorno and his Frankfurt School, defended her university's decision to drop Hemingway from a required course in favor of a rather inadequate Chicano short-story writer, by telling me that her students would thus be better prepared to live in the United States. Aesthetic standards, she implied, were for our private pleasures of reading but were now wicked in the public sphere.
It is a considerable leap from a Hemingway short story, superb as the best of them are, to 'Finnegan's Wake,' and our new anti-elitist morality will consign the book to fewer and fewer readers, which is an immense aesthetic loss..."
Reading that, I thought that if Bloom isn't willing to compromise on the 'WAKE,' for God's sake, how could the rest of us ever compromise on something as comparably easy as "The Great Gatsby?"
This is sickening!! In effect, you are saying that kids can't understand well written English, so let's dumb it down and explain it so the poor kiddies don't have to think or have a creative idea. Sickening!!
I often come across high schoolers whose favorite book is THE GREAT GATSBY. They've either read it in their English classes or found it on a list of books to read for the Accelerated Reader program (read a book, take a test, get points) that many schools depend so clingingly on nowadays. Fitzgerald's words seem to speak to young people. No one can seriously argue that the fake version will have such an effect.
Has anyone ever taught music by removing all the "difficult" notes from a Chopin concerto?
When I worked at a big-box bookstore, I used to watch high school students come in, peruse the Cliff Notes of their assigned book and sit right there in the store and write a book report on the book they'd "read". It made me so sad I wanted to cry for what they were missing, and would go on missing, given that they were convinced they now knew what the book was about.
I once overheard a young woman in college tell a friend, "We gotta read this book about some old guy and a fish. Who wants to read a book about a fish?" Does anyone really think that she would find a dumbed-down version of "The Old Man and the Sea" any more interesting? If the teacher can't convince her of the beauty of the original, why bother?
And when I was first learning Spanish, I read children's books with no feeling of shame. I'm now reading "Un Espia Perfecto" by John LeCarre, and hope to move up to Miquel Angel Asturias in the original. Why on earth would I need to have it raped and bastardized?
You know if I was not fired this year because the content I taught in my English Class was deemed "too difficult" for urban 9-11th graders I may not have paid much attention to this thread. However, because I taught this in Bushwick, NY along with Allende's House of Spirits, Ethan Frome, Their Eyes were Watching God and To Kill a Mocking Bird I was told these kids simply could not understand it because of where they came from. Truth is, Educators sell kids short. Especially the students who do not have advocates for them because these so called educators from the top education schools in the country like Columbia Uni. simply do not believe these students can learn big words, or discuss or debate. It truly makes me sick. I do not think I will return to the classroom not because of the students but the Administrators. Thanks for opening the dialogue. Parents need to see more discussions like this.
Ebert: This is a flat-out tragedy.
Hey Roger, Jim Emerson sent me a note that he had forwarded my discovery and disdain for the odious M. Tarner. I just wanted to add that I discovered the existence of this genre of dumbed-down literary pastiches when I was checking my local library system's online database of books. I was looking for a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsy and stumbled onto Tarner's "retelling." Curious, I did some ferreting around the Internet and learned that she also "retold" Austen's Emma, Dickens' Bleak House, Melville's Billy Budd, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Hardy's Return of the Native, and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. A truly dispiriting litany. But the good news is that my 15-year-old son WANTS to read The Great Gatsby because he hears it really is great--and he is not interested in any ersatz version.
BTW, when I met you at the VA Film Festival all those years ago I was pregnant with said progeny. Your fan, Amy Heller
Ebert: Yes, you, via Jim, were my sources for the most inspiring links.
Yeah, sure, they SAY it's for ESL students, but I can guarantee that this version will be taught in non-ESL classrooms somewhere.
It's all about making money. They can't really spin much merchandise out of GATSBY (at least until the new film version comes along, remade in the style of TWILIGHT), so they've spun off this novel to make more dough. There's a lot of money in education, and miseducation.
“I have students in my classes who are in their 50's and 60's. Why would I give them a Young Adult novel? It isn't age appropriate, that's why!
Let's give them a taste of the classics. They'll ask for more if they can understand them!”
Abbreviation:
Old people should not read books for young people. They should read books they can understand.
Even as someone who came to reading great works of literature through the abridged Children's Illustrated Classics versions as an elementary school kid, this makes me want to cry. I think you're exactly right that the people who read this travesty of an adaptation will think they've "read" Gatsby and never come back to it unless required, and they'll be missing one of the most beautiful American novels yet produced. I may have to take it upon myself to memorize the text like one of the characters from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 just to make sure it's preserved, if only in one human soul.
When I was in high school, one of the selections in my American Literature anthology was Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Well, no. One of the selections was an abridged version of it, completely lacking the fire, passion, and rhetoric of the original, watered down to mealymouthed platitudes with a more appropriate readability score for tenth graders.
I have no idea what the point was. I imagine that in some curriculum guide somewhere, some bloodless functionary wrote "Objective 2. Recognize and identify major colonial American authors." But the reasons Edwards is major and important are because of his Puritan theology and his masterful rhetoric: softpedal one and eliminate the other, and he becomes a trained response to a pointless question.
I am 65 years old and have read Gatsby every few years for the past 40-some years. For me it is the great American novel and its language never fails to fill me with joy and gratitude.
I wish I hadn't read your blog today. I don't even want to know about this travesty. I'm going back to bed immediately.
As one who has read the book (albeit having learned more from classroom discussions of the book than from the book itself), I have a question, Mr. Ebert. Are none of the optional answers to your question "Was Jay Gatsby a success in life" the right answer? The reason I'm asking is because each of them sounds pretty simple, and the cause(s) of Gatsby's lack of success run(s) deeper and in a more complex manner than said answers suggest. I'm sure you're aware of that, but what I'm curious about is if you gave simplistic answers because more, shall we say, "accurate" answers would spoil the story? I don't think Gatsby was a success, but for reasons which, if revealed, would give the story away because they revolve around the plot, though Gatsby did indeed meet some unpleasant people.
And as for reading the book, I'd say that the average reader requires a bit more patience than usual, because Fitzgerald, like any other great writer, uses a plot to convey a theme as oppose to writing for the sake of the plot. He doesn't need a plot or narrative method suited to the audience's liking to say what he has to say, and he DOES have a thing or two to say which we can learn about (and likely should).
Ebert: The answers are intended as satirical.
I share your chagrin about the dumbing down of our education system. But I also challenge you (in a friendly way) to stop and realize that your failure to properly identify these texts for what they are -- "learners of English" is an unmistakable clue -- and to do a bit of follow-up research on line to find out just how, where and by whom they're actually used is, in some way, a good example of less than ideal Internet literacy on your part.
As to whether or not it's appropriate to use them to teach English to non-native speakers, the first test they fail is that of being authentic. Authentic materials are always preferable to contrived, canned materials. But, realistically speaking, that's not consistently possible. Motivation is another important consideration. It may be that novels in such a contrived form are more appealing to the learner: Who wants to see Spot run when you can have a sense that you're making contact with a touchstone of American culture that has more bark?
In fact, the vast majority of ESL students are unlikely to end up tackling English literature. Those who cross that threshold won't be unduly deterred by having read a comic book rendition of a real novel somewhere along the way. Those who don't may actually surpass the general knowledge level of native speakers, more and more of whom have no idea there was ever an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Great Gatsby.
I think that rather than giving up on the original - it is possible to spend more time and to give more support to those who need it - and to stick with the original. I do not think reading the new version of Gatsby will give anyone anything useful - anymore than I think having someone drink Grape Kool-Aid will make the appreciate or understand a fine red wine.
When I first read Gatsby I barely understood any of it, but I felt it. Taking away the poetry is useless. It would be like reading a one paragraph synopsis and assuming you won't like the movie (or book) I'm not saying that the story doesn't matter but not nearly as much as how it is told.
Your comments on No Fear Shakespeare made me think of a book I had when I was 9 or 10 called "Shakespeare Stories - the Histories", it was a compilation of the plots of the Histories (though oddly including Macbeth and King Lear) as short stories. They contained only the plumb lines from the plays ("Out, Damn spot!"), but they were well written as short stories that stood on their own. A year or two later, when I was ready, I could tackle the original, already understanding the plot and thus able to appreciate the craft. It's like knowing the plot of an opera going in, so you can appreciate the arias without caring too much about what they're actually saying.
So as a gateway, these kind of simplifications can be helpful. The problem, of course, is that many will stop at the gate and not pass through it into the city.
It seems a damn shame that the Educator Classic Library books are out of print. These were oversized, mostly-unabridged versions of various classic books whose wide margins were full of annotations: definitions of unusual words, translations of foreign phrases (so you could better get why the mouse did not appreciate Alice asking "Où est ma chatte?"), even illustrations as needed (what a bathing-machine would look like, for example).
Read about them here: http://www.valerieslivingbooks.info/classics.htm
Now while the Educator books were aimed at younger-than-high-school readers, it seems like the annotation approach would work very well for high school curriculum books as well.
After having gone through a brief phase where I lost interest in reading, it was my encounter with The Great Gatsby in 11th grade that dragged me back in. I remember finishing the final enthralling chapters and thinking, 'wow, so thats what a novel is supposed to be like'. Pathetic.
I can't wait for the simplified version of Tender is the Night.
As someone who has studied several foreign languages, I think it is better to read original work. I especially like having those books that have your native language on one side and the original on the other.
Language learning is hard, but what makes great literature worth reading is how the language is used to express ideas and sometimes those ideas can be easily summarized in a sentence or two, but it doesn't stay with you like a well-told tale.
Movie scripts, poems, short stories and lyrics to popular music can all help students learn language. It's not like "The Great Gatsby" has hard vocabulary words out of a science text.
As for today's writers, only Jhumpa Lahiri and Khaled Hosseini are as masterful in their language as F. Scott Fitzgerald, I think. The question to all of this is obvious, at least to me: Why don't school administrators just choose ANOTHER BOOK? Just save "The Great Gatsby" for the magnet students. Duh. I hope there are never any special editions of "Lolita" re-written by Nicholas Sparks or "The Catcher in the Rye" re-written by William P. Young in the future.
The Macmillan Readers provide a choice of enjoyable reading materials for learners of English.The series is published at six levels - Starter, Beginner, Elementary, Pre-intermediate, Intermediate and Upper.
Who among us isn't a "learner of English?" If you aren't encountering ideas or words that make you stretch, you're doing it wrong.
Picture someone like Joseph Conrad, (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski), learning English well enough to write the books for which he is known, all without the help of this bowdlerized, watered-down tripe. Am I calling Gatsby "tripe?" No, because this is no longer Gatsby.
Just as a great movie suffers, even to the point of losing the qualities that make it great, if the projection quality or medium is poor, so can a great book lose its power if the language is weakened. What else is a book but words in the service of an idea? Change the words and you may well change the meaning, the idea itself.
I'm mostly fascinated with the "Gatsby was a success, wasn't he?" part. I wouldn't begin to know how to answer that. Sucess by what standard? Success is a politician's word. It means fifty different things to fifty different people and he could be read either way and five hundred in between.
This isn't Fitzgerald these kids are reading. It really has nothing to do with The Great Gatsby. If kids can't follow this short book, then their vocabulary and reading skills should be brought up to it. There's no point in bringing it down to them. It does them no favors and leaves out everything great about it.
One of the best ways to learn new words is to read ones you don't already know, but in context. Dumbing down the novel is a good way of dumbing down the audience reading it.
As an English teacher, I agree with what Lisa and others have said. The Great Gatsby is actually quite difficult for ESL and "at-risk" students to understand. Sometimes I wonder if having struggling students read works like this is not just turning them off literature forever.
I think the comparison to the bowdlerized Huck Finn is unfair, as they were done for different reasons.
As for having them read easier YA novels instead, that's a whole different conversation. In many school districts, that would simply not be an option for any teacher.
"a kid would be better off just cutting class and going to the school library."
That's exactly how I got through high school. When I told the school board where I'd been spending my days while ditching school, they didn't believe me.
Meanwhile, they say that one fifth of high school graduates can't read their diplomas.
A study shows that 70% of middle schoolers read at least 10 books a year, while only 50% of high schoolers do the same. If I wanted to play the game of smoke and fire, I could go ahead and say that every year spent in school makes you stupider, but... I don't need to twist the figures and facts around to believe that: I used to GO to school.
The phony intellectuals are having another fit over nothing I see.
It's been said by more than one poster that it is for ESL students. You know, to learn how to read and write in english. Get over it. I don't want to right a whole essay about how the most barbaric societies were the most literate and educated.
Ebert: So let that be a lesson to us, write?
This is really bad. Why Gatsby of all books? You ‘d think they might have gotten a clue from the fact that none of the several film adaptations of the book was really successful, though none were awful and most had good performances. They all fail because they can’t immerse you in the voice and viewpoint of the narrator, Nick Carraway, who doesn’t really do that much in the story – his actions rarely drive the events of the plot.
If it’s really for adults just learning the language that makes it even worse; you’re ruining a book that they should be able to read in just a few more years. I don’t buy that it’s necessary either. There nothing wrong with giving them young adult novels. You just need the common sense to select one’s by writers who have proven their ability to appeal to adults. I know plenty of adult readers who eat up J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Peter Naess. If they don’t like fantasy, there’s always Treasure Island. I made it through that when I was about eight. In a language class you start out reading kids' books. That’s just the way it is. When I took French they gave The Little Prince to seventeen year olds who were already reading Voltaire and Hugo in translation.
If you’re really afraid to give them anything that they might see as being written for kids, just use the newspaper and let them learn literary appreciation in their own language. If some idiot is forcing you to teach language and literature at the same time at an inappropriate level, and they’re not ready for Fitzgerald, start them with the Hemingway short stories. The sentence structures are simple enough, and if there are any words they don’t know that’s good. They should be picking up new words every time they read. If they’re trying to learn English they should all have a dictionary.
I read The Great Gatsby this past May, and loved it. When I read a novel, I want to get lost in the world the author envisions, in little details and implications. A very different experience from watching a movie, where I usually focus on character. But that's just me.
In this sense, abridging a novel diminishes it, and takes away the basic appeal of literature: to transport us to different times and places.
I also agree with the point that sometimes the best way to learn words is by reading them and inferring their meaning through context. My father taught me to have a dictionary nearby when I read a book.
At the school where I work, the majority of the students are adult refugees, who start off with poor or no English. YA novels are inappropriate for them, aimed as they are to western youths.
Yes, new learners of English are totally incapable of appreciating the poetry of Fitzgerald's words, but they're able to recognise and discuss symbols and themes as much as anyone. Why make them suffer through books for children before they can reach works worthy of actual discussion?
There is an even worse and more inexplicable crime here. The photo of the book that you use is the Penguin edition which, as I recall, substitutes American words like" gas" and "gas station" for British words "petrol" and "petrol stand". This I think is a far more inexcusable crime than an ESL version of the book.
On the subject of whether this book is for ESL students or not, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that this is perfectly believable, specifically because of the culture that has been engendered by an absolute disregard for literature and the value and beauty of language. We can believe this idea of a truncated and mutilated book because we're faced with reports every day of the possibility that a teen from a poor background can have only 900 words as part of their core vocab, that libraries are less important than any other use of public funds, and that children deserve to be short changed in their education.
What beauty or truth is there in the blunt bits of text that are carved out of novels and presented as 'extracts' for students to analyse and learn? There are people who can go through education without ever picking up a book and there are reasons for it. This has turned into a bit of a rant for which I apologise, but the main thrust of my point is that it doesn't surprise me. Even apart from the obvious if sad truth that we can believe (and some people will support) that such books are given to students, it's indicative of something more.
Everything has to be tied up neatly. There can be no loose ends. Nick Carraway cannot just stare across the water and contemplate. There must be a moral. There must be a cause and a result to the book. We can no longer read for the sake of it, we must read in order to reach a conclusion. What next?
'Sam had learned after he watched Frodo go for a sailing trip, about the importance of helping friends, and never wearing jewellery.' -Lord of the Rings
'Ralashnikov was very sorry for what he had done. Some day he would get better. But that is another story.'- Crime and Punishment
'Illness was a very bad thing, and very hard to get rid of. But if they washed everything, then it would be okay'- The Plague
But then why do I have a rather strong feeling Camus and Dostoyevsky would never get that treatment, because now no-one would ever dream of teaching them in schools.
It's challenge time!
Because of her brilliant work elucidating Gatsby, she gets to abridge the following books
Man And Subperman- The third act will be a bit of a hump, considering it challenges the reader to contemplate activities outside the play and forces them to analyze what makes a scene organic to the play
Brothers Karamazov- Use simple language to analyze the spiritual nature of good and evil. Is evil simply the absence of good, as Smerdyakov hints of Ivan, or is Alyosha's mentor correct that evil is more than that, a sort of willful permanent adolescence.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra- No explanation needed
Any more suggesions, Ebert
Remember, a little bit of knowledge is a ...thing
It's like reading an abridged version. The full text, complete with the characterization, plot, descriptions, purple prose, padding and other stuff is what the writer had in mind when s/he wrote and it must be judged by its own merits.
What's worse about that mindset is the fact they're conditioning the children to read only "easy stuff". I guess they'll never read anything like Dostoevsky or Eco.
To those defending it as intended for use by Second Language Learners: In my 8th grade Spanish class, we read a similarly vapid reduction of Cervantes's La gitanilla. It did not contribute to my education. I can, in fact, say without exaggeration that I have enjoyed recovering from sinus surgery more than reading that reduction. Obviously in my 5th year of lousy tokenistic Spanish classes I was in no place to read Cervantes in the original. So what? I can wait. I did wait. When I read Cervantes for real in High School it was worth it.
Speaking as one who has learned a few languages other than my native one, I personally am really just fine with sticking to fairytales and children's stories until I'm better at the language. I'm not going to ask various cultures to vivisect their famous authors for my benefit.
like-minded: "Picture someone like Joseph Conrad, (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski), learning English well enough to write the books for which he is known, all without the help of this bowdlerized, watered-down tripe."
You can't expect an average or below-average reader to be able to match Joseph Conrad's abilities.
Roger, are you aware that there are students of below average intelligence who would find reading The Great Gatsby difficult?
Ebert: Then I don't recommend they read it.
I read the Cliffs Notes for most of the books studied in my high school literature classes. It wasn't because I lacked reading comprehension; I was an AP student with great grades and test scores. The reason I didn't read the book is that I didn't have time. I don't mean that I felt like going out with friends instead. I wasn't watching TV and playing video games. I went to school, participated in dozens of extracurricular activities at lunchtime, and stayed after for more extracurriculars. The more activities, the better it looks on that college application! Then I came home, ate dinner (maybe,) and went back for more extracurriculars. When I got home at 9 or 10, I did my homework until 1 or 2, usually falling asleep on my physics or calculus book. How could I have possibly made time to appreciate nuances of language?
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that was right or even OK. Everyone wants to complain about "the American educational system," but these very complaints are driving the problem. Those in power keep trying to "fix" the system by adding more and more QUANTITY. More books to read. More subjects. More tests. Today's high school students are overworked and overscheduled. If you want them to read something, and really read it, give them time to do so. Guide them through it. Discuss it along the way. Don't just hand them a book and tell them to have it read by Monday.
Ebert: Classics Illustrated? I devoured them.
Good you confessed. 'Twill make you feel better. May even mitigate in your favor on the Day.
What scares me more than anything is the possibility that if the movie is ever remade, it will be adapted from -this- version of the book.
It's not a zero-sum game; anyone who reads the "retold" version still has the opportunity to read the original. In fact, the "retold" version may even be a stepping stone to help someone who has trouble understanding the original get a firmer grasp, much like a study guide. At the very least, it's informing the reader that such a book exists.
Now, here's a book that should be burned.
This essay is terribly misleading. It's a learning tool for ESL students that can be used to compare progress to true fluency. It's an effective method and a very good idea. In no way is it intended to be a replacement or substitute for the original text, and Mr. Ebert fails to make that clear here. In fact, the vocabulary based levels can be used to help an English learner actually work their way up to reading the original text itself. Furthermore though, reactionary snobbery isn't very constructive in terms of addressing literacy issues.
As a reading specialist and an ESL teacher, I feel somewhat qualified to address your questions. Despite what a previous poster suggested, there are NOT a lot of other options out there when it comes to high-interest, low vocabulary books (though the market has vastly improved in the last 5-10 years). These HI-LOs, as they are called, are not intended to replace the originals, but rather to help improve the reader's fluency while providing vocabulary with meaningful context. Most young adult books would be extremely difficult for a student with a year or three of English. Children's books are often embarrassing for a 16 year old to read.
Every teacher should have an extensive classroom library filled with a variety of genres at a variety of reading levels. Research suggests, at an absolute minimum, 10 books per student. With 30 students, that would require 300 books at the very least. This title would most likely be another option in the library. Perhaps, in the future, that student may return to the original classic when he/she is better prepared to fully comprehend and appreciate the book. Maybe. But we ESL teachers and reading specialists are charged with a much more rudimentary task, teaching kids who can't read to read.
As to the most difficult question, why eviscerate Fitzgerald, I say "why not?". Every year, great movies get remade, to disasterous effect. At least this culturally inferior product was produced with basic literacy in mind.
As someone who used to be quite religious, raised on the King James Bible, my heart sinks whenever I read a modern translation.
For your consideration:
Psalm 23:1, King James Bible (1611): The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Psalm 23:1, New Living Translation (2007): The LORD is my shepherd; I have all that I need.
I don't know about you, but the second version makes me want to vomit. Psalms without iambic pentameter isn't actually Psalms. Might as well be reading the phone book for Christ sakes.
Just to present a differing point of view, who really cares? The kids who will read the dumbed-down version probably wouldn't get anything out of the real book. They're just cutting their losses.
I completely agree with you Roger. I am a junior in college and I can still remember the eagerness I had in high school to read this novel. I devoured it, along with Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" (my favorite novel), during the summer preceding my junior year of high school; of course, I read it again during the school year when the time came. This is a true masterpiece of literature in general, not just American. To think of the sad state our culture must be in to provide a real market for this blasphemy...
On a lighter note, seeing Fitzgerald brought to life in "Midnight In Paris" this past sunday was a real treat for me. Woody Allen is one of the greats, no doubt about it.
By the way, here is another alternative way to learn the story of "The Great Gatsby."
http://greatgatsbygame.com/
I remember reading this book in high school and hating it. It's not a matter of being too hard to read, but that the story is boring and the characters unappealing. This is the sort of book that teaches kids to hate reading.
The attitude of the educational establishment appears to be that if they don't force culture down the throats of the children, they'll never get it. Better, I think, to teach children the joy of literature at the level they can appreciate and trust that they will continue to grow on their own. In my post-college years, I read "The Brothers Karamazov", "Crime and Punishment", and "War and Peace", books that I would not have enjoyed as a teenager. I would never recommend that children be forced to read these books.
OMG so ungood. Not LMAO. George O. never knew how prescient he was. This is not the first book to be tampered with however. Huck Finn has been "cleansed" recently too.
I'm currently in high school and will be going into AP English next year. On my own interest, I read this book at the beginning of the tenth grade. Now entering the twelfth, I find myself hearing references to it and looking up what I missed that first time. I often find myself pulling out my edition of it and reading about "the valley of ashes." The book it simple yet powerful.
GATSBY is not a hard read for a high school student, and I don't think they made this simplified edition thinking that it was. Not wanting to anger the teenagers--and even, sadly, the parents--they made this edition knowing that teenagers, for the most part, hate the book and don't like to read; and the education system doesn't like to make students do what they don't like....
I'm not sure I buy this ESL argument that some people have been making. If you're new to a language, you begin with young adult books, or even books for children. It's not insulting or condescending to ask an adult to read such things, much less a teenager. My ESL study books were full of comic strips and simple 'Hardy Boys' type stories. In fact, I went looking for them myself when I needed the practice. My first set of real French "books" were Asterix and Obelix, and I STILL read and enjoy them (those rascals).
After becoming proficient in comic book ESL reading I began to seek out 'combined readers', which were stories wherein one page was English and the facing page was French. The translation was always honest and certainly never chopped down to the extent The Great Gatsby seems to have been in Roger's example. I honestly don't see the point of it.
These combined readers were specifically made for ESL students. I also remember shelves and shelves of books marketed by ESL publishers which gave one options at almost every reading level. Most of these were original stories but there were also many translations, and as I remember, they too ran the gamut from easy to hard. For example, I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in French and it was an honest translation. The book is easy in terms of it's language and theme, there was no need to 'dumb it down'. There were many options like this for French, I would imagine that english ESL students have much more choice since the demand is so much greater. Furthermore, one of the great joys of learning a second language is having access to their literature. I would feel thoroughly ripped off if some publisher had inoculated me to the pleasures of Cyrano de Bergerac in it's original and authentic French by offering me nothing more then a diluted and dim-witted Christian de Neuvillette beneath my literary balcony. Non, merci !
I can understand Roger's outrage even though I'm not a fan of The Great Gatsby myself. I have many cherished books and would feel quite a bit of pique knowing someone had been messing with them! As I say, I don't quite buy the ESL argument, but I would give it a pass if teachers insist that these simplified versions are helpful. However, if they are indeed meant for regular students then it's a bloody tragedy that this sort of thing happens.
FYI - my first real book was The Hobbit. Thank you again Mr. Hunter for setting my on the path to a lifetime of reading.
I'm with Ebert on this. I am a learner of a second language (first being English, learning Japanese) and I am at the point where I am seeking novels and the such for reading and learning. I would like to read some famous literature, but am starting with some other easier books. As much as I would like to read Haruki Murakami or the like, I would avoid a dumbed-down version because I understand that good books are more than their story.
Furthermore, someone saying they have read The Great Gatsby because they've read one of these versions is the same as someone saying they can play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because they know how to play the opening chords on piano.
The real issue with the abbreviated versions are that they are far from normal literary English. If any ESL learners are reading this: find some novels that you can mostly understand, but aren't specifically written for learners. Especially avoid "dumbed-down" versions of classics.
i originally wanted to say something like, "
When I read critical analysis of 'Gatsby',
what the story is 'about' moves me,
but when I try to read the text,
I am distracted by Fitgerald's overuse of Adverbs.
I have read correspondance between Hemingway & Fitzgerald,
and it seems to me that Ernest was correct
when he needled F. Scott,
about being insecure as a writer.
Sorry if this offends anyone,
but it is what I 'feel'.
The Theme of Gatsby is necessary.
but it will be re-presented by a better writer.
F. Scott is important in that he kept certain coals glowing,
Like that writer before Shakespeare,
who wrote that great play about an angry young prince,
That writer whos name I cant remember.
;)
You can't REALLY expect the children of illegal aliens to be able to tackle something like "The Great Gatsby" in it's original form, can you?! English is not their first language you know, how DARE you.
I'm reminded of an anecdote related in Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, in which he describes a Polish friend who grew up enjoying Little Women, but when she finally read it in the original English, she found the language stilted and old-fashioned; it turned out that she'd actually been enjoying the translator's voice, which was written in a more modern variant of Polish. German-speakers can pick up a new edition of Shakespeare in a more modern voice without detracting from its purity, but there's something grotesque about doing the same in English, as the Kakutani editorial in the Times pointed out so eloquently.
Funny how that works, isn't it? I remember reading Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved" and rolling around the phrase "they were outside the world, men and women made of air" for some time before discovering that Levi never actually wrote that; he wrote the equivalent in Italian.
And there seems to be some resistance to saying that Gatsby was difficult to read; I, for one, have trouble wading through the prose. Maybe it was because I'm not used to unreliable, self-contradictory, evasive or extremely wordy narrators; I had the same problem with Jane Austen.
Finally, it occurs to me that the natural conclusion of this trend has already been expressed in the Book-A-Minute version, which is at least redeemed by being funny.
While I should be getting ready for bed right now, I have to comment on this post.
I came across something similar to The Great Gatsby Macmillan Reader edition while talking to one of my students last year, who is Japanese. She had a version of O. Henry's short stories that eviscerated the originals, cutting out all the poetry and beauty. I realized this when I wanted to show her one of the greatest passages in "The Gift of the Magi," which I had remembered from when I read the original in school, and found that it wasn't there. Worse still, the style was wrong. It wasn't O. Henry, it was O. Boring. Horrified, I told her that she had to get her hands on the original and read that, instead.
You are right, Roger. If the originals are too difficult for ESL students to read, then they shouldn't be reading them. Otherwise, they will think that reading is just for comprehension, and miss what a beautiful language English can be, especially in the hands of a master like Fitzgerald, or O. Henry. Therefore, I encourage anyone who teaches ESL students how to read to have them read the real thing, no matter what their English level is. Writing can be good at any level, but if students are reading Fitzgerald, it should sound like Fitzgerald, and if editors and writers insist on "retelling" classics by stripping them of everything that made the originals great, the cover should read "dumbed down by," instead of "retold by."
To put it another way: if Michael Bay "retold" Citizen Kane, would it bear any resemblance to the film by Orson Welles? If I only saw the Bay version, could I truly say that I had seen Citizen Kane?
"I have students in my classes who are in their 50's and 60's. Why would I give them a Young Adult novel? It isn't age appropriate, that's why!"
Seriously? I'm almost 50, read voraciously, read Solzhenitsyn in Junior High and I still read Young Adult and Juvenile novels. Many of them are better than the new fiction being marketed to adults.
I was going to write something mundane about the effects of reading the book when I was around 30, roughly the same age as the main characters and the author himself. I am an old fart now.
Then a curious thing happened. I just stumbled upon the sorry tale of Benjamin Button. This I had never before read, nor have I seen the movie version.
The short story first appeared in Colliers in 1922. That was the year Fitzgerald first began work on "Gatsby." So I guess you could say he birthed both Monsieurs' Button and Gatsby at about the same time in his life.
And it's freely available through a link at the bottom of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" Wikipedia page in big, bold, easy to read print - compliments of the University Of Virginia.
What a find.
Mr. Ebert,
Besides offering adults learning the language to read adult stories in Engilsh, a point that has been touched on by several readers already, I think these retellings serve another important function: helping readers become culturally literate.
We rightly expect others to have some basic familiarity with the American canon; I think that for a new American, reading a watered-down version of The Great Gatsby could be, while not the same as reading the real thing, could be a good way of incorporating yourself into our culture. You may not yet be able to read The Great Gatsby in its true, artistic form, but it can't hurt to become familiar with who Jay Gatsby is or what the East Egg and West Egg are, since they are part of our lexicon.
I still think the guy who edited Huck Finn was being a douche.
One bad onion don't make onions bad.
Dear Roger,
I'm 23, I was in High School a mere 5 years ago, and I still have contact with those High School teachers for whom I wish to converse with. In my tenure in High School, we received edited versions of Maya Angelou's beautiful poem, Still I Rise. The teacher refused to assign us Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eyes, and blacked out the F Word, and homosexual references in the work The Catcher in the Rye.
Though I was allowed to read The Great Gatsby as it was meant to be read, I never thought there would come a time, where reading a book in school the way the author inteded it to be read would be considered a wonderful achievement in our society. I am both outraged and dismayed over the idea that a work so brilliant, so wonderful, as The Great Gatsby, must be dumbed down for the masses. It reminds me of the movie Idiocracy, which, ironically, the movie executives felt American's wouldn't be smart enough to understand. A society that perpetually lowers the standards until an average person with an average would be the smartest person in the world.
Many people today march on the streets and talk about Big Brother watching, they quote George Orwell's 1984, but with our society of hopped up children stuffed full of ritalin and anti-depressions, with medications to dull the senses becoming the biggest thing on the market, and books becoming a thing of the past, I think Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is more likely a future. Not a society where a government bans books, but where people don't even care to read them. Frederick Douglas wrote that for a man to be a slave, he must be kept ignorant. The school's today are perpetuating the ignorance of a generation, so soon too, I have no doubt that we will enslave ourselves in our own apathy.
A terrific piece of analysis on a not dwelt upon enough topic. I wish I were good enough writer to tell you how correct you are - but i'm not. Just rest assured you are correct.
I agree that the dumbed-down version of Gatsby is an obscenity. And I am sure that I will still agree once I have completed my easy version of Finnegans Wake for doctoral candidates.
Gatsby's dream floated around him, almost as if he was not connected to it- in my mind.
The characters reminded me of a line from Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" : " In the room the Women come and go talking of Michelangelo"
Moving in and out of the party rooms, almost as if phantoms against the scenery of Gatsby's hopes and desires, not really understanding the depth of the man. (Plath visits this theme in The Bell Jar, with the main character Esther feeling removed from society as if covered by a translucent glass bell until she falls into a serious clinical depression).
I think often this is the complex of the artist, who suddenly finds themselves a distant observer in the goings on around them. So Gatsby perhaps got his dream, but despite the constant crowds and wealth, it was experienced mostly in mental isolation, I believe.
These types of characters expose in detail, the danger the artist can face born with a mind that traverses against the main avenues, finding themselves suddenly in a room full of great noise, totally not getting the meaning of it all.
On a completely unrelated note. When I typed your name into Google today, and the little list of guesses of what I might be about to type next came up, it read:
roger ebert
roger ebert reviews
roger ebert twitter
roger ebert thor
Out of all the dozens of topics you’ve ever written about, apparently the Thor movie is still considered the most important. On the bright side, at least Ryan Dunn wasn’t on the list anymore.
We did this book in A levels. A lot of people wernt fans of the book but I for one loved it. It's one of the rare books where the more you read into it it becomes even more interesting.
And by the way, I think often the way literature is presented to kids makes it really unattractive. I am a writer and a poet and I was trying to find some good readings of Keats on youtube, and they always seemed to be recited by some very unamused, elderly gentleman in depressing monotone inflections.
We are much more interesting than that (I hope), and are much more inspired during the creative process of poetry, but it seems the way it is taught in schools is totally out of touch with its true nature.
And, like I mentioned before on this blog, half the time we do not even know the deeper meanings of what we produce, how can some outside person become an "Expert" in Proust, Fitzgerald, Woolf, etc...
Maybe using some blended learning and critical thinking, and having them create their own artifacts more as a process of keeping knowledge and literature fresh might renew interest in the great novels and their merits.
Because: (off the cuff...)
The vessel carries, with swift flight carries
the new minds
into the sun spun glorious hues
of the new day
Ugh, that's all that can be said. Making my way through Willa Cather's gorgeously written "O Pioneers!" and having many other great American novels on my "to read" list, I am disgusted that I was not exposed to more great literature in school. Now I see that I got off easy with the recent censoring of "Huck Finn" and now what is essentially a censoring of "The Great Gatsby" (I mean, it's changing the source material without consent from the artist, that's censorship).
"You can't become literate by being taught illiteracy"
I couldn't have put it better myself.
'Gatsby remains one of the great world classics; though it is difficult to understand why any person with even a reasonable knowledge of English would find it difficult to read. What happens then, should they ever try Milton or Chaucer, or Hardy or Dickens!
And anyway, retelling of the sort mentioned here is something of a sacrilege: imagine if instead of 'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn', Gone with the Wind was retold as 'So, what the hell!'.
I have to admit, when I first read Gatsby I absolutely loathed it. It really fit perfectly into my theory that books were being taught more as science reports that were meant to be dissected and analyzed, instead of enjoyed as works of art that could be dissected and analyzed.
After I re-read it years later I realized that the real reason I didn't like Gatsby was that at 16yrs old with the world in front of me I couldn't understand chasing a dream that had long since ended.
On the cheap book front, it's always disturbing when you must reiterate a most basic point. Namely, in this case, that the very purpose of education is to introduce you to things that are unknown and how to assimilate and utilize that information.
The shining city on the hill has become a city drawn in crayon
'The Great Gatsby' was assigned to my English class in the 8th grade, and I must say I did not enjoy it or appreciate it at the time.
I was a bright but immature working class kid with an obsessive interest in escapist fantasy. I still hadn't developed an interest in girls, and reality seemed entirely too depressing to contemplate. I don't remember having trouble reading it, but I do remember thinking The Great Gatsby was about a bunch of rich wankers I could care less about. I ended up speed-reading through it. Any incites or poetry were lost on my young mind. Still earned an 'A' in the course, though.
I returned to the book 15 years later and thought it was brilliant. I don't think my teachers were wrong to assign the book to me at 13 years old, but I also don't think it was wrong of me to reject it at that age.
If a book doesn't challenge your vocabulary or knowledge then how can you learn from it? Yes, there are books that are simply entertainment but the truly great works are those that not only entertain but educate. If when reading a book you come across a word you don't understand, as you said, you can learn the definition of the word by the context or you can look it up in a dictionary. Complaining that the word is "too hard" for you or others is basically saying, "I'm not very smart so please make everything easy."
The recent kerfuffle over the editing done to Huck Finn proves that many think it's simply easier to take a great work of art and neuter it so that young people don't have to take the time to understand it. I would guess that hard science fiction/science books may be extinct in the next 20 years because they're just too darned hard to understand! (sarcasm intended)
Calabogie
White upper class men who think themselves so extraordinarily intelligent they feel the need to demean students with learning disabilities or ESL learners because instead of wanting to read puerile, horribly bad YA books they try to find a way to approach classical literature are what's bringing our educational system down, not efforts to get people with a low literacy level reading Fitzgerald.
Also to the person who claimed that their heart sinks when they read modern translations of the Bible - my heart sinks when people still cling to an incredibly, INCREDIBLY unreliable and badly done translation of the Bible because it 'sounds' better than accurate translations. If you want to read the Bible as a secular book, fair enough although even there you should aim for a better edition, but for spiritual study, KJV is one of the worst editions you could use.
"The Mediocre Gatbsy" by Virginia Pharis, who is some kind of genius:
http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue178/mediocre_gatsby.html
"I enjoy solitude, which is why I moved from a small mid-western town to New York: I want to be alone. I purchased beachfront property because that’s all I could afford. Although my house was a humble and mean dwelling (having only four courtyards and no moat), I was neighbor to a wealthy man, Gatsby, whose three-moat palace was constantly alive with lavish parties, gay soirees, and slumber parties for small children. He’ll give you candy if you don’t tell mommy and daddy.
My first week in New York I was invited to the estate of my dearest cousin Daisy and her husband Tom. When I arrived at their estate, I was escorted to the veranda by a butler. There I met Daisy, Tom and a woman I didn’t know. The woman sat with a mint julep in hand and slid languidly off the couch with a sophisticated “urp.”
Daisy ran to me, her golden curls and other things bouncing gently as she ran. She embraced me and kissed me passionately.
“They’re from the mid-west,” said Tom to the woman.
“Oh Nick Nick Nicky Nick Nick! My rose! My absolute rose! How have you been and why haven’t you come to visit and do you like the house and you remember Tom don’t you and why didn’t you come to my wedding oh the war wasn’t it and what a dreadful hostess I must be this is Jordan she’s single—”
Tom’s tranquilizer dart hit her in the neck and she fell languidly to the floor.
“Thanks,” I said.
Tom nodded and returned to the house leaving Jordan and me on the porch.
“He’s got a woman,” said Jordan, struggling to be heard over the squeaking of bedsprings.
Tom’s mistress was a dreadful woman which pretty much meant that she was poor and a little pudgy. Tom of course was just as dreadful, so they were pretty much meant for each other, which is fine, because Daisy never really loved him anyway, but that’s beside the point. The point is that I got Jordan’s number.
I later received an invitation to one of Gatsby’s parties. I decided to go, thinking that maybe there would be pony rides. There were no ponies, but I did meet up with Jordan who suggested that we go find Gatsby. As the words escaped her mouth, an attractive man about my age and chiseled like a Greek God approached us.
“Hello Old Sport, I’m Gatsby.”
“Well, that was lucky.”
“Old Sport, why don’t you come over tomorrow to ride my hovercraft, Old Sport, or we can have lunch, Old Sport, and weren’t we in the army together Old Sport, and I’m an Oxford man myself, Old Sport, and heir to a vast family fortune, Old Sport, nothing illegal about how I get my money at all, Old Sport, and did I mention that I’ve been in love with your cousin Daisy for five years and it would be just swell if you could set us up, Old Sport.”
I agreed because, hey, it’s not like she liked her husband or anything. Besides, I really wanted to see that hovercraft.
I reunited Gatsby and Daisy and they got along swimmingly until Daisy accidentally ran over Tom’s mistress with Gatsby’s steam-roller driving home one night. Daisy and Tom fled the country (dead mistresses will do that to you) and Tom’s mistress’s husband killed Gatsby in a vengeful rage which was fine, because Gatsby wasn’t really who he said he was except he kind of became the lie so he was... Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that no one came to the funeral so it was really sad."
If you want an example of how children's editions of classics can be a good thing you might look at Lamb's 'Tales From Shakespeare'.
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00078081/00001/1j
The authors tried to stick as much as possible to Shakespeare's vocabulary & avoid words which had come into existence since his time. The result, although considerably easier than reading the originals, is still unquestionably challenging for young readers, & possesses a quality of its own, unlike the literary pap of this edition of Gatsby.
So - this is a "learner's edition", as it were? I distinctly remember having one of those when we read "Romeo and Juliet", and that one didn't omit one word of the Shakespeare - it had explanations, footnotes and learner tasks aplenty, but the text was there. What's the point in cutting down a book to make it "more accessible"? Why not pick a different book? There must be novels out there, even outside the Young Adult bracket, that are a ) easier to read and b ) more dependent on what story is told, rather than how it is told.
To throw in a tangent, I was made to read Gatsby in high school, and believe it or not, although we read the original text, "Gatsby was a success, in the end" was pretty much exactly the reading that was taught to us!
The explanation went something along the lines of how Gatsby's friends were all odious spoiled rich people who didn't care about him, but he was a romantic at heart, and because unlike all of the rest of them he didn't come from old money and had to find his way on his own, he was a plucky American archetype and therefore the hero of the book. Or something like that.
As far as I can tell, they were teaching us the book in precisely the way you advocate against -- as a novel with a plot, foremost -- because presumably no high schooler would be able to sit through any book that didn't follow the logical structure of a summer movie. If a book is said to be "good" and "a classic," it must be because it's a great story. And any good story has to have its hero, doesn't it? And if Gatsby was the hero, then he must be a success, right? One way or the other? Or something?
I actually re-read the book for the first time since high school last year, and I was a little surprised at how little my modern reading jibed with what I remembered from class. They had made us read it, all right, but they had taught all the Fitzgerald right out of it.
But I often had this experience with books they taught us in school. I remember distinctly being told that Huckleberry Finn was an allegory, and in an allegory certain things represented other things, so in this case, for example, traveling down the river represented the journey of Life. As we proceeded through the book, this idea became abridged: The river represents Life. And as we'd read excerpts in class, and some poor student would read out a line such as, "Huck dipped the oar into the river," the teacher would interrupt with, "Which represents what, class?" And we'd all have to mumble, "Life." To this day I have no idea what possible benefit this little mantra had to my reading of the book. More than anything, it seemed like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that made it impossible to concentrate on reading the actual text, let alone enjoying it.
They damn near made me hate The Catcher in the Rye as a 16-year-old, if you can believe that one.
So I guess my point is that there's more than one way to bastardize a text, and if you want to find a way, look no further than an American classroom (ESL or otherwise).
I'm really puzzled by that conclusion. Was that simply their crazy interpretation of the ending??
Do you ever wonder why we teach literature at all? Do we devote tax money and a not minuscule percentage of classroom hours to the teaching of Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, etc., for the sake of the individual student or is it for the sake of something creepier like providing bases for class or a national consciousness? Can reading these books, and then telling each other how great they are, in some ways be a sneaky means of instituting conformity and then having even the smartest people among us like lick the hand that leashes us? Not to say I don't still read plenty of them.
Are books like this really intended by our system to edify, to electrify, to enrich, to etc., or are they intended as a set of touchstones for group unity, and so that we know when to rally the wagons around and assume a defensive posture against everyone who hasn't read them, which will correspond socioeconomically and politically with such and such and...
I don't know. Looking at some of our public figures, I have a hard time expecting anything consistently more parts insidious than stupid coming down from on high.
The odd thing about this whole project is that 'Gatsby' is, on a syntactical level, very easy to read. Sure, Fitzgerald uses words like 'commensurate,' but the narrator is casual and friendly, the style is not at all obtuse or confusing, and the imagery has the lucid naturalness of life.
If anything, it's easy at that age level (I know I did this in high school!) to NOT focus on the language of 'Gatsby,' and instead focus on the story - because the writing is so natural and flowing and simple that a high schooler couldn't possibly imagine how difficult it must have been to write.
What I'm getting at is that 'simplifying' classic texts just propagates the myth that classic texts are hard.
Sorry for a second comment so soon, but I just wanted to point out the obvious to everyone who is saying that for foreign language students it is a good resource to have simple books. What is ACTUALLY being done is stealing a book and chopping it up, because publishers are too cheap to pay to have one written at the appropriate language level. It's cheaper to pay this women to take a classic and bastardize it, than have her write a simple short book with an interesting story.
So forget the moralizing about it being better to give someone a sample of real literature (which such a version isn't anyway) the whole thing is based upon what is the cheapest way for these publishers to make more money
I add my voice to the chorus of those outraged. Either read The Great Gatsby or work until you're able. But don't dumb it down.
Both my kids, neither of whom spend much of their time reading, read Gatsby in high school. Both of them loved it. It's not terribly hard compared to Spenser or Joyce.
This news depressed me even more than the thought of having to watch the immensely talented Leo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in a 3D film of Gatsby. Why, o why?
I am extremely offended by this travesty. Why torture ESL students with this?
English is not my first language, but I had the pleasure of reading The Great Gatsby in its original form when my English skills were subpar.
It gave me an additional appreciation of the fine nuances that English language can convey.
I'm actually quite offended by the English language learners thing. Much as you pointed out with native-speaker literacy, the way to acquire literacy in a second language (mine was Spanish) is to read books that are above you and that maybe you don't perfectly understand the first time and work to figure out what goes on. I certainly didn't really understand el Quijote the first time through, or Unamuno's Niebla, but I understood enough to know the plot (reconstructed in my own basic version, I hardly needed another for that task), a better sense of the construction and use of the Spanish language, and an awareness that the authors were geniuses. This filled me with a desire to go back and reread them, which I have done multiple times at various points in my life and I now understand them at a much more profound level. They are constant companions in my life in a way they wouldn't have been had I read adulterated, bastardized versions.
I also feel that Gatsby is an odd choice for this treatment. I'm less opposed to beginning Latin students getting Virgil in the type of prose first year students can understand because the poem is so important to understanding Roman culture, and really, Western Civ. Two things that however much I may like Gatsby, really can't be said. Having said this too, it's always understood in Latin I that what you're reading is the plot in simple Latin and that one day, when your skills have improved, you will go back and read the real thing and savor and appreciate the poetic genius that is the Aeneid. I would hate to think that ESL students, or high school students, anyone was reading dumbed down Gatsby and feeling that they were getting the real thing.
Greetings! I feel for you! I hope you land on your feet! We do need a discussion about this! I am a graduate student who happened to take a literature course in an undergraduate school recently(a comunity college actually), and was appalled at the low reading level of some of the students. The reading material was actually varied and interesting, including some of Sherman Alexie,Toni Morrison and others(it was an American Ethnic literature class). There were no "fakes" mentioned in this discussion. Another interesting factor was the attitude of the Professor, who took the position that statistically half of us would fail(he said this on the second day of class). So there were a lot of negative expectations right from the beginning and a lot of people dropped out(I stayed the course). There does need to be ways that students can postively enjoy classics like The Great Gatsby without negative expectations of the students or the Teachers getting in the way!
Frank
Readers Digest Condensed books. What was their purpose? My mother collected many of those volumes. But, I never saw her read one ! Neither did I. But I did use a "Classics Illustrated" to give a book report on a book that I never read. As one responder said, "time" not enough for a teenager, especially one as insecure as I was.
How can someone do this? How can you so bastardize a classic piece of American literature?
Sup? So long story short, some shit happened, and I got put on this boat, and the captain was this crazy bastard who wanted to shoot a whale or something, but it's cool because there was this cool Indian or African or something, he didn't really talk but he was a bro. So anyway we're sailing around for this whale named Moby DICK (lol), and some shit happens, and eventually we catch the whale and the captain dies and the boat sinks and everyone dies. Moral: NUKE THE WHALES.
It's hard to be satirical when reality is constantly trying to outdo its own stupidity.
Wait a minute. Isn't The Great Gatsby about 150 pages total? So, they cut out half the pages in the book? Did they not think a seventh grader could get through 150 pages? 7th graders that have probably read every 700 page Harry Potter book twice? What they hell will they do with an O. Henry. short story?
They were poor and sad. She cut her hair. He bought a brush. And they were still poor and sad.
First of all, I agree utterly with every word you have written. But your tendency to generalize your own experience as a young (or older) reader to the general run of people, students or otherwise, is misguided. It is clear that your verbal abilities are 3-4 standard deviations above the mean, which means that your experiences reading could be described as qualitatively different from most people's. So let's not dumb things down, by all means. But let's not take your abilities and experience as typical, either.
Excuse me while I regurgitate.
While offering no literary defense of this adaptation of Gatsby, I recall my mother -- a bookstore manager for many years -- talking about the popularity of Harlequin Romances and similar less-than-stellar works, which sold well at her store while clearly more worthy books sat on the shelves. Her attitude was "At least people are buying books and reading them." Half a loaf, as it were.
The book cover you posted is just as embarrassing as the simplified text. Where's the famous beautiful cover by Francis Cugat? Penguin Modern Classics should be ashamed for changing it.
>> in the precise words he choose to write what some consider the great American novel.
You might want to correct that - I think you meant to use "chose" instead of "choose".
This is one of your best blog posts. I simultaneously laughed and cringed at Tarner's words. Thanks for this, it was a lovely post!
Oh, nonsense. I had kids in my 8th grade reading class last year who read on a 4th & 5th grade level, but were so captivated by the ideas in certain classics that they read them on their own, outside of class (or frequently during class), slugging their painstaking way through the weighty poetry and prose, one long page at a time. Reading something too hard, and loving it, actually made them better readers.
Not to worry. This will be a moot point once everyone becomes functionally illiterate. Who will trouble to read even an airport novel if you can watch Glee on your iPad? Parents give their tots portable DVD players, buy SUVs with DVD players in the backseat. And we expect these children to grow up to read? Hahahahaha. Apocalypse soon. Reading will go the way of newspapers, democracy, personal interaction and other antique superfluities not needed by the brave new digital world.
This actually ties in well with my response to your Transformers entry. I just finished a masters degree in English with a creative writing emphasis, and I'm actually pretty terrified of teaching composition, as many of my peers are very discouraged at how badly their students write and how uninterested they are in reading. The only reason I have any hope is that I, too, wasn't all that interested in reading or writing until I reached college, where it hit me that if a person will read just a few good books every year they will soar intellectually above most of the people they encounter on a day-to-day basis. One of the first classes I took in college was a Faulkner class by a professor I greatly admired. I am not ashamed to admit that much of the time I did not know what I was reading, but it was either read on and go to class, withdraw, or fail. So I read on. I think that's one of the biggest problems we face as a people: we think that if we can't grasp it immediately, it must not be worth our time. This completely discounts the necessity of mystery, a thing humans absolutely cannot live without. I am with G.K. Chesterton on his quote, "Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic." And how wonderful it was when after reading a few Faulkner novels, I caught onto his style and the mysteries unfolded into more beauty and food for thought and discussion. I'm not saying that everything that challenges and expands the mind needs to be obscure. I won't be telling anyone to go read Fredric Jameson's Marxist literary criticism probably ever. But real mystery, discovery, these things seem unimportant to most Americans as far as I can tell, and the repercussions will be grave. Here's hoping if I step into a classroom I can make a little bit of a difference. Thanks, Roger, for your consistent posts on the beauty and need for reading great literature and viewing great films.
Even for ESL students, this butchering of a classic is a travesty and an injustice. A large part of what attracts those who become bilingual the hard way, rather than picking it up as a second native tongue as a baby, is the *sound* of a language, its flow and rhythms, and the feel of them in the mouth. This is why we often begin with simple poems once we have the very basic grammar under control. In fact, we do it for children learning to read their own native tongue as well. "De Xochimilco he traido las plantas de mi jardin; Rosas, violetas, claveles, nomeolvides y jazmin" -- I'm decades out of high school Spanish, but those words will probably never leave me any more than "New shoes, new shoes, red and pink and blue shoes" will. There is poetry and music in Fitzgerald's words that would have reached even ESL students; they might not have understood it completely, but they would never have forgotten, and wanting to understand might very well have brought them back.
Ebert: So let that be a lesson to us, write?
Slam! Dunk! Happy Dance!
I had nothing much for this blog but a sad little smirk and maybe a few quotes from Amanda McKittrick Ros, until what should come in the e-mail but a proposal to re-write MOBY DICK. You know, my favorite American work of All America.
You know, the "epic of Captain Ahab’s blind vengeance which brings him and his crew to their end except Ishmael the story’s narrator."
Only one with no sense of smell would wonder what's driving people out of the charnel house.
Stay alive for a very long time. Your corpse won't be cool before it turns out you wrote "Transformers IX: Awesomer than ever."
Truly, there's a problem with literal mindedness in all this, too. Not reading Fitzgerald or any of the classic writers isn't going to make anybody less "saved." But it is the same cracked reasoning used for atrocities like "The Good News Bible" and others, about which some here have very justly complained.
Reading stuff that bores you won't make you any smarter, either. Forcing literature on 15 year olds that they might actually enjoy when they're 30 isn't a smart idea, either. But the way school has been dumbed down and bored-up, they'll be lucky if they'll want to read anything at all by age 30.
This retelling is an abomination. "Run, Daisy, Run!' We should strive to RISE to the nuances, not remove them.
This is more a response to answer Ebert's comment to you Nicole: As someone who has taught this novel for 11 years, I can tell you that this adaption doesn't bother me for a number of reasons. The first reason, and the biggest, is that the Great Gatsby is only a "great" book for people who see its value, which of course brings up the whole Literary Cannon debate. Just because a lot of people like the Great Gatsby doesn't mean that the novel holds any relevance to teenagers.
I agree that Fitzgerald's writing is amazing and poetic and etc. etc. etc. But, the book flopped horribly when it was originally published. And, that happened for a reason. The story is boring! A whole lot of nothing happens surrounding the social class tensions of rich snobby people: Blue Bloods vs. Nouveau riche vs. Ivy League snobs! The Great Gatsby is a soap opera based in a world that most students don't know or care to know. And, I don't blame them.
There is lots of beautiful writing out there with story lines that students can dig into. For instance, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huck Finn and The Road are great examples. And if I had my druthers, I would ax Great Gatsby and replace it with Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, which is at least a coming of age story.
However, this book is continually shoved down the throats of students everywhere because it is supposed to say something about the attainability of the American Dream and how we are supposed to feel for Gatsby and how close he almost got to achieving his dream--oh, by the way, let's overlook the fact that Gatsby is a gangster that hangs out with a man who wears human molars for cufflinks. It is funny; by the end, the kids see Gatsby as a creepy stalker and Nick as someone with a little bit of man-crush (to say the least).
So, this adaptation comes about because of the basic laws of supply and demand-- students read this adaption, get the point, and move on to something they actually want to read, like Twilight or whatever. Then, later in life, once the reading bug has caught, they come back to Gatsby and read it cause they want to read it, not because the Cannon tells them to.
In reply to Wayne Hepner, I also read "The Little Prince" when I was studying French but that was something I did on my own. In class we read a short existentialist novel (while I longed for the romance of the Three Musketeers).
When I was teaching language learning (Japanese to Americans and English to Japanese) I encouraged people to find their inner child and allow themselves to have fun and make mistakes.
Wish I had kept up with all my languages studies which included reading classics in their original form at a painful snail's pace (in Japanese and Chinese) and a bit faster in French and Spanish.
Hearing the music of the language is part of learning.
Ebert: In French, I began with Tintin, Simenon and newspapers.
I assume your advocacy for "literary purity" generally applies to literature written in original English. Only the most fanatical among us would expend effort to learn, say, Spanish to read Cervantes, or Russian to read Dostoevsky. If you are willing to become such a polyglot, more power to you. For the rest of us, we may have to content ourselves with a universally esteemed translation.
To Garry:
"Psalm 23:1, King James Bible (1611): The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Psalm 23:1, New Living Translation (2007): The LORD is my shepherd; I have all that I need."
Not only is the modern translation horrid, these 2 statements do not mean the same thing. "I shall not want" implies that some of the deadlier sins will be negated: lust, envy, avarice. "I have all I need" is something you say to your waitress.
RE Roger's blog. The fact that this "book" exists and is defended is a travesty. I am puzzled by the ESL teachers here who are advocating for this "version" of Gatsby (it's so far from TGG it might as well be called "The Story of Jay and His Green Light"). Intermediate travesties of literature can never be appropriate. Just how are these ESL courses structured?
Freshman year in college, I took a German Lit course. I had studied German through middle school and HS. We sat in this class, all 17 of us, and went page by page through a collection of short stories depicting post WW2 Germany. The book was titled, "Aus Unsere Zeit". It was depressing as all get-out. But each pupil read a passage, attempted to translate, and we all chimed in with help or thoughts. In this way, we became much more fluent, not only in reading German, but also in speaking it. Sadly, I couldn't manage to keep up my German studies (due to being on the "nursing" track through college--another blog entry entirely), but what German stays with me is due to that class. Lord knows the grim tales in that tome were not dumbed down-nor was the instruction, thank god. And yet we managed--with personal attention, group participation and a fascinating (but awful) group of stories.
YA Lit is much more than Harry Potter or Superfudge. (Twilight does not qualify as Lit by any stretch of the word). To paraphrase Madeleine L'Engle, there is no such thing as writing more simply for children [or teens].
I understand using Easy Readers for those just starting to learn, but Intermediate Readers should be challenged, and engaged. Turner's excrescence does neither. WHY would anyone want to read Fitzgerald or any literature after exposure to Jay and His Green Light? If ESL teachers think their pupils will do so on their own, they're deluding themselves.
I shudder to think what ESL does to poetry. And one last thing: I just listened to a rebroadcast of an NPR show (This American Life) about a prison in Missouri that has the prisoners put on Hamlet, one act at a time. If that disadvantaged population can not only GET Shakespeare, in the original, but enough to please professional critics, surely "ordinary" people just trying to learn English are as capable?
Hi Mr. Ebert,
I myself am a frustrated second year teacher who majored in English Language & Literatre. This overwhelming insistance on teaching the "classics" (in any way, shape, or form) not only does the text a disservice, but in many circumstances, the students themselves. As a competent and qualified teacher, it would be nice to have more leeway in choosing what texts best serve my students' needs and ability levels. But for now, I suppose teaching Hamlet in the Hood will suffice-- at least adolescents can more readily relate. Word.
If that moronic book is for ESL students, it's a failure.
Teach them English first, then move them on to the classics.
If they cannot read The Great Gatsby and understand it, they need to stay in high school until they have the language skills to understand it. They will need those language skills in the adult world.
Dumbing down classics treats ESL students like morons and does not improve their language ability. If I were an ESL student, I'd be offended at having to read that moronic tripe (which misses the point of the novel).
Although apparently you have no opinion on the subject, perhaps annotated literature is one of the most practical ways to introduce some neophytes to original literature. Such notes can explain obscure words, phrases, and historical references without seriously impeding the reader's progress. The reader may consult or ignore the notes at will.
I read an annotated version of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" with notes by the late science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Besides explaining more arcane passages, Mr. Asimov added a welcome scientific commentary (e.g. the physical improbabilites of extreme dwarfism and gigantism) which enhanced my appreciation of the satire.
For some literary works (such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"), annotation may be indispensable.
In my experience as a student, teaching students (like myself) why to read rather than how to read is the important lesson missing from schools around the country. Most people my age don't appreciate the written word, which limits them from caring whether or not "The Great Gatsby" even exists.
Roger, your comment about Gatsby being less about the story than how the story is told (or something to that effect) precisely illustrates why the Robert Redford version of Gatsby was such an abomination. There were other problems as well, but Gatsby, I think, is generally an unfilmable novel. I've learned that Hollywood is trying again with Carey Mulligan as Daisy. This has disaster written all over it. It's like trying to film a poem, or a song.
As I reread your original post, I noted that you had thoughtfully provided a direct link to the full text (?) of the abridged Gatsby.
Out of curiosity, I clicked the link.
Guess what ... Websense is blocking it.
Here's their reason: Personal Network Backup and Storage.
Huh?
What the bloody hell does that mean, anyway?
Websense is also blocking (for my protection, no doubt) the entire Cracked.com site: Tasteless.
Okay, that one I get ... sort of.
Of course, that doesn't explain why I can still get all the political trash-talk sites, complete with comments that would make R. Lee Ermey blush, but still ...
I'm tempted to rehash other comments I've made on other threads about my own high school days (mid '60s) and the decline of reading ability I noted even back then, but that's old ground. I'd like to think I know better than to beat it to death.
Then again ...
I'm part of that Boomer generation (a term I've always hated), and those semi-affluent white kids I went to school with are now in their sixties, as I am. That means most of them became parents and later grandparents. As it happens, I didn't. But I do wonder how - or if - they were able to help their own kids (grandkids) with schoolwork when so many could barely handle their own back in the day.
I'm not trying to flatter myself; I'd be facing the same obstacles everybody else would, the technological ones especially.
I would like to believe that I could figure out some ways to use the new stuff, to make it work for me and whatever kids I might have had.
But that ship sailed long ago.
*sigh*
One more bit of business:
Jasper.Forde.com
That's his website. If you visit it, among many other amusing features, you can download his map of Fiction Island for free.
It's worth a close examination: many of its designations have a particular applicability to what we've been discussing here.
Also, it's just funny as all get out.
This is a reply to Todd Wilson, regarding the ESL value of these materials.
Here's my sticking point: why is this... thing... even referred to as "The Great Gatsby?" If Margaret Tarner simply changed the names, I promise you that nobody would ever recognize the story as "Gatsby." It wouldn't even be plagiarism, not with that much distance between Fitzgerald and Tarner. The Tarner adaptation is not merely simplified, it is sanitized, mushed down to a kind of flavorless paste -- devoid of any "meaningful context," and bereft of any of the value of the original.
In short, why do not Tarner and writers in this market not simply produce original material? Call it "Successful Larry," and maybe mention it was inspired by "The Great Gatsby," and everybody's happy. Right?
I can think of several cynical reasons why this is not the way things are done, but perhaps I am missing something.
While this particular book may be targeted at ESL students, I know that our elementary school library contains several similar books. E.g. a 100 page version of Moby Dick targeted at 4th grade readers. I don't know firsthand if similar books are at our middle/high schools.
There are many quality books written for readers of all different levels. I can find books that are enjoyable for me to read in the children's, young adult, or adult sections of the library. I don't see the point of taking a work of art in one medium (adult literature) and turning into a substandard work in a different medium (intermediate reader's fiction). A novel is more than simply a plot (to the extent the plot gets through in these simplified versions).
OTOH, maybe the easy-reader-novel strategy can be applied in other fields as well:
http://www.how-to-draw-cartoons-online.com/mona-lisa.html
We read Gatsby in high school. I admit that I didn't fully understand it at the time (which I chalk up more to the teacher rushing through it; and having to study it with a group of thoroughly uninterested teens sapped my own curiosity).
However, I never regretted being exposed to Gatsby. I may not have understood the nuances or the morals of the story, but I understood that it was a great novel, and I understood why. Something about it sunk in deepened my appreciation for literature and kept me reading other authors -- Vonnegut and John Irving became favourites in my teen years.
Anyone who thinks thinks that any story needs to be dumbed down or changed to reach another audience should write their own novel. Write novels that will gradually increase a reader's intelligence until they can get to Gatsby's level. That should be the goal. Dumbing down Gatsby is in essence a cheat.
Now in my 40s, having read this post, I want to return to Gatsby and know it for the first time. Thanks for this wonderful, piercing essay Roger.
Couldn't agree with you more. Even if one doesn't get every word, there's something sublime about just letting Fitzgerald's language roll over one's mind. By the way, the ending of Gatsby reminds me of the ending of A River Runs Through It. That ending would, undoubtedly, have been bastardized into something like, "And so we remember the people who have died and who have been a part of our lives," completely missing the elegiac aspects to the writing.
Amen Mr. Ebert. There is an elegance of language that can only be found in the older classics, reducing those works of art in such a way is a crime.
The existence of this book and the fact that it would be taught in any classroom reinforces my opinion of the great problem with the American public school system. It's an opinion I developed after being public school educated by a long series of inept, uncaring teachers.
There are a very large percentage of teachers who genuinely do not care. They don't like teaching, they don't like thinking, and they don't understand why anyone would like thinking. They assign books in class because that is what the standards for that grade level require them to assign. It is unlikely that they have actually read the book completely (or recently), and it is even more unlikely that they read the book critically. They will teach the basic plot of the book because that is what is easiest to teach. They will scratch the surface of the book to pick out the most obvious theme, as that is what is easiest to test on. In their minds, understanding literature is for intellectuals and academics, and most of the kids they are teaching will end up as office drones anyway. What's the point?
Again, I developed this out of my own experience; I had four different English teachers in my small town high school, and this described three of them. The fourth was the greatest teacher I had in high school. The less said about those who taught my other subjects, the better.
This explains the why novels such as James Stoddard's "The High House" and its sequel "The False House" are no longer in print. They were written as a tribute to AND IN THE STYLE OF such classic fantasy writers as C. S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany, and H. P. Lovecraft. This is to say that they assume an intelligent reader with a broad vocabulary who just might read parts of the tale aloud to further enjoy the texture and atmosphere the author's choice of words provides. It would be better for the abridgers to go all the way to a tweeted version for those who will read nothing else, and let those who wish to enjoy literacy to have the resources to do so. The abridgers should be required to justify their actions in the face of Professor Higgins' lecture to Eliza Doolittle Words are power; nobody should be limited to a single AA battery's worth.
Brandi, I thoroughly agree with you!
I worked for a Summer in the ESL section of my college library and came across a great number of these titles. I thought it was particularly disheartening to see that they had dumbed down some Joseph Conrad book (I can't remember which one).
The idea of a book written by a non-native speaker being simplified so that non-native speakers could read it seems to capture the problem pretty succinctly.
And that my friends, is one of the many, many reasons we homeschool. We get to read real books.
O God no what is happening, Roger? I am now looking at a proposal for a book "picking up where PRIDE AND PREJUDICE left off," where no one ever suspected that a certain Mr. "X" is in fact a vampire.
The Dumb Police have been given their orders. We are under attack. Take shelter. Don't trust anything but used book stores.
This book is meant for English language learners, not those for whom English is their first language. To explain to you the value of such abridgements in this space is impossible, as it would take an entire semester of Second-Language Acquisition theory. But I'll try to offer a couple of points:
1. While young adult and children's books do offer a limited vocabulary, their subject matter isn't appropriate for adults. Learning a language should involve a certain level of dignity, which is why classic books are often adapted in this way. Learners can become familiar with a culture's literature without being pandered to.
2. There is value to limiting the word counts in a book -- it's not an arbitrary thing, and it's not to disrespect the original authors of a book. There are only so many "new" words a learner can parse through context clues -- it's a lower percentage than you might think -- and these word limits are meant to empower readers rather than dumb things down for them.
I suggest you not only print an essay reevaluating your previous position but also apologize to Ms. Tarner. You have completely misinterpreted and mischaracterized the nature of her work, I'm sure causing her much negative publicity that is entirely undeserved.
I agree that butchering any novel is a sin. As Ebert says, what's the point? Why not just have someone tell you what the book is about if you're not going to read the original words?
But I think there's a bigger tragedy here, which is that this dumbed-down version is not going to excite anyone. Even kids who don't know what they're missing are not going to be excited by uninspired simplistic mush. Shouldn't the first goal of literacy be to help kids discover that reading is awesome? But who's going to be excited by stories that have had all life and personality sucked out of them?
And so rather than risk the possibility that even one student will be inspired by the original text, you'd rather ensure that none will?
Ebert: I believe any student could be inspired by the original text.
This isn't that surprising to me. A few years ago the Department of Education, I think, conducted a study that found that nearly a third of the residents of Los Angeles county were functionally illiterate. That's probably inflated because of the high number of residents there that don't speak English, but the numbers countrywide were something like one in five. Which sounds astonishing to me, but there you go.
Here's the link to the results actually. http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/stateestimates.aspx
Suppose you'd decided to take up Finnish, and the only two Finnish-language novels on hand were an abbreviated hi-lo version of Under The North Star, or the Finnish equivalent of Twilight. Do you really mean to tell me you'd rather read the latter?
The reality is that adult learners of English don't want to read young adult books, nor should they have to. You may choose to be outraged at their desire to learn English in a way that doesn't insult them, but the Macmillan Readers exist because reality supersedes your outrage.
It's also not as though ELLs (English Language Learners) are so stupid they'll think they're reading the "real" book.
Roger, you mentioned that Macmillan's Upper Level books -- they are actually called Macmillan Upper Intermediate Macmillan Readers. And although they offer a wider vocabulary of 2,200 words, you will be horrified to learn (if you don't know already) that they have not been spared the butchery of The Great Gatsby. In fact Macmillan's product line seems to revolve around butchery.
The Upper Intermediate Macmillan Readers include such classics as Moby Dick. Here are the first few sentences from the real thing:
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation."
And here are the first few sentences from the Upper Intermediate Macmillan Reader version of Moby Dick:
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, on a wet and miserable November day, I decided to get on a ship and sail to different parts of the world. There was nothing to interest me on shore and I was feeling irritable and bad-tempered. Whenever I feel like this, I know that it is time for me to go to sea again."
Yes, these are intended for English language learners. You asked why teaching English requires the butchery of classics, and why ESL students couldn't learn English by reading young adult novels that don't require butchery. I have the answer. Because those young adult novels are published by other publishers. And so Macmillan has two options: hire their own writers to write new works of fiction, or hire their own writers to butcher existing works in the public domain.
And so, given those two options, why did they go the butchery route? Possibly because it's easier and cheaper to modify an existing story. But I suspect the real reason is that schools/students aren't going to buy titles they've never heard of, but will buy The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, etc., even knowing that they are butchered.
If I assume those popular "cliff notes" also fall under this post, am I correct? If so, I must confess, I've used those notes more than a couple times. Yes, now I think back, and I've failed myself from getting exposed and learn to appreciate classics.
However, I also think that I chose this one because it was simply easier, and faster, to get it over with and get a passing grade. See, I think the problem is that I could use these abbreviated notes and still pass. Teachers are asking plots and facts in the books to test students, instead drawing them into intellectual discussions. Should they asked questions beyond facts, maybe involve some artistic or philosophical analysis and response, then I wouldn't have been able to "get by" by just going through the notes...
Yes, I know I was a lazy kiddo. But teachers were the same.
As an adult learner of Danish, I tried to improve my reading skills. I read original "easy" books for adult learners, extended my reading skills, but also my knowledge of contemporary Denmark, and gradually I read at a slightly higher level. I worked my way towards the easy version of "Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow" and was really pleased to do it. I also tried to read Harry Potter, and other YA books that I had already read in English. I got absolutely nowhere. The style, idiom, and vocab of books aimed at twelve year olds was completely beyond me. No careful work with a dictionary every third word was going to make it an effective way of learning to read _even though I already knew the text_.
Oh, and everyone saying "You can't learn through dumbed-down originals", I assume your primary school teacher plopped you down with a copy of "Ulysses" and you just got on with it. Or did you maybe learn to read English through a series of increasingly more difficult and targeted texts until you were able to strike out on your own?
I never read Great Gatsby, but yes, those excerpts do have a certain flowery flow and is very well-written. That's not to say the simplified, explanatory versions don't have a purpose. Sometimes it's beneficial to have it "translated" for those of us who don't understand the metaphors, motifs, or figures of expression even though we can technically read it (because some Americans really can't relate to the context).
Imagine if the American Pie movies were directed by Kenneth Branagh. I went to college, yet I'd still probably wouldn't be able to relate to any of what those American Pie kids did, and as an Asian American, can't even relate to the John Cho character.
However, that's not to say that the underlying themes are too hard to understand, as I see it, Jim is the main character and we see his almost "realistic" transformation into manhood by the time we get to American Wedding. All the Americana could be overlooked if the viewers are just watching these movies to see boobage and crunkage. My point still being that if the viewer doesn't know that American Pie is trying to get at the heart of what it means (or thinks it should be) to grow up in America, then the viewer will just interpret it as a bunch of partying slackers.
Jim's dad really grounds it all, imo. The pedagogical figure points those of us in darkness towards the correct light.
As others have stated, this version is not for everyone. That fact is slightly implied; you would be hard pressed to walk into a bookstore and find a Macmillan Readers version of a text lumped in with the other books. It is set apart because, well, it is not the original.
This is a tool for educators, plain and simple, and it is not meant to be the only tool either. In the forms that I have seen it used (I formerly worked as a volunteer for my local literacy center, and we had these books on hand), it is merely a benchmark. The beginner is read as a first step, the intermediate as a second, the upper as a third, and finally--hopefully--the full text, in all of its symbolic and emotional glory, is the a last step in the process.
These tools are not meant to be used as a way to admire art, because simply put, they are not art. They do not contain the original ideas in a "dumbed down" fashion; for the most part, they do not contain the original ideas at all. Young adult novels, for all their use of cheap entertainment, have no place for the adult learners, and cannot be used as such. The teacher, therefore, has a choice to make: he or she can use the tool to teach, or he can wait for an artistic piece using 1,600 words and never teach at all.
If the goal is to appreciate the art of this book, then for some people these tools are a necessity. Without them, the progression to actually being able to understand the language in Fitzgerald's masterpiece would be slower, more difficult, and bogged down by self-doubt. But these tools--not "works"--provide the reader with a stepping stone that could eventually bring them to comprehension of that green light--which, oddly enough, is part of what I believe the book symbolizes.
I'd be so pissed if I saw that cover on bookdepository, bought it and found out it was a "retelling". Heck, bought two book reviews instead of the books themselves because of misleading covers.
You're right about difficult words. English isn't my native language and every other page I'll find a word I don't understand. Usually you get the meaning from the context. And if a word is repeated I'll look it up in my dictionary. But each time I finish a book (and I go through maybe 20 English books a year) my English will have improved a little bit.
Children shouldn't be given a dumbed down version of a book. If they're unable to read them, give them something simpler to read. I also agree with Greg Esres. There's little use in forcing students to read books they don't enjoy. Let them read King & Crichton. Hopefully that will get them into reading and they'll find out about the classics later. Forcing them to read the classics first might give them a lifelong hate for reading.
I personally loathed the Great Gatsby, mostly because it had been forced upon me in High School instead of just being a book I chose to read (it's amazing how much that one factor can lower one's opinion of a book), but it doesn't deserve this.
Yes, it may be an easier version for those who do not know English as a first language, but why? Why should our great literary books be "dumbed" down? When I took literature courses in college I had to take a Spanish literature course and the books I had to read by Gabriel Garcia Marquez were not dumbed down for me. When I took the course of the Divine Inferno by Dante, those books, the entire inferno, were not dumbed down for me. So please, Mr. Ebert, explain to me, why, in this day and age when everything should be equal, should our literary works be dumbed down for everyone else?
Butchered classics vs. young adult novels vs. something else...
Don't we always hear about English language learners who learned English by watching TV? Doing an internet search just now, I find someone recommending the following types of television shows for learning English: weather reports, cartoons, children's shows, game shows. The general idea is that you want shows that are very visual and that use the same words show after show.
Another internet search finds advice about books, which includes the emphatic advice to "Don't try to read 'the classics." Instead, start with short stories and comics. The articles author says he/she started learning German by reading Winnie the Pooh.
So for those who say that English language learners would rather read a simplified classic than a young adult novel... Frankly, it seems to me that reading things that are readily available at your ability level would be the easiest way to learn, whether it's children's picture books, comic books, or whatever. The cliche you always see regarding illiterate adults who are learning to read is that they start with "See Spot run" books, not butchered classics! I don't think anyone who's learning a foreign language would be offended by reading material intended for kids. They know they're learning. What better way to learn than the same way kids learn? And I'll bet you anything a well-written kids book is more entertaining than a dumbed-down classic.
If this has already been mentioned, please excuse my comment - too many previous comments to go through! I completely agree that there's no place for a junk-food version of "The Great Gatsby," though I note the previous comment that the books are meant for English language learners. Good plan, but maybe stay away from dumbing down the classics. The learners will enjoy it more when they are able to read and understand the original.
Anyway, my original point was....I'm not sure it was necessary to identify the author by name. She was just doing her job. You have so many readers, Roger; it seems unfair for this person to get the negative publicity.
They should at least have the decency to retitle it "The Middling Gatsby."
I'm a high school graduate and what is this... I don't even
Let's say there's a brilliant film reviewer. He writes about a movie, and his piece is unbelievably well-written, moving, passionately argued--really great stuff. As close to perfection as film criticism comes.
Then this brilliant film reviewer goes on television to talk about this same movie. He spouts three or four canned sentences, points he made in the written review.
Would anyone be outraged by that? Or would we all simply recognize that in film criticism, there are different mediums; different audiences; different markets; and that no harm was done to the original written review by dumbing it down for a wider television audience?