Gatz, a production by the Elevator Repair Service theater group, is coming for the first time to New York. It’s an adaption, of sorts, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” but unlike most other Gatsby adaptations, it’s generating a positive buzz. The piece itself is a whopping six hours long because each word of the original novel is spoken. Reviewers praise the imaginative approach: an actor as Nick Carraway reads out loud from the actual book in a very ordinary office setting as other officemates trickle in and adopt the dialogue, slowly easing into character. In effect, writes Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, “Rather than dramatizing ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ‘Gatz’ dramatizes the experience of reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ and in so doing delivers the book back to its author.”
My first thought was how Scott Shepherd, the actor who reads the novel on stage, must have internalized the book by now. Shepherd knows “The Great Gatsby” by heart, and The New Yorker article specifies that he can place any three consecutive words in the novel, and continue to recite by rote indefinitely.
Pedagogy used to rely in large part on the memorization of literature, especially poetry, but in my own childhood education the only thing I remember memorizing is the times table (and poorly, at that). I was disconcerted, then, in a poetry workshop a few years ago, when the professor required the class to memorize and recite several poems over the course of the semester.
To prepare, I would scrawl the lines of the poem over and over again in my notebook. Curiously, any cohesive feeling the poem originally inspired in me would evaporate over the course of such tedium. As when I stare at a word too long, the associated meaning devolved to a mere letter-shape, or a sound to plant in my brain. I was reminded of this process by my actor brother, who copies and recopies his lines to memorize them. To help him learn them, we run through the script in monotone, passionless voices, until the lines are stuck in his brain. He says the emotion comes later.
Poem-memorizing is similar. Once I had repeated the words until they no longer meant anything, I found the poems had taken some internal residence in me. Meaning was recast, newly felt.
Flipping through the pages of my old notebook recently, I discovered the series of pages on which I had scribed Ted Hughes’ poem “Full Moon and Little Frieda.” Though my memorization of it had long decayed, reading it, especially in my own handwriting, felt strange, like the recollection of a dream that manifests in hazy d??ja vue.
The poem’s images are visually arresting in themselves, but the “cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket,” the “spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch” felt personal, as if Hughes had extricated sights from my own childhood. Hughes wrote, “Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm/ wreaths of breath,” and I can practically hear hooves, feel the exhale of soft, wet muzzles, hot air rising like smoke. I read through the poem a few times. Then I closed my eyes and knew the words.