Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [77]
I would like to begin with a quote from Fitzgerald that is central to our understanding, not just of Gatsby but of Fitzgerald’s whole body of work, I began. We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we’ve mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion. Nick disapproves of all the people with whom Gatsby is in one way or another involved, but he does not pass the same judgment on Gatsby. Why? Because Gatsby possesses what Fitzgerald, in his story “Absolution,” calls the “honesty of imagination.”
At this point, Mr. Nyazi’s hand shot up. “But Gatsby is even more dishonest than all the others,” he squealed. “He earns his money through unlawful activities and he consorts with criminals.”
In a sense you are right, I said. Gatsby fakes everything, even his own name. All the other characters in the novel have more stable positions and identities. Gatsby is constantly being made and remade by others. At all of his parties, most of his guests speculate in conspiratorial whispers about who he is and the fabulous or awful deeds he has committed. Tom sets out to investigate his true identity and Nick himself is curious about the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Yet what Gatsby inspires is curiosity tinged with awe. The reality of Gatsby’s life is that he is a charlatan. But the truth is that he is a romantic and tragic dreamer, who becomes heroic because of his belief in his own romantic delusion.
Gatsby cannot tolerate the shabbiness of his life. He has an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness,” and “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” He cannot change the world, so he re-creates himself according to his dream. Let’s see how Nick explains this: “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
Gatsby’s loyalty was to his reinvented self, which saw its fulfillment in Daisy’s voice. It was to the promises of that self that he remained faithful, to the green light at the end of the dock, not a shabby dream of wealth and prosperity. Thus the “colossal illusion” is born for which he sacrifices his life. As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
Gatsby’s loyalty to Daisy is linked to his loyalty to his imagined idea of himself. “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .”
The dream, however, remains incorruptible and it extends beyond Gatsby and his personal life. It exists in a broader sense in the city, in New York itself, and the East, the harbor that once became the dream of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and is now the mecca of Midwesterners, who came to it in search of a new life and thrills. While the city evokes enchanted dreams and half-promises, in reality it harbors shabby love affairs and relationships such as Tom and Myrtle’s. The city, like Daisy, has in it a promise, a mirage that when reached becomes debased and corrupted. The city is the link between Gatsby’s dream and the American dream. The dream is not about money but what he imagines he can become. It is not a comment on America as a materialistic country but as an idealistic one, one that