Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [78]
“ ‘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 aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’ ”
Shall I read on? Please continue until the end of the next paragraph.
“ ‘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.’ ”
He could be dishonest in life and he could lie about himself, but one thing he could not do was to betray his own imagination. Gatsby is ultimately betrayed by the “honesty of his imagination.” He dies, for in reality no such person can survive.
We, the readers, like Nick, both approve and disapprove of Gatsby. We are more certain of what we disapprove of than of what we admire, for, like Nick, we are caught in the romantic implications of his dream. His story reverberates with the tales of the pioneers who came to the shores of America in search of a new land and a new future and of their dream, already tainted with the violence that had gone into making it real.
Gatsby never should have tried to possess his dream, I explained. Even Daisy knows this; she is as much in love with him as she can ever be and yet she cannot go against her own nature and not betray him.
One autumn night they stop at a place where “the sidewalk was white with moonlight. . . . Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”
Now, could you kindly turn to page 8, read from “No—Gatsby . . .”
“ ‘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.’ ”
For Gatsby, access to wealth is a means to an end; it is a means to the possession of his dream. That dream removes from him the power to differentiate between imagination and reality—of “foul dust” he tries to create a fairyland. His reveries for a while “provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”
So now, let us review all the points we have discussed. Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man’s love for a woman, a woman’s betrayal of that love. But it