Sacred dreams are scary to touch
The Great Gatsby, limerence, and postponing things that are more meaningful
If you had a dream
and it was within reach,
would you grab it
or withdraw, too scared to touch it?
Writing stories is important to me. I’ve been doing it since I was small, ever since I learned to write, probably. At first, it was exhilarating that my dreams could come true in this way. But then the dream got too big, and I stopped.
In love with a dream
In The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway hears a lot about his neighbor Gatsby before he sees him for the first time. Nick lives in a small house in West Egg next to a mansion that is lit up every night and hosts grand parties that seem to draw everyone in New York. He knows that the mansion belongs to Gatsby but he has never seen him. And then one night, he sees Gatsby alone on the dock, staring at a green light across the bay that separates West Egg from East Egg.
I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
It’s revealed later that Gatsby is in love with Nick’s cousin Daisy. But Daisy is already married to Tom Buchanan and living in a mansion on East Egg. The green light is a signal glowing on their dock. The novel is about Gatsby’s extravagant quest to win back Daisy’s love. Sounds like a dream of a love story. Except there’s something sinister going on.
Gatsby doesn’t just want Daisy back. He wants to reconstruct the dream that he had in his mind. He wants everything to be perfect. Born in poverty and somehow propelling himself to a life of wealth through daring and risk-taking, Gatsby now has money, but he doesn’t have class and acceptance from the high society that he aims to be a part of. Daisy isn’t just a girl he loves; she’s a symbol of that world he wants to belong to, and winning her back is his way of gaining entry.
The light across the dock isn’t distant from Gatsby by accident – in a way, he’s scared to reach out and touch it. Gatsby never reaches out to Daisy directly. He reaches out to Daisy’s childhood friend Jordan and opens up to her about his love. Then he invites Nick to a party where he tries to befriend him. Taking Nick out to lunch in New York, Gatsby tries very hard to convince him that he’s the real deal, showing him bravery medals and photographs of his time at Oxford. After all this, after five years of waiting, all he wants is for Nick to host tea at his house and to invite Daisy over. Nick is touched that such a wealthy man would stoop to this level.
But is this stooping?
No. Gatsby is constructing an experience. He’s carefully asking for the thing for which he’s least likely to be rejected. With that foot in the door, he tries to construct an evening of joy. After a cozy tea party at Nick’s, Gatsby invites Daisy to his mansion and shows her the splendor of his world. He smothers her with expensive shirts and gets someone to play live music. What starts out as an intimate reunion veers out of control as Gatsby tries to force-fit it into his idea of the dream he lost. At one point, Gatsby sees the green light across the bay again.
Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close to a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
With Daisy by his side, Gatsby has both achieved his dream and lost it at the same time. Later in the same chapter, Nick observes:
Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
Limerence
What Gatsby has isn’t love. It’s limerence. It’s what Werther had for Charlotte. It’s what Snape felt for Lily Potter. It isn’t unrequited love or one-sided tragic infatuation, it’s one step beyond that. According to psychologist Nicky Hayes:
It is this unfulfilled, intense longing for the other person which defines limerence, where the individual becomes "more or less obsessed by that person and spends much of their time fantasising about them."
The love isn’t about the person anymore, it’s about your idea of the person. Gatsby doesn’t reveal himself completely to Daisy because love requires vulnerability and showing her the messy parts of himself could lead her to reject him . By putting her on a pedestal and showing her only the flashy, new money, cultured image that he has created, he pushes all his secrets into the closet. How did Gatsby get rich? What was his past? Who was he before he met Daisy? He doesn’t even give space for these questions to pop up, because he wants to erase this side of himself.
He isn’t in love with Daisy. He worships Daisy. Just watch the language he uses when he reminisces about the last time he met her:
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… 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…. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Gatsby’s language in Daisy’s presence is deliriously religious.
What Gatsby is in love with is the version of himself that he sees reflected in Daisy’s eyes. He hates his mediocre past and the feeling that he doesn’t belong, and he views her as a crucible for this catalysis. She is a mirror to show a perfect version of himself, and he doesn’t want to see the possibility that this mirror could have defects, because then it’ll show him a distorted version of himself.
Sometimes, the dream isn’t a person, it’s your idea of yourself.
Why I stopped publishing fiction
I liked to write fiction. I wanted to be a writer. When I thought about the future, I imagined myself writing stories, seeing my name on the spines of hardcover books stacked on shelves in Higginbothams, hearing my lines become a part of culture like “the first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.” It wasn’t an idle dream either, I was writing a lot at one point and sharing my stuff online. Then I stopped.
I’ve been thinking about why I stopped. Sure, self-judgment was one reason. I’m embarrassed to share the stories I wrote in college now – they were full of ideas, but amateurish in their execution. But I always knew that, and I was okay with it on some level. Now I have drafts that are much better sitting on my computer waiting to be edited and submitted, not because they’re embarrassing, but because they have the potential to be good. They’re too precious to just submit to a magazine online. I care about writing fiction so much that I’d rather not do it at all, because my identity as a fiction-writer is more important to me than putting out the stories.
I don’t want the dream of how I imagined becoming a writer to make contact with reality, because it might be disappointing. It’s like Gatsby’s green light.
It’s only fiction and poetry and the “creative stuff” that I make that I have this problem with. I’ve been writing a newsletter every week for three months. There was a time I used to write movie reviews every week, and one month where I wrote a movie review every day. I wasn’t so precious with what I was writing because there was no dream there – it was a low-pressure activity where I thought I wasn’t doing anything especially creative, and I never imagined that I would be known for doing that sort of stuff or that it would lead anywhere. The opportunities that resulted from that surprised me – in a good way – and I never paused to think about where I was going. That lack of analysis-paralysis is what’s missing with fiction.
You’d think that awareness of this problem would solve the problem. So far, it hasn’t. What it has done is make me question why I care about fiction so much while not caring about stream-of-consciousness blogging, or at least be more okay with the end result being imperfect. Maybe it’s because my fiction has always been more personal in nature, and I pour more of my feelings and flaws and fire into characters who display vulnerability that I avoid sharing in other ways – and misrepresenting these characters and emotions feels like a self-betrayal in some sense. But the end result of that is being so wary of misrepresentation that there is no representation.
Hmm… That’s where the train of thought stops for now. I’ll pick it up some other time.
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