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WHAT IS LOVE
A misplaced emotion. A futile attempt to unveil an irretrievable youthful passion from the shadow of money, power, and glory. An ashen fantasy, eclipsed by the universal commensalism, painted rosy by unrequited dreams. An evaded acknowledgement to the fading traits and the newly-fostered habits. A sigh.
THE EMOTION
The love between Gatsby and Daisy is doomed from the start. An unbecoming soldier without any trappings, a Southern belle rooted in magnanimous townhouses, the path of these two would hardly cross had it not been Gatsby’s seducing charisma, offering Daisy an unfamiliar sense of security.
On the first glance, their love seems to be rooted on some rather plausible ground. Gatsby has an unique magic in his eyes to reassure people, to comfort people, to connect deeply with people. Once being glanced upon, the person, especially for a romantic and dreamy girl like Daisy, would be forever unable to relinquish this privilege. As remarked by Jordan, “It is in a way that every song girls wants to be looked at some time.” Caraway has described this look and smile as such:
It faced—or seem to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
What is contained in this smile? A cordial fondness, a complete trust, a reassurance that there is nothing but pure honesty between the two individuals. With such a look, Daisy for an instant has forgotten to ask his address, and thereby mistook Gatsby as someone from the same social hierarchy as she is.
Daisy presents to Gatsby a bestirring sensual voice, an illustration of the higher hierarchy, and an imagination of what the life of the rich resembles. Daisy is a embodiment of all the symbols of the life she is entitled to: the piano, the barbecue after dark, the cool bedrooms and the redolent activities in the corridors, the shining motorcars and crispy dewy waterlilies, and the unrestrained love. These trappings are what Gatsby, penniless, has been dreaming since changing his name to Jay Gatsby.
What fun they have had! The autumn night, the heartbeat, the ever-nearing lips, the kiss, the incarnation. Wed in this instant is his passion and her breath. This is the last fun they have had ever, for it took place before the painful recognition of their difference in social statues, before the broiling quest of Gatsby, before the impassion wedding action of Daisy. Back then, they are still kids acting from adrenaline. No money power glory, no mortal consideration, no Eastern commensalism, come to spoil the play.
In a sense, Daisy loved Gatsby for his sense of security, and Gatsby adored Daisy for the wealthy world she represents. Yet again, the security is founded on nothing but promises. With Daisy being a impatient belle of the South, she couldn’t wait forever for Gatsby to gather his gears. In her isolated artificial Garden of Eden, she couldn’t imagine any horror taking place in Argonne or Normandy, nor patiently have faith in a rags-to-riches story of Gatsby. Her mind is domineered by an unquestionable practicality, which impels her to choose the best mating option in the nearest vicinity, both temporally and spatially.
Therefore, though intense, their emotions are misplaced from the start. Gatsby aims for the symbols Daisy represents rather than the person she is, and Daisy is too inexperienced to understand the weight carried in such a character.
THE ATTEMPT
For years upon reminiscing to the redolent green light, Gatsby has created an artificial wonderland. His mansion has achieved to magnify his sullen anticipations made when he was a penniless soldier, and he is hoping that one day, Daisy would accidentally bump into his orgies. But Daisy, being a nice girl with a renowned reputation of being sober, never crossed the bay.
At first, it baffles me of why Gatsby has continued his quest for Daisy even after harvesting the life he had coveted. He has his party, his reputation, his orgy, his wealth. Where is Daisy placed in this card game? But, it is evident that Gatsby is not content. During his own parties, where the pantry is a feast of countless dead animals and the setup costs countless dead president, where everyone present are trying to soak themselves drunk to the marrow, he is detached. He is the sober shadow waving his hand in a perpetual goodbye, the solitude back view watching the green light across the bay. It is not simply Daisy that he’s craving for. Going a slight deeper into subtleties, he yearns to experience again—this time with wealth and looks and dignity—his first love. Caraway has made some obscure comments on this topic:
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 has 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 thing was arguably the pure passion to another soul, barring all rational considerations. Unsurprisingly, he failed. Both Gatsby and Daisy have gone too far from their naivety in Tennessee, one bedeviled by the countless symbols he placed on his mate, another grew accustomed to the veneer of pretentiousness in the East. Daisy had exclaimed that the best thing a girl can be in the world is a pretty little fool, being pushed by the tide. If the tide appoints her to be pretentious, to overlook Tom’s infidelity, to act silly, then she’d be obliged to play by its rule. Nothing could possibly pry out the old Daisy, affectionate, honest to herself. The Eastern world she lives in is callous and indifferent, ignoring while fake smiling to anyone who is irrelevant to you, calling a big party intimate because no one would come to talk to you, believing that money and power alone can suffice all human needs. It is a commensalism world God is paralleled with the eyes of Doctor T.J. Ecklburg, a deserted advertisement.
Personally, I believe that Daisy has shut her auditory system the night she was married to Tom. Rather than letting the negativities come to bug her, it should be easier to subsist under their iron rules and be a believer. She might not have sensed the drastic changes taking place on her. Therefore, she is appalled by Gatsby’s party. Not because she is unaccustomed to this form of orgiastic revel, but because she suddenly sees what cruel factors have shaped her too for the past years. This sudden recognition is the awful yet simple awakening that she had failed to understand.
She has tried, just as Gatsby has done, to reverse the time. The moment she tears towards the beautiful shirts, she might have thought that her childhood simplicity is back. But no matter how much foxtrot, how many times she sneaks to Gatsby’s mansion, how many cocktails they had together, she is changed forever. When Gatsby and Tom are in New York fighting over Daisy, she chooses to sink deeper to herself, and let the men fight over some dead dreams. She left after she accidentally killed Myrtle instead of staying by Gatsby, because upon weighing the childhood passion against her own welfare, she’d be flitting to desert the former.
It has taken Gatsby years of time and boxes of accumulated wealth to understand that the bestirring magic in Daisy’s voice is backed by money. It’d be impossible for Gatsby to retrieve his uncontaminated passion by dating Daisy. Time is all going too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knows that he had lost the freshest and the best part, forever. The best part of his love, his companion, his life. They have all been profoundly changed, corrupted, their old traits obliterated.
Indeed, it is silly of Gatsby to still guard Daisy even after understanding the essence of their existence. He could have lived. But what would happen, even if he had lived? Arguably, nothing. The pillar of his life has crumbled, leaving a shattered ashen ground glittering with the broken bits of his anticipation, leaving him tearing open and witnessing their own fatal blunders. He would have been miserable even if he had lived.
THE FANTASY
I picture their town with a desert landscape: scorching sun, ashen road, dust hovering in the air, paper men moving with Brownian motion, thing happening unheeded to, people crying and laughing and celebrating and dying without being glanced upon, a silent riot, paralyze, blank.
There is a hole in people’s heart. Words in the street say that only materials can fill the hole and cure the disease, so we haul for them, until the accumulated to such a degree that they ferment to a swelling mansion. But the hole is tearing up our bodies, devouring our flesh, sucking out all emotions. We drink and party and revel, for the anesthesia effect. The hole gets ever larger and our orgy ever more blinding. We would die without it.
One day we die, no one knows when, where, how. They carry our bodies and dump them into the trashcan with other orange peels and lamb chops. We become ashen apparitions drifting in mid-air, thinking of our unfinished quest to fill the hole, lamenting the deficiency of materials. The truth is fake, the materials unreal. We know no love, but it would be nice to have it. We have forgotten how we became this way. Everything we touch crumbles, and we’d laugh about it. Oh, such fun.
THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT & THE SIGH
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Caraway’s statement had been obscure to me. I understood the difference between the affectionate West and the indifferent East, it eluded me then why Tom and Daisy were all listed as symbolical sense of Westerners. One explanation can pave the way: the corrupting power of the entire commensalism society has changed all of the original Westerners callous and dishonest.
One astonishing example is Caraway. Unlike the ubiquitous narrator I had envisioned him to be, Caraway experienced a subtle transit in the course of the book. But without the psychoanalysis done on others (apparently, Caraway is not courageous enough to face himself), this point is rather hard to discern. At the start of the book, Caraway brands himself as one of the few honest man his has ever met. Honesty entails the ambitious goals as to stay true to his own emotions, and never “be nice to others” while stealthily cursing them underneath. Caraway had loathed this particular act of shamming, especially evident when he’s first invited to Tom and Daisy’s for dinner.
Yet gradually, he has learnt to conceal himself. He starts to call up Jordan, leave her a blank hope, and then hung up the phone in the middle of a conversation. He’d promise to call, but never show up. The honesty is gradually leaving, but he still reckons that “he is too old to deceive and call it an honor.” By saying this, he is deceiving himself. Corruption of the East has its power.
Caraway manages to recognize his gradually corrupting mentality. Unlike Gatsby who would persist in sick or death, Caraway fled. Away from the sickening environment, back to the cordial hometown.
This mentality is thoroughly depicted in the last paragraph of the entire book, something that has eluded me for long.
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 gras 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 orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes 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.
Gatsby had thought that the green light, representing Daisy, is the remedy for his sickness. But he didn’t know that both himself and Daisy had been changed drastically by the metropolitan society, and the only place hoarding the potion was the past. The countryside in Tennessee, which only subsists now in memories, only that can help Gatsby.
Gatsby has placed the wrong bet. Similarly, the misguided his emotion to a wrong direction. While the quest for Daisy and materials can temporarily fill the vacancy in his heart, it’s of no avail. The pursuing is busy, but the pursued is tired and disappointed. One fine morning, the one will find that things are not as the way he/she has planned to be. And then what?
Gatsby chooses to persist, and he ends in death. But Caraway chooses to rewind the journey, to go back home, to start from the place where nothing is corrupted. Indeed, it’s a chance to nurture love again, hoping to evade the past mistakes.
But nobody would ever know his fate, and I call this uncertainty a sigh.
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