Amana Marie Le Blanc
Literature 5535: American Romanticism
Craig White
December 1, 2000

The Recuperative Loss of "Winter Dreams:" Modern Romance

In the traditional Romance narrative, there is some desirable object whose consummation is the driving preoccupation of the text’s protagonist. The aspiration of the Romantic hero is to capture that elusive object that will, nevertheless, consistently out-strip him. These heroes are intimately acquainted with the pain of the loss and suffer deeply for feeling so acutely. However, loss itself, is essential to the equation and is, in fact, a large portion of what establishes the thing as desirable.

In the texts of traditional Romanticism the individual has preeminence, and his or her subjective psychological experience with the loss in question is the major concern. The realization that Romantic subject’s drama plays itself out against the backdrop of a system in which the value of a thing is directly proportionate to its scarcity, is the first step beyond traditional Romanticism. Realist texts are conscious of the shaping influence that the socio-political has on the individual’s ideology – They are consciousness of the impact of Capitalism. The industrialization of that era (late 19^th, early 20^th century), and the subsequent commodification of everything, creates the crisis of self. The central questions that arises in these contexts concerns the extent to which the individual can be perceived as individual, capable of imaginative aspirations outside the economic determinism of his society. The central question to Realist authors is: Are we dealing with the loss of actualized selves or merely cogs, and if the latter is the case, what have we lost?

With this question still relatively unanswered, Scott Fitzgerald’s "Winter Dreams" moves us into Modernism. This Modernist text retains echoes of Romantic ideology while simultaneously being extremely conscious of the influence of the social environment. Here we are operating in a decidedly liminal sphere. Fitzgerald masterfully weaves this intricate web whose lines are taut with the tension of the forces between which it is extended. He is quoted as having said of his celebrated The Great Gatsby (of which "Winter Dreams" is an early version): "That’s the whole burden of the novel – the loss of illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory" (Preface, Gatsby XV). Referring back to the pivotal Realist question, Fitzgerald seems to be indicating that what is as stake is the system that validates our notions of loss. The illusions that "give such color to the world" have allowed us to passionately bemoan the loss of isolated actualized selves, but strip away the illusion of the solipsistic being that is utterly impervious to social forces and one it left with nothing to bemoan.

There is a passion in "Winter Dreams’" protagonist Dexter Green that clings to the dream because "The thing was deep in him. He was too strong, too alive for it to die lightly" (2136). And yet, of his love for the alluringly elusive Judy Jones, we are told: "It excited him that many men had loved her. It increased her value in his eyes [my italics]" (N 2131). In these two statements we see the narrator’s stylistic shift between an admiration for Dexter as a Byronic-hero-type (free, imaginative, and individual), to an awareness that his sentiment (his "self" in a manner of speaking) has disappeared into consumer culture (i.e. the supply and demand for Judy). I will examine the dialogue between Romanticism and Realism in Fitzgerald’s Modernist tale as well as look forward and consider the implications, or the outcome, of this dialogue (between Romanticism and Realism) - postmodernism.

Romanticism’s self, as distinguished from the Realist’s self, is the independent, raw, imaginative, presence that has agency within his sphere. The Realist self is the agent of his social environment and in bound its the causal determinations. An investigation into the character Judy Jones would, itself, be a comprehensive study into the interplay between the Romantic self and Realism’s self as a socio-economic construct. Judy is a unique and wholly individualized self in that she projects a sublime beauty that is emblematically indicative of the soul’s infinite "capacity for wonder" (Fitzgerald, Gatsby 189). She is "inexpressibly lovely" and "feverishly" vital, but there is, in her sensuous "ungodly" lips and "passionate eyes," something fundamentally disingenuous. Her smile is all at once "radiant, blatantly artificial – convincing" (2126). Therefore one cannot speak of Judy Jones, the Romantic self, without reference to her social self.

The question that arises then, is which part of Judy Jones is the pure unadulterated self, which is an artificial product of society, and why. How did Judy become commodified? Fitzgerald seems to answer this question by referring to the structure of our consumer system – Capitalism itself. Very early in the story the narrator tells us that Dexter "wanted not the association with glittering thing and glittering people – he wanted the glittering things themselves" (N 2128). It is, indeed, the impetuous grasping for "glittering things" that drives Capitalist economy. And yet, things "glitter" for us because we have always already associated them with a distinctive self. Regarding Judy’s "radiant" house, we are told: "what gave it an air of breathless intensity was the sense that it was inhabited by Judy Jones" (2131).

Having thus correlated the thing to the self, it is no great cognitive leap to relate to the self as a thing. In as much as Judy breathes life into things, she also becomes enmeshed in the things and becomes a thing herself. Thought, as the definitive locus of the Romantic self, seems to collapse into the thing. Regarding Judy’s acuity, Fitzgerald’s narrator tells us that "there was very little mental quality in any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest degree of her physical loveliness [my italics]" (N 2133). She has become yet another "glittering thing" that Dexter (and others) yearn to consume. And after so much consumption (as product, a thing, in a consumer culture) "she had come, in self defense, to nourish herself from within" (N 2134). Commodities have a purpose to serve – they are to be consumed – beyond that there is no interaction. Consider this rather absurd, but illustrative, proposition: Does one typically consider the feelings or "mental quality" of her car? If my car should require mental nourishment, it would certainly be wise a move on its part to learn "to nourish herself from within."

The great German idealist philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, works with the interrelationship of the thing to the person as the development of consciousness beyond an internalized state toward the social. He says:

This is a radical argument for the notion that one individual can only distinguish other individuals in the world as they project their will on to possessions, things. In as much as a person possesses things, they essentially define him. Not surprisingly, in more modern philosophical schools of thought (Heideggerians and Levinasians) often perceive Hegel as the great Capitalist philosopher.

Dexter, however, does not conceptually link his voracious hunger for things with his craving for Judy as a thing to be consumed, and is, therefore, profoundly "disturbed" by her artificiality, her thingness. He is bothered by the fact that "her smile could have no root in mirth, or even amusement." Yet, he continues to consume "No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up [and by extension, the thing that she is] could cure his illusion as to her desirability" (N 2134). The extent to which Dexter is unable to relate to Judy as other than a thing, is a clear indication of his own personal implication in a commodity system as contrasted to the actualized "self."

That Dexter loves Judy is incontrovertible, but at some point in the course of his obsession he has confounded subject with object and he can no longer separate the two (or perhaps, as Hegel might argue, Dexter can only relate to subject though objects).

There is "feeling" in the house for Dexter, and bedrooms personify activity and romance. The house breathes with the nostalgia of human presence and in the end all these things become "more real" to him than the human’s themselves (and humans become more synthetic). One can see this tendency even more clearly in another passage in which the narrator contrasts Dexter’s attitude toward Irene to his feelings toward Judy. In this beautifully poignant passage both woman are systematically dissected and reduced to detached objects.

Here we see that Dexter, in his deep-seated longing for that which he cannot perceive as other than a "thing," is implicated in "thinghood." The "thing" gets "deep in him."

The desire and loss cycle of Romanticism is by no means eradicated in this Realist consumer nation inhabited by metamorphic pseudo-selves. Dexter as a self/thing loves Judy as a self/thing and "he would love her until the day he was too old for loving – but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness" (N 2138-9). This Romantic trope is still very much a part of the prevailing ideology even though Fitzgerald is dealing with less actualized individuals. Even the urban offing (the very site and manufacturer of the artificial self) becomes yet another item to be lost. To Dexter "the city itself, now that he had gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty" (N 2139). Fitzgerald equates the loss of synthetic construct (the city) to the loss of person (Judy).

Toward the end of the tale, Fitzgerald shifts into another mode in which his narrator evaluates the loss of the protagonist’s idea. Although Dexter, as a transmuted self/thing, is still operating in the Realist society and using Romantic the desire/loss template, he moves beyond both subject-centered Romance and object-centered Realism when he is made to deal directly with his elemental concept. In the end, is the disappearance of the illusion that most distresses Dexter.

What is at stake in Fitzgerald’s "Winter Dreams" is far more than the material world with its things (subjects and objects). He upsets the metaphysical foundations upon which the physical world rests. This is Fitzgerald’s Modernist Romance.

In "Winter Dreams" the interchangeable subjects and objects that appear and disappear (if for no other reason than to keep alive Romantic pathos in a Realistic ethos), lead Dexter to the realization that beyond having lost a thing, he is losing the conceptual system by which he is able to conceive of the loss of things themselves. He had grasped for things that slipped away from him and, though it was painful, he still believed in them. His dream remained intact. Dexter could not have Judy but he was able to keep the dream of Judy even as (and because) he lost her. But when Devlin’s absentminded comments about Judy jolt Dexter into wakefulness and expose his dream to the stark reality of the passage of time, he comes to understand that his dream (the very same dream that colored his actual world) is fundamentally out of sync with the real temporal world.

In this Modernist Romance, one is called upon to reflect on the discordance of the real to the ideal. Romance appears in the franticly dogged desire for disappearing "real" things as a consequence of the loss of the idea that created those things.

Having lost the dream, Dexter reassesses the "things" (the objects and subjects) of his life, and finds that they no longer exist for him. They are "no longer in the world" because the world for Dexter was delineated by dream and with its disappearance, the matter of the world (his reality) disappears.

In as much as Fitzgerald’s protagonist passionately grieves for the disappearance of the ideal/real, he is still operating in systematic Modernism (Romantic Modernism for my purposes). In the Modernist schema there is still a distinct system to be remembered and mourned. Dexter has kept his system alive all those years by virtue of his memory. Dexter’s grief at the loss of a remembered system, is itself a clinging to an tangible system.

In the end, however, "even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished" (N 2141). When he is no longer able to grieve, because he can no longer remember what is it he lost his real world vanishes. "‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘long ago, there was something [he cannot remember what] in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more [my italics]’" (2141).

Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism, believes it to be "axiomatic that ‘modernist history’ is the first casualty and mysterious absence of the postmodern period…it vanished without a trace" (xi). Dexter’s temporal link to his "country of illusion" is his grief, but because he is no longer even able to grieve, all ties to his past have disappeared. He is unable to demarcate his place in the present by referring to the past. This placelessness, this linkless suspension in the present, is one of the fundamental tropes of postmodernism.

Another feature of postmodernism appears distinctly in the concluding lines of story: "‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more’" (2141). Here we see Dexter almost mechanically reiterating the sentiments that he is attempting to communicate. Repetition is made necessary by what seems to be the discrepancy between "the thing" and the idea of "the thing."

Jameson reminds his readers that Hegel understood the central linguistic paradox to be the fact that "the sensuous…cannot be reached by language, which belongs to the consciousness" (139). Therefore, Hegel contends, we are inclined to connect the abstract linguistic signifiers to the signified by invoking the "plurality" of the utterance, by reiteration. Jameson gestures toward the notion that in postmodernism the "linguistic failure… opens up a provisional space in which this breakdown is reexperienced over and over again as a process, a temporary runoff between the habitual onset of linguistic belief and the inevitable degradation of the signified into its material signifier or the sign itself into a mere image" (139). Dexter links the idea to the utterance through repetition and, in the process, is able to offset this "inevitable degradation" (at least momentarily).

Although the language problem is provisionally dealt with by repetition, it is by no means resolved. In the postmodern sphere the language issue is compounded by the fact that the sensuous is slipping away as an anchor to reality. Earlier I noted that for the modernist, "things" disappear as result of the loss (or the metamorphosis) of the formative idea. For the postmodernist, it seems, the world of "things" is receding, but language (as a derivative of the ideology that created and colored the disappearing or world) still points to those absences. Dexter certainly seems to be doing something of this sort with his evocative "something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone."

Having analyzed the stylistic postmodernism of Fitzgerald’s narrative, I must nevertheless return to its realist romance – its modernism. The text, itself, wants to be read as a romance found in the real. It leaves the reader with a profound sense of melancholy at the loss of the "something." And the splendor of Dexter’s "winter dreams" is no less glorious for having been illusory.

Although illusion had "unconsciously dictated" Dexter’s life, he was privileged to have truly experienced life’s great polarities – the "ecstatic happiness and intolerable pain" – an intense experience that is "reserved only for the strong" (2128, 2135, 2139). This intensity, that is the consequence of our imaginative capacity create, is a glorious gift. Lord Byron, in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, describes the experience thus:

Dexter viscerally experienced the sense of having been "magnificently atune to life" (artificial though it may have been) (2130). His creative capacity to "endow with form" his fancy has made him "a being more intense," and though he lost it, for a moment he grasped the "imag[ined]]" life – the "winter dream."

Dexter’s winter dreams had been whimsical as sprites and had dissipated upon his awakening into the realist’s world. Nevertheless, one is still left with a deep sense of wonder at "what a breeze could be generated by a butterfly’s wings" (2128).

In the closing paragraphs of "Winter Dreams" the narrator slips into a more consoling tone. To be sure Dexter had been shut out of his Eden, but although "the gates were closed, the sun was gone down and there was no beauty," the emblematic "grey beauty of steel" remains. Even though paradise has been lost, the steel gate remains as a gesture toward the absence – this is the recuperation. Dexter, as a modern pseudo-subject, has lost the thing, the self, and the idea, and he cannot cry or care, and yet, "he wanted to care [my italics]" (2140). Unlike the postmodern subject’s absolute apathy, Dexter consciously retains his desire to grieve (though not the grief itself). He wants to care. Fitzgerald makes his readers care about "the loss of illusions that give such color to the world" – those exquisite "winter dreams" (Preface, Gatsby XV). He compels us to ask the two great Keatsian questions:

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "Winter Dreams." in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 4^th Edition. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 2125 – 2141.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1925.

Hegel, G.W.F. Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. New York: Continuum, 1990.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.