Time and Exchange in Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" - Luke Sperduto

I. Introduction
"Winter Dreams," the last story F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his home town of St. Paul,
exemplifies the multiform capacity of narrative activity to reckon with the human experience
of time and exchange. While individuals' subjective experiences of the passage of time and the
exchange of their goods and services inevitably diverge from the objective socio-economic
markers (e.g. calendars and market prices) that represent them, the latter necessarily affect, and
are affected by, the former. Because it captures systematic regularities in economic behavior,
the dialectical interplay between these subjective experiences and their objective
representations is of concern to law and economics.1 The following paragraphs investigate a
particular dynamic of this interaction through literary analysis of "Winter Dreams," a mythic
parable Fitzgerald would later describe as a "sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea."2
II. Definitions
The dynamic of interest is this: Even as subjective experiences of time and exchange are
catalyzed and constrained by the socio-economic markers that convey them to the world, it is
ultimately the vitality of subjective experience motivating the development and progressive
refinement of those objective markers. Before turning to Fitzgerald, let a test case, Peevyhouse
v. Garland Coal and Mining Co., illustrate the components of this dynamic.
Objective socio-economic markers of time are simply intervals of plain old
chronological duration, spanning the period of Garland's lease (i.e. 5 years), for example, or the
two days of the original jury trial. Subjective experiences of time, in contrast, are moments
when memory and anticipation transform present perceptions, such as the moment when the
Peevyhouses bought their land from Lucille's parents, perhaps remembering their families'
farming heritage and looking ahead to the birth of their son.3
Peevyhouse considers two measures of expectation damages, "the cost of
performance" of the breached contract and "the diminution in value" of the non-breaching
party's property resulting from non-performance. These will serve as token examples of
objective markers of exchange, with the first assumed to diverge less from the Peevyhouses'
lived experience of leasing their farm. For purposes of this analysis, a subjective experience is
a conscious episode of a life, while an objective marker is that which makes the lowest
common denominator of many such experiences publicly cognizable. The "development and
progressive refinement" of an objective marker is an increase in the fidelity of its
representation of lived episodes.
III. Analysis
Published in The Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922, "Winter Dreams" showcases
Fitzgerald testing out the tropes and narrative techniques that would convey his great theme. A
socially aspirant and motivated young man, Dexter Green, courts the radiantly beautiful
daughter of wealth, Judy Jones, her elusive charm embodying that illusory fulfillment always
just beyond the reach of even the most ambitious and successful of self-made men. This
storyline, together with the narrator's metaleptic imperatives directed at the reader (e.g. "do not
get the impression," "Remember that"), supports a four-tiered hermeneutical analysis. In the
text itself, in the metatext of the narratorial imperatives, in the historicity of Fitzgerald's own

1
Consider the "endowment effect" as a classic example of the divergence between the
2
Patricia Hampl, The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (St. Paul: Borealis, 2004), 107.
3
Judith L. Maute, "The Unearthed Facts of Peevyhouse v. Garland Coal & Mining Co." In
Contracts Stories, edited by Douglas G. Baird, 265-303. New York: Hudson, 2004.
life and in my own retelling of each we find subjective experiences of time and exchange in
productive tension with their objective representations.
The text of "Winter Dreams" is riddled with overlapping timescales and transactional
metaphors. Dexter's personal experience of time is inflected by the seasons ("there was
something dismal about this Northern spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous
about the fall") and punctuated by encounters with Judy. The word "sudden" and its
derivations are used seven times throughout the story, and variations on "abrupt" six times,
each describing Dexter's perceptions of reality when Judy is near. "Ecstasy" is used eight
times for nearly the same purpose. Generational time sets the rhythm of Dexter's social ascent
("in acknowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them he was admitting that
he was but the rough strong stuff from which they eternally sprang"), and his commercial
fortunes trace a quasi-metaphorical trajectory from agriculture to industry to services to
finance, suggesting his experience as a human allegory for the epochal development of
capitalism. In the end, when he realizes his dream is lost, looking out his Wall Street office
window there is "no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time." Yet, in his
pursuit of Judy's "passionate vitality" Dexter's own industriousness helped erect the cold steel
confronting him.
Judy, the lodestar of Dexter's ambition and primary distorter of his experience of
time, is often understood by him through metaphors of exchange and transaction. When he
tries vainly to convince himself he could be satisfied with another woman, she becomes an "old
penny's worth of happiness he had spent for this bushel of content." When she teases him back
to her, he tells himself "he had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad account
from his books." And her other suitors often "tag along for a year or so longer" in exchange
for "a brief honeyed hour" with Judy. She herself explicitly refuses to be anyone's ideal and
yet her "passionate energy" is often described like a force of nature that her many suitors would
conquer and commodify.
The other clear takeaway from the text itself is its metatextual insistence on its own
narrativity. The narrator issues three commands directly to the reader (each urging the
formation of a certain memory), conspiratorially uses "us" and "we" to indicate the shared
superiority of narrator and reader and thrice refers to the text as a "story." In another instance
the narrator says, "It began like that and continued, with varying shades of intensity, on such a
note right up to the dnoument." I follow Tim Randell's argument that these features create an
author-character and a reader-character whose interactions serve to eject actual readers from
"Dexter's mythic point of view," a point of view that the story otherwise encourages them to
share. The "cognitive trauma" of this tension, commanding readers to dissociate themselves
from the emotions they had shared with the protagonist moments before, facilitates a critique
of Dexter's shallow dreams and, by extension, of the reader's own complicity in them.4
Readers become aware of themselves as consumers of fiction through the tensive syncopation
of protagonist-time and narrator-time.
Finally, Randell adduces evidence from Fitzgerald's personal reading and letters
showing that in the spring of 1922 he "began to understand his own complicity ... in furthering
the economic and political relations that he wanted to attack and reveal." As a "conduit and
material producer of dreams that serve the powerful," Randell argues, Fitzgerald "became
aware of himself as a well-kept tool of domination and control" and wrote "Winter Dreams" as
a result.5 It is this awareness, and Fitzgerald's expression of it, that I find particularly valuable
for students like myself, exchanging money and time for a shot at our own winter dreams.

4
Tim Randell, "Metafiction and the Ideology of Modernism in Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams"."
Fitzgerald Review, vol. 10, 2012, 114-118.
5
Id. at 112, 124.
Name and Contact Information

Luke Sperduto

sperduto@uchicago.edu

952-406-2277

Academic Background

As an undergraduate at Harvard, I concentrated in Philosophy with a secondary field in

Economics. Among my favorite Philosophy courses were "Kant's Ethical Theory" and
"History of Modern Moral Philosophy," with Professor Korsgaard, as well as a number of
Political Philosophy courses. I also enjoyed courses on the history of capitalism, taught
by Professors Sven Beckert and Ben Friedman, and on "The Enlightenment Invention of
the Modern Self," with Leo Damrosch.

After graduating in 2011, I went to the London School of Economics and Political
Science, where I earned a one-year diploma in Econometrics and Mathematical
Economics and an MSc in Economics and Philosophy. Then I moved to southern
Minnesota, worked as an Institutional Research Analyst at Riverland Community College
for a year, and taught a course called "Philosophy in Short Stories" for high school
students.

In 2014-15, I attended the Autonomous University of Barcelona, completing the required

coursework and some independent research for a PhD in History of Science. My
research, now indefinitely postponed, focused on the development of blood banking
technology by a Catalan doctor during the Spanish Civil War.

I am now a first-year student at The University of Chicago Law School.