Review: Last week, we discussed the role of solipsism as part of the ego's disconnection to the world. Today we'll talk about the ego's hunger for the chimera and BE-ESSING, that is being a BS artist.
Solipsism would make a good mapping component for the body of your essay in which you explain the ego and its disconnection from others.
One. Reading Questions for "Feathers" (332)
1. Explain the essay’s title. Iridescence, something that intoxicates, chimera, metaphor.
2. What evidences the narrator’s empty existence on the first page?
3. On page 333, what evidences the narrator’s dysfunctional marriage? The wife feels threatened by a simple dinner. How insular is she? What kind of stagnation are we talking about here?
4. What reasons can we infer that the narrator and his wife don’t want children? Do children force parents into a social world? What else?
5. How does “Feathers” repeat the same themes in “Cathedral”? See page 335. Openness vs. closed system of living. Edenic images similar to the paradise seen from the Cathedral. The Peacock is Otherness like the cathedral. The shimmering Otherness of the peacock is juxtaposed with the pedestrian banal working-class existence of Bud and his wife.
6. How and why does Carver juxtapose the different economic classes in this story? Is he painting Fran as some anal-retentive middle-class suburbanite? See page 342
7. How does Bud’s wish to fix his wife’s teeth repeat themes in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”? Living love vs. thinking about love.
8. What significance is there in having an ugly baby in the story? 349, 350 The baby contrasts the peacock, the reality behind the chimera or ideal.
9. Why did Fran and the narrator have a baby after visiting Bud and his wife? What were the motives? What were the effects of acting on this compulsion? 354, 355 Quick fix? Living vicariously through others?
10. The story’s ending is about what? The reality of banality and the dream of Otherness? Looking to be razzle-dazzled by something that ends up being incurably ordinary? We seem to love an idea about life, marriage, having children, etc., but not the reality of it.
Part Two. The Chimera’s Definition, Causes and Effects
1. The chimera is a mirage that draws us in slowly, starting with a burp or a trifle, a tease, an iridescent color that flashes before our eyes or it hits us over the head. In either case, it grows into an obsession and consumes all our energies, thoughts, and dreams.
2. The chimera is based on unconscious longings for class ascent, acceptance, love, popularity, wealth, parental unconditional love (Rosebud), the Chanel Number Five Moment, distinction, proving our doubters that they were wrong.
3. We project our fantasy onto a tabula rasa.
4. Often the chimera is a panacea, a cure-all for all our woes.
5. The Absolute Fallacy (success, fitness, perfection, perfect absolute relationship)
6. The Transcendence Fallacy
7. The Bitch Goddess Fallacy
8. The inevitable despair of the chimera. George Bernard Shaw said there are two great tragedies in life: Not getting what we want and getting it.
9. The cycle of ongoing chimeras, people who never learn and who go in circles, jumping from one chimera to the next.
10. The paradox of the chimera: Chimeras destroy us but they also feed our dreams and in some ways give us strength, drive, motivation, and vitality that we otherwise wouldn’t have.
11. The need for the chimera: We must have stars in the horizon for which he can row our oars.
Examples of chimera (have students come up with some):
1. The low-carb diet or the South Beach Diet
2. Yoga
3. A Lexus IS350
4. Viagra
5. Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft
6. Dianobol
7. Having a six-pack
8. Cosmetic surgery, botox or nose job or implants.
9. G-Star Jeans (underground store for special jeans, not the ones you can buy at Nordstrom)
10. the cognoscenti.
11. Becoming famous
12. Angelina Jolie; she’s more than a human. She’s become the great bitch goddess, every man’s dream and every woman’s nightmare. The fantasy of the seductress.
13. Jennifer Aniston, the myth of the good girl, the myth of innocence.
14. Celebrity of all kinds, an autograph, a sighting.
15. Las Vegas
16. Palos Verdes (my neighbors in Torrance are bitter that they haven’t moved to PV yet. Peevers.
17. UCLA
18. iPod
19. Anything sold on the QVC network
20. Marriage. Not all marriages but most are built on the Goody Box chimera. When I want a goody I reach into the goody box. But what happens when all the goodies run out.
21. Me-Time. People who have lots of me-time are miserable.
1. a panacea like a Fad diet
2. a rite of passage like a car representing freedom, independence, and sexual attraction.
3. a form of medication for depression or some deeply acute problem that you bandage with a simple solution; you buy a wardrobe to cover a restlessness and anxiety that haunts you.
4. the myth of romantic absolute, fueled by crappy love songs.
5. a childhood longing, like Christmas lights and Budweiser sign.
One. Reading Questions for "A Small, Good Thing" (376) 1. What is “a small, good thing,” exactly? Hand-crafted individual care stripped of pretentiousness and bearing authenticity. “A small, good thing,” is a refreshing break from all the B.S. that saturates our lives every day. B.S. is insulting and manipulative and impersonal. People B.S. on autopilot. 2. What forces in the story are presented in stark contrast? The authenticity described above and bloated, impersonal egotistical pretentiousness. For the latter, see the description of the doctor on page 382. 3. Who consoles the parents for the loss of their son, the doctor or the baker? Why? The doctors read from scripts. They’re like robots. In contrast, the baker connects on a personal level. He offers them food, which is a metaphor. 4. How does Dr. Francis fail to provide empathy on pages 396 and 397? He makes the married couple leave when they should stay. 5. In contrast, how does the baker express authentic empathy on page 404? Rather than inflate who he is, he humbles himself and strips himself of all pretension or rather shows that he is completely absent of pretension. He talks about self-doubt and loneliness, not pleasant topics, but they’re real topics, unlike the B.S. dished out by the doctors. Part Two. The Opposite of Empathy, the BE-ESSER The story is about the dangers of being a B.S. Artist or a BE-ESSER 1. BE-ESSERS are often too intoxicated by their own BS and fail to see that others are not as impressed with it as they are. In other words, they suffer from an inflated self-esteem that has no correspondence to reality, what we call a narcissist. 2. BE-ESSERS often feel that they’re “superior BS” ability gives them license to do anything so that they have no boundaries. 3. BE-ESSERS can’t stop BSing even when the situation demands it. 4. BE-ESSERS tend to dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole as they continue BSing. 5. BE-ESSERS are more concerned with image than substance. They cannot tolerate people having the “wrong impression” of them. 6. BE-ESSERS create a fictional persona that is so addicting they don’t know how to be real anymore and live the rest of their lives as compulsive liars. 7. BE-ESSERS can’t achieve intimacy because their whole life is a performance act. 8. BE-ESSERS are good at drumming up feelings of self-righteousness even when they are grossly wrong. In other words, they end up believing their own BS. 9. BE-ESSERS spend so much time puffing themselves up that they have too much pride to admit when they’re wrong. 10. BE-ESSERS rationalize their lies by justifying the means with the end. See the book On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt in which he says that bullshit is worse than lying, that bullshit is defined by pretentiousness, misrepresentation and all the insidious things we use to puff ourselves up such as false modesty, sycophantism, omission of certain facts, slight exaggeration, etc. The B.S artist does not lie because for him there is no truth. Everything is B.S. The result of this attitude is nihilism. Part Three. Journal Entry Spend about 15 minutes writing about a chimera you became obsessed with, how it propelled you into the world of solipsism, and how it crushed you with devastating disappointment. We'll read them to the class.
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