Relevant Options for Essay
Option 1
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state? Consider, the Faustian Bargain, settling, the dream of eternal adolescence, and the chimera for a comparison essay that includes at least 3 stories, "The Half Sister," "The Natural Order," and "Peter Khan's Third Wife." Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Some helpful clues:
Characters feel helpless in a cycle of futility and this sense of helpless desperation makes them reach out for misguided, demonic love.
Characters are stagnant and not part of the natural human narrative of a beginning, middle, and end.
Characters are intoxicated by a false ideal of themselves and seek demonic means to reach their false ideal.
Option 4
Compare the theme of the chimera (idealized love) and its resulting futility as it occurs in the "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams." Observe that both stories follow the Faustian Bargain motif. Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources. Here's another link to "Winter Dreams."
Helpful Clues
Both characters lose sense of time.
Both characters live for a glorious future or long for a past ideal while squandering the present
Both characters idealize an unworthy person, either cipher or narcissist or both.
Both characters pursue their chimera dream with the intensity of a drug addict, severing relationships and alienating themselves from others along the way.
The Faustian Bargain or "deal with the devil" could be attributed to the following:
1. Trading our soul and independence of mind for Hakuna Matata, a delusion.
2. Compromising our integrity and intelligence for a velvet trap.
3. Giving up our personal dreams to conform to the family or tribe, resulting in self-abnegation and self-erasure.
Strategies for Writing an Essay Based on Today's Topic
The "love stories" in James Lasdun's collection are really not about love at all but are about the Irrational Mind evidenced by ____________, ______________, _________________, and _________________.
In "Peter Khan's Third Wife" Clare gradually descends deeper and deeper into madness with no self-awareness or Third Eye. She descends into madness. We can conclude that her story is not a love story; it's a story about madness.
What is a love story? A story about the Irrational Mind, Madness, and Insanity.
Rule Number for Writing a Love Story: It's Never About Love. It's About Eros.
It's a story, for sure, but it's never about love. Love is just the packaging and the illusion experienced by the character. We are so sick in our need to package ourselves, and others, as illusions of love that these illusions result in divorce lawsuits.
If not love, then was is a love story pointing to? There are psychological explanations for "falling in love."
1. Unrealistic expectations based on boredom, immaturity, and desperation.
2. Novelty, the craving for something new to eat before spitting it out and going on to some other new thing. This is the mindset of a child.
3. The chimera, a figment of our imagination in which we chase phantoms produced by our unconscious. These phantoms represent our hunger for an Absolute an Escape, a form of Transcendence.
4. We fall in love often to escape a sense of our mortality. Falling in love makes us feel that we've conquered death, that we've transcended death because we've found something eternal. All crappy love songs are about rising above the transitory, shallow world and connecting with something deeper and larger than ourselves and this connection makes us feel like we will never die. We can't emphasize this enough: The hunger for connection saves us but it can also kill us, depending on the manner of the connection. Remember: Connection is a way of overcoming death.
5. We cannot bear to live in boring temporal world; falling in love, we connect with a parallel world to the one we live in. This parallel world feels eternal and makes the temporal world we live in more bearable.
When you fall in love, life is no longer boring. Look what happens to jeans and chewing gum when you fall in love.
Rule Number Two for Writing a Love Story:
Love Always Ends in Madness, Misery, Or Death, Or All of the Above
Because the love story is rooted in the human condition of desperation and because a love story captures a state of ecstasy which by its very nature is short-lived, a love story always has a crash, in which the character falls to earth and either comes out wiser or more often than not is permanently psychologically damaged or even dies.
Rule Three for Writing a Love Story:
There must be intense feeling of love, a form of ecstasy, followed by the curdling of love, which is a fancy way of saying hate and this hate makes us question if we ever found love in the first place. The ecstasy of "love" creates unrealistic expectations (because this bliss cannot be sustained) and because the intensity of love (always touching) must fade and its fading results in resentment and awkwardness.
Rule Four for Writing a Love Story:
We become convinced of our "love experience" to the point of being possessed with moral rectitude and we have contempt for the rest of the world for its incapacity to understand our rarified emotion. Additionally, we become defensive and hostile to anyone who questions the authenticity and superiority of our "love experience." As a result, we pity and condenscend to the world for its inability to taste our paradise. As such we become, by virture of falling in love, borish, pompous, insufferable asses. Happily, or sadly, depending on how we look at it, our "love" vanishes and we are sent back to Planet Earth and join misery with the rest of the human race.
Rule Five for Writing a Love Story:
We always give everything of ourselves for this "love," sacrificing everything "to make it work," but in the end this "love" devours us while giving us nothing in return. As a result, we exit our "love experience" feeling used, abused, exploited and the aftertaste of such an experience is intense bitterness, perhaps even suicide. Often this motif is referred to as the "Vampire Theory of Love" in which one subject gets bigger and stronger while the other gets smaller and weaker.
Rule Six for Writing a Love Story:
Love in a story is never about connection with reality; it is always about retreating into the solipsistic fantasies of self; therefore, a love story is always about a form of insanity. See, for example, "Peter Khan's Third Wife."
Rule Seven for Writing a Love Story
Love in a story is always about the confusion of noble emotions for what "love" really is, capricious, fickle, impulsive behavior. A love story is not about the pursuit of love; it is about the dalliance, the caprice, the fling and aggrandizing something so base and selfish with words like "love."
Rule Eight for Writing a Love Story
Love in a story is often about the sublimation (re-direction) of erotic desire manifest in melancholia, depression, and other poignant emotions associated with the spiritual world. See "The Half Sister." Or see the famous James Joyce short story, "Araby." Unfulfilled erotic love finds expression in acute sadness and defeat.
Rule Nine for Writing a Love Story
The subject is never interested in love; the subject is both bored and frustrated with his low place in life so he "falls in love" to create drama, a distraction from his horrible life. As soon as he no longer feels frustrated, he abandons his love project even if it means breaking the other person's heart. Why? Because a love story at its heart is about selfishness. If love is born from selfishness, fear, and desperation, then it must end badly.
Rule Ten for Writing a Love Story
It must never be about the compatibility of the sexes. It must be about their essential incompatibility. As George Carlin said, "In relationships, women disover that men are stupid and men discover that women are crazy and the reason woman are crazy is because men are stupid."
“Peter Kahn’s Third Wife” 185
- What romantic yet sobering thought informs the story? That romantic love overtakes us, defies logic, survives great obstacles, grows from desperate circumstances, and in many ways is unforgiving and self-destructive.
- What ambiguity haunts us regarding Clare Keillor’s interactions with Peter Khan? Is the magic real, self-induced? Is Clare chasing a chimera? Is her life wasting away like the man Dexter in “Winter Dreams”? See 186 bottom.
- On the bottom of page 186, we see a drugged, opium-like state in which Clare is “glazed off from the everyday world.” It appears that her life is enduring the intervals between one glazed off moment and the next. Is this true of all of us? We wait for grand moments that never come. She models diamonds to be the image of perfection for others when her real life is a huge mess. There is our irony. She finds comfort in her job where she escapes into chimera world.
- With love, do we really deal with love or do we live inside our head, lost in a world of solipsism? Explain in the context of the story. Peter Khan seems oblivious to Clare, at least during his first two wives. Her "affair" is in her head.
- Could we argue that it should be obvious to Clare that Khan is not worthy of her obsessive love? Explain. Could Clare’s abusive husband impair her judgment? Explain.
- There are two worlds in this story: the glassed-in sphere on page 189 and the real world. What is the relationship between these two worlds and Clare?
- Why is Clare satisfied to live in a hateful relationship with Neil? See page 192. Perhaps her hate “readies” her for the “love” she must have with Peter Khan, an illusion.
- Does Clare really see Khan as a cipher on page 192?
- Why does Clare lie to Neil by telling him she had an affair with Khan?
- How does the story end?
Introduction:
Write a personal story about someone you know (could be you) in which the narrative is not about love but about madness.
Many years ago my friends were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van. Standing outside of the van were four giddy, nubile, beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.”
Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still giddy from a Grateful Dead concert and they greeted their rescuers by waving their tie-dye bikini tops and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores. My three mechanically-adroit friends helped cool off their van’s steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women invited the young men to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, the men told me, earthy women who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire.
But my friends had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer, the three apologetic men rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.
Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they go to the Dodgers game. Their demeanors change during these accusations. They become beastly, red-faced, and seem to be foaming at the mouth.
Even ten years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the hippy goddesses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, they’re still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that titillate their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those Bacchanalian nymphs.
Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, they can not live in the present and as such they treat their girlfriends, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard. After all, their hearts are still trapped in a time warp—that fateful day they encountered the van of sun-drenched sirens and repelled their invitation to ecstasy.
My three friends cannot forgive themselves for their stupidity. They still hurl accusations toward one another. Each is to blame for declining the invitation and going to some stupid baseball game. In short, my three friends are eternally miserable, still unable to live in the here and now because their minds and souls remain fixated on that hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of their reach.
Being fixated on the past is my friends' destructive chimera, which has over-taken them and has made them lose all contact with reality. Indeed, we see a similar destructive chimeric power in the short stories "Peter Kahn's Third Wife" and "Winter Dreams," which show the chimera's deleterious effects, including __________________, _______________, ______________, and _________________.
James Lasdun, “It’s Beginning to Hurt” (209)
One. “Strange, to be lying to her once again.”
The word “strange” is disingenuous since the definition of strange in this context is an unusual occurance, but the story evidences a husband who is a pathological liar. He tells lies as a matter of course. He is wrapped up in lies. We see a marriage in a condition of rupture. The story’s title in this context seems like an ironic understatement.
We read the husband is “thinking about the ceremony he just attended.” Is he rehearsing his lie for his wife? In fact, he did go to a funeral. The lie surrounds the circumstances behind the funeral regarding a woman named Marie.
Two. What chimera informs the husband’s affair with Marie?
They have their affairs in different houses—homes that are listed for sale in the real estate market—and each home is like being transported “into a different world.” This chimera creates an ecstasy, which becomes the husband’s addiction. And he must hide his addiction to his wife with an elaborate labyrinth of lies.
Three. What is the metaphor of the rotting salmon hidden in a basement drawer among beetle and rat traps?
The salmon, a metaphor of fertility and spawning, is dead and rotten. It is the underbelly of what should be a flourishing entity—marriage. Instead, the marriage is a cadaver reeking of stench and death.
McMahon Grammar Exercises: Pronoun Errors
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hold of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
“Oh, Death” 137
- How does the story set up the conflict between edenic and secular or temporal time? See 139. “Just somewhere to go . . . “ A man cave. See 140.
- What can we glean about Faye in the story’s first few pages?
- How is Faye destroying Rick’s life on page 138? The story is about the motif of consummation unto death.
- What is the main plot development on page 146?
- Explain the narrator’s ambiguity toward Faye on page 148.
- What elicits our sympathy toward Faye on pages 149 and 150?
“Lime Pickle” (197)
- What is the metaphor of eating Indian food for the first time? The senses are heightened and this is one we’re vulnerable to things like “love” or its illusion.
- What is the story’s purpose of juxtaposing the narrator and Anna on one hand and Anna’s father Roland Hamilton and Lesley on the other? The fallibility of love or its volatile, unstable nature becomes apparent. We are especially contemplating love as an indulgence, its sensual manifestation, Eros. See 200.
- What evidences Roland’s selfishness? He destroys his daughter’s birthday by divulging an affair, putting it in her face and saying to “bottle things up is bad for digestion.”
- What is Roland’s fate? See 206.
- How does the story end?
McMahon's Approach to Writing a Thesis Based on Previous Lecture
When we're technically right about something, we often become blind to the related areas in which we're profoundly wrong, thereby maximizing our stupidity and making us submit to the Irrational Mind. In James Lasdun's masterful collection, three stories bear witness to this principle, "The Half Sister," "The Incalculable Life Gesture," and "The Natural Order."
In groups of 2 or 3, explain how the principle applies to the 3 stories.
"Oh, Death," "Peter Khan's Third Wife," and "Lime Pickle" are all love stories. The characters receive epiphanies about the truth behind their love or if they don't receive epiphanies at all, we the readers receive them from a careful reading of the story.
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