November 15 Homework #18: Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and write a 3-paragraph essay that compares how Dexter Green and Nikolay both traded true happiness and meaning for a life wasted on a chimera (illusion).
Essay #5 Due 12-13-18: 260 Points(over one-fourth of your total semester grade)
You need minimum 3 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Option A
Read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” the Guardian essay, and “Winter Dreams” and develop a thesis that addresses the claim that happiness is a form of deception that results in a squandered life and moral decrepitude. Consider the false types of happiness we settle for based on denial, willed ignorance, pursuing chimeras, and Pascal's notion of the Imaginary Life.
Blaise Pascal, writing in his Pensees, summed up our incurable vanity that seeks to flatter ourselves with a trumped-up image at the expense of our substance and moral character. He writes:
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
Option B
Read Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Human Gene Editing” and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that gene editing poses moral and political problems that we cannot handle.
Sources:
"Here's what we know about CRISPR safety"
"Genome editing: Are we opening the back door to eugenics?"
"Human Gene Editing Is Leaving Ethics Dangerously Far Behind"
"Genetically Modified Humans? No Thanks"
More pros and cons from Business Insider
"Building Baby from the Genes Up"
Netflix Explained, "Designer DNA Explained"
John Oliver on Gene Editing (video)
Option C
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalist, hyped-up thesis. See Guardian review, New York Times review, and Vox interview.
Option D
In the context of Evan Osnos’ “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” analyze the causes behind the wealth tech industry’s obsession with preparing for the Apocalypse. See Salon article (misanthropy discussed), NPR report, Vanity Fair article, Yes Magazine article, and "Silicon Valley's Doomsday" YouTube video.
Option E
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment. See Victoria Sweet's essay "Your Body is a Teeming Battleground," Guardian review, and In These Times review.
Option F
Read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and defend, refute, or complicate the author’s claim that non-theism is morally superior to theism. As a source, you can use McMahon's blog post, Notes from Above Ground, and other credible sources.
Option G
Watch Hasan Minhaj defend affirmative action in the context of Asian Americans suing Harvard (Netflix Patriotic Act, first episode), and write a research paper that defends, refutes, or complicates Hasan's argument. Consult "The 'Whitening' of Asian Americans" in The Atlantic; "The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action" in The New Yorker; "The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans" in The New Yorker.
Option H
Watch Hasan Minhaj in Netflix's Patriot Act argue that Amazon's policies present unfair practices to other businesses and the consumer to the degree that they should be subject to antitrust laws. Defend, refute, or complicate Minhaj's position. See Hollywood Reporter for actual video, Business Insider for employee abuses, and Huffington Post.
November 8 Essay #4 is due on turnitin. Homework #16 Read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the story’s moral message. How is the story’s Paradise a falsity? Indeed, we will be exploring the following theme as we read a few related short stories for an essay option: Happiness is a trickster.
November 13 Homework #17: Read Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes Nikolay’s moral disintegration and decrepitude. We will also explore a Guardian essay that critically examines how the story reveals a lot about the deception of happiness.
November 15 Homework #18: Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and write a 3-paragraph essay that compares how Dexter Green and Nikolay both traded true happiness and meaning for a life wasted on a chimera.
November 20 Homework #19: Read Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Human Gene Editing” and write an essay that explains why the author maintains his position.
November 22 Holiday
November 27 Homework #20: Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the author’s position.
November 29 Homework #21: Read Evan Osnos’ “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” and in 3 paragraphs analyze the causes behind the wealth tech industry’s obsession with preparing for the Apocalypse.
December 4 Homework #22: Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and in 3 paragraphs support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
December 6 Homework #23: Read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains her reasons for arguing that non-theism is morally superior to theism.
December 11 Peer Edit
December 13 Essay #5 Due and Portfolio Part 2, #11-#23
Option A
Read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” the Guardian essay, and “Winter Dreams” and develop a thesis that addresses the claim that happiness is a form of deception that results in a squandered life and moral decrepitude. Consider the false types of happiness we settle for based on denial, willed ignorance, pursuing chimeras, and Pascal's notion of the Imaginary Life.
The Imaginary Life especially pertains to "Winter Dreams."
Blaise Pascal, writing in his Pensees, summed up our incurable vanity that seeks to flatter ourselves with a trumped-up image at the expense of our substance and moral character. He writes:
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
Paraphrase of the Above
Seeing people watch us pretend to be happy makes us think we're happy.
Contrarian Thesis
I object to McMahon's essay assignment because there is an implication in the assignment's very framework that the Imaginary Life is intrinsically bad. In fact, all of us cope with the sheer brutality, misery, and chaos of existence by constructing an Imaginary Life. The question isn't whether or not we construct an Imaginary Life. The question is what quality is our Imaginary Life because not all Imaginary Lives are equal. For example, the novelist or the musician retreats into an Imaginary Life to find relief from reality. But normal people go back and forth between real life and the Imaginary Life. Nut cases like Dexter Green, Nikolai, and the fools of Omelas are so stuck in their Imaginary Lives that they can't get out. But so what? Are we supposed to reject the Imaginary Life just because of a few nut jobs? Seriously, McMahon, you annoy me. I'm going back to binge watching Schitt's Creek on Netflix.
Weaknesses in the Assignment or Framework of the Topic?
One. Moralist framework is bogus because there is no evidence that societies are moral in a universal way. Values may be universal (don't be cruel) but when values conflict and one value triumphs over another, the very definition of morality, cultures behave differently.
Two. Decency is never pure. Behavior is always a mixed bag, even from "decent" people. Moral compromise may be necessary to live.
Three. The psychology of happiness doesn't necessarily coincide with the moral theory of happiness.
The stories about a society that makes moral compromises, a man who deludes himself into being happy, and a man who pursues a mirage that squanders his life are all true in the sense that they mimic pervasive patterns of human self-destruction. But so what? I'm a student struggling to pay my bills and to survive college. I don't give a rat's adenoidal gland about patterns of human self-destruction, false happiness, solipsism, etc.
"Listen to me, McMahon. I'm so busy I don't have the luxury of thinking about this stuff. So the only reason I'm going down this road is to come up with enough material so I can turn in an essay. Are you feeling me?"
Narrowing the Fifth Essay Down to 1,000 Words
Essay variation #1: Omelas and Sweat Shops Essay
In an argumentative essay, support, refute, or complicate the following assertion: "Omelas" is not a story about happiness. Rather, it is a story about how we cannot find success and belonging in mainstream society unless we accept a certain amount of willed ignorance, inure (numb) ourselves to evil for the sake of enjoying privilege, and compartmentalize our morality (being decent in most areas of our lives but accepting evil when such acceptance is sanctioned by mainstream society) in order to reinforce society's power hierarchy.
We in essence make a bargain or a trade-off so that moral impurity is impossible. If this claim is true, then we can kiss goodbye the notion of being Social Justice Warriors. Or can we?
Sources:
Using examples from the garment industry (child labor violations), you could easily write a 1,000-word essay addressing "Omelas" alone. You could as a source refer to the John Oliver video, Netflix documentary The True Cost, ThoughtCo "Analysis of 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' by LeGuin," David Brooks' "The Child in the Basement."
Ivan's Defense Mechanism:
He obsesses over his anger toward Nikolai because his anger is a distraction from his own comfort, privilege, and false happiness.
The commentary seems to be saying that we like to scapegoat some grotesque character we know who has found false happiness while we are blind to our own false happiness.
We may find Nikolai's "happiness" abhorrent while remaining blind to our own false pleasures in life. In fact, we may scoff at all the world's gooseberry collectors even as we blindly treasure our own gooseberries. We are a race of people suffering from delusions within our delusions.
Essay variation #2: The Happiness Delusion
Argue that the "happiness" we see in "Omelas" and "Gooseberries" is no happiness at all, but a morally bankrupt delusion. Your main source for this essay is "George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness" in The Atlantic.
Sources:
Using examples from the garment industry (child labor violations), you could easily write a 1,000-word essay addressing "Omelas" alone. You could as a source refer to the John Oliver video, Netflix documentary The True Cost, ThoughtCo "Analysis of 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' by LeGuin," David Brooks' "The Child in the Basement,""George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness,"and "Comfort Reading: Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov." Also consult the essay "George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness" in The Atlantic.
Nikolay is a solipsist.
What is solipsism? 10 Characteristics
One. Solipsism is a retreat into the dark forest of the ego, a scary place brimming with paranoia, delusions, a lack of proportion, a lack of correction (checks and balances from other people).
Two. The solipsist is a person whose only reality is his self. As a result, he connects with nothing in the outside world. He lives inside the cocoon of self.
Three. What is scary about solipsism is that the solipsist does not know he exists in a state of solipsism. He is a fish in a fish bowl and the fish bowl is his entire universe. He does not see the universe outside the fish bowl.
Four. The solipsist is often a misanthrope, an isolated person who hates mankind. His views are never challenged by anyone because he repels other human beings from his circle.
Five. Another type of solipsist is a narcissist. He may be surrounded by people, but these people are not friends. They tend to be sycophants, known as "butt kissers."
Six. Sycophants enable the narcissist and keep him inside his mental bubble. By doing this over and over, sycophants help the narcissist become the premiere solipsist.
Seven. There is a fine line between a narcissist and a solipsist.
Eight. Because the solipsist lives in his own head, he suffers serious blind spots in his thinking and his general view of the world.
Nine. None of the assumptions or conclusions a solipsist makes can be trusted. Most likely, the solipsists assessments about his reality are false ones.
Ten. If the solipsist convinces himself that he is happy, he is most likely not happy, and even if he believes he is happy, his notion of "happiness" is most likely repulsive the dispassionate onlooker.
Sample Thesis #1
While I would like to argue that happiness is a morally-bankrupt delusion unworthy of our pursuit, my reading of "Omelas" and "Gooseberries" has steered me into a different direction: We must seek illusory happiness as a necessary spice to our dull existence because without this spice we would go insane.
Sample Thesis #2
"Gooseberries" posits the idea that even the deepest thinkers of this world engage in selfish delusions, self-righteous hypocrisy, and self-serving behavior so that in addition to grotesque narcissists like Nikolai even "normal" people are afflicted with a certain degree of solipsism and deformed versions of false happiness.
Sample Thesis #3
While we may be repulsed by Nikolai and his fat dog, the story makes a convincing case that we all treasure our "gooseberries" as a necessary coping mechanism to this chaotic universe for which there is no happiness and meaning. Gooseberries in fact are a metaphor for the necessary intoxicants we use to prevent us from going crazy. McMahon "performs" his piano in front of an imaginary audience. That is his gooseberries. Person X saves up for a car he can barely afford, which becomes his gooseberries. Person Y settles into a cozy relationship with Person Z and the two convince themselves that they have found a fortress in a hostile world. That fortress is their gooseberries. In the absence of our specially tailored gooseberries, we would all face an insufferable abyss, unmanageable chaos, and unrelenting despair. Let us not therefore castigate Nikolai, for he is embracing whatever paltry opportunity exists for a modicum of sanity and well-being in a world fraught with chaos and misery. Contempt for Nikolai and ourselves is not the appropriate response. Sympathy is the right moral note we must strike as we contemplate our pitiful state.
Sample Thesis #4
Contrary to the above thesis, there is nothing adaptive about settling on some delusional gooseberry or other. The story is a horrifying portrait of what happens to us when we allow narcissism, egotism, greed, and solipsism to disconnect us from humanity. In place of this connection is solipsism, the retreat into madness of our ghastly gooseberries, whatever they may be. Living in the digital age, the majority of people have their own digital gooseberries: the trappings of social media. Feasting off our fake popularity in social media is has the same pathological components of solipsism found in Nikolai's sick love of gooseberries evidenced by ______________________, _______________________, ___________________________, and ___________________________.
Sample Thesis #5
Nikolai's gooseberries, Dexter Green's Judy Jones, and modern day social media zombies' "likes" all contain the parasitic components of crack cocaine addiction evidenced by _________________, ______________________, ______________________________, and _____________________________.
Essay Variation for "Winter Dreams":
In the context of Pascal's Pensees 147, we can examine Dexter Green's life as someone who embodies the aspiration to achieve the American Dream, which the story masterfully shows to be a necrophilic Trickster that sucks the life out of us the way a drug sucks the life out of an addict.
Another Variation of "Winter Dreams":
Analyze the emptiness of Judy Jones in the context of Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness."
Sources:
For your sources, you can use Pascal's Pensees 147, McMahon's blog post on "Winter Dreams," Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness," and Laurence Shames' chapter "The Hunger for More." You can also use the PBS Newshour video "The Origin of 'White Trash' and Why Class Is Still an Issue in the US."
Essay variation #2:
Argue that the "happiness" we see in "Omelas" and "Gooseberries" is no happiness at all, but a morally bankrupt delusion. Your main source for this essay is "George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness" in The Atlantic.
Sources:
Using examples from the garment industry (child labor violations), you could easily write a 1,000-word essay addressing "Omelas" alone. You could as a source refer to the John Oliver video, Netflix documentary The True Cost, ThoughtCo "Analysis of 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' by LeGuin," David Brooks' "The Child in the Basement,""George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness,"and "Comfort Reading: Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov." Also consult the essay "George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness" in The Atlantic.
Nikolai's Irrational Mind Born from His Pathology Or the Other Way Around?
Nikolai suffers from the most extreme form of egotism, called solipsism. Solipsism can be defined in many ways:
Only one's mind exists.
No one exists as humans, only a two-dimensional, fawning audience.
The self can never know others, only its own self.
The solipsist can attach no meaning to others, only to himself.
The solipsist lives in an insular, private world disconnected from others. We could argue therefore that smart phones are a form of solipsism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein writes of solipsism: "Hell is not other people. Hell is yourself." And he writes, "I am my own world."
Nikolai's second pathology is self-complacency.
Complacency is being satisfied with mediocrity.
Complacency is being content without new challenges.
Complacency is being soothed and medicated on routine and the comfort of monotony.
Complacency dulls one's appetite for life.
Complacency is a form of the Jahiliyyah, a long period of ignorance and darkness.
Nikolai's third pathology is the spiritual death resulting from cocooning or contracting rather than expanding in life.
Cocooning is retreating into the home and creating a safe place while avoiding the challenges and anxieties produced by interacting with the outside world.
Cocooning in the modern age is constructing elaborate home entertainment systems and personal chefs that allow us to never leave the home.
Sample Thesis Structure
Reading Chekhov's stories, we begin to see that we all have limited free will, but it eventually vanishes as we surrender to our Irrational Mind, which includes, ____________________, _________________________, _______________________, _________________, and _________________________.
Fake Happiness in "Omelas"
Omelas is a story about denial and willed ignorance as part of the bargain we make with society to receive some kind of pleasure, convenience, or general benefit that we deem as happiness.
Part of their bargain is compromising their critical thinking and individual freedom in favor of settling with conformity to the societal structure. Settling into the structure, making peace with, and finding a sense of belonging with it, comes at the price of dumbing down one's self and giving up one's individuality.
Such a bargain is morally bankrupt. How happy we are in this bargain depends on how much of a conscience we have. The less conscience the more we can delude ourselves into believing we have achieved happiness.
Fake Happiness in "Gooseberries"
Gooseberries is a story about selfishness, isolation, and greed being falsely comprehended as happiness. The main character has no meaningful connection with others. Rather, he lives entirely inside his head, a condition philosophers call solipsism.
Here is an excerpt:
George Saunders: I was a first-year grad student at Syracuse when I went to see Tobias Wolff, who was our teacher, do a reading at the Syracuse Stage. He was feeling under the weather that night, so instead of reading from his work he said he was going to read Chekhov. He read three Chekhov short stories known as the “About Love” trilogy, and “Gooseberries” is the middle component. It was a huge day for me because I’d never really understood Chekhov at all. I’d certainly never understood him to be funny. But when Toby was reading him, he captured this beautiful range of feelings: beautiful, lyrical sections and laugh-out-loud-funny things.
The story is an extended meditation on the idea of happiness. It’s basically a story of two friends who get caught in a rainstorm while they’re out hunting, and they go to a nearby house of someone they know named Alekhin. After they take a swim, one of the friends, Ivan, tells a story about his brother, who had an obsession with owning a small estate, and with eating the gooseberries that he grew on the porch. As Ivan tells the story of his brother it becomes a kind of a screed about how happiness—especially his brother’s happiness—disgusts him, how pig-like people who pursue their own happiness are.
Ivan’s story builds in intensity, and by the end he’s making this beautiful, passionate case for why happiness is a confusing, undesirable emotion. In his telling, it’s almost a delusion to be mindlessly happy when others are sad. The sentiment is so heartfelt that it’s almost as though it came right out of Chekhov’s journals:
At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of his life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.
I always come out of that passage feeling like it’s a beautiful piece of rhetoric, one that articulates something I really believe. I’ve quoted this line on book tours, trying to explain why I don’t mind writing dark fiction: One role of literature, I’ll tell them, is to be the guy with the hammer, saying, “Look, we’re all pretty happy right now, but let’s just not forget the fact our happiness doesn’t eradicate the suffering of others.” It’s a beautiful insight about the lazy nature of happiness—and, for a few minutes, I think we’re meant to think that this stirring speech by Ivan is the whole point of the story. In a way, it is. Except, on the next page, we see that Ivan’s audience is bored and disappointed by the story. They wish that he’d had something better to say, and the whole evening ends on a flat note.
But then there’s this wonderful little reversal at the end, a mysterious and beautiful turn. It happens when Ivan goes up to his room, which he’s sharing with his friend Burkin. They’re both in bed, beds which have been made up by Alekhin’s beautiful maid:
Their beds, wide and cool, made up by the beautiful Pelageya, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.
Ivan Ivanych silently undressed and lay down. “Lord, forgive us sinners!” he said, and pulled the covers over his head.His pipe, left on the table, smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin lay awake for a long time and still could not figure out where that heavy odor was coming from.
Rain beat on the windows all night.
Ivan leaves his unclean pipe out all night, keeping his friend Burkin awake. And that’s how Chekhov gets away with putting his real feelings about the oppressive nature of happiness into a character’s mouth. Without irony, without condescension, he just lets the character have his say. But then, here, Chekhov destabilizes the beautiful rhetoric of the previous section by showing another side of the guy who made that impassioned speech: He’s also self-obsessed and thoughtless enough to burden his friend with a smelly pipe. It's a great double whammy. You get the beautiful, articulate case against happiness, and then you get this complicating overtone of selfishness in the person who just made that beautiful speech.
We’re often told not to put our passions and political feelings into a story. But I actually think it’s a good idea. Put them in there, then step away. Imagine that the idea isn’t you, that it’s just an idea that part of you expressed. Then you can use the structure and the form of the story to kind of poke at your own beliefs a little and see if you can get more light out of them.
That’s exactly what happens, structurally, in “Gooseberries.” Ivan starts to tell his story right on the first page, but he’s interrupted by the rainstorm. And while they get in out of the rain, meet their host, and bathe, a full third of this nine-page story goes by. I always ask my students: What’s the point of this digression? Because the short story form makes a de facto claim of efficiency—its limited length suggests that all the parts are there for purpose. If there’s a structural inefficiency that never comes home to roost, or never produces beauty later, we note that as bad storytelling. And so whatever ultimate meaning “Gooseberries” has, it has to have something to do with what's contained in that digression—or else it’s a flawed piece.
Looking at what happens during the digression, then, you start to realize that the story is a reflection on different forms of happiness. There’s a beautiful scene where they’re all taking a sensuous bath—“Oh my God, Oh my God,” Ivan keeps repeating, so completely moved by the feeling of the water. Then, later, this woman Pelageya waits on the men—and she’s so beautiful that they can only turn and stare at each other with their jaws on the floor. Why are these things here? Why are they worth giving space to in this extremely short piece? It’s because they’re both manifestations of beauty in the world, celebrating the things that make us pointlessly happy, and they complicate the dark vision of happiness that Ivan spells out later.
That’s one of my favorite things about Chekhov: his ability to embody what I call “on the other hand” thinking. He'll put something out with a great deal of certainty and beauty and passion, absolutely convincing you—and then he goes, “On the other hand,” and completely undermines it. At the end of this story you ask, “Chekhov, is happiness a blessing or a curse?” And he’s like, “Yeah, exactly.”
Now, who knows how Chekhov did this. It could be that he was there on page one, with Ivan about to tell his story—but something in him was just saying quietly, “Too soon. It doesn’t feel right yet.” Then, his genius produced this rainstorm, and the rainstorm produced this house that suddenly appeared on the horizon, and then his curiosity followed the characters there, and got them into the pond. Or it could be that Chekhov created this whole digression just following the thrill of the language—and that he invented the rest of the story only to justify the digression. We don’t know how he wrote—I have a feeling that Chekhov wrote in a different way than any other mortal. But I would guess that writing this story required him to be flexible, to let the story’s form wander away from his original intentions.
When I write, I’m just hoping that the story will surprise me in some way. You’ve got to let yourself write freely, with a lot of joy and conviction. Then, having done that, step back a little and see what you’ve done. See if that thing you’ve expressed is actually iron-clad. Just poke at it somehow, or let another character poke at it. And see how it’s asking you to challenge it, this object that you’ve made. As Einstein said, “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” Whatever lame-brained notion I had about the story, I’m praying to god that it gets overturned and turns into something more intense.
A writer’s stance is basically to suss out the energy: Where does the story want me to go? That’s complicated, because I think everybody goes into a story with some notions of what they hope to accomplish. You need to be willing to renegotiate the things you thought you knew for sure. And so the question for any writer is: On what basis am I renegotiating?
Here is an excerpt from "Comfort Reading":
When Ivan visits he finds his brother pompous, insufferable. The gooseberries – the first harvest – are "tough and sour", but Nikolai, "with tears in his eyes", pronounces them delicious. Ivan then embarks on a passionate tirade against the inequality of a society where "'the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible'":
We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes.
Ivan's speech drags injustice and misery into Alekhin's snug drawing room. It is, to borrow Jack Kerouac's description of Naked Lunch: "a frozen moment when everybody sees what is on the end of every fork". As Malcolm writes of Gooseberries and its fellow stories, they "do not celebrate the hearth but, on the contrary, constitute a three-part parable about the perils of staying warm and safe, and thereby missing what is worthwhile in life, if not life itself". The meaning and purpose of life, Ivan exhorts his friends, does not reside in happiness and comfort, "but in something more intelligent and great", in kindness to one's fellow humans.
Ivan's behaviour irritates Burkin and Alekhin, who find it "boring to hear a story about a wretched official who ate gooseberries". They understandably don't want to hear about inequality and hardship, cosily swaddled as they are. But there is another, more enigmatic layer to Chekhov's story, one that perhaps only rereading unearths. Ivan calls happiness, just like the perceived succulence his brother's gooseberries, an illusion; and yet a suspicion grows that it is Nikolai's happiness, pure and simple, that angers Ivan, and that perhaps his impassioned argument has been constructed retrospectively in order to justify his position. We then consider that earlier, when the men were bathing, only Ivan swam in the pond, which when the men first entered the farmyard was described as "cold, malevolent". As Ivan splashes about his two friends stand moodily at the pond's edge, urging him to hurry up so they can go inside. Is the pond, then, a symbol intended to rhyme with the gooseberries? Are Nikolai's happiness on his farm and, in a smaller way, Ivan's happiness in the pond related? As is so often the case in Chekhov, the story poses questions but supplies no definite answers; in a letter of 1888 to his publisher Suvorin he writes:
Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes … You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.
At the story's end, as rain beats against the windows, Burkin lies in bed. He is bothered by a strong smell that he can't place (it is the smell of stale tobacco from his friend's pipe). Here, in miniature or like a fading melody, Chekhov repeats the blend of contentment and unease that have intertwined throughout the story. And so we too are left like Burkin with something nagging at us, taking pleasure in Chekhov's artistry but haunted by the questions it asks.
Analysis of the above:
The commentary seems to be saying that we like to scapegoat some grotesque character we know who has found false happiness while we are blind to our own false happiness.
We may find Nikolai's "happiness" abhorrent while remaining blind to our own false pleasures in life. In fact, we may scoff at all the world's gooseberry collectors even as we blindly treasure our own gooseberries. We are a race of people suffering from delusions within our delusions.
“Gooseberries”
- How does Ivan criticize his brother Nikolay for “egoism” on page 269? Laziness and ego make his brother contract into a tiny world without adventure and challenge; it's the same as disappearing into the "TV cave." The ego is not challenged in such a small world. A tiny world is the world of solipsism.
- How does the story contrast a communal life and a solipsistic life and for what purpose? Communal life requires empathy, cooperation, and adaptation. Solipsistic life requires nothing and is therefore a form of death.
- We read: “Once a man is absorbed by an idea, there is no doing anything with him.” Explain what this means. Are we talking about a chimera, an obsession? Is solipsism the logical conclusion to an obsession? Do we live too much inside our heads and get lost in the ongoing loop or echo chamber?
- Reading about the merchant who poured honey on his riches so he could eat his money before he died, we see a connection between greed and spite. Explain."I want mine and you can't have any."
- We see that Nikolay the Greedy uses his widow’s money to buy an estate and “live the life of a country gentleman.” How is his life squandered on being a poser to others and himself? How has he made a deal with the devil? He lords over a tiny kingdom.
- Why does everyone, including the red dog, look like a pig at the estate? What does this all mean? We matter to others. We affect others. Our life is not our own. Our own moral dissolution injures others as well. We get fat and our dogs and children get fat.
- How does egotism infect everything Nikolay does including his acts of charity? He descends more and more into narcissism and solipsistic hell. He’s outwardly pious but dying inside. Yes, he gives money to inflate his image, but he has contempt for the human race. This reminds me of Pascal who wrote we live for image more than for substance. He uses liquor to soak the peasants’ brains so the peasants will be his sycophants and treat him like a god worthy of lecturing them on the greater truths.
- Explain Nikolay’s gooseberry fetish. They must be fake, a mirage, a chimera because we read a quote by Pushkin: “Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts/Than hosts of baser truths.” What do they represent? Rosebud? Unconditional love? Transcendence? Permanence? All of the above? The way I see it, the gooseberries represent medication. Nikolay has a huge ego and going through the world with a giant ego is tiring. I would even say the ego poisons us. So what does this have to do with gooseberries? The gooseberries are like Alka-Seltzer you take after getting a bloated stomach ache.
- Why does Ivan say there is a sadness to seeing people who have achieved fulfillment and happiness? Could it be that this sadness is seeing the illusion and misguided passions that are behind this happiness so that what is happiness is something perverse?
- Perhaps the gooseberries represent a drug that produces self-hypnosis that we can deny the world’s suffering and experience happiness in a cocoon. Perhaps the gooseberries are an indulgence, a self-medication. See page 273.I remember when a professor agreed to help me and a few other students prepare for our Masters degree test, the professor's wife gave us store-bought cookies while he ate Danish, stacked high on a plate and we weren't allowed to touch the Danish.
- What is Ivan’s psychological state after telling his friends the story of his brother Nikolay? He is in a state of urgency to warn his friends about self-complacency and the false happiness of being idle and mediocre.
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