When We Use Aristotelian Dialectical Argument (pitting opposing arguments against one another), Our Objective Isn’t to Declare a “Winner” But to Sharpen Our Logical Argument Skills
Student Who Objects to James Lasdun’s “Cheap Determinism”
Our Professor McMahon, gleefully presenting himself as the Prophet of Doom, has assigned us the dreary, defeatist short stories of James Lasdun, whose vision of humankind is saddled with a sad and sour brand of pessimism in which the characters, little more than nebbish waifs and socially inept sycophants, are victims of forces they cannot control.
McMahon is proud to taut Lasdun as a committed determinist, someone who rejects the notion that humans are free agents capable of making choices and taking responsibility for their actions. Rather, humans are, evidenced in Lasdun’s short stories, governed by determinism, which is to say they are helpless before the powers of their unconscious and their environmental upbringing.
I’m disappointed with McMahon’s choice of James Lasdun, for while I find some of Lasdun’s stories engaging and mildly entertaining, I find Lasdun’s brand of determinism cheap, predictable, and clichéd.
Once we realize that all of Lasdun’s characters are ciphers, weak, almost soulless creatures that conform to the whims of society—greed, lasciviousness, perpetual adolescence, Oedipal Complexes—to same some, we find ourselves bored in this noxious morass of predictable, trite, hackneyed short stories that end, predictably, with the character’s woeful, lugubrious demise.
It’s as if Lasdun is so determined to assert his pessimistic view of determinism that he purposely only uses weak characters for his nihilistic fiction. In this sense, his effete characters are empty pawns used to promote Lasdun’s cheap vision.
What could have been provocative short stories about the way responsible human beings are tested by temptation become thin fictions promoting clichés about “mankind’s helplessness in the face of forces he cannot control.”
Because McMahon has chosen Lasdun for our reading list, I assume McMahon is to some degree enamored with Lasdun’s cheap deterministic vision. McMahon would be well served to reconsider Lasdun’s collection as being worthy of his reading list and move on to something more challenging for his students. Next assignment, please.
McMahon’s Rebuttal to the Disgruntled Student
While I concede with the student’s observation that Lasdun’s characters are “little more than nebbish waifs and socially inept sycophants,” I rejection the notion that Lasdun has contrived a cowardly archetype of the cipher to promote his pessimistic vision, rendering Lasdun’s fiction, we are to infer, fraudulent. In fact, the characters are a reflection of Lasdun’s own genuine neuroses and failings. If Lasdun is guilty of pessimism, it is a pessimism born of Lasdun’s authentic personal struggles, not some glib affection designed so that Lasdun can brand himself as a cynic or a pessimist. Moreover, I would like to present today’s writing assignments as evidence that there is enough philosophical meat on the bones of Lasdun’s stories to merit their educational worth.
Student’s Counterargument
I’m glad McMahon has conceded that Lasdun’s characters are a reflection of Lasdun’s own neuroses and personal afflictions. And there lies to the rub: Lasdun’s world is too self-contained, too self-centered, and too Lasdun-centered to rise to the level of outstanding fiction worthy of our study. While Lasdun is an exquisite prose stylist, he is too shackled to the inner workings of his neurotic brain to branch out and give us a breadth of diverse characters that might make his pessimistic vision more convincing. Please, McMahon, dish us up something more substantial and less solipsistic.
McMahon’s Rebuttal
The German poet Ranier Maria Rilke said that all art should “spring from necessity.” Indeed, Lasdun, a man whose fiction is informed by his tormenting demons, writes his fiction from necessity. Our student who finds that Lasdun’s art is too limiting because Lasdun’s characters are all in one way or another reflections of Lasdun’s tormented self might benefit from embracing Rilke’s famous principle before he so quickly dismisses Lasdun’s fiction as a fraud unworthy of our study. In fact, Lasdun’s fiction, born of Lasdun’s demons, is the only kind of art Lasdun could have created and it is the best art form of all—born from the Mother of Necessity.
Essay Options That Pertain to “An Anxious Man”
Option One
Develop a thesis that answers the following question: How do characters in Lasdun's "love stories" reach the demonic state? (cause and effect thesis)
By "demonic" I mean several things:
They go mad.
They become irrational.
They become obsessed.
They lose contact with reality.
They become blind to their own self-destruction.
They lose sight of their meaningful connections and as a result they lose those connections.
They chase a pipe dream or a chimera and obliterate themselves in the process.
They become bitter at their wasted life and realize they've squandered their existence on a "crap dream." They're overcome, as a result, with self-hatred and remorse.
Consider, their madness as the result of 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," "An Anxious Man," "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.
Option Two
Analyze the dream of eternal adolescence and its corruption of the soul by comparing this dream to "An Anxious Man," "The Natural Order" or "The Half Sister" and Joseph Epstein's essay "Perpetual Adolescence." (definition thesis)
By perpetual adolescence, we meaning the following:
Chasing Eros instead of maturing.
Chasing the ego's needs instead of maturing.
Adulating or worshipping the culture of youth while shunning wisdom.
Chasing the compulsivity of youth and never learning the self-control of maturity.
Chasing the hedonism of youth instead of finding connection and meaning.
Pursuing Dionysian impulses instead of Apollonian inclinations. Some say that all literature is about the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
Be sure your essay is 1,000 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.
Option Six
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man")
Brooks points out that the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure is a drug that masks our misery and by masking our misery it actually prolongs our suffering. Moreover, the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure disconnects us from others and kills our empathy. In Brooks' words, we live, erroneously, by this principle: "Love things, not people." And there lies the Faustian Bargain, that in pursuing fame, wealth, and pleasure we find we cannot love people, including ourselves. We use others and ourselves to achieve fame, wealth, and pleasure. This Faustian Bargain applies to Joseph Nagel, the stock market addict from "An Anxious Man."
Option Seven
Analyze at least two stories as examples of the "emotional car crash" the characters have become because they either have no metacognition or the misapplication of metacognition. (cause and effect thesis)
An Analysis of “Love People, Not Pleasure” by Arthur C. Brooks
Brooks introduces his essay by explaining the mostly unhappy life of Abd-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, Spain, during the 10th Century. One of the richest and most powerful men in the world, feared by his enemies and respected by his allies, he said he was happy only for “fourteen days of his life.” How could the richest, most powerful man in the world make such a discouraging proclamation? Brooks points out that the greater our capacity for happiness, the greater our understanding its absence. Therefore, the happiest of us have the greatest capacity for unhappiness. We can conclude that happiness and unhappiness are not mutually exclusive propositions but can feed the other.
Brooks further compares the quest for happiness to addiction:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Brooks is saying that we mask our misery with alcohol, pleasure, materialism, fame, or some other fool’s errand, but in masking our misery we are merely prolonging it and allowing it to fester until it overtakes us.
Brooks then presents a study that shows a link between another fool’s errand, the quest for fame, and how fame results in misery, even insanity:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
It’s clear that those who worship the God of Ambition are disconnected, stressed, and afflicted with physical ailments, yet they stubbornly pursue their false gods, not just in the pursuit of money but for attention and adulation. It appears that people who go down the rabbit hole of the fame and money quest are blind to their endeavor. Worse, in our social media age there are more and more unsavory opportunities for finding ways to becoming pathologically addicted to fame and attention. As Brooks writes:
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?
This “fake life” described by Brooks becomes, in essence, a drug and an addiction that allows us to prolong our misery. All those “likes” on Facebook spike our dopamine levels and over time we need more and more dopamine and more and more Facebook “likes” to feed it until we hit a wall.
We can infer therefore that the happiest Facebook “friends,” those who post compulsively throughout the day, may not be happy at all but addicts to the process of creating a parallel universe that offers more spice to their own dreary, futile, miserable existence.
Brooks points out that the quest for money is more normal than the desire for fame, but that of course in its excessive form, greed, new pathologies are born:
Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.
For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.
No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.
Dismissing fame and money as possible causes of happiness, Brooks then looks at the success rate of the pleasures of sensuality. As he writes:
SO fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better. . . .
Wrong. In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.
This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
Brooks is saying, in other words, that we are hard-wired to pursue fame, money, and carnal hedonism. It’s in our DNA to pursue these things as part of our reproductive success. But this drive more often than not overtakes us so that we become pathologically selfish and as a result we burn bridges with others, resulting in our loneliness and isolation. Therefore, we can infer we are hard-wired to be miserable.
It turns out, Brook adds, that we’re miserable for another reason. Our restless, nagging impulse to find fulfillment “from the beyond.” As Brook writes:
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.
Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Abd al-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we do.
Connect the above with Essay Option Six:
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (Definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man")
Brooks points out that the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure is a drug that masks our misery and by masking our misery it actually prolongs our suffering. Moreover, the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure disconnects us from others and kills our empathy. In Brooks' words, we live, erroneously, by this principle: "Love things, not people." And there lies the Faustian Bargain, that in pursuing fame, wealth, and pleasure we find we cannot love people, including ourselves. We use others and ourselves to achieve fame, wealth, and pleasure. This Faustian Bargain applies to Joseph Nagel, the stock market addict from "An Anxious Man."
One. Why is Joseph Nagel the “Anxious Man” (and by implication the miserable man)?
He’s screaming at his wife in the opening scene because she didn’t sell her stocks soon enough. He’s snapping at his wife Elise like a manic junkie. He lacks self-possession. Clearly, he’s a man governed by his irrational passions.
Money makes him anxious. It “had aroused volatile forces in their household.” Elise’s inheritance, about a quarter of a million dollars, makes Joseph feel entitled. We read that “with the advent of Elise’s inheritance he had felt suddenly awoken into new and urgent responsibilities,” which turned out to mean buying bigger and better stuff and rising in social class.
Joseph worships power. He is a sycophant before power. He behaves obsequiously around the rich such as broker Morton Dowell and the imperious, vulgar socialite Veronica, the mother of the daughter who befriends Joseph’s daughter.
Joseph becomes agitated by his wife and daughter because they pose distractions from his obsession, the vacillations of the stock market. He resents any impediments to his obsession. He loves things, not people. This makes him disconnected and this in turn makes him anxious.
His obsession fills him with hatred and exhaustion, yet he pursues it anyway: “How exhausting it all was. How he hated it! It was as though, in investing money, Elise had unwittingly attached him by invisible filaments to some vast, seething collective psyche that never rested” (7).
He pursues what he hates and therefore he must know deep down he has no control over his life and this must make him loathe himself and this in turn makes him anxious and ashamed.
He knows his stock market obsession, and never knowing when to buy, keep, or sell, makes him miserable in what is perhaps the most delicious passage in the story on page 8:
Whatever you did, it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner . . . It was as though some malicious higher power, having inspected the workings of the human mind, had calibrated a torment for it based on precisely the instincts of desire and caution that were supposed to enable it to survive. One could no more help oneself than the chickadee that nested in the lilacs outside their living room could stop attacking its own reflection in the window all day long every spring, however baffling and terrible every headlong slam against the glass must have felt.
He knows he is engaged in a masochistic enterprise rupturing his marriage and ruining his relationships but he feels too feeble to stop. His feelings of helplessness clearly contribute to him being the “anxious man.”
Another factor that contributes to Joseph being the “anxious man” is that he lacks any conviction. As we read on page 11: “How wearying, how humiliating it was to have so little faith in anything, to be so abjectly at the mercy of every tremor of fear in one’s mind . . . Unballasted by any definite convictions of his own (convictions, he liked to joke, were for convicts), he appeared to have gone adrift in a realm of pure superstition.”
Without any conviction, Joseph lacks a core identity and without a core identity, Joseph must feel like a cipher and this feeling gives him shame. He masks the shame and misery by becoming a stock market addict and this addiction prolongs his shame and misery, just as we read in Brooks’ essay.
Let’s take another look at the assignment:
Connect the above with Essay Option Six:
Analyze "An Anxious Man" in terms of the Faustian Bargain described in the essay "Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks. (Definition thesis in which you show the distinguishing characteristics of the Faustian Bargain and show how they apply to "An Anxious Man")
Brooks points out that the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure is a drug that masks our misery and by masking our misery it actually prolongs our suffering. Moreover, the pursuit of fame, wealth, and pleasure disconnects us from others and kills our empathy. In Brooks' words, we live, erroneously, by this principle: "Love things, not people." And there lies the Faustian Bargain, that in pursuing fame, wealth, and pleasure we find we cannot love people, including ourselves. We use others and ourselves to achieve fame, wealth, and pleasure. This Faustian Bargain applies to Joseph Nagel, the stock market addict from "An Anxious Man."
Which thesis type do we use for this assignment?
Know the Four Types of Thesis and Know Which One Is Appropriate for Your Chosen Essay Assignment
Cause and Effect Thesis:
The characters in Lasdun's fiction are saddled by perpetual adolescence, which is the result of _______________, ______________, ________________, and __________________.
Argumentative Thesis
Abel has made the right decision to end his marriage because of the superior freedom afforded by the bachelor Stewart evidenced by ______, ________, __________, and _________.
Definition Thesis
What appear to be insurmountable obstacles in the characters' lives are really problems that can be solved if the characters free themselves from their learned helplessness, which is evidenced by __________, ___________, ____________, and ____________.
Joseph Nagel embodies the kind of Faustian Bargain described in Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure” evidenced by _________________, _________________, __________________, and _______________________.
Claims of Worth Thesis
The most valuable lesson we learn from James Lasdun's stories is that metacognition is the number one facility that allows us to undergo a radical transformation, free ourselves of our mindless habits, and conquer the mental disease of narcissism.
Sample Thesis Templates for Option Six (connecting Joseph Nagel to Arthur C. Brooks’ essay, “Love People, Not Pleasure)
Joseph Nagel, our whimpering anti-hero from “An Anxious Man,” embodies all the pathologies described in Arthur C. Brooks’ essay evidenced by _________________, __________________, ___________________, and ____________________.
A close reading of “An Anxious Man” shows that the Stock Market is a diabolical conception designed to pray on the weaknesses of the Joseph Nagels of the world. This becomes evident when we see that Nagel’s personality is comprised of _______________, ______________, ________________, and _______________.
Joseph Nagel’s relationship with the Stock Market is a masochistic one resulting in the misery described in Arthur C. Brooks’ essay evidenced by _____________, _____________, ________________, and _____________________.
Arthur C. Brooks’ essay fails to address Joseph Nagel’s true pathologies, which are, contrary to “Love People, Not Pleasure,” the result of ________________, _______________, _________________, and ______________________.
Review MLA In-Text Citations
You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.
Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase. Use the templates:
Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.
Verbs in Signal Phrases
According to . . . (very common)
Ha Jin writes . . . (very common)
Panbin laments . . .
Dan rages . . .
Dan seethes . . .
Signal Phrase Templates
In the words of researchers Redelmeier and Tibshirani, “…”
As Matt Sundeen has noted, “…”
Patti Pena, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone, points out that “…”
“…” writes Christine Haughney, “…”
“…” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs.
Radio hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counterargument: “…”
Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.
Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material.
Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).
In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).
Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.
Sample A Introduction and Thesis
I used to gleefully ridicule the gluttons who would eat countless platters of inedible slop at HomeTown Buffet, gorging until their bellies were so full their brains were drained of all nutritious blood supply rendering these overeaters brainless zombies.
But my mockery of these incontinent eaters was stopped in its tracks in the summer of 2003. My wife Carrie and I were walking back from the brunch buffet at the Sheraton Inn in Kauai where I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes slathered with thick maple syrup, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar, pecan-raisin cinnamon rolls, all washed down with several tall pitchers of freshly-squeezed orange juice.
With a self-complacent belch, I staggered up from the buffet and stumbled outside orienting myself to the sunlight. As I slogged my 259-pounds outside the buffet room and past a hotel window, I saw the reflection of a portly, unsightly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This disheveled, unattractive man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of a fat, shameless, overfed American.
I walked closer toward the bloated image of shame and disgust and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but was in fact me. I was that bloated apparition, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned all of my life.
This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on.
Indeed, the characters in Lasdun's fiction suffer a similar malady, what we might call the Irrational Mind evidenced by their denial of their shortcomings; their overwhelming passions that render them out of control; their gulf between who they think they are and who they really are; and the irresolvable conflict between their private desire and public duty.
A Contrarian Thesis That Argues People Are Not Helpless to the Irrational Mind but Rather Are Responsible for Their Actions
I am troubled by McMahon's emphasis on the Irrational Mind and how this mind renders us helpless and without free will. To the contrary, a close examination of the characters in Lasdun's stories purported to be helpless are actually in full power of their actions. Their self-destructive behavior could have been avoided but they made several wrong choices, not the least which were to choose to be in a place of temptation; to choose to lie about their weaknesses, rendering them more vulnerable to temptation; to choose to be willfully ignorant of dangerous behavior they had a history of committing; and to choose to coddle and nurture a forbidden emotion until it grew beyond their control.
“An Anxious Man”
- What evidences Joseph’s lack of control in the opening scene? What are at the root of his compulsive behavior? Is he perhaps addicted to the rush of high stakes, like a gambling addiction? Does he thrive on the drama to compensate for something that’s lacking in his life? He is the fool who stakes his happiness on the whims of Lady Fortuna as described by Boethius. Possible explanations for Joseph's stock market addiction include: he's running away from ennui; he's running away from his own emptiness; he has defined himself as someone who needs to be a certain financial level; otherwise he will be suffering from an affliction. But he has made himself too vulnerable and he is not what he needs to be a successful person: He is not self-possessed.
- How does page 4 set up Joseph’s sense of entitlement and discontent that never existed before? What does it mean to confuse necessity with desire? (see top of page 5) Studies show that wealth and a concern with money encourage privilege and degrade our powers of empathy.
- How might some describe Morton Dowell, described on page 5, as a Trickster or a Devil, a figure who stirs the malignancies within Joseph’s soul? Good salesmen never sell; they give us “opportunities.” He is a sort of pimp or drug dealer who entices by escorting us through the various levels of human emotion.
- What dichotomy of existence do we see in the story? Adrenaline World and Civilian World. The former eats the latter. In choosing the former, we embrace misery, panic, and anxiety because we prefer drama and its power to distract us from death and vapidity. See page 7 and 8. Does it not seem Joseph knows he’s made a deal with the devil yet can do nothing to stop himself? What does this say about free will? Once we get the wheels in motion, we can accelerate toward our demise with no opportunity to veer away from the danger.
- Explain how regret is the defining emotion of stock market investment. See page 8. You never invest enough; you never sell quickly enough; you sell too soon; your life is one of second-guessing yourself and regret and anger. You become bitter but you keep coming back for more and more of the stuff that poisons you. The irony is that this despair becomes an addiction.
- What does it mean to be “grounded”? What evidence is there that Joseph is not grounded? See page 18 among others. To be grounded means that we have the Third Eye, self-control, humility to learn from our mistakes, and developing strategies as solutions to problems rather than wallowing in the drama of our problems. All of the qualities come from a moral sense, so that when we say we are grounded we mean we have a moral center that directs our thoughts and actions.
Sample Thesis Statements
The tragedy of the Faustian Bargain is that once we are seduced by a false paradise, we submit our will to that sacrifice resulting in the Irrational Mind evidenced by _____________, ____________, _______________, and _______________.
Ennui and a lack of life purpose make us vulnerable to the Faustian Bargain in four ways, not the least of which is ____________, _______________, _____________, and ________________.
The characters in Lasdun's short story collection are woefully lacking in free will and are therefore slaves to the irrational mind evidenced by ________________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Class Activity
In a brief paragraph, describe a Trickster or Chimera you once knew (or currently know) and what made this Trickster/Chimera so powerful and seductive?
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