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THE GOOD LIFE, Antigone: the good life = acting rightly or “cultivating…

- - - - Antigone: Creon says “Anarchy! Show me a greater crime on earth!"
      - Autonomy --> Autonomous: “auto”=law; “noms”-self;
        “A law to yourself” --> Antigone is exercising her self-given laws
      - The Dispossessed: the theme of anarchy takes place on the anarchist planet of Anarres as a way for the individual to take back individual freedoms, where there is no authoritative or centralized power within the society
      - Individual versus society?
      - The Dispossessed: Utopian thinking brings about the idea that the individual can still have freedom within the society
    - - Emma feels a social obligation as a woman, as well as a domestic obligation as a wife and mother--however, she sees this social obligation as an infringement on her individuality and thus her freedom, bringing about the argument between social roles versus the individual’s role within that role and within the society
    - - Citizenship is viewed here as a reward in exchange for contributing to the society; this relates to the ideas of nationality and othering (or me vs you/us vs them), as well as ideas of exchange and the commodification of people
    - - Changez’s conflict with citizenship and loyalty in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
        
        “...dismiss any possibilities that my loyalties could be so divided” (120)
        --> this questions which country he wants to belong to? Which country is his, which is his home?
  - - - This desire to “get away” is a modern cliche, an idea that to escape the buzzing of modernity, you can jump on a plane and “escape” for a bit; this contrasts the life of the native: “Most natives in the world...They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives” (18-19)
      - Who is the insider and who is the outsider?
  - - - Changez struggles with a sense of shifting allegiances, often going back and forth in negotiations of his national identity
  - - - Owning a home for the family is more about gaining access into the American Dream
- - - - Beneath sees that time repeats itself, going in a circle in which we cannot control; arguably she sees the reality, but the one that is harsh, unequal, unfair, and disappointing; whereas Asagai argues that we cannot see what will happen in the future, and thus we don’t know how it may change, which shows more than anything his hope for the future
  - - - This explains the two functions of time, one that is the temporal, the line, where there is “no change, no progress, no direction, or creation,” and another that is atemporal and infinite, where there is “chaos” and no “clocks or seasons or promises” (223)
    - - The past is constantly being re-evaluated and re-nderstood
  - - - This belief that he can repeat the past is a perspective of time as a tangible and controllable commodity
        
        This returning to the past comes up in A Reluctant Fundamentalist: Erica “was disappearing into a powerful nostalgia” (113)
        
        “A past all the more potent for its being imaginary” (114) --> this connects to the idea of conflict between dreams vs reality, and the impossibility of returning to the past to obtain a vision of the good life
  - - - “ To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist” (55)
    - - This inability to “get over the past” is a result of the suffering of people who were subjugated to exploitation and had their freedom taken by the destruction of colonialism, not only live in societies that are entirely defined by this painful past, but many of these societies, like Antigua, have not been able to recover from the damages of such intrusions and invasions (hence, the concept of the native vs the tourist), resulting in an inability to separate themselves from the past, because life has not necessarily improved or progressed beyond the society’s destruction in the past
      - (Setting of the story): causal connections in which the history of exploitation and slavery leads to the present-day effects of capitalism
  - - - Connects to a nostalgia of the past in The Great Gatsby: a turning to history rather than looking to the future (dwelling in the past rather than holding on any hope for the future
  - - - Originally, Ki-taek has hope for his future, thus his constant ingraining of this necessity for a plan, or a certain goal or aspiration to strive for; Oh Geun-se, on the other hand, represents someone who has lost hope, and who has settled with what he has
    - - Ki-taek sudden loss of hope is shown in this response that “the best plan is no plan” --> this reveals the reality of the overall theme of the movie; what Bong Joon-ho was hoping to convey was that the parasite is hope, and the reality is the gap between the rich and the poor
        From this interpretation, it would seem to be a belief that things will not change (no hope=no change), possibly even a POV of time as a circle
- - - - Madame Bovary
        
        Bourgeois attitude associated with material gain, shallow culture, greed, and superficiality -->
        
        An important part of Emma's fantasy of the good life
        
        Bourgeois notions: stability, prosperity, nuclear family, social conformity
        
        Emma ties her dreams of romantic love to material things
        
        Belief in ability to “buy feelings” --> individual dreams are entangled in economic or social realities, which leads to unrealistic expectations
        
        Class aspirations (a broader political and economic backdrop)
        
        Madame Bovary: Emma is eventually “punished” as a character with death for the excessiveness of her desires, although her dreams complied with the expectations of the aspirations for the good life.
        (Emma as a tragic hero, like Antigone)
        
        Excess: the good life is always imagined as something infinite; false infinity of destiny, social mobility, and happiness
        
        The Great Gatsby: Although there was social mobility, the society is still caste-bound, where different ways of obtaining wealth were not equal (old vs new money)
        
        Gatsby is portrayed as a parvenu, or a social climber; there was a difference between the “new rich” class and the aristocratic “old money” class
        
        A Raisin in the Sun: Big Walter has “worked hisself to death...Like he was fighting his own war with this here world” (45) -
        
        Class is greatly associated with race, and although opportunities are presented as equal for all, the family faced challenges with poverty because their race kept them stuck to a lower class, facing backlash for trying to move up both socially and economically, despite these significantly less opportunities
        
        A Raisin in the Sun (alternate perspective of the white Chairman of the Committee for the New Neighbors Orientation): “for the happiness of all concerned that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities"
        
        Another representations of fixed classes and deepening class division as a product of a major product of the white man’s opinion
        
        Parasite: The Kim family devises a plan to gain access into a wealthy household through employment by the household’s family; what they fail to realize is that there will always be a gap between them -- where this is a wealthy family above, there is always a poor family below
        
        This class structure is revealed in the movie through the rest design: the story is essentially a tale of 2 houses, one of the upper and one of the lower class; the use of up-stairs and down-stairs shot reveal this hierarchical relationship, as well as the vast gap between the two levels
      - The Great Gatsby
        
        The story brings into question the authenticity of the characters. revealing that much of their actions are deemed performative; this adds to the surreality of the story, where nothing seems entirely real; emphasis is on value, surface appearance, and materialistic things; other themes include self-inventions and imitation
        
        The achievability of the good life goes hand and hand with the normalization of materialism and consumer culture, and this culture implies that the obtainment of a more materialistic and urban lifestyle will result in what was considered the good life
        
        This goal of the good life is represented in the ideals of the American Dream (the novel’s setting takes place in the period of the Roaring 20’s, where this idea was heavily promoted
        
        The themes of dream vs reality also play a role in imitation, particularly in the self-invention/fashioning of Gatsby himself, who “invents” a sort of character for himself through performance and romanticization, to represent a sort of ideal
        
        This brings into question the split between appearance and reality; Gatsby is a sort of assortment of imitations, raising the questions of conflict between individuality versus culture & society; singularity versus typicality; performance versus authenticity
        
        “The truth was that Jay Gatsby...sprang from the Platoonic conception of himself” (98)
        
        The Great Gatsby: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” (2) --
        This brings into question the idea that perhaps our most personal desires are inevitably shaped by others--that our desires are not our own--rather, society is bound to shape these desires for us. Thus, identity is a sort of continual performance
        
        Freudian idea that identity is not about a core fundamental truth, but rather founded on a series of identifications with others
        
        There is no clean split between authentic and inauthentic, truth and false
      - A Raisin in the Sun
        
        Big Walter (according to Mama): “Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams--but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile” (45-6)
        
        The good life is seen as unrealistic, but hope is seen within their control, especially a hope for the future
        
        This is also a different take on the concept of fate, with Big Walter's belief that these circumstances of inopportunely and disadvantage due to race are a result of a higher power, like God, rather than humans themselves--> this puts the problems of class division, racial division, etc, in a space where they are unavoidable and even unchangeable, where hope is projected into the future, rather than seen as a present-day possibility for change
      - Hope/The Promise
        
        The Great Gatsby: promise of the new world; Gatsby is someone sensitive to the promises of life; New York is seen as a site of promise and mystery, “freshness” and newness-- “Fresh green breast of the new world"
        
        A Raisin in the Sun: Promises of freedom, but at a disadvantage, where the actual attainment of the American Dream or the good life is fully impossible (the Younger family, although they have been economically and culturally integral to the society, they are still not at the center of it-->
        “A Dream Deferred” or the referral/failure of dreams
        
        The Dispossessed: The concept of the Promise-- “The world of the Promise” is Anarres (9) (the utopia, or the source of hope); other theme is of Hope versus Optimism
        
        Optimism and Attachment in The Dispossessed: the power of attachment to our dreams = the promise for something better, or the good life (utopian thinking is this hope, but it’s a hope with integrity and a promise for change
        
        Being open to new possibilities --> a world that isn’t determined by the past, and one that is always changing (the promise of the good life
        
        Parasite: Hope is the parasite of the movie; Bong joon-ho’s goal to convey this reveals the hopelessness of the Kim family’s situation; while the family, especially the father, Ki-taek, start the movie with hope--a “plan” that they can follow through and they can grapple onto as a better vision of the future or of the good life--after reality-checks of natural disasters, violence, and even death, the family also sees the reality of their situation, and their hopes are greatly diminished;
        Although the movie does end in a way that seems like a hopeless situation, the characters actually do hold onto their hope-- bringing to question whether we hope for things because we know the are unrealistic, or because we believe them to be realistic
        
        Utopian thinking: A utopia is an imagined form or ideal or superior human society; or a written work of fiction/philosophical speculation describing such a society --> in a sense, utopian thinking requires hope
      - Parasite
        
        The Kim family’s escaping descent of the staircases back to their own homes showed that their place in the upper class home was just an illusion
      - The Dispossessed
        
        The Dispossessed is a reflection of our world, but the ideal version of it
        
        This leads to gaps between reality and other things like dreams, the future or the past, or another reality/ “un-reality"
        
        The book’s centering around a utopian society and its flaws brings questions the very nature of what is the good life, or at least what could the very best possible good life be?
        
        Questions the fact that our attachment to dreams can function as an obstacle to flourishing (Cruel Optimism)
- - - - The belief that the cause of tragic or unhappy endings is due to fate, or external causes that are out of the individual’s control
  - - - Use of this phrase reveals the issue of subjectivity and a singular, limited perspective, and how this subjectivity can lead to ethnocentrism, and especially limits in understanding about one’s place as a tourist (personal belief as a tourist=one of wanderlust, contrasts the public belief about tourists=tourists seen as imposing, or invading a personal space
    - - Money as a “neutral commodity” in The Small Place:
        
        “Money is a neutral commodity, and time is neutral, too, being neither here nor there, one thing or another” (59)
      - Globalization as a theme of A Small Place
        
        Globalization and its relation to connections: the good life is about who has access to it: what are the costs and who can afford it?
        
        Led to be another cause of economic inequality
        
        The intensifying levels of interactions among major societies around the world have generated a new framework for human experience
      - A Raisin in the Sun:
        Mama: “Son--how come you talk so much ‘bout money?"
        Walter: “Because it is life, Mama!”
        Mama: “Once upon a time freedom used to be life--now it’s money. I guess the world really do change”
        Walter: “No--it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know it” (74)
        
        Walter sees money as the key to his misfortunes-- revealing the association of freedom with money; although they are arguably “free,” the true sense of freedom is only attainable through money
      - Commodity fetishism and how it plays a role in the society of The Great Gatsby, as well as further in Urras in The Dispossessed
        
        Commodity feshism: our labor and relationships become expressed as properties of the objects themselves
        
        Human relationships are treated as commodities, understood as objects of exchange (capitalist society)
      - Value plays a major role in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
        
        Value: value sometimes has less to do with intrinsic properties, and more to do with public opinion
        
        Changez calculates value as his job in America at Underwood Samson -- acts as a representation of America’s capitalist ideals of what is valuable and how to calculate worth through money
        
        The firm of Underwood Samson calculates and determines value
        
        This contributes to the capitalist logic of prioritizing profit, growth and efficiency, rationalization of values, and a “focus on the fundamentals"
      - Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby: “allure of the world” = an unrealistic reality -->
        
        They live in a “society where social relations are mediated through and structured by the exchange of commodities”
        
        Commodities are an object that satisfies some desire or need (it has value and can be exchanged-- either use-value or exchange-value)
        
        Money is a form of exchange value (the reduction of many objects to one quantitative term or a singular standard value
        
        Money further has the power to transform reality in a contradictive way -- Money becomes the mediator of all things
    - - A Small Place: “Once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted, they are just human beings” (81)
        
        The idea that being free=being equal; perhaps the search for freedom is just the search of being human-- to be human is to try to break limitations, to be free from the constraints of the conflict between the individual and the collective/the society
      - Freedom of race
        (Differences in opportunities based on race)
        
        A Raisin in the Sun
        
        Mama: “Something always told me I wasn’t no rich white woman” (44)--
        Mama associates wealth with whiteness, revealing the relation of class and race
      - Freedom with money
        
        Is a good life even possible under capitalism?
        
        Is there a way out from a world of commodities?
        
        A Raisin in the Sun
        
        Walter: “Don’t nothing happen for you in this world ‘less you pay somebody off!” (33)--
        Walter believes that money is what drives change, and more importantly, money is what will ultimately benefit him
        
        Parasite
        
        Bong joon-ho: “Essentially we all live in the same country...called capitalism"
        
        Madame Bovary
        
        Emma: “You’re free...Rich.” (121)--
        there is an association of freedom with money, because of the privilege that is directly tied to class, and the class that is directly tied to money; Emma associates her struggle for freedom with her struggle to change classes
        
        The Reluctant Fundamentalist
        
        Changez embodies the American Dream of corporate success; the age of globalization brings about ideas of attaining success through hard work for immigrants
        
        The Dispossessed
        
        Anarchism is anti-capital or anti-government, allowing room for individual freedom; this views the idea of individuality as something separate from society, unable to entirely coexist with community
      - Freedom of gender
        (Lack of freedom for women)
        
        The Great Gatsby
        
        As a woman, Jordan understands a necessity to play the game, while still getting access to same advantages that men get, despite the disadvtanges of her gender
        
        Jordan Baker: “Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men,...this was because she felt safer on a place where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible” (57).
        
        Like when Emma’s child was born a girl, Daisy faced the same disappointment, but not because they didn’t want a daughter, but because they both understood the restrictions imposed on women in their society
        
        Daisy:“I hope she’ll be a fool--that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (17)
        
        Madame Bovary
        
        Emma:Emma’s desire to “escape” reveals her lack of freedom: “Emma, too, would have liked to escape from life and fly off in an embrace” (196).
        
        The individual woman lacks the same freedom as the individual man; restrictions set in place by custom or culture appear to be out of the individual’s control
        
        Emma:“A man, at least, is free...But a woman is continually thwarted...she must struggle both with the softness of her flesh and the subjection to the law....There is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.” (77).
    - - Autonomy vs Pride
        
        Autonomy in A Raisin in the Sun: Beneath represents autonomy/independence --> what she desires represents the modern woman; she prioritizes romantic ideals over material gain
        
        Antigone: “Pride is crime” -Tiresias (112);
        Creon sees letting go of pride as resistance, and resistance is seen as anarchy, and anarchy is seen as crime