THE GOOD LIFE
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Alienation & Isolation
The Native vs the Tourist
Creon: allegiance to the city-state; prioritization of a person’s identity as a citizen
Citizenship: “to have a share in the polity; all citizens share in public responsibilities and in public privileges as if they were shareholders in a company"
The Great Gatsby 
A Raisin in the Sun
Madame Bovary
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Dispossessed
Life and Debt
A Small Place
Parasite
Ursula K. Le Guin
Bong Joon-ho
Mohsin Hamid
Jamaica Kincaid
Directed by Stephanie Black;
Written by Jamaica Kincaid
Lorraine Hansberry
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sophocles
HOPES & DREAMS
What is in your control?
The Circle vs The Line in A Raisin in the Sun:
*The Dispossessed: The Line within The Circle
Antigone: Autonomy = Free will?
--> your actions are within your own control/ obtaining power is within your own power
HOPELESSNESS
What is outside of your control?
The Individual and Society
A Belief in Fate:
“The power of fate is a wonder, / dark terrible wonder-- / neither wealth nor armies / towered walls nor ships / black hulls lashed by the salt / can save us from that force!” (108, 1045-1050)
What is considered right and wrong?
Who dictates this?
- Antigone: the good life = acting rightly or “cultivating cultures of character"
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831): argued that both Antigone and Creon were right, but limited from seeing the totality; battle of ethical systems, rather than a battle between “good vs evil”; while Antigone is driven by emotion and kinship ties, Creon is driven by welfare and community
Leads to a conflict of Divine Law vs Human Law in Antigone:
Antigone: “I have longer to please the dead than the living” (87)
vs.
Creon: “Whoever places a friend above the good of his own country, he is nothing” (204-5)
Different interpretations of a higher authority of the gods
Antigone
Antigone: Antigone is punished for going against Creon and the city-state, or the polis, by attempting to bury her brother, Polynices, despite his betrayal to the state by fighting for the enemy.
THEMES include the conflicts between the state vs the individual; human law vs divine law; duties as a citizen vs duties to kin
Anarchy
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
- “Impatience for change” (Emma, 34):
- “She was waiting for something to happen” (53)
- “It’s such a dismal thing...always to be stuck in the same place!” (Leon, 70)
Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby: Looking to the past/ dwelling in the past:
“Can’t repeat the past?...Well of course you can!” (110) ---
This is due to Gatsby’s desire to return to the past, more specifically, to return to a starting place and begin his life again
Emma in Madame Bovary: Waiting for change
The possibility of the Good Life: Dreams vs Reality
Madame Bovary
The Great Gatsby
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)
Autonomy can be a source of free will within the greater society; a source of control over the outcomes of your life
Bourgeois attitude associated with material gain, shallow culture, greed, and superficiality -->
Madame Bovary: “Still...we have to pay some attention to society’s opinions and abide by its morality” (Emma, 126)--
Emma believes that the individual must still act accordingly with the “rules" of the society due to its morals and customs--> is this Emma’s belief in self-control or lack of control?
Madame Bovary: Emma Bovary finds herself unhappy in her marriage to Charles, and thus escapes the reality of her discontent through committing adultery upon her romanticized view of love and relationships;
THEMES include romanticism, or the death of romanticism; a critique of bourgeois attitudes and culture; ideas of capitalist growth and its application to both the society and the individual, with an emphasis on the role of women in this money-oriented societal structure
Emma in Madame Bovary: "One mustn’t get used to impractical pleasures when one is burdened by so many demands” (206)
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
Fate in Madame Bovary:
“Fate is to blame!” (310)
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
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)
An important part of Emma's fantasy of the good life
Bourgeois notions: stability, prosperity, nuclear family, social conformity
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)
The Great Gatsby: Nick Carraway moves to New York, a city new and unfamiliar to him, and finds himself wrapped up in the industrial/capitalist urban society, where he gets caught up in Jay Gatsby’s nostalgic desire for Daisy, who is already Tom Buchanan’s wife;
THEMES include the alienation and isolation of the individual; the rise of urbanization, capitalism, consumer culture, and modernization; old money versus new money and its relation to social status and class
Nick in The Great Gatsby: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (35). --
Nick faces the struggles of alienation and isolation in a new and unfamiliar city, and his feeling of “within and without” parallels the same feeling as being just a face in the crowd.
Nick in The Great Gatsby: “I am full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires” (58) --
Nick’s desires are not being thwarted by an external force, such as societal expectations outside of his control, but rather by an internal conflict
The Great Gatsby: who can see clearly? --> vision plays a role in the story, notably in a way that is limited; Nick can only see from his limited singular perspective
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
Excess: the good life is always imagined as something infinite; false infinity of destiny, social mobility, and happiness
However, Creon’s self-interest seems to overpower his drive for the welfare of the community through an angry rationalizing of his position of power: “that man the city places in authority, his orders must be obeyed, large and small, right and wrong” (746)
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby...sprang from the Platoonic conception of himself” (98)
“He talked a lot of the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy...If he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find what that thing was” (110)
Gatsby in The Great Gatsby: Returning to the past or repeating the past
In contrast to Gatsby, Daisy in The Great Gatsby believes that the past is out of her control: “I can’t help what’s past” (132)
This belief that he can repeat the past is a perspective of time as a tangible and controllable commodity
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
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
A Raisin in the Sun: The Younger family faces the struggles of the class gap, wealth gap, and racial gap, and their relationship through their fight to close this gap, fulfill their dreams, and further attain the ideal of the American Dream;
THEMES include the struggles of poverty, the class system, capitalism, dreams and desires, the idea of the passage of time, and the limitations of the American Dream
Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun: “I want very much to talk with you. About Africa. You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity!” (62) --
Beneath is struggling with her identity because of the disconnect she feels between her home in America and her ancestral roots in Africa, especially because of how her race is viewed and treated in America
Walter: “Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretches out in front of me... Just waiting for me--a big, looming blank space--full of nothing. Just waiting for me” (73)
Walter sees the future with hope, as a place of sudden opportunity, like a script that has yet to be written, that he can change and adapt to his liking; but this viewpoint disregards how the past influences the present, and how the present will thus influence the future
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
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
Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun: she later understands that the greater workings of society are, to an extent, outside of her control, as the circumstances that led to her present-day were culminated by the mistakes of the past, thus she says this with sarcastic irony: “Cure the Great Sore of Colonialism--with the Penicillin of Independence” (133)
Beneatha: “...There isn’t any real progress...there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around....[toward] our own little mirage that we think is the future"
Asagai: “It isn’t a circle--it is simply a long line, one that reaches into infinity...because we cannot see the end--we also cannot see how it changes...those who see the changes--who dream--who will not give up--are called idealists...and those who only see the circle we call them realists!” (134)
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
Life and Debt: the film is an adaptation of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, accompanying her words with videos and imagery that further Kincaid’s point
What does a home mean?
A Raisin in the Sun: for the Younger family, owning a home is a dream for them that was born from the ideals of the American Dream; home ownership is an essential concept of the good life, although this was limited to a very “white vision"
The home stands as a symbol of Mama’s long-deferred dream
Owning a home for the family is more about gaining access into the American Dream
A Small Place: set in Antigua, the story shares a contrast between the tourist and the native--
THEMES include the underlying setting of exploitation, oppression, and colonialism, the massive gap between wealth and poverty, subjectivity, and alienation
Timelessness in A Small Place
“These people descended from slaves--what a strange, unusual perception of time they have...perhaps in a world that is 12 miles long and 9 niles wide...12 years and 12 minutes and 12 days are all the same” (9)
A Small Place and reasons for tourism: “As you walk down a busy street in a large and modern and prosperous city...dismayed, puzzles....at how alone you feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed....[believing that] ‘I must get away’” (15-16)
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)
“Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and forget?"
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
Who is the insider and who is the outsider?
“ To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist” (55)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Changez struggles as a young immigrant in America from Pakistan with the American ideal that hard work will lead to success, while also struggling with isolation and alienation;
THEMES include economic inequality, corporate success, the idea of fundamentals, and conflicts of nationality and identity
Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist: “Invited into the ranks of meritocracy...in return, we were expected to contribute our talents to your society” (4)
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
Social Status:
Changez: “...in unfamiliar surrounding, uncertain whether it is predator or prey” (31) --> alienation, cultural shock
The Reluctant Fundamentalist: A perspective of the present
Changez: “We have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings...that allows us to put the present into much better perspective” (45)
Changez: for him, home is about the people, and not the actual place (and the same is for Erica (her home was Chris)
- Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist: “Why did a part of me desire to see America harmed?” (73) --> Changez does not feel American; his heart stayed with his home
Citizenship:
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Changez: “Status...declines more slowly than wealth (10)
- Erica of The Reluctant Fundamentalist: dwelling in the past/looking to the past to find herself: “When Chris died, Erica felt that she had lost herself” (91)
The Individual versus Society
A Small Place: “You see yourself, you see yourself...” (13)
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
Society, money, and commodities
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
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
Conceptions of Freedom
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
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
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).
Individuality vs Selfishness
Taking individual action vs acting purely out of self-interest
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
Antigone: Conflict between the individual and the state (duties to family vs duties as a citizen)
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 Reluctant Fundamentalist: he novel’s reflection of 9/11 from abroad: a de-centered national narrative --> blurs the line of historical significance as it was an international event
The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Subjectivity of the story limited to only Changez is effective by reversing the usual hierarchy, giving voice to those often unheard (calls attention to the imbalance of perspectives of the dominating American POV)
Parasite: In their desperation for money, the Kim family attempts to get jobs working for the wealthy Park family, but things spiral out of control and the Kim family’s hopes for wealth and success plummet;
THEMES include poverty and economic inequality, capitalism, the ideology of values, and differing dynamics of power
The Dispossessed: The physicist Shevek of the anarchist utopian planet of Anarres journeys to the origin planet of Urras in attempt to cultivate his Simultaneity Theory; THEMES include anarchism, time, comparisons of societies in an almost anthropological fashion and thus, contrasts of values, beliefs, and customs
Jim: “Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.... Power comes from becoming change” (96)
- Comparing Jim’s belief to the circle and line theory of A Raisin in the Sun, he seems to see time as a line, rather than a circle
Jim’s POV of time as a line contrasts Erica’s POV of time as a circle: Erica: “It’s whether there’s something left...or whether it’s all already happened” (112)
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
Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back” (115)
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
VERSUS the ideals of the company Underwood Samson: “shaping the future with little regard for the past” (116)
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?
Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and his struggle with his sense of belonging in Pakistan or America: “I had changed; I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner” (124) --> this explains his feeling of separation and even alienation upon returning home from America to Pakistan
The firm of Underwood Samson calculates and determines value
Changez struggles with a sense of shifting allegiances, often going back and forth in negotiations of his national identity
This contributes to the capitalist logic of prioritizing profit, growth and efficiency, rationalization of values, and a “focus on the fundamentals"
Parasite: “We live here...This is our home now” -->
Owning a home is tied to this sort of fantasy-life belief that isn’t entirely real
Parasite and hopelessness (The father, Ki-taek, and the progression of his views on change):
Upon finding a man--Oh Geun-se, the housekeeper’s husband--living in the basement, Ki-taek asks him, “You don’t have a plan?”
To which Oh Geun-se replies, “I just feel comfortable here"
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
But later in the movie, after the family seems to be at rock bottom, Kim Ki-woo asks his dad, Ki-taek, what the plan is, and Ki-taek says: “You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all"
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
Bong Joon-ho’s perspective: things are out of your control (particularly poverty and economic disparity); the theme that hope is the parasite reveals the hopelessness of reality
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
Parasite
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 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
Bong joon-ho: “Essentially we all live in the same country...called capitalism"
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?
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
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
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
The Dispossessed: Anarres attempts to close the gap between the individual and the society by centering the society around individual freedom of choice without a singular center power
- The Dispossessed: Shevek: “Status is the same as class?” (16)
Shevek: “Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time....But...it cannot explain why things endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time--never of the circle of time....
Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line....
Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change” (222-23)
The Dispossessed: literature as cognitive estrangement, produces a distancing or alienating effect through the use of 3rd person, but with a combination of neutral narrative perspective and focalized narration (often in Free Indirect Style)
On a narrative level, Urras is in the present, whereas Anarres is the past; but historically in the novel, Urras is the place of the past, where Anarress is the future (the utopia) --> This shows multiple perspectives of time, especially a blurring of the past, present, and future
The only way to create a line--opening the line out of the circle towards a changed future--is through a permanent state of revolution (through a mediation of the past, present, and future)
Kummel’s theory about an “open-ended utopia”: “In the open circle of future and past there exists no possibility which is not made concrete by real conditions, nor any realization which does not bring with it new possibilities. This interrelation of reciprocal conditions is a historical process in which the past never assumes a final shape nor the future ever shuts its doors."
The past is constantly being re-evaluated and re-nderstood
Questions the fact that our attachment to dreams can function as an obstacle to flourishing (Cruel 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
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)