Word: aikens
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...part of Blue Voyage a man and a woman sit and talk about nothing in particular. No action: yet under Aiken's incisive eye the scene comes alive...
Such piercing introspection is Aiken's greatest talent, as well as the framework on which he hangs his personal Weltanschauung. For he believes that the real nature of human existence manifests itself not in overt actions but in painful silences...
Throughout Aiken's writing we witness the human tendency toward self-destruction. "We specialize in smash-ups," says Andren Cather, the drunken hero of Great Circle. "If there's anything we dearly love, it's a nice little smash-up." This aspect of life is sharply portrayed in Blue Voyage. The hero, Demarest, speaks of a love he will never recapture: "There's no concealing the suffering it has brought, that frightful and inescapable and unwearying consciousness of the unattainable...
Again and again Aiken's novels echo the idea that love means pain, although his heroes still invariably heed the call of the Sirens. Why the love-pain equation? Like the lovers in Blue Voyage, we are unable to communicate, and must therefore bottle up our desires and the things we want to say. But what if the perfect communication were achieved? "What if it were at last possible to talk of everything with a woman? To keep no secrets, no dark recesses of the mind, no dolors and dunks, which could not be shared with her? But then...
Although in Conversation this sort of temporary isolation saves a faltering marriage, Aiken points out that to isolate ourselves within the shell of the ego is no way to avoid pain. In King Coffin, Jasper Ammans, a young, insane intellectual who lives on Plympton Street in Cambridge, walls himself up within himself; he decides to kill a total stranger--"the final action by which he would have set the seal on his complete freedom." Ammans observes and analyzes his victim, Jones, so intensely that Jones' life, Jones' frustrations, Jones' pains become Ammans' own pain--and self-destruction. Involvement with others...