Word: arendt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...intellectual desire, not a visceral one, that it did not spring from a central concern in Styron's life. What kind of evil, after all, do you find on Martha's Vineyard? There are long sections of secondary history, and extensive quotations from people like Hannah Arendt, passages that seem tacked-on, contrived. The characters fail to come to life, being in effect tools of a superimposed authorial purpose. The only realization of evil comes through the author's ventriloquism: "I began to see how, among its other attributes, absolute evil paralyzes absolutely...
...still the genocide the authors try to describe is not fully understandable. We know about the Teutonic strain of extreme self-righteousness, Germany's economic chaos between the wars and about the ideology that found a target for this bitterness in the Jews. We have Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, which suggests how good citizens, following orders given by other good citizens who were also following orders, could have run the death camps. We know in great detail how the rounding up and the killing were done...
There is a kaleidoscopic quality to these images. Myth and legend are intertwined. Fiction becomes truth. Good and evil are presented on equal terms; there is no shift in the narrative voice. In the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt so well described, lies its horror. The pre-moral eyes of a growing child and the discipline of the poet lend the narrative the detachment needed to convey this banality. The narrator does not judge, but show, weaving the events into a fabric of legend and death...
Essays on surrealism, the mimetic faculty, Brecht and the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus support Hannah Arendt's claim that Benjamin was the most important German critic between the world wars. His romantic attachment to anarchy and violence as messianic salvations may remind some readers of Norman Mailer at his steamiest. Yet at times, Benjamin's insights cast prophetic shadows. On the effect of film and advertising, for example: "Before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that...
Robert Frost. Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling. Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath...