Word: arendt
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...their continuance. He declared that the power to name the country's economic and industrial managers would remain in the hands of the party, thus assuring the threatened bureaucrats of their continuing influence. Hard-liners must have also been gratified by the expulsion of two leading reformists, Marian Arendt and Jan Malanowski, from the Central Committee...
...intrudes upon the blithe assumptions of ordinary men that the world is a logical place were not a serious theme (see Kafka). Or that his insistence on the omnipresence of evil, even in the most commonplace settings, did not square with the basic drift of thoughtful philosophers (see Hannah Arendt). Or that the decline of the traditional moral order, supported by society's most basic institutions, did not throw everyone?not just Hitchcock's heroes, who were so often forced to run both from cops and crooks?back on their own desperate resources (see Camus or, on any of these...
...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...