Word: asylums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...diplomatic cold front formed over a year ago when Sweden began granting asylum to U.S. Army deserters and then became the first Western country to grant official recognition to North Viet Nam. The situation was not eased when Premier Olof Palme, then Education Minister, marched in a Stockholm candlelight parade to protest American war policies. The Apollo 11 astronauts' world tour last fall pointedly omitted Sweden, and two months ago, Sweden announced that it would send Hanoi $45 million in reconstruction aid. In reply, the U.S. closed its consulate in Goteborg. More significantly...
...hero of Shock Corridor (1963) is a reporter obsessed with winning the Pulitzer Prize. After a year of training with a psychiatrist, he feigns neurotic incest- wishes to get committed to a certain asylum. Here live three patients, sole witnesses to a murder whose perpetrator they are unable to reveal. Making friends with them, he helps them recover their rationality so they can reveal the murderer's identity. But he becomes excited and loses control at each witness's moment of revelation, driving each back into insanity without discovering the vital name. Surrounded constantly by sights and sounds that belong...
Various interpretations of this strange plot suggest themselves. One stresses retribution both moralistic and Freudian. The hero entered the asylum to exploit its patients, to use them as sources of information rather than as humans. The plot comes full circle, making him mad through the ravings of those he tried to use. Its symmetry is expressed in a typically explicit line of Fuller dialogue: "What an irony- an insane mute winning the Pulitzer Prize...
...Shock Corridor also criticizes American go- gutter ideals. Its hero, obsessed with making it, tramples on others including his girl friend- a stripper, a social outcast. Dreams of her calling to him help drive him insane. The asylum's other inmates are even more explicitly victims of social contradictions-anti-Communism and race hatred...
...Appearances to the contrary, they had not plotted their defection in a group before leaving Prague on the five-day, $170 Swedish tour. The idea had come to them individually, and each had kept it to himself. But the word eventually leaked out of the rash of requests for asylum. By Christmas, the last day of the tour, the tourists were sharing anguished doubts whether they should go through with it or return to the familiarity-and growing repression-of their homeland. Pointing to some of the eleven children on the tour, one man said: "Some of us parents...