Word: banality
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What is the ultimate Moravia fable? Surely The Invisible Woman. As stripped of decor as its subject, this little anecdote depicts almost blandly the tragicomedy of a wife whose husband quite literally looks through her. The chilling aftereffect upon the reader makes the horror of science fiction banal by comparison...
Hesse, even in his latter days of so-called realism and classicism, refused to let go entirely of his fruitless, banal recherche du temps perdu. The last piece included in this volume, "The Interrupted Class," drifts at times into the same melancholy desire for the carefree, innocent days of youth. But here some resolution of the conflict between innocence and experience finally appears: Hesse declares innocent youth a sham. While it's no transcendence into Blake's realm of "organized innocence," as one might expect from the spiritualist Hesse, it is a sign of some growth, however late...
...than it seemed on the New York stage. Judicious pruning and re writing have sharpened Playwright Rabe's savage satire, while the TV for mat has liberated the play from a living-room set, showing that the family is sur rounded by a whole world of other equally banal -and equally murderous- families...
SITUATION COMEDY is the most banal of American art forms, and unfortunately one of the more popular. Why is anyone interested in Donna Reed's dinner parties or Archie Bunker's poker games? Perhaps because the genre exploits all the most offensive conventions about American families--men are henpecked and boorish, women are hysterical--and viewers get a chance to laugh at their spouses behind their backs...
...shows in blending resonances from such things as the Divine Comedy, the Revelations of St. John and the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh with a story whose surfaces occasionally resemble All in the Family. Happily Gardner is on record as believing that a novelist should tolerate, even affirm the banal and the ordinary. "When Dickens wept over Little Nell," he says, "it was not because he was a subtle metaphysician. He mistook her for human...