Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...underlying the metaphysical quest of the theater of the absurd: the absence of God and the emptiness of God-bereft man. Beckett's theater is one of deep existential anguish: "The boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being." Beckett's writing also contains an elegiac, apocalyptic note. The world is running down: "Something is taking its course...
Beckett's message must be picked up in fragments, like shards around a ruin. He is an elegiac host at civilization's wake, taking for his text Cyril Connolly's "It is closing time in the gardens of the West. From now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair." The quality of Beckett's despair assays high; it is the quantity that is suspect. There is so much of it, and most of it is unearned. His characters are not scarred by life...
...kind of nostalgic gallantry accounts for this whole maimed and meandering book. Author O'Connor is less concerned with the fates of Charlie Carmody and Father Kennedy than with the fate of the entire Irish-American community in an unnamed city that is obviously Boston. What he feels elegiac about is the death of a separate ethnic cultural identity. While he prizes the U.S. melting pot, he dreads the homogenized young American to whom a wake is about as dated as a brogue. And so he tries to capture not only the wakes but the tangy, smoky drift...
Shadows on the Grass, by Isak Dinesen. This aristocratic Danish author of superior Gothic romances has fashioned a nonfictional still life, elegiac in mood, diamantine in craft, of her past as a coffee planter in Kenya...
Shadows in the Grass, by Isak Dinesen. This aristocratic Danish author of superior Gothic romances has fashioned a nonfictional still life, elegiac in mood, diamantine in craft, of her past as a coffee planter in Kenya...