Word: epigrams
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...called an "arch-artist" by George Bernard Shaw and "that sovereign of insufferables" by Ambrose Bierce. In The God of Mirrors, Oscar Wilde qualifies for both titles, reducing every crisis to an epigram. Some of them are prophetic. In Dorian Gray, "the bad will suffer. The good will be rewarded. That . . . is what fiction means." Some are merely contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation...
...fortunes, his adoption of Clara, his new romance and the completion of the monograph are rushed onstage in the final scenes, as if to emphasize the ironic conclusion: Job's "tragedy was that of the happy ending." That sort of throwaway irony seems worthier of an Oscar Wilde epigram than a meditation on a profound theme. The Book of Job has haunted writings as disparate as Mark Twain's novel The Mysterious Stranger, Robert Frost's verse drama A Masque of Reason and Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. It requires more than bursts...
...impulse toward poetry seems to burn more hotly in playwrights than the impulse toward literal truth. The conjurer's tricks of the dramatist-metaphor, epigram, literary allusion and the fateful juxtaposition-somehow feel more artistic than the precise evocation of life. That attitude seems to have gripped even one of the stage's most adroit neorealists, Marsha Norman. She won her reputation with the 1979 drama about a woman's leaving prison, Getting Out, and last year received the Pulitzer Prize for 'Night, Mother, a mundanely detailed conversation over cocoa and marshmallows between a daughter...
...side of May's door "...with his muzzle-loading revolvers, knives, lengths of cord, gas chambers, doppelgangers, poison-bearing pins" versus a group of friends sitting on a couch, smiling encouragingly, waving brightly-coloured plastic baseball bats." It is here that Pesetsky's wisdom lies; rather than offer epigram, dogma, or role model, she generally keeps her characters' lives firmly within the Barnum & Bailey's that is their natural sphere...
Jackson appears unbowed by the criticism. "I think jealousy is a factor sometimes," he said. Indeed, the epigram-spouting Jackson is so accessible and eager to supply a colorful comment that many collective black successes are wrongfully attributed only to him. Jackson is widely credited with the surge of black voter registration and turnout in Chicago, for example, although the drive was far from a one-man or even a one-organization effort. His current registration crusade has received wide attention, although it is only part of a larger campaign that includes the Urban League, the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil...