Word: epigraph
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These disturbing fables might have as their epigraph the theme of Goya's nightmarish etching cycle, the Caprichos: "The sleep of reason produces monsters." With merciless humor, Goya gave the forms of grotesque man-beasts to 18th century hypocrisies. Jakov Lind, writing cheerily of cannibals and cripples in Nazi Germany, imprisons the reader in sweaty dreams of guilt. The guilt is not merely German. Lind's force lies in his ability to suggest that the sleep of reason in this century produced not only monsters but a monstrous complicity-a pact signed and mutually witnessed by murderers, accessories...
...Bottom? A clue to Novelist Johnson's intentions is the title, which is given in the epigraph as from M.N.D., Act II. If the clue is followed up, it will be found that Pryar and all the characters at Cobb comprise the cast of a Midsummer Night's Dream in modern academic dress with Cobb's Boosie House as Theseus' Palace and the New Hampshire forests as "a wood near Athens...
...mixed up as the lady who called Rama a "lecherous eunuch," and wonder about the Eastern profundities that sprinkle the book like sacred coconut in the curry. Example: "What is holiness but the assurance man has of himself?" Nor is there much help from the book's epigraph which quotes from the guru: "Waves are nothing but water. So is the sea." While conceding that it probably sounds better in Sanskrit, the bemused Westerner can only reply: "Sentences are nothing but words. So are novels...
Marriage-Go-Round (20th Century-Fox). "Higamous hogamous! Woman's monogamous. Hogamous higamous! Man is polygamous." This questionable proposition, the theme of almost every sniggery story since Eve caught Adam fooling around with Lilith, served as a sort of epigraph to an anthology of off-color jokes composed in 1957 by a shrewd young man named Leslie Stevens and palmed off on the Broadway public as a play. Partly because the jokes were slickly written, mostly because they were deftly read by two famous charm merchants (Charles Boyer, Claudette Colbert) and a well-stacked skyscraper (Julie Newmar), the play...
...strange paradox that the Socialist welfare state, instead of liberating the mind from economic concerns, has actually committed its favorite sons to a slavish preoccupation with wealth and the good will of the master class. The special irony of that situation is expressed in the novel's epigraph from Hilaire Belloc...