Word: fleshed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dustjacket calls Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh an autobiography--but the inadequacy of this label constantly astounds the reader. For Dahlberg's autobiography is also biography, philosophy and lyric poetry...
...These Bones Live, a collection of critical essays published in 1941, laments that American authors refuse woman, deny the flesh. Twenty years later, Truth Is More Sacred, a collection of letters between Dahlberg and Sir Herbert Read, clarified many of the themes in the earlier critical work. In both books Dahlberg emphasizes the moral aim of literature, refuting Sir Herbert's arguments to the contrary. According to Dahlberg, the artist should maintain a "healthy" attitude towards life, should celebrate love with "abundant rejoicing" rather than scorning it as do many American writers. In fact, in The Sorrows of Priapus, "abundant...
...main problem which mother and son share is not the loneliness of their spirits but rather the desires of their flesh. In long, detailed passages, Dahlberg reveals his own passion, his adolescent frustration and its eventual satisfaction. In theory, these pages should resemble the autobiographies of such authors as Lawrence, Mailer and even Rousseau, all of whom describe their own sex lives in minute detail. Yet such comparisons are singularly inadequate. And the reason for this, the difference between Dahlberg's book and other autobiographies, explains the power of Because I Was Flesh...
...describes the painfulness of desire with lyrical agony, recalling his cry in the Sorrows of Priepus-- "All flesh is trouble." Such passages inevitably echo Lawrence. Yet Dahlberg can write in a subsequent passage of Lizzie's troubles with her bladder. One can hardly imagine Ursula or Lady Chatterley, or Lawrence's own mother in See and Lovers, with such an ailment...
...story, in which two star-crossed lovers relive an old Cambodian legend, is almost the same as the story of Orpheus. The lovers themselves (Sam El and Narie Hem) are even more beautiful than the lovers in the earlier film-they look like oriental deities sculptured in living flesh. The color is rich and sensuous, and the camera catches dim disturbing glimpses of Angkor Wat, the great stone temple that lies sleeping in the jungles of Cambodia like a monstrous unimaginable spider...