Word: hysterias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...French West Africa. The central character of his first novel, set in a British colony on the edge of independence, is Lieut. Michael Glyn, an English lad of good family and education who has no sense of vocation for his job and is emotional to the point of hysteria. This is the sort of man who has the hopeless task of working out an orderly turnover to a native government after the new country's first election...
Scare rumors aid the scare mongers. Senator John McClellan reports that many of his constituents actually fear that the tractors will be used for "military purposes," a less-sophisticated version of the same hysteria that prompts Time to label the tractors "bulldozers"--an ogre word with a vaguely military sound. The National Review hints that Castro's tractors will immediately be shipped to Red China. And the darkese suspicion of all was voiced by a reader in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, who said that henceforth American foreign policy would be directed by Walter Reuther...
...exits are either barricaded or booby-trapped. A rumor of gas causes mass hysteria. A simple cough is like a thunderbolt that brings on a rain of German grenades. A classical pianist plays a melancholy tune on his sweet-potato pipe and quotes Dante's Inferno as his mind ebbs away "in the lake's foul bottom, plunged in dung"-a grim elegy that unites all their fates. A sentient lover (Tadeusz Janczar) pretends "we're walking in a dark and fragrant wood," but his blonde, tough-minded mistress (Teresa Izewska) shatters the illusion tersely...
...design. The Shakespearean moment, in the tragedies, is the restoration of order after individual or civil turmoil; in the comedies, it is the lover's mistaken identity. In Ibsen, it is self-doubt besetting the stolid bourgeois; in Strindberg, it is a shrill cry of female hysteria; in Shaw, it is paradoxical argument overturning a pose. Germany's late Bertolt Brecht, one of the 20th century's remarkable playwrights, has his own typical moment. In play after play, through changing locales, characters and moods, the Brechtian moment is man selling his fellow...
...Love he customarily handles as parody, death as an animal calamity, and time as a metronome of disaster. He brings full authority perhaps only to man's inhumanity to man and to the theme of money, one of the great neglected subjects of modern fiction and drama. A hysteria of violence hovers constantly at the outskirts of his work. Today that seems timely; in time it may seem merely tedious...