Word: iseult
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Updike has found a tantalizing metaphor for this quest in the legend of Iseult-the unattainable woman who vanishes at the instant she is possessed. "What is it that shines from Iseult's face but our own past, with its strange innocence and its strange need to be redeemed?" he wrote in an essay in 1963 What is nostalgia but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven forever removed from change and corruption? A woman, loved, momentarily eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under...
Alone of the characters in Couples, Piet is married to Iseult-the unreachable Angela, who cannot yield to him though she recognizes him as "the only person who ever tried to batter through to me." Life with Angela thus becomes for Piet an unbearable nostalgia, embodied in her, and his salvation comes down to a matter of attempting to tolerate the intolerable. They are "ordained for divorce," says Updike, and their submission is an acknowledgment of death's approach...
...made to "relive the whole of history in a single night's sleep." He is a pubkeeper named Porter, but his Freudian alias in the dream is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Why Earwicker? Well, Porter's night life is invaded by an incestuous passion for his daughter Isobel (Iseult-Isolde). The inadmissible word "incest" sneaks by as "insect," specifically "earwig." Thus the odd name, says Burgess, is "dreamily appropriate...
...ROMANCE OF TRISTAN AND ISEULT, retold by Joseph Bédier; translated from the French by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld; illustrated by Serge Ivanoff (172 pp.; Heritage; $6). If 13-year-old girls still come in the shy, quiet variety, this prettily done-up edition of the old Celtic tale should be an ideal present. It is full of sadness and magic, and it rings (as Padraic Colum observes in his introduction ) with the voice of the singer and the sound of the harp...