Word: manichaeanism
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...compensate for the one-sided action in the ring, Mailer continues his familiar shadowboxing with the ineffable. He uses nearly all the old combinations. In his interviews with Ali and Foreman, Mailer is the old Manichaean attempting to create tensions with ambiguities of good and evil. Ali is seen not only as a dark prince who taps Mailer's deepest anxieties about Negroes, but also as the "black Kissinger" who may one day pose some vague political threat...
Americans have always had a certain Manichaean attitude toward other nations-and indeed toward life itself. There was light and darkness, good and evil, success or failure-and no other choices, even within ourselves. The whole trend of American history and character has made us believe that an individual can be anything he aspires to be (can "go to heaven if he wants to"). That is a heady belief until he fails; then failure is all the more bitter because it is his own fault. The nation as a whole can do anything it aspires to, including transcend history...
...astonishing to contemplate, but another extraordinary aspect of Holmes is that, along with his violin, he sounds a metaphysical chord. He and Professor Moriarty are Manichaean twins, representing the endless moral struggle between good and evil...
...Burgess novel is frequently an embarrassment of riches, a kind of conspicuous consumption of exotic plot thickeners, linguistic games, disturbing tragicomedy, Manichaean trampoline acts and Christian and mythological symbolism. Thematically speaking, anything goes-as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional...
...years since World War II, the U.S. and its fighting men have been suspended in a murky, twilit world, where neither war nor peace prevails. World War I, World War II and even Korea were what Colonel Samuel Hayes, head of West Point's Psychology and Leadership Department, calls "Manichaean" conflicts, ringing clashes between good and evil, with no doubt about the identity or nature of the aggressors...