Word: merci
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame sans Merci-enigmatic as a sphinx, cruelly indifferent as a Byzantine empress, wearing the features of the Divine Sarah and the aggressive glitter of a vintage Cadillac fender...
...Kingsley Amis characters-as well as the distaste the author seems to feel for his own creations. It has always been noted in extenuation that literary satire thrives on vile bodies and that swinishness justifies a measure of pique. But now Amis stands revealed as a misanthrope sans merci. From Ending Up it is clear that if anyone asked him the old vaudeville question "Would you hit a lady with a baby?" Amis might gleefully reply: "No, I'd hit her with a brick." And mean...
...romantic fascination with the image of woman as sphinx, Medusa, castrator or remote, implacable goddess -the belle dame sans merci in her numerous fictive avatars-also figures in symbolist painting, especially in the world of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), another member of Péladan's circle. Art or The Caresses conjoins a mysteriously smiling sphinx (looking not unlike a satisfied Rossetti redhead in a leopard coat that has grown onto her skin) with a puzzled-looking boy who has presumably come to answer her riddle. It is painted with a high, pale elegance that altogether removes it from...
...mainly read by Hornblower scholars who wish, as it were, to set their very stuns'ls in pursuit of their elusive literary quarry. As for the rest of us, one is put in mind of the French Gourmet Brillat-Savarin, who was once offered grapes for dinner. "Non, merci" he briskly replied, "je ne prends pas mon vin en pilules...