Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Beckett's champions argue that his threnodies in dusky twilight represent the existential metaphor of the human condition, that the thin but unwavering voices of his forlorn characters speak the ultimate statement of affirmation, if only because the merest attempt at communication is itself affirmation. His crit ics believe that no literary bridge can be built on so shaky a foundation. Looking out across his bleak, windless landscapes, they see nothing but nihilism...
...Every time you put your hand out," complained one top national Republican, "they spit in it." The metaphor may have been a little crude, but it could hardly have described more exactly relations between the national G.O.P. organization and the Young Republican National Federation. After a week of attempted handholding with a Y.R. convention in Omaha last week, senior Republicans may well have decided that it is easier to get along with Democrats...
...inexperienced playwright, to shape things in the play." Macbeth, Hamlet and Julius Casear provide matrices for most of MacBird's episodes, and supply the better part of the linguistic embroidery. Miss Garson also draws on Othello for bits of martial brouhaha and on Richard II for the pervasive vegetable metaphor that crops up in MacBird's first press conference ("This land will be a garden carefully pruned; / We'll lop off any branch that looks too tall / That seems to grow too lofty or too fast") and in the spectacle of a mad Lady MacBird sweetening the land with bouquets...
...West is a standard horse epic in which the Oregon trail is a metaphor for life and the people in the wagon train are symbolic of mankind. Adapted from a novel by A. B. Guthrie Jr., the film has somehow lost the earthy realism of the book, and has become merely a landlocked ship of fools. Among the passengers are a flint-eyed scout (Robert Mitchum), a pioneering couple (Richard Widmark and Lola Albright), a frightened newlywed who alternately freezes and teases her husband, a Negro slave-not to mention a crowd of teenagers, old folks and other essentials...
More often, Agnon transcends the Orthodoxy of his material. In The Bridal Canopy, the Hasid Reb Yudel Nathanson, a deliberately quixotic hero, half saint, half shlemiel, sets out to beg a dowry for his daughters. The book is one long metaphor for the wandering Jew, but Agnon heroes have a disconcerting universality. "A difficult thing to grasp," says Reb Yudel, pondering war. "What satisfaction do the kings derive in sending folk of this countryside to another land and folk of another land to this countryside? What difference does it make to the Angel of Death whether he has to come...