Word: monkeyed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thereafter, however, the film turns almost unbearably dark in tone, as the scientists attempt to stimulate erections and ejaculations electrically, perform mutilating operations in order to study muscle functions, and finally, in its most sickening sequence, briskly and bloodily reduce a living squirrel monkey to a set of microscope slides. The excitement of the researchers rises to almost orgasmic heights in the process, though just what they are doing-other than transforming life into a sliced abstraction-is unclear...
Lord Rochester's Monkey is the biography of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). The book was finished in 1934, but Greene's publisher rejected his manuscript and he just forgot about it. With all due respect for Greene's talents as a novelist, he should have left the manuscript in the library at Texas University, or better yet, he should have burned it. It's an interesting biography, but only insofar as Rochester is an intriguing character; Greene's style and his organizing abilities aren't capable of sustaining a work that brings together Rochester's life...
Greene compares Rochester's poetry to that of Donne, and in at least one respect he's right: "Both poets were driven by the circumstances of their lives to be satirists." But Lord Rochester's Monkey goes too far in ascribing to Rochester (based mostly on his death-bed return to Christianity) a metaphysical resonance that just isn't there. Rochester was a bold and cunning contriver and his redemption for enjoying all the pleasures of a decadent age lies in his contempt for that age, expressed in poems like "Upon Nothing," and "A Satyr Against...
...Monkey, or a Bear...
...letters to Pritchett, Greene said, "one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy." He demonstrates that same kind of sympathy in Lord Rochester's Monkey but it is overbearing. And as Leon Edel says in his book Literary Biography, "There enters into the process a quality of sympathy with the subject which is neither forbearance nor adulation." Edel describes a certain form of the biographical genre that, in its rejection of chronological order, can "borrow from the methods of the novelist without, however, being fiction." Here again Greene...