Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...driving across Indiana in early May 1968, searching for Bobby Kennedy's whistle-stop campaign, one heard another chord as well -- Paul Simon's wistful note of mythic disconnection: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes...
Some of the events of the year -- the starvation in Biafra, for example, or the seizure of the American intelligence ship Pueblo -- might have occurred in some other year. The events were significant, but not central to the drama. For the essential 1968 was mythic. It proceeded chaotically, and yet finally had the coherence and force of tragedy. And if it was the end of some things (of the civil rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement...
...that mysteriously stepped outside of time, one that was forever bringing the young to dimensions of eternity and the sacred: the boy-soldiers in Viet Nam were connected to death, the heroes to their own cessations, cut down in the prime of their youth and work. Part of the mythic power of the year derives from the mystery of all the possibilities that vanished into death and nothingness. (In October there came an odd, minor coda to the sex and death and disillusion of the '60s, when Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis. Illusion -- Camelot and the rest -- came to disillusion...
...however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness...
...mythic parallels, it is possible that there are similarities between Hamlet and Flute's Tamino (also played by Aron) or between Hamlet's Queen Gertrude and the Queen of the Night. However, the play doesn't really explore these similarities, and the decision to unite these three works remains a mystery...