Word: mythicize
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...almost a great book. It is wildly flawed, too big for Mailer, unbelievable, confused, without humor (though with much wit), not a thriller (though it might have ben a smashing thriller), not a psychology, lacking in characterization. But finally, An American Dream has immense proportions--almost, one might say, mythic proportions--and the relentless pace of carnivore running hunted through a modern jungle to feast and keep from being feasted upon, to smell, to taste, to explode at last, to be killed and take, hopefully, a few of the enemy with...
...mythic level, the play is more opaque. Two characters seem more like gods than people, gods of the modern mind. Palmer, the psychoanalyst, is the contemporary god of reason, restoring order amid emotional chaos. Honor Klein, the anthropologist, is the primordial goddess of instinct, violence, and what D. H. Lawrence called "the blood consciousness." These occult beings appear in rooms whose doors have not been opened, but a more tangible proof of godhood is their incestuous relationship, which sets them apart from the others and constitutes normal behavior only among gods. By making Honor the more powerful...
Soon the literary critics were in full cry. A New Statesman pundit called Dr. No "the nastiest book" he had ever read, full of "two-dimensional sex longings." Breathing even more heavily, a professor in the New Republic discovered mythic overtones and likened poor Bond to Perseus and St. George. Ian Fleming could find only contempt for anyone who tried to read anything into Bond. He quite frankly wrote for money, and did not like his hero very much, although, he admitted, "I admire his efficiency and his way with blondes...
...someone who had tried to capture the essence of heroism," he is nevertheless subject to strange tics and seizures, inexplicable quirks of behavior; a steely disciplinarian, indifferent to the value of individual lives, he displays exemplary courage and single-minded patriotism. Clearly Tanz is meant to be a mythic, archetypal figure--Herr Kirst even goes so far as to suggest that he is "the personification of war"--but he also seems horribly real. Tanz is the sort of man that made Germany's nightmare, and readers are likely to notice him in theirs
...Andre Malraux and sponsored by the French government, which will eventually run to 40 volumes encompassing the whole of man's arts. Lavish in its illustrations, the present volume catches all the expressive, primitive power of Oceanic art while detailing its surprising variety and the age-old magic, mythic and ritualistic impulses that fostered it. A reader pondering its carved canoes and implements, its funerary and fertility figures and its grotesquely surrealistic ceremonial masks will catch more than a glimmering of what astounded and enthralled the eyes of great artists as different as Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Brancusi and Matisse...