Word: paradox
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plays flourish in paradox. He appears to hold a distance between himself and his characters; yet the greater his disengagement, the more cutting the drama. The plays are about stripping away, about revelation; yet they give the feeling of tightness, of mounting frustration and desperation, like a large room in which all the exits systematically and for no apparent reason begin to disappear. They are funny, brutal declensions of pathology, each rooted in a private pain whose source remains a secret...
These results indicate that nothing has happened to relieve the general mood of public despair. Nor have Americans' opinions about how well things are going in their personal lives changed significantly. Putting this seeming paradox together with answers to other questions, Yankelovich analysts conclude that Americans are "undoubtedly leary" of any change, like impeachment, that could upset their own personal sense of well being...
SUSAN EHRLICH'S Beatrice is the paradox that makes it so hard for me to pass judgement on this production. In one way, she is outstanding, in another, she is terrible. She creates a Beatrice who is a wonderfully consistent, three dimensional person--an all too rare accomplishment for an amateur. But, tragically, her Beatrice is not the person Zindel wrote, and this throws the production off balance. She is too low-key, too gently humorous. She doesn't bite or sting, and doesn't build up the bitterness that brings her to cry at the end of the play...
...summing up his career, especially as his voice now seems to be murmering ever closer to a final silence, is attractive. This is the impulse behind A. Alvarez's contribution on Beckett to the "Modern Masters Series," a publishing phenomenon that is in itself a mark of the paradox that has made such a lonely, distant writer as Beckett so well known...
Beckett's artistic paradox is that he destroys his art in the act of fully realizing it; his personal paradox is that loneliness and elusiveness should make him so widely known to the public. Such exposure presents dangers. An art of such simplicity can be easily smoothed away into cliche, but only by the auditor. There are lines in Waiting for Godot that make you squirm now. There is the danger of reading a moral into Beckett's work, as, Alvarez points out, the Nobel prize committee did in their citation of Beckett's writing as "a Misere from...