Word: pascale
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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McCarthy devotes several pages to a demonstration that "France has always mixed politics with literature, and many great writers have been polemists (sic)," including Rabelais, Pascal and Voltaire. This stab at elevating Celine's propaganda to the level of genuinely profound thinkers in disparate eras, when the issues were different, is a bit strained. When McCarthy ranks Celine as a contributor to "a distinguished, yet troubling tradition," his discussion smacks of lame and unnecessary justification...
...SUSTAINED EFFORT to associate the psychology of Celine's characters with Pascal's metaphysics gets McCarthy into worse trouble. He replaces the theatrical vocabulary which the novelist uses to describe his characters' penchant for self-delusion, their yearning for a grander reality, with the concept of divertissement. But Pascal's concept derives from metaphysical anxiety, while, by McCarthy's own admission, Celinean beings wallow in the concrete...
...connection raises an intriguing question--is McCarthy's inspiration traceable to an Ostrovsky connection, too? In 1971 Erika Ostrovsky published Voyeur, Voyant, a romanticized but keenly intelligent biography of Celine, cast in elegantly spacy prose. In it, she lets fall the word divertissement with McCarthy's meaning but without Pascal's support. Elsewhere she undermines Celine's pretence that he resented public interviews and solicitation of his advice by jibing, "Somehow, he protested too much." When relating how Celine insisted that he did not believe in love, the Frenchman's latest biographer sounds a rather pompous echo: "One thinks that...
Another early suspect was ornithosis, a disease transmitted through bird droppings and direct handling of infected birds. "The picture in Philadelphia fits ornithosis like a glove," said Dr. Pascal Imperato, chief epidemiologist of the New York City health department. "The symptoms, the fact that this is obviously a common-source outbreak, the fact that there has been no secondary spread of the disease. All these point to ornithosis above all else, and ornithosis is very hard to isolate." An Allentown, Pa., physician, Dr. Gary Lattimer, tended to agree. Assuming that the disease fitted this diagnosis, he treated three...
Screenplay by ERNEST PASCAL...