Word: peasant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hubert Cole's Laval is neither traitor nor hero. Instead he is a complex, unprepossessing peasant, skillful but overwhelmed by pride, brilliant but narrow, who gambled his life (plus what was left of his country's honor) in the hope of horse trading with Hitler to ease the pangs of the occupation in France. "If I succeed," Laval said prophetically in the dark days of 1942, "there won't be enough stones in this country to raise statues to me. If I fail, T will be shot...
What he worked for (besides his own fortune) in the doomed years between the wars was a hard currency at home and peace in Europe. Laval, Cole insists, had an almost psychotic revulsion against violence and a pinchpenny peasant's hatred of war for its waste of blood and cash. In 1944 he defended Vichy with a startling comment: "These four years of occupation have cost less than three months...
Miss Buck has made it possible for the ordinary sort of simple, average American to place himself, with equal facility, inside the lives and minds of a Chinese peasant and a nuclear physicist...
What Bryher eventually brings into view, however, is the enduring landscape along the fringes of a wasting war of occupation. Hannibal's army lives off the Italian countryside for decades at a stretch, until the danger from the war is as familiar a part of peasant life as drought or plague. The Italian villagers are loyal to Rome when the legions can defend them, comfortably acquiescent when the Carthaginians ride into town and offer better prices. To the fearful peasantry, Hannibal's few armored elephants loom dreadfully, like the roaming German Tiger Tanks of World...
...instinctively feel it. He is agonized by not feeling it, tormented by the paralysis of being in which the heart's purpose is blunted by the mind's doubts. He self-consciously flogs his will to take the place of his instincts ("Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!") His delay intensifies his guilt; his guilt mounts to anguish, and his anguish drives him to the far edge of sanity. The moment-to-moment danger, tension and exhilaration of the play is not that Hamlet will kill the king, but that he will lose his reason...