Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...back seat to first-person narration in contemporary fiction; still, when the narrator's chief preoccupation is his own lack of selfhood, the novelist faces an imposing task. In this case, he succeeds only in order to fail. Evoking Jed's self-confessed insubstantiality by equipping him with poetic phrases and intellectual rationalizations in place of emotions, Warren purposely forfeits the possibility of making his protagonist a fully rounded, artistically engaging human being. Jed is a small triumph of characterization, but a pyrrhic one nonetheless...
That A Place to Come To works as well as it does is largely due to Warren's poetic mastery of language. While his diction is less lush than Faulkner's his syntax less consistently run-on, he possesses a marked gift for penning phrases laden with metaphorical richness. His characters struggle to evade the "doomful tangle of time" and watch music flowing over faces like "the flow of fate as it returned upon itself." In winding torrents of words, they unthread the skein of illusions cloaking their lives, acknowledging its demise in cold, sudden, one-sentence paragraphs. Tone, metaphor...
...Carrington. Rose exists only as Jed imagines her-a compound of firelight and sweating sexuality. She is a medley of images, of bare feet and huddled fur and surrender. But, like Jed, for whom she ironically represents a form of ultimate reality, she is less a character than a poetic creation--evoked, but in the end, not completely present...
...piece on a film partly about music would be complete without some reference to the soundtrack, and Baskin's score makes the task easier. While most of the songs sound like a second-rate version of Laura Nyro with a jazzy twist and a male voice, the occasional poetic outbursts in his lyrics do draw attention. Baskin seems to be treading on all too familiar ground...
Without the dancers (June Kinoshita, Mira Nair, Maura Moynihan, Laurie Merrick) the plot would not hold together well, nor would it be as exciting. The dancers' movements are poetic, blending with the words and the music so thoroughly that they are inseparable. The different elements explain and express each other...