Word: primal
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There is a cutting, angry quality to almost everything Kincaid has written, some recent, eerily serene essays on gardening excepted. Her primal theme, repeated well past the point of obsession, has been her abiding resentment of her mother. A remarkable short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, and two autobiographical novels, Annie John and Lucy, have not been enough to wash her feelings out to sea, and she restates them again in Autobiography. Anyone who imagines that tensions between husband and wife exceed those between parent and child is not paying attention to Jamaica Kincaid...
...were to go back to the elements of the states and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, I doubt not that we should discover in them the primal causes of...the habits, the ruling passions, and, in short, all that constitutes what is called the national character." --Alexis de Tocqueville...
...blithely as if it were a cardboard prop, and incorporated their famous arguments into gag lyrics for their duets. They worked literally nose to nose: Jerry would lick Dean's face; Dean would flick his cigarette ashes in Jerry's mouth (and lick Jer's face). It was primal therapy on the 12-inch screen, stripping bare a volatile marriage in all its grotesque intimacy--a bizarre comic display of love and resentment. No way it could last...
...open, pieced-together asymmetry of Constructivism. Form for him is always closed and unitary, though different forms could be added to one another to make a whole, as in the interplay between sculpture and base. And he especially loved form that spoke of life or awareness at their origins: primal, self-enclosed, a marble egg floating in its own space like a cell, an egglike head lying on its side, filled with what the poet Octavio Paz called "the dreams of undreaming stone...
...could read Sabbath's Theater as Roth's backlash, a Mamet-like refutation of P.C. feminism. But that would be missing the point. Roth never comes close to defending Sabbath. He only hopes to render the man--his "primal emotions and indecent language and careful, complex sentences"--in such high relief that, try as we might, we cannot despise him. When Sabbath is booted out of his puppetry professorship at a local college, Roth sees fit to include, as a foot-note, a lengthy transcript of the offending teacher-student phone sex episode. This is only Roth the provacateur, daring...