Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the Watergate hearings finally opened under the glare of TV lights in the palatial Senate Caucus Room, the question-and-answer ritual seemed half-remembered from past confrontations. Then, with unexpected suddenness, James McCord Jr., one of the convicted Watergate burglars, tried to tie the scandal to former Attorney General John Mitchell and to Richard Nixon: "I felt the President of the United States had set into motion this operation." It was, admittedly, only hearsay testimony, and Nixon, through his press secretary, once again vigorously denied his involvement. Even before the hearings started, however, the week had brought news...
...parade of piteous horrors. Andre Schwarz-Bart, a French Jew who survived Nazi camps and Resistance fighting and has already given us one masterpiece, gets into the mindscape of each French colonial and transplanted African tribesman. He dramatizes their religious and political tensions with precise evocations of war and ritual, and he compresses his narrative to unsentimental essentials. The book is both poem and protest; more than a simple howl against oppression, it is a dirge for all the human values which oppression destroys...
Despite the ritual assurances in the Guggenheim catalogue that Dubuffet is still a subversive force, the flurry and scandals that once attended his shows have died. Whatever else he may be doing, he is not-as a New York critic claimed in 1948-"debasing and perverting the very nature of art." His crude little turnip-men and personages compounded, apparently, of excrement and butterfly wings, his animals and objects in all their quirkish black humor with (lately) their deadpan repetition of red and blue stripes within the wiggling contours, are only pictures after all. They have altogether lost their shock...
...English send CARE packages to needy sheep dogs in Scotland, yet lead the world in the ritual demolition of foxes. For their sins and sensitivities, they deserve this odd, sporadically charming book, which blends dotty episodes-suitable for framing on The Avengers-with a moral message about the beastliness of man to beast and man alike...
...succeeds, Kott implies, he becomes the new tyrant. If he overreaches himself and fails, he becomes a scapegoat. In either case there must be a letting of blood, a climax of cruelty. Sons will devour fathers or fathers will devour sons. Call it cannibalism or call it sacrament, a ritual will take place, and out of that moment of utter darkness there will come a light: the illumination that turns ritual into drama...