Word: seer
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20th Century Seer...
...when the author is praised today, it is less as a spellbinder than as a seer. Bertolt Brecht is typical of those who believe that "Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state apparat." But Kafka was no East European Orwell staring into the cracked crystal ball. He was wholly apolitical and without any real presentiments of the Holocaust, which was to consume all three of his sisters. He knew of anti-Semitism when it was virulent but not lethal; he experienced bureaucracy before the days...
...years. We encounter the symbols of his old age and the images of his old age; they are not repetitions of images called up by his younger self. They speak out of awareness of the past, his deep national feeling, his sense of himself within his race and as seer and singer. He writes of spirals, gyres, staircases to be climbed, a freedom and loftiness that defy horizontal decay...
EVERY BELLOW NOVEL has at its center some slightly modified version of the Bellow hero. A dreamy type, someone off in his own world--irretrievable so to the "commonsensical" folk surrounding him. The Bellow protagonist is a seer, a dealer in the currency of big ideas and grand historical visions. And yet, he has street smarts--savvy gleaned from a long well-spent education. But whether a garden-variety schlemiel like Tommy Wilhelm of Seize the Day, a disheveled and dislocated intellectual like Mosses Herzog of Herzog, or a questionably successful writer like Charlie Citrine of Humboldt's Gift. Homo...
...Ward, with a little help from Steinbeck, has peopled the row with an assortment of all-too-familiar oddballs. There's Doc (Nick Nolte), a handsome, lazy scientist: "the seer," a dotty wise-man-of-the-sea type: and Mac and his boys, a bumbling gang of filthy but lovable squatters that Ward milks for all the slapstick...