Word: swiftian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bestselling novel by Britain's John Braine (TIME, May 27, 1957), is a powerful, disturbing piece of cinema realism. On the face of it. the film is a social satire: a hilarious lampoon of British provincial society, an ironic study of Angry Young Manners and morals, a Swiftian extravaganza on the problems of a social climber in a society without stairs. But behind the comic mask there is the tragedy of social change, which is here expounded as the agony of moral growth, as the spiritual disaster of a young man who might be called the Julien Sorel...
...moment of truth for these characters sadly shatters the mythic mood of the play. When the bandit is revealed as a braggart, the samurai as a snuffling coward and his wife as a trollop, the Kanins' script, unlike the film, fumbles away the Swiftian savagery of Akutagawa for something close to farce. What Akutagawa intended as the subtle shadow play of appearance and reality becomes, in the wigmaker's summing up, little more than an optical illusion: "Truth is a firefly...
Unhappily, Williams' story dies with his telling it, for though he weaves a spell he cannot validate a vision. It matters less that noisomely misanthropic symbols keep recurring in his work than that they nowhere seem purgative. With Swiftian ferocity he reveals a Swiftian tormented-ness; and as with Swift, however much he retches, he cannot disgorge.* More culpably, Williams' gift for theatricalism makes the how of Suddenly Last Summer devour the why, turns the horrifying means into an end in itself...
...some readers they have long been collector's items. In the bland climate of U.S. letters, true satire rarely flourishes, but the chilling ferocity of West's satirical attack would be rare anywhere. It involves not only a total rejection of common American ideals, but a Swiftian loathing for the texture of life itself. In his earliest work West recognized this of himself, in the character of a Cultured Fiend who says: "I was completely the mad poet. I was one of those 'great despisers' whom Nietzsche loved because 'they are the great adorers; they...
...take the reader of this chilling little volume a while to catch on to the fact that Author Duff is not really writing in praise of hanging. He has, in fact, produced a devastating Swiftian satire against capital punishment...