Word: thurbers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Iceberg. Brash young Review-men got E.M. Forster to explain why he stopped writing novels in 1924, James Thurber to discuss the difference between American and British humor, William Faulkner to talk about his technique, recorded equally penetrating chats with Francois Mauriac, Joyce Gary, Robert Penn Warren and other literary lights. Result: 21 interviews in the Review and a book (Writers at Work; Viking...
...this point, most critics appeal to sex alone. Rabbits are noted for fecundity. Thurber is an old man. He puts rabbits everywhere. Therefore, the argument runs, fertility has become a fixation with the author, sure evidence of the frustration of age. This line of thought not only does Thurber an injustice, but reflects rampant intellectual cowardice. One must face the rabbit squarely, meet him head-on. The issue cannot be casually side-stepped...
...Thurber chooses the comic motif, yet in this process presents to the reader's (perhaps subconscious) appetite a number of themes primary to our age. For Americans sex and war have replaced food and physical danger as cardinal concerns, and new symbols are needed to connote these fears. Thurber has answered with the rabbit myth...
...Also, Thurber needs them in The Last Flower to play off against the rabbits--now normal in size, but fierce, not meek. Note the sequence: war ends; the dogs, symbols of normalcy, abandon man; fierce rabbits descend; with time, natural conditions resume; children chase away the rabbits; the dogs return to man. Nature at the start was inverted both by war and the denial of sex. The rabbits can be viewed as the scourge of the gods (or of nature) after war, and one might add that the "enormous rabbit" itself could be America's fear of warfare...
...rabbit symbol plays a "deus ex machina" role similar to the oracles in Oedipus Rex and the Witches in Macbeth. And it is no injustice to mention Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Thurber in the same breath. They differ in modes of presentation, but not in depth of content...