Word: tormenting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pinter's play patterns coalesce about three recurring elements and phases-the room, the torment, and the expiation. The room is the setting, the torment is often an extended abrasive comic put-on, and the expiation is usually an act of physical or psychic violence. The room is a square womb. Though lighted, it seems dark, partly because it is sometimes windowless or tightly curtained against any blade of outside light. Outside this haven of refuge lurks the nameless, faceless intruder who will violate the safety and innocence of the room...
...torment is often comic, but it is no laughing matter. In Pinter as in Kafka, punishment presupposes guilt, even if the crime is unspecified. The act of atonement is always arbitrary. In expiation, a Pinter hero-victim may lose his life, or his wife, or his mind. Kafka's religious overtones find no echo in Pinter. To him, the universe runs with the remorseless senselessness of a concentration camp...
...Guam in July 1944, Itō fled with two comrades into the jungle-and hid there until 1960, convinced throughout that a Japanese task force would soon arrive to drive the enemy away. This book is his account of his 16-year struggle in the jungle and his torment upon return. It is disjointed in places, and it suffers somewhat from a translator bent on changing Itō's rural Honshu argot into phony British slang. But nothing can destroy its authenticity as one of the toughest survival stories that any man has lived to tell...
Poetry is in a positive sense now up and doing. Your encomium to torment and haunting inadequacy does not help...
...oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity, as exemplified in the paintings of his friend, Artist Sidney Nolan (see color pages). The play is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, but Lowell has typically given it a punishing contemporaneity. A parable of human pride and torment, it becomes all the more poignant with the realization that Lowell himself is a man riven by deep conflicts...