It is a lesson to be celebrated by those who wish to express what the pandemic has wrought as they sift through a landscape turned ferociously upside-down and inside-out. “What joins all these dissimilar figures, from unrelated nations and epochs, is how they transformed the curse of distance into a blessing, the need to see the world afresh. Tagged with: 1970, African American, America, Beatrice, Literature, Novels, Race, The Canon Ariel Dorfman on Literature and the Pandemic (WaPo, June 2020) “At seventeen, however, he met his Beatrice, who was three years his senior.” –Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)įor more on this passage, see Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), pp. A hatred of, and fascination with, any hint of disorder or decay. He responded to his father’s controlled violence by developing hard habits and a soft imagination. For all his exposure to the best minds of the Western world, he allowed only the narrowest interpretation to touch him. The works he admired most were Dante’s those he despised most were Dostoyevsky’s. He noticed Gibbon’s acidity, but not his tolerance, Othello’s love for the fair Desdemona, but not Iago’s perverted love of Othello. “Thus chose to remember Hamlet’s abuse of Ophelia, but not Christ’s love of Mary Magdalene Hamlet’s frivolous politics, but not Christ’s serious anarchy.
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