This section contains 539 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
The title of Miss McCarthy's collection of essays [On the Contrary] suggests an arbitrary contra mundum attitude. Her target, however, is less what people think than what they think they think; her obsession is with the contrast between reality and the fashionable images of reality, whether in politics, magazines, plays or novels. Reality, as she sees it, exists in the spontaneities and unpredictabilities of human experience. Yet all of us, she supposes, are engaged for a multitude of reasons in a conspiracy to escape reality, to tame and falsify it. Mankind evidently can live by cliché alone. Miss McCarthy's effort is to get us off the stuff and restore the capacity for individual perception. She does this, as ever, with immense wit, charm and style. The result is a singularly bracing antitoxin to contemporary cant. (p. 23)
The last third of the book explains brilliantly how literature takes people...
This section contains 539 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |