Word: motivelessly
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Afro-Islamic Harlems. The Dreams of Reason proceeds like a script for a dream film in 112 numbered but un-spliced sections. The action is arbitrary and apparently motiveless. The identities of the characters and/or freaks are seen for the first time, but they are recognizable as old friends or enemies, and the most bizarre events are totally credible. The question of truth never arises; it is only the interpreter of the dream who is confused. The reader -or dream interpreter -will have to sup ply his own factual journalism...
...first he seems a run-of-the-mill monster. "Should I give her one or not?" he asks himself in perplexity over whether to offer a caramel to the young ward of a friend. With petty but apparently motiveless malignancy, he hires some hooligans to humiliate one of his girl friends by smearing her gates with tar-a sign that she has lost her virtue...
...word. Ubu Roi furnished the absurdists with their basic attitude: shock the bourgeoisie and slam the Establishment. In a 1923 play, In the Jungle of the Cities, Bertolt Brecht furnished the theater of the absurd with its basic theme. Two men, Shlink and Garga, engage in a fierce but motiveless contest, and Shlink tries to sum it up: "If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside it would be so great that they would turn to ice . . . so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible." Although Brecht abandoned the theater...
Intimate Enmity. The earliest work in the volume, dating from 1923, is In the Swamp (alternate title: In the Jungle of Cities), which is deliberately obscure and mystifying. Two men, Shlink and Garga, engage in a relentless but seemingly motiveless duel of wills. In typically bizarre Brechtian fashion, Shlink is a Yokohamaborn Malay who has become a lumber merchant in 1912 Chicago. Garga is a lending library clerk who refuses to sell Shlink his personal judgment of a book. Shlink decides to buy Garga's soul instead, and a peculiar campaign of mutual self-abasement develops. At first...
...Miles. The sheriff and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation were baffled. The crime seemed motiveless. So far as the citizens of the region knew, Clutter had no enemies. Searchers found no sign of robbery: jewelry and a wallet in plain view had been left untouched. An examining physician certified that mother and daughter had not been sexually molested...