Guilt and Despair in Murderers
Abstract
Literary CriminologyGuilt and Despair in Murderers SAGE Publications, Inc.1972DOI: 10.1177/0306624X7201600215 James M. Reinhardt THE writers represented in this brief piecemeal tractate show marked variations in their style and form, and in imaginative quality. And yet every one, without exception, manifests a magnetic passion for pressing whole ranges of symbolic meaning into limited synergies of words that, for the most part, are heard in everyday parlance. When played along the dark levels of grim despair and human tragedy such magic associations of ordinary words sometimes have the power to evoke exciting and fugitive moods and passions. The effect varies and depends somewhat on the reader's temperamental disposition and his immediate mental state. Sometimes so much as a startling turn of a line or the sparkle of a metaphor will capture the reader's imagination, generating new psychic demands. The mind is filled with a restless longing to be swept clean of the cumbersome rules of logic and dimensional reality. Windows may be opened to exotic sounds and sights that have no parallel in a world where two by two always equals exactly four. A former seminar student in social psychology reading Othello, remarked: "A sense of tragedy loomed in consciousness