ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s and into the next century, Edward Bond seeks to illuminate and resolve situations of cyclical social aggression, proceeding from his belief that ‘the idea that human beings are necessarily violent is a political device, the modern equivalent of the doctrine of original sin’.1 Bond illustrates the madly systematic (self-)destructive compulsions which a distorting society has inscribed into the national unconscious, its instinctive ‘nightenglish’. He attempts to enlighten the reactionary reflexes of this benighted ‘nightenglish’ through refer ence to a politically rationalised ‘dayenglish’ of analytic explanation. Some times his own terms of explanation appear prescriptive and systematic in their rationalism. At best, they are shockingly incisive regarding national patterns of ignorance and instrumentality.
