Calvary Hill. For all of Diego Martin's comparative sterility - "the newness and sameness of everything" (p. 227) - the streets of the Hill remain "the very guts of emptiness" (p. 143), and Fisheye and his band of disaffected warriors have little else to do but loiter at the Corner, holding their bodies "in that relaxed aliveness " (p. 26) as they watch "the monotonous pedestrian journeying of people ensnared in their daily surviving, a ritual impelled ... set in motion," Lovelace writes, "by that most noble and obscene reason: the wife, the children, the belly, the back of the foot; the need to keep keeping on" (p. 166). It is easily observable how keeping on in such economic conditions is "noble and obscene" at the same time. The oxymoron serves to increase the sense of realism and, with it, the inherent pathos for the plight of the uprooted urban workers - even for Fisheye and his unemployed hooligans. Frustration and anger - "an anger older than themselves" (p. 164) - is the inevitable result, which manifest in the posturing and ultimate misdirected violence of Fisheye and his band. With effortless narrative pace, Lovelace's description of the band members' "tight unhumorous grins" (p.165) culminates in the "serious stupidity ... the important stupidity" (p. 179) of their failed pseudo-revolution in Woodford Square.Finally, the racial prejudices which characterize the Hill are also effectively dramatized in paradoxical terms. Despite Miss Cleothilda's hollow oxymoronic maxim, "All o'we is one" (p. 14), an outsider like the Indian, Pariag, will never be able to feel a human bond with the others in the Yard. Then again, that is not wholly true; only paradoxes can accurately and adequately convey the urban truth. It is only after the destruction of his bicycle that the Yard can see past Pariag's race to his humanness; Pariag feels this closeness as well. However, with the culturally pluralistic ideal almost in reach, Lovelace translat...
