Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 00:34:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: The cracked looking glass of a servant


You err. Finnegans Wake is the text that the Gestapo was
suspicious and not the Brits.
This can be verified in Ellman's bio of JJ.

Kenner's remarks about Beckett do at least have their origin in having
conversed with Beckett.
On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:

> Supposedly during World War I, when James Joyce was sending out various
> chapters of  "Ulysses" the British censorship department suspected them
> of being a secret code.
>
> Hugh Kenner has described the world of "Waiting for Godot" on one level
> as a perfect description of a clandestine meeting  between members of
> the resistance during World War II with all the anxiety and endless
> deferrals this entails.  Samuel Beckett himself served in the resistance
> and received a medal for his services after the war.
>
> Art as the language of espionage  -- Grhame Greene. Knew all
	about this. And Christopher Marlowe. Later killed
for being double-crosser and a cross-dresser in every sense.
> Intelligence and counterintelligence
> Slipping secret codes past the censors
> What can a minoritarian literature do?
> Or as Sam once put it so well:
> "What else is there to do when you're lying in the ditch but sing?"
>
> Sam used the code of silence, explored the crack ---- interesting nice
thread s here...
> Where less is less until nothing comes.
>
> Jimmy used the mother code, womb and matrix, hall of mirrors
> To keep the critics busy a thousand years
>
> Ireland
> A conquered nation
> Ruled by the bloody black and tan
> The sun never sets on the British Empire because
> Even God doesn't trust the Brits in the dark
>
> To be at home is to be in exile
> To be in exile is to be at home
>
> Ulysses, Stephen, Paddy, Having Childers Everywhere
> Belacqua, Murphy, Malloy, Moran, Malone
> I can't go on, I'll go on
> The voyage of a broken pencil
>
> Bloom as Everyman, the Wandering Jew
> Molloy as Noman, lost in Dante's Wood
> Silva Obscura
>
> Joyce's endless cycles
> "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
> brings us a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and
> Environs."
>
> Beckett's End Game
> "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then
> it's night once more "
>
> YES (JOYCE) NO (BECKETT)
>
> Perhaps the messages in the end are not incommeasurable
> Secret sharers
> Brothers in exile
>
> "Grain upon grain,
> one by one,
> suddenly, there's a heap,
> a little heap,
> the impossible heap"
>
> Both had to leave, to get out, to see their native state more clearly
> Nietzsche's pathos of distance.
>
> It has been remarked that the Irish, like the Jews and
> African-Americans, share a surprising facility with language,
> disproportionate with their status in society.  It is almost as though
> in becoming territorialized by others -
> heretics, servants, slaves
> their language became deterritorialized
> it allowed them to name the terror
>
> The cracked looking glass of a servant
> Reveals a broken god
>
>
> Jimmy and Sammy
> Remind me of
> gogo & didi
>
> two tramps
> who stand perpetually
> at the crossroads of language
> & wait for the night to fall
>