Search results
country.’8 When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and both Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, Beckett was visiting his mother in neutral Ireland. He returned to France the following day. According to biographer James Knowlson, ‘[Beckett] had followed the rise of Nazism in the 1930s with fascination, growing disgust, and, finally, horror,’9 and on 1 September 1941 he formally joined a non-combat arm of the French Resistance called Gloria SMH.10 In the Resistance, Beckett was involved in gathering intelligence. Specifically, he was
had been the fragmentation of the human form that the body itself, human physiology, must be re-asserted. He had begun to re-assert it already in Call Me Ishmael, where his account of the story of the whale ship Essex graphically recovered the details of human suffering and abandonment that lay behind Melville’s novel.4 The term ‘Resistance’ has two meanings. It refers to the French Resistance, of course, in which Riboud had been active, but it also sets up a field of relations, the kind of field Olson was beginning to explore as he contemplated ‘Projective Verse
celebrated heroines of the French Resistance, such as Odette (1951), and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), its genre is more female adventure or spy story than combat tale. The heroine, played with an unconvincing Scottish accent by Cate Blanchett, is a translator whose knowledge of French assists the war effort, initially in London. After a whirlwind romance with an RAF flyer, who goes missing in action, she
Member of the French Resistance (London: Macmillan, 1947), p. 52. 27 Wake, pp. 132-3. 28 Mata Hari was a Dutch-born exotic dancer and courtesan who became embroiled in espionage by accident at the behest of her German lover. She was suspected of being a
someone being saved from a firing squad by injustice: it is a possibly autobiographical record of Blanchot in the French Resistance. Having been through the trauma of the death-sentence, without the execution, the narrator ends with ‘l’instant de ma mort toujours en instance’ – the instant of my death always in instance: hanging fire, indefinitely suspended, always in process, always in trial, postponed
. Television parodies of the clichés of the First and the Second World Wars persisted through the 1970s and 1980s, and are still powerful today. Beyond the Fringe skewered ideals of insane devotion to duty in the face of certain death, and the television programme ’Allo ’Allo affectionately mocked the French Resistance and presented the German occupiers of France as bumbling idiots, easily outwitted by elderly women with radio transmitters hidden under their beds. More recently, the comedian Harry Enfield and the writers of the comedy series The Fast Show produced pastiche
responsible for the killing of her fiancé, Maurice Duval, by the French Resistance. Thus in both novels a revelation centres round a murder by shooting – the second Mrs de Winter famously discovers that Rebecca was shot by her husband rather than accidentally drowned – although in The Scapegoat one of the doubles is the murderer rather than the victim. Both John and Mrs de Winter only learn about the
measure by her experiences at the fringes of the French resistance, her guilt over her collaborationist stepfather’s execution, and by this sudden attempt to turn her into a civilised English art student. Rose Macaulay would have agreed with the critics of Casson’s scheme; ‘bombed churches and cathedrals’, she wrote in The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), give us ‘nothing but resentful sadness’. 90 Her own house was destroyed by an incendiary bomb in 1941, and she felt that the Blitz had changed the meaning of ruins for her contemporaries
, ‘Resistances’, trans. P. Kamuf, in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 ), p. 13. Of course, part of the positive valence of résistance as a term comes precisely from the French Résistance of the Second World War and its surrounding mythography, as Derrida himself notes
shall return to such labelling shortly. Yet another term suggested by Segal (452) is ‘Beckett’s theatre of inadequacy’. Further shades of the absurd The Kharmsian trace While Kharms’s literary career was first suppressed, and then terminated in appalling circumstances, he and (the early) Beckett were close contemporaries. Beckett was born just four months after Kharms; and when Kharms died of malnutrition (in a psychiatric prison hospital, early in 1942), Beckett was active in the French resistance, and beginning to think of engaging, too, with Watt. It seems quite