Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Reflections on the "left-fork" of the double-fork split of reality in "The Quotidian", as espoused by my step-father in his analysis of what Samuel Beckett contorted in a sandstorm of words and subjective existentialism. The plight of a split in reality is loosely attributed to that Kafkaesque victim group which will remain unnamed but it is named in the passage from my step-father's analysis below.

 I look at all the book reviews and videos possible on the topics of the books that my step-father wrote and none have been commented upon or made mention of in any YouTube video analysis of literary criticism or analysis.

The essence of what my step-father--Gary Adelman--Professor, activist, blind, seer but sightless....serious flaws unmentionable, seriously joyous in living transmuted into my life as a force that has kept me alive where apes have failed in similar circumstances.

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The theme of the outcast Jew was never more ever-present than in this piece of writing. The lack of attention to my father's writings echoes the sentiment in this academic journal piece, buried under obscurity and archived peer-reviewed literary publications in academic research databases--which I accidentally happened upon as a near fluke for "free" and shortened considerably for the "dumbed down" public which has a very hard time accessing anything but "decent, good conversational gossip" and meaningless chatter (i.e. in the form of Banshees of Ishinerin).


The struggle for meaning always had the tinge of the silencing of the lambchops--the Jews--with my step-father's every written line it reverberated somehow. He never uttered the words to me in any private conversation, nor was this a theme he ever once harped upon, neither as a warning (it would have behooved my life to know I was a target of poisoning assassination, but my step-father also was poisoned). 

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There was always a longing to find a deep meaning in the words. He always admonished me to not read anything but the highest level literature and not the trashy stuff and certainly--he tried to get me to stop watching movies and tv for any prolonged period of time. My circumspect skeptical wariness of all things mainstream mean Street media come from and are derived from his passion to find meaning.


I was a part of his utter sacrifice to find publishing for his introverted search for meaning as written in book form. Despite all he did to appease the Nazi organization, his writings remain obscured even more than Thomas Hardy's "Jude The Obscure", which was one of the novels my father wrote his criticism of in his most elegant poetic language. "Jude" is the word "Jew" in German. 


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Excerpt from "Beckett's Readers: A Commentary and Symposium". Gary Adelman, et al. Michigan Quarterly Review. Volume XLIII, Issue 1. Winter, 2004.

My step-father's visage within the blindness of his personal quotidian---Beckett, Existential verbal reality fork-in-the-road to the imagination. The eternal Jew relegated to obscurity and hellish scrutiny, shrouded in this literary criticism.


"...The literary imagination is a choice, a left fork off the quotidian. If the splitting were only in the mind and not the world, deep imaginative reflection would be schizophrenic. But Kafka locates the commonplace in that deep realm of the imagination. In the work of Kafka and Beckett, the barrier between the imaginative and real worlds has dissolved. K. of The Castle strives in the imaginative world while acting out his desire in the quotidian. The same in essence is true for the Unnamable. We interpret and understand his struggle as though it took place in the mind of someone in our world desperate to keep the intimations of his uniqueness from being smothered. Wordsworth's Intimations Ode provides a useful analogy: "trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God"; "Shades of the prison-house begin to close"; "And custom lie upon thee . . . / Heavy as frost." In Beckett, life extinguishes any intimations of the sacred. The self—the soul—is extinguished, and would be for the Unnamable if he were not crafty-wise and indefatigable.

We pull for him, impelled by our recognition of different aspects of the hero, and the different planes on which his representation has a powerful significance. The Unnamable, as epic hero for our times, merges into the aspect of the condemned Jew, one of the vanquished, repelled by life yet clinging to it, as if his ghostly existence constituted an act of responsibility to those already murdered. The hero also reflects the plight of the writer: repelled by the world and by his death-in-life withdrawal from it, dimming out, his witness and his art in any case worthless, he feels incomprehensibly driven to go on trying to create. Implied as well is the manifestation of the hero as the rebellious Son refusing to serve a world irredeemably cursed, yet who believes in the fairy tale of the Good Master esteeming his bravery and intending to reward it."


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