. Comedy : is a disruption, eventually welcome, in my reckoning of the Caribbean and it's literary wake. 'An Entertainment' indeed. G Herbert epigraph, 'And the sad man is cock of all his jests' : something Catholic (the Cuban context helps dramatise this) and a dialectic of hopelessness. The underside of redemption. And a mode of blanket cynicism, which has some comedy effect but is also disturbing. Fiction : 63, "With a secret remedy you don't have to print the fomula. And there is something about a secret which makes people believe... perhaps a relic of magic. Have you read Sir James Frazer? / "Have you heard of a book code?" (naturally, Lamb's Shakespeare).
. 111 " 'Or just making it up. [...] There are lots of other jobs that aren't real.
Designing a new plastic soapboax, making pokerwork jokes for public
houses, writing adversiting slogans, being an M.P., talking to UNESCO conferences. But the money's real. What happens after work is real. I mean your daughter is real and her seventeenth birthday is real."
. 149 : "Was this comparative education?" (Prof. Sanchez).
. "Then you have invented him too well, Mr Wormold. There's a whole file on him now. / 'He was no more real that a character in a novel'/ "Are they always invented? I don't know how a novelist works, Mr. Wormold. I have never known one before you.'
. But also, 171 : "Dear Mr W, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement." / 'There's torture and torture." [...] It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.
. 243 : (Beatrice's harangue at courtmarshall at HQ in London : "That fool dressed up as a colonel said something about 'your country'. I said 'What do you mean by his country? A flag someone inventend 200 years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the H of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the TUC and British Raiways and the Co-Op? You probably think it's your regiment, [...] 'Oh, I forgot--there's something greater than one's country, isnt' there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact, NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don't mean any more to us than all the other letters, USA and USSR. And we don't believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom. What kind of freedom? You want your carreers.' I said I sympathized with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn't anyway put their carreers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary system."
. Spy literature self-parodic before even constituted as self: constitutively so. p. 51 (Viking Press, 1958 ed°) : "Our man in Havana belongs - you might say - to the Kipling age. Walking with kings - how does it go? - and keeping your virtue, crowds and the common touch." "The Atomic Cleaner", and plans for military installations copied from parts of vaccum cleaner. Boy's Own Paper (133 & passim), "The question we have to consider is to which paper they belong. [...] Are they Russan agents, German agents, American, what? Cuban very likely."
+ playing checkers. ("you see I was right to make that king".
. Cold war context - published 1958. Wordliness in this context, and the odd spaces of Monaco et al. 199 "We here a lot nowadays about the cold war, but any trader will tell you that the war between to manufacturers of the same goods can be quite a hot war".
La vitesse et la densité (toute en légèreté et presque offhand) de la poétique de Greene. L'efficacité globale de chaque détachement de phrase. Mouche. L'assurance du rythme, le haut-la-main, la haute-volée. Qui permet aussi, ou génère aussi, la qualité de comédie - et quelque chose d'un effet d'inanité. Something British in this sense, dans le défaut et le moins-disant ? ; l'implicite à profondeurs et à résonsance ; l'ample connivence énonciative mêlée de dénégation - où l'euphémisation est une culture politique. Le ciselé énonciatif, et prosodique.
La finesse énonciative qui se défausse de toutes les voix narratives, avec effets de comédie.
Relais avec Vidia Naipaul.
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