Word: beckett
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...GROVE PRESS offers up this plump, accessible volume to the generous consideration of literary skimmers who have shied away from the deepening mire of Beckett study. Interest in Beckett is at once so sticky a wicket to most people that they turn away from even the intrinsic pleasure of his works, and at the same time so enchantingly open to interpreters that the PMLA index mushrooms yearly with new entries under his name. The flood of criticism is growing so rapidly that Richard Seaver estimates in his introduction it will surpass in bulk by the year 2000 the secondary work...
...zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable--as something by definition incompatible with art." Although this assessment sounds overly self-deprecatory, it points out the reduction in the scope and power of creator and character--the self--which is central to all Beckett's work. It is not that Beckett lacks the linguistic talents of his friend Joyce, but that these talents are no longer tools for manipulating the established material of literature. Rather they compel the author to write; instead of being marshaled, they command. Just as Beckett's characters sense...
Seaver underlines the irony of Beckett's creative impulse ("The expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express") in the title he has chosen for this anthology, but he makes his selections in order to expose the remarkable continuity of Beckett's expression. In view of his fairly consistent production from 1929 through 1975, Beckett's labors seem less a romantic existentialist's anguish of creation than a diligent craftsman's continuing search for innovative forms...
With selections drawn from fairly regular intervals over these years, this book uncovers Beckett's development from a crisp but somewhat pedantic short-fiction writer ("Dante and the Lobster"), through his experimentation with the novel form (large sections of Molloy and The Unnamable), and finally into the most popularly successful phase of his art, drama (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape...
Aside from these milestones in Beckett's course through the variety of literary forms--like Joyce, he never uses an identical form twice--this anthology provides a valuable service in printing Beckett's early essay on Joyce's Work in Progress (later known as Finnegan's Wake), "Dante...Bruno. Vice...Joyce." It has long served as a starting point for inquiry into the metaphysics of Beckett's later works, as well as Joyce's, but has remained only in the hands of critics, since it is long out of print. It possibly offers even more as an introduction to Beckett...