Word: beckett
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MERCIER AND GAMIER by SAMUEL BECKETT 123 pages. Grove Press...
...Beckett completed this terse comic novel (in French) in 1946, then shelved it, perhaps because it retained too much luggage from traditional fiction: plot, ambulatory characters, glimmers of recognizable settings and human haunts. In Waiting for Godot, which he wrote soon after, Beckett said good riddance to such trappings and began the task that has occupied him ever since: willfully writing himself into a corner where there is only room enough for the mind to contemplate itself. He is the king of solipsists...
Mercier and Camier was finally published in France in 1970, and Beckett then translated it into English. In the light of all he has written since, this early novel seems positively pastoral. Two seedy stumblebums named Mercier and Camier, forerunners of Estragon and Vladimir in Godot, set out on a mysterious journey through vaguely Irish scenery. Mercier is "a big bony hank with a beard," and Camier has a "red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs, beady pig eyes." Naturally their amblings attract attention. A policeman who sees them warns: "This is a sidewalk, not a circus...
Ruin and Collapse. It is axiomatic in Beckett's work that the concept of purpose is beyond comprehension. This may not be true, but if granted only for the sake of argument, everything tumbles into place. Waiting for Godot was after all the critical knuckle cracking, simply a play about waiting. Mercier and Camier are waiting under the illusion that they have some place to go, though they do not know where or why. They keep returning home to look for lost possessions or items they have al ready junked as superfluous. Along the way, pub stops...
Fromm Foundation Concert; Intonation before Sotoba Komachi by Donald Sur, Pianissimo by Donald Martino, and "Eh Joe" (a musical version of a Beckett television play) by Earl Kim; Sanders...