Word: beckett
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STORIES AND TEXTS FOR NOTHING by Samuel Beckett. 140 pages. Grove...
Some writers chronicle men on their way up; others tackle men on their way down. Samuel Beckett stalks after men on their way out. Bereft of eternity, he writes of the unending ravages of time. His characters stumble through a sludgy limbo, out of life but not quite into death, "without the courage to end or the strength to go on." Nothing happens; nobody comes, nobody goes. Yet his plays (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) and novels (Malloy, Murphy) are metaphors of modern man's spiritual bafflement. "Waiting for Godot" has become a tagline for frustration...
...Beckett's champions argue that his threnodies in dusky twilight represent the existential metaphor of the human condition, that the thin but unwavering voices of his forlorn characters speak the ultimate statement of affirmation, if only because the merest attempt at communication is itself affirmation. His crit ics believe that no literary bridge can be built on so shaky a foundation. Looking out across his bleak, windless landscapes, they see nothing but nihilism...
...Beckett's voices, now mocking, now doubting, always carry their own special lyricism: "Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?" And perhaps to understand Beckett's sullen craft and art fully, it is best to recall that age during which all human voices almost automatically speak poetry-childhood. Then, too, the voice is a plaything, a comforter in the dark. In spite of his tottering old men, Beckett is more the toddler...
...daring and venturesome was the ill-fated Broadway production of Waiting for Godot. Today, the same nerves have apparently been hit by the highly profitable Off-Broadway prank, MacBird. Obviously, these works have little in common aside from their relative popular momentum and their respective pans from Walter Kerr. Beckett's sad farce, already found on at least three Harvard reading lists, seems firmly included in the century's catalogue of major literature. Barbara Garson, on the other hand, has chosen quite deliberately to write on water in order to capture and abuse a given historical minute. (She hasn...