"I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me to leave all out would be another, and truer, way." john ashbery
philip wrote a while back & said he'd re-read two of the three parts of beckett's trilogy. he didn't get around to the unnameable which is my favorite(along w/endgame & krapp's last tape). this is also beckett's birthday month(april 13th 1906 to be exact)& they've just released the first volume(there will be three)of his letters. so i got to thinking about beckett.
i suppose i read the plays first. back in high school, we didn't really have access to staged plays. i do remember seeing a dreadful, dragging mess of godot at the pensacola little theater. it was done by an out of town troupe & they really had no idea what in the hell they were doing. each line was delivered by every actor in the same monotone. there was a long pause between EVERY line spoken or move made. the actors lumbered around the stage in catatonic stupors. this would have been some form of desecration but they clearly had no sense of what it was they were desecrating. it was just a bad mistake. a very bad mistake.
beckett had been labeled(& misunderstood)as an existentialist writer. the fact is no one had any idea what that meant, anymore than they understood how/why someone like kierkeggard was an existentialist philosopher or that heidigger could be one too.
w/the exception of heidigger, what everyone was missing was the comedy in these very very human writers. w/soren, it was more heavy irony(tho he could be funny when he wanted to be). w/beckett, it was comedy, or more precisely, the comedic. or even more precisely, the hollywood notion of physical comedy(embodied by buster keaton), along w/the sense of the oddness of the everyday. beckett's exploration of the everyday is what pulls him into the late(as opposed to the early)20th century. when the great post-war philosopher wittgenstein(surely an existential philosopher but never labeled one)describes his method, he might well be describing beckett's:
"it is wrong to say in philosophy we consider an ideal language as opposed to our ordinary one. for this makes it appear as thought we could improve on ordinary language. but ordinary language is all right. whenever we make up "ideal languages" it is not in order to replace our ordinary language by them; but just to remove some trouble caused in someones' mind by thinking that he has got hold of the exact use of a common word. that is also why our method is not merely to enumerate actual usages of words, but rather deliberately to invent new ones, some of them because of their absurd appearance."
beckett felt that the everyday was all right too. he simplified everything to get at what was underneath, what remained when the superfluous elements of life were eliminated. i imagine this is not an easy thing for a writer(or a thinker)to do. an artist's mind creates & creation is an ever expansive endeavor. reduction seems counter-intuitive in creation.
it strikes me that what we get when we engage a work of art is a mind working w/& in certain constraints(the tools of the trade, the genre of the art). is that mind affected by historical conditions? yes & that must be taken into account. isn't it in fact TWO minds at work? the one manifested in the art & the one evaluating? again, yes & that needs to be considered too. & isn't that second mind also affected by(sometimes quite different) historical conditions? ditto.
beckett worked hard to make things easy for us. every work from godot on seems to have weathered the fierce process of living. they've been worn down by that process, reduced to simple words & actions. their value, as w.s. merwin writes, lies in that survival. they've made it through:
the late poems are the ones
i turn to first now
following a hope that keeps
beckoning me
waiting somewhere in the lines
almost in plain sight
it is the late poems
that are made of words
that have come the whole way
they have been there
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