Samuel BECKETT: Stormy Writing...
2 pages
Published by
Michel ODIKA
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Samuel BECKETT: Stormy Writing…
Michel ODIKA
Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you
must go on.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on (Samuel BECKETT).
Countless words go a long way toward...
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Samuel BECKETT: Stormy Writing…
Michel ODIKA
Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you
must go on.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on (Samuel BECKETT).
Countless words go a long way toward explaining the hold Samuel BECKETT
continues to have on literature lovers, nearly two decades after he passed away.
Many things have been written about the way in which Samuel BECKETT
revolutionized theater, about the deep impact his worldview had on this specific
form of expression.
However, very little of what has been written about the man
is of much value to the basic reader who is only mildly familiar with his work,
or who knows the writer as a name in literature history rather than an authentic
and original style, or who has read his books but, having come to literature
within a different context than that in which the dramatist thrived, may be at a
loss to discern what it is about Samuel BECKETT that earned him the taken-forgranted position he holds in the pantheon of modern literature.
.
.
The haunting effect of Samuel BECKETT’s style is partly due to the way in
which the writer keeps shifting back and forth between violent contrasts and
extreme opposites: Birth was the death of him, he once wrote about a character…
So to speak, sometimes you are afraid to read that man – an undercurrent of
laughter that complements the darkness.
.
.
But what really gives the writer his
creative power is a compelling mixture of poignancy and… hope: Nothing is
funnier than unhappiness, according to the dramatist.
It is also worth noting that Samuel BECKETT’s voice sounds like someone who
is “relaxed”, but “never unmindful of human vulnerability”.
How can one
person fit all that into a limited number of lines? I don’t know, but all we have to
do is to read close enough.
Above all, the ability to compress that much
emotional resonance into that “piece of thought” (called book) is presumably
one of the key things that delineates greatness in a writer…
What else? All the interests associated with Samuel BECKETT s dramatic work
combine in three crucial affirmations and one motivational question.
First of all,
the words constitute a world certainly, but under no condition can the words be
the world as such.
Second, as distinguished from reality, the world, rather than
the words, is the totality of facts, not of things.
Third, for most people, the limits
in their stock of words are equally the limits of their world and, as a result, all
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