An Outsider in His Own Life
From the beginning, Samuel Beckett's sense of utter isolation was profound
It's not hard to guess why Samuel Beckett's latest biographer, Anthony Cronin, portrays him as ''the last modernist.'' When ''Waiting for Godot'' opened in London in 1955, Kenneth Tynan remarked, ''It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.'' If modernism liberated the writer from conventional storytelling and ordinary psychology, Beckett's novels and plays took modernism just as far as it could go. But ''Godot'' was an evening's entertainment compared with what followed. Like the anorexic sculptures of his friend Giacometti, Beckett's work grew ever more austere and minimal, halting at the point of disappearance while retaining much of its hypnotic power. Like the man himself, whose gaunt figure, courteous mien and aversion to publicity became legendary, Beckett's writing took literature as close to silence as we can imagine.
Though Beckett lived until 1989, he belongs chronologically (and spiritually) to a much earlier era. Born in 1906, he fits in easily with writers like Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Witold Gombrowicz, Henry Roth, Nathanael West and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. They were all second-generation modernists who arrived on the scene in the late 20's or early 30's, shortly after Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Proust had written their major works. Caught between the anxieties of influence and the uncertainties of political and economic crisis, they turned toward a dark, acrid and mocking humor that became one of the great literary vehicles of the Depression years.
Beckett seemed to be the last of this generation, not only because he carried on so long but also because he was late in finding his own voice. It was not until after the war that he made his wholly original synthesis of Proust's explorations of memory, Joyce's linguistic virtuosity and learned whimsy, the Surrealists' fascination with dream logic and Eliot's and Kafka's profound sense of sterility and blockage. These writers were in the air in 1928, when Beckett arrived in Paris and quickly attached himself to the circle around Joyce and Eugene Jolas's avant-garde magazine, Transition. The elements of Beckett's vision could already be found in his grim little 1931 book on Proust, where he evoked the deadening effect of habit as the only defense against time and mortality. He arrived early at an extremely bleak view of life and a sense of the peculiarity of his own detached and morbid temperament. But the fiction and poetry that followed were too cerebral and, at the same time, too directly autobiographical to make much of an impact. He probably accumulated more publishers' rejections than any other great 20th-century writer. Had Beckett died by 1945, like some of his colleagues in the French Resistance, his early work would have been among the minor curiosities of Irish literature.
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/outsider.html
By MORRIS DICKSTEIN
From the beginning, Samuel Beckett's sense of utter isolation was profound
It's not hard to guess why Samuel Beckett's latest biographer, Anthony Cronin, portrays him as ''the last modernist.'' When ''Waiting for Godot'' opened in London in 1955, Kenneth Tynan remarked, ''It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.'' If modernism liberated the writer from conventional storytelling and ordinary psychology, Beckett's novels and plays took modernism just as far as it could go. But ''Godot'' was an evening's entertainment compared with what followed. Like the anorexic sculptures of his friend Giacometti, Beckett's work grew ever more austere and minimal, halting at the point of disappearance while retaining much of its hypnotic power. Like the man himself, whose gaunt figure, courteous mien and aversion to publicity became legendary, Beckett's writing took literature as close to silence as we can imagine.
Though Beckett lived until 1989, he belongs chronologically (and spiritually) to a much earlier era. Born in 1906, he fits in easily with writers like Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Witold Gombrowicz, Henry Roth, Nathanael West and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. They were all second-generation modernists who arrived on the scene in the late 20's or early 30's, shortly after Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Proust had written their major works. Caught between the anxieties of influence and the uncertainties of political and economic crisis, they turned toward a dark, acrid and mocking humor that became one of the great literary vehicles of the Depression years.
Beckett seemed to be the last of this generation, not only because he carried on so long but also because he was late in finding his own voice. It was not until after the war that he made his wholly original synthesis of Proust's explorations of memory, Joyce's linguistic virtuosity and learned whimsy, the Surrealists' fascination with dream logic and Eliot's and Kafka's profound sense of sterility and blockage. These writers were in the air in 1928, when Beckett arrived in Paris and quickly attached himself to the circle around Joyce and Eugene Jolas's avant-garde magazine, Transition. The elements of Beckett's vision could already be found in his grim little 1931 book on Proust, where he evoked the deadening effect of habit as the only defense against time and mortality. He arrived early at an extremely bleak view of life and a sense of the peculiarity of his own detached and morbid temperament. But the fiction and poetry that followed were too cerebral and, at the same time, too directly autobiographical to make much of an impact. He probably accumulated more publishers' rejections than any other great 20th-century writer. Had Beckett died by 1945, like some of his colleagues in the French Resistance, his early work would have been among the minor curiosities of Irish literature.
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/outsider.html
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