29 - Beckett: filling the silence

Summary

We always find something, eh, Didi, to give us the impression that we exist?

– Estragon, Waiting for Godot

The Irish-born Samuel Beckett (1906–89), though associated with the ‘new novel’ (see below, pp. 223–24) and the ‘new theatre’ of Eugène Ionesco (1912–94), Arthur Adamov (1908–70) and Jean Genet (1910–86), wasahighly original writer who developed his own distinctive modes of expression in fiction and on the stage. His work has been described by J. M. Coetzee as ‘philosophical comedy’. ‘Beckett,’ he writes, ‘was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty – inexplicable and futile, but a duty nonetheless – is not to lie to ourselves. It was a vision to which he gave expression in language of a virile strength and intellectual subtlety that marks him as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century.’

Finding a voice

Beckett's discovery of his literary voice came to him as a kind of revelation shortly after the Second World War. It became clear to him that he should allow his work to be created out of his pessimistic view of the world and his sombre conception of what it means to be human; it would be shaped by what he called, in his highly autobiographical play Krapp's Last Tape (1958), ‘the dark [he had] always struggled to keep under’. It was now, in 1946, that he decided to write mainly in French, which he knew intimately (he had been a student at Trinity College, Dublin, excelling at French and Italian, and had settled in Paris in 1937). Eschewing the Joycean verbal flamboyance of his pre-war English works (Murphy, 1938, for example), he aimed for a more rigorous and concentrated form of writing. The now familiar adjective ‘Beckettian’ is usually used to denote ‘meaning stripped down to a minimum of discourse or ornament to reveal existence as such in its full bleakness’ (Luke Thurston).