Samuel Beckett a mind so dark you wonder if the Renaissance had actually taken place

Sam Beckett's writing is not about 'something' what then is it about?

Which brings me to tennis, Beckett was fascinated by tennis, as am I, pauvre moi, so much so that I have oft
wondered about the
etymology of the word 'tennis', which bring me to....

The Swiss tennis champion Stan Wawrinka has the words “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” tattooed in blue ink on the inside of his left forearm.

Which bring me to....the lachrymose ending of Israel Horovitz’s recent movie My Old Lady has Kevin Kline paying his respects at a tombstone on which are engraved the words “If you do not love me I shall not be loved.” The first of these quotations is from Samuel Beckett’s late prose piece Worstward Ho, the second from his 1936 poem “Cascando

is this Beckettian verbal nausea or lapidary cadence?

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

Years after the utterly unexpected success of Waiting for Godot in the mid-1950s, which brought him money and fame. Success was not what Beckett had bargained for: his compact with the Muses stipulated that he must embrace, as his biographer James Knowlson summarizes, “poverty, failure, exile, and loss.” Instead of failing better, he was now succeeding worse.  Damn it.

More content in his Sisyphus role, he wrote ‘...
the only chance for me now as a writer is to go into retreat and put a stop to all this fucking élan acquis [momentum] and get back down to the bottom.’

'I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you.'  You can say that again, Sam.

With Beckett  memory is mocked. Beckett’s characters do not remember. Memory is mocked—Molloy can’t remember his own name or his mother’s; Estragon can’t remember in the second act of Godot what happened the previous day in the first act and he and Vladimir can’t remember whether they lived in the Mâcon country or the Cackon country. A typical exchange in Endgame is:

Hamm: What have you done with your bicycle?

Clov: I never had a bicycle

 

 

What then should be the role of the writer, he should know his place of trying and failing “to find the rhythm and syntax of extreme weakness, penury perhaps I should say.”

There is a magnificent, ten-word summation of how he writes in a letter of 1959 to Nancy Cunard: “Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.'
Thus life in failure can hardly be anything but dismal at the best, whereas there is nothing more exciting for the writer, or richer in unexploited expressive possibilities, than the failure to express.

Beckett writes '...to Dublin for a week at least at the beginning of December to see an old friend who is very ill, the usual Irish errand.” “I feel as clucky and beady about this piece, ...it is pleasantly sad and sentimental: a nice little entrée of artichoke hearts, to be followed by the tripe à la shit of Hamm and Clov. People will say, Well, well, he has blood in his veins, who would have thought it, it must be age.
Beckett's niggle about words, why should he search for the wrong word when he is adept at choosing the right word? Is it him just being meticulous or is that Beckett is drawn to enigmas, or to anything that strives to elude description. And the real does defy description. He may give a soupcon, a hint of meaning
without disclosing what it is.

Beckett may be of the view that some of us at least want the counter-truth –  on occasion we want oblivion, extinction, irreversible loss of consciousness.

Some of these requirements are insufficiently, or mostly prophylactically, rendered by literature.

 

Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect.' Did you get that?

Can this be a negotiation between the narcissistic pleasures of unbridled fantasy and the particular thirst for communication which can be qualified as ‘love of the brethren’

This counter-truth – that, on occasion and more than moodily, we want oblivion, extinction, irreversible loss of consciousness,

 

 

One has to say that the familiar Beckett themes: isolation, absence of hope, approach of death are well so...Irish.