[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 527 KB, 1982x2696, Samuel_Beckett.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23004076 No.23004076 [Reply] [Original]

Does anyone actually like this guy? Waiting for Godot was ok, but seems like he is just a mandatory reference to look cool when you talk about more popular dudes like Joyce and Cioran. Seems like his prose gets almost no attention these days.

>> No.23004080

>>23004076
Cioran is not more popular than Beckett
lol lmao even

>> No.23004091

>>23004080
Nor is Joyce. OP is a fag.

>> No.23004100

>>23004080
He is. How often do you see memes about Beckett?

>> No.23004104

>>23004100
You have rotted your brain with memes.

>> No.23004115

>>23004104
Recommend me his best play.

>> No.23004116

>>23004104
More people know about Cioran than Beckett. I bet that more people read him too. This has nothing to do with who you think is better.

>> No.23004124

>>23004076
Eh. I haven't read too much of him but I have I didn't really like that much. Too sterile for my taste. I don't think anyone's mentioned named him as their favorite author
>>23004091
lmao what the fuck are you talking about

>> No.23004131

>>23004076
He’s extremely soulful and imaginative, and he writes beautifully. I like him a lot, but I don’t feel that I understand him well enough to say that I like him for the right reasons.

>> No.23004142
File: 222 KB, 1965x1306, IMG_2710.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23004142

>>23004100

>> No.23004152

>>23004116
> More people know about Cioran than Beckett
Are you from Romania?

>> No.23004186

>>23004142
>Novelist
Ah yeah, such great novels like...?

>> No.23004190

>>23004115
Just look and see what the local theater groups are doing and go see it live, Beckett is very commonly staged.
>>23004116
I think Joyce is best of the three. I also think you are a retard.
>>23004124
>lmao what the fuck are you talking about
Waiting for Godot alone puts him above Joyce for popularity,
>>23004142
Philosophy gets huge amounts of citations which skews ngrams.
>>23004186
His trilogy is great.

>> No.23004196

>>23004190
>Waiting for Godot alone puts him above Joyce for popularity
You are retarded

>> No.23004201

>>23004076
Read Endgame
Godot is nothing compared to Endgame
Endgame literally is some of the most powerful literature I've ever read
If you aren't careful, it'll force you to kill yourself

>> No.23004210

>>23004196
>hard to find people who has not read or seen waiting for godot
>easy to find people who have never read any joyce
ffs even my parents who read nothing but genre have read and seen waiting for godot.

>> No.23004218

>>23004076
The trilogy is a favorite. He reached a prose ideal. The plays are good too.

>> No.23004227

>>23004210
I think more people have heard of Joyce but more have read Beckett. My normie sister has Waiting for Godot which apparently she read in college (theater class) and she says it’s a favorite. I haven’t met anyone who even has namedropped Joyce but my social circles possibly suck.

>> No.23004237

>>23004210
Country? Where i live people at least know that Joyce is the guy who wrote hard to read books, but they know nothing about Waiting for Godot.
>>23004142
I concede. Must be a regional thing then.

>> No.23004240

>>23004237
Romania? South America?

>> No.23004256

>>23004240
Yeah, Latin America. Is harder to find someone who likes Beckett than a Joyce reader here. Maybe is because reading Ulysses and some Cioran gives you cred with the arthoes, idk.

>> No.23004270
File: 215 KB, 1788x1169, IMG_2711.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23004270

>>23004256
> Yeah, Latin America
Interesting. It checks out with the map on trends. So this explains this video (Mexican interviewer tells American author if he knows Cioran and receives a negative answer): https://youtu.be/3w-yE2cpNrk?si=75ycxMjwVaHFk-ZE

>> No.23004284

>>23004270
>Third world can relate more with a depressed failure like Cioran than most europeans
Makes sense, what can i say

>> No.23004290

>>23004284
kek

>> No.23004299

>>23004227
Sure, everyone knows Joyce's name but that is not popularity unless you are a socialite, an author who is not read is not popular.
>>23004237
US. Here the Joyce reader has almost certainly read Beckett but the Beckett read most likely has not read Joyce in my experience. I get to talk about Beckett's trilogy far more often than even The Dead.

>> No.23004302

>>23004284
>Third world can relate more with a depressed failure like Cioran than most europeans
>Godot is nothing compared to Endgame
Endgame literally is some of the most powerful literature I've ever read. If you aren't careful, it'll force you to kill yourself
?

>> No.23004306

>>23004299
I thought most serious English speaking readers were into Ulysses for some reason. Is it a niche book only read by an even smaller minority than I thought?

>> No.23004351

>>23004306
In Ireland and Joyce is far more popular here. He's basically our national author. Bloomsday is a big thing here.

But everyone replying is basically going off anecdotal experience ("I talked about this/that with people I know") and extrapolating it out to a more general set which isn't very rigorous and should be taken with a grain of salt. I don't even know how you would "measure" who is more popular anyway.

>> No.23004374

>>23004116
Maybe if /lit/ is your frame of reference. On Goodreads, "Godot" has almost 200k ratings, "The Trouble with Being Born" 8.5k.
This site is quite insular and you're rotting your brain if you spend so much time here you take it for reality.

>> No.23004377

>>23004306
A lot of people are not into big and complex novels even if they are fairly serious about reading. I have an mfa friend who is very serious about literature and made it his life, reads almost nothing but short stories and probably has over 1k heavily annotated short story collections, he is just really into short stories.
>>23004351
>pedantic voice of reason
Of coarse it is anecdotal.

>> No.23004379

>>23004302
>it'll force you to kill yourself
Good. Might watch now

>> No.23004386

>>23004377
> I have an mfa friend who is very serious about literature and made it his life, reads almost nothing but short stories and probably has over 1k heavily annotated short story collections, he is just really into short stories
Has he ever given you specific recs?

>> No.23004393

>>23004302
> Endgame literally is some of the most powerful literature I've ever read.
Huh? The flick with the big purple dude who collects magic rubies or whatever?

>> No.23004399

>>23004374
>I don't even know how you would "measure" who is more popular anyway.
Simple. You should just look lit/ top 100. Easy-peasy.

>> No.23004402

>>23004076
He is like Brecht. Only drama school pseuds bother with him.

>> No.23004408

>>23004351
Yeah, here in the US joyce is way bigger, too. My department offers classes on Joyce and has a Joycean scholar. Never heard anyone talk about Beckett beyond Waiting for Godot.

>> No.23004412

>>23004386
>Has he ever given you specific recs?
seconding

>> No.23004418

>>23004399
*at

>> No.23004427

>>23004351
Is Keith Woods popular in Ireland?

>> No.23004438

as people here say read the prose. the trilogy did it for me, still thinking about it years after I read it. waiting for godot had been ruined for me before i read it and endgame was funny but unintelligible on its own (for my stupid ass anyway).

>> No.23004470

>>23004131
I like him. I understand him, but posterity won't be kind to his work. His appraisal banks a lot on the tastes of what critics and writers in the 50s and 60s considered Avant Garde. It's fast dating. His plays (or play) will survive but his prose work doesn't seem to be in the best of places.

>> No.23004471

>>23004438
also one way to get into his thinking is to read the stories (nouvelles et textes pour rien) written before the trilogy and see how he progresses from narrative stories with 'minimalist' characters, i.e. vagrants who have nothing, to narraors who really aren't anything at all except alive, the same trajectory takes place in the trilogy. so it's minimalism gradually being taken to an extreme, narrative and development is thrown out. the characters not so much speak as are 'spoken' by life at the end, in fact they want to die but 'it', ie drives beyond individual control, never stops speaking, going on and on, which for Beckett is also kind of funny.

>> No.23004491

>>23004438
>>23004471
I want to like his prose works, but I just can't for some reason. My favorite author is Pynchon who is so maximalist with his prose and content, so maybe there's something just inherently within me that gravitates toward that.

I do enjoy Godot, though. Maybe I'll give his trilogy a try again. It's been sitting on my shelf since I first bought it and didn't finish.

>> No.23004498

>>23004190
Ulysses is pretty much Ireland's national novel. Waiting for Godot is famous, no doubt. But everyone who knows Beckett, is also aware of Joyce.

>> No.23004507

>>23004386
>>23004412
Not really, most of our friendship is music, we have been playing together since high school when we formed our first band. When it comes to literature we are opposites and the vast bulk of the reading we have in common was stuff we read back in high school and the few years after. I almost never read short stories and he almost never reads novels.
>>23004438
And if you love The Trilogy you should read The Making of Americans. Doubly so if you also love Joyce.

>> No.23004561

>>23004491
i never force myself but i suggest trying it when you're feeling down, or maybe exhilarated in an annoying way, it has the quality that great literature has: it softens the pain but also helps one keep a cooler head when experiencing 'uppity joy'. i like Pynchon as well.

>>23004507

thank you, been meaning to get into Stein more but have shied away from her more challenging work. I don't care much about Joyce but the excerpts I just looked up from the making look good.

>> No.23004562

>>23004201
True. That's probably his best overall work imo.

>> No.23004576

>>23004299
Beckett's trilogy really not comparably famous to Ulysses.

>> No.23004756

>>23004470
Can see why you'd say that but it strikes me as a facile judgment. His aesthetic preoccupations were sincere and came from quite a human, if eccentric, place, I understand there's a "novelty" element to any experimental work but I think under that fluctuating popularity there will remain a consistent current of people who feel something real there. I have not much patience at all for the "avant garde" for its own sake, and I don't think that's really what Beckett is doing. I think his style, like all meaningful styles, follows from the circumstances of his time, which are not too different from the circumstances of our own time (or at least our recent past), hence the fact that almost any recent writing that feels at all vital is redolent of him, whether due to direct influence or simply the influence of similar circumstances to those which informed his style.

>> No.23004913

>>23004756
I don't think that's entirely true. My biggest problem with his style is that it doesn't always feel sincere. The kind of vitriolic, moping voice that he cultivates almost never works well paired with metafiction. Unless your purpose is overambitious, (Unnamable reads better than the others for that reason) it's difficult to not be bothered by the constant self awareness. Either the character is speaking in Beckett's voice or Beckett is embodying the narrator, both of which don't feel sincere in the slightest. Fiction of this sort always ages the worst. I don't agree with your claim about his influence either. There is a very small batch of writers that feel similar or were influenced directly
to him, and of them only Bernhard can be called a real Great imo. For that matter, Bernhard's angry style works because it feels lived in, unlike Beckett. Confessional fiction of this sort requires the content to stem from Writer's unflinching emotion and opinion. With Beckett you never feel that. The metafiction tendencies make it still worse.

You read Dostoevsky's Notes or Kafka's neurotic tirades and their pain and annoyance is more obvious. Beckett in some ways was trying to write the terminal confessional novel (and he might have succeeded) but what after when the novelty wears off? Readers 300 years later won't read a writer for his games or his opinions on writing (as if every writer doesn't have one). They read him for what he can tell them about themselves or the world. Even art for art's sake is trying to capture sonething profound about living that doesn't necessarily have to be a philosophy. Now I am not saying Beckett doesn't do that. He does do that, especially in books like The Unnamable, but the aesthetic which is the vehicle is very problematic imo.

>> No.23005310

How It Is might be the most intense piece of art I've ever engaged with. Beckett was one of the greats and among those in the know he's not going anywhere. It's easy to box him in as a cold experimenter but his books ooze with feeling, sympathy.

>>23004913
>Bernhard
What of his is like Beckett? I've only read Old Masters which didn't feel similar at all.

>> No.23005317

>>23004076
I haven't read much of him but my experience has been that I like the way he writes far more than I like what he writes about or his ideas and themes. Kind of a shame.

>> No.23005351

>>23005310
Corrections and woodcutters. There is a question over how much Beckett influenced him as ranting style had existed before Beckett and they seem to share common influences in Kafka and Dosto, but in any case I was talking more about writers similar to him.

Btw I never accused him of coldness. My problem is the exact opposite. There is too much feeling and emotion and it doesn't come off as authentic, which becomes a problem.

>> No.23005661

>>23005351
>Btw I never accused him of coldness
I wasn't going after (you) with that one, it just seems like a common stereotype.
>doesn't come off as authentic
Agree to disagree

>> No.23005742

>>23004076
If you saw a well-mounted live performance of Waiting for Godot or Krapp's Last Tape, you too would actually like this guy. Because they are immensely entertaining theatrical works, and a bit more than that besides.

>> No.23005821

>>23004076
I read Beckett in high school and college. Never heard about Cioran until much later. No way he's more well-known than Joyce or Backett.

>> No.23006156

>>23004142
is this relative to the total volume of google searches? because otherwise that's grim... with the explosion in internet traffic, to be in steady decline since 2004 is incredible

>> No.23006284

>>23004284
Beckett was the exact same breed of moper as cioran was.

>> No.23006627

>>23004076
I liked molloy immensely but his plays at hit or miss from what I have read

>> No.23006967

>>23004076
Psued faggot

>> No.23007026

>>23004076
one of my favorites, I greatly enjoy Murphy and the Trilogy, can't stop laughing reading them

>> No.23007700

>>23004913
>>23005351
The sincerity I was referring to is that of his actual underlying purpose, not of the specific expressions of emotion in the narrator-voice - the ironic tone of those declamations is in fact necessary to the bigger picture. He sincerely struggled with communication, which prevented him from expressing himself in any direct way.

>> No.23008189

>>23004076
Endgame is fantastic. He's a master stylist.

>> No.23008335

His plays read well, but they're meant to be performed by good actors, and they really come to life on the stage, in performance. As B intended.

>> No.23008987
File: 50 KB, 1206x648, shakespeare.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23008987

>>23006156
>Google Trends normalizes search data to make comparisons between terms easier. Search results are normalized to the time and location of a query by the following process: Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity.

What's in steady decline is the average IQ of the internet user.

>> No.23009006

>>23007700
>He sincerely struggled with communication, which prevented him from expressing himself in any direct way.
Nothing I have read about Beckett suggests he had genuine issues like a Kafka or even someone like Proust. He just cames across as someone who read a lot of schopenhauer and leopardi

>> No.23009068

>>23009006
Ah I was trying to keep it short and hoping I could get away with not elaborating on that, but it's understandable you'd take it that way; what I meant was "struggled with the abstract concepts underlying philosophical communication". As in, he truly felt that trying to communicate on a certain plane of seriousness and truth was a vexed question. What you're talking about, navigating the world, is a matter of language games - being able to enact those has nothing whatsoever to do with one's feelings about communication on that higher plane.

>> No.23009144

>>23009068
>As in, he truly felt that trying to communicate on a certain plane of seriousness and truth was a vexed question.
Yes that's correct. But that's a question taken up by linguistic philosophers like Wittgenstein or Fritz Mauthner without the need of artifice. I don't think Beckett's concern was only cerebral. He denied having interest in philosophy. His art was in the aesthetic. Not to communicate the impossibility of exactness in language, but to communicate the frustration with it. Something like the Tractatus is much more specifically written in a style the underlines the problems of language. With Beckett you cannot help but sit through his emotional rambles and repetitive self awareness. I get what he is trying to do. But you don't have to like it. A thematic justification doesn't fit aesthetic parameters. Aesthetic is felt.

Whichever way you want to see it, Beckett's tonal delivery cannot be ignored and his version of it never feels as authentic as writers before or after who genuinely were outcasts. His brand of comedy makes the artificial sheen even brighter in his work. Hate him or like him, Beckett has much more in common with his friend Cioran than he does with a real neurotic like Kafka.

>> No.23009259

>>23004427
Yeah, as the village idiot

>> No.23009264

>>23009144
Yeah idk perhaps you have a point, your thoughts on him are certainly more developed than mine.
>His brand of comedy makes the artificial sheen even brighter in his work.
This seems like it might be salient, can you give an example of where this stands out to you?

>> No.23009666

>>23009264
The ending section in Malone dies when Malone seemingly was in the old age home. Beckett's self awareness of the story makes it look like he is laughing at his character's misery. It maybe me and he has his merits, but I think Schopenhauer was a blowhard and I don't think some of these stretches will appeal to anyone but people who are inclined towards philosophers like schopenhauer.

I think his best plays are better than his prose works. They atleast always came off as more genuine. There is humor there also, but it feels more natural. My favorite line from Endgame, after Hamm's final dialogue, is this one: nothing is funnier than unhappiness, we laugh until we don't anymore, not quoted exactly but it was something like that.

>> No.23010948

>>23009666
Spooky trips, very nice.
I assume you are talking about the “romantic” sequence, since the very end was triumphal for the character: I see where you’re coming from and there’s obviously comic intent there, it’s an exaggerated grotesque caricature, but I always got the sense that he felt there was some humanity or some truth in those extremes of weakness and absurdity that he couldn’t find in a more normal character. But as you say it might just have been an attempt at sideshow novelty, it’s hard to say I guess. Fwiw I think his most important influence was Swift, who trafficked in similar sorts of absurdity but who was unmistakably, deeply human. Gonna keep thinking about it but I’ll post now just to keep the thread bumped.

>> No.23010977
File: 734 KB, 644x698, 1647641993047.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23010977

>>23004076
>Waiting for Godot was ok
It really wasn't

>> No.23012044

>>23009666
>>23010948
Like, here’s maybe a better formulation: his whole shtick is about contradiction and self-negation, within a context of paralyzing self awareness. I think the tension of irony and sincerity fits pretty nicely with all that, and I think the butt of the joke is always first and foremost the author himself, most of all when he finds himself getting a little too melodramatic over abstract internal issues that could not have seemed anything but trivial in the years directly after the war.

>> No.23012128

>>23004201
but read molloy first

>> No.23012131

>>23004076
Hes my fav author

>> No.23012246

Does anybody know if the title Waiting for Godot (and/or the original French language title: En attendant Godot (1949)) was a bilingual, sideways sort of pun riffing on Simone Weil's book En attendant Dieu (Waiting for God) (1947)?

>> No.23012311

>>23012246
Seems very likely, this is what comes up when searching about it: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/498028

>> No.23012378

>>23012311
Oh, that's very interesting. Thank you.

>> No.23012407

>>23012378
In a similar vein, the trilogy is very much in conversation with La Commedia. There is perhaps some difficulty in mapping out the specifics of the resemblances, but the basic structure is certainly there.

>> No.23012456

>>23012407
Interesting. I had never considered that.

>> No.23012475

>>23012456
There’s little tells, like the mention of Sordello, but it becomes more obvious in light of the very noticeable presence of Dante in his earlier stuff. His whole artistic lens is very deeply wrapped up in Christianity and Christian thought.

>> No.23013018

>>23012475
Do we know if, or to what extent Beckett's lifelong fascination with Dante touched on the *substance* of the Commedia, in addition to what I would assume - perhaps incorrectly - was his chief fascination with the work -- the sheer beauty of the language and and poetic imagery.

I always meant to read Ellman's bio, but never got around to it. Is Ellman still considered the gold standard for Beckett biographies?

>> No.23013416

>>23013018
Depends what you mean by the substance, the most obvious interpretation is that he took the structure and certain qualities but reversed the ordering ideal. Rather than moving towards perfect knowledge in God as Dante does, Beckett's subject moves toward the annihilation of all knowledge.

>> No.23013430

>>23013018
And idk anything about biographies there so I can't help you, sorry.
While I'm sure the beauty was a big part of it, I think he was probably more interested in the spiritual/philosophical aspect, I think the focus on self-annihilation, suffering and extremes made Christianity and its medieval forms pretty interesting to him.

>> No.23013442

>>23013430
so I can't help you there*, lol

>> No.23014472
File: 38 KB, 619x375, 1504898481285.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23014472

Thanks.

>> No.23014920 [DELETED] 

>>23012044
Yes, I also noted that in my post. It'd be tautological to say that the self reflexive narrator is aware of his narration.

My question is what after? The irony is good for a laugh once in a while but what after that? Philosophers have sustained themselves meditating on nothing for multiple books, so it's not like it can't be done. But Beckett doesn't seem all that serious about the philosophy. His self awareness and brand of humor explodes any possibility of warmth for the narrator. You can do away with both but you need something to keep people coming back to your work. Beckett doesn't do that well enough in my opinion. Fictions like Beckett's are sustained entirely on the performance of the narrator. Here Beckett's lack of genuity hurts him.

>> No.23014933

>>23014920
Beckett is for Beckett, there is no need to extract any kind of philosophy

>> No.23014961 [DELETED] 

>>23014933
Ironically, to a lot of philosophers and critics in the 60s Beckett's works were philosophy bait. Almost all French philosophers in this period have published something on him.

That's what hurts him. He didn't want to do it, but couldn't escape it either. His work isn't deeply coded either to keep his reaership coming back to him. He lives by his aesthetic, and to me that aesthetic doesn't always comes across as genuine.

>> No.23016236

No idea why the guy who I was talking to deleted his posts (or had them deleted), perhaps it was a meta-statement about Beckett's self-negating method, anyway:
As discussed above, there is at least some degree of codedness to the trilogy and Godot; it's minimalist, but it's still Modernism.
The question of his seriousness or genuineness is complicated, I'll try to see if I can come up with something that feels like it addresses it completely (or maybe I already did and we're just talking past each other, idk). Appreciate the discussion, it's making me think a lot, hope you're willing to continue it regardless of whatever caused you to delete.

>> No.23017344

>>23016236
I don't want to be too negative because i still like him, all things considered. I think I have given a good account of how I feel already.

>> No.23017487

>>23017344
Nah you have, I think I'm just having trouble properly modeling your way of thinking such that I can come up with a statement of his merits that's valid under your paradigm. Either that or one of us is coping. But regardless I'm not trying to make you wait around until I come up with a satisfactory answer, I understand if you feel like the discussion isn't really going anywhere. I'll probably keep trying to work it out though since it'll be frustrating for me otherwise and it's a good theory of mind exercise, that hasn't always been my strength lol.

>> No.23018076

>waiting for God...
>...ot
what a fucking hack

>> No.23018202

>>23018076
He insisted Godot is not God. I agree with him. It's really obvious what Godot is.

>> No.23018229

>>23004351
Joyce is more popular, but I wouldn't say he's far more popular. If you've studied literature at all in an Irish university then Beckett will be as important on a module about Irish lit. If you're talking about how much the general public knows it might be a different story, but the average man knows fuck all about either anyway, so that is a poor metric

>> No.23018230

>>23004427
He's been retired a good while, no? Not sure what relevance he has to literature anyway

>> No.23019650

>>23017344
>>23017487
Basically I think that what he's doing is just very conceptual/philosophical/spiritual and it's not really the sort of personal confessional narrative you describe. It's from an individual's perspective and very significantly contained within the realm of individual internality, but the individual voice is highly stylized and not at all wanting or trying to be a naive rendering of the author's own experience "from the heart". Like La Commedia, it is the description of a somewhat theoretical, fictionalized subject moving through a progression of different states, each of which is metaphysically significant, on the way to some final absolute perfection.
Now you may say you've addressed all this already and none of the theoretical framework matters if it doesn't work as a reading experience, but I think it very much does, it just offers a different kind of experience than what you seem to be expecting from it based on certain deceptive resemblances. I truly believe that contradiction and paradox are at the heart of literature and life, and I believe that the contrasts between distance and intimacy, genuineness and irony, absurdity and sublimity, the great and the small, particularity and universality, are all expressed by the thoroughly self-contradictory nature (in terms of subject matter or of tone) of Beckett's narrative prose. The actual experience offered to the reader by this is hard to describe due to the very characteristics that make it great, but I think "human" and "sublime" are both good descriptors. In every insightful description of the canonical great Western writers you will find some form of this phenomenon of contradiction.
In terms of recognizable displays of "humanity", this is perhaps incidental to my main point, and you might not consider this evidence very strong, but I think it shows through on the margins, not in the narrator's description of his own experience but in the things he *notices*, the details of the lives of animals or small lost objects, or of silent, inchoate sufferers like Lambert's wife, and in his disdain for the settled, the content, the common. These peripheral experiences are not described with the self-conscious bombast of the narrator's own questionably serious torments, merely described in a flat tone that carries an unmistakable "dying fall" for those who are primed to hear it. Sympathy for the narrator comes in not when he complains about something, but when he ridicules himself, shows us how absurd and small he is. When he speaks in a "sad" tone we laugh, when he speaks in a "funny" tone we cry.

>> No.23019653

>>23004100
>How often do you see memes about Beckett?
What kind of zoomer-ass question even is this?

>> No.23019665

>>23004201
I made my mom read it and she hated it. She calls it "that awful book with the people in trash cans."

>> No.23019672

>>23004351
Yes, Joyce is the king when it comes to Ireland. Beckett is fairly popular though, but not close to Joyce.

>> No.23019679

>>23018202
>waiting for God...
>...ot
lol, get it? but wait, there's more!
>Godot... =/= God
wow, now that's a real mindbender isn't it? I'm such a bleak existentialist its unreal. now give me a Nobel prize

>> No.23020429

>>23019650
>I think that what he's doing is just very conceptual/philosophical/spiritual and it's not really the sort of personal confessional narrative
Confessional literature doesn't mean it has to be autobiographical. It's not like Beckett was the most happy go lucky person around. All the reports on his personal life indicate he was a deeply nihilistic person, much like his narrators. It's confessional literature within the framework of fiction itself. The narrators are trying to confess their lives before it is ended. Confessional literature began with Christian writers, it need not be separate from spirituality.
>it very much does, it just offers a different kind of experience than what you seem to be expecting from it based on certain deceptive resemblances. I truly believe that contradiction and paradox are at the heart of literature and life, and I believe that the contrasts between distance and intimacy, genuineness and irony, absurdity and sublimity, the great and the small, particularity and universality, are all expressed by the thoroughly self-contradictory nature (in terms of subject matter or of tone) of Beckett's narrative prose. The actual experience offered to the reader by this is hard to describe due to the very characteristics that make it great, but I think "human" and "sublime" are both good descriptors.
We are going back to square one. The debate between aesthetic and thematic justification. I will just repeat what I said previously. Kafka's work is as contradictory or perhaps even more so than Beckett's but Kafka's oppressive aesthetic always feels lived in. Beckett's doesn't, there are always trappings of artificiality within his work. Beckett knows that, hence the metafictional elements but it doesn't surprise the reader. It would be expected of a writer of Beckett's stature. Aesthetic is more than the sum of parts and while Beckett excels at individual aspects of fiction, the whole is lesser and less impactful especially on rereads.

>> No.23020453

I don't know about his prose, but Cascando is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read.

1
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2
saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words
terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending
I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3
unless they love you

>> No.23020808

>>23020429
I think all or most of those things are terms that apply to aesthetic qualities as well as “themes”, maybe we need a more specific definition of “aesthetic”. I guess my question is: why is being lived-in necessary? Just because it’s in the first person? To me the true greats, even Proust, are dramatists, they don’t simply describe their own experiences, they give a realistic picture of the world, “realistic” relative to the foundational circumstances and assumptions of the work and its setting, that is, since many great works, including the trilogy, have settings that are more idealized or mythological than realistic. And especially if you say you’re not necessarily expecting him to be personal, why do you have to feel that he’s “lived” what he’s describing?

>> No.23021326

>>23020808
By lived in i think I mean authentic. Kafka wasn't writing realism either but his neurosis appears as if springing from something fundamental to the way he thinks. Beckett's fiction doesn't quite have that quality. As for Proust, many of the reflections on memory in the book are Proust's own reflections. The whole drama with Odette and the bougeois isn't why people read ISOLT. With Beckett the drama of the narration never fits in with the authenticity of his true feelings.

>> No.23021887

>>23020453
Who are some other writers who so mastered the art of repetition?

>> No.23023099

>>23021887
Many of the major Modernists did a lot with repetition, inspired I assume originally by the Bible via Whitman. Really effective imo although it's so powerful as to sometimes feel manipulative.

>>23021326
I guess it just seems very clear to me that Beckett is being purposely farcical in his narration most of the time and that he's not really claiming to be coming from a place of dealing with his own personal neurosis. This would of course take us back to the previous discussion about what the value of the stylized comic narration is, which is what I was trying to convey by talking about the aesthetic properties of contradiction.
>As for Proust, many of the reflections on memory in the book are Proust's own reflections.
There's a guy who's posted here at length a couple times about how Proust is more about others than about himself, not even so much in the middle volumes (disclaimer, I've only read part of volume 1) but when he's observing the minutiae of the lives of his aunt and her housekeeper, or of Swann's or Legrandin's pretensions, or just the history of the place. The narrator's role in all of this is largely transparent.
And even if that's a mischaracterization of Proust, surely it's *possible* for a narrator to be doing something with first-person narration other than relaying his own personal point of view.
Maybe it's better to think about it in terms of the "unreliable narrator" tradition. One of the types of unreliable narrator is the "clown", which I think is precisely consonant with the statements I've made about the narrator being the butt of the joke, and about how the reader is meant to laugh when he cries and vice versa. I just think you might be leading yourself astray by expecting too much of Kafka in Beckett whereas, like I said, he inherits much more from Swift in sensibility and Dante in structural vision.
For what it's worth I really love Kafka, I just don't think he's necessarily an ideal comparison point.

>> No.23023289

>>23023099
I think you are still not getting my point, anon. I am not trying to find Kafka in Beckett, but there are similarities between their aesthetics and Kafka's feels more authentic.

You are right about unreliable narration, but another writer who employed it a great deal, Nabokov, has these same criticisms aimed at him. I like Nabokov as well, but a profound writer he was not. My problem has never been Beckett's technique or fictional justification. It's the authenticity of his fiction. You can only read so much from a farcial narrator, certainly not 400 pages and go back again for round 2. At some point the question appears, what's the draw? I don't think Beckett is very funny either desu.

One other thing, I don't think the narrator's are being clownish on purpose. Their contradictions are circumstantial. Bad memory, delusions mixed in with real life events, need for closure etc. But the fact that a farcial tone still comes through, unmistakably Beckett's (or the thing's in the unnamable, which is still Beckett), underlines my problem. It's like a big red sign calling attention to itself constantly. When his work becomes unapologetically philosophical like in the Unnamable, it fares better. But will anyone revisit it again after seeing the trick? It doesn't hold up as a philosophic text alone. It's domain of fiction leans on Beckett's statement of art, that there is nothing but words and thoughts that must keep on going until death, even if aware of their uselessness. How rereadable is that really? Paraphrasing myself, fiction of this sort relies solely on the narrator's performance. If the performance is convincing, the work is guaranteed for posterity. The reader realizes that what's bringing him back isn't anything other than the narrator's way of taking him through places he has already seen. Maybe what I am saying is that Beckett's text lacks a certain incestual richness that sustains texts on themselves. Unnamable was an attempt at that I guess. The voice being the possible creator of the texts read previously in the trilogy. But there are only a few moments of satisfactory links delineated between the 3 books.
>There's a guy who's posted here at length a couple times about how Proust is more about others than about himself, not even so much in the middle volumes (disclaimer, I've only read part of volume 1) but when he's observing the minutiae of the lives of his aunt and her housekeeper, or of Swann's or Legrandin's pretensions, or just the history of the place. The narrator's role in all of this is largely transparent.
Whose to say he isn't writing his own opinions on similar people he has known? Besides, is there anyone who reads this book for its romance or involving plot? I reckon not. Those are the weaker aspects of the novel.

>> No.23023450

I think Beckett will turn out to be one of those writers who was highly influential in his own time and for a few decades afterward, but whose work sours over time.

I've seen a few of his plays performed and read his stuff and it is truly the type of vapid thing a modern MFA could easily come up with IMO.

The feeling I get from reading and watching his stuff is the same juvenile emotions and thoughts that I was having when I was 14 years old, he feels immature. That type of stuff was maybe groundbreaking in his time, but we are far enough removed from him to see that he built a road to nowhere.

The prose is not beautiful, the sentiments are not lasting or beautiful, the philosophy is juvenile, and he lives on by the momentum of past prestige.

>> No.23023727

>>23023289
I had a step-by-step response written out but I think perhaps it can be condensed.
Scale and distance are fundamental to the (aesthetic, as I would define it) phenomenon of the literary sublime. Seeing people from a great distance makes them look small and insignificant, and if we are also allowed to see them very close up, i.e. to see them how they see themselves, in all their foolish self-seriousness, the contrast between the two points of view is both comic and tragic, and invariably allows us to see ourselves in them. Farcicality is simply one way of creating this distance, and was at one time a very popular one, hence why I keep mentioning Swift as the most important direct model and precedent (we could also throw in the likes of Pope, Gay, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne; or the earlier Picaresque tradition, including Cervantes; or the fabliaux of Chaucer; or later satirists like Austen and Dickens).
Now, I'm not saying that the validity of the method necessarily means Beckett is doing it correctly, however potentially powerful his fundamental innovation (viz., collapsing the omniscient narrator and the clown into a single individual) might be. But you have to at least acknowledge his aims on their own terms before you can critique his execution. If you can criticize the narrator's performance, or the text's richness, or whatever else you find lacking, while acknowledging the paradigm under which he's working, that would be fair game, but based on the other stuff you've said it seems like your problem is with the paradigm itself.

>>23023450
This is a much more obviously muddled take and it highlights why I appreciate the quality of the discussion with the other anon. You're just eager to put him in the first convenient box that presents itself.

>> No.23025308

>>23023727
Well, Swift isn't exactly the greatest thing ever so how does that figure? Perhaps you are right that I am critiquing the paradigm itself, but that's because there aren't examples of the paradigm working. It doesn't work in Beckett's case either. On the other hand, a book like pale fire is much more rereadable than Beckett's, given how incestous the text is. One can argue that's a good example of the paradigm of the unreliable narrator. You talk about farciality creating distance between the object of narration and the reader, but in Beckett's the object of narration is the narrator himself. Beckett's choice of emotionally and tonally charged narration fundamentally destroys any distance that can be achieved. How can that distance be created when all narration about the object is so opinionated and mediated through a hyper annoyed narrator?
>collapsing the omniscient narrator and the clown into a single individual
Never happened. No Beckett narrator is ever omniscient. Not for a second. The narrator of the unnamable being the creator of the other two texts still only gives the text a metafictional dimension. Think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what an Omniscient narrator is.

>> No.23026085

>>23025308
>Well, Swift isn't exactly the greatest thing ever so how does that figure?
I'll beg to differ. Perhaps his reputation is an Anglosphere thing, I consistently see him mentioned in the same breath as Cervantes. In any case, this is certainly a point in favor of the hypothesis that the difference here is more about sensibility than anything else.
>Beckett's choice of emotionally and tonally charged narration fundamentally destroys any distance that can be achieved. How can that distance be created when all narration about the object is so opinionated and mediated through a hyper annoyed narrator?
Well yeah this is the whole crux of the trilogy, there's a part of the narrator/author from which he is able to distance himself, and so that part can be simultaneously annihilated and redeemed, freed from its suffering. In this capacity the character is Christ, taking the author's sins upon himself and absolving him of them in his own death; this is hinted at fairly directly at some point in MD. All of the fluctuations of the narrator's tone are movements toward this development, toward the splitting and destruction of the self on the cross of narrative distance.
And I really think that "annoyed" is pretty wide of the mark in terms of how he intends the narration to come across. Whether he reads that way to most people, I don't know, but it seems like it captures only a tiny and somewhat insignificant part of what he's really going for.

>> No.23026530
File: 22 KB, 741x414, images (38).jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23026530

He was an incredible writer and person.
His speech at his wife's funeral was adapted to sad horse cartoon

>"You're dead and everything is worse

>> No.23028041

Bump + question: how are later writers (Bernhard, Krasznahorkai, Fosse) similar to Beckett, and where do they differ?

>> No.23028388

>>23028041
Bernhard is very similar in that his novels increasingly take the form of monologues by a narrative voice with neurotic traits, where the neurosis tends to demolish plot and setting (although it's a very different form of neurosis from the one shown by Beckett's characters, and sometimes more of a shock than a neurosis).
Krasznahorkai is not that similar: he is monologic but place and plot are somehow articulate and clear in all of his novels, and although they are structured in creative ways, there is no attempt of destroying them - maybe he comes "out of" beckett in that he restructures place and plot and characters following "voice", but he doesn't seem concerned with pushing how much the medium can work once someone takes away the coordinates.
Fosse I don't know.

Overall, Bernhard is likely the most similar, to the point that I was doing research into how much he might have read Beckett. All I found is that people did refer to him as a Beckettian writer, and I remember that in one of his novels he refers to reading Joyce (maybe Woodcutters), so I assume he must have heard of Beckett as well. Yet, direct influence seems difficult to trace... Any anon has any info on Bernhard-Beckett connections?

>> No.23029583

>>23025308
>>23026085
Another Swiftian point: I think Swift's use of tiny people to show the foolishness of grand ambition is very much a precedent and forebear of Beckett's use of preternaturally naive/foolish/clownish/confused narrators to show the folly of intellectual ambition. I think that (farcical, fablesque, caricaturistic) naivete is a much more salient quality of the narration than anger; I cannot imagine he very often truly meant to come across as "angry" in the way that you seem to believe, he is even less Celine or Dazai than he is Kafka. As with Swift, the true anger is always concealed behind a dry, level, scientific equanimity of tone.
And to clarify about the "omniscient" thing: I should've been more precise, but as I said above I like to try and keep posts from getting too unnecessarily long. All I meant was that the traditional critical/patronizing/sadistic *role* of the omniscient narrator in a farcical narrative is annexed, in the trilogy, to the subject of the farce himself - thus becoming the exact opposite of omniscient.

This isn't really for the purpose of argument but it illustrates my point about Swift's reputation and it gives me pleasure so I'd like to share it. T.S. Eliot (and Thackeray) on Swift:
>This, of the conclusion of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms - which seems to me one of the greatest triumphs that the human soul has ever achieved. It is true that Thackeray later pays Swift one of the finest tributes that a man has ever given or received: ‘So great a man he seems to me that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.’

>> No.23030515

>>23028388
Bernhard's biggest influence was Kafka and maybe that's what were the Beckettian influence shows. His whole work is very autobiographical.
>there is no attempt of destroying them - maybe he comes "out of" beckett in that he restructures place and plot and characters following "voice", but he doesn't seem concerned with pushing how much the medium can work once someone takes away the coordinates.
You are putting this on a pedestal way too much. Having the whole book as a free associative interior monologue is hardly radical enough to suggest that it destroys plot or setting. What's the plot in Journey to the end of the night? In Tropic of cancer? There hasn't been a plot in a 1st person monologue in centuries. What's so boundary pushing about it? Anyway, settings in Bernhard's novels are clear. Settinglessness is an aesthetic choice anyway, it doesn't have much to do with the technical aspects of the novel. Molloy could have been set in some defined fictional town and it wouldn't lose anything really. Just that its narrator's memory isn't all that bad.

>> No.23030520

>>23004076
One of the funniest writers I’ve read but I’ve only read the trilogy and a few of his short stories. I like him a lot but he is exhausting in a similar but opposite fashion like Henry James. I can only read a little bit of both before I have to take a break. For me they definitely aren’t the binge read type

>> No.23030559

>>23026085
>>23029583
Well I don't agree, perhaps we have to settle for that. I can't see how Beckett's narrators are being purposefully sardonic. His obsession with failure in fiction had him utilize narrators who were lacking both physically and mentally (mostly in memory), the self reflexion in the text is because of these aspects of the book. You might be correct somewhat about Beckett's conscience at using them but it only raises the question about the sincerity of his fiction. If it's purposeful then it doesn't fit in with how the narrator's are portrayed. And the question remains, what is achieved by it? I don't reckon reading about the minuteness of man and how funny it is is so interesting to read for the umpteenth time. We would want the writer to get serious about his vision, if he has one.

>> No.23031051

>>23030559
>Well I don't agree, perhaps we have to settle for that.
That's perfectly fair, at this point I'm just annoyed that I haven't really been able to articulate myself in a way that I myself find satisfactory so I'm trying to fix it into some final form so I can stop thinking about it (very apropos to the discussion, isn't it?). If you don't have the patience to engage anymore that's fine, we may well be at an impasse. I'd love to think I could open your eyes to different modes of value in literature but it's all subjective at a certain point.
>I can't see how Beckett's narrators are being purposefully sardonic.
Yeah I'm not 100% sure about this one, I might have overstepped somewhat if I implied that, but their constant self-refutation and self-degradation is enough to effectively signal that they aren't intended to be drawn exactly to life, and that they are speaking in the voice of the author commenting on them.
>You might be correct somewhat about Beckett's conscience at using them but it only raises the question about the sincerity of his fiction.
But you get they're not really supposed to be discrete individuals, right? He's not taking a person that exists and saying haha, look at him, what a failure. He's externalizing a part of fundamental human experience and putting it in a setting where the specific phenomenon in question (failure, ignorance, confusion, aporia) can be explored. They are not intended to be any more coherent than the plot or the setting, they are aspects, shadows, voices, bearers of a tragic flaw. This becomes more clear of course as the trilogy goes on and we see these "individuals" in various stages of decomposition. He's trying to understand, or un-understand, the mind, thought, knowledge, etc. by taking it apart piece by piece, and the emotional faculty is involved in the disassembly process as well hence the necessity of emotional display and also the lack of direct truth-to-life in that display.
>minuteness of man
Imo this is what Achilles, Oedipus, Falstaff, Quixote, Flaubert's characters, Proust's characters, etc. are all about, it's fundamental. I agree that harping on it in an insensitive way can come across badly. As I've tried to show, I believe it's more complicated than that, perhaps a specific example would be helpful here. I might try to post something in that vein later but, again, feel free to ignore if you're over the discussion.

>> No.23031055

>>23030559
>>23031051
Oh and I also meant to add that I think there is a heroic quality to the "minuteness of man" thing and I do think Beckett means, however obliquely, to convey that.

>> No.23031501

>>23031051
>He's trying to understand, or un-understand, the mind, thought, knowledge, etc. by taking it apart piece by piece, and the emotional faculty is involved in the disassembly process as well hence the necessity of emotional display and also the lack of direct truth-to-life in that display.
I wish he did that. It's arguable in the Unnamable but Molloy and Malone dies do only a lap around it instead of engaging with it head on.

That's part of my problem. The books don't work as pure think-pieces, and they have aesthetic flaws as works of fiction. The self reflection doesn't let anything form perfectly. Now someone would say that's what he is going for, but then it isn't anything really. I don't reckon Beckett recognized himself with the Dadaists and surrealists, and his fiction doesn't read like them either. There is a reason most of them are forgotten. Readers read to find what they cannot think on their own. Anyone even passingly familiar with schopenhauer will know about the trouble of consciousness. Beckett's enterprise must have been to represent it aesthetically enough that the process itself is alluring for the reader. The text depends on its writing than its apparent promises. His choices make it difficult to realize that however, which has, from the start, been my foremost complaint.

I like Endgame a good deal better than his prose works. It is expressing the same ideas as Beckett's prose works, but it feels more genuine and lived in. It also has a mystique about it that for some reason his prose works, despite the narrator's attempts at obscurity, lack.

>> No.23031532

>>23023450
>I've seen a few of his plays performed and read his stuff and it is truly the type of vapid thing a modern MFA could easily come up with IMO.
If you read Endgame and really believe that, I would doubt your ability to perceive literary language.

>> No.23032682

>>23031501
He was into Duchamp, Surrealist poetry and Surrealist-Abstract Expressionist painting, so he had at least some affinity for that. As for the question of aesthetic appeal, I’ve tried to enumerate the various ways in which I find him aesthetically appealing - both on the macro/structural level, in which capacity the part of my post you quoted *is* in part a statement of aesthetic virtue, and on the micro/experiential level, the “high playfulness”, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, and distancing effect of the delicate absurdity of his narration, the interplay of ugliness and beauty, intellect and ignorance. Again, if you feel like explaining in a little more detail what specifically you believe the aesthetic dimension of the text, or a text in general, to consist of, our exchange might be made a little clearer.
I disagree about reading to find what you can’t think on your own, and anyway the form if not the content is certainly novel, at least for me. Personally, as I tried to convey with my little appeal to literary tradition there, I believe the important themes are eternal, and the Modernists tended to believe that as well.

I understand not liking meta/reflexivity stuff or finding it obnoxious, however I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the trilogy is essentially, at its core, about the act of writing itself, and could not exist as itself or accomplish its goals without being permeated entirely by that aspect. And fwiw I also think that those techniques, when done correctly and in accordance with the theme and purpose of the text, offer the reader a potentially sublime aesthetic experience.

>> No.23033721

Just gonna bump so I can try to post something with a quote in a bit

>> No.23034104

I just realised this guy mostly wrote in French

>> No.23034586

>>23031501
>I wish he did that. It's arguable in the Unnamable but Molloy and Malone dies do only a lap around it instead of engaging with it head on.
This is also untrue, they are a necessary part of the buildup process. Again, he is following the structure of La Commedia, and again, the characters are not necessarily separate individuals, which means that he is in fact engaging with the breakdown of the mind and the self from the beginning. What is the relationship between Molloy and Moran? Why is there a mysterious figure called Youdi giving instructions to Moran? Surely we can't just take these things at face value, we have to entertain the possibility that there is something more there. What is Molloy's arc, if not an attempt at reversing his birth by killing his mother, which is obviously an act of self-destruction; and how is his journey not a form of decomposition? What is Moran's arc, if not a breaking down and disintegration of mind and personality via merging with his opposite? What is Malone's arc, if not a process of self-destruction through the self-distancing medium of MacMann? How do these things not convey the decomposition I am talking about, and how are they not relevant in tracing this "progress of the soul" to where it can begin its final act in the Unnamable?

>> No.23034608

>>23004076
Damn. Not too often do you see an actual literature thread with actual discussion, especially one writer, and it last a week with more than 100 replies

>> No.23035476

>>23034104
Generally speaking he did his own translations though.

>>23034608
It's just me and the other anon plus I bumped it a couple times. I think OP is somewhat correct that not many care too much about him although there's a fair few positive but not in-depth replies (not that the OP post deserves an in-depth reply).

>> No.23035484

>>23035476
It seems like Beckett is one of those writers that has a cult following here. There are a number of writers who don’t get mentioned often but have a smaller but more dedicated following. A lot of times anons will come out of the woodwork for a writer they are passionate and knowledgeable about

>> No.23036880

>>23035484
True, someone was saying something to that effect about Dickens recently.