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A reader's guide to Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett, who wrote everything both in French and English, specialized in short enigmatic texts, implying vast visionary works of which the stories are broken pieces. Kenner's guide is designed to help readers see beyond the story in Beckett to the text as a whole and to appreciate the uniqueness of each of his works.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 17, 2023
This 'reader's guide' (there's a whole series of these) provides a short section on each work of Beckett's up until the 70s. Kenner provides some interesting theories (Waiting For Godot as a WW2 gestapo paranoia farce, Watt as an expression of Beckett's wartime anxiety) and lays down some of his typical narrative-perspective theory and waxy biographical pretext about the works of Beckett, but reneges pretty often into merely summarizing the works, something that may be useful to those new to Beckett's machinations. One gets the sense Kenner wrote this mostly as a for-pay assignment.
July 25, 2017
Samuel Beckett is famously inscrutable; this holds for everyone, apparently, except Hugh Kenner.
"He is the clearest, most limpid, most disciplined joiner of words in the English language today... and not the least of the pleasures he affords is the constant pleasure of startling expressive adequacy." Here is the sentence-- excuse me, word grouping-- Kenner adduces as evidence for this high praise:
"some reflections none the less while waiting for things to improve on the fragility of euphoria among the different orders of the animal kingdom beginning with the sponges when suddenly I can't stay a second longer this episode is therefore lost"
Hugh Kenner is sometimes inscrutable.
Anyway, the work is a brief synopsis of Beckett's major work, pointing to those things in the works that we ought most to admire (as always, for Kenner, it's the ingenuity of doing something somehow new with the material that's most worthy of comment).
To say that it is written by Kenner is to say that it is enlightening and interesting. This book will probably tempt you to try reading Beckett again. (Though, if you're a Beckett Reader, looking for Guidance, you may find yourself freshly bewildered. Ah well.)
"He is the clearest, most limpid, most disciplined joiner of words in the English language today... and not the least of the pleasures he affords is the constant pleasure of startling expressive adequacy." Here is the sentence-- excuse me, word grouping-- Kenner adduces as evidence for this high praise:
"some reflections none the less while waiting for things to improve on the fragility of euphoria among the different orders of the animal kingdom beginning with the sponges when suddenly I can't stay a second longer this episode is therefore lost"
Hugh Kenner is sometimes inscrutable.
Anyway, the work is a brief synopsis of Beckett's major work, pointing to those things in the works that we ought most to admire (as always, for Kenner, it's the ingenuity of doing something somehow new with the material that's most worthy of comment).
To say that it is written by Kenner is to say that it is enlightening and interesting. This book will probably tempt you to try reading Beckett again. (Though, if you're a Beckett Reader, looking for Guidance, you may find yourself freshly bewildered. Ah well.)
October 9, 2022
Kenner is a great analyst of the Modernists, and this book is no different - designed as a guide to Samuel Beckett and most of his works. Off first glance, I loved the conversational, casual tone to Kenner's book - it helps demystify the strangeness of Beckett's writing, and opacity, for in Beckett, the strange and opaque predominant and present the primary puzzle for any reader daring enough to pick his works up.
*
The section on 'Murphy' helped clarify the novel's strangeness - it took the wildness of Murphy the character and Beckett's book and clarified that Murphy withdraws willfully from the world around him, and therefore, so must the book he inhabits. Kenner points out the novel's typical generic structures, as exemplified by Celia, Counihan, Wylie, Neary and Co., and essentially foregrounds that Beckett wishes to make what we see as the dull (interior world Murphy lives in) vivid, and the vivid (the external world of mishaps and acts in the everyday) dull. Murphy's world can't be put into interior monologue or soliloquy as both only approximate Beckett's interests in the inner life, reliant as they are on external things to reinforce the stream of consciousness. It's part of the book's mega brilliance. The chess game is explained as an almost final therapeutic act between Mr. Endon and Murphy, where Murphy sympathizes and empathizes with Endon's schizoid predicament and wishes for friendship, only to have it skewered at a final point as Murphy can't quite approach where Endon is, and Endon doesn't care due to his condition. It's a final epiphany for Murphy, a moment of release or quasi-arrival that's in itself a failure prior to his death.
*
The chapter on the Short Stories was useful, as it pointed out some intricacies of the 'More Pricks than Kicks' short story cycle, primarily that Beckett was influenced by, and trying to one-up Joyce's Dubliners'. Belacqua is a somewhat stand-in for Beckett, but I think the primary significance of the work is to mark Beckett's death out of the style that was engorged by Joycean influence, so that he took to French to find his real voice.
*
The chapter on 'Endgame' was great, with the most significant part being that the underlying conceit to the play is that a metaphorical chess game is being played with the characters on stage. Hamm is the King waiting to be checked, and thus have his "Game" ended. The trash cans are rooks - different parts of the staging correspond to the chess board. It was a brilliant bit from Kenner on one of Beckett's central preoccupations literarily and metaphorically.
*
The bit on 'Happy Days' was great because it points out that it's a play that's about as happy as many of Beckett's protagonists will ever get, and acts as a companion to 'Endgame'. Kenner wisely points out that the play is a look at manners of gentility in English culture - a satire perhaps, or a warm-hearted joke, poking fun at the nature of English manners and decorum as inhabited by Winnie and Willie. The part of Winnie is one of Beckett's best parts for women - and it shows that he's not a blunt-forced sexist in his depictions of females. The play also picks fun at the nature of theatre props and that even the words will be renewed - Beckett speaks about how not only the characters Winnie/Willie are doomed in the pits they're in, subject to the sands of time, but that the actors playing them must continue to play them, almost as a fate resigned. Kenner also points out that Poets create words for us to use as property, words ill-used, ill-remembered, and ill-said. It's the burden of the Poet, much as for the Reader and rememberer. Beckett's self-referentiality of his work within the work while the play happens is multi-faceted - it's a newer type of drama that he was writing following 'Waiting for Godot' that goes far beyond the mere "Theatre of the Absurd" moniker he was given.
*
The chapter on "Come and Go" was ineffective as it only elicited some of the basic content of the play without noting the interaction of the stage directions and what Beckett's planned silences in the play achieve. Many critics have noted "Come and Go" as Beckett's greatest play - it's a micro-play, of only 121-127 words depending on the rendering, and I will admit that I was underwhelmed on first read. But it's not solely a text to be read - it's meant to be watched in performance, because that's where his specific stage directions give the play a greater meaning, density, and life than just the written word does.
*
Kenner then pens a chapter on the "strange happening texts" of Beckett's late period: this is the Beckett that made me truly idolize him, because he's doing something so strange, unique and wonderful here that I would wager we're all still coming to terms with what the basic meaning is - much less the broader artistic implications. He starts with 'Enough', noting that it may in fact be a novel because Beckett's skill at compression by this point in his career enabled him to write novels in only a few pages. There's an enigma to the meaning - we know it happens on earth, that there is a narrative "I" who remembers things - much of 'Enough' is about uncovering the meaning. 'Imagination Dead Imagine' could be about the process of Imagination dying while being aware of its activity. It's a crazy piece. 'Ping' is likewise more experimental, with Kenner comparing the lack of verbs in the piece as akin to a strip of film that you observe, where the movement of the eye from panel to panel creates the action. It could portray a consciousness nearing the end of life under duress, as David Lodge has put it.
*
And then, ah yes, 'Waiting for Godot' - Beckett's best-known work, though not quite his greatest I would say. It contains pivotal Beckettian themes - Absurdism/Existentialism are trite ones that lesser critics would attach to it; a better formulation would be Companionship as the central theme. Didi and Gogo are there for each other, and the play is about their merging, or symbiosis as Beckett has put it, in different forms, also symbolized through Lucky and Ponzo who are different versions of the two leads. There have been religious interpretations, political interpretations, psychological Freudian and Jungian interpretations, feminist interpretations - so many looks at the thing, and yet, as Beckett has wryly put it, how can so many critics take something so simple, and make it overblown? For when you look at 'Godot', it's not necessarily a wait for God or the return of religious/rational order: that's an interpretation that Beckett has shut down.
*
The section on 'Murphy' helped clarify the novel's strangeness - it took the wildness of Murphy the character and Beckett's book and clarified that Murphy withdraws willfully from the world around him, and therefore, so must the book he inhabits. Kenner points out the novel's typical generic structures, as exemplified by Celia, Counihan, Wylie, Neary and Co., and essentially foregrounds that Beckett wishes to make what we see as the dull (interior world Murphy lives in) vivid, and the vivid (the external world of mishaps and acts in the everyday) dull. Murphy's world can't be put into interior monologue or soliloquy as both only approximate Beckett's interests in the inner life, reliant as they are on external things to reinforce the stream of consciousness. It's part of the book's mega brilliance. The chess game is explained as an almost final therapeutic act between Mr. Endon and Murphy, where Murphy sympathizes and empathizes with Endon's schizoid predicament and wishes for friendship, only to have it skewered at a final point as Murphy can't quite approach where Endon is, and Endon doesn't care due to his condition. It's a final epiphany for Murphy, a moment of release or quasi-arrival that's in itself a failure prior to his death.
*
The chapter on the Short Stories was useful, as it pointed out some intricacies of the 'More Pricks than Kicks' short story cycle, primarily that Beckett was influenced by, and trying to one-up Joyce's Dubliners'. Belacqua is a somewhat stand-in for Beckett, but I think the primary significance of the work is to mark Beckett's death out of the style that was engorged by Joycean influence, so that he took to French to find his real voice.
*
The chapter on 'Endgame' was great, with the most significant part being that the underlying conceit to the play is that a metaphorical chess game is being played with the characters on stage. Hamm is the King waiting to be checked, and thus have his "Game" ended. The trash cans are rooks - different parts of the staging correspond to the chess board. It was a brilliant bit from Kenner on one of Beckett's central preoccupations literarily and metaphorically.
*
The bit on 'Happy Days' was great because it points out that it's a play that's about as happy as many of Beckett's protagonists will ever get, and acts as a companion to 'Endgame'. Kenner wisely points out that the play is a look at manners of gentility in English culture - a satire perhaps, or a warm-hearted joke, poking fun at the nature of English manners and decorum as inhabited by Winnie and Willie. The part of Winnie is one of Beckett's best parts for women - and it shows that he's not a blunt-forced sexist in his depictions of females. The play also picks fun at the nature of theatre props and that even the words will be renewed - Beckett speaks about how not only the characters Winnie/Willie are doomed in the pits they're in, subject to the sands of time, but that the actors playing them must continue to play them, almost as a fate resigned. Kenner also points out that Poets create words for us to use as property, words ill-used, ill-remembered, and ill-said. It's the burden of the Poet, much as for the Reader and rememberer. Beckett's self-referentiality of his work within the work while the play happens is multi-faceted - it's a newer type of drama that he was writing following 'Waiting for Godot' that goes far beyond the mere "Theatre of the Absurd" moniker he was given.
*
The chapter on "Come and Go" was ineffective as it only elicited some of the basic content of the play without noting the interaction of the stage directions and what Beckett's planned silences in the play achieve. Many critics have noted "Come and Go" as Beckett's greatest play - it's a micro-play, of only 121-127 words depending on the rendering, and I will admit that I was underwhelmed on first read. But it's not solely a text to be read - it's meant to be watched in performance, because that's where his specific stage directions give the play a greater meaning, density, and life than just the written word does.
*
Kenner then pens a chapter on the "strange happening texts" of Beckett's late period: this is the Beckett that made me truly idolize him, because he's doing something so strange, unique and wonderful here that I would wager we're all still coming to terms with what the basic meaning is - much less the broader artistic implications. He starts with 'Enough', noting that it may in fact be a novel because Beckett's skill at compression by this point in his career enabled him to write novels in only a few pages. There's an enigma to the meaning - we know it happens on earth, that there is a narrative "I" who remembers things - much of 'Enough' is about uncovering the meaning. 'Imagination Dead Imagine' could be about the process of Imagination dying while being aware of its activity. It's a crazy piece. 'Ping' is likewise more experimental, with Kenner comparing the lack of verbs in the piece as akin to a strip of film that you observe, where the movement of the eye from panel to panel creates the action. It could portray a consciousness nearing the end of life under duress, as David Lodge has put it.
*
And then, ah yes, 'Waiting for Godot' - Beckett's best-known work, though not quite his greatest I would say. It contains pivotal Beckettian themes - Absurdism/Existentialism are trite ones that lesser critics would attach to it; a better formulation would be Companionship as the central theme. Didi and Gogo are there for each other, and the play is about their merging, or symbiosis as Beckett has put it, in different forms, also symbolized through Lucky and Ponzo who are different versions of the two leads. There have been religious interpretations, political interpretations, psychological Freudian and Jungian interpretations, feminist interpretations - so many looks at the thing, and yet, as Beckett has wryly put it, how can so many critics take something so simple, and make it overblown? For when you look at 'Godot', it's not necessarily a wait for God or the return of religious/rational order: that's an interpretation that Beckett has shut down.
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April 15, 2021Wonderful. How could I not enjoy 200 pages of rhapsodizing about my favorite author? Not sure about the theoretical or critical value of this text—but as pure appreciation, drawing of connections, close attention to cognitive and sensuous experience, I have no complaints. This is an exercise in cultivating love, excitement, towardness. I’m grateful for it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews