Samuel Beckett

by Al Álvarez

Samuel Beckett is one of the world's most famous living writers, despite the difficulty of his work and the obscurity of his personal life. In 1968 , when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was one of the few Nobel choices about whom nobody argued. For everyone, he is the artist of deprivation and terminal desolation, and he has expressed his vision with unique purity and power. In this important new study, the distinguished critic A. Alvarez discusses the entire corpus of Beckett's extraordinary work. Mr. Alvarez's last book was a study of suicide. THE SAVAGE GOD.

Genres: Biography, Irish Literature, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Biography Memoir

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Alfred Alvarez was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.

Reviews

[سپید · Rating 3 out of 5]

اول اینکه بکت احتیاجی به تفسیر نداره، فهمش در خودش نهفته‌ست. دوم اینکه کتاب قدیمی بود، برای سال ۱۹۷۳. اما جدای از همه چیز فکت‌های جالبی داشت.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Beckett hatte ebenso wie Joyce einen Hang zum Schweigen; sie vertieften sich in Gespräche, die oft nur aus gegeneinander gerichtetem Schweigen bestanden, beide tief traurig, Beckett meist über die Welt, Joyce meist über sich selbst. Joyce saß in seiner gewohnten Haltung da, die Beine übereinander geschlagen, die Zehen des oberen Beines unter dem Spann des andere; Beckett, der auch groß und schlank war, verfiel in dieselbe Haltung. Plötzlich stellte Joyce etwa folgende Frage: „Wie konnte nur ein Idealist wie Hume eine Geschichtsbetrachtung schreiben?“ Beckett antwortete: „Eine Geschichtsbetrachtung in Schilderungen.“ Joyce sagte nichts.“
Das klingt, als seien Wladimir und Estragon mit ihrer Weisheit am Ende – allerdings in komfortabler Umgebung und mit Universitätsbildung.
(A. Alvarez, „Samuel Beckett“; darin ein Zitat aus Ellmanns „James Joyce“)

Immer wieder stelle ich mir die beiden schweigend im Gespräch vertieft vor, immer wieder ist diese Szene genauso erheiternd wie deprimierend. Ich glaube, dass Alvarez den Beckett-Aufsatz vornehmlich deswegen geschrieben hat, weil Becketts manisch-depressiven Züge ihn beschäftigt haben. Fast zeitgleich schrieb er ja auch an seinem Buch „Der grausame Gott“.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Beckett hatte ebenso wie Joyce einen Hang zum Schweigen; sie vertieften sich in Gespräche, die oft nur aus gegeneinander gerichtetem Schweigen bestanden, beide tief traurig, Beckett meist über die Welt, Joyce meist über sich selbst. Joyce saß in seiner gewohnten Haltung da, die Beine übereinander geschlagen, die Zehen des oberen Beines unter dem Spann des andere; Beckett, der auch groß und schlank war, verfiel in dieselbe Haltung. Plötzlich stellte Joyce etwa folgende Frage: „Wie konnte nur ein Idealist wie Hume eine Geschichtsbetrachtung schreiben?“ Beckett antwortete: „Eine Geschichtsbetrachtung in Schilderungen.“ Joyce sagte nichts.“
Das klingt, als seien Wladimir und Estragon mit ihrer Weisheit am Ende – allerdings in komfortabler Umgebung und mit Universitätsbildung.
(A. Alvarez, „Samuel Beckett“; darin ein Zitat aus Ellmanns „James Joyce“)

Immer wieder stelle ich mir die beiden schweigend im Gespräch vertieft vor, immer wieder ist diese Szene genauso erheiternd wie deprimierend. Ich glaube, dass Alvarez den Beckett-Aufsatz vornehmlich deswegen geschrieben hat, weil Becketts manisch-depressiven Züge ihn beschäftigt haben. Fast zeitgleich schrieb er ja auch an seinem Buch „Der grausame Gott“.

[Saman]

شهرت و اعتبار ساموئل بكت در مقام استاد ادبيات مدرن، قطعي و مورد تأييد همگان است. اما اين شهرت متكي بر آثاري است سرشار از ايهام و ايجاز و برخوردار از مضامين و اشكالي بس تكان‌دهنده و بي‌سابقه آثار بكت كه با گذشت زمان و به تبع نوعي منطق شعري، تكيده‌تر، مرموزتر و زيباتر شدند
نويسنده‌ي اين كتاب (آ. آلوارز) در مقام شاعر، منتقد ادبي و مؤلف در اين كتاب به اجمال نگاهي به آثار اين نويسنده داشته و مورد تحليل قرار داده است

[Shima Masoumi · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب بدی برای بکت شناسی نیست ولی اگه کتاب هیو کنر رو خونده باشین این کتاب چیزی بهتون اضافه نمی‌کنه. حتی در قسمت‌هایی از تحلیلش جنبه‌ی آیرونیک نوشته‌های بکت اصلا در نظر گرفته نشده. (البته من متن اصلی رو نخوندم و شاید این حذفیات از مترجم باشه).
ترجمه‌ی کتاب نامنسجم و در بخش سانتورهای دکارتی تا حدی نامفهومه.

[Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rozi Dusti Bakhshi Az Safheye 35-36 In Ketabo Khond. Mikhast Dar Morede Ye Film Sohbat Kone Va In Moghadameye Aghazesh Bod Va Donbal Kardan Va Khondanesh Az Hamon Ja Aghaz Shod.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

One assumes that it was Alvarez's excellent The Savage God: A Study of Suicide that nominated him to write this primer on Beckett. He showed in that book a capacity to mingle hardcore Oxbridge bonafides with a 70s-era inclination to social skepticism and sour wit; in other words, the perfect person to assemble a Beckett explainer.

Alvarez's appraisal of Beckett, however, becomes a little repetitive. His assessment, especially of the postwar works starting with Molloy, is that they are a kind of assassination upon literature as a form, a dismemberment of character, dialogue, setting, plot, and so on. This may be true, but does not tell the whole story, as it largely elides the incredible poetry of these late works. I would've found this book more useful had it taken a broader perspective on Beckett as a poet rather than anatomizing his works one at a time, works which, one must admit, are rather similar to each other.

But at the end of the day, Alvarez gets Beckett, and describes his accomplishments in beaming, vivid, and spot-on terms. To Alvarez, the "vaudeville misfortunes" Beckett puts his characters through stand in for all variety of human disappointment, humiliation, and pain. Alvarez is particularly sharp when he puts Beckett in the context of British poetry and drama of the late-40s:

Without quite seeming to, he has forced a way through to authentic poetic drama. The conventional, sub-Elizabethan inflation of Drinkwater and Fry* led nowhere, except to Thomas Otway. Eliot had seemed to be opening new ground with Sweeney Agonistes, but he abandoned the project [...] In comparison, Beckett seems far less grandiose; he uses knockabout routines--falling trousers and swopping hats--which come straight from the world of Laurel and Hardy. Yet he ends with plays that are genuinely poetic, both in dramatic conception and in language; they make their effect like poems, immediately and elliptically, through a language at once stripped to its essentials, and yet continually stirring with life.

*Poor Christopher Fry. After In Search of Theater, this is second book I've read this year in which some new school drama critic takes him down as an odious representative of the old school. You'll have your day, Christopher... or, rather, I guess you already have?

[Dante · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Fontana Modern Masters book briefly en/joy/dur/ed. Interesting in his account of Beckett's relation to Joyce and his supposed annihilation of the novel, and certainly well-written. His reading becomes somewhat repetitive in its irksome teleological presentation of Beckett as a writer ceaselessly moving toward a more minimal, pure expression of depression and absurd angst, and any comic stylisations in Beckett's work are given little attention. Some fine points mired in a fairly restricted framework. Can't ask for much with such a short text.

An oddity is also apparent in a rather minor reference he makes; he writes 'somewhere in Ulysses an Oxford Don appears pushing a lawn-mower that goes 'cleverclevercleverclever''. An amusing scene, so I wanted to check and read around it; but this doesn't appear in Ulysses at all, only a scene somewhat like it. Some searching also led me to Alvarez' autobiography, Where did it all go right in which the same line is repeated, yet this time its attributed to Finnegan's Wake . How odd. Perhaps some meta-jape regarding academic indulgence, a productive false memory, or a Zizekian manouevre in which a good point won't be restrained by the truth.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leave it to Sam Beckett to be one of the few (as of the Seventies) living humans to be included in the prestigious "Modern Masters" series published by Vintage Press. (Others included Herbert Marcuse, subject of a savage attack by British philosopher Alistair Macantaire and, inevitably, Noam Chomsky).
A. Alvarez, English poet and author of THE SAVAGE GOD: A STUDY OF SUICIDE here presents a critical study of the man who had the least wish to live of any contemporary author. "My unsuccessful abortion" is how Beckett described his birth. Alvarez tackles the plays, of course (WAITING FOR GODOT, ENDGAME, HAPPY DAYS, KRAPP'S LAST TAPE) but particularly illuminating is his study of the novels(THE UNNAMEABLE, MALONE DIES), in a chapter entitled "Desolation Row". These novels are, in the poetic words of Alvarez, both brilliant and unreadable; an assessment which probably pleased Sam. If you've never read Beckett here is the place to start. If you have, you will reframe him after one of his contemporaries (Beckett had no peers) is finished with him.