Weiss Simply Beckett

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-943657-79-7
Verlag: Simply Charly
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 22, 129 Seiten

Reihe: Great Lives

'Katherine Weiss'  is a beautifully written book, one brimming with fresh critical insights. What is obvious is her utter command of her material. As part of the Simply Charly series, the book is designed for university students and theatergoers, but, in fact, it also appeals to scholars long familiar with Beckett's work. Drawing on history, politics, trauma, and memory, Weiss leads the reader through Beckett's plays in clear, engaging prose. In sum, Weiss' book has the reach and depth to make it one of the more important coordinates in Beckett scholarship.'
-Matthew Roudané, Regents' Professor of English and Theater, Georgia State University

Born in Dublin on Good Friday, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) attended Trinity College and taught briefly in Belfast before moving to Paris, where he lived for most of his adult life. Deeply influenced by James Joyce, who became a close friend and mentor, he published poetry, novels, essays, and reviews before stunning Paris, and eventually the rest of the world, with his play  in 1953. Famously described by one critic as 'a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats,'  redefined dramatic structure and showcased Beckett's commitment to an art based on the ideas of 'non-knowing' and powerlessness.

In , professor Katherine Weiss provides a highly accessible and insightful introduction to the award-winning author and his paradoxical works, with a particular focus on Beckett's theater activities, both as a writer and director. Through discussion of the written texts, significant productions of the plays, and audience and critical reactions to Beckett's work, Weiss helps the reader understand the groundbreaking nature of his achievements and points the way toward a greater appreciation of his oeuvre.

Combining admirable erudition with reader-friendly style,  is a fascinating journey into the world of an author whose work went to the heart of the human condition.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weiss, Katherine

Leseproben

In the Irish village of Foxrock in 1903, William “Bill” Beckett, of the successful quantity surveying company Beckett & Metcalf, had a house built for his bride Maria “May” Roe Beckett on the corner of Brighton Road and Terrymount Avenue. The couple had been married for two years and Frank, their firstborn, was one year old when the family moved from Pembroke Road into the three-story Tudor-style home they called “Cooldrinagh,” which had a veranda, croquet lawn, large garden, and tennis court. It is in this fine house that Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on April 13, 1906. His childhood in Cooldrinagh would be filled with comfort and luxury, a place where a boy could play with his brother and three cousins who would join the family in 1914. Deirdre Bair, author of recalled that Beckett had said that his childhood was “uneventful,” adding that he “had little talent for happiness” (14).

Both Bill and May came from affluent families. Bill’s father William and his uncle James were master builders who constructed important civic buildings, such as Ireland’s National Library and National Museum. Bill was a good-natured man who had a firm hand on the business world. The Becketts descended from the French Protestant Huguenots. The Roes, according to Beckett, had come from a Quaker background. His mother was the daughter of a grain business owner. Biographers James Knowlson and Deirdre Bair disagree as to why May began working as a nurse. She was educated and brought up in social standing that would normally warrant only volunteerism, but May took up work as a nurse at the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin. Bair argues that May’s “high spirits and penchant for the unusual made her a constant discipline problem” at Moravian Mission School, causing her to “put her skills to more formal use and set off for Dublin where she shocked everyone by taking a job and getting a salary” (8). Knowlson, on the other hand, revealed in that the decision was driven by the death of May’s father. Knowlson discovered that the family grain business “took a serious downward turn in the early 1880s” and the death of Samuel Roe left the family with his debts to pay (25). The decision to become a nurse changed May’s life: she met her future husband at the hospital where she worked in 1901. Bill was recovering there from an unknown illness which is believed to have been influenza or pneumonia.

April 13, 1906, the day of Samuel Barclay Beckett’s birth, was Good Friday and Friday the 13th, meshing the crucifixion of Christ with the day believed by some to bring bad luck in the western world.1 Religion and superstition were merged into one for the author; throughout his life, he was plagued by the awareness of having been born on such an unfortunate day. This sense of dread and failure from the first breath is repeatedly present in Beckett’s prose and plays. In his fiction, conception and birth are often recollected with disparaging remarks and macabre humor. In the opening of “First Love,” his short story of 1946 which depicts a homeless man who believes he finds love and moves in with a young woman he first calls Lulu and then renames as Anna, the narrator expresses this displeasure with birth: “For the date of my own birth, I repeat, my own birth, I have never forgotten, I never had to note it down, it remains graven in my memory, the year at least, in figures that life will not easily erase” (25). Here, the phrase “will not easily erase” reveals that the narrator wishes he could wipe out that day. And, in the word “graven” Beckett aligned birth with death. Birth, for Beckett, marks the moment when we begin our descent into the grave. Despite the grimness of the narrator’s statement, humor is present when he claims to never forget the date. But he is quick to correct himself, as he has forgotten all but the year of his birth.

Beckett again injected humor into his prose when he had the narrator recall learning that his partner, Lulu (who he also calls Anna), is pregnant:

She offered me a side view of her belly. She even undressed, no doubt to prove she wasn’t hiding a cushion under her skirt, and then of course for the pure pleasure of undressing. Perhaps it’s just wind, I said, by way of consolation. She gazed at me with her big eyes whose colour I forget, with one big eye rather, for the other seemed riveted on the remains of the hyacinth. The more naked she was the more cross-eyed. Look, she said, stooping over her breasts, the haloes are darkening already. I summoned up my remaining strength and said, Abort, abort, and they’ll blush like new. (44)

The narrator’s suggestion that Lulu’s expanded belly is just intestinal gas and his disgust and attempts at fleeing his responsibility by encouraging her to seek an abortion so that her darkening nipples will return to their youthful blush, reveal Beckett’s own anxiety over conception and birth. Beckett claimed to have remembered being trapped in his mother’s womb, as told in James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s . This, along with the poverty later in life and political upheaval he witnessed as an adult, led to his decision not to father any children of his own. While the tone in his short story “First Love” is one of dark humor, in his drama there is little laughter when characters reflect on birth. For example, as early as in , a play about two tramps who wait endlessly for a Mr. Godot, a man they have never met, and who are visited by two other tramps, birth is aligned with an image of death. Pozzo, the bourgeois tyrant who has lost his sight, responds out of frustration with the word “when,” to the tramps, Didi and Gogo: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (83). Moments later, Didi ruminates to himself: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingering lay, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries” (84). Still preoccupied with birth and death years later, Beckett opened his 1979 work, , with “Birth was the death of him” (425). The character standing alone on stage in this short play continues to recollect the horror of youth: “Ghastly grinning ever since. Up at the lid to come. In cradle and crib. At suck first fiasco. With the first totters. From mammy to nanny and back. All the way. Bandied back and forth. So ghastly grinning on” (425). In this one-man show, the images of an eerily grinning child and the description of his first failure—the act of feeding at the mother’s breast—are haunting images that collapse birth into death in ways that are reminiscent of W. B. Yeats’s troubling images of the soul being “fastened to a dying animal” in the poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The human body for Yeats, another Irish author who won Nobel Prize for literature, is a “paltry thing,” “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Familiar with his countryman’s poetry, and the paintings of W. B.’s brother, Jack B. Yeats, Beckett carried forth a tradition of Irish arts, a tradition consumed with images of poverty, acts of violence, and the birth of a nation. Yet, despite the similarities, none of Yeats’s mysticism or nationalism makes its way into the works of Samuel Beckett.

For Beckett, being born and living was a struggle, but not one marked with spiritual turmoil as it was for Yeats, financial hardship as it was for Tennessee Williams’s family,2 or with violence as it was for the American playwright Sam Shepard. Beckett’s view appears to be inherently Irish. Like James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, he was troubled by a sense of body and place, and haunted by Foxrock, the Dublin suburb he left behind. Ireland, as Seán Kennedy reveals in “Does Beckett Studies Require a Subject? Mourning Ireland in the ,” resurfaces as a site of trauma in Beckett’s work. For Joyce, the human body and Ireland became a place to defy the conservative Catholic space and provincialism of nation and family. He celebrated sexuality in the Penelope chapter in , for example. In Yeats, too, Ireland appears in the most uncommon spaces as, for instance, when he sought to transcend “the pavement grey” of London’s Fleet Street. The persona of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” transports himself to the isle, as is evident in the concluding line: “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

Childhood memories

For Beckett, however, the decaying body and the Ireland of his childhood were sites of impotence and ignorance—of personal, historical, and political failure. Beckett’s memories of his childhood were peppered with conflicts, with his devout and stern mother and his kind father. He often recollected walks in the Dublin Hills with his dad, which are memorialized in the pages of his late novel . In a more daunting way (as in his first completed but unproduced play ), he also remembered nightmares of being pressured to jump off the raised mass of land at Forty Foot into the Bay at Sandycove Memories of his mother, however, were less kind. James Knowlson, Beckett’s authorized biographer, wrote that “May Beckett had very strict standards of behavior and the children had to conform or risk her anger and punishment” (Damned to Fame 39). Her standards did not lessen as Beckett grew older; May’s judgement over Beckett’s life choices, such as living with Suzanne...