The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Of Narayan's many novйis, my personal favorites are The English Teacher and The Vendor of Stveets; you might want to start with those, and I suspect you will go on to read many oth­ers. Followers of this Plan will also be interested in Narayan's very good prose abridged versions of the Ramayana [15] and the Mahabharata [16].

J.S.M.

125

SAMUEL BECKETT

1906-1989

Waitingfor Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape

In Waitingfor Godot Estragon remarks to his pai Vladimir, "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?" Perhaps Becketfs entire lifework is the "something" designed to give his audience and himself the impression that they exist. However absurd or painful life may be, art somehow ratifies or vindicates it. Of his own motivation he has said, "With nothing to express, no desire to express, but with the artisfs need to express."

What kind of art is Becketfs? It completely ignores the tra­ditional conventions of the stage, among them clarity. Becketfs most famous play is Waitingfor Godot. Asked who Godot was, Beckett replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." As for form, he once wrote to his younger disciple Harold Pinter, "If you insist on finding form [for my plays] Fll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cвncer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has." Ever since the Greeks, physical or mental action, adding up to some kind of statement or resolution of conflict, has been a staple of drama. But early in Godot we have:

ESTRAGON (giving up again): Nothing to be done.

and the curtain lines are:

VLADIMIR: Well, shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go. They do not move.

Shakespeare [39] has accustomed us to a mixture of humor and tragedy in the same play, but the dominant tone is always clear. Beckett, however, in accord with absurdist doctrine, deliberately carries this confusion of genres to almost fright- ening extremes. Once, directing the Berlin production of Endgame, he remarked that the most important line in the play was:

NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

Beckett has removed himself completely from Aristotle^ mimetic theory of drama [13]. He throws out ali the play's tra­ditional furnishings, somewhat as Virginia Woolf [111] has done for the novel and minimalist painters for art. One playlet (Come and Go) contains only 121 words. Another, Breath, lasts thirty seconds.

Beckett's triumphs as a dramatist may make us forget that he is also a novelist of extraordinary originality. Among his fic- tions are Watt and the trilogy composed of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable.

Interpretations of Beckett have been as endless as they are ingenious, but each reader or viewer must make up his or her own mind. Perhaps mind is the wrong word, because the meaning is the play itself, to be felt rather than understood, as with music. Beckett is trying to make us share his agonized inability to answer the two darkest questions: Who are we? Why are we? Ali his work is an elaboration, sometimes bleak, sometimes comic, of Hamm's statement (in Endgame): "YouYe on earth, there's no cure for that!"

So far more than twenty-five volumes of Beckett have been published, certainly the most comprehensive treatment in ali literature of the theme of negation. Yet he is no cynic—indeed he is deeply moved by human misery, and his own life (he per- formed nobly during the French Resistance) evinces great purity of character. His nada, unlike Hemingway^ [119], is not a response to the dislocation of our time but is deeply meta- physical, a vision of life as eternally the same and eternally incomprehensible. It is interesting that a dramatist so obscure, so nightmarish, so uncompromising, and so oblivious to what we normally expect from drama should have met with world- wide acclaim. However strange his way of saying it, he must be saying something to us.

The last words of The Unnameable are "I can't go on, Fll go on." Of that, make what you will.

C.F.

W.H. AUDEN

1907-1973

Collected Poems

It is a minor paradox that in our hypertechnological era poetry should be alive and well. Poets proliferate; more to the point, many are producing work of high quality. Nor can their influ­ence be gauged by sales figures alone. Their work seems, rather, to be absorbed somehow into the mental climate of intelligent men and women who are not necessarily assiduous poetry readers.