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Lifelong Suffocation
Lifelong Suffocation
By STEPHEN SPENDER
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9/9/2016
Lifelong Suffocation
know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on
my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed."
Thus Beckett uses the foetal position to describe life, all the life of his unnamable nonheroes. He jumps, as it were from the childhood to second childhood, because his
metaphor works best when it describes the search for identity of the about-to-be born,
the loss of identity of the senescent.
Looking at life in this way, the able-bodied executives of life and love are self-deluded
farceurs and provide the very considerable comedy in Beckett's novels. Yet although he
is a very funny writer, his humor limits him when it springs out of contempt for others.
Like Wyndham Lewis he has little room in his universe for any love but self-love. On
the other hand, Beckett has a far greater respect for truth than Wyndham Lewis, for
whom truth meant unpleasant lies about other people. Indeed, his great virtue is the
passionate pursuit of his own kind of buried reality, which he holds with a very rm
grip indeed. But even if one protests much of the time against his whole view of life,
one is carried away very often by the seriousness of his view of the whole of life. He
never lets the reader forget for a moment that main is an isolated, decaying, selfdeluding, un-self- knowing, death-sentenced, rutting, body and mind.
Beckett has also learned well from his master, Joyce. He is an incomparable spellbinder.
Reading him, one comes to recognize the phrase that introduces a theme--"But now I
shall say my old lesson, if I can remember it"--and one sits back enchanted as a child
for a bedtime story. He writes with a rhetoric and music that--as with some passages of
Henry James and D. H. Lawrence--make a poet green with envy, and make him note
how little able formal poetry is today to rise to the epic sweep of the great themes.
Yet when critics compare Beckett to Kafka, and to the Joyce who was a universal
philosopher, I think they are putting readers on the wrong track. He's much closer to the
Cline of "Journey to the End of the Night," or to the early stories of such writers as
Jean-Paul Sartre.
Kafka essentially recognizes the force of systems outside himself by which he knows
that he will come to judgment. Joyce has a philosophy of history which merges into prehistory and geology. With Beckett , individual self-awareness is everything. Beckett is
valuable to us because he writes about a limited real experience in a way which takes us
far beyond his limits.
Nevertheless, it is important that the Beckett cult should not blind us to his limitations.
The interest hovers on the edge of complete solipsism, and his contempt for everyone
and everything outside groping self-awareness, verges on the automatically facile. Yet
he is a serious writer with something serious to say about the human condition: and
therefore one of the dozen or so writers whom those who are concerned with modern
man in search of his soul, should read.
Besides his considerable work as a poet, critic and essayist, Mr. Spender is author of a
recent volume containing two novels, "Engaged in Writing."
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html
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Lifelong Suffocation
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-unnamable.html
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