October 3, 2006
Terry Eagleton on "political Beckett"
A friend suggested I read Terry Eagleton's article in the current New Left Review, "Political Beckett?" I'm glad that I did. The article is available online only to subscribers, so here's a brief excerpt:
Beckett, then, was one of the few modernist artists to become a militant of the left rather than the right. And James Knowlson [Beckett's official biographer] is surely right to maintain that 'many of the features of his later prose and plays arise directly from his experience of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger and need'. What we see in his work is not some timeless condition humaine, but war-torn twentieth-century Europe. It is, as Adorno recognized, an art after Auschwitz, one which keeps faith in its austere minimalism and unremitted bleakness with silence, terror and non-being. His writing is as thin as is compatible with being barely perceptible. There is not even enough meaning to be able to give a name to what is awry with us. [ . . . ] He shares with his compatriot Swift a savage delight in diminishment.Beckett's art maintains a compact with failure in the teeth of Nazi triumphalism, undoing its lethal absolutism with the weapons of ambiguity and indeterminacy. His favourite word, he commented, was 'perhaps'. Against fascism's megalomaniac totalities, he pits the fragmentary and unfinished. In his Socratic way, Beckett preferred ignorance to knowledge, presumably because it resulted in fewer corpses. If his works are morosely, hilariously conscious of the fact that they might just as well never have existed—that their presence is as farcically gratuitous as the cosmos itself—it is just this sense of contingency, one quite as much comic as tragic, that can be turned against the murderous mythologies of necessity.