Samuel Beckett (Blooms Modern Critical Views)

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Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Samuel Beckett by Harold Bloom. Hardcover , pages. Published January 1st by Chelsea House Publications. Bloom's Modern Critical Views. Description Each title features: The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Product details Format Hardback pages Dimensions Looking for beautiful books?

Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more. Other books in this series. The ""Crucible"" - Arthur Miller Prof. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller Prof. Fahrenheit - Ray Bradbury Prof. Joyce is to Beckett as Milton was to Wordsworth. Study does little to unriddle Beckett or Wordsworth. Place my namesake, the sublime Poldy, in Murphy and he might fit, though he would explode the book.

Place him in Watt? It cannot be done, and Poldy or even Earwicker in the trilogy would be like Milton or Satan perambulating about in The Prelude. The fashion largely derived from French misreaders of German thought of denying a fixed, stable ego is a shibboleth of current criticism. Both stances define modernism, and modernism is as old as Hellenistic Alexandria. Callimachus is as modernist as Joyce, and Aristarchus, like Hugh Kenner, is an antiquarian modernist or modernist antiquarian.

Beckett, too, is as modernist as the Buddha, or as Schopenhauer, who disputes with Hume the position of the best writer among philosophers since Plato. I laugh sometimes in reading Schopenhauer, but the laughter is defensive. Basilides or Valentinus, Alexandrian heresiarchs, would have recognized instantly the world of the trilogy and of the major plays: It is the world ruled by the Archons, the kenoma, nonplace of emptiness.

Such a turmoil of self-deception and naif discontent gains nothing in dignity from that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God. He has the fidgets, a disorder which may very well give rise, as it did with Rilke on occasion, to poetry of a high order. But why call the fidgets God, Ego, Orpheus and the rest? In , the year that Murphy was belatedly published, Beckett declared his double impatience with the language of transcendence and with the transcendence of language, while intimating also the imminence of the swerve away from Joyce in the composition of Watt — At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words.

With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do. There it seems rather to be a matter of an apotheosis of the word. Unless perhaps Ascension to Heaven and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same. Yet the grand paradox is that lessness never ends in Beckett. Nothing is got for nothing even in Beckett, this greatest master of nothing.

In the progression from Murphy through Watt and the trilogy onto How It Is and the briefer fictions of recent years, there is loss for the reader as well as gain. A wild humor abandons Beckett or is transformed into a comedy for which we seem not to be ready. Even an uncommon reader can long for those marvelous Pythagoreans Wylie and Neary, who are the delight of Murphy, or for the sense of the picturesque that makes a last stand in Molloy.

Neary turned his cup upside down. Here are the pudenda of my psyche. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary. One can be forgiven for missing this, even as one surrenders these easier pleasures for the more difficult pleasures of How It Is: Sentences, phrases, images even, are the veritable arias in the plays and the later fiction. The magnificent rising of the kite at the end of Murphy occurs in a guarded but positive surge of ceremonial song, to which he will never return.

I lay and waited. Then came the mishap. Only Kafka, or Beckett, could have written the sentence in which Gracchus sums up the dreadfulness of his condition: Call it the silence, or the abyss, or the reality beyond the pleasure principle, or the metaphysical or spiritual reality of our existence at last exposed, beyond further illusion. Beckett cannot or will not name it, but he has worked through to the art of representing it more persuasively than anyone else. Endgame Trying to understand Endgame, Theodor W. Adorno attained to a most somber conclusion: Consciousness begins to look its own demise in the eye, as if it wanted to survive the demise, as these two want to survive the destruction of their world.

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett : Prof. Harold Bloom :

Proust, about whom the young Beckett wrote an essay, is said to have attempted to keep protocol on his own struggle with death. Endgame carries out this intention like a mandate from a testament. Hugh Kenner, a very different ideologue than Adorno, was less somber: Neither the struggle with death nor the conviction of despair seems to me central in the play.

An extraordinary gusto informs Endgame, surpassing even Brecht, Pirandello, and Ionesco in that quality. It is a gusto quite indistinguishable from an acute anxiety attack, but anxiety and anxious expectations need not be confused with despair or hope or with a struggle against death. Endgame contrives to be both biblical and Shakespearean, despite its customary Schopenhauerian and Gnostic assumptions. Anxiety, Freud noted, is the reaction to the danger of object loss, and Hamm fears losing Clov.

Or, as Freud ironically also observes, anxiety after all is only a perception—of possibilities of anxiety. Hamm, a bad chess player, faces his endgame with a compulsive intensity, so that he is formidable though a blunderer. His name necessarily suggests Ham, who saw the nakedness of his father, Noah, and whose son Canaan was cursed into servitude for it. That would make Nagg and Nell into Mr. Noah, which seems not inappropriate but is sufficient without being altogether necessary, as it were.

As in Waiting for Godot, we are back in the kenoma, or sensible emptiness, a kind of vast yet dry flood. Kenner and other exegetes have centered on a single moment in Hamlet, where the prince tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what they are not capable of knowing, even after they are told: To me it is a prison. Where the will to live is unchecked, there are anxious expectations, and anxiety or Hamm is king, but a king on a board swept nearly bare.

But that raises the authentic aesthetic puzzle of Endgame: Is there another, an opposing side, with a rival king, or is there only Hamm, a perfect solipsist where even Hamlet was an imperfect one? The Demiurge, like every bad actor, finds his opponent in the audience, which comes to be beguiled but stays to criticize. Beckett does not evade; Endgame is his masterpiece, and being so inward it is also his most difficult work, with every allusion endstopped, despite the reverberations.

We have only a play-within-a-play, which gives us the difficulty of asking and answering: What then is the play that contains Endgame? If the audience is the opponent, and Hamm is bound to lose the endgame, then the enclosing play is the larger entity that can contain the chess game between Hamm and ourselves. That is not quite the play of the world, yet it remains a larger play than any other dramatist has given us in this century.

Entropy is all around them and within them, since they inhabit, they are, that cosmological emptiness the Gnostics named as the kenoma. A man waiting for recognition is more likely than ever to be obsessed that his feet should hurt continually and perhaps to be provoked also to the memory that his own father invariably wore a bowler hat and a black coat. When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate also the boundless, eternal, infinite, and timeless nature of the Abyss, but could not express its immutable eternity, being as he was a fruit of defect, he embodied their eternity in times, epochs, and great numbers of years, under the delusion that by the quantity of times he could represent their infinity.

Thus truth escaped him and he followed the lie. Description that is also lament—that is the only lyricism possible for the Gnostic, ancient or modern, Valentinus or Schopenhauer, Beckett or Shelley: Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth— And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?

When the moon rises, Estragon contemplates it in a Shelleyan mode: We have that excuse. We have our reasons. All the dead voices. They make a noise like wings. They all speak at once. Each one to itself. What do they say? They talk about their lives.

To have lived is not enough for them. They have to talk about it. To be dead is not enough for them. It is not sufficient. They make a noise like feathers. Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! Pozzo, originally enough of a brute to be a Demiurge himself, is now another wanderer in the darkness of the kenoma. Beckett and the Mass Media A lthough a Nobel Prize Laureate and modern classic whose plays are performed the world over, Samuel Beckett nevertheless has the reputation of being a difficult and depressing author.

Indeed, that is how he strikes many people who see his work performed. And their impressions do accurately reflect their reactions: Beckett certainly never set out to entertain or please anyone. He writes strictly for himself—or rather, his work is an attempt to explore himself and the nature of his consciousness, to reach to the inner core of that mysterious entity called his own individual Self.

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As a Cartesian, albeit a heretical one, Beckett is convinced that our own individual consciousness is the only aspect, the only segment of the world to which we have direct access, which we can know. Who, then, am I? Beckett is a poet, an artist, yes, but above all he is an explorer. His work—his prose narratives, plays, mimes, radio and television plays, and his film—all form part of a vast whole, an exploration of the questions just posed. Thus Beckett starts from zero: Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

So the individual must start with a completely clean slate, no preconceptions, whether religious, philosophical, scientific, or merely commonsensical—no traditionally accepted truths, only the evidence of his own consciousness. In one of his rare theoretical pronouncements, not about his own work but about that of certain modern painters, Beckett speaks of the situation of the modern artist in a world where all the religious, philosophical, and political certainties have been swept away in the aftermath of the catastrophe of World War II and the collapse of all previously established systems of belief.

Thus, the obligation to express himself in the face of this total negativity remains for the artist the only positive element, the germ from which a new system of values might perhaps be made to grow. The obligation to express contains an ethical imperative: Truthfulness and courage are thus the cornerstones of a new scale of values for human conduct. This attitude, of course, is along the same lines as that of the existential philosophers who flourished in Paris in the forties and fifties, led by Camus and Sartre.

I doubt whether Beckett was directly influenced by them. No, I firmly believe that he arrived at his existential ontology purely by observing his own consciousness and exploring its problems. Moreover, of all the existentialists, he is the most consistent. If the existentialist view, starting from Kierkegaard, has always been that any thought can only be the expression of an individual consciousness and that therefore ideas put in a generalized abstract form and claiming universal validity must of necessity be false, the French existentialists of the Paris school contradicted this principle by pontificating in general terms and writing philosophical treatises claiming universal validity.

Beckett is an existential thinker who consistently refrains from uttering any generalized thought or universally valid truth. Beckett and the Mass Media 15 comment on his own work. His work must speak for itself, in all its ambiguity and open-endedness. When asked who Godot was supposed to be, he replied that if he knew who Godot was he would have had to put it into the play, for withholding that information would have been cheating, willful mystification of a paying audience. In a letter to a friend, the director Alan Schneider, who was about to embark on a production of Endgame, Beckett wrote in December When it comes to journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind.

And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds no joke intended made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.

Samuel Beckett

The work is an emanation of himself, a natural and spontaneous outflow of his consciousness. I once asked Beckett how he went about his work. He replied that he sat down in front of a blank piece of paper and then waited till he heard the voice within him. He faithfully took down what the voice said—and then, he added, of course, he applied his sense of form to the product.

He, and most human beings, thus can be seen to appear to themselves mainly as a narrative, and ongoing story; or perhaps a dialogue, for our consciousness contains contradictory ideas and impulses and thus frequently discussions and debates, fierce struggles between them. Yet, in trying to observe the nature of his own self, Beckett comes to the recognition of another split in the self.

I want to smoke! No, it is bad for my health! There is someone—myself—who listens to the narrative that emanates from myself, and the moment I try to catch the essence of the self that speaks the words I hear in my consciousness, the observer has already become the observed. It is an endless quest: We experience ourselves and the world through a stream of consciousness, an interior monologue, a continuous murmured narrative.

The few texts that contain descriptions of strange unworldly worlds are clearly accounts of dreams. There is in them no description of objects from the outside—objectively seen.

In his early essay on Proust, Beckett expresses contempt for writers who spend their time in describing the outside world, clothes, landscapes, furniture. He feels that doing this is a waste of time, a whistling in the dark, a concentration on the accidentals of human existence rather than its essential nature. Such description is like the listing of items in an inventory, a mindless chore.

For him the art of writing must be more than the mere recitation of externally observed objects. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. When the sense is dancing, the words dance. This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old articulation.

Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. But his work too is not about something; it is that something: Beckett and the Mass Media 17 monologues can be acted without any adaptation—and they have been. And, of course, the need to have the words not only read but listened to, seen as paintings are seen, experienced as gestures are experienced, logically leads to more elaborate forms of drama.

Yes, but drama, immediate as it is, purports to be an objective representation of the world with people in it seen from the outside, does it not? All drama, it could be argued, is of this nature: True enough, but most playwrights think they are dealing with an objective world, that they are translating observation of people in that world into drama. Although Beckett, the sanest of men, is anything but a schizophrenic, he is deeply interested in schizophrenic phenomena: In Endgame Hamm speaks about a painter he had known who had painted the world in all its vivid colors; yet, one day he stopped painting, and when he went to his window and looked out at the landscape with all the waving yellow corn, he could see nothing but ashes.

Remember, this comes from a man who is sitting by a window; he sees the world passing by just a few yards away, but to him all this is hundreds of miles away. He regards the schizophrenic mind merely as an extreme example of how the human mind in general works. Understandably, though a master of words, a great poet, Beckett is not enamored of the raw material of which these voices are composed: Beckett is reported to have said: From the very beginning, Beckett was impatient with language and its use in literature. In an early document, a letter he wrote to Axel Kaun, a German friend, in —which has only relatively recently been published— Beckett said: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless for me to write an official English.

And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things or Nothingness behind. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently misused.

As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins Telling It How It Is: Beckett and the Mass Media 19 to seep through: I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralyzingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts?

His whole career, his progress as a writer, can be seen as an attempt to grapple with this program he set himself more than half a century ago. First his decision after the war to write some of his major works in French—demanding a new discipline, a new economy in the use of a language that was not his mother tongue. And then his gradual veering from long prose pieces toward dramatic forms. For in drama as a medium of expression the word is no longer the only or even the principal element: Here a hole is being bored into the surface of the words; the words are being invalidated by action and image.

The image is not a description of something: An image, moreover as advertisers know only too well , lingers in the mind and is more intensely and lastingly remembered simply because it is so concise, because it compresses so many distinct elements into an indivisible package. They are essentially images, images that may be built up over a certain span of time. The time it takes to complete the image plays its own part in the final impact of the images: Once perceived, they linger in the mind of the spectator and gradually, as she or he remembers and ponders them, unfold their multiple implications.

The great power of such metaphors lies in their conciseness, their economy: But there is also in that image the pathetic need for contact with her husband behind the mound, the human striving for contact, however impossible it is to achieve; there is also in it the preoccupation of all of us with our possessions, however ridiculous and trivial, and there is reference to the fading content of our memories in the half-remembered quotations from the classics. These and hundreds of other elements are all compressed into a very short span of time, into a single but multifaceted and rich image.

Beckett is always striving for greater and greater conciseness and compression. He wants to say what he has to say as briefly as possible. Hence also the attraction of the compressed image. His work for radio, which embraces a number of his most powerful pieces, can be seen as springing directly from this preoccupation. Beckett discovered radio early on when the BBC approached him to write a radio piece. His first attempt at the medium, All That Fall, is still fairly realistic: But soon Beckett realized that here he had the ideal medium for a stream of consciousness. His next radio play, Embers, already takes place altogether within the mind of an old man who cannot stop Telling It How It Is: Beckett and the Mass Media 21 talking.

At one point he remembers how he retreated to the toilet when his logorrhea became too strong, and his little daughter asked what he was doing there talking. In later radio pieces Beckett dissects the mind of a writer like himself. In one of them, Rough for Radio II, there is a producer, called the animator, and his secretary, who are compelled each day to go down into the cellar and take a little old man called Fox clearly Vox—the voice out of the cupboard where he is kept; they have to listen to what he says so that the secretary can take it down.

Fox says little of interest, but the animator and the secretary are compelled to do this every day of their lives. They can only faintly hope that one day they will be spared this chore. This quite clearly is an image of the creative process as Beckett himself experiences it. Deep down, Beckett is a frustrated painter. He certainly prefers the company of painters to that of his fellow writers. His greatest friends have been painters. On the stage the visual image is equally important to—nay more important than—the words.

The two tramps on either side of the little tree in Waiting for Godot, the pathetic figures of the old parents emerging from trash cans in Endgame, are infinitely stronger than any words that are spoken in those plays. The same is true of Krapp listening to his former self on an old tape recorder, Winnie sinking into the ground, or the heads of the three dead characters protruding from funerary urns in Play, the isolated spot of light on the mouth in Not I, the rocking chair with the old woman moving up and down in Rockaby.

The rumpus a few years ago about a production of Endgame in Boston, where the director had decided to locate the play in a New York subway station after World War III, is a case in point. But he could not direct all his work on the stage the world over. This is why he eventually was so greatly attracted to the medium of television. Here he could not only direct his own work but also fix the visual image on the magnetic tape for future generations. His plays are full of images and allusions taken from the silent cinema. In his only foray into writing a film—called Film—Beckett chose to cast the main character with that great silent film comic Buster Keaton.

Film, although a fascinating experiment, was not a complete success: Taping for television is simpler: The short television plays that Beckett had written since the late seventies—Ghost Trio,. In them he has, as in his earlier mime plays, broken the terrible materiality of language and has produced a new kind of poetry—a poetry of moving images that is neither painting, because it moves, nor cinema, because it is extremely austere in the use of cinematic devices such as montage or sophisticated editing.

The short stage plays that appeared during the same period also show the influence of his work with the television medium. In one case, a stage playlet, What Where, has been modified by Beckett under the influence of his having been involved in the production of a television version. In the original stage version, the four men appearing in the play entered and exited rather laboriously; in the television version their faces merely appear out of the darkness.

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This made Beckett realize that the heavy materiality of entering and leaving the stage was unnecessary to bring these figures on and off, so he revised the stage version to make the faces of the men merely appear out of the dark. In the play Not I Beckett preferred the television version to the original. Beckett and the Mass Media 23 suspended in darkness in the middle of the stage, while on its side a hooded figure—the Auditor—listens to what the Mouth is spouting and occasionally makes a deprecatory gesture.

When Beckett agreed to have his favorite actress, Billie Whitelaw, appear in a television version of this play for the BBC, the mouth could only be shown in close-up and the Auditor disappeared. Of course a mouth in close-up is a much more powerful image than a mouth seen at a distance on stage. He was deeply moved by it and, I think, considered it the definitive version of Not I. And it is preserved for the future. He was a man with an immense interest in mathematics and technology. In working with him on a number of radio productions I was always deeply impressed by his passionate interest in the technologies involved and by his brilliant use of his technical know-how in controlling the production with the utmost precision.

His involvement in radio, cinema, and television also underlines another important point: Radio and television drama and the cinematic feature film are forms of drama open to all dramatists, and it is significant that some of the most important dramatists of this century have been drawn to the media.

Brecht wrote radio plays at a very early stage, and Pinter, Stoppard, Beckett, Bond, and Shepard have written films and television plays. Beckett was one of the pioneers, an acknowledged master dramatist experimenting with the new medium. It is perhaps a pity that the United States, which lacks a unified television service that can accommodate minority tastes and hence experimentation, is one of the few developed countries where serious dramatists have reduced access to this fascinating and most important medium. As I mentioned at the outset, Beckett is still regarded as a difficult author, accessible only to elites.

Beckett does not even fit into this stereotyped category. But once one has grasped what Beckett is concerned with, he is not difficult or elitist. On the contrary, he deals with the basic problems of human existence on the most down-to-earth level. In fact, Beckett regarded himself as—and was—basically a comic writer, a humorist, even though his humor is black humor, gallows humor.

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

As one of the characters in Endgame says, one of the funniest things in the world is human unhappiness. We can all do with that kind of sense of humor. Yet what he shows is the need to have compassion, pity, and love for our fellow human beings in this mysterious, impenetrable, and inexplicable universe—and to be able to laugh at ourselves, including our misfortunes. Set against the background of the vastness and infinity of the universe, our misfortunes must appear laughably trivial. Theology and Fictional Technique in Joyce and Beckett T hrough their fictional technique both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett articulate theological uncertainty, the uneasiness of twentieth-century readers about whether reality can be grounded in ultimate authority.

The status of this traditionally godlike narrative authority is reinterpreted by Joyce, then challenged by Beckett. Both Joyce and Beckett question the authority of the traditional omniscient narrator, but do so in ways expressed through opposite stylistic assumptions and techniques.

Two examples from Ulysses illustrate how the questionable authority of interior monologue is replaced by a secular version of the controlling narrator, the author himself as manipulator of language. Such a narrator is too apt to call our attention to himself and his handiwork to be considered godlike. But, if not omniscient, he is at least omnipresent in terms of style. Through incomplete or confused dialogue and monologue Beckett dramatizes the difficulty, if not From Re: Loxterman the impossibility, of either the author or his central characters being able to communicate the sort of universal truths that we have come to expect from omniscient narration.

Historically considered, Joyce and Beckett have become two of the most influential writers of our century through their inclusion of problematic interpretation as part of the aesthetic experience, a degree of complexity that requires readers to acknowledge their own complicity in making meaning out of what they perceive. Joyce pioneers the inclusion of indeterminacy in his narrative, first in the opening of Portrait and next in those later chapters of Ulysses where his method of narration takes precedence over who and what are being narrated.

Finnegans Wake represents the culmination of a language and style which pre-empts that narrative guidance through a story line which has traditionally been central to the reading experience. Here readers must puzzle over each syllable of the language from beginning to end, being perhaps more consistently aware of their own attempts to interpret what is being said than of anything else. First, for both came poetry and an analytical essay on a major literary predecessor, Beckett on Proust and Joyce on Ibsen. Then More Pricks Than Kicks, a series of stories set in Dublin and united by a common character instead of a common theme, as in Dubliners.

In parallel fashion, then, Joyce and Beckett have developed from realistic writers depicting characters in terms of situations into tragi-comedians exposing the provisional nature of what the reader perceives to be their enterprise, truth-telling through fiction. In both we can see the end implicit in their beginning. Even where they retain some conventions of fictional realism, Theology and Fictional Technique in Joyce and Beckett 27 their decentralization of the narrative, through substitution of first-person or interior monologue for omniscient direction, prepares the way for their subsequent shift to an emphasis on meaning as autonomous illusion.

Their fiction becomes increasingly self-referential, no longer an interpretation of external reality so much as a construct of language open to multiple interpretations by different readers. When Stephen Dedalus shuts his eyes while walking on the beach, he can still hear the sound of crunching stones and shells, and thus concludes that he cannot ignore the existence of external reality: In aspiring to be an artist, Stephen seeks a kind of immortality.

Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Later Leopold Bloom does pick up the scrap of paper on which Stephen has jotted his fragment of a poem. But it has become too blurred for Bloom to read U Wistfully he touches on the Cartesian solution of an omniscient entity bridging the dualistic gap between concept and percept: What Stephen sees behind him when he does turn around holds theological promise: Yet, as we might expect in a chapter on appearance and reality, this ending remains decidedly ambiguous.

For the actuality of the situation undercuts any theological interpretation of what Stephen may see in the ship. What begins as comparatively pure internal monologue, a philosophical reflection that reaffirms Cartesian dualism, ends in a yearning for theological reconciliation.

Yet such a hope as Stephen bitterly appreciates better than anyone Theology and Fictional Technique in Joyce and Beckett 29 contradicts his role of freethinking atheist, which he first revealed publicly when he refused to kneel and pray for his dying mother at her request U 1. By the second line the narrator begins treating words abstractly, solely according to their value in creating patterns of sound.

Since his epic parallel with the sirens and the situation in the hotel requires that the sound be singing, Joyce adopts the organizational technique of an operatic composer. In the excerpt above, however, we see not their admonishment of the waiter but 30 Alan S. Initially Joyce violates our expectations about linear narrative so that we will be more attuned to these fragmentary phrases in the overture when we encounter them again later, as aural motifs repeated within the dramatic context of the narrative.

Of course, the use of words as abstract sounds works against their usual connotations and denotations. During the rest of the narrative that follows his verbal overture Joyce introduces rhythmic patterns and words distorted for time and sound values to remind us continually of his narrative concept of comparing words with music, even as we also try to follow the story. Character and plot are diminished as we become aware, before anything else, of Joyce exposing his artistic manipulations of reality so that readers may see his narrators laboring mightily to create the illusion of significance.

Joyce delights in making more out of his subject than it inherently deserves; and he lets us in on his joke. They are perhaps too numerous and various to represent omniscience; yet they do strive to approximate omnipotence by imposing on plot and character a total conceptual order within their individual chapters. In Finnegans Wake the autonomous narrators of Ulysses become one, representing a universal consciousness that is both interior monologue and exterior narration.

Consciousness expressed in language through character and narration exists prior to and so perhaps independent of physical identity, as a voice without determinate location in time or space. Loxterman Sometimes first-person narrators within the same novel even have multiple names, confirming their indeterminacy. For Beckett all conventional narration, from omniscient to first-person, becomes problematic. Does this lack of presence imply that there is another narrator narrating this narrator? The theological implications of such an infinite narrative regression are most clearly stated in one of the Stories and Texts for Nothing.

Early in the play, while they wait, Vladimir and Estragon decide to kill time by killing themselves. But they realize this might be impractical because the branch of a nearby tree might not be strong enough to hang both of them, and then one would be left alone—presumably a fate worse than death 12—12[b]. So to pass the time, instead of committing suicide, they begin to reflect on the efficacy of prayer: What do we do?

Godot puts off an immediate answer to their prayer so that he can consult family, friends, and business associates. The progression of consultants grows increasingly impersonal and businessoriented until it results in a personal decision reached impersonally, one based on the proverbial bottom line: At first they are inclined to do nothing because they fear what Godot might do: So it is not surprising that they should mistake Pozzo as being Godot 13[b]—15[b].

So perhaps cruelty is that common denominator that entitles man to claim a resemblance to God. Of course, Beckett is suggesting not that Vladimir and Estragon misunderstand the nature of prayer but that they understand the nature of a God who will never answer. Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? Theology and Fictional Technique in Joyce and Beckett Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries [Vladimir] listens. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. What have I said? However painful they may be, our lives seem so short that death appears superimposed upon us from the very moment of our birth.

As if to establish that this heritage of suffering after Adam and Eve remains all-encompassing, Vladimir listens for the cries that must constantly be in the air everywhere; and when he hears none, he concludes not that they are not there, but that he has been tuning them out for too long: Since consciousness precedes everything else, how can we know for sure whether, at any given moment, we are dreaming or not? The issue has already been raised: But this raises 36 Alan S.

In Happy Days Winnie steadfastly avoids wondering what lies beyond her set of circumstances, perhaps because they are so inexplicable. Being buried alive under the constant glare of the sun, Winnie insists that she is satisfied merely to have Willie be her witness. So, while Stephen still longs for a transcendent witness, Winnie has settled for Willie. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Winnie fears loneliness most. Most of the time he can only be posited as a witness, and that makes him a source of great distress. She is most likely correct in fearing that Willie will lose interest.

But concentration on all these changes makes the play seem more dynamic, in the traditional manner of character and plot development, than it actually is. Amidst so much suffering and uncertainty, what seems to be a fundamental change in time could be illusory too.

So why not retain the more comfortable older illusion rather than multiply the unknown by accepting a different order of reality? Winnie herself best sums up the effect of her temporal paradox: As with people, so it is with events: She must conserve her limited amount of material and pace herself in such a way as to get through each interval between the bells for waking and sleeping. He could leave any time, if he has not already.

Bleak as it first sounds, however, even this statement harbors a saving contradiction. In itself it sounds like a truth, belying its own meaning. Thus, even after saying it, Winnie can continue to be thankful, this time for the 38 Alan S. In their different ways both Joyce and Beckett offer us philosophical comedy that challenges our traditional assumptions about the nature of external reality.

Joyce moves in the opposite direction, celebrating his own ability as an artist to exceed reality. Rather than wryly reminding his audience how much his characters lack, as Beckett does, Joyce achieves his own comic effects by encouraging readers to see his narrator trying to make both his characters and what happens to them mean more than they inherently deserve. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. The more Joyce knew the more he could. They turn out to be infinite spirals around a self whose existence cannot be adequately explained because it can never be prior to the thought being expressed in the language that articulates it.

He excludes and Joyce includes; he underexpresses and Joyce overexpresses.

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