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Reading Beckett (for the first time) is like watching a highly adroit but mystifying magician. Or seeing a play in another language. Or coming across a street performer performing complicated and dizzying feats—like juggling on a high-wire while simultaneously turning cartwheels and meditating.
In other words, Beckett, for me, felt like an entertaining yet befuddling spectacle. I love his playfulness with language, his daringness in using completely inaccessible vocabulary and classic/archaic allusions, and the Shakespearean absurdity and seamlessness of his dialogue. He is not a realist, yet his characters never fail to strike a chord of reality. I wasn’t always sure what was going on, and his language lost me nearly every other page, but about halfway through I gave up trying to comprehend every sentence and just went along for the ride. His genius is undeniable, and I have no qualms with “existential pointlessness.” However, I can’t say I ever got fully taken in by his prose, nor did I experience the depth of feeling that other writers can elicit. He’s in his own class; a comedy of consciousness and black irony, a satire whose “point” or “center” is elusive as a runaway kite. I found Beckett worth reading for linguistic inventiveness alone, but I suspect that the deeper forces at work in Murphy will surface with time. Come to think of it, he reminds me vaguely of Gertrude Stein—an inverse “fool” who confounds with his complexity of words, rather than complicating through simplicity as Stein does. Both writers “get under [my:] skin,” as Stein once rightly declared of her own sentences. There’s no one else quite like them, so perhaps by default they’re like each other. They both get that there’s no answer; so why not play with the mind’s questions?
In other words, Beckett, for me, felt like an entertaining yet befuddling spectacle. I love his playfulness with language, his daringness in using completely inaccessible vocabulary and classic/archaic allusions, and the Shakespearean absurdity and seamlessness of his dialogue. He is not a realist, yet his characters never fail to strike a chord of reality. I wasn’t always sure what was going on, and his language lost me nearly every other page, but about halfway through I gave up trying to comprehend every sentence and just went along for the ride. His genius is undeniable, and I have no qualms with “existential pointlessness.” However, I can’t say I ever got fully taken in by his prose, nor did I experience the depth of feeling that other writers can elicit. He’s in his own class; a comedy of consciousness and black irony, a satire whose “point” or “center” is elusive as a runaway kite. I found Beckett worth reading for linguistic inventiveness alone, but I suspect that the deeper forces at work in Murphy will surface with time. Come to think of it, he reminds me vaguely of Gertrude Stein—an inverse “fool” who confounds with his complexity of words, rather than complicating through simplicity as Stein does. Both writers “get under [my:] skin,” as Stein once rightly declared of her own sentences. There’s no one else quite like them, so perhaps by default they’re like each other. They both get that there’s no answer; so why not play with the mind’s questions?