Wilde, the jokester; Joyce, the joke; Beckett, the bore!

The Irish have a lot to answer for!  I mean to say, what have we ever done to them that we deserve a slow, excruciating death by boredom from the likes of Samuel Beckett?  Yes, yes, alright, I know that, like some of "the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit", we biffed and bashed a few Paddies from time to time, but inflicting Beckett on us is just a typical piece of Celtic over-reaction.  (Oh God, I hear you mutter, what's set the old fool off this time? - I had better explain.)

Last night I sat through a performance of "Happy Days" by Samuel Beckett, a title which surely deserves an action under the Trade Descriptions Act.  For those sensible people who are blessed with only a passing knowledge of the late, and not at all great, Mr. Beckett, let me tell you that this play is the one that features a woman buried up to her waist in the first act, and then up to her neck in the second.  She talks.  She talks a lot. A lot of talk. Non-stop talk. Talk, talk, talk, is what she does a lot of.  And she repeats herself. Constantly. Over and over again. As she talks . . .   well, you get the flavour of the thing, I trust.  It was rather like standing in a very long, supermarket queue next to a woman chattering and chuntering in a loud voice about nothing to a silent companion - I forgot to tell you that in the 'play', her husband?, companion?, makes a few very brief appearances and interjections from the depths of the earth mound in which this woman is buried.  A critic described Beckett's technique, thus: "a few words are entered on the page, then repeated in various orders or identical phrases until their possible meanings have been exhausted."  You can say that again! And "exhausted" is 'le mot juste', if I may use the language in which Beckett preferred to write.

I am only familiar with two of Beckett's works, this 'play' and the one he made his reputation on, "Waiting for Godot".  In so far as I understand either of them, I think the author is trying to tell us all that life is empty and meaningless.  Were he still alive, I would be tempted to offer him ten foot of rope and a suggestion box, but that would be a futile gesture because he would make no attempt to use the rope in order to facilitate a quick exit from what he alleges is this utterly miserable "vale of tears".  Of course he wouldn't, because he doesn't believe it for a second!  Going around looking intense and sorrowful whilst wearing a polar-necked jersey and telling everyone, especially young girl students from the Sorbonne, that life is empty and meaningless was a technique much in use by French intellectuals as a tactic for parting those same young girl students from their knickers!  That old fraud, Sartre, depended on it, and given that he had a face like Toad of Toadhall, he needed a good line.  'Paddy' Beckett simply took this technique to extremes such that not only silly girls from the Sorbonne were impressed but even sillier 'arty' intellectuals fell for it, too.  Well, we all know how dumb they are as any quick visit to the Tate Modern will confirm - and all visits to the Tate Modern are usually quick given the rubbish contained there-in.  Actually, thinking about it, I would rather spend and hour and a half contemplating Damien Hirst's dead sheep in formaldehyde than sit through "Happy Days" again, at least the sheep wouldn't talk!  Talk.  Speak.  Chatter.  Gossip ... Oh God, it's getting to me again!

Mind you, the sheer humbuggery of Beckett does deserve some admiration.  There he was for 50-odd years telling us how futile, cruel and malignant life was and how wretched the human condition, whilst living in Paris and carefully salting away the considerable royalties, to say nothing of the huge financial bonanza that came with a Nobel Prize for Literature(?) and shagging innumerable young French women!  Happy Days, indeed!  I bear him no malice, I just wish I'd thought of it first, what a wheeze - write incomprehensible rubbish, tell everyone it's deeply meaningful and watch the money roll in.  It isn't too difficult because you can always rely on the spectacularly dim and pretentious, like Harold Pinter - another Nobel Prize-winner and, please note, a man much given to polar-necked jerseys - to rush in where fools fear to tread like our 'Arold, thus:

"The further he [Beckett] goes the more good it does me.  I don't want philosophies, tracts, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement.  He is the most courageous , remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. [...] He's not leading me up the garden path, he's not slipping a wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a revelation, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy - he doesn't give a **** whether I buy or not.  Well I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.  He brings forth a body of beauty.  His work is beautiful."

Does Private Eye still have a 'Pseuds Corner'?

Comments

[Larry Teabag]

Suffice it to say that I disagree. But either way, you might be amused by this short film poking fun at Joyce and Beckett's differing prose styles... on the golf-course.

[David Duff]

Excellent film, if only Beckett had half that amount of humour - although I suppose he did laugh all the way to the bank.

By the way, 'Teabag', you're becoming remarkably restrained these days, is it approaching middle age, or just growing up? Whatever, please feel free to offer up a spirited defence of those two old, 'Oirish' phonies, I am always prepared to be re-educated.

[Larry Teabag]

I am always prepared to be re-educated

I don't believe that for a second!

On Joyce, I can't do better than to quote Orwell:

"The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared — for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique — to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose. Here is a whole world of stuff which you supposed to be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives."

(I think he says "America" rather than "Dublin" because he's basically writing about Henry Miller and made a slip.)

For Beckett, I can do no more than direct you to watch this.

[David Duff]

'Teabag', you are guilty of inflicting a 'cruel and unusual punishment' on a poor old man. I watched your Beckett film clip and the only thing to be said of it by way of mitigation is that the man says absolutely nothing. This was a vast improvement on that wretched woman in "Happy Days" who never stopped talking! As for Orwell, I suppose that all one can say is that even great men have their blind spots. However, I do recommend any of my readers not familiar with Beckett's work to follow your link and find out for themselves. (The management of this blog accepts no responsibility for any subsequent suicides!)

I should add that I did once read "Ulysses" right the way through as preparation for directing Stoppard's "Travesties". I still think that entitles me to some sort of medal, don't you?

[Larry Teabag]

Thought you'd like it.