Twenty four A's

Contemplating the ridiculous
BY RAVI VYAS / THE HINDU

NOTHINGNESS, emptiness, repetition, boredom, for better or for worse: Samuel Beckett refined these characteristics throughout his literary career. But the result is far from a sadness of content. There is laughter behind the apparent sadness (they are two sides of the same coin in any case) because it is a reflection of the ridiculous human condition: "When you are in the last ditch with your back to the wall, there is nothing left to do but sing." Or, "nothing is funnier than unhappiness...Yes, yes it's the most comical thing in the world." What "nothingness" conceals is the constant contingency as one character asks another in his 1958 play, "Endgame": "We're not beginning to...to...mean something?"

Everything is contingent on something else and to that extent Beckett is "the last modernist", or, if you like, the "first postmodernist". Emptying his books of plot, descriptions, scenes and characters, Beckett is believed to have killed the traditional novel, or else taken it to the crossroads of the modern novel. So, a contemporary critic has said that Beckett will continue to be relevant "as long as people still die". But Salman Rushdie, introducing Beckett's later novels in a new Grove edition issued to mark his centenary this year, takes the opposite — or, life being what it is, perhaps the identical — view: "Those books, whose ostensible subject is death, are in fact books about life". One of the most obscure writers of the last century has suddenly become all things to all people. There is even a book, Beckett and Zen, which isn't a far-fetched connection, come to think of it, because we need to empty our minds to open up one of Beckett's texts to simply hear the words that are there. And figure out what they mean.

Beckett's appeal

Why does every critical writer want to recruit Beckett? What is their eagerness to claim Beckett as one of their own? The clue perhaps lies in Beckett's famous trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable on which Beckett's high reputation as a novelist rests. After the tremendous world-wide success of "Waiting for Godot", Beckett has become what he is today: an icon, not just in the popular-cultural sense but in the original meaning of a picture of an existential saint who disliked publicity, gave away his Nobel Prize money, and lived in Spartan rooms across a courtyard from a prison whose inmates he could hear howl.

Increasing relevance

The answer why Beckett has become increasingly relevant lies in the trilogy, which is considered as a critical introduction to his original masterpiece of the theatre, "Waiting for Godot". In these novels, there is little or no dialogue. Malone Dies is a sombre soliloquy in which one or two shadowy characters appear; and in the other two the page is unbroken except for an occasional questionnaire. Place and time are of no importance; towns have peculiar names like "Bally" or "Hole"; the past is murkily remembered, the present non-existent, family ties are few and far between: "She died giving me birth," said Mr MacStern. "I can well believe that," said Mr de Baker. All his characters are deformed or hideous and move in a terrifying atmosphere of rejection, abandonment and guilt.

Molloy begins with Molloy shut away in his dead mother's room, steadily writing. Each week he is visited by a stranger who takes away what he has written and pays him money. What he has written is a long, fruitless odyssey in search of his mother.

Molloy begins crouched in the shadow of a rock watching two men, A and C, approach each other across a plain. One carries a stout stick, the other — or is it the same man? — is followed by a dog. Molloy isn't sure whether they are travellers or mere strollers. The two come together briefly, and then separate:

"Did he not seem rather to have issued from the rampart, after a good dinner, to his dog for a walk, like citizens, dreaming and farting, when the weather is fine? `A' backwards towards town, `C' on by ways he seemed hardly to know."

Here they serve as an image of two ways of going, to be brooded upon as he himself prepares to set out in quest of his mother. But his own journey is less rosy than A's or C's. He has a stiff leg, which makes walking difficult, so he has to go by bicycle, harried by the police and a rowdy mob. The second half of the book is the same story again from the opposite point of view told by Moran, who is a clear-cut, man of action, unlike Molloy who is vague, destitute, helpless, crippled and given to too much logic and reason. But both Molloy and Moran meet the same dead end: Moran finishes as a recluse with Molloy similarly wrecked.

Profound pessimism

Malone Dies takes us further on into the darkness: one voice, less plot, an old narrator who keeps harping, with pride on his impotence. There is peace of total personal negation; nothing remains. In The Unnamable even this begins to fail. If Malone Dies retains some paltry shreds of plot, incident and character because it is an attempt at an ending, there is none of it in The Unnamable because Beckett's pessimism was too profound to allow him to believe that death would be an end or even a relief. Voices would continue beyond the grave, into the "pit" where the Unnamable is fixed.

There is no one way you could read this trilogy; you could do it in several different ways. As he said in his prose masterpiece, Worstward Ho! six years before his death in 1983: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
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The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1959), Samuel Beckett, Picador Books, Price £2.95.

Final and Posthumous Works

Most of the short pieces Beckett wrote in later years are a condensation and a refinement of themes he had explored earlier at greater length. The stripping away of inherited “Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms” which marked his official passage from English to French never ceased.

The same process continued in his theater—the “theatrical chamber music” in which everything counts: every syllable, every sign, every pause.

“I don’t expect I’ll have any more big ones,” Beckett told a friend in the summer of 1981. And the works did continue to grow shorter. But not necessarily slighter. Like Rembrandt’s smaller drawings, they are monumental miniatures.

Through successive rereading of such works at “Ceiling” and “The Way,” one comes to appreciate the matchless precision of Beckett’s method of composition. He was one of the most skilled practitioners of the craft who ever wrote. His wholly original style, unerringly true, is of the kind that “can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting.” Which, freely translated, means by rewriting. There have been other great writers—Marcel Proust, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline—who were obsessive rewriters. But Beckett, a greater craftsman than either, goes a step beyond. His work is fired and purified like molten gold in the crucible. It is not surprising that all of his writing shows a precision, a concentration, and, in the broadest sense of the word, a purity which set him apart from his peers.
FROM "Fathoms From Anywhere" / MORE: Manuscripts & Publications

Faraway launched here

The HRC's Beckett Online: Googling for Godot
BY KATHERINE CATMULL / AUSTIN CHRONICLE


When your Web-wanderings bring you to the Harry Ransom Center's online Samuel Beckett exhibition, you have a choice.
"I can't go on", reads one scrawled line. "I'll go on," reads the other.
Choose the first of these iconic lines from Beckett's novel The Unnamable, and you're promptly thrown back to the page you came from. Choose the second, and you enter "Fathoms From Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition."
The title is taken from a letter Beckett wrote in 1959: "I don't find solitude agonizing, on the contrary. Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere."
Most avant-garde art looks quaint and time-bound 50 years on. But Beckett's plays and novels remain essentially strange, like visitors from a cultural future. Beckett was so far ahead of his time that we haven't yet caught up with him, and his work retains unnerving power.
Launched on the centenary of Beckett's birth, April 13, 2006, the exhibit will be kept online "in perpetuity," says curator Cathy Henderson, associate director for exhibitions and education at the HRC. (This Friday, Dec. 22, marks the 17th anniversary of his passage to the grave, by the way.)
The exhibit is designed to accommodate those who want a quick dip into Beckett, says Henderson, as well as those who want to swim deeper in the HRC's Beckett collection, which is among the world's finest. "A collector of Beckett first editions will be able to see images of what the first-edition books look like," she notes. You can also see handwritten drafts of the plays and novels and hear passages read by Irish actor Barry McGovern.
Besides deeper layers of information and more interactive and multimedia components than real-space exhibitions allow, an online exhibition also circumvents what Henderson calls "fatigue and label burnout," since visitors can bookmark and return whenever they like.
It's interesting to wonder what Beckett's dazed and dogged characters would have made of the Web. "Too fearful to assume himself the onus of decision," someone remarks of the titular character in Watt, "he refers it to the frigid machinery of time-space relation." Now Watt could just hit the "I'm feeling lucky" Google link over and over.
Perhaps he'd land at the HRC Web site and hear that famous passage from The Unnamable: "You must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any … where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
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"Fathoms From Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition" is on view through eternity here.

Jump and fall

Waiting for Beckett
Valerie Lawson / The Sidney Morning Herald


"Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order," said Samuel Beckett. And it is the right order in January, as dance opens the Sydney Festival this weekend, followed by a mini-fest of Beckett plays.
Not that dance and thinking are mutually exclusive. Far from it in this festival, which has brought the intellectual choreographers Akram Khan and Ohad Naharin to town.
Neither Khan, the wunderkind of British dance, nor Naharin, who leads Tel Aviv's Batsheva Dance Company, take the easy option when it comes to dance making and talking about their art.
Naharin shuns generalisations and almost scolds when asked what dance-savvy audiences and "virgin" audiences would see in his work Telophaza, opening at the Capitol Theatre tonight.
"It's less about whether they've experienced dance and more about what kind of experience they've had otherwise," he said.
"Have they been using their imagination? Are they capable of abstract thinking? Do they have connection to form? Do they realise the subtext of things? What kind of expectations [do] they bring? How intelligent they are; how sensitive they are. That's much more interesting than whether they've seen dance or not."
He says he chose the title "for the way it looks, and that the meaning of it comes from biology, from our body, from regeneration."
Naharin's early mentors were the founder of the Batsheva Dance Company, Martha Graham, and the French choreographer Maurice Bejart, both of whom taught him about exaggeration, he said, but the most important dance figures in his life today are his dancers.
"They are very intelligent and musical. They really love to dance, and don't really separate the dance from their life. They are eager to learn, very creative. Many of them are capable of choreographing, and many of them do."
But what they cannot do is nurture their vanity, for Naharin bans studio mirrors wherever his company works.
He even lived without a mirror at home for seven years, as he believes "the use of the mirror spoils the soul".
Three-quarters of the dancers in his troupe are Israeli, and although Naharin was born in Israel he became a US citizen as he developed an international career.
His cross-cultural background runs in parallel to Akram Khan's. London-born with Bangladeshi grandparents, he is based in Britain but his work is in demand from the Netherlands to China.
Collaborating with Khan in Zero Degrees is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, whose background is Moroccan and Flemish. Opening last night at the CarriageWorks, Zero Degrees takes the audience on a physical and metaphorical journey from Bangladesh to India.

Design Lessons

"Treat the undergrads like they're grown-ups (which they are); show them crazy respect, and ask their opinions all the time. Tell your graduate students to stop talking and start building; tell them not to come to class next week if they don't bring in 12 sketches. And then thank your lucky stars when they arrive with 3."

Fine Govern Dance

Fiennes brings star power to Sydney Festival
Mary Boland / Sydney Morning Herald


Ralph Fiennes, Barry McGovern and Charles Dance bring star power to the Sydney Festival's celebration of Samuel Beckett.
When Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was first performed in English in 1955, the Irish critic Vivian Mercier described it as a two-act play in which "nothing happens - twice". It is hardly surprising, then, that Beckett, inventor of the dramatic non-event, also gave us a love story so starkly devoid of tenderness and romance as to divorce us from any expectations of love stories - and of love itself.
First Love, which will be performed as part of the Sydney Festival's Beckett Season, is a first-person narrative starring Ralph Fiennes as a freeloading vagrant who moves in with a prostitute he meets on a bench. He initially rejects her advances -"the mistake one makes is to speak to people" - but realises he is in love when he finds himself writing her name in a dried cow pat. She falls pregnant, to his dismay -"perhaps it's just wind, I said" - and he ends up fleeing the house while she is giving birth, her labour cries following him up the street and for the rest of his days.
"It's utterly devastating, that last part," says the artistic director of Dublin's Gate Theatre, Michael Colgan, who recently adapted the poignant novella for the stage in his latest project aimed at bringing Beckett's work to new audiences. The Gate is also bringing to Sydney two other performances based on Beckett works not originally intended for the theatre. The mesmerising Barry McGovern stars in I'll Go On - an adaptation by McGovern and fellow Irish Beckettian Gerry Dukes of the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable - and Charles Dance in Eh Joe, which Beckett wrote for television in 1965. There will also be poetry and prose readings.
Colgan, who met the Nobel laureate in Paris several times during the writer's final years, has been described as Beckett's most enthusiastic apostle. Sitting in his spacious office in a Georgian building on Dublin's Parnell Square, Colgan recites softly from First Love, marking each pause with a stern glance over his spectacles. Later, in his missionary zeal to spread Beckett's words, he walks back and forth across the room with the frequency of Endgame's Clov, returning each time with other works, different editions.
"I think there's been a change," he says of the public's response to Beckett since the Gate presented all 19 stage plays and a handful of radio plays in Dublin's first Beckett festival in 1991. Back then, Colgan had often remarked the writer was unjustifiably neglected. Today, thanks in no small part to those productions, which travelled to New York's Lincoln Centre in 1996, to London's Barbican Centre in 1999 and to Melbourne in 1997, Beckett has a new audience who see his work as less intimidating and more accessible, less depressing and more humorous.

"I think people are getting the humour now. They're being less reverential; less reverential in that way of just sort of reading it in your Sunday clothes," Colgan says.
Following the success of the 1991 festival, Colgan took Beckett from stage to screen. Having set up Blue Angel Films with Irish movie producer Alan Moloney, he turned to well-known writers and filmmakers such as David Mamet, Anthony Minghella and Neil Jordan to direct prominent actors including Julianne Moore, John Hurt and Kristin Scott Thomas in the now-acclaimed Beckett on Film series. And last year Colgan chaired Ireland's Beckett
Centenary Festival committee, which oversaw dozens of events, including more plays at the Gate and other theatres. There were also Beckett-inspired art exhibitions, musical performances and conferences that brought together Beckettians from around the world.
Whatever the reclusive writer would have thought of having his photograph displayed on billboards throughout his native city and on flags lining Dublin's main road, O'Connell Street - both Colgan's initiatives - Beckett might have been quietly amused that audiences in his centenary year have changed utterly since they heckled, brawled and walked out in droves during initial performances of Waiting for Godot in Paris, London and Miami.
"It's not like before, where people were suspicious of modernism; people will not now look at a Sean Scully [painting] and say, 'carpet tiles', whereas in the '60s and '70s, people had a great suspicion," Colgan says.
"I think a sign of real greatness is an ability to survive scrutiny and withstand interpretation. Beckett has done that. All the plays have that integrity of writing; he's not trying to trick anyone. To call a play Act Without Words II or Rough For Theatre I or Play, you're not writing for Julianne Moore or writing for producers. The integrity and honesty of the piece speak to you; you accept it for what it is. I think audiences, young audiences especially, get that."
After Fiennes had a sell-out run at the Gate last year with Irish playwright Brian Friel's Faith Healer, he and Colgan began looking for a suitable Beckett work to perform. The duo chose First Love, a piece Beckett wrote in 1946.
"[Fiennes] would ring me up and quote from the shorter texts. He began leaving messages," Colgan says, picking up the novella again and quoting several passages, including two that contain the C-word. "Of course I've left them in [the stage production]. It's a shock when you hear it, but it's also so very considered, the way he uses the word."

Colgan adapted the work with no pressure from the sometimes formidable Beckett estate, managed by the writer's nephew and executor, Edward Beckett, whose mission is to ensure Uncle Sam's detailed stage directions are strictly adhered to. That this text was not intended for the theatre may have made it less controversial for Colgan to adapt. However, he is confident he has the estate's general blessing.
"They know that I do Beckett very well," he says. "And, I say it with terrible modesty, but it's a sad fact that I've done more Beckett productions than anybody else in the world. So they know that my heart is in the right place. I've never had a problem with it."
When he first met Beckett, Colgan was accompanied by Barry McGovern, who has since become one of the foremost interpreters of Beckett's work. They had gone to Paris in 1986 to take I'll Go On to a festival marking the writer's 80th birthday. The production had come about when, two years previously, Colgan wrote to Beckett to ask if he and McGovern might produce Beginning to End, the one-man show of Beckett's work performed for years by Irish actor Jack MacGowran. Beckett had no objection.
"But then came the sentence that changed my life," Colgan says: "There remains the possibility of a one-man show on the same lines, but with a different title and a different choice of texts." The result was McGovern's tour de force, which he first performed in 1985 and was now bringing to the city where Beckett had lived for decades.
Sitting in the Gate theatre bar, the actor recalls that first meeting, at the Hotel PLM on the Boulevard St Jacques, for which the Dublin duo arrived an hour early. Beckett was punctual to the minute. "We drank coffee and smoked. He was complimentary. He was interested in seeing a picture of the set," says McGovern, who would meet the writer again about half a dozen times. "At that stage he didn't go out much. He didn't go to the theatre any more or get involved in things. He was very much private and had health problems. But he was very encouraging; he had heard things about it.
"There are lots of myths about Beckett but he was happy to talk about lots of things. I asked him about pronouncing certain names. I should have asked him more."
At subsequent meetings they spoke for at least an hour. "We'd share whiskey or beer and those cheroots he used to smoke. I remember him saying goodbye to me [for the last time] and thinking I'd never see him again. I was with my wife and he embraced us warmly. I remember the stubble on his cheek. And those piercing blue eyes."

McGovern, who has played Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon in various productions of Godot, says I'll Go On evolved naturally as he and Gerry Dukes worked on the texts. "What we tried to do was get a feel for the three novels; this search for self, this search for identification. I see it as a son­ata. A great opening movement; that Molloy section as the really first great movement. Then Malone Dies is the slow movement, in a sense, followed by prestissimo at the end, where I just do 10 minutes from The Unnameable, which is as much as you can take - or as much as I can take!"
The performance looks and is exhausting, he admits. "The Unnameable is this incredible driving on towards this 'endnessness' which never really comes. It's like a train and then as the later paragraphs go on, they're bigger and bigger. Sometimes you've six pages of a paragraph with just commas. It's like panting, panting on.
"Obviously we're keeping in some of the fierce humour but there's a lot of it that's quite frightening as well and that's not just humorous, so it's getting the balance right."

The Beckett Season takes place at Parade Theatres, NIDA, from January 12-21.

Celsius

«...this place, if I could describe this place, portray it, I've tried, I feel no place, no place around me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't flesh, it doesn't end, it's like air...»
The Unnamable