Samuel Beckett (Blooms Modern Critical Views)

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Since the publication of his first book in , Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. Sterling Professor of the Humanities Harold Bloom. Home Contact Us Help Free delivery worldwide. Plays, Playscripts English Literature. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett. 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. Wor k s Ci t e d Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett, A Biography. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable. Duke University Press, The Book as World: Harvard University Press, Gifford, Don, and Robert J.

Bucknell University Press, Oxford University Press, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett. University of Minnesota Press, The Art of Rhetoric. Edouard Morot-Sir, et al. University of North Carolina Press, The Plays of Samuel Beckett. University of Washington Press, Fiction and Metaphysics, Some Variations on a Theme. University of Notre Dame Press, H ersh Z eifman The Syntax of Closure: I had certainly traveled greater distances in my life to see Beckett on stage Buffalo is less than a two-hour drive from my home in Toronto , though seldom with greater anticipation.

For not only was this a new Beckett work, but it was to be performed by Billie Whitelaw, an actor I deeply admire. On one level, my response was purely aesthetic: As one reviewer rhapsodized: Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Billie Whitelaw, I later discovered, likewise related personally to the character, as she has to all the Beckett women she has portrayed.

I used to sit and watch her. How awful it must be to sit there waiting for death. If we consider briefly the history of drama, it is immediately apparent that the vast majority of plays do come to a definite end; though the exact nature of the resolution may be uncertain and open to debate, a strong sense of closure is nevertheless present. Syntactically, these plays are the equivalent of a periodic sentence. Thus a small group of plays—particularly in the modern theater—ends not on a period but on a question mark: The play obviously comes to some kind of close, but genuine closure is denied.

Alving is paralyzed by indecision: The last words we hear her speak in the play are her attempt to answer that question: What follows the colon is in effect a restatement of the original subject: For the structure of Glengarry Glen Ross is circular: That the play circles back specifically to a restaurant is symbolically apt, for Glengarry is finally a play about consumption—not of food we never see the salesmen eating but of people.

Perhaps the most subtle examples in modern drama of plays that end figuratively on a colon are those of Chekhov. Things certainly happen in a Chekhov play—decisive things, heartbreaking things, things that alter the course of entire lives—and yet, on some important level, nothing important really changes. There is, then, no genuine 48 Hersh Zeifman resolution at the end of a Chekhov play.

His dramas are thus emotionally, if not literally, circular: Consider the close of Three Sisters, for instance, which recapitulates the emotional stasis of the opening: Almost a quarter of a century later I can still vividly recall those huge circular arcs of despair, those great loops of movement paradoxically going nowhere—an apt description of the structure of the entire play.

The one major exception is Happy Days, which subverts closure by means of the alternative syntax: Winnie herself is uncertain: Do you want to touch my face. Is it the carnal he seeks, then, or the charnel? The play refuses to answer: When night finally falls, however, the bitter irony is that nothing has really changed: It is also, paradoxically, what they most fear. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of them says: As Beckett remarked in Proust: The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

For where is there to go, except back to the very beginning? The circle, by definition, denies closure. The show, in a horrifyingly literal sense, must go on. The most relentless example of this circularity in Beckett is his drama, Play. For endless repetition invariably creates an unbearable tension in the audience—a tension that, lacking closure, can never find release. No such closure is possible, however, because no such words exist: The actor portraying Mouth never actually leaves the stage, but rather the reverse: In the quartet of theater plays that immediately follow Not I, however, we note a startling stylistic shift: The surface similarity to Not I is obvious; indeed, Beckett told Patrick Magee, who originated the role of Listener, that he would never allow the two plays to be performed on the same bill: That smile, though ambiguous— perhaps scornful, perhaps suffused with happiness, perhaps both—brings the play to a dramatic halt, presumably stilling the voices once and for all: The strip is about the size of a cemetery plot; May is thus, in a sense, pacing her own grave.

Is such closure, however, capable of being attained? But Footfalls, even more than That Time, carries a surprising sting in its tail. There is nothing left. No such thing as no light. Any second we expect [it] to speak. And yet, A Piece of Monologue backtracks slightly from the more definitive closure of Footfalls. For the dying of the light does not result in total darkness: The tenuously precarious balance of a Beckett play has finally tilted, and the tilt is reflected in a change of syntax: If there were only darkness all would be clear. But where we have both dark and light we have also the inexplicable.

Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. On one of my last visits before her death, my grandmother, who for the previous year had talked not at all or only gibberish, suddenly uttered a coherent sentence; speaking to me in Yiddish—or to herself, or perhaps, like W in Rockaby, simply to the rocking chair—she whispered: During rehearsals of Endgame in Berlin, Beckett commented to his actors: Performance and Critical Perspectives Urbana: University of Illinois Press, , p.

Faber, , p. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, trans. Farquharson Sharp, in John Gassner, ed.

Samuel Beckett by Harold Bloom

Bantam, , p. Grove, , p. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, trans. Ann Dunnigan, in Robert Brustein, ed. The Major Plays New York: Signet, , p. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days London: On another level, however, Happy Days is not really atypical, since it can be argued that the overall structure of the play is indeed circular: Corti, , p. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot London: Oxford University Press, , p. Calder, , p. See Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Princeton University Press, , p.

Samuel Beckett, Proust London: John Calder, , pp. Samuel Beckett, Murphy London: John Calder, , p. Turret, , p.

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Samuel Beckett, Not I London: Faber, , pp. Quoted in Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: See also Cohn, Just Play, p. Quoted in Walter D. Helen Watanabe, Journal of Beckett Studies 2 Cambridge University Press, , p.

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Quoted in Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett, p. See Brater, Beyond Minimalism, p. Kalb, Beckett in Performance, p. Editions du Seuil, , pp. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, in Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Tom Stoppard, Travesties London: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed.

Ruby Cohn New York: Rockaby, directed by D. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker Associates, The Syntax of Closure: Berkeley, , p. Quoted in Cohn, Just Play, p. Pennsylvania State University Press, , pp. The chess game hinted at in the title of the play is indeed a multiple quotation. Published by Colin Smythe. This is more than cursory memory: The interplay of analogies and reversals is complex. According to Didier Anzieu, Beckett relevantly influenced Bion in his psychoanalytical theories. The implication is that manipulation or fight are acceptable in terms of power and government, not within the couple.

Two different lines of behaviour are therefore envisaged. But with the chess game the prince is then led to deal properly with a compound of idyllic-Utopian enlightenment and the Renaissance sense of state and history. Beckett and Postmodernism 63 not even as an illusory or heuristic ideal: Moreover, while analysing the uses of the name Caleb connected with the Hebrew word for dog, Ernest Renan mentions a Caleb who followed Moses into the desert and reached the promised land as indicated in the Pentateuch: B—Un peu de Pentatuque? B—Teuque ou tuque, tu en veux, oui ou merde? Like the biblical Caleb mentioned by Renan, Clov aims at Moses and at the myth of salvation from the desert, though with a total ironical reversal.

Clov indeed wants to kill the Moses-boy with a gaff, while Hamm halts him, and will reach no promised land: This will eventually lead them both to death. But the interplay does not end here either: It in fact produces a double falsification: On the one hand it evokes Shakespeare, on the other it echoes and radicalises the scepticism of two 18th century authors, Dr Johnson as pointed out by Ruby Cohn , and Chamfort, a reference still to be explored.

Giacomo Leopardi, one of the major voices of Italian literature. As already known, Italian literature in particular meant to Beckett first of all Dante, occasionally Petrarch or Pirandello; as to Leopardi, I think he can actually be recognised as probably the second major Italian influence on Beckett, after Dante. Like Beckett, Leopardi linked his poetics and literary work with the deep reflections of a philosophe, whose European relevance is now being studied. Beckett has in fact left both versions extant, and translations into other languages vary according to their derivation from either the French or the English edition.

Has he actually renounced the complexity of quotations in English, or has he favoured a different quotation, probably implied from the beginning along with the others, but left obscure by multiple superimposition? In fact in the same play Beckett often varies quotations according to the language: Once left with no reference to Moses, what are the possible meanings of the Endgame boy in the English edition? This indeed must be the primary meaning of the image within both the economy of the play and its philosophical implications.

Thus this wondrous and fearsome mystery of universal existence, before ever being disveiled or penetrated, will dissolve and be lost. Leopardi, Severino points out, was a poet-philosophe, and can be considered as a post-enlightenment nihilistic watershed in European thought, just as, we could add, Beckett is today considered a literary-philosophical watershed of postmodernism. Similarly, a long passage on the dead in Waiting for Godot recalls another of the Operette morali, the Dialogue of Federico Ruysch and his mummies: Solmi, Ricciardi, Milano , pp.

For Leopardi, who must according to S. But this task is, in a more complex way, at the very centre of the postmodern outlook. Beckett and Postmodernism 71 ready to ply to the violence of the volcano and to start again after destruction. While Leopardi despairs of the Utopian tradition typical of enlightenment, Beckett implies a further step: The selfcriticism of the code of enlightenment can indeed open up to all other codes, no longer as Truth, but as a range of relative possibilities as illusory as their negation.

Beckett and Postmodernism 73 made possible by the end of the dominance of one code, and calling for a new difficult responsibility of choice. Beckett stops before such a landscape, he himself has helped prepare by erasing preceding landscapes, while Leopardi would never have dared to think in terms of such a wide ultra-filosofia, the possibility of which he had nevertheless theorised. Beckett in Le strutture e il tempo Turin: This relationship and its influence on Endgame is enlarged on in G. Restivo, Le soglie del postmoderno: Endgame , Il Mulino, Bologna in press. The play of the cultural codes in The Tempest is discussed in G.

Restivo, Le soglie del postmoderno, cit.

Roger Toumson, Trois Calibans Havana: Gontarski Ohio State UP Maurizio Calvesi, Duchamp invisibile Rome: Bulzoni ; also printed in English by Leuven UP. John Pilling, Samuel Beckett London: A Study of Samuel Beckett London: Hart-Davis , pp. Emanuele Severino, Il nulla e la poesia Milan: Rizzoli , p. Giacomo Leopardi, Palinodia, vv. L ois G ordon The Language of Dreams: If the dream functions for the same purpose—as relief and continuity, one might suggest that the dream is all we have in our desperation; it is the modern equivalent of religion—a new another form of play, a form of relief without transcendence, without mysticism, our only would-be, not greatly successful, escape from pain.

The dense, cryptic, contradictory nature of this material is accomplished by specific rhetorical devices From Reading Godot, edited by Lois Gordon, pp. The following includes examples of displacement, condensation, plastic pictorialization, and multiple manifestations of paralogic, all of which reject causation and temporal linearity. If, to Freud, intrapsychic mechanisms allow the individual disguised outlets dreams in which to express repressed ego-censored feelings, for Beckett they become unique poetic techniques with which to elaborate the conglomerate emotional experience—in Godot, the feeling of precarious survival in the incohesive worlds of self and the universe.

Freud described the dreamer as a poet but hastened to add that the final dream scenario would always remain unedited, a drama derived from an entirely personal vocabulary, and that final interpretation would be inconclusive. In addition, given the transformational energy propelling dreams, one could always anticipate a sense of excitement from the dream and an evocation of infinite meaning only rarely equaled in the theater. All the same, to Freud, underlying, alinear patterns might allow one to decipher partial meanings, in addition to the conglomerative effect.

In fact, one can be quite specific in outlining how the recurrence of certain patterns described by Freudian analysts as typical of dream or unconscious thought2 provides what they call the grammar of Godot. One might begin at any point in the play and trace transformational patterns via a variety of avenues: For example, in Godot causal relations are obliterated, inverted, or set into contradiction. The use of alternatives like either-or is similarly abandoned, with the result that both elements of disjunction are placed in a single context; in other words, either-or becomes both-and.

As Beckett once said of him, Pozzo might be a Godot: The word if, which in logical thinking indicates wish or the conditional, is represented by simultaneity. In fact, the traditional logic implied in the use of conjunctions is entirely revised in unconscious thought process: All relations of similarity, correspondence, and contiguity are unified. Disjunctures of ordinary logic, time, and space, along with the absence of the conditional tense, result in the equation of the fantastic with the realistic.

To Vladimir and Estragon, God is a businessman, consulting his family, friends, and bank accounts. It follows that when Pozzo appears before Vladimir and Estragon and is served his private communion of food and wine, he is mistaken for Godot. Dream images and characters, like unconscious thought, are also formulated upon the literal, foreign, and etymological roots of words. Luke is also iconographically associated with the calf, which is gastronomically associated with tarragon in French, estragon. Dream concretizations extend to the imprecise use of words and temporal dislocations: These condensations enrich the sparse dialogue and setting with multiple levels of meaning.

A word may be repeated or used simultaneously as different parts of speech, once again reinforcing the conglomerative effect. When the four major characters fall, Beckett uses fall as both a noun and verb, and the figures fall down upon one another in the shape of a cross; at one time, the four form a double cruciform. The same holds true of their lifting up or raising of Pozzo and Lucky.

As Beckett directed, when Lucky is uplifted, he is to stand between Vladimir and Estragon with outstretched arms, in another configuration of the cross. They do not move. There we are again. There I am again.

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Repeating, without conclusion, the tale of a dog beaten to death by a cook, after which several dogs bury the dead, after which the dog is beaten to death, after which several dogs bury the dead. It is also a fitting introduction to a second act that repeats and elaborates upon this subject.

To return to the brief distinctions made in chapter 3 between dream or unconscious thought primary process and rational thought secondary The Language of Dreams: The Anatomy of the Conglomerative Effect 79 process , I want to explain the paralogic of primary process, which has its own unique rules of structure. In addition to being personalized, rather than goal directed, and often perceived as gibberish or nonsense, it is typified by non sequiturs, for it is not bound by the everyday usage of time and space. In addition, whereas in logical, secondary process, the subject of a minor premise is always included in the major one for example, in All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man. For example, in Certain Indians are swift. Stags are swift, and so on, one would not rationally conclude that all stags are Indians. But in paralogic, objects may be equated on the basis of a single property, here, the common swiftness of stags and certain Indians. Where it falls mandrakes grow. Did you not know that? Vladimir is unable or unwilling to rationally consider their suicide. To both Vladimir and Estragon, hanging is associated with the Fall, the result of the original sin of simply being born. Vladimir paralogically equates the visual similarity of an erection with hanging, along with his other associations of death, shrieking, and sexual response.

The play as a whole becomes a working out of hope deferred versus hope retained, the wavering resolve to await Godot and the heartsickness that that brings. Dislocations, distortions, and misunderstandings of time fill the play: Vladimir and Estragon scrutinize the sunset. Each of these examples demonstrates the asyndetic omission of causal links or logical connections that traditionally focus a statement toward a goal. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. Again, the personalized response avoids the question. Estragon connects the memory of a color with past thirst and suggests, for the future, that they go to the traditional source of spiritual succor the Holy Lands.

Estragon is always aware of his fallen state. Asyndetic thinking frequently has a poetic quality, although it is a poetry born of an entirely personal idiom. Words that lack referentiality and are askewed from a logical goal often lend the dialogue an autistic quality: The English say cawm,. You know the story of the Englishman in the brothel? The following exchange illustrates how each speaker imbues his words with an entirely personal meaning. Estragon has mistaken Pozzo for Godot: A kind of primitive poetry fills the play in its many sequences of repeated dialogue: What was I saying?

The foregoing accounts for how proper names in dreams may be generated through aural, visual, or phonetic similarities. Furthermore, the o sound and the shape of a well, pozzo in Italian, function as emblems of totality and nothingness—the conglomerative meaning of waiting and game playing, reason and unreason, the circularity of wish, as opposed to the actuality of Godot. Magical thinking is exemplified in the use of synonyms and the incremental modification of proper names.

The Language of Dreams: That is, the subtle distinction maintained in the use of like rather than as evaporates. Lucky is not a man who behaves like a beast of burden; he feels and is treated like an animal and is thus portrayed as one, complete with rope and a load to cart. Similarly, because Estragon is told that he and Vladimir are no longer tied to Godot, Estragon mistakes Pozzo for Godot simply because Pozzo holds Lucky on a rope. When asked if Vladimir is sixty or seventy, Estragon replies that he is eleven.

Pozzo has great difficulty sitting because he concretizes standing as gaining godlike or lunar power: While in waking life it is mad to consider God in flesh-and-blood terms because God is a delusion as far as the senses tell us, in dreams, fears and hopes are enacted concretely, and one can thus expect Godot to be not like a father but, in fact, the father. As primary process articulates what secondary process analogizes, Vladimir and Estragon concretize the anthropomorphic deity as an actual flesh-and-blood person, Mr.

And what did he reply? Assured of his direction in life and confident of his control over time, Pozzo, in the daytime, in the sun, has literal vision. But nighttime frightens him. In the concretizing of abstractions, objects or metaphors are treated as though they were literally the things they may be said to represent: Sometimes these objects become highly personalized. Not only do Vladimir and Pozzo read the sky and light as though it will personally announce their fate, that is, when Godot will come, but the sun and moon come to function like physical extensions of their minds and bodies.

If, existentially, the individual is the measure of his universe—author, actor, and director—unconsciously, one occupies that center concretely as both subject and object. The Anatomy of the Conglomerative Effect 85 weariness. For them, tomorrow has come at last: All evening we have struggled, unassisted. No t e s Note to epigraphs. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical.

Salomon Resnik, The Theatre of the Dream, trans. Tavistock Publishers, , 17— Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, D. Winnicott, as well as Bion. Basic Books, , and Bert O. States, The Rhetoric of Dreams Ithaca: Cornell University Press, , and Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Dreaming New Haven: Yale University Press, States has written a number of outstanding books on dreams as well as one about Waiting for Godot in which he does not discuss dreams: The Shape of Paradox Berkeley: University of California Press, They are essentializing processes, as aestheticians say.

Joan Riviere New York: Collier, , —89, and —6, respectively. See also note 9, chap. Language and Thought in Schizophrenia, ed. On the inability to deal with generalizations in paralogical thought, see E. See also American Handbook of Psychiatry, ed. The Human Condition through Dreams Albany: Putnam, ; and J. For an introduction to these concepts, with illustrations from literature, see Frederick J.

Louisiana State University Press, Riverrun Press, , Freud writes of conjunctions, with this his list, , in The Interpretation of Dreams: The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech. Riverrun The Language of Dreams: On the instances of waiting, see In waking, syndetic, or secondary process, all but one or two alternatives in a series would be eliminated; in asyndetic thought, the various alternatives are retained.

A statement lacks logical linkage and even the imaginative connective of symbolic statement.

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See Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, ed. Williams and Wilkins, , I: Much of the comedy in his world derives from this fish-out-of-water condition, when people are suddenly caught at some disadvantage out of their appropriate role. Murphy the novel is set in London, to which Beckett moved in the s after a nervous collapse.

He found the transition from Dublin painful. At home, he had been treated as an From Samuel Beckett Years: Centenary Essays, edited by Christopher Murray, pp. Published by New Island. Murphy is a novel of emigration, an attempt to document the plight of those Irish in England who have to contest the image of the Stage Paddy at every turn. He sees himself very justly as a sophisticated, angst-ridden intellectual, but when he goes looking for manual labour, he is mocked as a buffoon. He decides that there is no point in trying to break down the closed system that is the English stereotype of Irishness in s London.

The ultimate closed system for Beckett is language itself, used throughout the book to obscure rather than illuminate reality. It is like a Zen koan, something which can only cripple or exhaust the mind which seeks illumination from it. The novel itself opens with an account of the entire universe as an impermeable code: His error is to believe that he can opt out of this world and attain freedom in his pure mind.

Though communication may be impossible, Beckett persists in the belief that other people are still necessary, if only to provide us with a measure of our solitude. There may be self-exile but there is no self-sufficiency. But Murphy falsely believes that there is and so he sits in his rockingchair in a daily attempt to find it. The rocking appeases his body, so that he can come alive in the mind.

Murphy himself is a closed system and great play is made of his non-porous suit, which prevents internal air from escaping or external air from entering, with disastrous results in terms of body odour. Murphy and the World of Samuel Beckett 91 The comedy of non-communication is developed in many ways. Typographically, the pages look as if they record conversations, but often upon inspection reveal that it is one person who does all the talking: This was not a question. Cooper waited for the next question. They point forward to the monologues of Molloy or Malone Dies, as well as to the later short plays.

Because the self can never fully shrive and forgive the self, such monologue is, as Hugh Kenner has said, issueless and potentially endless. For Murphy, the only way to conquer desire is to ablate it. Silence is his fourth highest attribute; and he ends one chapter listening spellbound to the dead line on a dangling telephone. As the plot unfolds, the many forms of language either stumble or fail completely. Even the terse 92 Declan Kiberd language of a cryptic telegram becomes confusing: Slips of the tongue are endless.

This ability to obfuscate with words is seen as a particularly Irish gift. When Neary, maddened with unfulfilled desire, tries to dash out his brains on the buttocks of the statue of Cuchulain in the GPO, a Garda says with supreme tautology to the crowd which had gathered to witness the event: It expresses discontent with the limited capacity of words to capture states of feeling and reinforces that sense of discontent with many flashbacks, flashes forward and interpolations.

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

On many occasions the narrator breaks down the illusion which has been built up in Murphy and he does this with interpolated stage directions. If Murphy is the finest modern attempt to subject the figure of the Stage Irishman to the close psychological analysis made possible by the novel form, then these stagy effects are all the more appropriate as carry-overs from theatre.

Many of the exchanges in the book read as if the characters were going through an oft-rehearsed set of speeches: I name no names.