In memory of the author of Waiting for Godot, Sam Beckett, a Francophile who worked as a courier for the French Resistance. On several occasions over the first two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte dAzur. There he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation, though, he rarely spoke about his wartime work, in his later life, he would refer to his time with the French Resistance as boy scout stuff. Beckett saw himself as an Anti-Joyce. In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. Beckett had felt that he would remain forever in the shadow of Joyce, certain to never best him at his own game. His revelation prompted him to change direction and to acknowledge both his own stupidity and his interest in ignorance and impotence: I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding. Knowlson argues that Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it ... In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss – as he put it, on man as a non-knower and as a non-can-er. The revelation has rightly been regarded as a pivotal moment in his entire career. Beckett fictionalised the experience in his play Krapps Last Tape (1958). While listening to a tape he made earlier in his life, Krapp hears his younger self say clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most..., at which point Krapp fast-forwards the tape (before the audience can hear the complete revelation). Beckett later explained to Knowlson that the missing words on the tape are precious ally. This had interesting financial implications. In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes published the first part of Beckett’s short story Suite (later to be called La fin, or The End), not realizing that Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story; Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. So, heres to Sam, the Jackson Pollack of high lit, who made incompetence and ignorance work for him. https://youtube/watch?v=tuU3RrGj3Lc
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 01:35:10 +0000
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