To end yet again

Samuel Beckett's recent work

L. C. Dobrez

pp. 130-146

in: Ian Donaldson (ed), Transformations in modern European drama, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1983

Abstract

Today we have no Delphic oracle, no intimate voice like that which spoke to Socrates — unless we except the daimons that find utterance through some of Beckett's obsessives — but, if we had, I expect it would tell us that there is no wiser man in the world than Samuel Beckett, since of all men Samuel Beckett is the one most conscious of his failure where wisdom is concerned. When I spoke to Beckett in 1977 he suggested that his productive writing phase began when he became aware in himself of what he termed not ignorance but nescience, ignorance as it were positively oriented. I want to focus on this element of Unknowing in Beckett's work, with particular reference to two plays written in recent years, That Time and Not I. Looking back on the long career which produced theatre of the calibre of Godot, Endgame and Happy Days and the poetic prose of Murphy, Watt, the novellas, the trilogy and How It Is, one might be excused the temptation to seek for signs of artistic decline in the seventies. But, since small masterpieces such as Lessness and The Lost Ones, the output of fine writing has continued. That Time and Not I are minute plays, each eight pages long in the Faber edition, yet they merit comparison with the best of the earlier work and surpass anything else written in English since Joyce.

Cited authors

Socrates

Beckett Samuel