Back to Beckett

I know Tim Parks as the author of Judge Savage, a novel he published in 2003 that I liked very much, and a non-fiction collection, Hell and Back, that has useful things to say about writers as varied as Dante, Borges, Montale, Henry Green and Christina Stead. He is English and has lived in Italy for 25 years, and you can learn more about him and his work by visiting his web site. In the July 13 issue of The New York Review of Books, Parks has a review of recently published books by and about Samuel Beckett, whose centenary we observed April 13.

Beckett inspires admiration, even reverence, among unlikely writers, or at least writers whose opinion of Beckett I would be reluctant to assume. I put Parks in that category. His work, at least what I have read of it, is in no way “experimental” or “avant-garde,” whatever those terms may mean early in the 21st century. He creates characters (memorable in the case of Judge Savage), constructs a credible, compelling plot and deploys language skillfully without prattling on about signifiers. Here’s what he says of Beckett’s language:

“But while Beckett was granted his quietus in 1989, there is no closure for his readers and critics, nor would we want it; for if a death wish was central to his writing, no prose was ever livelier.”

Parks gets it. Beckett’s prose is the liveliest I know, at once concise and precise, often funny, always charged with thought and feeling. In Company he wrote: “Yet another then. Of whom nothing. Devising figments to temper his nothingness. Quick leave him. Pause and again in panic to himself, Quick leave him.”

In his review of Company, reprinted in Every Force Evolves a Form, Guy Davenport writes (typically, in parentheses): “(The only punctuation in this book is the period. Beckett gave up the semicolon years ago, and the comma several books back.)”

This is a rare slip for Davenport, as the passage I just cited contains a comma. Otherwise, the observation is correct. Like Joyce in the “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses, Beckett jettisons punctuation the way Molly Bloom pulls pins from her hair and drops them to the floor. His prose in bone, not soft tissue – what survives.

Parks deftly pinpoints why Beckett, who so frequently skirts nihilism, is steeped in the language and thought of such religious writers as St. Augustine, Dante and Milton: “With Beckett, it is the persistence of a `religious’ seriousness in the declared absence of any sustaining metaphysics that gives his work its special, for some, saintly, pathos.”

Realism is a notoriously sticky Tar Baby of a concept. Most of the theorizing and maundering about what is realistic and what is not seems sterile and unproductive. According to Parks’ unconventional accounting, one I would endorse, Beckett, especially in his later fiction, is a realist, though not in the Flaubertian or Dreiserian modes. We might call it philosophical realism, to distinguish it from literal-minded physical realism:

“Yet for all these aggressive experiments one is struck on rereading Beckett that he did not dispense with traditional realism tout court. Throughout his work we come across passages of haunting descriptive power in which we cannot help feeling the author has a considerable emotional investment.”

Reading Beckett’s work, at least from the time he wrote Watt, during World War II, is an emotionally engaging act. We identify with his characters – Watt, Molly, Malone, the Unnamable, Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov, Krapp – in a way postmodernists would say is trivial and silly, even impossible. But if Beckett were merely creating clever but ultimately empty word games, only the professors would still be reading him. Even with his abhorrence of sentimentality, Beckett remains a storyteller (anti-storyteller, if you must), and stories are about you and me.