SAMUEL
BECKETT
Friend
of Existentialism and Joyce and foe of mankind's illusions, Irish novelist
and playwright Samuel Beckett put the Theater of the Absurd on the mainstream
map. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 for his contributions to literature, Beckett specialized in using the mordant humor and vulnerability of the vagabond clown to underscore human foolishness, frailty, and anguish.
In a world that Beckett witnessed as slowly disintegrating into chaos and decay on its inexorable march towards death, the only existing freedom lay in self-expression; the word was the only weapon against encroaching and sure entropy.
Beckett's finest moment is “Waiting for Godot” (1953), a theatrical exercise in the meaningless pursuit of meaning. The play's pithy style condenses meaning and compresses content, mercilessly whittling characters and action into a Hemingway-esque melange of essence that is both hilarious and ferociously empty.
Beckett was unsurpassed at transforming the poetic metaphor into a visceral, concrete reality, and his graphic theatrics are supremely image-based -- in “Godot,” for example, the empty road on which the two tramps wait for destiny represents life as a futile waiting game. “Endgame” (1957) and “Krapp's Last Tape” (1961) are also considered major works in the Theater of the Absurd -- prime examples of the movement, these plays portray human existence as a pessimistic tragicomedy that offers little hope for succor, let alone redemption.
Beckett's disillusionment with earthly life eventually resulted in experiments that eliminate the physical world altogether: “Breath” (1971) is a 30-second piece with only faint human cries as sounds, while “Company” (1980) features a dumb man who listens to a disembodied voice reminisce about his past. Lacking history, motivation, and social context, Beckett's characters flail about in a hostile universe with nothing but their core emotional responses.
For Beckett, as grim a joke as any resided in his conviction that the life of the mind was infinitely preferable to life in the body.
