Cult of impersonality

FAME IS FLEETING, but to Samuel Beckett's taste, not fleeting enough. If most writers feel themselves condemned to obscurity, for Beckett the opposite was the case. He was, in his own words, ``damned to fame."

Indeed, the durability of his fame is on striking display these days. In celebration of Beckett's centennial, his plays are being produced in hundreds of theaters around the world; conferences and colloquia are taking place everywhere from Dublin to Oxford, Paris to Tokyo, Ankara to Odense; and a splendid new edition of his works, edited by Paul Auster (and with introductions by Colm Toibin, Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, and J.M. Coetzee), has just been published by Grove Press.

Beckett, who died in 1989, lived to see the full flowering of his fame, and the retiring Irishman was forced into a spotlight he had no desire to stand in. But what were the chances that this spotlight would shine on him in the first place? He was an obscure writer writing in a foreign language about obscure figures living in a very foreign world. When one considers the strangeness of the works that sealed his fame, the plays ``Waiting for Godot" and ``Endgame," both written in the 1950s, not only is it remarkable that they were successes, it is remarkable that they were produced-and that the first audiences were patient enough to await their seemingly endless endings. But wait they did. And to his limitless consternation, Samuel Beckett became an international literary celebrity.

With piercing blue eyes, a gaunt face scored by lines of laughter and loss, and hair standing on end-as if outraged by the thoughts transpiring beneath it-Beckett looked the part, and got the part. And thanks to the special logic of fame, the more he tried to lead a private life, the more he tried to move away from literary groups, associations, councils, and societies, the more they courted him with prizes, decorations, and honorary degrees. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, he chose to accept it only because refusing-as had Sartre a few years earlier-would have aroused more attention. So he sent an envoy to Sweden to accept the check and discreetly distributed the money to those in need.

And yet, as much as Beckett hated the limelight, his desire to withdraw from it makes a fitting metaphor for his peculiar literary achievement.

. . .

Born in a well-to-do suburb of Dublin in 1906, Samuel Barclay Beckett studied French and Italian literature at Trinity College, and, when the occasion presented itself, left Dublin, like James Joyce before him, for Paris, where he would eventually settle. In 1928 he met Joyce and grew close to him, serving as a sort of secretary to the celebrated author, who was at work on ``Finnegans Wake." His fascination and friendship with Joyce continued apace until Joyce's wife, Nora, effectively ended it, convinced that Beckett was responsible for the schizophrenia of their daughter, Lucia (she had fallen in love with him, but the love was unrequited).

Beckett left Paris for London in 1933, underwent a long and strange psychoanalysis, and in shorter and longer fictions such as ``Murphy" (1935) sought to free himself from Joyce's exuberant influence and to find his own voice. The outbreak of World War II found him again in Paris, and he promptly offered his services to a Parisian cell of the Resistance. That cell was soon infiltrated, and Beckett, lucky to escape with his life, fled Paris for the Atlantic coast with the woman who was to become his wife. While he contemplated his next step, he played chess with Marcel Duchamp (the cryptic artist was extremely good at the game, and he beat Beckett badly). In 1942, continuing his work in the Resistance (he was later to receive the Croix de Guerre), he and his mistress took up residence for the duration of the war in a small village in southern France where no one spoke English and he had nothing in English to read.

During these years, French became second nature, and with the end of hostilities Beckett realized that he had at his disposal the means to solve his special literary dilemma. If Proust and Joyce had done everything possible in the way of addition and enrichment of literary style, as Beckett believed, then he would follow the negative path of subtraction and impoverishment. The way to do this, he decided, was to switch from his native English to French, allowing him to write, as he put it, ``without style."

Beckett's prewar English novel ``Murphy" began, ``The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." The trilogy of French novels that directly followed the war offered even fewer alternatives-and less sun. Yet the ``nothing new" of the stripped worlds of these works became something new indeed. ``Molloy," the first of the trio, is the most novelistic, having several distinguishable characters and something resembling a plot. Much of this traditional infrastructure begins to give way in the moribund middle volume, ``Malone Dies," and by the last book of the trilogy, ``The Unnamable," plot, character, and even movement have given way to an astoundingly restricted field of fictional vision.

The narrators of these books are afflicted by a sort of logorrhea: They want to stop talking-because there is nothing new to say and the old things are too terrible to contemplate-but they can't bring themselves to do it. As Beckett said in his first work of fiction, ``More Pricks Than Kicks," ``say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down."

With the plays ``Waiting for Godot" and ``Endgame," the ever more disembodied voices of the novels were figured on the stage. The classical dramatic scenarios of conflict and resolution-whether comic or tragic-were replaced by an intrigue whose central riddle seemed to its first audiences to be when the play would start, and when it would end.

. . .

The first words of Beckett's first book-a study of the then not-yet-famous Marcel Proust-had been an epigraph from the Italian poet Leopardi: ``and the world is mud." Over the course of the coming years, as he found his own voice in poetry, fiction, and drama, Beckett's world was to remain muddy: uncertain in contour, distressing in color, dubious in odor. And it was the relation of Beckett's devastated worlds to the catastrophes of recent history-to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and other sites of shocking suffering-that did so much to make his uneasy fame. In the traumatized aftermath of the war, with many ready to declare God dead-and literature seemingly well on its way toward a similar extinction-Beckett seemed a fitting note to end on. Or perhaps to begin anew from.

Desperate times call for desperate measures-and desperate art. Beckett's jarring mixture of cold impersonality and wounded warmth seemed to hold the right mirror up to nature. One of the sternest observers of the day, the critic T.W. Adorno, found in Beckett's experiments in reduction and negation exactly what was called for: Having said yes to war and the unprecedented horrors that came with it, we needed to learn to say no.

Critics disagreed about the meaning of Beckett's works, but all agreed that there was something dark and unsettling at their core-and, for that matter, on their surface. Beckett's works are, quite literally, absurdly funny. One laughs and feels suddenly lighter, better, and then, recalling why one laughed in the first place, what dark situation was the occasion for the joke, one is suddenly less sure of the propriety, and even the possibility, of laughing at such a thing-and the laughter fizzles as quickly as it had flared.

Observing this phenomenon, the German literary critic Wolfgang Iser performed an experiment in the first years of Beckett's fame. Traveling around Europe, Iser attended a variety of productions of Beckett's famous plays. The common point he found was not only that the public laughed at the tragic comedies, or comic tragedies, Beckett had so strangely crafted, but that their laughter-whether in Paris, London, Berlin, or Dublin-stuck in their throats. The initial guffaw was followed by a sudden silence-as if the audience was shocked that they could find something so grim so funny.

It is this silence on which Beckett's literary fame finally rests. His was an ascetic and austere exercise in reduction, a stripping bare of the artifices of art. Though he was kind, generous, and splendidly funny, Beckett crafted a relentlessly gray and impersonal style opposed to the splendid spectra that Joyce, Proust, and a host of other modern masters had offered. He spent a whole life and career of withdrawal and subtraction-both personally avoiding publicity, and in his works, avoiding personality-as though trying to maximally withdraw and at the same time express something urgent. Something, to borrow the title of his final novel, ``Unnamable."

Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.