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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 2 of 2. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 7, 2004, at 13:48:38
'His work is always stripped, severe, grotesquely comic, and haunted by the theme of nonexistence. He seeks to represent the mind purified down to its last bitter, almost unbearably pure negation - and kept alive simply by the force of that negation. From Rene Descartes, the seventeenth-century French thinker, and his follower Arnold Geulincz, Beckett took over premises regarding the separation of body and mind that led him to represent, almost uniformly throughout his work, mind under the compulsion of questioning itself. Fastened to a dying animal, as Yeats said, the mind of a Beckett character seeks constantlly to reassure itself of its own existence by developing a brilliant, sterile dialectic of its own. The old scarecrows and crones that animate what a clever undergraduate once called Beckett's "cruci fictions" live in a disgusting world and are themselves disintegrating. They all have stories to tell, and as long as they can keep on talking, can keep some sort of empty verbal game going, they need not despair of their being. But any sort of comfort or security beyond the absolute minimum eludes them. They take no action, they preach no doctrine, they know nothing save their own ignorance, they are kicked and cuffed by society, they sting, they sulk, they snarl at their own disgusting condition. And yet in some dark way, they represent humankind, "without the courage to end or the strength to go on" - as the narrator of "The End" describes himself. Whether clinging to hopelessness as their one hope or, like hte heroine of "Happy Days", to love in the grip of the grave, they bear witness, as more comfortable folk could not, to the essential holiness of existence.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Sixth Edition, Volume 2) p. 2243.
Posted by alexandra_k on November 9, 2004, at 23:42:03
In reply to On Samuel Beckett, posted by alexandra_k on November 7, 2004, at 13:48:38
this is from memory so it may be a bit F'd up.
My life is vile
I hate it so
I'll wait a while
And then I'll go.Why wait at all?
Hope springs alive
Some good may fall
I may yet thrive.It is because I cannot make up my mind
Whether god is good
Indifferent
Or unkind.
This is the end of the thread.
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