[...] With Invisible, Auster has now written 15 novels, of which his most critically acclaimed and best-selling work is The New York Trilogy, a series of books published in 1985. He is best known for literary gamesmanship, using techniques that draw attention to the text itself (which some refer to as ‘intertextuality’) as well as posing philosophical conundrums. This self-referential, formalistic approach is characteristic of late twentieth-century postmodernist literature.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
But there’s a difference this time. Invisible shows Auster keeping the literary devices much more under control. The story moves along at a rapid clip, and Auster’s style is crisp and riveting. The changes in narration do not lead us to lose the plot; instead he weaves a mystery we’re invited to help solve. Furthermore, Auster goes beyond formalism and creates engaging characters. It could be argued that the characters are not fully developed or sympathetic, but they are certainly not just ciphers for philosophical positions. [Read the article]
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
The real gem wasn't in competition but in the more experimental (and this year, dull) Un Certain Regard selection and it came from the grand master of the filmic game, Jean-Luc Godard, or JLG as he's now known, like some kind of perfume (a whiff of bitterness, with top notes of genius).
Helped with production by fashionista Agnes B and using words ("textos") credited to J Derrida, W Benjamin, S Beckett and W Shakespeare, among others, 79-year-old JLG's avowed final work Film Socialisme was the freshest, coolest thing I saw, bursting with a new wave of anger and vitality, retooling once again the visual language of cinema.
Shot in astounding, crisp HD, it's a fragmented collage of ideas and thoughts, beautifully pure graphics, scratched Dolby sounds and twisted images. He even plays with the convention of subtitles, merely placing English words along the bottom of the frame: "smile dismiss universe" or "destructive constructive". At one point, a girl at a petrol station refuses "to talk to anyone who uses the verb to be". Then a llama appears behind her. You want story? Forget it, but there's plenty of meaning here as Godard swipes at European history, Palestine, Jews, bankers and the futility of language and the strictures of time. As the final credits simply say: NO COMMENT – and the old man didn't show up for his Cannes press conference. [Read the article]
Samuel Beckett: Works for Radio: The Original Broadcasts is a four-CD set of recordings of the five works Beckett wrote specifically for radio performance: All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music, Cascando and Rough for Radio. It includes as well a recording of The Old Tune, Beckett’s translation of Robert Pinget’s La Manivelle, and a monologue titled From an Abandoned Work. The recordings are of the original BBC broadcasts, done from 1957 to 1976, the performances for which, in the case of the five works written for radio, the works were commissioned. La Manivelle is a work commissioned by the BBC from Pinget—Beckett did the translation for the first production, which is the recording included in this set. From an Abandoned Work also is presented in its first, and perhaps only, broadcast performance.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
The worth of this set is both in the quality of the performances and in the historic value of the recordings, although these virtues are not equally shared by all the productions. The strength of these productions rests on the actors, most particularly, on the presence of Patrick Magee, who appears in every work, and who can be considered the quintessential Beckett voice. His vocalizations—gravelly yet tender and vulnerable, broken yet strong, aged, filled with rigor, at times barely human, barely articulate, at times almost unlistenable, and always delicately turned to every emotional nuance—is the tonality not just of Beckett’s perennial characters but of the Beckett aesthetic. His is the very sound of Beckett’s universe. (We know that Beckett felt the same—he wrote Krapp’s Last Tape for Magee to perform.) The alignment of Magee with Beckett is one of the gifts this last century received. Present as well are two of the other actors who helped to define Beckett on stage, who knew him, worked with him, and understood how to forge the message: Jack MacGowran and Billie Whitelaw. Any recording of either of these two doing Beckett is indispensable. (Whitelaw, in particular, for those of us who rushed to see the first English language productions, in New York and so often done with Whitelaw, of Beckett’s short stage works in the 1980s—works many of us consider the height of Beckett’s achievement on stage. It was like watching works belonging to the ages emerging in our time, before our eyes, and Whitelaw was the necessary presence in virtually every one of the productions, achieving what seemed not to have been done before, and never with such stunning force, clarity, and impeccable impact as in Rockaby.) [Read the essay]
There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?Also at A Piece of Monologue:
As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. [Read the article]
David Shields recently dismissed most contemporary novels as "antediluvian texts" that "could have been written by Flaubert 150 years ago". "In no way," claimed the author of Reality Hunger, "do they convey what it feels like to live in the 21st century."
He has a point – albeit one that Alain Robbe-Grillet had already made in 1965 when he deplored the fact that young French novelists were praised for writing "like Stendhal" but castigated as soon as they refused to abide by the "dead rules" of a bygone age. Along with Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon – the main proponents of the new novel (nouveau roman) – Robbe-Grillet stood resolutely in the second camp. In his essays, he returns time and again to the notion that the novel, from Stendhal to Joyce, has constantly evolved – hence the absurdity of using "the norms of the past" to judge the fiction of today. Far from representing a rejection of the past, the quest for a new novel was thus very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed.
Feeling that his work was too often misrepresented by the critical establishment (with a few notable exceptions including Barthes, Blanchot and Nabokov), Robbe-Grillet published a series of articles to set the record straight. In 1963 they were collected in Towards a New Novel – for my money, one of the most important works of postwar literary criticism. However, these "critical reflections" were never meant to constitute a manifesto. Every novel, according to Robbe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is "known in advance". "The New Novel," as he put it, "is not a theory, it is an exploration." Why bother writing a book that illustrates a rule when "the statement of the rule would suffice"?
Quoting Heidegger at the beginning of an essay on Waiting For Godot, Robbe-Grillet writes that the human condition is "to be there". In another essay, he states that it is "chiefly in its presence that the world's reality resides". So there you have it. Man is here, the world is there and the distance between the two lies at the heart of the new novel project. We endow the world with meaning (or meaninglessness) in order to control it. From this point of view, the writer's traditional role was to excavate nature in order to unearth the "hidden soul of things". Robbe-Grillet calls for the creation of a new form of fiction that reflects the "more modest, less anthropomorphic world" we live in today – one which is "neither significant nor absurd," but simply is. [Read the article]
You British folks understand, don't you, that if an American presidential candidate said his hero was Samuel Beckett, he'd be finished. I mean totally finished. He couldn't even get away with an American equivalent. It'd be one thing for a US pol to say Mark Twain. That's about the only serious writer in history a pol could name and survive. [Read the article]Interesting to note, then, that the American government's very own 'Deputy', Vice President Joe Biden, has been revealed as a fan of James Joyce. A news story just published by the Associated Press reveals that last year Biden received a signed copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, purchased as a gift by auction:
Vice President Joe Biden didn't accept many gifts last year, but one involved highbrow literature.Whether Biden is now 'finished' for his interest in Joyce's work, or whether the news undermines Tomasky's culturally-biased assumptions, remains to be seen.
Biden received a first-edition copy of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" signed by the author, James Joyce, and valued at $3,500. The story is a chapter from the Irish writer's famously complex novel, Finnegan's Wake [sic].
The giver was Margaret Spanel of Hightstown, N.J., a donor to Democratic candidates. The information was included in Biden's annual financial disclosure report, released Monday.
Spanel, 97, sent the book to Biden after hearing him say Joyce was his favorite poet, the vice president's office said. [Read the article]
Beckett is not simply a harbinger of humanity's meaninglessness. He is also a lively satirist, with a keen eye on the perils and pleasures of political pragmatism.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Many of Beckett's narrators, for example, are proud of their lack of political commitment, their capacity to fit what they say to the demands of their audience.
Beckett's Malone, in the novel Malone Dies, confides that "what I like about me" is that "I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or Sweetheart! For example, without having to wonder whether I should not rather have cut out my tongue, or said something else".
Mr Clegg might find some solace in this cheerful adaptability, as he sits at the cabinet table.
Much of Beckett's comedy comes from this depiction of the malleability of words, their refusal to mean just what they say, or to behave exactly as they should.
In Beckett's work we are often a mystery to each other and to ourselves, and our attempts to communicate only deepen the mystery.
Moran ponders, for example, on his relations with his son. "Did he love me", he wonders, "as much as I loved him? You could never be sure with that little hypocrite".
Such a distrust of the words and attitudes of others will, I imagine, stand Mr Clegg in good stead in the coalition government to come. [Read the article]
If [Jacques] Derrida is the great thinker of ‘our time’, it is because he is concerned with a questioning and rethinking of what the term ‘epoch’ or the phrase ‘our time’ could or should mean. He is concerned with the notion of the untimely, with trying to elucidate Hamlet’s haunting proposition: ‘The time is out of joint’ (1.5.196). Above all, Derrida treats terms such as ‘epoch’ and ‘our time’ with considerable suspicion. Thus, thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are important to him because they are, as he puts it, ‘thinkers of the untimely, who begin by putting into question the interpretation of history as development, in which something that is contemporary to itself – self-contemporary – can succeed something that is past’ (A Taste for the Secret, p. 6). What Derrida shares with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is ‘a certain malaise about belonging to a time, to our time – the difficulty of saying “our time”’ (TS 7). As he asserts at the heart of Of Grammatology: ‘To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity”, “immediacy” [and] “presence” … is my final intention in this book’ (Of Grammatology, p.70).Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida
Limit(e) Beckett is a collaborative project and an online resource, aimed at promoting the study and appreciation of Beckett across existing borders. We want to foster dialogue between the francophone and anglophone worlds, between established and emerging scholars, between academic and non-academic readers, and between different disciplines and across different media.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Our website, at http://limitebeckett.paris-sorbonne.fr/ is the heart of this project. It provides several approaches to our central aim: as journal, as creative showcase, and as online resource. Limit(e) Beckett is a new and innovative peer reviewed bilingual journal, which publishes scholarly articles on Beckett and the limit(e). Our first issue features articles in French and English, on Beckett and philosophy, Beckett and the arts, and Beckett across languages. The website will also be a showcase of Beckett’s wide influence beyond academia, featuring creative engagements with Beckett’s work in the visual arts, film, contemporary writing and beyond. Finally, Limit(e) Beckett also offers a valuable online resource for Beckett enthusiasts, making out-of-print works of criticism available online, and collecting information about upcoming events and useful resources.
In order to ground this online resource in a real community, we organise occasional events around this broader project. We launched this project in 2009 with a highly successful conference in Paris that brought speakers from the UK, the US, France and beyond, and featured both academic papers and an exhibition of artworks inspired by Beckett. We hope to hold further events in the future.
For further information, please contact the editorial team at limitebeckett@gmail.com.
In 1973 Beckett muses on the “ontological indecency” that prevented his books from being published for so long, and he also amusingly dismisses all the essays and theses on his work as “a useless form of vivisection . . . academic dementia”. Earlier, in 1968, he tells Juliet of a moment of “sudden revelation” at the end of a jetty (as recalled in Krapp’s Last Tape), yet Beckett gave strict instructions to his biographer James Knowlson to kill this canard once and for all. (“All the jetty and howling wind are imaginary,” Beckett told Richard Ellmann.) If Juliet’s interview is accurate, it would appear to be a myth of Beckett’s own making.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
This is a powerful record of two isolated, intense presences. Juliet’s conversations with Beckett take up only a third of the book, and the Irishman comes across as mildly manipulative and passively domineering. Van Velde is more nervous and mentally fragile, and in terms of sheer oddness the book belongs to him. “Life is such a horror that one feels that anything can happen,” he tells Juliet. “If someone came around to shoot me tomorrow, I wouldn’t even be surprised.” [Read more]
The 70-year-old thespian had been rehearsing the Samuel Beckett play Waiting For Godot in Melbourne, Australia.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
During a break, a passer-by approached him as he sat in his tramp costume and put an Australian dollar in his hat.
"During the dress rehearsal of Godot, I crouched by the stage door of the Comedy Theatre, getting some air, my bowler hat at my feet (and) seeing an unkempt old man down on his luck, a passer-by said, 'Need some help, brother?' and put a dollar in my hat," he tweeted.
How to escape time? Whereas, speaking of realism, the recurrent claim in Cioran is this one: “we are going to die,” prophetically he is more interested in how one does it. The modality of death, as that which can be perceived as taken out of time, or rather that should be the aim of everyone—vanquish death out of time, as it were—is clearly a topic that is for Cioran not only much more fascinating than stating the obvious, but also one that borders on an attempt to write for and on the surface of things, not their depth. Space, in other words, is the big thing. It unfolds more authentically than time because it is not bound to any linear experience. [Read the article]My thanks to Rainer J. Hanshe for drawing the article to my attention.
"There's a theory about déjà vu."More at A Piece of Monologue:
"I don't want to hear it."
"Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can't fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically supernatural stuff. We're seeing into the future but haven't learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material."
"Why are so many people having these episodes now?"
"Because death is in the air," he said gently. "It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven't learned about ourselves. Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven't known how to make the material surface. Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.'"
Don DeLillo, White Noise
My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape. Back then I remember images of Beckett making as great an impression on me as his work. He always looked so impressive – that beak-like nose, eyes staring dead into the camera – and he had an austerity to him, even when he was young, that makes it very easy to connect the man to the words.It's interesting that a potential political leader should choose a figure like Beckett for 'subversive' content or dry humour, when surely Beckett's themes of waiting and deferral are more clearly suited to the contemporary political landscape?
Since then I must have read Waiting for Godot – of course – a hundred times. Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.
It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then?
But amid the bleakness, there is also humour, and it's no surprise that there are so many comedians among Beckett's fans. His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected. He leaves you with a sense that you knew what he meant, even if explaining it back would leave you lost for words. Direct and disturbing – it is impossible to grow tired of Beckett. [Read the article]
