IN THE DIM VOID: SAMUEL BECKETT
This book considers Samuel Beckett's 1980-83 trilogy of short
texts, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Wortstward Ho, otherwise
known as the Company or Nohow Trilogy. These are dense, complex,
allusive, highly lyrical and emotional pieces which contain many of
Beckett's key philosophies and approaches to writing.
Includes photographs of Beckett and his plays, and a
bibliography.
EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE
The emotional core of Company is a nostalgic yearning,
manifested in those vignettes or memories, which some see as having
correlations with Beckett's own life, so that Company is the
closest thing in the Beckett canon to autobiography. Certainly many
of the sections in Company have the whiff of autobiography, but
these are memories mediated, edited, shaped, compressed and
transformed by Samuel Beckett's various voices. For in Company we
find a narrator, a voice, a remembering self, in fact a complex
hierarchy of various levels of consciousness and
self-consciousness. Some of the passages are Beckett at his most
lyrical, his most self-indulgently lyrical, one might add, for no
sooner is lyricism evoked than it is stamped out. Ornamental
writing is detested by Beckett, yet he can be as poetic in the
ecstatic sense as any other poet. Here is a powerful sequence from
Company:
the light there was then. On your back in the dark the light
there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at
break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. A nook
in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of high mountain.
Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For the third or
fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and were
derided. All you had seen was clod. So now you heard it in your
heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You
lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your
nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water until they ache.
You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain
again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue
against the pale sky. You lie in the dark and are back in that
light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till
morning light. (20)
This memory sequence is a kind of ecstasy. An everyday sort of
ecstasy, perhaps, but even Beckett's rigorous control of language
and his hyper-realist outlook on life cannot hide the joy in this
passage. For there is joy in Beckett's art, though always, as in
Thomas Hardy's fiction, very brief joy, soon smothered by all
manner of other concerns.
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