03.14.07
Beckett Expo: A sneak peak
I caught a sneak peak last night of the Samuel Beckett exposition that opens today at the Centre Pompidou. It was difficult for me to imagine exactly how an art museum would present the work of a novelist, playwright, and poet, but with all of the audio and video pieces, as well as paintings influenced by or favored by Beckett, the show pulls it off and you can spend hours taking it all in.
I recently took on a small side project of creating a Samuel Beckett crossword, which forced me to research and rediscover the work of one of my favorite authors of the twentieth century. As Professor Tom Bishop discussed in a talk he gave last fall, Beckett criticism often focuses on pessimism, the failure of language, the human condition of blindly, senselessly marching towards inescapable death. Bishop points out, however, that no character in Beckett’s work ever commits suicide, and there is a strange sort of optimism that one can read once they put down the existentialist lens. Godot never arrives, but Bishop asks, would it necessarily be a good thing if he did? The waiting continues, the characters continue to be.
Rather than attempt to delve deeper into Beckettian criticism, I thought I’d list some of my favorite Beckett quotations here, as a primer for those new to his work.
“Il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer… Je vais continuer.”
“You must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.”
“Tant quil ya de la vie, il y a de l’espoir.”
As long as there is life, there is hope.
“Rire ou pleurer c’est la même chose à la fin.”
“Laugh or cry, it all comes out the same in the end.”
“Mais à cet endroit, en ce moment, l’humanité c’est nous, que ça nous plaise ou non. Profitons-en, avant qu’il soit trop tard.”
“But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!”
