I still remember my first exposure to Beckett, in the form of Waiting for Godot. I was then fifteen, if memory serves me right; and as yet unschooled in the rites and mythologies of Western theatre. Thus, the play which had baffled critical wisdom upon its first appearance, was immediately accessible to the fifteen year-old’s imagination; and the response it elicited was also immediate- I found it utterly repugnant.
I was under the influence of Ayn Rand’s theory of Objectivism, in some ways it continues to influence my metaphysical stance to this day, and my aesthetic position was one of militant romanticism. And here was Beckett- official spokesperson of everything my classically heroic conception of being found contemptible- pessimism, despair, and, what seemed, a perverse hopelessness!
A decade and more later, I continue to believe in the Aristotelian credo of the relentless pursuit of perfection. Yet, with each lonely step I take towards the actuation of my artistic ideals, Beckett’s craggy, leathery face looms ever larger in the horizon: his grotesque, reptilian stare, like a cold searchlight, illuminating the way. No, I have not undergone any momentous life-experiences that have thus polarized my sensibility. Rather, Beckett has slowly, but inexorably, grown on me, the pathetic articulations of his decrepit characters assuming the luminous cadence of music.
We live in times when the classically heroic human has become something of an endangered species. Having watched, with the rest of my generation, the last century whimpering to its end, and having been thrown by the new millennium into a malevolent environment where the horrific has become the norm, where the spectre of faceless, irrational terror has reduced the sanctity of human life to a vulgar joke, heroic certainty is a thing we can ill-afford. It is in this environment that we see Beckett, neither as a pretentious mediocrity aspiring to literary high priesthood, nor as a false prophet, but as the magus of our collective aesthetic- he does not preach to us the doctrine of spiritual suicide, but he does tell us that if we have to find the fortitude to carry on the grim business of living in these darkened times, then we have to first recognize that the universe we inhabit is governed by blind, chaotic chance. It is by taking cognizance of that certainty that we can hope to find the will to go on, not in hope of some promised homeland, for there is none, but simply because we exist, and therefore must fill up the seconds between the swaddling clothes and the shroud with actions and words. It a task that is more, not less, heroic.
Words- yes, words. Beckett was fascinated by them- mesmerized by their curves, seduced by the infinite possibilities hidden in their texture. And that is why, ultimately, Beckett is not to be read, but performed, or at least imagined. And that is why, what within the confines of black on white appear to be bald, even clumsy clusters of words, at times strewn together without any centripetal force, assume in the arena of one’s imagination a music of surpassing beauty. Think of the haggard Krapp mouthing the word spool with an infantile relish, and then let that slowly sink in until it consumes you, and you’ll realize what I mean. In many ways, his writing can be compared to the strange modern art/science of creating fractal shapes, for through the seemingly repetitive, yet never quite similar patterns of his phrasing, fascinating worlds emerge, so that, finally, the very structure of the words become their implicit message, the dancer, the dance.
This, then, is Samuel Barclay Beckett, in his centenary year. And no matter what we do to mark the occasion through our usual tributary devices of deification- how many symposia we hold, how many obscure academic papers we write, how many stagings or screenings of his plays we organize, the truth is that Beckett, by the very fact of his existence and his writings, has told us that all such rituals are meaningless. One day he was born, one day he died, that is all. Yet, the men and women that he has left behind in our dreams- the stinking hoboes and the semi-buried women, the quavering old men and the slave masters- they have become mirrors in which we recognize our own faces, and in these times when air-planes piloted by gratuitous bigotry obliterate the aspirations of thousands in a fraction of a second, and the equally gratuitous dance of retribution levels several millennia of human aspiration to the lonely desert, in these times Beckett is something much more than a post-modern writer who changed the face of drama overnight - he is a loadstone of our conscience.
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