The Nobel Prize in Literature 1969 : Samuel Beckett "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation"
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Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist.
As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce, Beckett is considered one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists.
He is also considered one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd." As such, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 for his "writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".
Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. He died in Paris of respiratory problems.
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Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the 1950s—towards compactness that has led to his work sometimes being described as minimalist.
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The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece Breath, which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on Oh! Calcutta!, the theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece).
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In the dramas of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements.
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The ironically titled 1962 Play, for instance, consists of three characters stuck to their necks in large funeral urns, while the 1963 television drama Eh Joe—written for the actor Jack MacGowran—is animated by a camera that steadily closes in to a tight focus upon the face of the title character, and the 1972 play Not I consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, 'a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness'.
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Many of these late plays, taking a cue from Krapp's Last Tape, were concerned to a great extent with memory, or more particularly, with the often forced recollection of haunting past events in a moment of stillness in the present.
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Moreover, as often as not these late plays dealt with the theme of the self confined and observed insofar as a voice either comes from outside into the protagonist's head, as in Eh Joe, or else the protagonist is silently commented upon by another character, as in Not I.
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Such themes also led to Beckett's most politically charged play, 1982's Catastrophe, dedicated to Václav Havel, which dealt relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship.
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After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of mirlitonnades, some as short as six words long.
These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon, have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English.
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Though Beckett's writing of prose during the late period was not so prolific as his writing of drama—as hinted at by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts entitled Fizzles, which was illustrated by American artist Jasper Johns—he did experience something of a renaissance in this regard beginning with the 1979 novella Company, and continuing on through 1982's Ill Seen Ill Said and 1984's Worstward Ho, later collected in Nohow On.
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In the prose medium of these three so-called '"closed space" stories',Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of Company make clear:
A voice comes to one in the dark.
Imagine.
To one on his back in the dark.
This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again.
Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark.
Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said.
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Beckett wrote his final work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" (also known by its French name, Comment dire), in the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days. The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself—a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, perhaps amplified by his sickness late in life.
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"BREATH" :
Synopsis
Even for Beckett, whose later plays are often extremely short, Breath is an unusually terse work. Its length can be estimated from Beckett's detailed instructions in the script to be about 25 seconds. It consists of the sound of “an instant of recorded vagitus” (a birth-cry), followed by an amplified recording of somebody slowly inhaling and exhaling accompanied by an increase and decrease in the intensity of the light. There is then a second identical cry, and the piece ends. No people are seen on stage, but Beckett states that it should be "littered with miscellaneous rubbish." He did specify however that there were to be “no verticals”, the rubbish was to be “all scattered and lying.”
History
“Tynan had asked [Beckett] … to write a brief skit for an erotic review, and Beckett agreed when he heard that Edna O'Brien., Jules Feiffer, Leonard Melfi, John Lennon and Tynan himself were planning to contribute. All the contributions were to be listed anonymously on the programme so that none of the contributors would be identified with his writing.”
Beckett sent the text of the play on a postcard to Tynan. At the first production, his staging was altered to make the work fit in with the somewhat risque nature of the revue by adding naked bodies to the rubbish, suggesting that the work was about sexual intercourse. “In one of his few displays of public anger, Beckett called Tynan a ‘liar’ and a ‘cheat’, prompting Tynan to send a formal notice through his lawyers that he was not responsible for the travesty, which he claimed was due to others … Beckett decided the incident wasn’t worth the argument and dropped it.”
“85 million people saw 1314 performances making it easily Beckett’s most viewed play.”
“John Calder claims that Tynan commissioned it; but Ruby Cohn disputes this, saying that Samuel Beckett had recited it to her years before, and that Calder published a fair copy but not the original, which SB had written on the paper tablecloth of a café.”
- A brief account of the history of logic, from the The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (edited by Ted Honderich), OUP 1997, 497-500.
- A biography of Peter Abelard, published in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 115, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, Detroit: Gale Publishing, 3-15.
- Philosophy in the Latin Christian West, 750-1050, in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Jorge Gracia and Tim Noone, Blackwell 2003, 32-35.
- Ockham wielding his razor!
- Review of The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books 2000 (367pp).
- A brief discussion note about Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.
- Review of St. Thomas Aquinas by Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame Press 1982 (172pp). From International Philosophical Quarterly23 (1983), 227-229.
- Review of William Heytesbury on Maxima and Minima by John Longeway, D.Reidel 1984 (x+201pp). From The Philosophical Review 96 (1987), 146-149.
- Review of That Most Subtle Question by D. P. Henry, Manchester University Press 1984 (xviii+337pp). From The Philosophical Review 96 (1987), 149-152.
- Review of Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages by Jorge Gracia, Catholic University of America Press 1984 (303pp). From The Philosophical Review 97 (1988), 564-567.
- Review of Introduction to Medieval Logic by Alexander Broadie, OUP 1987 (vi+150pp). From The Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 299-302.
