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Beckett is a very strange man, no question of that. Even his handwriting,
of which I have seen one instance, is peculiar in the extreme.
Esslin finds fault with my own view, expressed in a piece I did on
Beckett for
The New Leader:
"Samuel Beckett and James Joyce in
Endgame,"
and in which I attempted to explain Beckett's play in terms
of his attitude to James Joyce. Esslin says that my theory "surely be–
comes untenable;" not because there may not be a certain amount of
truth in it (every writer is bound to use elements of his own experience
of life in his work) but because, far from illuminating the full content
of a play like
Endgame,
such an interpretation reduces it to a trivial
level." Did I reduce the relationship between Hamm and Clove to a
trivial level? I made the point that the
Ivalue
of recognizing the auto–
biographical material in the play was that by so doing, it was possible
to absolve the author of the charge of pessimism. But never mind my
own interpretation of the play. Here is Esslin's: "The experience ex–
pressed in Beckett's plays (including
Endgame)
is of a far more pro–
found and fundamental nature than mere autobiography. They reveal
his experience of temporality and evanescence; his sense of the tragic
difficulty of becoming aware of one's own self in the merciless process
of renovation and destruction that occurs with change in time; of the
difficulty of communication between human beings; of the unending
quest for reality in a world in which everything is uncertain and the
borderline between dream and reality is ever shifting: of the tragic
nature of all love relationships and the self-deception of friendship ...
and so on." Are Beckett's plays about all that? From this list of abstrac–
tions one would think that Beckett's plays had been written in the
Genn:an language and not, exquisitely, in the French. Besides, what
have Esslin's list of abstractions to do with the life of Samuel Beckett?
And what has that life to do with a general cultural crisis? These are
the connections Esslin is obliged to establish, and he does not.
On the subject of Genet, too, Esslin's concept of the "absurd" is
little help. He turns to the data about Genet's life which we have
from the playwright himself. It seems that Genet was abandoned as a
child, and when accused of stealing, resolved to become a thief. Between
1930 and 1940, as Esslin notes, Genet led the life of an itinerant
delinquent, among beggars and pimps; he made acquaintance with the
French jails. Fortunately for the theatre, he never quite became "the
hardened jail-bird on whom the prison gates shut forever."*
• Rimbaud,
A Season
in
Hell
