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LEO BERSANI
than the way his work has been enthusiastically, avidly consumed. Not
only that; the consumption has, as the astonishing amount of critical
comment shows, been anything but passive.
While
I
find all Esslin's choices less interesting than pieces by
Maurice Blanchot, Frank Kennode and Northrop Frye---which are
not included-his collection does have some interesting essays (those,
for example, by Hugh Kenner, Ross Chambers and Dieter Wellershoff ).
It
is, however, somewhat disconcerting to read so many admiring, un–
daunted analyses of a significance for which Beckett implicitly expresses
only boredom and disgust in the dialogues with Duthuit. Most surprising
of all is the often repeated claim that Beckett is speaking for all of us,
hitting dead center in his picture of Modern Man. Esslin, with rather
cavalier logic, praises his work as constituting "an exploration, on a
hitherto almost unprecedented scale, of the nature of one human being's
mode .of existence, and thereby into the nature of human existence
itself." Kenner ends an amusing, urbane piece on the importance of
bicycles in Beckett's writing with a fantastic jump from the pleasures
of cycling to the assertion that the trilogy "takes stock of the Enlighten–
ment, and reduces to essential tenns the three centuries during which
those ambitious processes of which Descartes is the symbol and
progenitor . . . accomplished the dehumanization ' of man." For
Giinther Anders, the plight of the bums in
Waiting for Codot-who
are
"representative of millions of people"-"mirrors our ,own fate, that of
modern mass man." And Ruby Cohn ends her competent bopk-Iength
study of Beckett's comic devices with the insistently repeated claim
that the Beckett hero, "reflecting the absurdity of the Macrocosm in
the absurd details of his microcosm, ... cries out in the frustration of
his humanity, which is our own."
Has Beckett, then, failed t,o fail? Elaborate explications of his
work are, unfortunately, not wholly unjustified. He has, first of all,
no mean erudition, and a host of deciphering critics has collected
numerous allusions to St. Augustine, Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Male–
branche, Berkeley, Wittgenstein, etc., etc. We also have the pleasures of
symbol-chasing: in addition to joke names like Hamm, Clov and the
town of Shit (which Beckett, who tends
to
be more demure in his
native tongue, has changed to Turdy in the English version of
Molloy),
Godot, alas, suggests God, and Malone and Macmann have been
interpreted as Man Alone and Son of Man. Finally, Beckett's characters
both insistently and nonchalantly bring up such "meaningful" subjects
as Christianity, the limits of reason, language as arbitrary nonsense,
and the horrors of sex and the body.
Now there's something very elusive about this aspect of Beckett,
