Beckett in Germany

[Dave Monroe]

Interesting article in the New York Times the other day, about the
rather more positive (vs., in particular, the U.S.) recpetion of Samuel
Beckett's works, esp. Waiting for Godot, in Germany in the immediate
postwar years.   Notes precisely the effects of the Holocaust on all
concerned, by the way.  But got me thinking, why have Samuel Beckett and
Thomas Pynchon been "my" authors?  What might possibly connect them?

Perhaps precisely their positioning in those postwar, post-Holocaust,
post-Hiroshima, postpoetic (in Adorno's sense) years as authors writing
works of both some popular appeal, or, at least, with some background in
the popular (esp., in both cases, slapstick) and of great scholarship
(both in the humanities and the sciences, and note the particularly
entropic concerns of both SB and TRP), with a profound sympathy,
empathy, even, for, indeed, the excluded, the passsed over, the
preterite ...