Beckett in Germany

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Dave Monroe schrieb:

> 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 ...

Exactly. It is the thrill, I think, you get when reading a text that
obviously takes into account the horrors of especially this century but
which refuses to be explicit (in lit crit terms: explicit in the sense of
depicting and judging the atrocities from the point of view of an
onmniscient narrator) about them (a stance that might or might not be
influenced by Adorno's famous dictum), a text whose farce is steeped in
acid. Beckett is very funny, and so is Pynchon. The works of both perhaps
ask us to rethink the nature of the comical after WWII.

Thomas, a little drunk and rather tired, for reasons of his own, but
nevertheless on board of this ship that sails to god knows where without a
captain...