Beckett in Germany

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 10:17 PM
Subject: Beckett in Germany

>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 ...
>

precisely all of that, plus a lot of binaries hidden in the texts . . .

"I confuse east and west, the poles too, I invert them readily." (20)

"Against the charitable gesture there is no defense." (...) "I speak in the
present tense, it is so easy to speak in the present tense, when speaking of
the past. It is the mythological present, don't mind it." (24)

"And of my two eyes only one functioning more or less correctly, I misjudged
the distance separating me from the other world, and often I stretched out
my hand for what was far beyond my reach, and often I knocked against
obstacles scarcely visible on the horizon." (47)

"Yes, my progress reduced me to stopping more and more often, it was the
only way to progress, to stop." (72)

"Then I went into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating
on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."

from *Molloy* (1979 Picador edition of The Beckett Trilogy)

Otto