Beckett in Germany

[Dave Monroe]

Many, many pairs, it seems, in Beckett, Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky,
Mercier and Camier (cf. the two thieves at the Crucifixion), Hamm and Clov, Nagg
and Nell, Winnie and Willie, Moran and his son (cf. Abraham and Isaac), et al.,
but never quite symmetries, no?  Waiting for Godot, for example, who described
it as nothing happening, twice?  Except Beckett seems to take care to break any
possible symmetries, any simple repetitions, the leaves are off the trees, Pozzo
is blind, and so forth ... nothing happens, then even less happens ... many
solitary, or, at any rate, unpaired, figures as well (Watt, Murphy, Molloy, The
Unnamable, Belacqua Shuah, Krapp, et al.), but ... and many, many negations,
even in a single work, as those passages from Molloy (a personal favorite, note
also the possible Leibniz parody in those [monadological?] "sucking stones")
show, but ... but perhaps that implied, implicit critique of that romanticist
and/or Hegelian return?  A la Pynchon?  They do both seem of a moment, though
Beckett of course crosses over, is in transition to, it ...

Otto Sell wrote:

> ----- 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