Beckett

[wood jim]

Beckett's oeuvre has several elements in common with
Parisian existentialism. Reminiscences of the category
of "absurdity," of "situation," of "derision" or the
opposite permeate it as medieval ruins permeate
Kafka's monstrous house on the edge on the edge of the
city: Occasionally, windows fly open and reveal to
view the black starless heaven  of something like
anthropology. But form---conceived by Sartre rather
traditionally as that of didactic plays, not at all as
something audacious but rather orientated toward an
effect---absorbs what is expressed and changes it.
Impulses are raised to the level of the most advanced
artistic means, those of Joyce and Kafka. Absurdity in
Beckett is no longer a state of human existence
thinned out to a mere idea and then expressed in
images. Poetic procedure surrenders to it without
intention. Absurdity is divested of that generality of
doctrine which existentialism, that creed of the
permanence of individual existence, nonetheless
combines with Western pathos of the universal and the
immutable. Existential conformity---that one should be
what one is---thereby rejected along with the ease of
its representation. What Beckett offers on the way of
philosophy he himself also reduces to culture-trash,
no different from the innumberable allusions and
residues of education which he employs in the wake of
the Anglo-Saxon tradition, particularly of Joyce and
Eliot. Culture parades before him as the entrails of
Jugendstil ornaments did before that progress which
preceded him, modernism as the obsolescence of
modernism. The regressive language demolishes it. Such
objectivity in Beckett obliterates the meaning that
was culture, along with its rudiments. Culture thus
begins to fluoresce. He thereby completes a tendency
of the recent novel. 

Theodore W. Adorno "Trying to Understand 'Endgame'" 
Translated by Michael T. Jones From New German
Critique 26, (Summer) 1982). 



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