Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

what is the appeal of Quad to you?

I love the tranny strap on sex bit.

the negation of plot/character and the reduction of stage directions to diagrammatic procedures allows for this incredible kind of fractal patterning to emerge. My guess is that it’s about the way in which simple, schematic processes gives way to complex phenomena (such as biological life) without ever positing that the former is necessarily the cause of the latter. Life is the emergent phenomena of self-perpetuating, recursive systems that resist the entropic trajectory of the universe, like the weeds and yukka that grow where all else has withered away and died.

>(If you didn't like/understand Waiting for Godot, don't reply)

Nabokov HATED Beckett's plays while loving his his novels and the same goes of plenty of educated people .

fag ..

Please write some more about Beckett!

Any particular text, theme or approach you’re interested to know more about? I could bang on about How It Is for hours since it was the main subject of my thesis (I think I’m probably the reason why it made it onto the doomer chart too since I used to obsessively post about it years ago), but I’d be happy to talk about some of his lesser known works too

Honestly, I'd be down to read anything about Beckett, it may sound cliche but I'd really like to know more about his Trilogy and subsequently about How It is. This whole gradual stripping down of setting is fascinating.

I can see how you'd find them compelling, they're his most.. they're clearly philosophical and explore and expand on some profound philosophical concepts, it's almost like a Thus Spake Zarathustra. That's pretty powerful.

If you want a uniquely inspired critical perspective on The Unnameable, I highly recommend reading Deleuze’s essay on exhaustion, it really opened my eyes to Beckett’s aesthetic practise as a whole. It makes a lot of sense when contextualised against the first two books in the sequence - Molloy is the most “conventional” novel in terms of narration and structure, but only in order to dismantle the “thinking” subject reductio ad absurdum into obsessive/ autistic tendencies and schizophrenic delirium. Malone dies is centred on the idea of transitional spaces, using the way a child learns to distinguish between the “me” and the “not-me” (IE by playing with toys) to construct his narrative (which eventually ends in the author-as-petulant-child ripping his dolls limb from limb, suggesting an estranged form of maturity/puberty). By the time we reach The Unnameable, it becomes apparent that the “author” of all these works is nothing except the very words that he speaks, or rather, that the narrator only appears through his linguistic self-erasure, through his attempts to reach a terminal exit velocity, a definitive, exhaustive “conclusion”.

This is where How It Is really complicates things; with no punctuation to break up the mantric flow of the text, it would appear the book is meant to be read at a lightning-fast pace. Yet it undermines all the effort The Unnameable made to “end” the trilogy by positing an interminable number of interpretative possibilities that branch out from a singular atomic point, without definitively affirming or denying any of them. It’s arguably the closest any work of fiction has ever come towards portraying the sublime modality of the spinozian monad

Holy fuck, are you that retard that keeps infiltrating Dostoevsky threads with the ridiculous "claptrap journalist" remark? Listen, pal, just because one fucking writer had shit taste doesn't mean it excuses yours. Ffs.

is just meme posting man

I guess I won't reply then, but I just do not like Waiting for Godot. What am I missing?

the one who doesn't reply to this is missing good taste

I’m fairly well-read. No doubt, my taste isn’t as good as it could be, and that’s why I’d appreciate your help.

To my understanding, Waiting for Godot is an existential allegory. I focused on the aspect of boredom, and how time loses any linear passage in the wake of this ennui. I suppose Godot could be God, but I also don’t think that it matters what Godot is. We are always fixating on some arrival, some endpoint, to distract us from our pervasive and unlimited possibility of choice. By waiting, Vladimir and Estragon can delude themselves from any necessity of self-action. Lucky is so named because he is fortunate to be a slave, to be functionally bereft of any possible choice, a privilege Vladimir and Estragon are not afforded. I guess, Vladimir and Estragon are really waiting for death, which is the abnegation of self and its possible choices.

Unless I’m misunderstanding the play, I didn’t like Waiting for Godot because, in my opinion, it’s not a cohesive work. I think its supposed absurdity masks the undeveloped nature of most of its themes. I didn’t find anything profound in the topical way it addresses boredom, time, existentialism, or death.

Please change my mind?

Thanks for the right up, I will read Deleuze's essay! Do you have any other works that could help understanding Beckett as a whole or some of his works? I want to move from surface level knowledge about him.

>its supposed absurdity masks the undeveloped nature of most of its themes
I still think its a great play, but I can agree with this. Waiting For Godot was his "hit", but that's only because its quite a watered-down approximation of his reoccurring ideas and themes. Even the title is too on-the-nose to take seriously. It's taught a lot to younger students because most of his other works would likely be impenetrable to them. I'm sure if you tried to teach "krapp's last tape" to a bunch of teenagers they wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything except the poop-joke title.

Glad to see I'm not totally off-base. Krapp's Last Tape is the last major Beckett work I haven't read, and I'll read it today on the back of your recommendation

Regarding Molloy (to some extent even Murphy), (in layman's terms) could it be oversimplified in saying that it's a negation of one's person, some sort of degeneration explained on two subjects, cases (one in midst towards the end, the other from the start) through a secondary focus on the explanation of their "quirks", getting more and more hyperbolic as they "progress"? Like, for example, Molloy's pebble-sucking method and Jacques' former preparation OCD to the shirt wearing method so it doesn't wear out. Something in the lines of, when you stop caring about the things that should matter from a conventional standpoint, you start developing somewhat apsurd habits or switch your attention to things that should be done with a routine, not demanding a hard thought, and over-analize them in process? In other words, if a individual denounces universal exoteric values, his focus shifts to everything that comes within, which eventually becomes a constant and persistent self-analysis in which everyone's emotions, thoughts and actions can be explained by drawing a parallel to oneself or just accepting the "I don't know" formula (or "It could be that way - maybe, but I don't know").

Never read him, good starting point/reading order?

yeah, that's a neat idea. Jacques is an interesting one because the text loops back on itself, that is, if you accept the notion that Jacques and Molloy are the same person in the wrong chronological order. So those early signs of OCD ""could"" be indicators of how he became this way.

The thing is, I don't think this is what Beckett was trying to achieve. The above reading is kind of a freudian one, trauma and its effects. After all, we start the novel off with Molloy living in his mother's house– what better way to signpost that this is, in typically Beckettian black irony, NOT a book about psychoanalysis? Beckett is asking us to resist the biographical temptation, to see these characters as automatons, vehicles for ideas, and not as "real" people.

It's something of a double-bind, I think. On the one hand I think he does an unbelievably committed effort in representing the experience of mental illness, but at the same time, I can't help but concede that they are intentionally unreal characters. There's something more at play.

If you're going to read it at least read along to (a recording of) the real thing!

youtube.com/watch?v=otpEwEVFKLc

It was written for Patrick McGee, so you should absolutely consume it as intended.

agree with, , you must watch.

>to see these characters as automatons, vehicles for ideas, and not as "real" people
I agree with that, what I said was an idea that was implemented in me by him through them. I disliked the reverse cycle notion that Jacques is Molloy in a former life stage, although his thinking about Molloy could be interpreted as a "vision" of his latter self. Still, I think that are just traps, let's call them, forcing you to think more, especially about something that is somewhat shallow compared to other information thrown at you. Like the astrology he tends to mention in Murphy (if I recall correctly).