I am trying to give Beckett another go and read all his novels. As a young man I could read Patrick White even though I thought he put the reader in a coffin, leaving the lid open. But I could not read Beckett because he put you in a coffin and nailed the lid down. Now that decades have passed perhaps I am old enough to appreciate him.
Well I have read Murphy and most of Watt and I am beginning to founder. It does not appear to be a matter of the reader's age at all. Indeed for me there is something of the precocious adolescent in Beckett. (I find the same in Joyce).
There are some laugh out loud remarks in these novels and in Murphy some valuable comment upon establishment psychiatry and its practices, but what I can only describe as computer language takes over and swamps Watt.
Here is a sample taken at random: "With regard to the so important matter of Mr. Knott's physical appearance, Watt had unfortunately little or nothing to say. For one day Mr. Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, and the next thin, small, flushed and fair, and the next sturdy, middlesized, yellow and ginger, and the next small, fat, pale and fair, and the next middlesized, flushed, thin and ginger, and the next tall, yellow, dark and sturdy, and the next fat, middlesized, ginger and pale, and the next tall, thin, dark and flushed, and the next small, fair, sturdy and yellow, and the next tall, ginger, pale and fat, and the next thin, flushed, small and dark, and the next fair, sturdy, middlesized and yellow, and the next dark, small, fat and pale, and the next fair, middlesized, flushed and thin, and the next sturdy, ginger, tall and yellow, and the next pale, fat, middlesized and fair, and the next flushed, tall, thin and ginger, and the next yellow, small, dark and sturdy, and the next fat, flushed, ginger and tall, and the next dark, thin, yellow and small, and the next fair, pale, sturdy and middlesized, and the next dark, flushed, small and fat, etc." This is about a quarter of the sample. The infinite computations presumably involved in one person's perception of another is interesting, ho-hum.
If anyone thinks they suffer from depression, just read Beckett, and if you can read passages like this without skipping them, you are in a bad way. Just one of them may seem amusing, or clever, but this sample is one of very many, and they become overwhelmingly tiresome. If they make any point it is lost in the technique. In fact I would claim that this technique is the basic feature of Beckett's writing.
I hope to have the strength to keep reading Beckett in order to appreciate the fact that he received the Nobel prize for literature. Obviously I realise that he could be said to be giving expression to the nature of our civilization, a civilization which is in deep shit without a shovel, but strangely even a melancholic depressive like me cannot take it. Am I meant to thank Beckett for his awful honesty and to put him on the shelf like a picture on the wall? Books that I will never want to open. And is not an unopened and unread book like a festering evil?
