Samuel Beckett Is Closed by Michael Coffey

Author:Michael Coffey [Coffey, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2017-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

IX.

—That fellow’s very deft.

For Beckett, the high priest of failure—“fail better,” “like none other dare fail,” “better worse,” “say nohow on”—what are we to make of the works he abandoned?

The remainder is comedy.

After we played a few games—we shot baskets into his hoop, fooled around online, and then played with his remote-control cars, we got on his bed and looked out his window, which had a view from high up of the Hudson River and the highway that runs along it.

—Roy McMillan. One of the best at his position.

—Hoovers everything up.

—One out to go.

Did Beckett’s abandoned work, of which there are a dozen or so—abandoned plays, radio scripts, essays, poems, translations, and a few prose pieces—not fail enough? Did they fail the test of failure? Else why abandoned? Did they edge toward success, or some facile form of failure, or were they abandoned because their ambitions for failure were too grand, the failure envisioned unattainable or the execution too poorly conceived?

What’s left over is comedy. It is strictly human. Henri Bergson said that.

Coming down the highway were nothing but EMS vehicles and fire trucks. We turned on the TV and had trouble finding a station that was working but then found CNN and we sat watching. I got butterflies in my stomach.

—So what do you make of this filmmaking, Sam?

—The movie part of it. The camera moving, the eye. It changes possibilities. Narrator on a dolly.

—Next stop, Hollywood!

Or were there landscapes of failure that Beckett considered too dark to traverse, prompting retreat? An afternoon in the Beckett archive at the University of Reading reading the six pages of his abandoned prose work “Long Observation of the Ray,” from 1976, written in English in his small, slanted hand and a series of typewritten drafts, suggests to me that there is indeed a place too dark for Beckett. This elaborately schemed piece—meant to cover nine “themes” in precise mathematically determined packets of sentences, with a structure described by Steven Connor, one of only two scholars who have written on “Long Observation,” as proceeding in “exactly equivalent increment(s) and diminishment(s), consisting of one sentence referring to each” of the nine themes . . . followed by “a sequence of three sentences referring to” the nine themes, “followed by similar sequence of six, nine, six and three sentences,” concluding with another sequence of one sentence each “from the nine themes,” was worked on by Beckett for over the span of a year before being dropped. “Long Observation of the Ray” attempts to describe the play of light (from a lantern) within a hermetic spherical chamber six feet in diameter, and how the light can be made to wash with equal intensity the entire surface from an identical distance, which is required for the intensity to remain constant. Beckett encounters and fiddles with many of the epistemological and technical problems this scheme presents. He is trying to hold constant a closed system with the light source not biasing what it illuminates. The second essay on this mysterious piece, by David Houston-Jones, hints at a possible reason.

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