Samuel_Beckett_-_Short_Biography___Style

Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989) He wrote during the 20th century He was an Irish writer, dramatist (playwright) and poet. Biography (family and historical background) and most representative works Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin, Ireland, in 1906. Beckett’s father was a quantity surveyor (he worked within the construction industry) and his mother was a nurse. The Becketts were a Protestant family who lived in a large house with a big garden in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsford House School in the city centre near Harcourt Street. When he was 13 or 14 (1919), Beckett went to Portora Royal School, the school Oscar Wilde attended. From 1923 to 1927, Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, in Dublin. In 1928, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, he moved to Paris and took up a job as an English teaching assistant in higher education establishment. While he was there, he was introduced to Irish author James Joyce. This meeting had a profound effect on Beckett, who quickly became an apostle of the older writer. In 1929, at the age of 23, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay that defends Joyce’s work and method. Beckett’s close relationship with Joyce cooled when he rejected the advances of Joyce’s daughter. It was also during this period that Beckett’s first short story, “Assumption”, was published and that he won a small literary prize for his “Whoroscope”, which dealt with philosopher Descartes meditating on the subject of time and the transiency of life. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon became disillusioned with his chosen academic vocation and resigned. He commemorated this turning point in his life by composing the poem “Gnome”. After leaving Trinity, Beckett began to travel in Europe. On the course of his journeys, he did odd jobs to get by, wrote poems and stories, and came into contact with many tramps and wanderers. These acquaintances would later translate into some of his finest characters. In 1931 he published “Proust”, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. In 1932 he wrote his first novel, “Dream of Fair to Middling Women”, but he was unable to get it published at the time, so he abandoned it. However, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett’s early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection “More Pricks than Kicks”. After his father died, Beckett settled in London, where he underwent psychoanalysis and attended one of Carl Jung’s lectures. The lecture focused on the subject of the “never properly born”, and aspects of it would become evident in Beckett’s later works including “Watt” and “Waiting for Godot”. He lived in London from 1933 to 1936. In 1935, Beckett published a book of his poetry called “Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates”. During this time, he also published a number of essays and reviews, and finished his novel “Murphy”. In 1936 departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen, also noting his distaste for the Nazi savagery which was then overtaking the country. In 1937 he returned briefly to Ireland and he finally settled in Paris. In 1938, while refusing the solicitations of a notorious pimp, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed. After his recovery, he went to visit his assailant in prison. When asked why he had attacked Beckett, the prisoner replied “Je ne sais pas, Monsieur” (“I don’t know, Sr.”), a phrase reminiscent of some of the lost and confused souls that would populate the writer’s later works. The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who knew Beckett from his first stay in Paris, and the two would begin a lifelong companionship. After the 1940 occupation of France by Germany, Beckett joined the French Resistance working as a courier, and on several occasions he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and his wife fled south to the safety of a small village, where he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home and he also continued writing his novel “Watt”. In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room in which his entire future literary direction appeared to him. It was inspired in part by his relationship to Joyce; in it, he was faced with the possibility of being eternally in his shadow. This was a pivotal moment in his career, and the experience was later fictionalized in the play “Krapp’s Last Tape”. Later that year, he returned to Paris (France had been liberated from German occupation) and began his most prolific period as a writer. In the five years that followed, he wrote “Waiting for Godot”, the novels “Malloy”, “Malone Dies”, “The Unnamable”, and “Mercier et Camier”, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. Although English was his native language, all of Beckett’s major works were originally written in French (he claimed that in French it was easier for him to write without style). He translated all of his works into English himself. The success of “Waiting for Godot” opened up a career in theatre for Beckett. He went on to write a number of successful full-length plays, including “Eleutheria”, “Endgame”, “Krapp's Last Tape”, “Happy Days” and “Play”. The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. He also wrote for radio, film and television, and started to write in English again, though he continued to do some work in French until the end of his life. In 1969, Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His wife died in 1989, and Becket, who was suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson’s disease, died later the same year. Style (techniques and stylistic resources) • Beckett’s writing style can be divided into three periods: his early works up until the end of WWII in 1945; his middle period from 1945 until the early 1960s; and his late period from the early 1960s until his death in 1989. - His earlier works have an erudite nature, an elaborate prose style and a language derivative of Joyce. - During the second period, he wrote his best known works. He turned definitively to the French language, stating that writing in a language that was not his first tongue taught him discipline in economy of language and contributed to a sparseness of style. It was during this time that his work began to develop the unique style for which many critics claim that Beckett is one of the forefathers of post-modernism. In this unique style, Beckett trades in plot, characterization and final solution, which up until then had been the hallmarks of traditional drama, for a series of concrete stage images. Language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the unexpressible. His characters, usually grotesque, exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, attempting some form of communication. Beckett’s work more than any other broke form the realist tradition, dispensing with conventional plot, space and time and focused on the essential elements of the human condition. In his novel “Malone Dies” he used interior monologue. - During his late period, Beckett became more minimalist, exhibiting an increasing tendency towards compactness. He abandoned both conventional plot and conventional syntax, stripping his language down to fragmented phrases and one-word expressions to mirror what he considered the difficulty, if not impossibility, of human communication. The stark, stripped quality of his writing, with its Protestant aversion to frippery and excess, the austere minimalism of his art is, among other things, a critique of bloated nationalist rhetoric. Yet there is also a distinctively Irish quality to Beckett’s deflation of the florid and high-flown, just as there is something recognizably Irish about those starved, stagnant landscapes where, like colonial victims, you do nothing but sit and wait for deliverance. • Beckett’s works are usually animated by satirical wit, black humor and pessimistic undertones (tragicomedies). Despite these pessimistic undertones, in many cases the will to live seems to win out in the end. • His themes are evocative of the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence. Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. In his works, Beckett deals with themes such as insanity, chess, memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, the positioning of bodies in space and precise movement. He also deals with the idea of dictatorship in his most politically charted play, “Catastrophe”. Literary movement (specific trend or trends that apply to the author) Samuel Beckett is considered by many one of the last modernists; and sometimes one of the first postmodernists. Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett’s works represent the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of place and time in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. He is considered one of the key writers in the “The Theatre of the Absurd” (he was an Absurdist).