Reinventing Beckett

Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of transformations and reinventions. In the process of remaking himself, over and again, from donnish academic to avant-garde poet, from Joycean acolyte to post-Joycean minimalist, from humanist to post-humanist, perhaps, most certainly from poet to novelist to playwright to theatre director, Beckett was simultaneously reinventing every literary genre he turned his attention to. In the midst of remaking narrative in the wake of World War II, for example, he began simultaneously the reinvention of theatre, writing the ground-breaking (but still unproduced) Eleutheria between Molloy and Malone meurt [Malone Dies] and En attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot] between Malone meurt and L'Innommable [The Unnamable]. Almost as soon as he began to experience some recognition, most notably in the theatre, however, he began to recoil from it as well, as if it represented a threat, the desired attention he had struggled so hard to achieve barbed with threats to his art (and even perhaps to his self-image). Enthusiastic about his anti-boulevard play Eleutheria and eager for its publication and performance, for example, he quickly repudiated it, withdrawing it from scheduled publication after the staging of Godot, finding it in later years impossible to translate even for his long-time publisher, Barney Rosset, refusing again to have it published,at least in his lifetime, and finally, if fundamentally by proxy, prohibiting any staging, apparently in perpetuity. It was, however, a play central to Beckett's theatrical reinvention as it, almost literally, swept the stage clear of both boulevard and naturalistic debris and so bared the stage for what would become, in English, Waiting for Godot. British critic and staunch Beckett advocate Harold Hobson may have privileged Beckett's second full-length play in the following description, but his comments are equally apposite to Eleutheria, the restriction to “the English theatre” excepted.

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