During my time at New York University, undergrad English majors were permitted to enroll in one of two competitive seminars. Offered only during the fall and only to seniors, I had my pick to delve into either James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. After a full year of waffling, I opted for Joyce, and for the following twelve felt unresolved in this decision.
Beckett became friends with his contemporary in the late 1920s, as the elder Irishman’s eyesight had already begun to fail. Trusted to take dictation amid the bedside crafting of Finnegans Wake, Beckett “realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more… I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away.”
There’s something particularly potent in this analysis, reflected throughout the author’s exhaustive exploration of minimalism, nonsense, and the unsaid, as well as his probingly avoidant approach to living itself. When he was near-fatally stabbed by a pimp in 1938, Beckett elected to drop all charges. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, he agreed to a single interview, under the stipulation that no questions be posed. And he frequently returned to writing in his non-native French, not due to its flourish, but rather because it allowed him to work “without style.”
Joyce and Beckett found reason to visit one another regularly despite the absurdist’s increasing hermeticism. Both made themselves present when the other was confined to the hospital. But these two zeniths of English, scorned by its origin’s empire, were never quite coequal. And it feels appropriate to have studied Joyce with formality, and to have allowed Beckett’s feral genius to dictate its own terms. It’s everything he left out of the orthodoxy that makes itself luminously unknown.
-David Fishkind