You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on

(Last sentence of The Unnnamable: last book of the Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable Trilogy)

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the works of Samuel Beckett have proved to be very popular with prison inmates.

I'm making my way through the Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie's account of life in a Spanish jail after being convicted of involvement in a plot to murder the last of the European fascist heads of state, General Franco, in the early 60's. It surprised me that Christie- a deeply politically-involved person, should have taken so warmly to the work of a writer like Beckett who deals with much broader existential themes.

And then there's the work of the San Quentin Drama Group, an organisation founded by lifers specifically to perform the stage plays of Samuel Beckett.

But let's not forget that Samuel Beckett was member of the French Resistance during WWII. Some say that the characters of Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" suggest the figures of Beckett and his wife-to-be Suzanne fleeing from the German occupation of Paris. That makes the mysterious "Godot" the Resistance contact who never turns up.

Be that as it may, it's perfectly possible to view Beckett's Endgame as a surreal representation of life in a nuclear fall-out shelter after the bomb has dropped. The resources of everday life are rapidly running out. Art (represented here by a picture with its face turned to the wall) is meaningless.

It's much more likely that- rather like the "Numbskulls" cartoon in the children's comic "The Beano"- the stage characters stand for the forces operating inside the human mind: the two windows of the stage set suggest the eyes of a skull, while the parents living in the ash-cans are a formative part of everybody's psyche.

Ashes recur in Beckett's much later stage work "Play", the heads of the three characters (a man and two women) emerging from funerary urns and doomed to relive a much-fragmented account of an adulterous affair, prompted by an inquisitorial light which flickers from face to face, giving each the "Third-degree". (The Gestapo, again?).

And in the "All the dead voices" passage in "Waiting For Godot":

-All the dead voices.
-They make a noise like leaves.
-Like ashes.
-Like sand.
-Like leaves.

And in the final chapter of Beckett's early comic novel "Murphy", in which the eponymous solipsistic anti-hero is incinerated in a ludicrous accident with a gas-tap. A Last Will & Testament is discovered post-mortem in which Murphy requests that his ashes be flushed down the lavatory in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin ("What the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house"), preferably while a play is in performance.

Some of Beckett's favourite stage interpreters of his work have appeared in dark and disturbing movies:

1. Billie Whitelaw (the mouth in "Not I"; the old woman in the rocking-chair in "Rockabye"):

Played the sinister nanny in The Omen.

2. Jack McGowan (the central character in "Eh, Joe?; the original Clov in "Endgame"):

Played the drunken film director Burke Dennings in "The Exorcist"- and died during the editing of the movie.

3. Patrick Magee (the original Hamm in "Endgame"; the original Krapp in "Krapp's Last Tape"- written specifically for Magee by Beckett who fell in love with his voice and originally entitled "Magee Molologue"):

Played the wheelchair-bound writer in "A Clockwork Orange" and the army surgeon in "Zulu".

"Stories, stories, years and years of stories. Like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, to be together and whisper together in the dark..."

A continual preoccupation of Beckett's character is the need to tell themselves stories. This is to be found most obviously in "Malone Dies", from which the above extract is NOT excerpted- but I can't remember right at this moment which volume of Beckett's oeuvre it comes from: a very Beckettian quandary.

It's interesting to observe how Beckett's drama gradually dispenses with virtually all the elements of what we would normally think of as constituting a play:

1. "Waiting For Godot" has no plot, to speak of.

2. Krapp's Last Tape" uses the device of the tape-recorder to fill us in on the character's back-story. Beckett rejects linear narrative and conventional character-development and pares down the "action" to a solitary character confronting his past selves.

3. Later plays such as "That Time" and "Not I" are really not so much plays as animated paintings: a single stage image, with accompanying voices.

-- Let's go
-- We can't
-- Why not?
-- Because ...

- What about hanging ourselves?
- Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
- (highly excited) An erection!
- With all that follows. Where it falls Mandrakes grow.That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
- Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Mysteriously, the names of many of Beckett's characters begin with the letter 'M': Murphy, Mercier, Molloy, Malone, May (in "Footfalls"), but nobody seems to know why.

Whatever the explanation, it's much less obvious than Kafka's choice of 'K'.

The general trajectory of Beckett's work, taken as a whole, is a movement from the presentation of an external social world- to which his misfit characters have at least some relation- to the interior world of a single human mind populated only with memories and stories.

In the early book of short stories "More Pricks Than Kicks" the anti-hero Belacqua inter-acts at some level with the denizens of Dublin's bohemian demi-monde. Somebody, after all, has to buy and cook the lobster that is the subject of one of these stories ("Dante and the Lobster") whose submersion in a pan of boiling water at the close prompts the famous ending:

"It's a quick death, God help us all."

It is not.

The eponymous anti-hero of "Murphy" might be a solipsist- binding himself naked to a rocking-chair with 7 silk scarves and rocking himself into oblivion- but, unlikely as it may seen, he has a girlfriend, a circle of acquaintances, even a job (as a warder at a mental hospital) and plays a game of chess with a catatonic patient.

There's a case for saying that Vladimir and Estragon, the two clochards in "Waiting For Godot", are one and the same person- an illustration, if you like, of RD Laing's notion of "The Divided Self".

In "Krapp's Last Tape", the stage character is evidently a writer. At one point, the taped voice of his younger and more pompous self speaks of a moment of literary revelation:

"...the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most..."

(at which point, the elderly Krapp angrily switches off the recording)

It's logical to suggest that the nature of this curtailed revelation is that the writer should concern himself with "the dark", with the forces inside his own mind, rather than with any kind of social inter-action. (Let's accept here that Krapp is a self-caricature by Beckett).

From this point in Beckett's career onwards, the focus is on the individual: the disembodied Mouth in "Not I", the solitary old man in "That Time", the solitary old woman in the rocking-chair in "Rockabye"....

There are exceptions and kinks in this general trajectory, but by and large the movement from exterior to interior life is a consistent one.

Samuel Beckett was born- or, rather, had the misfortune to be born- on Good Friday, April 13th, 1906.

So the poor sod is not only born on Friday 13th, but on the day Christ was crucified!

Everything else follows from there, really.

Eddie, congratulations on this thread.
A real joy to read!

The new Rules & Regulations on ER prohibit contributors from "replying" to their own posts.

That's the principal reason I've been spending a lot of time on ATU recently.

Indeed, very interesting. I've never encountered any of his work, I've always assumed him to be really uber difficult. But with what feels like an infinite summer holiday ahead of me, maybe I'll give him a go.

LaRue

It's perfectly possible to have a nodding, theoretical acquaintance with the work of Samuel Beckett at the age of 16, but I'd suggest that you need a few years of heartbreak, loss, madness, bereavement and despair to really "get" him.

In just the way, it's quite impossible to really "get" the plays of August Strindberg without having your heart broken a few times.

I'm not being in the least bit patronising here: these are stone-cold facts.