Sometimes, I'm pretty sure English teachers assign things because it's hilarious for them to watch their students get wildly angry at a text. I'll admit it: part of the reason I insist on teaching The Scarlet Letter is because the struggle is hilarious for me. I've been told this makes me a sadist, but I'm okay with it; I'm convinced I'm not alone here. The best way to improve reading skills is to encounter and overcome the challenges in a difficult text, after all. Nathaniel Hawthorne is not the most difficult author a student will ever encounter, particularly if that student intends to pursue their studies to college or beyond.
This play made my whole class angrily question the purpose of reading it. From Estragon's first line: "Nothing to be done," we should have felt our impending doom. Shortly thereafter, we witnessed the first instance of Vladimir and Estragon's common refrain:
ESTRAGON: Let's go.
VLADIMIR: We can't.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We're waiting for Godot.
Because this conversation recurs in various forms countless times throughout the play (fine, they could be counted, I'm just not going to do it here), it obviously leant itself to parodies and became our symbol for hopeless causes through the rest of the year. It's not my goal to ruin this masterpiece of absurdist theatre for you here. Suffice it to say that both Act I and Act II end with this sequence:
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.
For high school seniors who are always looking for something to "happen" during a play or novel, this was bound to lead to ... frustration. (Andover Theatre people, I hope you recognize these lines that were parodied in Don Zolidis' hilarious one act "!Artistic Inspiration." Symbolism, Symbolism, Symbolism!)
In my undergraduate time at St. Olaf, the Beckett I ran up against was "Krapp's Last Tape." I remember being only marginally less frustrated--partially because I knew what to expect, and partially because we read the play before going to see a production of it at the Guthrie Theater. Seeing absurdist theatre is a much better experience than merely reading it, but I still was not a tremendous fan.
And now, in graduate school, Mr. Beckett has reentered my life but in prose form. For class this week we're reading First Love and Other Novellas. I'll admit that as a more mature reader I now see the humor in Beckett and I was only tempted to throw the book at something once (that one of the four novellas is going to get another read later this week. I gave up.), and I really did laugh--or at least chortle--aloud in the library today. From talking about how children and "all their foul little happiness" deserve their own sidewalks on busy streets to keep them out of everyone else's way, to tripping an old woman and responding with "I had high hopes she had broken her femur, old ladies break their femur easily," the irreverence with which Beckett's nameless narrators treat other humans perfectly fit my somewhat angry mood today(38).
That is not to say that I found unbridled delight with reading Beckett this time. Particularly, two of his sentences brought back the old "I want my head to blow up" feeling, both of them from the novella "First Love": "For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably,"(70) and "It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, for of all the other songs I have ever heard in my life, and I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physically impossible short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence has gone on long enough"(76). The first sentence made me involuntarily twitch and reread it six times. The second made me laugh, but I still had to rest my head on the desk for a few moments afterwards. (If you're curious, it was "The Calmative" that did me in--probably because it was the fourth piece of Beckett's I tried to read in a row. My limit is apparently three.)
I still felt frustration with my reading this afternoon, but this quote about Beckett by playwright Harold Pinter opened my eyes to some things:
The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.
His work is beautiful.
There are so many horrific, truthful, agonizing, and beautiful--to borrow Pinter's word--beautiful descriptions in Beckett that I was sorry to have missed them before. They are never descriptions of beautiful things; Samuel Beckett does not deal with happy people generally, but they are people who are so totally isolated and alienated from their society that a reader cannot help but be emotionally moved by their plight. I still think Beckett's language has a tendency toward obfuscation, but I'm willing to forgive him much more of this now.
This morning I was extraordinarily angry at the library's website, various online databases, Amazon's Kindle store, and having to walk to a bookstore to buy an actual copy of a book. My anger was not least because, after spending three hours looking for a particular article in seventeen different places online through the University of London and the University of Minnesota and even checking four London libraries for the hard copy of that journal, I found that article in five seconds when I typed it into Google. Google! (I'm hoping none of my students are still reading, since I yell at them for doing precisely this.) At the end of the day, I'm glad I found the article I needed online, but mad about the three hours I could have used more productively. And I'm glad Samuel Beckett and I have reached an uneasy truce. We'll see if the ceasefire lasts through class discussion on Thursday.
Anne Lamott says this about Samuel Beckett:
ReplyDelete"...a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. Even someone as grim and unsentimental as S.B., with his lunatics in garbage cans or up to their necks in sand, whose lives consist of pawing through the contents of their purses, stopping to marvel at each item, gives us great insight into what is true, into what helps. He gets it right - that we're born astride the grave and that this planet can feel as cold and uninhabitable as the moon - and he knows how to make it funny. He smiles an oblique and private smile at us, the most delicious smile of all, and this changes how we look at life. A few small things seem suddenly clear, things to which we can cling, and this makes us feel like part of the solution."
I had to look up the word obfuscation :)
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