Nobel Prize: Kyrie Eleison Without God

In her memoirs, Peggy Guggenheim describes a character she calls “Oblomov,” which is her name for the young Samuel Beckett of the 1930s. The name was apt. Oblomov is the hero of a 19th century Russian novel by Goncharov, and he is famed for his inability to get out of bed. The mere thought of taking any action or making any decision makes him burrow deeper under the covers in a paroxysm of inertia. Miss Guggenheim’s “Oblomov” told her that “ever since his birth he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother’s womb. He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating.”

As a poet, novelist and playwright, Samuel Beckett has ramified that ordeal by suffocation into images of frustration, impotence, alienation, futility and absurdity. As a drop of water implies the sea, the personal obsession of a scrupulous and sensitive writer may mirror the inarticulate concerns of multitudes of men. The significant artist “dreams ahead”—he catches on to his age and then his age catches up to him. When Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last week at the age of 63, it was perhaps as much of an honor to his international audiences as to him. The judges were acknowledging that this demanding, obscure and austerely self-contained writer had become the laureate of an age that feels suffocated by its desolating sense of nothingness.

Metaphysical Blackout. Beckett’s friend and mentor, James Joyce, once said: “Here is life without God. Just look at it!” In a way, Beckett’s entire work is an agonized sermon on that text. In his world, the machinery of existence seems to be grinding to a halt. The titles Krapp’s Last Tape, Endgame and Malone Dies suggest a civilization with terminal cancer. The suffocating womb becomes a death trap: the urns encasing the characters in Play, the mound of earth piled up to the heroine’s neck in Happy Days, the ashcans of Endgame. One critic has called a Beckett hero a perverse Cartesian: I stink, therefore I am. Actually, the degradation and mutilation of the body are Beckett’s image for the withering away of the soul.

The mood of Beckett’s plays and novels is traumatic loss, a vestigial memory of the expulsion from Eden. With elegiac melancholy, Beckett intones a kyrie eleison without God. Waiting for Godot is hope’s requiem. The two tramps Estragon and Vladimir wait in vain.

Waiting is the real activity of all Beckett’s seemingly totally passive characters. As in an electricity blackout one waits for the light, so in Beckett’s metaphysical and moral blackout one waits for new gods and values to replace the old. At times, Beckett seems almost complacent in his despair. Doing nothing is regarded as the higher wisdom and action as impatience, an attempt to induce the birth of some new vital myth that is as yet, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “powerless to be born.”

And so the two tramps wait. To pass the time they play games. Games become a substitute for life and the loss of purpose. They are the contretemps of clowns. The clown is the only entertainer who consistently draws laughter through his own self-abasement. Beckett’s ultimate position is that man is the clown of the universe. But he is a clown for whom Beckett weeps, and that is his saving compassion.

Dramatically, Beckett is more important for his focus than his range. He has forcefully reminded the modern theater that the proper study of the stage is man and the dilemma of his humanity. His spareness has been a valuable lesson in economy. But his use of the internal monologue is not ideally suited to the stage. In his trilogy of richly introspective novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Beckett roams inside a character’s skull as if it were a continent. Onstage, the monologue is cramping, and the most dramatic skull is always likely to be Yorick’s.

Priestly Vocation. Though he has spent most of his life in Paris, Beckett is Irish and the lilt of the Gael runs poetically through even his laconic prose. The brooding sense of grievance, the delight in wordplay, the spellbinding gifts of the barroom raconteur: all these Irish traits are in Beckett. With Joyce, he shares an inordinate relish for puns and scatology, and a tendency to regard sex as either a joke or a sin. Like Joyce, he regards writing as a priestly vocation. Few men have invested the role of a man of letters with more dignity.

If Beckett’s art is deep, it is also narrow. The world outside his mind does not exist. The sense of place and society that saturates Joyce is missing in Beckett. Nor does he display Kafka’s piety before systems and forces outside himself which may bring him to judgment. Poet Stephen Spender speaks of Beckett’s “contempt for everyone and everything outside groping self-awareness.” In a way, that is precisely his appeal to the contemporary personality, which is almost neurotically self-concerned and incessantly practices auto-analysis. It must be said for Beckett that his self-analysis has been honest and punishing. The concluding words of The Unnamable might comprise an epigraph in courage that knits him to his task and to buffeted and bewildered men everywhere: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”