"Why this farce, day after day?"

Samuel Brustein’s Chronicle Book Review essay on Beckett is excellent—a great companion to the Beckett pieces I previously mentioned by Benjamin Kunkel and Tim Parks. There are many notable ideas in the essay—especially notable are Brustein’s observation on Beckett’s finicky, controlling attitude toward productions of his work—but what most interested me was a single line: “That this most solitary and unengaged of writers should have chosen the most social of the arts as his favored medium is also anomalous.”

Brustein’s point is that for someone so prone to solitude it’s somewhat surprising that he should choose an art so dependent on social interaction and collaboration. This might follow in some sense, but I think there’s another way to look at it. Individuals who are smart, verbal, and curious about the human condition but not especially gifted with social interaction often turn to narrative in general and drama in specific because it allows them to experience, or even create and experiment with, social interaction in a controlled environment. Drama, whether reading it, writing it, or performing in it, acts as a safe place for solitary individuals to explore how people interact without having to actually blunder through the sometimes-painful process of actually interacting.

Beckett, clearly, was hyperaware of both his own longings to communicate and the difficulty and artificiality of doing so. Sensitivity such as his often leads to a painful understanding—and confusion with—the repetitive, dull customs of interaction that dominate so much conversation. Much of what made his work so consistently fascinating was the way he stripped away the artifice of everyday chatter to reveal its terrible emptiness.

His obsession with controlling every aspect of the performances of his works speaks to this as well. Beckett’s awareness led him to understand the flaws and frailties in human interaction, but writing plays allowed him both to expose that and to control it as he could not in real life. As such, performance had to be highly controlled as well. The stage, then, was a place where this “solitary and unengaged writer” could escape from his solitude and disengagement, but only insofar as the performances did not reflect anything his solitary, disengaged mind could not have generated on its own.