Words, Words, Words

Benjamin Kunkel’s New Yorker essay on Beckett dances across the page, fluttering with fancy footsteps and twirls of phrase, yet it always lands in just the right spot. It is not particularly revelatory—certainly it lacks the interpretative pyrotechnics of Tim Parks' recent NYROB piece—but it is both precisely written and a pleasure to read. Kunkel throws out a number of ideas, among them, Beckett’s vulgarity, his conscious rebellion against Joycean excess, and his constant, futile labors to escape the prisons of words and meaning. As Kunkel so eloquently states it:

Beckett’s work can lay a strong claim to universality: not everyone has a God, but who doesn’t have a Godot? Still, when it comes to exegesis, we are mostly putting words into a mouth constantly engaged in spitting them out.

What Kunkel has done so eloquently is to capture exactly the problems with--and yet also the delights of--reading and writing about Beckett. His plays are theater in vacuum, consuming meaning and ripping apart the structures that wall up around us to hold meaning together. Where post-Beckett minimalists like Mamet and Pinter infer meaning, or obscure it, Beckett simply whisks it into the void. In Beckett's alternate universe, reality is not merely falling apart—it never existed to begin with.