How
It Has Been and Continues to Be
With How
It Is/ Comment C’est
by
Samuel Beckett,
A
Novelist’s Perspective
Peter O’Neill
I will always remember reading the opening two
paragraphs of Comment c’est / How It Is for the very first time, I had
had an old Éditions de Minuit version which I had brought back with me from
Paris where I had been living from 1989 to 1995. That first year in Paris, just
before he died that Christmas, I remember travelling on the public transport
systems, particularly when travelling through the inner city, quite terrified
that I would ever meet the almost mythic writer. I hadn’t even really attempted
to read the book back then as I was still struggling to read Molloy and
I knew that Comment C’est was a work that was way beyond me, so I had
put it aside for the day when I would be ready. Little did I realise that it
wouldn’t be until 2012, when I was doing my Masters in Comparative Literature
under the guidance of Brigitte Le Juez[1],
that I would actually pick up the book again. That is a period of 23 years! I would
then spend the next several years studying the text, I eventually presented two
articles that I had written about it, the first in 2018, in Paris[2],
and the second in 2019 in my hometown of Cork. I had been invited to present a
third text at Reading University, at the Centre of Beckett Studies, but Covid
put a stop to all of that and by the time I was
invited to participate online, the following year in 2021, I had moved
onto another major influence, Charles Baudelaire.[3]
As you can see, my engagement with French literature,
or let me rephrase that, Franco-Irish Literature has been lifelong and it has
taken me to places and people that I would never have been given the
opportunity to meet if I had not first started reading Molloy back in
The Phoenix pub on the quays in Cork City, sometime back in the late eighties
when Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor, who later went onto form Gare Saint
Lazre Players Ireland [4]
were, no doubt, also busy engaging with
the works of Samuel Beckett. I should probably say something about Cork, the
city where both Judy, Conor and I all grew up, back then, and how it was in the
late eighties.
Firstly, pre-1989, the world was a very different universe,
back then. The former Soviet Union was, of course, still in place and the Cold
War was just about coming to an end. Allof this is very important to appreciate
and understand. Think of the play Catastrophe ( 1982)which was dedicated
to the Czech playwright Václav Havel and who was actually imprisoned by the
communist regime that was working hand in glove with the Soviets who had taken
over the country in the summer of 1968, after the so called Prague Spring protests
which had been ongoing. Havel, a political dissident, had written a number of
plays critical of the political situation in the country and had become even
more politically active, which led to his imprisonment. So, the fact that
Beckett was to write an entire play, Catastrophe, which treats the whole
theme of censorship, and which was dedicated to Havel just goes to show how politically
motivated Beckett was as a writer. But, when one considers his involvement with
the French Resistance during the occupation of France, in WW2, and his
subsequent flight to Roussillon ( 1942) with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, his
life-partner, and where he remained until the end of the war, one can hardly be
too surprised at the political aspect of his writing[5].
Cork, at the time, was a very poor place having been hit very hard by recession and Unemployment, something about the dark and shabby world that Beckett’s prose and plays evoked easily resonated with us back then. Of course, we all had to emigrate as there was nothing but despair for us in the Republic of Ireland back in the nineteen eighties, and this too, emigration, is a common theme of the early Beckett, think of his novel Murphy ( 1938) which portrays a typical Irish bohemian living in exile in the UK, surrounded by fellow migrants who, like him, are trying to eke out and existence.
To be continued..
[1] Le Juez, Brigitte: Beckett avant la lettre, Chez
Grasset, 2007.
I
bought a copy of this work when it first came out in 2007, I had just graduated
( I majored in philosophy as an Oscail student where I encountered the
philosopher, Cyril McDonnell, author of Heidegger’s Way Through
Phenomenology to the Question of the Meaning of Being: A Study of Heidegger’s
Philosophical Path of Thinking from 1909 to 1927, Verlag Köenigshausen-Neumann,
2015.) and on reading Brigitte Le Juez’ s work I made the decision to do my MA
with her eventually in 2011-12 in Dublin City University, it was a part time
course and I eventually graduated in 2013. I delivered my first presentation on
Beckett on the 3rd August, 2013, in University College Dublin, Joyce’s
old university and this experience formed the basis for my first novella, More
Micks than Dicks, 2017.
https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/Beckett%203%20programme.pdf
https://www.amazon.in/More-Micks-Than-Dicks-Beckettian/dp/0955685796
[3]
I was invited by the Alliance
Francaise in Dublin to organise and host the bicentenary celebrations for
the birth of Charles Baudelaire.
http://web.alliance-francaise.ie/newsletter/april21.htm
[4]
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50fe596ee4b0499abb0986a9/t/5ef32fd88dc5576f4ffff7c2/1592995801206/Symposium+Review%3A+How+It+Is+by+Samuel+Beckett+Symposium+2019+%E2%80%93+The+Beckett+Circle.pdf
[5]
There have been many essays
and books written about Beckett’s political outlooks and engagement, Hugh
Kenner’s very eloquent and insightful interpretation of Waiting for Godot,
in which he grounds the so called-abstraction of the events taking place to the
very empirical reality of life under the Gestapo in occupied France in which
Beckett experienced at first hand, is one of the most revelatory, in my
opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH92D2EwvZA
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