Samuel Beckett - Life and works, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Samuel Beckett - Life and works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! SAMUEL BECKETT Samuel Beckett, the Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright, was born on 13 April of 1906 in Dublin. He studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College, and graduated in 1927. In 1928 Beckett went to Paris to work as an English teacher. There he met and became friend with James Joyce. He then travelled in Britain, France and Germany, writing stories and finding occasional jobs. Beckett returned to Paris in 1937 and met Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil who became his lifelong companion and wife. He began his literary career as a short-stories writer, but his international reputation was established by his plays. Samuel Beckett was one of a group of dramatists, who developed the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd”. The group’s common basic belief was that man’s life appears to be meaningless and purposeless and that human beings cannot communicate and understand each other. Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (1952) was the first play in this style. Ireland was a neutral country during the Second World War and Beckett was allowed to remain in Paris. He fought with the French Resistance until 1942; when members of his group were arrested by the Gestapo and he was obliged to flee. In the 1960s his successful plays led to a career as a theatre director. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but did not accept it personally as he did no wish to make a speech at the ceremony. In the 1970s and 1980s he continued to wr living in a small house near Paris where he could devote himself to writing and avoiding publicity. In the late 1980s, he suffered serious health problems and lived in a small room in a nursing home where he died in December 1989. Poetic and style Beckett obsessively explores the inconsistency and fallacy of the modern world through a series of themes —> the most important of which are: • the negation of time: a growing sense of timelessness surrounds and traps Beckett's characters, who seem to have no past and no future. Their existence happens in the endless present of the contemporary age, which is characterised by the obsessive repetitions of actions, empty gestures and meaningless cliches and dialogues. • the problem of perception: many of Beckett's characters are obsessed with the idea that they can be sure of their existence only if someone perceives them and their actions. The fear of non-existence stands at the core of the characters' obsession with never-ending dialogues or monologues —> whose aim is not to communicate, but to give them the certainty that they exist. • the idea of imprisonment: the repetitions of actions, words and clichés that characterise many of Beckett's plays give the audience the idea that modern life is like a prison and that human beings are like 'actors' condemned to play a part until the end. One of Beckett's main concerns was language and its power to convey meaning. Beckett's characters explore all the expressive possibilities offered by language: they use all kinds of styles, repetitions, high and low terms and even silence, in a desperate attempt to find a way to establish a form of true communication. However, what they come up with is the idea that language is fragmented, meaningless, and totally unable to express any meaning. In Becketts universe, language thus becomes a means to express the meaninglessness of life. Another significant aspect of Beckett's experimentation with language regards the language he chose to write his dramatic and non-dramatic works: after writing most of his best works in French, a language he knew very well, Beckett self-translated them into English only at a later stage. This is highly significant because—> for Beckett language was a mask, a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the real things (or the Nothingness) behind it. His experimentations with both French and English represent his attempt to go beyond language and to explore the expressive means of both languages. The bilingualism of Beckett's plays also increases and multiplies the ways his plays can be read and staged and makes it almost impossible to define their meaning in an unequivocal way. Beckett would translate his French originals into English in a literal manner so that the meaning of some idiomatic French phrases was lost on English-speaking audiences, producing texts that were more indefinite and vaguer. Waiting for Godot (1952) Originally written in French, Beckett's first play was first published in 1952 with the title “En attendant Godot”, and later translated by the author and published in English as “Waiting for Godot”. It tells the very simple story of two men, Vladimir and Estragon, who call each other Gogo and Didi, and who meet near a tree in an unspecified place in the country. We discover that they are waiting for a man called Godot. Two men enter: Pozzo who is going to market to sell his slave, Lucky. Pozzo stops to talk for a while and Lucky entertains the men by dancing. Pozzo and Lucky leave and a boy appears bringing a message for Vladimir. He tells him that Godot will not come tonight but will surely come tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon decide to leave but as the curtain falls on the first act they do not move. Act Two is similar. The next night Vladimir and Estragon wait by the same tree. Lucky and Pozzo return, but now Lucky is dumb and Pozzo is blind. Pozzo does not remember meeting the two men the day before. The messenger boy returns. He insists that he did not speak to Vladimir the day before and tells the two men that Godot will not come that night. Once again Vladimir and Estragon: decide to leave but yet again they do not move as the curtain falls and the play ends. Waiting for Godot is one of the most shocking and revolutionary works of theatre ever composed and contributed to giving its author planetary fame. It is also a very difficult play to classify. Beckett subtitled it as a 'tragicomedy in two acts'. —> The play is full of tragic and comic elements: • what makes it a tragedy is the idea that life is nothing but an endless and vain waiting for something to happen; • what makes it a comedy is the series of gags that the two main characters enact to kill their time while they vainly wait for Godot to come. The play shows all the features that are typical of Beckett's dramatic production: it has no real plot, it is extremely essential; it is obsessed with the idea of the passing of time and the meaning of life; its language is fragmented and broken.