In the current New Republic, there’s a thorough and interesting review (by John Banville) of the first volume of Beckett’s letters. It runs to 752 pages, costs US$50 and there are to be three more volumes. Beckett stipulated that, of the 15,000 letters he wrote, only those should be printed which related to his work. An impossible brief. It looks like a very long wait for the complete correspondence, an expensive investment in the meantime, and to hell with the general reader.
The review quotes a passage which will no doubt go straight into the Beckett primers.
It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.
As Banville says, this is the kind of pronouncement that has enthralled critics of modernism and it’s gravy for the deconstructionists.
? yet reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language “best used where it is most efficiently abused”? Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?
One day, I hope, someone will be able to trace the full variety of motives for the twentieth century’s attacks on the organised and ordered word and the various goals of the attackers.
Oh, Banville gave me an idea for the next Wordability competition. Sharpen your keyboards.
