Ceasing to describe
I’ve had a secondhand copy of Samuel Beckett’s novella Mercier and Camier for nearly eight years. I’ve opened it once, to write the date of purchase inside: Margaret Thatcher’s seventieth birthday. Keith Ridgeway, a fellow Dubliner, and author of The Parts, a new novel seeking attention, tells us that it is unjustly neglected. He means Mercier and Camier. It was written after Beckett’s famous epiphany “as he stared into the Irish sea south of Dublin in April 1946.” What was that then?
“Put simplistically he realised that his writing future lay not in the firm ground he knew over his shoulder, but in the darkness facing him, about which he knew nothing. It was time to write from the wordless inside. He would use his confusion and uncertainty where he had previously used his intellect and his wit. He would cease to describe and begin to create. Note the date. Note the bravery. He was 40 years old.”
Apparently, as M&C doesn’t quite fit the other post-epiphany books - because it is comparatively conventional - it has “annoyed Beckett scholars and biographers ever since”. Mr Ridgeway doesn’t name names or give examples, which is a pity. He goes on: “the book’s detractors certainly comfort themselves with the fact that Beckett refused permission for its publication until 1970, and did not bother translating it into English until 1974. Nevertheless, [it] remains � one of my favourite pieces of Beckett writing.” But perhaps Beckett was the best judge.
Anyway, I’m off to eat my words in order to fill up my wordless inside.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- A shift away
- New Beckett Site There�s an impressive new websit…
- I could vomit
- Krapp on Channel 4 At last Channel 4 are contin…
- Picture this, as such
