| face it: godot's not comingSamuel Beckett is one of those writers that you're supposed to like if you fancy yourself at least a tiny bit intellectual. It is thus with some shame that the LHG confesses to having sat through Waiting for Godot on two ocassions (the first time on a high school literary magazine field trip, the second time on an attempt to offer an original date to a very unlucky girl) and both times having been bored senseless. In Paris, when the play was first performed spectators rioted - it's beyond us why they even bothered. But we do like how Beckett describes his take on language:"More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the impertubability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come... when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today." |
