The Imaginary Museum of Samuel Beckett

I assume that all of you are here because you are interested in Samuel Beckett—Samuel Beckett’s books. And I am sure that all of you have read (at one time or another) some of these books, or seen some of the plays written by Beckett (in English or French). But I doubt that too many of you have read all the books written by Beckett (some sixty titles are on the list attached at the end of this text).

Well, I have read all these books—several times even. Read and reread them (in English and in French). I am not saying this to impress you, but simply to indicate that one must be crazy to read the entire oeuvre of Beckett. Certainly, only mad people, fanatics, would spend time reading and rereading everything Beckett has written. In Waiting for Godot—Beckett’s most celebrated play—it is said: We are all born mad. Only a few remain so. I believe I am one of those who remained mad, because for more than forty-five years I have not stopped reading and re-reading the books of Samuel Beckett, and I always imagine that others too are as mad as me, and that they too never stopped reading and re-reading Beckett.

In any case, it is with this idea in mind—with this assumption that everybody has read everything Beckett has written—that I prepared a lecture for this occasion—an extremely complicated lecture, probably boring and much too long, which explained everything Beckett wrote.

I left that complicated boring academic lecture in the form of an explication de texte in the sun of California, and instead I wrote a few notes which I have before me, and with these notes, I want to take you on a little journey, an impromptu journey through the landscapes—the somewhat devastated landscapes of Samuel Beckett’s work. Or rather, I want to take you on a visit in the imaginary museum of Samuel Beckett. For you may not know this, but Beckett was a great artist, yes a great painter. No, he did not paint with paint, he painted tableaux with words. And so I want to take you through some of Beckett’s books, not to explain what they mean, but to show you what there is to see in these books, to have you look at them somewhat like tourists look at paintings on the walls of a museum. What I want to try to show you are the great tableaux that Beckett has created for us—with words.

Normally, one explains (at least to those who are in need of explanation)—one explains a work of fiction (a novel, a story, a play) by discussing the characters. That is to say, by looking at the human condition as represented in the characters. By discussing the characters of a literary work, one usually arrives at the meaning of that work. But to discuss or analyze the beings (les êtres) of a novel or a play as if they were real, as if they were living in our world, is to deal with the work in terms of sociology and psychology, it has nothing to do with the aesthetic quality of the work. That kind of sociological and psychological explanation finally has nothing to do with literature—literature as art, I mean. Samuel Beckett was, above all, an artist. Perhaps the last of the great artists of the 20th century. The British critic, Colin Wilson, once referred to Beckett as “the last of the Mohicans.”

To speak of the unhappy condition of Beckett’s creatures, the lonely miserable condition of Gogo and Didi, Molloy, Malone, and all the other human wrecks (les épaves humaine) one encounters dans l’oeuvre de Beckett—(excuse the French intrusions, but when talking about Beckett one cannot avoid being bilingual, since he was certainly one of the greatest bilingual writers of all time). To see only the unhappy, depressing, morbid condition of the Beckettian creatures is not only indulging in sociological misérabilisme, but it is a way of ignoring...