Samuel Beckett's biographer donates hours of taped conversation with writer to Reading's archive
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- Listen to Samuel Beckett’s authorised biographer, Prof. James Knowlson, as he talks about his donation of more than seven hours of taped conversations with the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, novelist and poet to Reading’s Beckett Collection.
The collection, managed by the Beckett International Foundation alongside the University of Reading, is the largest archive relating to Samuel Beckett in the world, preserving the legacy of one of the 21st Century’s greatest writers.
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I hope these recordings become public and not hidden away in an archive. Many people would enjoy hearing Beckett speak on a personal basis.
Incredible. I was only reading one of Knowlson’s books on Beckett this past week. It would be a joy to have some of these recording digitised and shared online.
A great scholar of one of the greatest writers. We owe him a great debt for his work on Beckett and setting up an invaluable archive.
I just read Beckett's biography and it was amazing!
How can we hear the recordings?
In Samuel Beckett’s great work, WAITING FOR GODOT, there happens this small incident. Ponder over it
Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are on stage. They are there to wait - just as everybody else in the world is waiting - nobody knows exactly for what. Everybody is waiting, hoping that something is going to happen: today it has not happened, tomorrow it is going to happen. This is the human mind: today is being wasted, but it hopes that tomorrow something is going to happen. And those two tramps are sitting under a tree and waiting… waiting for Godot.
Nobody knows exactly who this Godot is. The word sounds like God, but it only sounds, and in fact the gods you are waiting for are all Godots. These two tramps are there just to wait. What they are waiting for is the coming of a man, Godot, who is expected to provide them with shelter and sustenance. Meanwhile, they try to make time pass with small talk, jokes, games, and minor quarrels….That’s what your life is: one is engaged meanwhile with small things. The great thing is going to happen tomorrow. Godot will come tomorrow. Today one is quarrelling - the wife with the husband, the husband with the wife. Small things, ’small talk, jokes, games… tedium and emptiness’.
Today, that’s what everybody is feeling: tedium, emptiness….’Nothing to be done’ is the refrain that rings again and again…. They say again and again ’Nothing to be This play of Samuel Beckett, WAITING FOR GODOT, IS very essentially Taoist.… In the midst of the first act, two strangers - Pozzo and Lucky storm onto the stage. Pozzo seems to be a man of affluence; Lucky, the servant, is being driven to a nearby market to be sold. Pozzo tells the tramps about Lucky’s virtues the most remarkable of which is that he can THINK. To show them, Pozzo snaps his whip and commands ’Think!’ and there follows a long, hysterically incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion until the three others hurl themselves on him and silence him.
What is your thinking? What are you saying when you say ’I am thinking’? It is a ’hysterically incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion’… until death comes and silences you. What is your whole thinking? What can you think? What is there to think? And through thinking how can one arrive at truth? Thinking cannot deliver truth. Truth is an experience, and the experience happens only when thinking is no longer there Tao says that theology is not going to help, philosophy is not going to help, logic is not going to help, reason is not going to help. You can go on thinking and thinking, and it will be nothing but invention - the pure invention of human mind to hide its own stupidity. And then you can go on and on, one dream can lead into another and that other dream can lead you into another… dream within dream within dream that’s what all philosophy, theology is."