He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a limbo purged of desire . . . If that is what is meant by going back into one’s heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies supressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off.Beckett’s first novel, written in 1932.
Published in 1992, posthumously.
— Samuel Beckett ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’
Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude
This blog published under a Creative Commons license
an ArtsJournal blog
Poor Beckett, he didn’t know about the joyous pragmatism of a life devoted to art that reaches the people, about making sure that the deepest expressions of one’s heart be designed to be merchandized. He didn’t know the value of engaging patrons and whipping them up into the enthusiasms that sell tickets. He lost the natural and healthy desire to be a crowd pleaser. Nor in his ignorance did he see the satisfactions of a successful media campaign. The poor man foolishly ignored the role celebrity and the market play in the creation and promotion of art. He was so fundamentally un-American.
And then when he became a world success, the poor fool didn’t know how to take advantage of it and dote and bask in his glory and power. In his blindness, he only saw a bunch of gobbling turkeys harassing him, as if humans were given to the mindless worship of heroes and false prophets.
Thanks. Yes, crowd-pleasing, ticket-selling entertainment and “the mindless worship of heroes and false prophets” appear to go hand in hand. “The entire mechanism by which fun is produced and communicated these days seems ever more simplistic and transparent,” Joseph Roth once pointed out, not long before Hitler’s election coup.
Living in Beckett country, meaning the bleak courtyard in Berlin which I stare into, missing only a prisoner to remind me of just how free my mind is to get lost there, disembodied, and even to enjoy it like waking up in a dream, soaked in a flood of emotions … inexpressible and incommunicable to myself or to anyone else… for many months now I have again sought his company and felt that intimate embrace, though never having read this one novel of his … I can’t wait to hit the prison guard over the head and escape into the last novel of Beckett’s that I have not read …