In terms of generational correlates, in this transitional modern-postmodern generation, you mentioned Borges, but I wonder if there isn't a parallel here to Nabokov, too. I can only speak to Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, from VN's own golden streak in the fifties, but each of those features a central character (Lo, Pnin, Hazel) who is annihilated, stripped down to mere existence, only the faint evidence of a suffering life poking up through a snowstorm of some tyrant's verbiage, and whose only revenge is to, in some sense, go on (which Pnin manages completely, Lo incompletely, Hazel not at all). That reduction of novelistic character into an abject, objectified sufferer has resonances with Beckett, to me, although maybe Beckett is overall more hopeful, depicting the actual suffering life instead of just the grave piled over it. (You could probably draw a political distinction there, the Russian noble guilty but not able to actually enter the consciousness of the downtrodden the way the earthy middle-class Irishman can, etc.)
Yes, that's a great comparison (and contrast)! I think Beckett, Nabokov, and Borges are sometimes grouped as the contemporaneous global trio marking the modernist-postmodernist divide. Since you covered Nabokov, I'll say that I prefer Borges's mode of "overcoming" the novel both realist and modernist (if this has to be done, and it doesn't) to Beckett's: turning fiction into brief and elegant philosophical experiments on Platonic/Cartesian themes rather than interminably dramatizing the terminal agonies of the cogito.
Assuming I’ve guessed the antifeminist correctly, yes one wonders. She got in twenty years early on the gender critical stuff too! I’ve read more of Beckett’s novels than his drama, and I like those without quite loving them. It’s actually an almost perfect mirror of my relationship with Joyce-there is a humanity that I love, and yet the style becomes so extreme as to be nearly unendurable. The best Joyce is better than Beckett, but I’d rather read the trilogy than Ulysses, let alone Finnegans Wake He is absolutely a writer of the desolation of the European mind after the early 20th century, of there being nothing left to do but play mental games with yourself and your past because philosophy ended with Heidegger and literature with Joyce-I like “I can’t go on. I’ll go on ” inas much as I understand it to mean trying to be something other than the merely animal inhabitant of Hegel/Kojève’s end of history, but I see why it annoys you. Oddly who he really reminds me of are the great South and central American writers of the second half of the 20th century, who I think perhaps slightly more successfully with the same post Joycean (read Near to the Wild Heart!) subject matter.
I'd probably rather read the trilogy than Finnegans Wake, but I'll take Ulysses over both! Bloom (Harold not Leopold) agrees with you, though: he said Beckett wrote the best prose of the 20th century. I basically reject the whole end-of-history/literature/philosophy premise and think it's based on an over-estimation of the existential certitude exhibited in both books and real life before the 20th century. Even Hegel can be read as more conflicted and ambiguous than the "Hegel" stereotype. George Steiner has proposed that it was the 19th century in Europe that was unusual in its relative—only relative—stability, not the 20th with its more historically typical chaos. The technological situation certainly changed in extreme ways for both better and worse by the time of the world wars, but Shakespeare and Cervantes are already "postmodern." Therefore it's fine to appreciate Beckett (or Lispector or whomever) for their "minimal" response to these pressures, but I think modern and contemporary writers with a more "maximally" artistic and heroic ethos are just as legitimate, and generally more appealing to me. I'm glad to hear that Beavis and Butthead are also still "going on"!
Lispector I think is very different from Beckett, but it’s the same kind of straddling late and postmodern conditions. Yes, I probably do agree: it’s a basically philosophical problem transposed too broadly onto literature (all philosophers should be novelists or painters or something so they can come back down from the world of forms occasionally) where whether Steiner is right or not, post-Austenian realism is the exception. Yeah there was a short lived reboot when I was in my teens -I believe they commented on Jersey Shore instead of music videos (remember Jersey Shore?) and now there’s yet another. Supposedly it’s good? I haven’t watched.
I did watch the Jersey Shore era reboot, but didn't realize it had come back again. I liked it but thought they'd become a little too knowing, the material beneath even them.
In terms of generational correlates, in this transitional modern-postmodern generation, you mentioned Borges, but I wonder if there isn't a parallel here to Nabokov, too. I can only speak to Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, from VN's own golden streak in the fifties, but each of those features a central character (Lo, Pnin, Hazel) who is annihilated, stripped down to mere existence, only the faint evidence of a suffering life poking up through a snowstorm of some tyrant's verbiage, and whose only revenge is to, in some sense, go on (which Pnin manages completely, Lo incompletely, Hazel not at all). That reduction of novelistic character into an abject, objectified sufferer has resonances with Beckett, to me, although maybe Beckett is overall more hopeful, depicting the actual suffering life instead of just the grave piled over it. (You could probably draw a political distinction there, the Russian noble guilty but not able to actually enter the consciousness of the downtrodden the way the earthy middle-class Irishman can, etc.)
Yes, that's a great comparison (and contrast)! I think Beckett, Nabokov, and Borges are sometimes grouped as the contemporaneous global trio marking the modernist-postmodernist divide. Since you covered Nabokov, I'll say that I prefer Borges's mode of "overcoming" the novel both realist and modernist (if this has to be done, and it doesn't) to Beckett's: turning fiction into brief and elegant philosophical experiments on Platonic/Cartesian themes rather than interminably dramatizing the terminal agonies of the cogito.
Assuming I’ve guessed the antifeminist correctly, yes one wonders. She got in twenty years early on the gender critical stuff too! I’ve read more of Beckett’s novels than his drama, and I like those without quite loving them. It’s actually an almost perfect mirror of my relationship with Joyce-there is a humanity that I love, and yet the style becomes so extreme as to be nearly unendurable. The best Joyce is better than Beckett, but I’d rather read the trilogy than Ulysses, let alone Finnegans Wake He is absolutely a writer of the desolation of the European mind after the early 20th century, of there being nothing left to do but play mental games with yourself and your past because philosophy ended with Heidegger and literature with Joyce-I like “I can’t go on. I’ll go on ” inas much as I understand it to mean trying to be something other than the merely animal inhabitant of Hegel/Kojève’s end of history, but I see why it annoys you. Oddly who he really reminds me of are the great South and central American writers of the second half of the 20th century, who I think perhaps slightly more successfully with the same post Joycean (read Near to the Wild Heart!) subject matter.
I'd probably rather read the trilogy than Finnegans Wake, but I'll take Ulysses over both! Bloom (Harold not Leopold) agrees with you, though: he said Beckett wrote the best prose of the 20th century. I basically reject the whole end-of-history/literature/philosophy premise and think it's based on an over-estimation of the existential certitude exhibited in both books and real life before the 20th century. Even Hegel can be read as more conflicted and ambiguous than the "Hegel" stereotype. George Steiner has proposed that it was the 19th century in Europe that was unusual in its relative—only relative—stability, not the 20th with its more historically typical chaos. The technological situation certainly changed in extreme ways for both better and worse by the time of the world wars, but Shakespeare and Cervantes are already "postmodern." Therefore it's fine to appreciate Beckett (or Lispector or whomever) for their "minimal" response to these pressures, but I think modern and contemporary writers with a more "maximally" artistic and heroic ethos are just as legitimate, and generally more appealing to me. I'm glad to hear that Beavis and Butthead are also still "going on"!
Lispector I think is very different from Beckett, but it’s the same kind of straddling late and postmodern conditions. Yes, I probably do agree: it’s a basically philosophical problem transposed too broadly onto literature (all philosophers should be novelists or painters or something so they can come back down from the world of forms occasionally) where whether Steiner is right or not, post-Austenian realism is the exception. Yeah there was a short lived reboot when I was in my teens -I believe they commented on Jersey Shore instead of music videos (remember Jersey Shore?) and now there’s yet another. Supposedly it’s good? I haven’t watched.
I did watch the Jersey Shore era reboot, but didn't realize it had come back again. I liked it but thought they'd become a little too knowing, the material beneath even them.
Glad to see I will not be the only one working through a complicated/ambiguous relationship with Joyce in the coming weeks.
Anyway you shouldn’t apologize, Beavis & Butthead has been revived a truly odd number of times-there’s a version of it airing now!!