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Samuel Beckett's work harbors an inevitable complicity with traditional
modes and values. His idealist and even nihilist inclinations, for
example, are closely related to the abstracting and systematizing
tendencies that have predominated in Western thinking. His drama
and fiction, in reproducing these tendencies, also help to reinforce
and legitimate them. Beckett's work can thus be said to encourage
an attitude of stoic resignation or life-denying withdrawal.
Beckett's Critical Complicity reveals an important countertendency.
In examining Beckett's art and literary criticism, his novel Murphy,
plays Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, his only film venture and the
late story The Lost Ones, Sylvie Debevec Henning shows that through
a variety of double-voiced techniques-irony, parody, and satire-Beckett
also brings a powerful critical light to bear upon our culture's
repeated attempts to reduce or eliminate the more problematic aspects
of existence and even mocks our desire to do so. His disquieting
and occasionally uproarious interweaving of contradictory perspectives-somber
and carnivalized, established and contestatory-suggests that suffering
and anguish are fundamental to life, while it affirms their relation
to playful laughter and creative vigor within a richer, if less
settled, cultural context.
Drawing upon the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida,
and particularly Bakhtin, Henning argues that Beckett's profound
critique of the Western intellectual tradition does not necessarily
entail the loss of all positive values and beliefs. On the contrary,
his use of carnivalesque and dialogized modes signals a revitalizing
capacity that has not been fully appreciated.
This book won the 1987 Midwest Modern Language Association Book
Award.
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