Beckett’s work has become increasingly topical. Over the past six
months, comparisons between the British government’s Brexit negotiations
and Endgame have cropped up regularly in the press, and Waiting for Godot
has been staged at the Irish border between the counties of Cavan and
Fermanagh. Prior to that, Beckett’s canonical plays on stasis, inaction
and circularity were regularly evoked in accounts of the Syrian Civil
War and articles describing the endless plight of Syrian refugees. And
prior to that, the idea that ‘this’ – any international crisis or
difficult episode in European or American politics – ‘is like Waiting for Godot’
provided many journalists with some convenient one-liners. Everyone is
waiting, nothing happens, and no one knows what to do: who else but
Beckett can help us think about that?
The great paradox is that,
on the surface, there seems to be little about Beckett’s work that might
enable us to think about politics. His texts deal with uncertainty,
displacement and postponement – ideas that are not easily compatible
with other types of writing that openly define themselves as political.
He has long been thought of as someone who had a deeply abstract way of
thinking and was only interested in pure philosophical problems, rather
than the problems of the world in which he lived. However, to many among
his acquaintances, he came across rather differently: as someone who
had an instinctive and deep understanding of pain and suffering, and as
someone who knew that times of genuine political tension also bring to
light many otherwise hidden truths. He was deeply interested in those
moments when what appears to be the set course of history is overturned,
and witnessed many such moments over the course of his lifetime.
To
some, the situations represented in his work – in his plays in
particular – can seem divorced from any recognisable reality. To others,
however, the situations of torture, dispossession and subjugation that
Beckett’s work depicts are intimately familiar, and its insights into
the importance of memory, courage and solidarity are unrivalled. When
war and conflict edge closer, Beckett’s writing becomes strangely real
and visceral. Many across the world have seen, and continue to see, deep
and immediate political resonances in a body of work revolving around
ruins, ashes, mud and stones, around waiting and suffering, and around
terror, devastation, internment and forced exile.
The political knowledge that the work carries is a political
knowledge that Beckett acquired in the hard way, through experience and
observation. The wars and severe political convulsions that made modern
Europe shaped his worldview, and he had an unusually extended knowledge
of what war does to nations and to peoples. The key themes in his
writing – violence, exploitation, dispossession – are politically
profound, yet the writing itself doesn’t conform with what is normally
expected of openly politicised literature. We can’t expect to find
directly identifiable, unambiguous representations of real events in
Beckett. What we get are evocations, layers, suggestions, echoes,
cultural ciphers, lone allusions. It is clear from the manner in which
he wrote that he sought inspiration in the world he knew, and that the
political tensions and tragedies that he witnessed were often what
inspired him to write in the first place; yet, at the same time, he
actively wrote all of this out, and avoided describing specific events
directly.
His experience of political history was unusually
extensive and unusually direct. He witnessed the impact of the Irish
Civil War and the Irish War of Independence in his childhood and early
youth, and gained first-hand exposure to Nazi Germany’s belligerent
rhetoric in adulthood. During the Second World War, he experienced Nazi
occupation in wartime France and contributed to the war effort and to
the work of resistance networks, translating military information for a
French resistance cell under the command of the British SOE. There were
other Irish nationals working for French resistance cells, but he is the
only Irish writer to have fought so directly in an anti-Nazi resistance
movement. The resistance cell was wiped out following a denunciation;
Beckett escaped but other members of the group – over a hundred of them –
were caught and shot or deported to the Nazi camps. He remained haunted
by what had happened around him. He never bragged about what he had
achieved, however. When he was asked why he had joined the French
Resistance, he simply said that he ‘couldn’t stand [by] with [his] arms
folded’. For the rest of his life, he followed the same principle: he
observed what was taking place around him and took action when he could,
without drawing attention to himself or seeking to claim credit for his
actions. Wars followed one another; in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
he followed the political debates ignited by the Algerian War of
Independence attentively, registering some of these tensions in his
texts from the period, and he supported his French editor, who was a
close collaborator and friend, through hard times, through censorship
and through struggles with the courts. ... [mehr] https://iai.tv/articles/becketts-political-imagination-auid-1205
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