Product Description

Most people most of the time want to live for ever. But there is another truth; the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humour, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possiblities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition, an age of transplants and life-support. But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not-simply-unwelcome encroachments of death? After all, it is for the life, the vitality, of their language that we value writers. As a young man, Beckett himself praised Joyce's words. `They are alive.' Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death. In cliches, which are dead but won't lie down. In a dead language and its memento mori. In words which mean their own opposites, cleaving and cleaving. In the self-stultifying or suicidal turn, dubbed the Irish bull. In what Beckett called a syntax of weakness. This book explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer - the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142601 in Books
• Published on: 1995-02-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Sunday Telegraph
`Ricks fascinates, teases and enriches our understanding'

Review
Ricks fascinates, teases and enriches our understanding (Sunday Telegraph )

About the Author
Christopher Ricks, one of the world's foremost literary critics, is Professor of English at Boston University.

Customer Reviews

vigour mortis
On the one hand, everyone knows that Beckett's work is important. On the other, it's doubtful that even the most literary-minded of us would say that we keep a copy of 'Malone Dies' for cosy bed-time reading. Beckett is often highly demanding and after all, most of his work is devoted to a single-minded confrontation with the one thing no one wants to think about (least of all in the wee small hours). As a saturnine, black-clad undergraduate I can remember brandishing a copy of the Trilogy in a seminar (I got half-way through it) only to be told by a tutor 'That won't cheer you up!'.

One of the great joys of Christopher Ricks' marvellous book is the way that he reveals a deeper truth in Beckett's vision. Beckett offers no palliative to the reality of our own mortality other than the uncomfortable idea that the possibility of existence never ending is a far more hellish alternative. Furthermore, the sheer vigour with which Beckett uses language to explore the rigours of existence is itself a triumph.

This is not a book that digs up the hoary old chestnuts of deconstruction. For too long, Beckett has been toted in academic-circles as the patron saint of the 'words words words' school of criticism. Ricks aims a few well-aimed broadsides at the idle musings of the post-structualists, in the process showing how the tragi-comic energy of Beckett's language stems precisely from it's reference to the real.

Ricks' little study is a shining example of what criticism SHOULD be. His feel for language is pretty much unparalleled(alright, perhaps by Frank Kermode). It's testament to his brilliance that he can spend two pages teasing out the connotations of Beckett's use of parantheses AND make it an exhilirating read.

Beckett's humour is often neglected, or seen merely in the context of existentialism- here it is rarely out of the foreground. Ricks convincingly links Beckett to Swift's satirical work and spends a great deal of time toying with the absurdly antithetical definitions and etymologies of some of Beckett's word choices. The last chapter on the 'irish bull' is both fascinating and hilarious and Ricks himself can't help slipping in his own Beckettian mots justes.

It's physically a slight little book, but it's more than worth the cover price (alright - why are academic books so expensive these days?!!!). If you care about literature, this deserves a place on your shelf.