Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures 1990

by Christopher Ricks

Most people want to live forever. But there is another the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, 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 possibilities 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 unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers? Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of in clichés, which are dead but won't lie down; in a dead language and its memento mori; in words which mean their own opposites, like cleaving; and in what Beckett called a syntax of weakness.
This artful study 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.

Genres: Criticism, Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Irish Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 1993

About the author

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book-length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'.

Reviews

[Alessandro D'Onofrio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il miglior saggio critico sulla lingua di Beckett.

[David Partikian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel Backett is one of those writers with whom serious literary students can easily become obsessed. Erudite and with a recognizable but inimical prose style and bleak existential outlook, his work is an essential part of the 20th Century canon. His contribution cannot be ignored. And, if one is to study Beckett’s oeuvre with a modicum of serious intent, one must have—at the very least—some familiarity with French, Beckett’s adopted tongue and the one in which he wrote most of his novels and plays.* Beckett was his own French to English and English to French translator which makes him a rara avis. His works are not exact translations, but rewrites with an artistic license that he could claim since he, better than anyone, was aware of his own intent, even if he was slyly intent on changing it.

Christopher Rick’s 1990 compilation of four Clarendon Lectures he gave on Beckett is the finest piece of Beckett criticism that I have ever encountered. Every single Beckett quotation—and there are a couple on every page from his first group of short stories More Pricks than Kicks to his last sparse prose Stirrings Still— contains a footnote with the French or English “translation.” In its published form, Beckett’s Dying Words is a close study of Beckett’s work with particular emphasis on his precision as a translator and his “Surgical quality,” a phrase the author used to describe the eponymous protagonist Murphy in his first published novel.

Beckett’s Dying Words is a fabulous erudite study on the niceties of the language, the French language, and the pitfalls that Beckett encountered in translating his own works into his peculiar Irish English idiom. It never strays into the realm of pretension, leaving me flabbergasted that such a critic as Ricks even exists in a discipline where academic hacks readily churn out theories du jour and regurgitate them in academic projects that will never be read, fodder for tenure. Ricks writes because he is the rare critic who has something to impart. Beckett fans rejoice and make sure that you have a copy of this book on your Beckett shelves. Your reverence for Beckett shall only increase.

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*Beckett’s early short stories More Pricks than Kicks, his first novel Murphy, the completely forgettable Watt, and his play Happy Days are among the few Beckett works to initially appear in English. A couple of his short stories and the first volume in his trilogy, Molloy were translated into English by someone other than Beckett, or under Beckett’s oversight.

[jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

sigh.... i liked this a lot... sigh...... sigh..