The Teller and the Tale Quotes

“What Beckett is dramatising here is a quite different view of the notion that man is the storytelling animal. What he is showing is that we may indeed have an innate capacity to tell stories, but that far from this being the royal road to truth it is simply a way of avoiding the truth, of avoiding the sense that something nameless is taking its course, that our lives are passing us by, that we are moving inexorably towards a death we do not understand or want and certainly do not know how to cope with.

But what does that do to the feeling that something nameless is taking its course, something that needs to be dealt with that otherwise will drive him mad? This, it seems to me, is the paradox that lies at the heart of all modern art: the need to speak of that which cannot be uttered, together with the recognition that the utterance perverts or destroys the thing that needed to be spoken of.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature and Culture