Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland
On Thursday, 13 April this year, the world will celebrate the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett.
RTÉ Radio and Television will mark the official Beckett Centenary Festival with our very own Beckett-100 celebration. Featuring an exciting line-up of special programming on television and radio, as well as a CD, book and website, RTÉ's Beckett-100 line-up will offer a comprehensive celebration of the life and writings of one of our greatest Nobel laureates.
RTÉ Television has since its foundation demonstrated an ongoing commitment to and recognition of Samuel Beckett, both as a giant of literary culture and as an artist of his time. For Beckett-100 RTÉ Television will screen Jack MacGowran's acclaimed 1966 performance in Beginning to End, as well as a selection of films from the award-winning Beckett on Film series. New commissions like the new Arts Lives film The Man Who Shot Beckett, as well as a special edition of The View presents ..., will celebrate one of the most outstanding literary artists of our time.
Meanwhile RTÉ Radio commemorates Beckett with new broadcasts exclusively produced for RTÉ Radio, archive material and a unique CD box-set of Beckett's Three Novels to be launched on 10 April. RTÉ Radio 1 in association with Gare St Lazare Players Ireland will broadcast Beckett's seven radio plays featuring David Kelly and Anna Manahan, among other leading actors. The thirteen part Thomas Davis Lecture series focuses on the work of Samuel Beckett and includes lectures by some of the foremost writers and academics studying Beckett today. This series will also be available as a book from New Island. Rattlebag, RTÉ Radio 1's daily arts programme, will broadcast Beckett specials, and Artzone on RTÉ lyric fm will celebrate Beckett and music with Bernard Clarke, and Beckett in photographs with John Minihan. John Bowman will delve into the RTÉ Radio archives to explore Beckett and Barry McGovern will introduce listeners to Beckett's Parisian friends through the 2003 documentary Beckett in Paris.
Speaking about this broad range of anniversary programming, RTÉ's Director-General, Cathal Goan, said: "Samuel Beckett is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. RTÉ's celebration, Beckett-100, will combine exciting new commissions with the best of work from the Television and Radio Archives. It is appropriate that RTÉ will mark the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth by bringing the life and work of this great artist to as wide an audience as possible - through radio and television broadcasts, CD recordings, a book, and the world-wide web."
Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin, on 13 April, 1906, the second of two sons. He graduated from Trinity College in 1927, travelling to Paris in 1928 where he lectured in English at the École Normale Supérieure. That same year he met James Joyce, the two becoming close friends almost immediately.
Beckett returned to Dublin in1930 to lecture at Trinity College, and it was there he began writing the short stories that would later comprise More Pricks Than Kicks. But, beginning to wrestle with depression, as well as a growing frustration with the teaching profession, Beckett resigned his position at Trinity in December of 1931.
He travelled again to Paris in 1932, where he completed his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and then to London. Beset by health problems and the sudden death of his father, his depression grew steadily worse.
Having studied German between1934-1936, Beckett travelled there in 1936. But witnessing numerous examples of the Nazi persecution of Jewish citizens, he left to settle permanently in Paris in 1937. It was now that Beckett began to experiment with writing in French. But with the invasion of Paris by the Nazis, Beckett quickly joined the French Resistance, passing on information regarding German military activities and positions to the Allied Forces in London. Eventually, however, Beckett was forced to take refuge in the south of France.
On his return to Paris, he began to write primarily in French, concentrating on the sound and rhythm of the words, unburdened by what he considered the distracting stylistics of English.
Beckett wrote the bulk of Molloy while staying at a villa near the Italian border in 1947, and En Attendant Godot in 1948-49. Produced by Roger Blin in 1953, in Paris, it is the first of Beckett's works to bring him widespread attention, creating controversy among critics and audiences alike. But with the success of the play, Beckett was forced to begin what would become a lifelong struggle to protect his privacy.
Krapp's Last Tape, written in early 1958, encountered huge opposition when staged in London, and followed Beckett’s own withdrawal of All That Fall from the Dublin International Theatre Festival when he learned that both an adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses, and a play by Sean O'Casey, had been censored from the festival.
But his native city did not forget him, and Beckett was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Trinity College in 1961, and married Suzanne Deschevaux-Dusmesnil later that year, and also completed Happy Days. But the ultimate award followed in 1969, when Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Tunisia when he received the telegram, Beckett was appalled, knowing that the award would bring only further intrusion.
Not I, Still, That Time, Footfalls and Ghost Trio were all written between 1972 and 1976. With his health in decline, Beckett was eventually diagnosed with emphysema in 1986 and, when his wife Suzanne died on July 17, 1989, it seemed only a mater of time before Beckett would follow.
Samuel Beckett died on December 22, 1989, and was buried at Montparnasse, in Paris. Molloy is less a novel than a set of two monologues narrated by Molloy and his pursuer Moran. In the first half of the work, the dying Molloy describes how he lost everything, including the use of his legs, on his journey in search of his mother. The petty bureaucrat Moran assumes the narrative voice in the second half, describing his hunt for Molloy, which leaves him crippled and just as destroyed as his quarry.Both halves of the book display Beckett's black humour and despairing outlook, as well as literary techniques that became characteristic of his work. Molloy's remarks, for example, reveal his uncertain memory: "It was winter, it must have been winter. . . . Perhaps it was only autumn." The sense of the absurd that marks Beckett's dramatic works is also present, notably in the narrator's--and the reader's--questioning the existence and truth of the story itself. Molloy and Moran are variations of a single centre-less persona, who appears elsewhere in the trilogy as Malone, Macmann, and Mahood. Molloy was Beckett's first major writing in French. Critics noted its sardonic relation to Homer's Odyssey and described Beckett's 1952 absurdist play Waiting for Godot as its fitting successor
MALONE DIES
This novel was originally written in French as Malone meurt (1951) and translated by the author into English. It is the second narrative in the trilogy that began with Molloy (1951) and concluded with The Unnamable (1953). The novel's narrator, Malone, is dying. He spends his time writing an inventory of his meagre possessions, a description of his condition, and stories about a character that is clearly an aspect of himself. Malone's fictional character, like Malone himself, is in an asylum. Malone cannot keep track of his character's name, and that fact that he struggles to tell his character's story can be viewed as a satire on the creative process as well as an attempt to understand the essence of the self.
THE UNNAMABLE
The Unnamable, published in French as L'Innommable in 1953, was translated by the author into English. It is the third in a trilogy of prose narratives that began with Molloy (1951) and Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies), published together in English as Three Novels (1959). Lacking any plot in the conventional sense, The Unnamable furthers the general focus of the trilogy--the search for the self within the tragic realm of human suffering.
The obsessive narrator--who opens the novel asking, "Where now? Who now? When now?"--is a disembodied person, living in a large jar in a restaurant window in Paris. The narrator is not sure where he is, who he is or why he is. He might have just died and found himself in another world, but it hardly matters. He changes his name (from Mahood to Worm and Basil), calls others by different names, imagines episodes, remembers events, speculates about the future. The final sentence in the novel is a long dramatic monologue. The narrator concludes with the desire to continue living despite an inescapable sense of anguish and entropy: "I can't go on, I'll go on."The tone changes from storytelling to desperate panic. It is one of the most compulsive voices in literature and will be brought to life by actor Barry McGovern here.
