Sunday, April 15, 2012

Awaiting Godot

I'm feeling snakebit some. For the few dedicated readers of "I Witness," I hate not posting at least one new piece each week, but I now have a pinched nerve or similar problem in my tailbone region, which makes walking, sitting at the computer, even thinking consecutively... a bloomin' series of unpleasantnesses.

I hope to regain comfort and commentary soon, but for now I invite anyone with a residual interest in French Existentialism--so popular and so dominant on campuses in the Fifties and Sixties--to seek out and savor (with savoir faire yet) Adam Gopnik's so-cool assessment of Albert Camus and that circle of post-War Sartre-orial thinkers, said essay to be found in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker.

I came away from reading Gopnik wondering about something else, not mentioned but pertinent: Where did Irish expatriate, Resistence fighter, and knotty, stubborn, struggling novelist Samuel Beckett fit in to this no-exit, hell-is-other-folks crowd of strangers? Was Godot (and all that came after) somehow the result of that Irish-French contact?

I'll be here, waiting for answers. (I can't go on, I must go on.)

2 comments:

Steve Provizer said...

Very sorry to hear of your physical travails and hope you're back at it soon.

I read the Camus piece and liked it. I don't know how Beckett fits into the puzzle, but for zany postulating on a previous batch of literati, I enjoyed Stoppard's "Travesties."

IWitnessEd said...

Thanks for comment and good thoughts. Stoppard is indeed wonderful; descendant of some unholy menage-a-trois involving Beckett, Whosit (French playwright who penned Rhinocerous), and Shakespeare & Co.--a bounced Czech as it were. Meanwhile Beckett and Sartre did have slight contact, but no word (parole, that is) for Camus, ever the enigmatic Outsider.