Cormac McCarthy HATED Samuel Beckett .
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- čas přidán 25. 09. 2023
- Cormac McCarthy did not like Samuel Beckett and had some rare choice words about him. After we discuss the tea, however, I will talk about how Samuel Beckett did influence Cormac McCarthy!
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McCarthy seems to have taken himself a little too seriously. Beckett's work, while permeated with humour, actually goes to depths of darkness that could be argued to go (and cut) deeper than even something like Blood Meridian. To put off Beckett as "not serious enough" indicates not having put much effort into attempting to process his body of work
Yeah, he said that part earlier in his career I think as a way to distance himself from his influence (anxiety of influence?) - However, at the later stages of career when he wanted to reinvent himself again with The Road/Stella Maris Beckett was an obvious choice. Take what worked before but add the scientific darkness to it.
@@WriteConscious good point
@@jamescareyyatesIII Beckett was very far from politically correct. Read his novels, they are full of obscenities (in a humorous way). People who say he is just cold and didactic haven't actually engaged themselves with his work, but just repeat what scholars have interpreted into it.
Agreed, Malone Dies, by Becket, is a great example
Beckett is not the most hopeless writer though he is often said to be.
‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on…’
McCarthy is more hopeless but is he a greater writer?
It’s part of Beckett’s religiosity and reverence for the canon, plus his experience of the grandiose nihilism of both fascists and communists in his lifetime to reject a similar nihilism in his own work.
It is the luxury of McCarthy’s time (a time won by the heroism of men and women of Beckett’s generation) to accommodate a hopeless art which former hopeless times could not afford.
I've only read Malone Dies and I thoroughly enjoyed it
given what mccarthy had said in the past re: stories/novels that aren't directly concerned with life and death, it would make sense that he might find beckett somewhat tedious. i'm a huge beckett fan who has read most of his major long form novels (the trilogy, WATT, MURPHY, HOW IT IS) and IMO i think he is unquestionably one of the greatest writers ever. though his style is a bit unorthodox and his odd sense of humor is definitely an acquired taste, if you can find the right headspace, his books are simply unlike anything else. even if his characters often spend incalculable amounts of time contemplating the very existence of reality under often baffling and nonsensical circumstances, there is something entirely strange and literally indescribable about the ways in which his characters are often hyper focused on literally nothing at all. on the surface it can seem like "nothing is happening" but i think the very opposite is true: EVERYTHING is happening all the time, beckett as the author is simply trying to find a way of making sense of it all by essentially negating the physical and embracing the cerebral aspects of it instead.
consider beckett's novel HOW IT IS. the book is basically about a naked man crawling through an endless field of mud on his stomach, his mind barely holding on as he remembers his past and attempts to force himself to find a reason of going on even though there is NOTHING left. though almost nothing seems to technically happen beyond his labored movements, every single line of text devoted to describing his arduous journey feels incredibly expansive and every moment that comes to the character's broken mind offers the reader an opportunity to wonder about what it is specifically that makes us want to hang on when we are faced with the drudgery, toil, and inherent meaninglessness of modern life. whereas CM likes to actively describe the actions of his characters as they traverse whatever dilemma they must overcome without much time given to their musings, SB basically does the opposite; for him the acts themselves don't really matter, it is the actual desire or urge of the character to find the will power to go on that ultimately seems to drive his prose. it would definitely not be a stretch to imagine CM not being overly invested in such a stylistic divergence from his much more demanding and involved writing methods, though IMO there are still some undeniable parallels between the two writers, especially in regards to how much both of them seem to concern themselves with creating characters who simply go on living regardless of what happens to them.
on a sidenote, i think SUTTREE is easily the most beckett-like of all of CM's books and yes, you are completely correct in pointing out how deeply hilarious it actually is when compared to the rest of his novels.
Beckett's stage props can appear frivolous on the surface, but once you seep into his prose deeply enough he'll have you continually reassessing your very existence.
His short story 'The Lost Ones' is probably THE litmus test for anyone who thinks they've got what it takes to put words on a page for a living. Try writing something of that complexity without the use of commas. The dude was an extraterrestrial.
I say this as someone whose two favourite authors are Beckett and McCarthy.
Beckett was a novelist who emulated his mentor James Joyce. He wrote "Waiting For Godot" as an exercise to get away from writing novels and its success was more about the trends in post-war European theater than anything he could have predicted. Beckett then went on to ride the wave of commercial success as a playwright, because he had little choice upon reaching middle age, having had minimal success as a novelist. In some ways, Beckett's novels may have been closer to David Foster Wallace than Cormac McCarthy. I suggest reading "The Unnamable" to note the comparison.
That's weird because my chief critique of Cormac is his ostentatious, arty, and anachronistic prose style.
Would love to see you breakdown McCarthy’s comment on Proust. There’s a quote out there how much he didn’t understand Henry James or Proust.
Prousts interiority vs McCarthy’s anti psychology
Henry James is an interesting one because they are both known for meticulous sentences. Again it might just be a psychological style.
I just think it’s interesting he even makes that division
Great video idea!
That's funny. Beckett and McCarthy are my favorites.
Beckett was serious about life being a bit of an absurd joke in a way. it didn't mean he wasn't sincere. His humor was very Irish.
Watt and Murphy are good novels by Beckett. He wrote Watt when he was on the run in WW2
@1:30 "... read correctly..." is funny, gave me a chuckle. You mean " read sincerely", no?
I love Beckett's novels. I never read his plays.
Watt is certainly "arch" and very surreal, full of weird wordplay and surrealism. I'd call it a schizo-mystical text. It works its way into weird beautiful moments.
Murphy is MUCH more readable, a true tragiccomic novel, and beautiful. I relate to it like no other novel TBH, the kind of psychology that it lovingly explores, and the sympathy it evokes for freaks.
I haven't read the post-war trilogy yet.
Cool! Thanks for sending me over here.
McCarthy wrote about the same things as Beckett did, but he didn't use he lense of absurdity to do it. He still used humor at times when it was right for the character, but he took the shit show that is life very seriously.
As it should be taken!
"In Samuel Beckett’s great work, WAITING FOR GODOT, there happens this small incident. Ponder over it
Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are on stage. They are there to wait - just as everybody else in
the world is waiting - nobody knows exactly for what. Everybody is waiting, hoping that something
is going to happen: today it has not happened, tomorrow it is going to happen. This is the human
mind: today is being wasted, but it hopes that tomorrow something is going to happen. And those
two tramps are sitting under a tree and waiting… waiting for Godot.
Nobody knows exactly who this Godot is. The word sounds like God, but it only sounds, and in
fact the gods you are waiting for are all Godots.
These two tramps are there just to wait. What they are waiting for is the coming of a man, Godot,
who is expected to provide them with shelter and sustenance. Meanwhile, they try to make time
pass with small talk, jokes, games, and minor quarrels….
That’s what your life is: one is engaged meanwhile with small things. The great thing is going
to happen tomorrow. Godot will come tomorrow. Today one is quarrelling - the wife with the
husband, the husband with the wife. Small things, ’small talk, jokes, games… tedium and emptiness’.
Today, that’s what everybody is feeling: tedium, emptiness….’Nothing to be done’ is the refrain that
rings again and again…. They say again and again ’Nothing to be
This play of Samuel Beckett, WAITING FOR GODOT, IS very essentially Taoist.
… In the midst of the first act, two strangers - Pozzo and Lucky storm onto the stage. Pozzo seems
to be a man of affluence; Lucky, the servant, is being driven to a nearby market to be sold. Pozzo
tells the tramps about Lucky’s virtues the most remarkable of which is that he can THINK. To show
them, Pozzo snaps his whip and commands ’Think!’ and there follows a long, hysterically incoherent
monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion
until the three others hurl themselves on him and silence him.
What is your thinking? What are you saying when you say ’I am thinking’? It is a ’hysterically
incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle
in confusion’… until death comes and silences you. What is your whole thinking? What can you
think? What is there to think? And through thinking how can one arrive at truth? Thinking cannot
deliver truth. Truth is an experience, and the experience happens only when thinking is no longer there
Tao says that theology is not going to help, philosophy is not going to help, logic is not going
to help, reason is not going to help. You can go on thinking and thinking, and it will be nothing but
invention - the pure invention of human mind to hide its own stupidity. And then you can go on and
on, one dream can lead into another and that other dream can lead you into another… dream within
dream within dream that’s what all philosophy, theology is."
Beckett is a titan, he has firm narration and almost a continuum of perfect prose. The problem is all his stories are the same POV.
This makes reading him a bit schizo-experience. Burroughs said he preferred Proust, and in a way I agree.
Btw, Borges really respected & talked for hours on CZcams about Joyce.
Borges 🙌
What do you mean "read correctly"?
Reading out in the Desert with lucid perception
@@WriteConscious your videos are gold man.
Haven't read McCarthy yet, nor Beckett for that matter. But it seems to me that McCarthy's dislike for Beckett, or at least, distrust, stems from the Joyce-Faulkner divide in the Shakespearean novelistic tradition. Joyce and Faulkner are both deeply Shakespearean novelists, but each of them definitely prefers a particular side of Shakespeare's heritage, to the (relative) detriment of the other sides: for Joyce, it's the visionary-cosmic comedies, and for Faulkner, the gnostic-cosmic tragedies. The 20th century being the century it was, both Beckett and McCarthy got to radicalize the philosophical premises of their respective literary fathers: Beckett in the nihilistic-absurdist comedy genre, and McCarthy in the gnostic-tragedy genre, with a darkness and terror and despair which were beyond even Faulkner's personality and material circumstances. So this could be another example of Harold Bloom's insight that writers tend to be more aggressive and critical towards writers which they resemble most (here, the common Shakespearean influence). Beckett's Joycean revisionism seems also to have sprung from his reading of Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, that sheer black hole of a book, which he has most certainly read (as for when, I have no idea, but if my memory serves me right, if you open any of Beckett's French oeuvre, the influence is absolutely unmistakable). Quite remarkable too, that Céline is one of the very few (the only one?) truly authentic "Shakespearean" novelist in the French literary tradition... Anyway, I'm absolutely not an expert, so I'll end my pedantic tirade here. Btw I'm French, and you have very good content.
Thanks!
I have only read All the Pretty Horses and was very disappointed. Teenage senoritas batting their eyelids at Texas stud cowboys, I don't like his prose style at all. Beckett is a profound artist, and his plays have been performed all over the workd for that very reason.
Wouldn’t hurt to give him another chance. Maybe give Suttree a read?
@@user-bj8gh6vq5m I 'm not a spring chicken anymore, and there are other books that interest me.
I am more familiar with Beckett than with McCarthy, and I appreciate both a lot. It is problematic to disparage Beckett while only being familiar with one play. Why not just say that both are important writers, read them and discuss their works?
I don't understand something. Why did this guy McCarthy hate Sam, if he wasn't even a Communist? Sam was apolitical. He was a war hero though.
Beckett is more speil than Beckett.
😶🌫️
It's GOD-OH, not GO-DOT...
Oh God.. Uh..
Go-dot. C’mon. Lovely.
lol