Beckett's and the English Language

Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright and author, is considered one of best English playwrights of the modern age. While both Britain and Ireland claimed them as one of their own it was really France that Beckett had the strongest connection with during his life. What follows is a voyage through Beckett's fractured relationship with the English language, from his initial use of formal style to his rejection of the language for French.

Although Beckett's initial writings were terse they were not especially radical for the time as seen in Gnome, written to celebrate his resignation from Trinity College:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning

For a time, Beckett's writing became heavily inspired by his work with Joyce. However during a visit home, Beckett had a vision of his future writing style, dismissing Joyce's inspiration by saying James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can. From then on he worked to further simplify and restrict his language. We can see in his personal letters that Beckett deemed formal structure as an unnecessary distraction, remarkign to his friend Axel Kaun that:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused . . . . Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as, for example, the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence?

Despite the succinctness of his language his books and plays are still filled with riddles, word games and disjointed language. The simple language allows the lines to be read at a fast clip, allowing for the verbal sparring that makes plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame so intriguing. However, if given the chance he will dispense with words and plot entirely as in his play Breath, which takes thirty seconds to a minute to perform and features no words at all.

Near the end of his life he struggled with writing anything at all remarking that Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. With his fascination with brevity, it is no wonder that the fake news site The Onion spoofed his work with the article Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play.

It was possibly because of this disappointment that he soon gave up on writing in English and wrote his most popular works originally in French. Roger Boylan from the Boston Review remarks that:

Beckett, who so valued control over his work and the paring down of language to its essence, chose French as his primary writing medium because he was afraid his wild Irish English would run away with him, as it had with his mentor, Joyce.

While he did eventually translate his works to English, he considered the French versions to be superior. RAlthough Beckett considered French his preferred language, some critics like the fluent French speaker Vladimir Nabokov considered his French to be "a schoolmaster’s French, a preserved French" lacking the moisture of verbal association and of the spreading live roots of his [English] prose. If you happen to be a French speaker yourself you can make your own comparison. Here is a video of the French version of Waiting for Godot as well as the same scene in English so you can be the judge.

However, both versions pale in comparison to the true masters, the cast of Sesame Street.