The Necessary Staying Put: Beckett and Social Distancing
After reading a witty reimagining of famous first lines rewritten for social distancing, it occurred to me that one really wouldn’t have to tweak much with Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. (Though the meeting with Godot, alas, might have to be postponed.) Beckett doesn’t necessarily offer solace in these times; one can only grin, or grimace, at his buoyant pessimism: “What room for worse!” we read in one Worstward Ho. He is however, one of the great modernist chroniclers of isolation, and one who labelled his own mid-career burst of production from 1946 to 1950 as the “siege in the room.” So join me, dear, homebound reader, on a tour of Beckett’s circumscribed though capacious universe.
In an’s novel , the critic described the young hero’s coming-of-age as “Die notwendige Reise,” or “The Necessary Journey.” Coming across this phrase as a young man, Samuel Beckett noted in his journal: “Journey anyway is the wrong figure. How can one travel to that from which one cannot move away? [The Necessary Staying Put] is more like it.” Throughout his career, Beckett’s protagonists undertake journeys that are more and more stationary, compelled by their obsessions (Krapp), their hopes (Vladimir and Estragon), or their surrounding (Winnie) to stay put.
