Samuel Beckett- 'How It Is'

I first looked into Beckett for my AS Art and Context exam unit. After purchasing the book How it is I have begun to learn about what I believe is the modernist abstract and gritty realism that made Beckett such a unique writer.

I find his writing highly academic and his writing style extremely unique . When reading the preface to the book I learned how he edits his own work from autobiographical to being almost ominous.

The book is in three parts and is 129 pages long (in this edition). The graphic work on the front of the book is purely typographic. The text of the title is bold and green on a light grey background.

 
"Beckett then, finds an analogous explanation of his means to satisfying thirst, before settling for a brief refusal to explain: ‘mouth opens the tongue comes out and lolls in the mud and no question of thirst either’. It’s as simple as that. We have a character alone, in the constant darkness, able to subsist. Which is all that is needed for the narration to proceed and, in the end, is all we are given. This is ‘How It Is’. Realism, causality and explanation are written out of the text. The narrator crawls through the mud and darkness without knowing where he comes from or where he is going, and certainly not why. He drags with him a sack containing tins of food, the origin of which is a mystery to him. On his journey he meets another whom he calls Pim and with whom he has a brief, abusive relationship. In ‘How It Is’ Beckett continues to strip away conventional forms, as if to adumbrate the ‘peeling the onion’ metaphor ventured in his earliest critical book on Proust."

Quote from Introduction in Beckett. S, Faber and Faber ,1964

''the last modernist.''- Anthony Cronin

Born in 1906,Samuel Beckett is described as fitting in "easily with writers like Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Witold Gombrowicz, Henry Roth, Nathanael West and Louis-Ferdinand Celine." Like them, Beckett was a "second-generation modernist who arrived on the scene in the late 20's, shortly after Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Proust had written their major works."  Also like them, Beckett was "caught between the anxieties of influence and the uncertainties of political and economic crisis," and he too "turned toward a dark, acrid and mocking humor that became one of the great literary vehicles of the Depression years."

'Waiting for Godot', perhaps Beckett's most famous work which premiered in 1953 is an allegory written in a heartless modern tone. The theatre goer naturally (in a way similar to my first experience of Nauman's work in the Sunderland show) "rummages through the performance in search of a meaning. It seems fairly certain that Godot stands for God. Those who are loitering by the withered tree are waiting for salvation, which never comes.The rest of the symbolism in Beckett's play is less accessible, and the following quote mirrors my own feelings about Beckett and equally my feelings in relation to Bruce Nauman's work:

 

"Although "Waiting for Godot" is a "puzzlement," as the King of Siam would express it, Mr. Beckett is no charlatan. He has strong feelings about the degradation of mankind, and he has given vent to them copiously. "Waiting for Godot" is all feeling. Perhaps that is why it is puzzling and convincing at the same time. Theatregoers can rail at it, but they cannot ignore it. For Mr. Beckett is a valid writer."

http://www.Samuel-Beckett.net/outsider.html

The following is a quote from Faber & Faber's 1964 Samuel Beckett in relation to How It Is.

"The earliest versions of ‘How It Is’ contain references to moles, and to callers, and to a scribbler relaxing in his cottage in the country. But, although Becket often began with images from his own experience, he would later remove autobiographical details and dismantle chronological and casual relationships, replacing them with the abstract from that have a coherence of their own. Thus the first version of the French text includes lengthy passages explaining the total darkness in which the narrator lives, and invoking the all-too-trivial moles who manage to be punctual in their own comings and goings without benefit of altering day and night. After several drafts, Becket simply asserts the existence of ‘impenetrable dark’.

Again, after the review of the various types of callers he has known in past lives, the narrator’s solitude is initially explained by a thorough examination of circumstance and probability. Beckett then cancels the passage and summarises in a few words: ‘long wrangle so minute that moments when yes to be feared’, then simply affirms ‘no callers this time’.

Likewise, the narrator’s continued survival seems at first to require some explanation grounded in realism. The contents of the all-important sack satisfy the need for food; Beckett then finds an analogous explanation of his means to satisfying thirst, before settling for a brief refusal to explain: ‘mouth opens the tongue comes out and lolls in the mud and no question of thirst either’. It’s as simple as that. We have a character alone, in the constant darkness, able to subsist. Which is all that is needed for the narration to proceed and, in the end, is all we are given. This is ‘How It Is’. Realism, causality and explanation are written out of the text. The narrator crawls through the mud and darkness without knowing where he comes from or where he is going, and certainly not why. He drags with him a sack containing tins of food, the origin of which is a mystery to him. On his journey he meets another whom he calls Pim and with whom he has a brief, abusive relationship. In ‘How It Is’ Beckett continues to strip away conventional forms, as if to adumbrate the ‘peeling the onion’ metaphor ventured in his earliest critical book on Proust."