william kent

Well-known member
I've found with the trilogy that none of it's ordinary, but the language and imagery is incredibly simple for stretches then he'll hit you with some dense, abstract passage or just crank the prose up for a while before bringing you back down again. Masterful, really.

This passage I pulled from Molloy a few pages back is one of the best things I've ever read.

In the end it was magic that had the honour of my ruins, and still today, when I walk there, I find its vestiges. But mostly they are a place with neither plan nor bounds and of which I understand nothing, not even of what it is made, still less into what. And the thing in ruins, I don’t know what it is, what it was, nor whether it is not less a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things, if that is the right expression. It is in any case a place devoid of mystery, deserted by magic, because devoid of mystery. And if I do not go there gladly, I go perhaps more gladly there than anywhere else, astonished and at peace, I nearly said as in a dream, but no, no. But it is not the kind of place where you go, but where you find yourself, sometimes, not knowing how, and which you cannot leave at will, and where you find yourself without any pleasure, but with more perhaps than in those places you can escape from, by making 'an effort, places full of mystery, full of the familiar mysteries. I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night. These things, what things, come from where, made of what? And it says that here nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen. Yes, a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began, is it clear enough? And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not. And if I went on listening to that far whisper, silent long since and which I still hear, I would learn still more, about this. But I will listen no longer, for the time being, to that far whisper, for I do not like it, I fear it...

There's a bit in Malone Dies where he compares something to a man with an ailing dog that really got me the other day. It wasn't like the thing above, it was just this perfect little fragment lodged within the text.

To old dogs the hour comes when, whistled by their master setting forth with his stick at dawn, they cannot spring after him. Then they stay in their kennel, or in their basket, though they are not chained, and listen to the steps dying away. The man too is sad. But soon the pure air and the sun console him, he thinks no more about his old companion, until evening. The lights in his house bid him welcome and a feeble barking makes him say, It is time I had him destroyed.
 

william kent

Well-known member
The tugs, their black funnels striped with red, tow to their moorings the last barges, freighted with empty barrels. The water cradles already the distant fires of the sunset, orange, rose and green, quenches them in its ruffles and then in trembling pools spreads them bright again. His back turned to the river, but perhaps it appears to him in the dreadful cries of the gulls that evening assembles, in paroxysms of hunger, round the outflow of the sewers,
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just ordered a nice cheap 2nd hand copy of the complete dramatic works. Only thing I've ever read by him is Imagination Dead Imagine, definitely one of the strangest things I've ever read -

Two white bodies are situated back to back inside a skull-like rotunda or vault. On the verge of extinction, the imagination of an unspecified being succeeds in imagining two bodies enclosed in a silent and motionless black and white environment subject to varying degrees of heat and cold with a brief interlude of grey.[2]

Didn't like it at all on first reading because of the repetition, but I enjoyed rereading it last night (inspired by reading through this thread). I'm guessing the plays are an easier access point to him than the novels, but we'll see.
 

william kent

Well-known member
This is cool, and taken from Imagination Dead Imagine I see. What came first the poem or the (longer) short prose piece?

Not sure.

One of things I find intriguing about him is the mathematical stuff. He likes to set up these scenarios with a specific number of parts then move them around and play with them. Reminds me of something I read about de Sade's Sodom essentially being a load of permutations of every possible perversion played out across a set number of participants. Some sort of proof or formula rather than a novel.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Looking at the round poem version, I'm guessing he composed into the circle shape first, which is genius if true. Maybe there's another circle poem with the rest of the piece?

Wikipedia is telling me it was:

Developed as an offshoot of the longer prose work, All Strange Away, and consistent with Beckett's preoccupation with cylinders and closed spaces in his work of the 1960s, the text explores "the theme of the dying imagination yet conscious of its own activity".[1]
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
It terribly claustrophobic, that mathematical, geometrical, repetitious closed space thing. A bit like listening to Autechre, which is what initially put me off I think
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Aye, I'm hoping the plays are gonna be more of a laugh than the prose, not sure how much I could take of that style of writing, impressive as it is.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Also hoping there's not too much Joycean scatological gear (someone mentioned this tendency in the thread earlier) I really don't want to read about anyone's turds. Must be the French influence.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Not read any Pynchon but the scatalogical parts of Burroughs are my least favourite bits, call me squeamish. I generally dislike Joyce for other reasons apart from that, but it definitely puts me off him even more. I really wish I could unread those notorious letters to his wife that someone posted on here once, yuk!
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I will probably get round to the prose if I like the plays. Have you read any of the plays, Version? Woops recommended Endgame to me once.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Not read any Pynchon but the scatalogical parts of Burroughs are my least favourite bits, call me squeamish. I generally dislike Joyce for other reasons apart from that, but it definitely puts me off him even more. I really wish I could unread those notorious letters to his wife that someone posted on here once, yuk!
You should just read ulysses start to finish. Those letters are the worst of him, but the only bit similar to them in the whole of ulysses are the very last 100 pages.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I just remember seeing a bit of a production of Godot on late night telly sometime in the 90s and I couldn't make head nor tail of it.
 
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