Imagination Dead Imagine [Paperback]

Samuel Beckett (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Calder Publications Ltd (December 31, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 0714542377
• ISBN-13: 978-0714542379
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Just imagine, just 8 pages!, June 30, 2003

By 

Peter Reeve (Thousand Oaks, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Imagination Dead Imagine (Paperback)

During his lifetime, many critics regarded Samuel Beckett as the greatest writer of the twentieth century and his "Molloy" novel trilogy was accounted the summit of his career. Since his death, his reputation has gone into rapid decline (or perhaps it is more accurate to say his work has faded into relative obscurity, which is not quite the same thing) and he is now chiefly remembered as the playwright whose "Waiting for Godot" helped change the course of modern theatre.

I suppose this post-mortem negative reassessment owes much to his later work, which is very slight, very sparse. It may nonetheless be very profound; it depends on one's point of view. But I think audiences quickly grew impatient with plays with a running time of a couple of minutes or less and novels (like "Imagination Dead Imagine", which followed the "Molloy" trilogy) that were eight pages long.

The fact remains that Beckett played a seminal role in the Modernist movement and that the recent evolution of neither the theater nor the novel can be understood without reference to him. So what are we to make of works, fragments, like "Imagination Dead Imagine"? The first thing to say is that it is quintessentially Beckett. If you want to read an example of his later work, you cannot do better than this. It lacks plot, character or theme in the traditional senses, yet it has a structure, in fact a very precisely defined structure. It describes a dynamic image somewhat in the manner of stage directions. I take this image - a sphere of alternating darkness and light, inhabited by two naked, fetally arranged figures - to be a metaphor for life itself, but other readers will give it more specific interpretations. That is literally all there is of the `story', apart of course from the experience of reading it, which is what it is all about, and which perhaps demands that you are in the appropriate mood.

Becket took that dark, nihilistic corner of human existence, wherein we face an inane, atheistic universe head-on, and made it his literary province. There is a very real sense in which life has no purpose or rationale and Becket made this the purpose and rationale of everything he wrote. In all his work, including this one, there is always a curious and contradictory note of optimism. He talks often of `going on' and `entering' as if he can never give up on life, however pointless, and that that is precisely the point.

Obscure or not, Beckett's contribution to the Modernist movement cannot be ignored and will not go away. If you do not know his later work, read "Imagination Dead Imagine".