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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bold Explorations Into the Void, June 4, 2003
By A Customer
A collection of six short pieces by Beckett (Cascando, Words and Music, Eh Joe, Play, Come and Go, and Film) for different performance mediums (radio, television, stage, film). None of these pieces are over thirty pages, and make for easy reading. The theme of the book can be summed up in Beckett's Berkeleyan introduction to the script to "Film": "Esse est percipi. All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being from flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception." In a word, existence is defined by perception, which in the end is self-perception, which is inescapable since you are... well, you. Most of the pieces in this book dramatize this very effectively: in Cascando, a slavish "Opener" is resigned to opening and closing the expression of his conscious experience, which is merely fragmented and meaningless thoughts. In Film, a man flees from perception, only to find that perception follows him to his room and witnesses his final resignation, sleep, with merciless scrutiny. Word and Music dramatizes the struggle of artistic expression, which inevitably fails. The most interesting piece, also the longest, is "Play." Here the stage is occupied by three urns with people in them. The play consists of the three urned characters taking rounds in describing a disastrous love triangle. The play ends on the terse cue from Beckett: "Repeat Play." (When performed as a radio play, Beckett suggested speeding the dialogue up 5% and turning down the volume 5% every rotation -- by increasing and decreasing in percentages, the play never ends, but becomes more and more distant and indiscernable). These urned characters are among Beckett's crueler and more inventive creations. The suggestion is that the self-perception cannot end with death, since the self never percieves its own end -- therefore, the last moments, in theory, must live on forever as the last of organic experience... a kind of sordid revision of Nietzsche's eternal return. The urned characters are, in effect, in eternal purgatory. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though I'm not used to such extreme philosophical literature. Beckett's boldness in pursuing the depths of existentialist extremity deserves applause, and confirms him as one of the bravest and most selfless writers of the post-war era. Art like this can't come easy to the mind that concieved it, and must be the product of an agonizing creative pregnancy. It reminds me of that craft that Villion, like Beckett, felt obligated to express when he wrote: "Now there's work that awaits the smith/ I'll smash down anguish and begin."
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