Beckett and the Problem of Modern Culture

The most obvious problem of modern culture is that there doesn't seem to be very much more of it. The dearth of great writers today is unjustly dismissed as a problem of perspective. For there are scarcely even any major writers, those known outside the c6teries of specialized amateurs of nouvelle poesie, nouveau (nouveau) roman, nouveau theatre. There remains, to be sure, at least one 75-year-old writer who constitutes exception to this generality. But Beckett's greatness lies in his lucidly paradoxical refusal of greatness. To understand Beckett, and above all to understand the problem of modern culture, we must take seriously his description of Bram Velde as exemplary modern artist: Van Velde . . . is the first to admit that to be artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping.' That this statement is paradoxical, Beckett freely admits. That failure, as a new criterion of authenticity, becomes a new form of success, that failure to express succeeds in becoming an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation, Beckett the Nobel-Prize winner is perhaps even more acutely aware today than when, as a little-known post-war novelist, he expressed these paradoxes in his Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. But paradox is not nonsense, and Beckett's analysis of modern culture may well be the best point of departure we have. Taken at face value, this analysis very nearly implies the impossibility of art. The successful artist is relegated to arts and crafts, to what we might otherwise call mass or popular culture. His success is the sign of artistic inauthenticity, of his having set himself a problem that is a priori of no esthetic interest precisely because it can be solved. Solving problems was possible, Beckett says or implies elsewhere, for Proust or Joyce; it is no longer possible for artists today. There are no more significant solvable problems left unsolved; success in art is paid for by insignificance, not to say outright plagiarism of earlier solutions. The artist-as-failure, if he is to exist at all, is thus condemned to tread a narrow line between inauthentic success and the truly irremediable failure to produce anything at all. He has nothing to express except his failure

Aesthetics · Art · Craft · Face (sociological concept) · Greatness · Impossibility · Literature · Obligation · Value (mathematics) · Law · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism