Brightlad,

There's really no need to descend into abuse. Chill out a little, all this huffing and puffing just because people don't agree with you is most unseemly.

I can't really see how he has killed off the traditional approach to literature as most of his best work was writing after the war and during the 60s. If things are a-changing it's taking a bloody long time, because the last time I popped into a bookshop there were a fair few books that have been written since then.

Thanks primarily to James Joyce (and now we're really talking about great writing) Beckett made a bold, radical, fascinating and let's face it pretty damn gloomy challenge to realism. He pushed at some boundaries, which is great, but that doesn't mean to say everything now follows in that direction. How dull would that be? So dull, I expect that some writers would rebel against it and people like you would, in the future, be hailing them as the best ever writer.

Much better in my opinion to debate what makes great writing.

Couldn't agree more. Beckett's only one kind of great: there's no single artist who can be every kind of great, only a multitude of creators who make many or fewer great works of art. An analogy might be with serialism in music: immensely radical, immensely important in the history of music, but not the only story in contemporary classical music. And yet serialism was seen by some - who for cultural reasons happened to acquire critical and professional dominance and then defended that dominance furiously - as the only way for serious music to go: everything else was old hat fit for nothing more than film scores. For twenty-odd years all other musical avenues - equally radical in different ways - were closed off for anyone who wanted to be taken seriously as a composer, and a generation of gifted musicians went almost unheard as a result. It's taken another generation again to prove that this is stultifying - even poisonous - nonsense: and to be 'allowed' to use the possibilities of their art form, not by denying serialism or its importance, but by recognising that it's simply one more instrument, to be used or not according to their creative purpose at the time.

Fortunately, at the moment (though I have my nightmares), serious literature and its analysis is less purely dependent on a narrow coterie of university-trained writers (as opposed to writers who choose to inhabit a university setting, which is different) than music was in the 50s-60s-70s. It's a form of creative provincialism, not to be able to see beyond the boundaries of a certain set of ideas and forms, after all, whether that province is Lake Wobegon, or the Left Bank.

Emma

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Oops, Sibelius, would have posted about contemporary music with more caution if I'd known you were around. But the dates do actually make a nice analogy between, say, Beckett and say Schoenberg.

By the way, are we talking about Beckett the novelist or Beckett the dramatist? I think it's questionable how influential the former has been - as Sibelius says, Joyce got there first. On the other hand I yield to none in my devotion to the latter, and no one could deny his influence on the drama and theatre which has followed, often perhaps in small ways in apparently very different dramatists' work. But that still doesn't make him the greatest dramatist ever, only one of them.

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Seriously, it's hard to argue against Aeschylus receiving the crown for 'greatest ever' writer, since he introduced the second actor and transformed theatre for ever.

But this:

"So dull, I expect that some writers would rebel against it and people like you would, in the future, be hailing them as the best ever writer."

is so true. Everyone was doing second actors, nothing new about that, and then Sophocles came along and did something quite astonishing - introduced a third. So which of them is greater?

Of course, there's a really delightful irony embedded in this discussion, which has escaped us all.

I agree with Sibelius that if the purpose of such discussions is to make us better writers, then discussing what makes writing great writing is the only useful way to go. Meanwhile, anyone trying to make a case for a writer being the 'best ever' writer has to define their terms, by explaining why some kinds of 'best' - some criteria of merit - should be priveleged over others: which is more valuable, the nutritiousnss of bouef bourguinon or the theatre of crêpes suzette?, as it were. Any argument about the value of a writer or a work - to be an argument worth having - has to have an accompanying meta-argument about which values matter - as Helen says, sales, world-changing, universal approbation?

But a large part of the project of Beckett, like Joyce, Eliot, and any other modernist writer you care to name*, and an essential element of their influence, was to destabilise the very concepts of absolute values, of certainty about merit, of objective judgement and its separation from subjective appreciation. No one, nowadays (thank goodness) can pronounce, Leavis or Eliot-like, about 'first class' writers, or knock, say, Scott or Milton off their public pedestals simply because they don't conform to some a priori definition of 'great', and therby deprive several generations of readers from being introduced to them.

In other words, to argue for the primacy of a writer who argued for the non-primacy of any judgement except death is amusing, but a tad circular.

Emma

*not to mention Sterne, who with Tristram Shandy was pushing at the boundaries of the narrative form of the novel when the novel itself had only just been invented as a boundary-breaking form in itself

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Yes, I know Eliot comes up twice, on opposing sides. Writers so often don't practice creatively what they preach critically.

Sorry, gotta go, I've got a novel to write. Tristram Shandy comes into it, and so does Milton...

Thank you all for your interesting/amusing replies to my original post. At the end of the day I cannot say that I am that interested; I am a painter anyway, not a writer.

Don't know about anyone else but I'm still fecking grumpy.
Night, night.
HB x

At the end of the day I cannot say that I am that interested;

That's a shame, because it generated an interesting discussion.

Night, night Helen!

Emma

I cannot say that I am that interested

Really? Then why bother asking? You seem to have gone to considerable trouble...

I wasn't drinking, brightlad. I was just trying to inject a bit of levity to counteract your intensity and perhaps to unseat you from your high horse.


Still grumpy this morning, Helen?

No Jem, am full of the joys having watched my son beat a cracking team 3-1, scoring one himself and setting up the other two.
Bring on the angst-ridden teenaged boys.
What is the most 'important' song of the 20th Century?
Who is the greatest architect?
Wh0 is the bestest, like, you know, ever, poet?
HB x

Is this like a quiz for Christmas Helen?
Ok, I'll add: What is the bestest Chocolate?
What is the best Turkey: - Free-range or supermarket butterball?
Ok, literary one, Who is the best ever childrens writer?



- NaomiM

what a sorry bunch of dope-heads you all are!

Yup! But we like it this way.

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Which is the best cheese, French or British?

Jem, Naomi, Helen. (Helen, your son's obviously a bit of a star...)

Emma

Which is the best cheese, French or British?

Oh, I know the answer to this....Brie!

all the people do on this forum is seem to pat each other on the back. 'oh how lovely dear, want to come round for tea after you drop the kids off at school?...oh loved your latest book..and who is this coming on the forum going on about that horrible man samuel beckett!'...
Bullshit.
I just aint got the time for you people.
Besides, painting is a far superior mode of expression to writing.