Beckett’s Buttonhook

Robert Taubman

• Ill seen ill said by Samuel Beckett
  Calder, 59 pp, £4.95, August 1982, ISBN 0 7145 3895 7
• Mantissa by John Fowles
  Cape, 192 pp, £6.95, October 1982, ISBN 0 224 02938 X
• Sounding the terriotory by Laurel Goldman
  Faber, 307 pp, £7.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 571 11962 X
• Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
  Chatto, 303 pp, £7.50, September 1982, ISBN 0 7011 2648 5

Beckett our contemporary – readers and audiences undoubtedly respond to him as a contemporary – is all the same very much a creature of the Twenties. He is the last great Modernist. His plays make use of Twenties techniques: hypnotic spotlights, loudspeakers, expressionistic props and highly-organised speech rhythms. Ill seen ill said is bafflingly obscure, not in any new and unfamiliar way, but in the now historic Modernist manner that uses metaphor and symbolism to half-suggest a meaning. It plays the old trick of the far-flung allusion – for instance, to the statue of Memnon at Thebes, to Michelangelo and to King Lear. It will give more work to the scholars who have already erected a monument to Beckett. He belongs with the generation of writers, like Joyce and Eliot, whose work requires such attention.