Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism
This article addresses a simple question: Is Beckett a postmodernist writer? Of course, the question is not so simple at all, for it begs a number of other tricky questions that get only more complicated as we address them: How am I defining modernism and postmodernism? What does the post in postmodernism signify? And in any case, Beckett's work does not suffer from not fitting easily into either of these categories or periodizations, so who really cares? Yet all the same, it seems that if postmodernism has any analytical value as a category, a style, or a "cultural dominant" applied to literature (in Fredric Jameson's appropriation of Raymond Williams's term), then Beckett is a crucial test case: He follows perhaps the most exemplary of prose modernists, James Joyce, and produces a body of work which is very much unlike that of his famous predecessor and compatriot/co-exile, as well as that of the subject of his youthful scholarly interest (another quintessential prose modernist), Marcel Proust. Beckett clearly, and not just temporally, comes after these modernists and their moment. His defining war is the Second, not the First. His childhood was not that of the fin-de-si?cle; his abandoned homeland was the Republic of Ireland; his exile was so famously marked by the change of language in order to achieve what he called "the right weakening effect" [2] in a clear attempt to escape the style of Joyce in the language of Proust, and thus attain a style all his own. If post simply means after, then Beckett is perhaps the first great postmodernist. But we all know it is not so simple.