I can't help comparing how my own fiction is reviewed in the US with how it's reviewed in Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, or the Netherlands. Similarly, Harold Jaffe told me in an interview conducted originally for The Hyde Park Review of Books, One should simply look at the images he has created in his novels and in his plays and not try to ascribe a meaning to these images. Therefore, one should not seek meaning in his work but look at the form of his narrative, the shape of his sentences, the movement of his language.
And suddenly I realized that it was not the meaning of words that really concerned Beckett, but the shape of language. It has perfect symmetry, the way it cancels itself. This is the sentence:ĭo not despair, one of the thieves was saved,ĭo not presume, one of the thieves was damned.Īnd Beckett said to me: It is not the meaning of this sentence that interests me, it is its shape, its movement. Later that evening - or perhaps the next day - in his apartment, we were talking literature and I asked him why he was so fond of a certain sentence which appears several times in his works, and what it meant to him. In a meeting in Paris in 1972, Beckett asked Raymond Federman, "When will they stop making me say more than I said?" Federman writes that, "It was as if Beckett was warning his readers and critics not to fall into the trap of symbolism and hermeneutics" (Federman, "Imagery"). To read Harold Jaffe's pieces as a commentary on or critique of the war on terrorism is to under-read him, as Beckett was misread as a "symbolic" or Swift as a fantasist. Eckhard Gerdes reviews Harold Jaffe's Terror-Dot-Gov: Docufictions.
0 kommentar(er)
