Top Ten Books for 2023

 Annual Top Ten Favorites

 Top Ten Favorite Books of 2023

Since January 1, 2023, these books have been my favorites.  They span a wide range of reading genres, from non-fiction to fiction, from lengthy to short works, and from the Classics to modern literary fiction.  The inclusion of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy is one example of an exception, and the pairing of Cormac McCarthy's two last novels because they enhanced one another is another. If I were to enlarge my list, I could have included more novels from this year, which was a really rich reading year.  Even though the other works were excellent, these ten will be with me for a long time; in fact, I reread the Faulkner and Ellison volumes. 

The list is in no particular order, but if I had to pick my favorite of the year it would be Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. I read these together as one book in the final months of the year and they stand out as the most powerful novels I have read in a long time. They have joined the other classics on my top ten books of all time. 

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

Landscape: Memory by Matthew Stadler

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Passenger / Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

All Down Darkness Wide by  Sean Hewitt

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

The City of God by Augustine of Hippo

The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

A Modern Trilogy

Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable 

by Samuel Beckett

“In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said it was never enough and always too much.”   ― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Beckett's three great novels like his plays, break new ground in their structure and narrative. A bleak emptiness hovers throughout the three novels that one may consider a sort of trilogy. I was mesmerized from the opening pages of Molloy and wondered what it was in this bleak indeterminacy that was so beguiling. Reading slowly and closely I slowly found a method in this seemingly chaotic world. Drawn inward by moments of humor that counterposed the strange events, if they can be called that, I was drawn forward by the narrator even as the narrative itself seemed to be collapsing. These are three novels with so much wonder and ideas to think about that the attentive reader cannot fail to be impressed. I found these novels to be moving in a unique way and important additions to the literature of modernism.

In Samuel Beckett's novel, Molloy, the first sentence states bluntly, “I am in my mother's room.” This is followed on the first page of the novel with the phrase “I don't know” repeated five times, and if you add “I don't understand” and “I've forgotten” you have eight assertions of lack of knowing. How can or should the reader interpret those comments as establishing anything but a high level of uncertainty both about what the narrator (I) is telling us and what the narrator, may or may not, believe about himself and the world around him? Of most interest to this reader is the comment that the narrator would like to “finish dying” and that his mother is dead, although he is not sure exactly when she died.

What is the reader's expectation for the succeeding 167 pages of the novel based on the first page filled with uncertainty and death? There is work mentioned, but the pages he works on are filled with “signs I don't understand”. Can we say the same for ourselves as readers? At best we are left with snippets of possible information about a handful of others (the man who comes every week, they who may or may not have buried his mother, the son that he may or may not have, and the chambermaid without true love, and yet another who was the true love-whose name he has forgotten, repeatedly). As I reread these lines I cannot help but note the humor of the situation.

Humor in the Silence

Waiting for Godot 

by Samuel Beckett

“We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!”   ― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is set nowhere, but in a place that is somewhere we know not.  The set is spare: a tree, a rock, the backdrop and the foreground. At the end of each act night falls and a full moon appears. The setting is in reality the stage. It is a stage that characters inhabit, walk on and off, look to the distance where they see no more than the audience which is nothing.  Estragon and Vladimir spend two days waiting, waiting for Godot to come. He does not come but instead sends a small boy with a message that Mr. Godot will surely come tomorrow. In each act there is an interlude with a visit by two itinerants, Lucky and his boss Pozzo.

The production of Waiting for Godot by the Druid Theatre Company of Ireland that I saw last week was a revelation.  Having read and studied the play I knew what words to expect, but the actors, through their movement and reactions, brought out the humor that is one aspect of the essence of this great drama.  When they used the silences to bracket their words and demonstrated a camaraderie that was visceral and transcendent made this an exceptional afternoon of theater.

There is deep meaning in the happening of the words and actions of this play. It views thinking as a strange, ludicrous activity; the actors pass the time in activity - dancing, talking or saying nothing at all, exchanging hats and meditating on the nature of their boots.  The beauty and feeling that the actors display is difficult to put into words.  You may read the play as I have before and will likely again, but to see it on the stage provides a perspective that cannot be achieved by reading.  My afternoon was one where I could delight in the beauty of the magic of theater thanks to a handful of actors and one Samuel Beckett.

Further Notes on Samuel Beckett

Collected Shorter Plays 

Embers

"That sound you hear is the sea. [Pause. Louder.]  I say that sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. [Pause.]  I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was." (87)


My recent reading of Beckett's plays included Happy Days, Embers, and Not I, the last two of which are included in this excellent collection of his shorter plays. The length of these plays does not diminish their brilliance or depth of meaning.
In these short plays Beckett focused even more tightly on the inner experience of humanity. In Embers, a play written for the radio Beckett presents a man named Henry who shares his thoughts, both through attempting to tell a story and through memories of his past. With creation of characters his imagination presents these others, including his family, with an intensity that makes them seem alive. Yet it is their ghostly and ephemeral character that takes precedence. In the background the sound of the sea provides an ostinato that is haunting. Henry's imagination, however, weakens over the course of the short play. We first experience this as his story is interrupted more than once, yet he returns to it only with more and more difficulty. 
The memories of his past include scenes with his daughter and his wife, who may be present although her weak monotone voice suggests otherwise. "Not a sound" is a recurring phrase; but more important is the sound of dying embers. Henry tries to make us hear this but cannot project it:
"not a sound, only the fire, no flames now, embers. (Pause.) Embers. (Pause.) Shifting, lapsing, furtive like, a dreadful sound" (90). It is a sound (the title of the play) that we are denied. It represents death and extinction and to give it sound would be to give it life.
Beckett's prose has a serene, almost poetic quality and must have been extremely effective on a radio broadcast.


Happy Days 

"Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day!  (Pause. Joy off.)  Another happy day." (23)

Happy Days presents a bleak landscape that is severed from anything like the real world. A woman, Winnie, is buried up to her waist in a mound at center stage. There is one other character, Willie, who for most of the play is hidden behind the mound, burrowing head first into it. However unrealistic this sounds there is a certain realism from  her handbag that contains some of the detritus of everyday life that plays an important role for Winnie. She is a seemingly irrepressibly cheerful woman whose incessant optimistic prattle provides a counterpoint to her situation. She tells a story of a man and woman (Shower or Cooker) who, passing by, speculate as to why she is there and why Willie does not dig her out. This emphasizes the oddness of her situation but does not explain it. The situation is particularly perplexing because the cause of her confinement is indeterminate. It is just as indeterminate as the situation of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. In fact this indeterminacy is one of the overriding themes in the plays of Beckett.
The second act begins with her buried further up to her neck and, combined with her memories that suggest a previous life when she was not buried, present a degenerative condition that is inevitable.
The play is one of contrasts with the chief one being that between Winnie's optimism and the gravity of her situation. In other plays Beckett's characters have recognised the bleakness of their situation and while they do not always strive to face their existence they do not deny its awfulness. Winnie's cheerfulness includes maintaining normal daily rituals like brushing her teeth and cleaning her glasses. The contrast with these rituals and the abnormality of her situation may represent the essence of her need to distract herself from her terminal helplessness. In the second act she has even less to be cheerful about yet still refers to life as "a mercy". She says to Willie, who is trying to crawl up to her level, "Have another go, Willie, I'll cheer you on." (63) It reminds me of the famous quote from the end of Beckett's novel, The Unnamable, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on,"

Each of these plays further the poetic and comic world of Samuel Beckett though each present a bleak horizon that is delimited by indeterminacy.  Perhaps this is the indeterminacy of the post-modern world or rather, it is the nature of our home in the universe.

Mechanized Memories

Krapp's Last Tape
by Samuel Beckett


“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”   ― Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape


Samuel Beckett was very precise with the stage directions for his plays. So, when beginning to read Krapp's Last Tape, a very short play, it is not surprising that the initial directions (before Krapp says a single word) take up one whole page. We learn a lot about Krapp in that page, before the dialogue begins, and he actually turns on the tape. There is even a bit of slapstick comedy (not many moments like that in this brief drama) involving a banana peel and, as he chooses a spool (this is what we would now consider an antique tape recorder with large 'spools' of tape),  he draws out the word "spooool" in an almost loving or endearing way that suggests the importance of the memories ensconced on the tapes.

He begins to listen to himself starting the dialogue, such as it is, between a sixty-nine year old man and his younger, thirty-nine year old self. He says, "hard to believe I was ever as bad as that" (p 10). It the voice of a cynical disillusioned old man listening to the more hopeful younger man. Their voices and psychologies are different. One way to imagine his feelings upon listening to the thirty-year old tape is to compare it to reading an old personal journal you may have kept or try to decipher the annotations you made in a favorite old book.

There are crescendos and decrescendos in the voice of the older Krapp. At times he caresses the tape player and leans toward it to listen more clearly (or not). It is a play of light and dark. The dark representing the present is seen in Krapp's myopia and the lighting and his own words.

"clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire". (p 9) He turns on the tape again and is jolted by the voice of his younger self in a tender emotional moment.

One may compare this drama by Beckett with the writing of Marcel Proust as they are both concerned with the contrast of finite human memory against nearly infinite time. They lay bare a tragic fact of a human existence: we compare the limitations of our own memories to the ceaseless expanse of time and space surrounding them.

Beckett's and Proust’s works demonstrate the deliberation over the extent to which we can understand the past, and they represent that past via language and the degree to which can we know either ourselves or others. In this play we have the older Krapp pouring over the pronouncements of his younger self while in the last volume of Proust's masterpiece (especially) the narrator is jolted by the changes in his friends that distance both them and him from their remembered selves. Both authors might suggest that what we can know of any of these things is an extremely limited amount, if it is any amount at all.

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Second Act, Same Result

Waiting for Godot

by Samuel Beckett

-   further notes

As the second act of Waiting for Godot begins Vladimir and Estragon are in the same place they were at the beginning of the play.  That is it seems to be the same, a country road, a rock to sit upon, a tree.  But the tree has leaves that it did not have in the first act.  The pair enter into a discussion about several things but soon turn to examine the tree, and its leaves.  They cannot agree whether the leaves were there the day before or not.  Is it the same tree?  Are they in the same place?  Where were they the day before?  The play seems once again frozen in a world of bewilderment.  But perhaps this is a variation of what was called the "imponderable" by Ludwig Wittgenstein.  That is the discussion verges on what might be called imponderable evidence.  That is the notion discussed by Wittgenstein near the the end of the second part of his Philosophical Investigations when he talks about "imponderable evidence" as that which is not "documentary" and represents those things for which language has no words.  How can we tell if that tree was genuinely the same tree as yesterday or even that our memory of what happened yesterday is genuine?

This episode in the play is merely one example of the continuing aporia of existence for our hapless heroes.  They are lost in a world that, for moments, appears to be real and not unlike our own; but it quickly diverges into a different world where memory plays tricks or ceases to exist and words cross paths in ways that suggest the dramatis personae are unaware of each other.  Is Estragon beaten every night?  He says he is but Vladimir cannot make any sense out of it.  The upshot of these moments is summed up by Vladimir when he says:
"We wait.  We are bored.  No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it.  Good.  A diversion comes along and what do we do?  We let it go to waste.  Come let's get to work!  In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more in the midst of nothingness! [He broods.]" (p 71)

Pozzo and Lucky, a pair that visited in the first act, return.  But now, unlike his appearance in the first act,  Pozzo is blind and does not seem to recognize Vladimir and Estragon.  The discussion between them, Lucky is dumb (again unlike the first act when he had a soliloquy), is strange when it turns upon the question of time--as Vladimir asks Pozzo, "Since when?" (was Lucky dumb).  Pozzo responds furiously:  
"Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time!"  Upon reflection this seems not to be an unreasonable question.  Don't we all, at times, torment or at least frustrate ourselves with unnecessary concerns about time?  Pozzo continues, "It's abominable!  When!  When!  One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? [Calmer.] They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." (p 80)

Pozzo and Lucky exit and, after a bit of dialogue with Estragon about whether Pozzo was  really blind or not (another imponderable), Vladimir seems to respond to Pozzo's remark,  "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.  Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.  We have time to grow old.  The air is full of our cries.  But habit is a great deadener." (p 81)
The play ends the same way the first act ended with the visit of an unnamed boy with the message from Mr. Godot that he will not be coming today, but he will be coming tomorrow.  Vladimir and Estragon agree to wait for another day.  Estragon has the last words, "Yes, let's go. [They do not move.]" 


Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.  Grove Press, 1954 (1952).

The Search while Waiting

Waiting for Godot 
by Samuel Beckett

“Vladimir: I don't understand. 
Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? 
Vladimir uses his intelligence. 
Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.” 

― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am", is a philosophical proposition by the French philosopher René Descartes. The simple meaning of the Latin phrase is that thinking about one’s existence proves—in and of itself—that an "I" exists to do the thinking; or, as Descartes explains, "[W]e cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt … ." While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception or mistake, the very act of doubting one's own existence arguably serves as proof of the reality of one's own existence, or at least of one's thought. It is the one thing of which one could be certain.

In Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot, there is one thing that is certain as well. It is that the characters, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for Godot. Estragon opens the play with the statement, "Nothing to be done." This is a sign that there will be little action in the traditional sense in the play. It is also a metaphysical statement about life, Estragon's life and life in general. As the play opens the dialogue between Estragon and Vladimir sometimes seems like parallel monologues. As often as they answer one another they also veer off on seemingly absurd tangents only to circle around to what seems like similar topics as the dialogue continues. I use the word continue because there seems to be a lack of progress. The setting is "A country road. A tree."; the time, "Evening." And it could be any country road with a lifeless, leafless tree at any time in the past, although from the dialogue one may infer that they are a significant number of years beyond the "90s", which may refer to the previous century. And they refer to the Eiffel Tower; thus they may be in France near the end of the nineteen-forties which is when Beckett began writing his "tragicomedy".

Beckett’s first serious dramatic work has become a landmark in modern theater. It was published in French as "En attendant Godot". According to the publisher, “the story line evolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone – or something – named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. " The play is presented in two acts in both of which nothing happens.

Some moments from the opening pages of the first act serve to define the characters and their (imaginary? or not.) world. Estragon seems beaten down as he spent the night in a "ditch" and when asked by Vladimir, "And they didn't beat you?" Estragon replies, "Beat me? Certainly they beat me." Thus confirming that he is not only figuratively, but literally beaten down. Vladimir has a more upbeat tone to his commentary, more voluble yet still spare with words, and sometimes, however briefly, betrays doubts only to quickly move on to a more positive tone of thought. Thought is something that is clearly evident in the manner and words of Vladimir while Estragon is so terse in his remarks, often in the form of questions, that he seems to lack the ability to think. That is, until you pause to meditate on his remarks and they begin to assume metaphysical importance, or perhaps not. Slowly topics emerge from the dialogue: the thieves who were crucified with Christ, the barren tree beside the road, suicide, and others. Yet, the dialogue seems to drift off in directions that one would never expect when discussing these, or any ideas. The unexpected becomes what you expect and the absurd becomes the norm in this play whose characters search for meaning in the nothingness of their presumed existence.


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Master of Articulate Silence

The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 
by Lois Gordon


"In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows--a physicist would say the negative particles--of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Beckett would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure.” (p 82)


As I will be reading several of Samuel Beckett's plays over the next three months I decided to explore some biographical material as background.  While I have both read and viewed a production of Endgame I am not that familiar with Beckett, the man and artist.   
The Samuel Beckett of this fine biographical portrait is an inspiring dramatist with tremendous skill. Gordon presents an alternative view of Beckett that follows the playwright and novelist from his birth until age 40, when he began to find himself as a writer. She parts ways with the popular understanding of Beckett as a grim, rattled existentialist introvert who barely clung to sanity. His life is presented within a larger historical context, following him from his conservative, morally minded, upper-class rearing in a well-heeled suburb of Dublin, to his academic and athletic successes before and during study at Trinity College, his rebellious immersion in bohemian Paris and in economically devastated 1930s London, and finally his involvement as a WW II Resistance fighter in France. 


Gordon's craft and her scruples are impressive. The focus is on the world from 1906 to 1946 in which Beckett matured and became the great writer that we know. With fascinating depiction of his involvement with the Red Cross and French Resistance we learn about the life that helped make the man.

Gordon seeks to put us in his shoes by describing in detail, for example, the probable impact on Beckett of his close friendship with James Joyce in terms that help us to feel it, and the political-cultural circumstances leading up to the rise of the Vichy government so that a reader can judge Beckett's likely motives and emotions in opposing it. Avoiding extensive discussion of his work and choosing not to emphasize the testimonials of people who knew him, Gordon relies mainly on external events to support her thesis. Of course, her conclusion- -``Beckett was not a fragile and reclusive man set apart from the real world. He was a sensitive and courageous man marked by and responsive to the world''--is arguable, but she significantly extends the scholarship about her subject. The clarity of Gordon's writing, never marred by willfulness or anxiety, is ideally suited to posing her challenge. Her study also draws us in by sheer narrative force. This is an exemplary glimpse of a literary enigma.  I hope to fill in some of the details that made Beckett such an enigma through the exploration of some of his short and shorter dramas over the next three months.


The World of Samuel Beckett by Lois Gordon.  Yale University Press, 1996.
Photo at above right of Trinity University, Dublin (commons.wikimedia.org)

Funny Unhappiness

Endgame
by Samuel Beckett

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.”  ― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

I remember reading this in anticipation of a lecture at the University of Chicago "First Friday' series. The lecturer certainly saw more references in the play to Dante, Descartes and others than I did. I have seen and read the play again since then and I am still trying to decipher a lot of what happens during the action. That is part of what makes Beckett interesting as a playwright for me. It is a play in one act with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French (entitled Fin de partie); as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The English title is taken from the last part of a chess game, when there are very few pieces left (the French title applies to games besides chess and Beckett lamented the fact that there was no precise English equivalent); Beckett himself was an avid chess player.
In the case of Endgame "Comedy" may be too cheerful a word to use for some of the lighter moments like the episodes in the ashcans. They are part of Mr. Beckett's grim joke on the futility of life. On the whole what Beckett has to say is contrary and nihilistic. But as a writer he can create a mood by using words as incantations. In the Paris Review article "Exorcising Beckett", Lawrence Shainberg claims that according to Beckett the characters' names signify the following: Hamm for Hammer, Clov for clou (the French for nail), Nagg for nagel (the German for nail), and Nell because of its resemblance to the English word nail.  Although the dialogue is often baffling, there is no doubt about the total impression.


Ruby Cohn, in her book Back to Beckett, writes that "Beckett's favorite line in the play is Hamm's deduction from Clov's observation that Nagg is crying: Then he's living." But in Berlin he felt that the most important sentence is Nell's: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." and he directed his play to show the fun of unhappiness. This is a thinking persons drama and in spite of its bleakness we are still here in the twenty-first century reading and puzzling over this brilliant work.

“Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.” 

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London, necessary and contingent

Under the Net 

by Iris Murdoch

“I hate solitude, but i'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”  ― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net




Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, has wonderful characters, including writers, eccentrics and a glamorous actress; but the character that imbues the novel as no other is London itself. The novel follows a picaresque structure, recounting a series of episodes narrated in the first person by James Donaghue, known as Jake. Moreover, London becomes the central setting of the main character’s adventures (particularly Holborn and the financial districts), together with brief but important scenes that take place in another great and enigmatic city, Paris. 

 London appears in many other ways, even philosophically. She wrote "There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent". But for Murdoch, in her novel, all of London is part of the story she weaves around her writer-hero, Jake Donaghue. It was dedicated to Raymond Queneau. When Jake leaves Madge's flat in Chapter 1, two of the books he mentions taking are Murphy by Samuel Beckett, and Pierrot mon Ami by Queneau, both of which are echoed in this story. Another character, Hugo Belfounder, is mainly based on Yorick Smythies, a student of Wittgenstein's.  It seems that literary references abound as in this example:
"...I like the women in novels by James and Conrad who are so peculiarly flower-like and who are described as 'guileless, profound, confident, and trustful'. That 'profound' is good: fluttering white hands and as deep as the sea..." (p 28)

 The epigraph for the novel, from John Dryden's Secular Masque, refers to the way in which the main character is driven from place to place by his misunderstandings. Angus Wilson summed it up as "wine, women, and Wittgenstein". Overall the novel is an exciting beginning to what would become a brilliant writing career.

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Books, 1977 (1954)

Musings on Literature

Anomie

      “One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one's inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.” - Emile Durkheim

Anomie is a term meaning "without Law" to describe a lack of social norms; normlessness". It describes a personal state of isolation and anxiety resulting from a lack of social control and regulation possibly resulting from the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community ties, with fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. It was popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his influential book Suicide (1897). Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau. It should be noted, however, that Durkheim never uses the term normlessness; rather, he describes anomie as "a rule that is a lack of rule," "derangement," and "an insatiable will." (Mestrovic, Stjepan. Emile Durkheim and The Reformation of Sociology) For Durkheim, anomie arises more generally from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations. This is a nurtured condition: Anomie in common parlance is thought to mean something like "at loose ends". The Oxford English Dictionary lists a range of definitions, beginning with a disregard of divine law, through the 19th and 20th century sociological terms meaning an absence of accepted social standards or values. Most sociologists associate the term with Durkheim, who used the concept to speak of the ways in which the actions of an individual are matched, or integrated, with a system of social norms and practices ... Durkheim also formally posited anomie as a mismatch, not simply as the absence of norms. Thus, a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion could also produce a kind of anomie, a mismatch between individual circumstances and larger social mores. Thus, fatalistic suicide arises when a person is too rule-governed, when there is ... no free horizon of expectation. 

 In Albert Camus's existentialist novel, The Stranger, the bored, alienated protagonist Meursault struggles to construct an individual system of values as he responds to the disappearance of the old. He exists partly in a state of anomie, as seen from the apathy evinced in the opening lines: "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas" ("Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know"). When Mersault is prosecuted for shooting an Arab man during a fight, the prosecuting attorneys seem more interested in the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother's funeral than the murder of the Arab, because they find his lack of remorse offensive. The novel ends with Meursault recognizing the universe's indifference toward humankind. In the first half of the novel Meursault is clearly an unreflected, unapologetic individual. Ultimately, Camus presents the world as essentially meaningless and therefore, the only way to arrive at any meaning or purpose is to make it oneself. 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose work can be viewed as a philosophical precursor to existentialism, expressed a similar concern in his novels. In The Brothers Karamazov it is expressed by Ivan that in the absence of God and immortal life, everything would be lawful. That one can do as one likes, but this one cannot. The novel, in part, explores the existence of God, the nature of truth, and the importance of forgiveness through the actions of its characters. Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Crime and Punishment, puts this philosophy into action when he kills an elderly pawnbroker and her sister, later rationalizing this act to himself with the words, "...it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!" Raskolnikov's inner conflict in the opening section of the novel results in a utilitarian-altruistic justification for the proposed crime: why not kill a wretched and "useless" old moneylender to alleviate the human misery? His nihilism can be seen as a variation on anomie.

Hermann Hesse's Der Steppenwolf can also be seen as a demonstration of anomie.The novel tells the story of a middle-aged man named Harry Haller who is beset with reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of "everybody", the regular people. In his aimless wanderings about the city he is given a book which describes the "Faustian duality" expressed by two natures of man: one "high", spiritual and "human"; while the other is "low" and animal-like. Thus, man is entangled in an irresolvable struggle, never content with either nature. While Haller longs to live free from social convention, he continually lives as a bourgeois bachelor. Haller argues that the men of the Dark Ages did not suffer more than those of Classical Antiquity.   It is rather those who live between two times, those who do not know what to follow, that suffer the most.

 The characters Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Waiting For Godot also express a sense of anomie. The play follows two consecutive days in the lives of a pair of men who divert themselves while they wait expectantly and unsuccessfully for someone named Godot to arrive. Frustrated at the long wait, they think of what to do to pass the time. Estragon suggests that they hang themselves, but since they are concerned that they might not both die, they decide to do nothing: "It's safer", explains Estragon. Another character, Lucky, describes an impersonal and callous God. Lucky next asserts that man 'wastes and pines', mourns an inhospitable earth, and claims that he [man] diminishes in a world that does not nurture him". The play illustrates an attitude toward man's experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can only be reconciled in the mind and art of the absurdist. 

 Is anomie a symptom of the decline of man or merely a growing pain on the way to a new and better or different culture? My reading of literature raises the question but the search for an answer continues.

"Years have passed, I suppose.  I'm not really counting them anymore.  But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away.  I don't know where or when.  Who does?  Where are all the rains of yesterday?"  
 - Roger Zelazny, "This Moment of the Storm"

Beckett

Krapp's Last Tape

On this day in 1958 Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape was first performed. According to the authorized biography (Damned to Fame, James Knowlson, 1996), it was one of the author's favorite works -- a "nicely sad and sentimental" play about which he felt "as an old hen with her last chick,":


It will be like the little heart of an artichoke served before the tripes with excrement of Hamm and Clov. People will say: good gracious, there is blood circulating in the old man's veins after all, one would never have believed it; he must be getting old."

- Samuel Beckett, letters

Samuel Beckett’s work has extended the possibilities of drama and fiction in unprecedented ways, bringing to the theatre and the novel an acute awareness of the absurdity of human existence – our desperate search for meaning, our individual isolation, and the gulf between our desires and the language in which they find expression. Educated in Ireland, North and South, he settled afterwards in Paris and produced his fiction and drama in English and French, translating himself out of the language in which he first wrote each text. Having begun literary life as a modernist and promoter of the reputations of Proust and Joyce, in the years before and after the Second World War he found his own voice (“began to write what I feel”) and continued to develop this voice unstintingly and without compromise until the year of his death.*



Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. Random House, New York. 1960 (1958)

*Davies, Paul. "Samuel Beckett". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001.