New Books In European Studies

“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but language, memory, and consciousness are not all she has. Beckett’s plays, novels, poetry, radio plays, and prose reveal our deepest humanity by stripping language to its bare essentials. Beckett wrote much of his work after 1945 in French, a language he learned mostly as an adult, and then translated it back into his native English to purge it of clichés and stock phrases. In the resulting works he reveals how our bodies moving through space are far more than vessels for a roving consciousness. They contain a hint of transcendence which manifests itself as the human need for self-expression through which we locate ourselves — in time, in relation to others, and in relation to ourselves. I spoke with Beckett expert, scholar, and theater director Nicholas Johnson at the Samuel Beckett Theatre at Trinity College Dublin,