Ends and Odds

Gabriel Josipovici discusses György Kurtág's work on Beckett in the current issue of PN Review.

He writes,

"As in all of Beckett after the great crisis of 1945-50, when he gradually realised that the 'dark he had struggled to keep under', as he wrote to a friend, was actually what he had to write about rather than escape from, a voice searches for the right formulation, does not find it, and gives up, but the search becomes the work. To read such pieces is not to enter another world but to enact a desperate movement in the inner reaches of one's being and to find, at the end, that the enactment of failure has led not to triumph but to a quite physical sense of release. One can see why the reading of Beckett in the moment of crisis in the 1950s freed Kurtág from the terrible sense of blockage that had overwhelmed him and helped him back on the path to composition. For blockage, Beckett seems to be saying, is not a chance calamity that has befallen you but a part of what it means to be human, and it cannot be overcome but only acknowledged, accommodated. And one can see why, given this personal sense of debt, Kurtág should have turned, in his sixties, at the height of his powers, to this beautiful last work of Beckett's."

You can read the full article online here.