Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That
May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play

From the Onion courtesy of This is not a compliment:

Just weeks after the centennial of the birth of pioneering minimalist playwright Samuel Beckett, archivists analyzing papers from his Paris estate uncovered a small stack of blank paper that scholars are calling "the latest example of the late Irish-born writer's genius."

The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969's Breath, a 30-second play with no characters, and 1972's Not I, in which the only illuminated part of the stage is a floating mouth.

"In what was surely a conscious decision by Mr. Beckett, the white, uniform, non-ruled pages, which symbolize the starkness and emptiness of life, were left unbound, unmarked, and untouched," said Trinity College professor of Irish literature Fintan O'Donoghue. "And, as if to further exemplify the anonymity and facelessness of 20th-century man, they were found, of all places, between other sheets of paper."

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In order to understand why this is funny, if you're not laughing already, check out this Wikipedia bio of Beckett. I've spent many years kind of hating the much-worshipped playwright for pretty much the same reason that the Onion decided to satire him. From the Wikipedia bio:

Beckett's new-found fame—coupled with the Nobel Prize in Literature that he won in 1969 and which he and his wife considered to be a 'catastrophe'—meant that academic interest in his life and work grew, creating eventually something of a 'Beckett industry'. Other writers also started to seek out Beckett, with the result that a steady stream of students, poets, novelists and playwrights passed through Paris over the years, hoping to meet the master.

That is, Beckett is virtually a literary god, but damned if I've ever been able to understand why. It could be that I'm just stupid, but when I first came across him, as an undergraduate at the Univeristy of Texas majoring in theater back in the late 80s, there was this wild sense of reverence for him, and no professor seemed to be able to really explain why this was the case. Sure, they told me that he somehow embodied the heart of existential absurdism, that he fully explored "the condition of man" and all that, but my own subjective reading saw his work as excruciatingly silly. And I'm usually drawn toward the absurd. Beckett, however, was to me like listening to AM radio static: you might hear a hint of a voice or song here and there, with the expectation that something was going to happen, but, ultimately nothing ever happened. I just didn't get it.

I'm still frustrated by Beckett, but I've recently come to learn that frustration is probably the point. In other words, to Beckett, life was frustration, an absurdity. Last year a couple of my MFA acting classmates did a scene in class from Waiting for Godot. I enjoyed it. With the guidance of our brilliant teacher, John Dennis, my buddies portrayed a couple of characters desperately trying to figure out their own missing backstories, to make sense of their senseless lives, being very silly all the while. Their performance made me feel like I'm starting to get it.

Maybe I've finally reached the point in life where I've figured out that there's no point to life.

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