Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
TIBOR TÓTH Beckett and the Poetics of the Absurd
32 Tibor Tóth wordplay elsewhere (such as the Joycean "prostisciutto" in line 13) clearly create a mask, irritate and prompt interest in the depths they half-conceal. The lines, "Kip of Christ hatch it!" (line 49), "Jesuitasters copy" (line 51), "In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg" (line 66), "Anna Maria! / She reads Moses and says her love is crucified" (lines 69-70), "Christina the ripper" (line 92) are irritating in themselves and paradoxic ally reveal what they are meant to conceal: a unique treatise on hist, sex, intellect, and the world that 'stinks fresh'. The irony applied to Galileo's revolutionary theory concerning the movement of the earth is meant to conceal the movement of the body during the sexual act pointless, senseless when thought of in terms of its potential to create new life. The movement illustrative of this near nonsensical desire is rendered absurd through a grammatical trick that will be repeated, when Beckett defines Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens twice: "That's not moving, that's movingHowever, since we are reading Beckett the otherwise present reference to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood could enrich the list of possible interpretations. The line could also refer to the heart of King Henry IV: the dead heart that is moved, taken to a Jesuit college, a fact that moves the Jesuits. The poem abounds in references to literature and mythology pretending to aim at concealing the dominating pornography. As we have already mentioned it might be interpreted simply as 'acting as if.' Christ, Maria Magdaléna, Cain and Abel, Moses, Copernicus, Galileo, Joyce, Yeats, Zeus and Leda, Prometheus, the seven days of creation are invoked to add to the power of the experiment and they lose their own meaning being recycled in a pornographic context. The recycled material does not add to the meaning of the sexual act shamelessly revealed,—on the contrary, —its function could be defined as a deliberate attempt to divert attention from the possible enrichment of the interpretation. They introduce the sense of chaos into the 'narrative', by means of juxtaposition. The incantation of the last lines touches the limits of blasphemy, but it cannot be interpreted as such without violating the atmosphere of the poem: Then I will rise and move moving toward Rahab of the snows, the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon, Christina the ripper. Hungarian and French.) Budapest: Orpheusz Könyvkiadó. 6-13. 6. (All quoted poems are from this edition.)
