Ackerley Chris - Beckett/ Philosophy

Alexander L. Gungov ( Sofia University , Bu l garia )

Why Bulgaria, and why Sofia University Press? What does Bu l garia have to do with philosophy, let alone with Beckett? The only Bulgar i an philosopher renowned worldwide, St. Cyril, dates from the ninth century (fortunately A.D.) and the only prominent contemporary philos o pher with a Bulgarian name, Julia Kristeva, happens to be French. Bulgaria a Wonderland where people shake their heads to say No and nod to say Yes , where the King de jure becomes the Prime Minister de facto ; a low-budget deficit state where the princ i pal qualification for one to be appointed Finance Minister (dedicated to fighting the soaring foreign debt) is that persons foreign citize n ship, and whose most substantial element of national security is a doner kebab shop shield. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, Sa m uel Beckett is prominent in the academic circles of this country and enjoys a following among the wider reading/theatergoing public. turned out to be a gesture prophetic of the later warm welcome of the Irish writer in Bulgaria and in the whole of Central and Eastern E u rope .

During real socialism a time when nothing exciting would or could happen in this country and in the other fraternal Warsaw Pact n a tions Waiting for Godot seemed to speak directly to socialist laborers. Now, in the post-totalitarian transition period, the entire Beckettian oeuvre seems perfectly tailored to all sorts of job market players, still crying (and therefore living) retirees, mute (but neverth e less also alive) totally independent drug addicts and prostitutes, downsized former employees, the newly homeless freed from the oppressive state and Communist Party tutelage, not forgetting the opt i mistic army of tomorrows une m ployed alumni and their worshipping scholarship professors.

As the present collection of essays shows, there are many a s pects and many senses of the relationship between Beckett and ph i losophy. Indeed, Becketts writings are permeated by the intellectual mood of their time but they also seem to foresee a bleak human dest i ny. Beckett was, of course, a witness to many of the major events of the twentieth cent u ry, including both the end of the Cold War (unique in the annals of warfare in that no official winners were declared and no casualties counted) and the birth of the post-1989 New World Di s order. Beckett passed away on December 22, 1989, on the final day of the so-called Romanian Revolution the only bloody event in the velvet Central and Eastern European autumn; just three days before the Ceauescu couples trial and execution itself seemingly staged according to a script by another giant of the theater of the absurd, Romanian-born Eugne Ionesco .

The eagerly hoped-for, radiant happiness of utopia, which was scientifically predicted to las t ad infinitum with the end of history, turned out to be an ongoing disaster to him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth shared by the civic electorates (devoted civil co n sumers) on both sides of what once was the Iron Curtain. The metal of this awe-inspiring partition was symbolically melted in a truly Becke t tian mode to produce a rather palpable income. Business-minded citizens of undisclosed ethnic origin, who had broken for good with the oppressive totalitarian past, started collecting various metal items for scrap purposes throughout the liberated former Co m munist Bloc and in Bulgaria in particular. National electric grid cables, sewage manhole covers, streetcar/train rails and bronze memor i als of different sizes and shapes went to scrap; no surprise, then, that some entrepreneurs had to be taken care of by hospitals and the last ri te s /rights institutions. These endeavors accompanying the acquis i tion of semi-miraculous skills became emblematic of the New E u rope: receiving a wage in the hundreds but facing bills in the tho u sands; being paid only quarterly or biannually; coping with laws changing on a weekly basis, etc. all of this turned out to be quite contagious for the rest of Europe. An eloquent illustration of this pe s tilent ial tendency occurred just a moment ago, as I was writing this Foreword: Henry Moores 500,000 Sundial has been stolen from the authors estate-museum. It was reported that the robbery was made not to fence the sculpture on the black market (as hardly anybody could instantly command such a price) but simply to sell it for scrap the copper in the bronze is estimated to fetch 1,500. More o ver, the news provided no details about the suspects being New E u ropes free citizens and not Her Royal Majestys own subjects.