H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 3 8passionately or not. It would be kinder to get me to a doctor than
to a registry office.
Is Samuel Beckett being sincere when he portrays humanity in
such bleak terms? Is this a matter of self- expression on his part?
Isn’t it possible that the real- life Beckett was a jovial, dewy- eyed
soul who looked forward to the imminent arrival of an earthly
paradise? As a matter of fact, we know that he was not. The real- life
Beckett was in some ways a fairly morose character, even though he
enjoyed a drink, a joke and a spot of congenial company. But it is
not out of the question that he regularly had his friends rolling on
the floor clutching their sides and howling for him to stop. He
might also have believed that humankind was destined for a glori-
ously fulfilling future. Perhaps his work is simply an experiment in
seeing the world as a post- nuclear landscape. Or perhaps adopting
this attitude provisionally was the most effective way he could
write. Shakespeare could create some compellingly nihilistic char-
acters (Iago, for example, or the psychopathic Barnadine in Measure
for Measure) without being a nihilist himself. Or at least not as far
as we know.
To doubt whether an author can be fully in command of his or
her meanings is not to suggest that literary works can mean
anything you like. If we were to read ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ as an
account of the electrification of the early Soviet Union, it would be
hard to see a relation between this account of it and the text itself,
so that there would be a logical problem about how it could count
as a reading of this particular work. There might seem no reason
why it could not serve as an interpretation of any literary work at
all. Maybe Stalin thought Paradise Lost was also about the electrifi-
cation of the early Soviet Union. In a similar way, ‘Enormous, flap-
ping, puce- coloured ears’ is not just an eccentric answer to the