SAMUEL BECKETT IN SPAIN

A collection of articles on Samuel Beckett and Spain could only speak, unfortunately, of a disagreement. On the one hand, the Irish Nobel Prize winner never showed much interest in Spanish culture; on the other, his work has not generated a large following in our country. It is well known that, with the exception of his best-known plays, the rest of his theatrical output, along with his forays into the novel, poetry, and essay, has gone rather unnoticed, despite the fruitful dialogue that these Beckett-style artistic expressions have established with readers in neighboring countries. Adding to this negative picture is the fact that the image that persists of Beckett today, despite the years that have passed since he burst onto the Spanish scene in the mid-1950s, is still that of an author shrouded in a thick fog of existential angst. The humor of his work seems to have passed him by in a culture, that of Spain, where humorous literature has a long tradition. This may be due to the prevailing ideological climate in Spain at the time, steeped in a pessimism with no way out due to the lack of freedoms. Beckett was read and listened to at the time in a political context, as in intellectual circles opposed to Franco's regime, his work was interpreted within the parameters of the specific situation in Spain. The absence of in-depth, well-documented, and cliché-free investigation into the content of his books was a constant in the first decades of Beckett's reception in our country.