Oh Mr. Beckett, what is this Endgame? What is this game? I read you and I do not understand you. And yet I do understand you. You confuse me. You make sense.
Why are Nagg and Nell living in dustbins?
Is this really merely the hopeless ramblings of an existential world? (Can I use the word “merely” in that sentence?).
I was disappointed to find that the entire Can Lit class, for what ever strange and delusional reason, is under the impression that Surfacing is about a schizophrenic woman. They had pegged it to a “T”, these second-year psychology students, let loose by that little man they call Lethbridge and for some reason worship, citing symptoms and claiming absolute certainty that their analysis was correct and right and intelligent. But it has been in my experience, or perhaps inexperience, that the answer is never what “everyone” thinks it is. That would be too easy, to simple, and to dissatisfying. It IS too dissatisfying. A book can never be “just” about something. Why can no one ever admit it? Surely someone, one of those people, must feel something ELSE when reading these books.
Surfacing is not about a schizophrenic woman, and claiming so is degrading and, actually, embarrassing.
What IS sanity, anyways?
This is precisely the question. My fellow Can Lit-ites may assume that the un-named narrator sinks into the watery wasteland of insanity only to “surface” back into the brightly-lit, rosey-sunrised air we call life. But what is this life? Who are these smiling faces waiting for us? Anna is a self-concerned, weak-willed materialistic embodiment of woman. David is crass, heartless, incapable of feeling. Joe is lonely and tamed, impersonal and direction-less. The Americans are everywhere: taking our land, stealing our culture, our language, our livelihoods and individuality; robbing us of our nationality. Flooding valleys so those south west desert-dwellers can dump our water into their swimming pools and fountains and green manicured lawns and wait for the bus under a fine mist of Canadian water. Ripping down cabins and building Walmarts.
And this is sanity? This is what she is “surfacing” to?
No. They are the insane. She is the sane. Or, at least, she attempts to be. She has the makings of a sane person. And yet she cannot achieve sanity fully because sanity is not attainable here, and now. She must resign herself to what we call humanity. And so, Surfacing is not a depressing insight into the mind of the insane and the turmoil which plagues its reasoning. No, though it is, to me, depressing. It is the struggle against humanity and society and life and the dissatisfaction that these things deliver. It is the cry “unjust! unjust!” and the yearning for something more and better and purer and more right than what we can have.
If this is insanity than I, too, am plagued by it, and so are all the writers of the world.
