Adorno ranked Beckett and Helms as serial successors to Kafka and Joyce

Evidence

In the spring of 1958, on returning from a trip to Vienna, he wrote to Horkheimer, `My most significant artistic impression was of a literally magnificent production of Beckett’s Endgame. This is really a significant text which you absolutely must readif only because some of its intentions are closely connected with ours. And it’s correspondingly uncomfortable, so much so that there was booing.’ Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Hans G. Helms’s FA: M’AHNIESGWOW stimulated Adorno into recognizing a development in literature that went beyond Proust, Kafka and Joyce. In Adorno’s opinion, Beckett’s Endgame was to Kafka’s novels, and Helms’s FA: M’AHNIESGWOW was to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, what serial music was to Schoenberg, free atonality and twelve-tone technique. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2238

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Adorno’s serial-music framework (Philosophy of Modern Music) into literature; parallels the claim that serial music extended rational organization while dropping the subjective complement. — connects to: Adorno saw Beckett and Helms as surpassing Kafka and Joyce. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2238; Adorno judged Helms’s philology-based associative text more avant-garde than Beckett. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2245; Beckett and Helms absolutized predecessors’ principles into necessity free of the individual
• SEED: Angle: tracing how Adorno’s musical categories (serial = the next step after Schoenberg) got transposed wholesale onto literature by his own hand.

Broader Connections

• Adorno saw Beckett and Helms as surpassing Kafka and Joyce. #corroborates (1.00) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2238
• Beckett and Helms absolutized predecessors’ principles into necessity free of the individual #expands (0.85)
• Adorno judged Helms’s philology-based associative text more avant-garde than Beckett. #qualifies (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2245