What happens when I Google “samuel beckett”? The answer depends on a number of other questions, but take my current situation to be illustrative: I am on my Macbook Air on May 20th, 2018, and and am using an Incognito Mode tab in Google Chrome to prevent the results from being tailored specifically to me. Google returns “about 433,000 results” (in “0.61 seconds”) and lays them out, Wikipedia-first, by relevance, popularity, and the rest of their algorithm’s black box. Below the first three results, Google informs me that people who ask about “samuel beckett” also ask “What does it mean to wait for Godot?”, “Why does Pozzo go blind?” and “Is Waiting for Godot an existentialist play?” – and, further, offers (dreadful) answers to those questions from Wikipedia, Shmoop, and ‘owlcation,’ respectively.
To the right of these results is what Google calls a “knowledge graph” about the “Irish novelist,” complete with a brief biography (from Wikipedia), his birth- and death-date, the genres in which he wrote (“Drama, fiction, poetry, screenplays, personal correspondence”), a list of several of his books, his plays, a list of other people who Beckett-searchers often search for (Joyce, Ionesco, Pinter, Brecht, and Kafka top the list; the first woman is 22 entries down, and is his wife), and a list of three (with a link to more) quotations from Beckett’s work:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again (sic). Fail again. Fail better.”
“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”
“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. ”
These quotations are the most virally successful snippets, online and off, of Beckett’s work. “Fail better,” in particular, has acquired a life of its own, been “salvaged from the darkness of its setting, sanded and smoothed of the jagged remnants of that context” and become “a quote, a saying – a linguistic object whose meaning is readily apparent, useful, and endlessly transferable, like a coin in the currency of wisdom.” (cite). It has also, here, been misquoted, as have the other two quotations provided above; “Dance first” is a concatenation of a conversation between Estragon, Vladimir, and Pozzo:
ESTRAGON: Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn't too much to ask him.
VLADIMIR: [To POZZO.] Would that be possible?
POZZO: By all means, nothing simpler. It's the natural order.
And the third quotation is mispunctuated; both times Hamm barks out his diagnosis, the two clauses are separated by a comma and ended with an exclamation mark.
	What is to be done with this rush of information? Derisive dismissal is the easiest response, and the most academically something one. However, this Beckett – this collection of information, of modularized and bastardized quotations and images and oversimplistic answers, of memes – is the Beckett most ready-to-hand to first-year who sees Waiting for Godot on her syllabus and decides to get a head start, or to a viewer of Game of Thrones whose brush with Beckett’s mood in XYZ has whetted their appetite. This Beckett – algorithmically generated from the grist of the internet – is best approached, I’d like to suggest, not as an author or as a director but as what numerous scholars working in a variety of fields has called a memeplex.