To think, years from now my name will be mentioned in the same breath as Laurence Llewelyn Bowen.
To be a genius is no longer enough. The recent revival of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days at the National Theatre - that "challenging" 1960 play best known for sending audiences to the exits in droves - may have had critics queuing up to hail the work conclusive proof of the playwright's genius. But in an age when even Pete Doherty is routinely described as such, you have to wonder just how devalued the word has become. It no longer guarantees an artist a place in the pantheon. Instead, only those who have become eponyms can truly be said to have achieved immortal greatness. As soon as Beckett mutated into Beckettesque or, if you prefer, Beckettian, the jury could definitively rest its case.
On the face of it, being made into an eponym would seem to be the ultimate artistic honour in that, thereafter, your name will be universally synonymous with a particular state of mind or place. Eponymisation, however, often turns out to be a backhanded compliment, reducing an artist's entire canon to a single, instantly recognisable motif. Thus, with a nod to Waiting For Godot, Beckettesque is taken to refer to a person in a state of quiet desperation, who is in for a bit of a wait. So degraded has the word's meaning become it is now perfectly acceptable to apply Beckettesque to an experience as vaguely purgatorial as queuing at a bar for more than five minutes.
Beckett is not the only artist whose work has become so cutely and cruelly reduced. Despite the breadth of George Orwell's work as novelist, essayist and critic, Orwellian has simply come to mean the all-seeing eye or an imaginary room that acts as a repository for one's worst fears. And since the advent of Room 101, it has become merely a repository for things that are slightly annoying. There's Byronic, of course, now applied to any long-haired TV personality (Russell Brand, Laurence Llewelyn Bowen) who is fond of shagging. And Dante-esque, which can, confusingly, mean two different things. A friend of mine recently returned from a first date, which he described with a sigh as, "completely Dante-esque". I thought he meant that the evening evoked a similar state of rapture to that described in Dante's poems to Beatrice Portinari. In fact, he meant that he'd spent the night navigating the seven circles of hell after the fashion of Virgil in The Divine Comedy.
All of which begs the question: which of this generation of writers and artists are likely to lend their names to the neologisms of the next century? The words Dylanesque and Pythonesque are already part of the lexicon and sure to survive: the former is synonymous with notions of authentic rock'n'roll poetry and the latter refers to zany behaviour that is not nearly as funny as it believes itself to be.
One other contender is Lord Archer, who believes he has a rightful place in history. For once, I must agree with him: 100 years from today, rest assured, Archerism will still be a by-word for fraudulent, porcine rapacity and conspicuous lack of talent.
