The ancient philosopher Porphyry noted that his teacher Plotinus “seemed ashamed of being in the body.” For Plotinus, matter, and the flesh in particular, obstructed the soul’s flight, that ultimate transport of “the alone to the Alone.” I sometimes think that if Plotinus had written novels and plays instead of treatises, he might have written like Samuel Beckett. Throughout Beckett’s fiction and drama, the body is an obstacle; it drags like a tin can tied to the tail of the spirit. Fatigue, inertia, and decrepitude – not to mention corns and boils and piles – afflict the bedraggled bodies of his dispirited characters and inspire their meandering grumbles. “That unstable fugitive thing, still living flesh,” Molloy calls the human body in the novel of that name.

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin 100 years ago this month, on April 13, 1906, a day which was, fittingly enough, both Friday the 13th and Good Friday. As if by birthright, his characters are invariably beset by bad luck and stand – or rather droop – in the shadow of Golgotha. Centenary festivities are under way around the world from Dublin to Durban, but, to be honest, a Beckett birthday party doesn’t sound to me like a whole lot of fun. I imagine the celebrants gathering in some forsaken ditch to swig drams of wormwood and intone dirges while they kvetch. The current hoopla would have appalled the austere and modest Beckett.

Birthdays aren’t lighthearted occasions for Beckett. In his 1951 novel “Malone Dies,” the narrator says, “I was born grave as others syphilitic,” and the punning quip has an autobiographical ring. Birth and death, the womb and the grave, collide – and collude – in his work. “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth,” Vladimir famously puts it in “Waiting for Godot,” and continues, “Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.” Beckett’s work is riddled with such holes, from the unmentionable orifices of the mutinous body to graves and ditches and those sleazy boltholes where his protagonists wait fretfully to die. In “Texts for Nothing,” first published in 1959 and perhaps his most beautiful prose work, the narrator groans, “I am down in the hole the centuries have dug, centuries of filthy weather, flat on my face on the dark earth sodden with the creeping saffron waters it slowly drinks.”

Grove Press, Beckett’s original American publisher, has produced the most suitable tribute for so fastidious and ornery an author. The Grove Centenary Edition of his works, edited by Paul Auster in four handsome volumes ($24 each), contains almost all the extraordinary prose, poetry, and drama Beckett produced over half a century. Volume One (496 pages), with a superb introduction by Colm Toibin, offers the early novels (“Murphy” and “Watt”), written in English, followed by “Mercier and Camier,” one of his first books composed in French. Volume Two (536 pages), introduced by Salman Rushdie, contains the great trilogy (“Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable”), together with “How It Is,” all written originally in French and translated by Beckett himself. Volume Three (520 pages), with a rather perfunctory introduction by Edward Albee, brings together the dramatic works from “Waiting for Godot” of 1952 to “What Where” of 1983. And Volume Four (584 pages), introduced in dry academic mode by J. M. Coetzee, has the poetry, the short fiction, and the essays, including the remarkable 1930 study of Proust. For the diehard Beckettophile, there is also “En attendant / Waiting for Godot” (Grove, 368 pages, $22), a sumptuous edition of his most famous play with the French and English versions on facing pages.

Presented thus, Beckett appears as a surprisingly prolific author, especially when one keeps in mind that an equally voluminous set could be compiled of the French originals alone. Even more surprising when one reads through these thousands of pages is to see, yet again, how drastically Beckett restricted himself to a very few dominant themes and settings that he explored over and over, with only slight variations, during a long lifetime. True, over the course of his work there is a progression – if that’s the right word – into ever greater spareness; the drama moves from speech to sighs at the end, and even the little that is uttered seems increasingly menaced by an annihilating silence. The wonder is that this is seldom monotonous. What’s the secret of the fascination that Beckett’s works continue to exert?

An old man engages in a demented monologue in a shabby furnished room, another babbles out of some fogbound ditch, a woman sits up to her neck in an ash can, a couple of tramps wait for an enigmatic figure who never appears and never will appear, a spot lit mouth soliloquizes. Beckett often is caricatured as a “prophet of despair,” a nihilist of a grimly Irish sort, and such scenarios reinforce this superficial impression. But the language, whether in French or English, fairly leaps from the page; his prose and his dialogue possess astonishing vigor. The bare words say one thing but their shape and rhythm and intonation say quite another; however bleak the message, it is delivered with pungent vitality. As one example, consider this passage from “The Unnamable,” perhaps Beckett’s strangest novel:

Under the skies, on the roads, in the towns, in the woods, in the hills, in the plains, by the shores, on the seas, behind my manikins, I was not always sad, I wasted my time, abjured my rights, suffered for nothing, forgot my lesson. Then a little hell after my own heart, not too cruel, with a few nice damned to foist my groans on, something sighing off and on and the distant gleams of pity’s fires biding their hour to promote us to ashes. I speak, speak, because I must, but I do not listen, I seek my lesson, my life I used to know and would not confess, hence possibly an occasional slight lack of limpidity.

The impact of the prose, at once scathing and suave, is most immediate when heard, onstage or in readings. The Irish actors Sean Barrett and Dermot Crowley demonstrate this brilliantly on recent recordings of the trilogy (Naxos Modern Classics; “Molloy,” $45.98; “Malone Dies,” $29.98; “The Unnamable,” $32.98).The jagged eloquence of Beckett’s prose, with its screeds against the treacherous body interwoven with sly allusions to writers as disparate as Langland and Dante, Kafka and Joyce, elicits a memorable reading from both performers.

Beckett the man seems to have had a gift for friendship, and his 100th birthday has prompted a number of affectionate memoirs. One of the best of these is the poet Anne Atik’s “How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 128 pages, $30).This is especially valuable because it captures the private Beckett, both in Boswellian notes taken after their meetings and in superb photographs – was any author more photogenic than Beckett? – and drawings by Ms. Atik’s husband, the artist Avigdor Arikha. Less compelling but still interesting is the ponderously titled “Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett,” edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson (Arcade, 313 pages, $27.95), an oral biography that contains reminiscences of varying quality by actors, directors, editors, and other writers, together with interviews with Beckett and, again, wonderful illustrations.

In the end, perhaps Beckett fascinates because he captures the restless tug and twitch of our impulses, torn between good and bad, hope and despair, with such perfect pitch. There’s little past, and almost no future, in his work; all occurs in the tumble of the passing moment and even that is shot through with dark flashes of contradiction. Beckett was no optimist but neither was he as absolute a pessimist as he seems. His characters veer from one extreme to the other at every moment, and yet they always slog on. Beckett liked to quote a sentence from St. Augustine: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” (How characteristic of him to admire a formulation in which both the promise and the admonition are framed in the negative!) His characters, like the thieves at Calvary – indeed, like us all – dangle in this suspension, that unceasing ache Beckett called “no’s knife in yes’s wound.”

eormsby@nysun.com