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- Herausgeber: ibidem
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This collection of essays, most of which return to or renew something of an empirical or archival approach to the issues, represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plurality of voices and bookended by an historical introduction and a thematic conclusion.?S. E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett Studies This is an important contribution to ongoing attempts to understand the relationship of Beckett's work to philosophy. It breaks some new ground, and helps us to consider not only how Beckett made use of philosophy but how his own thought might be understood philosophical.?Anthony Uhlmann, University of Western Sydney
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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ibidem Press, Stuttgart
In memoriam
Sean Lawlor (1948–2011)
The day that is darkest
Is the day without laughter
(Nicolas-Sébastien de Chamfortvia Samuel Beckett’s“LongAfter Chamfort,”trans. Sean Lawlor)
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank, first and foremost, Alexander Gungov for his unflagging support of this project – from initial appearance in the Sofia Philosophical Review V/1 (2011) to his encouragment and assistance with an extended version, published via the kind offices of Sofia University Press under the title Beckett/Philosophy (2012). We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of David Addyman and Tania Mühlberger for their pivotal assistance in final preparations of this text for press, as well as to all invited contributors for their goodwill and forbearance in the process of publication. The editors would also like to thank Christian Schön, Valerie Lange and their colleagues at ibidem Press for committed and enthuiasistic support in the re-publication of this volume.
Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s unpublished “Whoroscope Notebooks”; “Human Wishes Notebooks”; “Philosophy Notes” and “Interwar Notes”; and letters to Mary Hutchinson and to Barbary Bray, all © The Estate of Samuel Beckett, reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London.
Table of Contents
Foreword to theibidemPressEdition
Alexander L. Gungov (Sofia University and Sofia Philosophical Review)
In Beckett’senigmatically appealinguniverse, a philosophical touch shows through, born of imaginaryconversations and indirect disputes with philosophers. The authors in this volume have studiedin depth the philosophical sources of the Irish sage’soeuvre,revealinghisresponses to theloveofwisdom from various angles. The editors, Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani,havedemonstratedthe uniqueness ofthecontributions and their significance for the field, so they have released mefrom thisduty. What I wish to do is to tryto hearandsharesomenotesfromthe philosophicalsonorityof Beckett’s work amid the current human predicament.
Hope is ever more and more lacking today.Beckett’s writingscallfor hope in spite of or due to their seeming obscurity and uncanninessedgedwith absurdity. His first publication on Joyce’sWork in Progresshad seminal impact on his laterdevelopment. As Donald Phillip Verene pointsout in his essay included in this volume, Beckett did not pay special attention to the humorousaspectof Joyce’s style. Nevertheless, he absorbed its influence,oftendeflecting it into ironic twists. Irony isVico’sfourth trope, which, unlike metaphor, is not a part of the poetic language of the heroicagebut ratherdominatesin the following mediocre age, which isfocused on attendingtoone’smundaneconcerns. For thetwentiethand twenty-first centuries, however, irony is too week a tool;even satire provesshort ofvigor incopingwithitsunprecedented reality.The mode thatmatches the extraordinary demandsof the presentis the grotesque, which fully captures the world falling apart,masterfully conveying its innermost essence of decay.
YetBeckett’s grotesques are not just images of decline and destruction. The speculative impetus of Benedetto Croce’s Vico has passedintoBeckett’s dealing with the plain nonsense ofambientlife. The “paradoxically productive impasses”[1]are not simply examples of a deadlockinto whichthe author brings hisfiguresbut the speculative circles of genuine infinity,not a mathematicalinfinity butHegel’s cunning, creativekind. Hopelessness andthevain tensionsof seeminglyblockedcircumstances allude totheescape of sublation. This supreme faculty of reason is achieved with the decisive help of imagination embodiedina “Critique of Pure Imagination.”[2]Beckett comes close tothe Kantian/Lyotardiansublimein which theimagination is engaged intheimpossibleeffortto provide visibility to anIdea. Thesuccessful conclusionof this hopeless task is only alure; the real goal is the endless strife. Lyotard’sdifferend—an assignment that, by definition,cannot be fulfilled—recallsthe same situation butwithout themajestic delusion common to the sublime.
The speculative tendency in Beckett aiming at a new reality via a regenerated sense goes beyond the noble impotence ofthesublime andthe doomeddifferend. Itassists us not onlyto recognizethe marionette theater of our contemporary age—which is notitsworst misfortune–but to facesoberlythe transformation of human beings into statistical units.The overwhelming ontology of statistics is opposed by “an autonomous grace in a frozen figure, a trembling tension, once again, between philosophy and image.”[3]The irreplaceability of human warmth is awareness“yet to come”;but a piece of good news has already been announced,andit is my ardentwishthatBeckett/Philosophy, nowinibidemPress’ edition,spreadsitagainstthe dominating hyperreality of financial ledgers and statistical reports.
[1]Karim Mamdani, “Conclusion: Beckett in Theses,” in this volume, 389.
[2]Ibid., 391.
[3]Ibid., 390.
ForewordIs This the Right Time to PonderBeckett and Philosophy?
Alexander L. Gungov (SofiaUniversity,Bulgaria)
Why Bulgaria, and why Sofia University Press? What doesBulgariahave to do with philosophy, let alone with Beckett? The only Bulgarian philosopher renowned worldwide, St. Cyril, dates from the ninth century (fortunately A.D.) and the only prominent contemporary philosopher with a Bulgarian name, Julia Kristeva, happens to be French. Bulgaria—a Wonderland where people shake their heads to say “No” and nod to say “Yes,” where the Kingde jurebecomes the Prime Ministerde facto; a low-budget deficit state where the principal qualification for one to be appointed Finance Minister (dedicated to fighting the soaringforeigndebt) is that person’sforeigncitizenship, and whose most substantial element of national security is a doner kebab shop shield. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, Samuel Beckett is prominent in the academic circles of this country and enjoys a following among the wider reading/theatergoing public.[1]By thematizing and undermining the everyday confidence in common sense and axiomatic truths, Beckett inculcates a non-standard attitude toward the world and the self—one in keeping with the experience of stepping onto Bulgarian soil or taking in the news coming from this part of the globe. Indeed, Beckett’s Nobel Prize “for his unremitting explorations of ‘the degradation of humanity,’”[2]turned out to be a gesture prophetic of the later warm welcome of the Irish writer inBulgariaand in the whole of Central andEastern Europe.
During “real socialism”—a time when nothing exciting would or could happen in this country and in the other fraternal Warsaw Pact nations—Waiting for Godotseemed to speak directly to socialist laborers. Now, in the post-totalitarian transition period, the entire Beckettianoeuvreseems perfectly tailored to all sorts of job market players, still crying (and therefore living) retirees, mute (but nevertheless also alive) totally independent drug addicts and prostitutes, downsized former employees, the newly homeless freed from the oppressive state and Communist Party tutelage, not forgetting the optimistic army of tomorrow’s unemployed alumni and their worshipping scholarship professors.
As the present collection of essays shows, there are many aspects and many senses of the relationship between Beckett and philosophy. Indeed, Beckett’s writings are permeated by the intellectual mood of their time but they also seem to foresee a bleak human destiny. Beckett was, of course, a witness to many of the major events of the twentieth century, including both the end of the Cold War (unique in the annals of warfare in that no official winners were declared and no casualties counted) and the birth of the post-1989 New World Disorder. Beckett passed away on December 22, 1989, on the final day of the so-called Romanian Revolution—the only bloody event in the velvet Central and Eastern European autumn; just three days before theCeauşescu couple’s trial and execution—itself seemingly staged according to a script by another giant of the theater of the absurd, Romanian-bornEugène Ionesco.
The eagerly hoped-for, radiant happiness of utopia, which was scientifically predicted to lastad infinitumwith the end of history, turned out to be an ongoing disaster—“to him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth”—shared by the civic electorates (devoted civil consumers) on both sides of what once was the Iron Curtain. The metal of this awe-inspiring partition was symbolically melted in a truly Beckettian mode to produce a rather palpable income. Business-minded citizens of undisclosed ethnic origin, who had broken for good with the oppressive totalitarian past, started collecting various metal items for scrap purposes throughout the liberated former Communist Bloc—and inBulgariain particular. National electric grid cables, sewage manhole covers, streetcar/train rails and bronze memorials of different sizes and shapes went to scrap; no surprise, then, that some entrepreneurs had to be taken care of by hospitals and the last rites/rightsinstitutions. These endeavors accompanying the acquisition of semi-miraculous skills became emblematic of the New Europe: receiving a wage in the hundreds but facing bills in the thousands; being paid only quarterly or biannually; coping with laws changing on a weekly basis, etc.—all of this turned out to be quite contagious for the rest of Europe. An eloquent illustration of this pestilentialtendency occurred just a moment ago, as I was writing this Foreword: Henry Moore’s £500,000Sundialhas been stolen from the author’s estate-museum. It was reported that the robbery was made not to fence the sculpture on the black market (as hardly anybody could instantly command such a price) but simply to sell it for scrap—the copper in the bronze is estimated to fetch £1,500. Moreover, the news provided no details about the suspects being New Europe’s free citizens and not Her Royal Majesty’s own subjects.
Or to play a variation on the same theme, a conversation concerningBulgaria’s recent accession into the EU with two visiting faculty members fromIreland’s prestigious Milltown Institute comes to mind. As our eyes were glued to horse carts edging their way through the traffic jams on the busy Sofia boulevards, I warned my colleagues to expect those carts in downtown Dublin soon, ridden by cheerful fellows of bronze complexion (naturally to become paler in time). Whether my prediction has already come true I am not sure, but in the pan-European distress felt so strongly in the EU (and in the soon to be EU), sooner or later it will.
The deterioration of the human condition Beckett writes about belongs to the society of producers and its sequel, the society of consumers. In both ages, as Zygmunt Bauman justly observes, everyone must sell oneself as a labor commodity (in the way only certain professions used to do in pre-industrial times). Leading the life of a commodity—leading to, of course, the longing for other commodities—does not make much sense, no matter how colorful and seductive the surrounding masquerade. In the age of Consumerism, Camus’ feeling of absurdity goes beyond all deception and delusion in pleading for a serene, Stoic admission of hopelessness. Such a sense of absurdity is the brave admission of the dead end in which one has to live, of the absolute impossibility of finding a way out. Beckett’s own literary dead end is of a different sort: an absolute imprisonment in the issueless human predicament; in the processes of one’s consciousness, language, even stories. Beckett’s solution thus differs from Camus’ Stoicism but is no less philosophical—one might dare say it is even more so. Beckett relies upon the imagination not just as an artistic tool, but as a genuine philosophical faculty.
For a long time now, the imagination has been more than simply a psychic phenomenon; it is a central philosophical concept. We would do well to remember the social ontology constructed upon the imagination by the Renaissance Humanists; its contradictions in Descartes’ disdainful but simultaneously respectful attitude to the imagination; Vico’s praise of the imagination as the source of the social world supported by Providence; Kant’s vague root of all experience we are usually unaware of; Fichte’s interplay between intellectual intuition and the imagination; Hegel’s recollection presupposed by the speculative thinking;[3]Bentham’s untimely fictions; Husserl’s free variations of phantasy; Heidegger’s reaffirmation of Kant’s ontological imagination; Sartre’s existential imagination; or Bachelard’s poetic imagination;to mention only a few. Within these philosophies of the imagination, Beckett occupies a dignified place because he is positive that life itself could not be human without imagination. For him, the imagination is a powerful consolation for the human predicament rather than an instrument for utopia-building. While the Irish sage clearly and distinctly admits to a permeating and all-encompassing absurdity, he constantly suggests that the imagination is applied to absurdity in a striving to imaginetheunimaginable: “imagination dead imagine.”
Within philosophical discourse, imagining the unimaginable is sometimes referred to as the sublime. For Kant, the sublimepointed outto an awareness of the limits of the imagination and of the primacy of reason. According to Hegel, the imagination is sublated into speculative reason. For Jean-François Lyotardit is a painful and, at the same time, pleasant struggle to present what is unpresentable. To put this in social terms, it is the painful attempt to achieve justice when justice is impossible or, in Beckett’s perspective, it is the making of sense when the absurd reigns supreme. For this purpose Lyotard introduced the termdifferend. This term is capable of shedding some light upon Beckett’s struggle with human absurdity no less than upon Beckett’s legacy in the current epoch of Post-Consumerism. Although Bauman would not agree, the plague of consumerism no longer prevails. We are stepping into an era when not the consumer but the statistical unit becomes of prime importance. The world divides into a vast majority of statistical units and a tiny segment of the few chosen to manipulate these units. The laws of the game are designed by and for those whose work it is to manipulate; the others are entrapped in the situation of adifferend.In such an absurd situation, the law-abiding plaintiff cannot prosecute his or her claim—for that person is outside the legal framework by definition. No litigation could be held in such Kafkaesque circumstances, where the only option is to exercise one’sinalienable fundamental right to die.Togo beyond thedifferendone needs an amalgam of imagination and reason or,toechoBeckett, “a reason-ridden imagination” that issui generis.It distantly resembles Hegel’s speculation but is summoned to facethebewildering challenges of globalized humankind. Thisis apainful business, no doubt. Whether it also brings any pleasure is another question entirely. In any case, Beckett’s disposition to imagine the unimaginable might be summarized as:“I can't go on, I'll go on.”It is a kind of medicine. Is it intended just for palliative care or for an etiological treatment too? Who knows? . . .
***
Most of the present essays were published in theSofia Philosophical Review’s recent Special Issue, entitledBeckett/Philosophy, vol. V, No. 1, 2011 through the generous support of the Irish Embassy inSofia, and with H.E. Mr. John Rowans’ decisive encouragement. To this Special Issue, two chapters have been added to round out this collection: “On Vico, Joyce and Beckett” by the leading figure in the new philosophical humanism, Donald Phillip Verene, and “‘I am not a philosopher.’ Beckett and Philosophy: A Methodological and Thematic Overview” by the literary historian, Matthew Feldman. The first was already published inSofia Philosophical Review’s vol. V, No. 2, 2011 and the second—in vol. IV, No. 2, 2010. Further to these additions, the volume’s co-editor, Karim Mamdani, has added a paragraph on Verene’s submission in his “Conclusion.”
The original idea for compiling this volume came from Mamdani who suggested it to Feldman. The latter was immediately inspired and both started working on identifying and contacting the prospective contributors. By December 2010 all abstracts had been collected and June 2011 was set as the deadline for completing the essays. By 21 October, 2011, a Special Issue launch was organized atSofiaUniversityunder the auspices and active participation of the Irish Embassy, and in particular, of its Cultural Section Director, Ms. Ina Grozdanova. Following a welcome by the Irish Embassy’sChargé d’Affaires, two insightful speeches were given—by Matthew Feldman and Nicolas Johnston ofTrinityCollege,Dublin; they were followed by an enlightening presentation on Beckett’s reception inChinaby Mr. George Wu, a doctoral student at the Graduate Program in Philosophy Taught in English atSofiaUniversity. The audience was aware of being in attendance at one of the most splendid celebrations of Beckett’s intellectual heritage in Bulgaria. Regrettably, Karim Mamdani could not attend but we hope he is coming for the SUP book onBeckett/Philosophylaunch.
Shortly thereafter, Donald Verene kindly informed me about Emory University’s Beckett Project where a volume containing scores of Beckett’s previously unpublished letters was being compiled. In a real coincidence à la Vico, the launch ofThe Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956coincided with the launch ofSPhR’sBeckett/Philosophyspecial issue. Meanwhile, Feldman and Mamdani were eager to publish theSofia Philosophical Review’s Beckett edition in a separate, expanded volume. Their proposal was enthusiastically endorsed by the Sofia University Press Editor in Chief, Mrs. Margarita Krumova; its Director, Mr. Dimitar Radichkov; as well as by Mrs. Parka Atanasova, who was to become the SUP Editor in charge of theBeckett/Philosophypublication. The SUP, on behalf of these editors, Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani as well as myself, applied to the Bulgarian Ministry of Education for funding. The Ministry proved to be most responsive in wholeheartedly granting their support. H.E. Mr. Joan Rowan also kindly offered the support of the Irish Embassy in Bulgaria for the new volume.The Faculty of Philosophy at Sofia University decided to get involved financially too. Its pledge, however, due to a technical misunderstanding did not materialize until the very last moment (how not to recall yet again Vico’s pattern of providential misfortune!?) when their support, too, was confirmed. Beckettian maybe, but also a sublime way to emphasize “Beckett Studies” in Bulgaria and, we collectively hope, further afield.
[1]For Beckett’s reception in the former Soviet Bloc countries, seeOctavian Saiu, "Samuel Beckettbehind the Iron Curtain: The Reception of Samuel Beckett in Eastern Europe," inThe International Reception of Samuel Beckett,eds.Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009).
[2]Quoted in Matthew Feldman, “‘I am not a philosopher.’Beckett and Philosophy: A Methodological and Thematic Overview,” inSofia Philosophical Review, IV/2 (2010), 19. See also chapter 1 in this volume for a greater exposition on this point.
[3]Donald Phillip Verene,Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit(Albany: SUNY Press, 1985).
Introduction to Beckett/Philosophy
Matthew Feldman(Teesside University,UK)
Closed place. All needed to be known for say is known. There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing. What goes on in the arena is not said. Did it need to be known it would be. No interest. Not for imagining. Place consisting of an arena and a ditch. Between the two skirting the latter a track. Closed place. Beyond the ditch there is nothing. This is knownbecause it needs to be said. Arena black vast. Room for millions. Wandering and still. Never seeing never hearing one another. Never touching. No more is known.[1]
There can be little doubt, then, as Dermot Moran has recently suggested, that such a “stark Beckettian world cries out for philosophical interpretation.”[2]Yet at the same time,in acknowledgingthe pitfalls facing any facile linking of Beckett’s (or any other modernist’s) literature with philosophical ideas—in no small measure due to the challenging opacity of Beckett’s (especially postwar) literature—Beckett/Philosophycharts a narrow course. That is to say, the contributions to this collection examine specific philosophical interventions (or“slashes,”assuggested by this volume’s title), in Beckett’s development and expression as a literary writer. Western philosophy is therefore selectively engaged here through the lens of Beckett’s engagement with a particular thinker, doctrine or theme, as registered across his published prose, drama, and poetry, as well as in manuscripts, letters, and reading notes.
Moreover, in publishing this groundbreaking collection through the kind offices of theSofia Philosophical Review, the cumulative implications throughout are that, first, Samuel Beckett was a particularly philosophically-minded writer; second, his knowledge of philosophy was extensive, perhaps moreso than any other leading modernist author (save T.S.Eliot[3]); and finally, different philosophical concepts are repeatedlyinvoked and exploredacross anoeuvrelasting fully six decades. These suggestions thus open Beckett’s engagement with, and deployment of, Western philosophy for a distinctly philosophical readership for the first time. As such, the editors of this volume greatly hope academic philosophers might take up the baton offered by the present collectionfrom (mostly)literary critics, in order to further the work undertaken here by considering Beckett’s work from a philosophical perspective—perhaps via the starting points advanced by theindividual chapters thatensue.
Such a fruitful exchange might depart from a question literary-minded scholars should probably do well to avoid: just how accurately, or knowledgeably, did Beckett understand and employ philosophical ideas? Amongst the tributaries forked out by what is now a sub-discipline of Beckett Studies in its own right,“Beckett and philosophy,”this stream has yet to be pursued. To date, in fact, it is notable for its absence. To be sure, however, many other streams have been traversed by“Beckett and philosophy”;often departing fromLance St.John Butler’s comment that“[i]n spite of all protestations to the contrary, Beckett is working the same ground as the philosophers.”[4]This contention will be considered by the present introduction, while the conclusion to this volume reflects individually upon thefifteenchapters published here for the first time. It therefore marks a racing start toward interdisciplinary collaboration, not least asBeckett/Philosophyrepresents the most extensive discussion in Englishyetof Beckett’s relationship with philosophy. This is striking for at least three reasons.
First of all, Beckett seems the most philosophical of writers in both his“early”and“mature”(or postwar) work. His first essay from 1929, in praise of Joyce’s thenunfinishedFinnegans Wake, contained Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico in the title; in 1930, an award winning 98lines of verse parodied the life of René Descartes; and in the next year, Beckett’s only academic monograph,Proust, was so steeped in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer as to distort the eponymous author’sÀ la recherche du temps perduostensibly under examination.[5]Other philosophers name-checked across Beckett’s subsequent work, to name only some of those discussed in ensuing chapters, include Thales of Miletus in the 1932 poem “Serena I” (later included in Beckett’s 1935 poetry collection,Echo’s Bones); idiosyncratically“windowless”Leibnizian monads feature in the novelMurphyfrom 1935–1936; a long-unpublished dramatic fragment from 1940,Human Wishes, is based around the life of Samuel Johnson; Immanuel Kant’s “fruitful bathos of experience” is quoted in the Addenda toWattfrom 1945; Arnold Geulincx appears in the short story “The End” and the first novel of the“Beckett Trilogy,”Molloy,writtenover the next two years; Aristotle,“who knew everything,”makes an appearance in theTexts for Nothingfrom 1951;one ofZeno’sparadoxesopens the 1958 playEndgame; the Occasionalist philosopher Nicolas Malebranche is cited in “The Image” andHow It Istwo yearslater; and Bishop Berkeley’s tag “esse est percipi” prefaces the 1964 arthouse (and Beckett’s only) film,Film; while Fritz Mauthner“may be it”inRough for Radio II, first published in 1975.[6]Needless to say, there are many more along the way, but these are important and suggestive references by a writer well-known for his meticulousness.
Secondly and no less notably, philosophers have themselves been quick to invoke Beckett’s work for a variety of doctrines—as evoked by the title of Bruno Clément’s article,“WhatthePhilosophers do with Samuel Beckett.”As registered in one volume alone—and even before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969—Beckett wasthesubject of texts by Gabriel Marcel (1953, 1957),William Empson (1956),Maurice Blanchot (1959), Northrop Frye (1960),Claude Mauriac (1960), Raymond Williams (1961), Wolfgang Iser (1966), David Lodge (1968)in addition toa longer essay by Theodor Adorno entitled “Trying to Understand Endgame.”[7]In the years since, longer works have appearedby Gilles Deleuze, SlavojŽižek, Alain Badiou, and most recentlyHélèneCixous.[8]Although this list appears decidedly weighted toward Frenchphilosophers, in many ways Beckett’s international reception was defined by leading intellectuals both across andwithin nations—from the USA to China—(largely) following the surprise Parisian success ofWaiting for Godotin 1953.[9]Even the famous evasion by Jacques Derrida—that Beckett’s work was “too close” for him to write on—suggests that Beckett’s work may be seenasco-evolving with or even anticipatingsome of the major themes in contemporary philosophy(such as phenomenology or even Derrida’s poststructuralist philosophy).[10]
Third and finally, right from the start Anglophone critics have interpreted Beckett’s writings philosophically. In fact, the conventional starting point for“Beckett Studies,”a 1959 Special Issue of the academic journalPerspective, contained essayswith titles such as“The Cartesian Centaur” (Hugh Kenner) and “Samuel Beckett’sMurphy: A Cartesian Novel”(Samuel L. Mintz). Moreover, as David Pattie deftly summarizes this first period of Beckett criticism in English:
ThePerspectiveissue identified Beckett as an important figure in English literature; and moreover, it introduced the notion that the Beckettian universe was governed by rules that were, at bottom, philosophical [….] English criticism in the 1960s linked Beckett not only to existentialism, but to Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and, most decisively of all, to the work of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and his philosophical disciples.[11]
Similarly telling titles were to follow over the next decade, from a 1962 chapter by Martin Esslin—later of “theater of the absurd” fame—in the collectionThe Novelist as Philosopher, andRuby Cohn’s 1965 “Philosophical Fragments in the Works of Samuel Beckett” to John Fletcher’s “Beckett and the Philosophers” two years later; all capped by David Hesla’s remarkable “history of ideas”approach, and the first full-length study of Beckett and philosophy in English, his 1971The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett. Readers of Beckett in English, by this time, should they have wished to consult literary criticism to divine meaning from Beckett’s texts,would doubtless have been struck by the philosophical consistency in approaching a writer famed for his protestations of “ignorance” and “impotence.”[12]The view taken in this early period, despite the many nuances of this first period of Beckett criticism in English, is shorthanded by a chapter entitled “The Human Condition” inThe Testament of Samuel Beckett:“The whole of Beckett’s work moves relentlessly towards the answering of one question: What is existence? or, What is man?”[13]
From this initial period of Beckett Studies, furthermore two philosophical readings emerged: the existential and the Cartesian. The first, largely a product of its time, found in Beckett a fictional exponent of existentialismpar excellence: “From its inception, existential thoughthas felt itself at home in fiction. Because of its intense ‘inwardness’ and the ‘commitment’ of its proponents, it has expressed itself more strikingly in imaginative writing than in fictional treatises.”[14]Yet existential thought—for all its very Beckettian emphasis on solitude, alienation and “intense self-consciousness”[15]—did not seem able to account for Beckett’s artistic preoccupation with frailty, constraintand not knowing; or as he put it in conversation with James Knowlson: “he found the actual limitations on man’s freedom of action (his genes, his upbringing, his social circumstances) far more compelling than the theoretical freedom on which Sartre had laid so much stress.”[16]As for existentialism, so too for Cartesianism—at one point, thede rigueurphilosophical interpretation of Beckett’s work[17]—which may well be a red herring. Without doubt “Whoroscope,” Beckett’s first published poem in 1930, centered upon the life of René Descartes, and demonstrated some knowledge of Cartesian philosophy. However, this was inductively applied to a reading of Beckett’s work as a whole, creating the misleading impression that, as both online sources and theEncyclopaedia Brittanicahave it, Descartes was “Beckett’s favourite philosopher.”[18]Having had their say for so long overthepast years, neither existentialismnor Cartesianismisgivenachapter in this volume.
Given this longstanding tradition of reading Beckett’s explicit references, impulses and writings philosophically, it is thus surprising that an expansive collection in English has taken so long. Notwithstanding the scattergun approach taken by the recentBeckett and Philosophy—including essays on Beckett and everyone from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger toJürgen Habermasand Michel Foucault—critics have largely neglectedP.J.Murphy’s call in his 1994 “Beckett and the Philosophers”: “The whole question of Beckett’srelationship to the philosophers is pretty obviously in need of a major critical reassessment.”[19]Yet better late than never and, in this spirit,Beckett/Philosophyattempts just such a “critical reassessment” of Samuel Beckett’s relationship with Western philosophy. This is undertaken in two distinct ways: the empirical and the thematic.
In terms of the empirical, the first twelvechapters are concerned with the “meat and potatoes” of Beckett’s engagement with philosophy. It is now clear to scholars that Beckett’s substantial readingsinand note-taking from Western philosophy occurred during a period of systematic self-education across the 1930s. Beckett read widely and took detailed notes from a number of key philosophers during this period, as is demonstrated by the ensuing contributions. While Beckett’s philosophical indebtedness has long been recognized—particularly since the 1996 publication of James Knowlson’s unrivalled biography,Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett—a systematic treatment of leading “Beckettian” philosophers has been heretofore missing.[20]Those thinkers assembled in the first portion ofBeckett/Philosophymay therefore be seen to represent the current “canon” of philosophical influences upon Samuel Beckett. While some of the names are to be expected (Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, Bishop Berkeley, Arnold Geulincx), others are not (Henri Bergson, Gottfried Leibniz, Wilhelm Windelband, and the early Greeks); and still others push at the boundaries of philosophy itself (in different ways, Samuel Johnson and linguistic skeptics like Fritz Mauthner). By moving chronologically through Beckett’s interwarapprenticeshipin philosophy, the first ten chapters here collectively represent the leading, demonstrable debts to philosophy accumulated between the writing of his only academic monograph in 1930,Proust, viaMore Pricks than KicksandMurphy, to the start of the wartime novelWatt.
Although many of the ten initial essays trace the influence of particular philosophers and doctrines in Beckett’s postwar writings, key“Beckettian”themes comprise the final trio of essays inBeckett/Philosophy. These philosophical themes, in turn, may be said to be at the forefront of Beckett Studies—Beckett’s philosophical approach to literary aesthetics; ethics; and abstraction—as reflected by a number of recent studies.[21]Beyond pointing to the complexity of Beckett and/with/via philosophy, it is hoped that this connection of the empirical and thematic inBeckett/Philosophyshowsthat differing methodological approaches to Beckett’s engagement with philosophy need not be an either/or affair. Rather, Beckett’s early readings in philosophy are precisely the“scaffolding”for later key philosophical themes and concerns (such as Arnold Geulincx’s influence on Beckettian ethics); or in Knowlson’s recent formulation: “he does not attempt to reach firm conclusions. Concepts provide him rather with contrasting images, both verbal and visual, which he takes pleasure in weaving into intricate dramatic patterns.”[22]And it is, finally, these “dramatic patterns” that keeps both readers and critics alike returning to the vexed, yet uncannily beautiful, terrain of Beckett and philosophy.Speaking of which, let’s get moving, for
… time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, I am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. Ah yes, I was always subject to the deep thought, especially in the spring of the year. That one had been nagging at me for the past five minutes. I venture to hope there will be no more, of that depth.[23]
[1]Samuel Beckett, “Closed Place,” inTexts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950–1976, edited by Mark Nixon (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 147.
[2]Dermot Moran, “Beckett andPhilosophy,” inSamuel Beckett: 100 Years,edited by Christopher Murray(Dublin: New Island, 2006), 94. Despite merely seeing many philosophical allusions in Beckett’s work as simply “a kind of arbitrary collection orbricolageof philosophical ideas,”Morannonetheless astutely continues: “Beckett’s relation to philosophy is difficult to complex. He was not a philosopher; if he had been, he would not have needed to engage with art” (94).
[3]T.S. Eliot received postgraduate training in philosophy, like Beckett’s friend Brian Coffey, and unlike most modernist authors. See comments on the latter in §2 of my contribution to this volume, and on the former, see Manju Jain,T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992);Rafey Habib,The Early T.S. Eliot and Western Philosophy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Donald J. Childs,From Philosophy to Poetry: T.S. Eliot’s Study of Knowledge and Experience(London: The Athlone Press, 2001).Such book-length analysesarenotable fortheirabsence in Beckett Studies.
[4]Lance St. John Butler,Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable(London: MacMillan, 1984), 2. A similar view is espoused in a more recent study by Beckett’s long-time English publisher, John Calder’sThe Philosophy of Samuel Beckett(London:JohnCalder, 2002), which argues that “Beckett was the last of the great stoics” (1).
[5]See, respectively, “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” inDisjecta; “Whoroscope,” in Samuel Beckett,Selected Poems 1930–1989, edited by David Wheatley (London: Faber and Faber, 2009); and Proust, reprinted in “Proust”and Three Dialogues(London: Calder & Boyers, 1970).
[6]The dates provided above are taken from Ruby Cohn’s indispensableA Beckett Canon(Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press: 2001); see also John Pilling’s more biographicalA Beckett Chronology(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Philosophical references correspond to the following: Thales inSelected Poems 1930–1989, 25; Leibniz in Samuel Beckett,Murphy, edited by J.C.C. Mays (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 114; theHuman Wishesfragment is reproduced inDisjecta; Kant’s “das fruchtbare Bathos der Erfahrung” comprises entry 31 of the 55 Addenda items at the end of Samuel Beckett,Watt, edited by C.J.Ackerley (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 222; Geulincx appears in “The End,” in Samuel Beckett,The Expelled/The Calmative/The End/First Love, edited by Christopher Ricks (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 49, and in Samuel Beckett,Molloy, edited by Shane Weller (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 50; Aristotle appears in “Text for Nothing VIII” inTexts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950–1976, 35; Zeno’s paradox offers the backdrop to the opening ofEndgame, in Samuel Beckett,Endgame, preface by Rónán McDonald (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 93; Malebranche “less the rosy hue the humanities” is cited in “The Image,” inThe Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, 167, and retained in Samuel Beckett,How It Is(London: Calder, 1996), 33; Berkeley’s “to be is to be perceived” heads the script forFilm, inThe Complete Dramatic Works, 323; and Mauthner is mentioned inRough for Radio II, in ibid., 276.
[7]See Bruno Clément, “What the Philosophers do with Samuel Beckett,”translated byAnthony Uhlmann, inBeckettAfter Beckett, edited byS.E. Gontarski (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2006); andCritical Essays on Samuel Beckett, edited byLance St. John Butler (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). For discussion of Adorno’s work on Beckett, including a planned future essay onL’Innommable“at the end of a projected fourth volume” of hisNoten zur Literatur, see Shane Weller, “The Art of Indifference:Adorno’s Manuscript Notes onThe Unnamable,” inDaniela Guardamagna nd Rossana M. Sebellin, eds.,TheTragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett(Rome: Laterza, 2009), 223.
[8]See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” in hisEssays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998); Alain Badiou,On Beckett, edited and translated by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester:Clinamen, 2003);Slavoj Žižek, “Beckett with Lacan,” parts one and two online at:www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=78,andwww.lacan.com/article/?page_id=102(last accessed 8/12/11); andHélène Cixous,Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett, translated by Laurent Milesi (Cambridge: Polity, 2010)
[9]SeeThe International Reception of Samuel Beckett,edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman(London: Continuum, 2009).
[10]Derrida, cited inActs of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 60. For a variety of recent phenomenological approaches to Beckett, seeBeckett and Phenomenology, edited byUlrika Maude and Matthew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009); and for well-known discussions of Beckett’s work in light of poststructuralism, see Steven Connor,Samuel Beckett: Theory, Repetition, Text(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Leslie Hill,Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and, most recently, Anthony Uhlmann,Beckett and Poststructuralism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
[11]David Pattie,The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett(Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 105.
[12]As Ruby Cohn’s thoughtful “Philosophical Fragments in the Works of Samuel Beckett” puts it: “Beckett’s heroes not only deny that they are philosophers; they flaunt an inviolable ignorance […. But] they nevertheless continue to examine, propounding the old philosophical questions that have been with us since the pre-Socratics; on the nature of the Self, the World, and God,” reprinted inSamuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Martin Esslin(Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 169. See also “Samuel Beckett,” inThe Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935–1960,edited by John CruickshankWestport: Greenwood, 1962); John Fletcher, “Beckett and the Philosophers,” inSamuel Beckett’s Art(London: Chatto & Windus, 1967); and David H. Hesla,The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).
[13]Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller,The Testament of Samuel Beckett(London:Faber and Faber, 1964), 109.
[14]Edith Kern,Existential Thought and Fictional Technique(London: Yale University Press, 1970), viii. Comparable existential perspectives underwrite Ramona Cormier and Janis L. Pallister’sWaiting for Death: The Philosophical Significance of Beckett’sEn Attendant Godot (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979); and L.A.C. Dobrez,The Existential and Its Exits(London: The Athlone Press, 1986).
[15]Hannah Copeland,Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett(The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975), 42–43.
[16]Cited in my “Beckett, Sartre and Phenomenology,” inLimit(e) Beckett, 0 Issue, online at: www.limitebeckett.paris-sorbonne.fr/zero/feldman.html (last accessed 8/12/11).
[17]Tonoteonly the major accounts of Beckett and Cartesianism, see Edouard Morot-Sir, “Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems,” inSamuel Beckett and the Art of Rhetoric,edited by Edouard Morot-Sir(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1976); Michael Mooney, “Molloy, Part 1: Beckett’sDiscourse on Method,” inJournal of Beckett Studies3 (1978); and Roger Scruton, “Beckett and the Cartesian Soul,” in hisThe Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture(Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1983).
[18]For some of Beckett’s sources in the construction of “Whoroscope,” see Francis Doherty, “Mahaffy’sWhoroscope,” inJournal of Beckett Studies2/1 (1992). For an argument that Cartesian influence upon Beckett is largely circumstantial, and better recast in terms of a wider engagement with Western philosophy, see my “René Descartes and Samuel Beckett,” inBeckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes”(London: Continuum, 2008).
[19]SeeBeckett and Philosophy, edited byRichard Lane (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002); and P.J. Murphy, “Beckett and the Philosophers,” inThe Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited byJohn Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 222. Some recent exceptions on the subject of Beckett and philosophy include Anthony Uhlmann’sSamuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); GarinV.Dowd,Abstract Machines: Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari(New York: Rodopi, 2007);Shane Weller,A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism(Oxford: Legenda, 2005); and Simon Critchley, “Lecture 3: Know Happiness—on Beckett,” in hisVery Little … Almost Nothing(London: Routledge, 1997).
[20]For a discussion of Beckett’s philosophical readings during the 1930s, see James Knowlson,Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett(London: Bloomsbury, 1996), especially chapters 6 to 11; and Feldman,Beckett’s Books, chapter 2.
[21]See, respectively, Andrea Oppo,Philosophical Aesthetics and Samuel Beckett(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008);Beckett and Ethics, edited byRussell Smith (London: Continuum, 2009); and Erik Tonning,Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen, 1962–1985(Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).
[22]Cited in James Knowlson, “Samuel Beckett’sHappy DaysRevisited.” I am grateful to Prof. Knowlson for allowing me to consult this forthcoming, as yet unpublished, text.
[23]Beckett,Malone Dies, edited by Peter Boxall (London:Faber and Faber, 2010), 23.
“I am not a philosopher.”Beckett and Philosophy:A Methodological and Thematic Overview[(]
Matthew Feldman (Teesside University, UK)
§1
Some eight years after his artistic breakthrough with the Parisian staging ofEnattendant Godot, and some eight years before receiving the 1969 Nobel Prize for his unremitting explorations of “the degradation of humanity,” Samuel Beckett, unusually, consented to be interviewed. A now-famous exchange withNouvelles Littérairesjournalist Gabriel d’Aubarède cast longstanding doubt upon Beckett’s engagement with philosophy:
Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?
I never read philosophers.
Why not?
I never understand anything they write.
All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.
There’s no key or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.[1]
Yet the “novel” published byÉditions de Minuit only the month before,Comment c’est—tripartite in structure, unpunctuated in presentation, and notoriously difficult to digest—seemed at the same time to belie Beckett’s claims of philosophical ignorance.[2]Some pages after name-checking the famous Presocratic thinker, Heraclitus the Obscure, and some pages before the same treatment is meted out to the obscure Malebranche (an Occasionalist follower of Cartesianism), the following passage occurs in the ensuing English translation, entitledHow It Is:
mad or worse transformedàla Haeckel born in Potsdam where Klopstock too among others lived a space and laboured though buried in Altona the shadow he casts[3]
Amongst the madness and mud and misery and tin-can openers, the phrase is but one of many betraying what must,surely, be considered “philosophic terms”; if not a suspiciously detailed philosophical knowledge.
However, in Beckett Country—or in the “Beckettian” world if one prefers adjectives to nouns in describing this unique terrain—little is as it seems. Interpretations of his work founder precisely because “surely,” as above, is shorthand for reading into Beckett whichever theme, theory, or critical approach one fancies. And they have all been tried: gender, politics, psychology, you name it: sometimes with great merit.[4]But a problematic point remains; that is, given the challenging and slippery nature of the master’s work, Beckett Studies contains no theoretical graveyards. A Rorschach Test is a fitting analogy.[5]
Yet at the same time, the interviewer had not misheard in February 1961, nor had the interviewee misspoken. For the sentiment was to be repeated that very summer, just as Beckett was commencing the arduous self-translation ofComment c’estinto English asHow It Is:
One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess.[6]
And yet, avers the narrator in Part Three ofHow It Is,“nothing to be done in any case we have our being in justice I have never heard anything to the contrary.”[7]So which is the real Samuel Beckett? The interviewee who repeatedly disclaimed any familiarity with philosophy—despite referring to both “philosophical terms” and famous philosophers in doing so—or the avant-garde artist who clearly, if nevertheless opaquely, incorporated aspects of Western philosophy into his writings?
§2
To some extent, that vexing question had already been addressed in the earliest critical responses to Beckett, such as the groundbreaking 1959 Special Issue ofPerspective, containing titles like “Beckett’sMurphy: A ‘Cartesian’ Novel.” Other voices, also writing during Beckett’s lifetime, similarly took those sporadic references to Western philosophers and ostensibly philosophicalmise en scèneas key clues to the unravelling of his work.[8]Yet the detailed, archival spadework was left for biographers in the first instance after Beckett’s death; far and away most importantly in the expansiveDamned to Fameof 1996. Only then were philosophical themes in Beckett’s art properlysubstantiated, rather thansupposed. This was largely due to an enormous corpus of manuscripts, letters and notes made available to Beckett’s authorized biographer, James Knowlson, themselves joining the burgeoning Beckett Collection at the University of Reading for consultation by scholars exactlythirtyyears after its 1971 establishment in Reading, UK (now the home of the Beckett International Foundation).[9]
For a number of contemporary critics, the task now is to separatesubstantiatedfromsupposed. By way of contribution, the following chapters comprisingBeckett/Philosophyprovide unrivalled scope and empirical depth, in particular, by comprehensively demonstrating Beckett’s knowledge of philosophy; by highlighting his intensive self-education process over the 1930s, and revealing the extent to which Beckett was acquainted with some canonical philosophers. In here presenting a “taster” of this discussion through a snapshot of Beckett’s earliest textual philosophical engagement from 1929, pausing to raise an early methodological caution is in order first. While individual contributors to this collection may not recognize, let alone endorse, the falsifiable methodology I have elsewhere set out as a template for broaching the nettlesome matter of Beckett and philosophy, this methodological issue seems to me vital, and merits broaching here.[10]This is especially relevant to approaching Beckett’s work for, as noted above, the very opacity of his art is such that all theories may be “verified” in writing that often has no subject, no place, no material referent.
At issue, ultimately, is the matter of evidence. In our (apparently) postmodern world, it would seem that Sir Karl Popper’s great injunctions about the value of deductive logic have been lost in the ether of intellectual relativism. Perhaps nowhere has this phenomenon been more enthusiastically endorsed and applied than in philosophical approaches to literature. Whether in literature, or science, or politics, or psychoanalysis, as Popper has reminded us, evidence is not ephemeral, but integral to the human advancement of knowledge:
A Marxist could not look at a newspaper without finding verifying evidence of the class struggle on every page, from the leaders to the advertisements; and he also would find it, especially, in what the paper failed to say. And a psychoanalyst, whether Freudian or Adlerian, assuredly would tell you that he finds his theories daily, even hourly, verified by his clinical observations. But were these theories testable? Were these analyses really better tested than, say, the frequently ‘verified’ horoscopes of the astrologers? What conceivable event would falsify them in the eyes of their adherents? Was not every conceivable event a ‘verification’? It was precisely this fact—that they always fitted, that they were always ‘verified’—which impressed their adherents. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact a weakness, and that all these ‘verificationists’ were too cheap to count as arguments. Themethod of looking for verificationsseemed to me unsound—indeed, it seemed to me to be the typical method of a pseudo-science. I realized the need for distinguishing this method as clearly as possible from that other method—that is, the method of criticism, themethod of looking for falsifying instances.[11]
A fine example of the former,“verificationist” approach is provided by essays on Samuel Beckett and Michel Foucault,JürgenHabermas and other of their philosophical contemporaries in Richard Lane’s edited book from 2002,Beckett and Philosophy. One examplar must suffice here, from Steven Barfield’s chapter, as an example of a recent intellectual linking that simply cannot be refuted: “In this chapter I argue that the texts of Beckett and Heidegger have an uncanny and unsettling relationship to one another, which shows similar preoccupations but does not necessarily mean any influence of one to the other.”[12]In my judgment, a simple litmus test may be carried out by adding the wordnotto a methodological sentence like the one above, which looks uncannily like it would reveal just as much about Beckett and Heidegger by arguing the exact inverse; namely, “that their texts [do not] have an uncanny andunsettlingrelationship to one another.” In fine, Heidegger betrays some “Beckettian” themes, while Beckett is construed in a “Heideggerian” light. But does this, ultimately, tell us anything beyond Barfield’s interest in Heidegger, or the books on the former’s bookshelf? Put another way, how does this advance knowledge of Samuel Beckett?
What makes the latter approaches successful or otherwise is largely indebted to the rhetorical skill of the author, and to a much lesser extent, I believe, to the methodological guidelines for establishingwhysuch a fusing of radical intellectuals should, or should not be, justified in terms of Popper’s two great criteria for falsification: relevance and explanatory power. In effect, exhorts Popper, “falsificationists or fallibists [argue] that what cannot (at present) in principle be overthrown by criticism is (at present) unworthy of being seriously considered.” As Popper naturally counted himself amongst this group, one of his major achievements in the history of science was in offering a template for constructing theories—not a theory itself (at least “theory” as this is normally construed by all but radical skeptics like Gorgias of Leontini, and perhaps the more counterfactual of postmodern critics). In a word, Popper has reminded our discipline of literary studies that it is always preferable to theorize from a position of empirical accuracy rather than to do otherwise, or to simply ignore facts that do not conform to one’s preferred reading:
And while the verificationists laboured in vain to discover valid positive arguments in support of their beliefs, we for our part are satisfied that the rationality of a theory lies in the fact that we choose it because it is better than its predecessors; because it can be put to more severe tests; because it may even have passed them, if we are fortunate; and because it may, therefore, approach near to the truth.[13]
Having sketched these methodological points by way of negative example, to quote from Beckett’s unpublished review, “Les Deux Besoins” (“The Two Needs”), reprinted in his collected criticism of 1984,Disjecta,“let’s get on with falsifying.”In that 1938 text, Beckett first advanced the view that was later to make him an icon, and his works a unique beacon of humility in our all-too-clever world: reason is inimical to the artistic process which derives, instead, from the need to create. Quite unlike his early mentor, James Joyce, it was the gaps in knowledge that were to motivate Beckett, not the reformulation of extant knowledge so masterfully compiled inFinnegans Wake.
Forit seems to be with this realization—along with the critical shift to writing in French (both the unpublished “Les Deux Besoins” article and the “Petit Sot” series of poems date from 1938)—that Beckett returned full-circle to his position of ten years earlier: engaging with philosophy was superfluous to his artistic needs. However, the key difference between 1928 and 1938 was that Beckett had returned to this practice point from a position of knowledge instead of ignorance; or better still, through the embrace of what Nicholas Cusanus had centuries earlier called “learned ignorance.” In short, manuscript evidence strongly suggests that the direct influence of philosophy upon Beckett was a short and intense affair. Of course, philosophical themes were to recur across Beckett’soeuvreagain and again, right up to his death in 1989. But these were artistic reformulations of the work he had done in the pivotal decade leading to 1938. After that date, I want to suggest, Beckett’s philosophicaldevelopmentceased, and thereafter only philosophicalreinforcementis in evidence—such as his re-reading of Schopenhauer in the late 1970s/early 1980s (again, as demonstrably,falsifiablyevidenced in his “commonplace notebook” from the period, the so-called “Sottisier Notebook”).[14]Put simply, the philosophical evolution of Beckett’s art ended prior to WWII, halfway between the completion ofMurphyin 1936 and the start of the wartimeWatt.
§3
In addition to its value in taking the measure of Samuel Beckett’s decade-long philosophical auto-didacticism, turning to his earliest engagement with philosophy is instructive for at least four reasons. In his first published essay, written to support James Joyce’sWork in Progress(later titledFinnegans Wake), the 1929 “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” Beckett revealed tendencies that were to resurface again and again in his study of philosophy across the 1930s. None of these are unusual, even if all might be considered at variance with the (inductive) idea of Beckett as a universal genius and devourer of Western learning on one hand, or a philosophical novice on the other.
The first point is that, despite taking a degree in Italian and French at Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett had no philosophical training upon taking up a two-year teaching post in Paris at the start of November 1928. As he recalled decades later for his first biography (which he neither “‘helped” nor “hindered”), Beckett, in a letter of 24 October 1974, “stressed he did not study philosophy” prior to leaving Ireland: “Because he had not taken a philosophy course at Trinity College, which he felt was a serious defect in his education, he set out on what he thought was a systematic schedule of readings.”[15]On closer inspection, however, these readings were to be anything but systematic.
The second, derivative point is that Beckett relied heavily upon friends to recommend philosophical books. In the case of his initial philosophical engagement upon arriving in France as an Englishlecteur
