Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (original) (raw)

Beckett and the Voice of (European) Modernism

The pursuit of the voice, a disembodied manifestation, fragment, or echo of being or identity, is the heuristic that drives Samuel Beckett’s supreme fiction, then manifests itself powerfully, if obliquely, in the drama that follows. It may be, finally – beyond the Watts and Murphys, beyond the Didis, Gogos, Hamms, Clovs, Winnies and Willies – Beckett's most profound literary creation. He inherited a version of it from the Modernists – in particular James Joyce, the surrealists, and the Verticalists huddled about Eugene Jolas’s transition magazine in Paris – in the form of the interior monologue, which he then stretched, extended, and finally disbursed beyond recognition, beyond identity. Reduced to its fundamental sound, that mystery consists of a search for: 1. source, the location of the voice, without or within; 2. its credibility or authenticity, that is, whether transcendent or delusional; and 3. whether a marker of discrete, essential being or identity, or a cultural echo, often of a cultural echo. These were questions that drove Beckett’s art beyond the delineation of literary character, but even as character was disbursed, the origin of voice remained irresolute, part of the enigma, the paradox of being and the mystery that drove creativity. The very insolubility of these difficulties, thus, provided the impetus for Beckett’s articulating the epistemological quandary beginning with, then moving beyond Watt. Beckett’s exploration of these questions admittedly took a variety of forms: an early fascination first with echo, then with the schizophrenic voice; his need, expressed in the "German Letter of 1937” to find some kind of Nominalist irony en route to the unword; his attempt in the fiction from Three Novels to Company to determine the nature and location of that impossible imperative, the need to express; and finally his representations in the theater of a dramatic voice beyond the constrictions and conventions of the interior monologue, beyond the coherence of ego and character, difficulties that dominated the so-called mature fiction as well.

Philosophical Aesthetics and Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang 2008)

This book examines the role of Samuel Beckett in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, primarily through analysis of both his own essays and the various interpretations that philosophers (especially Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou) have given to his works. The study centres around the fundamental question of the relationship between art and truth, where art, as a negative truth, comes to its complete exhaustion (as Deleuze terms it) by means of a series of ‘endgames’ that progressively involve philosophy, writing, language and every individual and minimal form of expression. The major thesis of the book is that, at the heart of Beckett’s philosophical project, this ‘aesthetics of truth’ turns out to be nothing other than the real subject itself, within a contradictory and tragic relationship that ties the Self/Voice to the Object/Body. Yet a number of questions remain open. ‘What’ or ‘who’ lies behind this process? What is left of the endgame of art and subjectivity? Finally, what sustains and renders possible Beckett’s paradoxical axiom of the ‘impossibility to express’ alongside the ‘obligation to express’? By means of a thorough overview of the most recent criticism of Beckett, this book will try to answer these questions. Contents: Beckett’s philosophy as a discourse on ‘exits’ – Beckett as Essayist – From Dante to Proust: Beckett’s Literary Criticism Years – In Dialogue with Van Velde: Painting and Philosophy – Theodor Adorno and Beckett – Beckett’s Aesthetics of truth – Exhausting the Possible Field of Narrative: Deleuze and Beckett – Beckett with Jerzy Grotowski – Thinking Differently from Thinking: The Body in Beckett’s Later Theatre – Beyond the Stalemate of Subjectivity.

Thinking the Thought in Thought: Beckett’s Abstractionism between Philosophy and Literature

Banheek: An Inter-disciplinary International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2012

"The article seeks to study Beckett’s (in)famous abstractionism in the light of his engagement with the discursive borderline of philosophy and literature with recourse to Alain Badiou’s texts on Beckett and his meditations on the philosophy-literature interface. Through a close textual reading of a series of Beckett’s late prose-texts, I argue that Beckett as a creative writer appropriates the reflexive locus of subjective thought which philosophy tries to claim as its exclusive belonging. This goes contra to Badiou’s idea of philosophy being sutured to literature. In this problematic dialogue of the two discourses, Beckett’s obsessive abstractification renders the concrete as a remainder in the rigorous process of subtracting all particularities to arrive at a generic locus of thought. Beckett’s abstractionism is processual and non-absolute. It consists in the appropriation of the philosophical thought which thinks itself without an object and as its own subject."

A wretchedness to defend: Reading Beckett's letters

HJEAS Books, 2022

“A wretchedness to defend”: Reading Beckett’s Letters is an in-depth study of the correspondence of Samuel Beckett, selected and published by Cambridge University Press between 2009 and 2016. The volume treats the letters as inroads to Beckett’s poetics, stressing that, apart from their value as key documents to the Beckett canon, these are of a literary quality consubstantial with the output of one of the most radical modern writers. Reading Beckett’s pronouncements on works of literature and art, his first-hand accounts of grappling with his own writerly material, as well as his—invariably reserved—clarifications to theater-makers, translators, and interpreters of his work, in the context of his published fiction and plays and in light of recent advances in archival Beckett studies, the present book focuses on Beckett’s sustained self-education in literature, the visual arts, and philosophy, which imbricates his writerly choices, his lifelong commitment to critical reading, as well as his dilemmas in the practice of writing, self-translating, and theatrical performance. It points at the multiple ways in which this vast and many-faceted correspondence reveals previously unknown contexts, over- and undertones of the work, and illuminates the processes of knowledge and “unknowing” on which Beckett’s singular aesthetics of impoverishment, of the low, of finitude, of ethical blank writing and achievementlessness is premised. Given its multiple foci on Beckett the reader, the self-translator, and the self-director, the book is of potential interest to Beckett researchers, scholars working in the field of modernism and translation studies, as well as readers of Beckett.