Voicing the Void: Beckettian Drama as the Artistic Expression of the Philosophical Angst (original) (raw)

Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature

2013

How does philosophy think? How does Beckett’s literature think? Are they different ways of thinking, the same or both? Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature is an assortment of critical investigations re-reading the complex encounter between Beckett’s works and the discourses of philosophy. It marks an effort to read Beckett’s texts in various conjunctive and disjunctive possibilities where they encounter philosophy, bringing in the domain of theatrical performance and its own philosophical potential. The book is concerned with the discursive traffic which goes on between philosophy and literature, a traffic in which Beckett is a representative and symptomatic figure. It examines Beckett’s reception by a series of philosophically important proper names like Blanchot, Deleuze, Badiou, Critchley and Derrida—thinkers who have responded in one way or another to the challenge of Beckett’s works. It also intends to read Beckett alongside thinkers who did not or could not respond to Beckett due to their absence in Beckett’s time and vice versa. A classic and relevant example for the relation between Beckett and 20th century philosophers, is an approach of his works to Hegel. In this case, as in others, mutual absence paves way for the encounter. The articles in the volume seek to explore the problematic traffic where Beckett is upheld by philosophers who try to incorporate him in their own philosophical systems, and how Beckett in turn slips away and reshapes the philosophical discourses with the irreducible singularity of his works. In the process we encounter a Beckett who seems to be the favourite writer of 20th century philosophy, but also another Beckett whose works offer an innate resistance to philosophical ideation, revealing thus a fascinating ability to exhaust philosophical as well as hermeneutic operations. The book revisits the strong philosophical propensity within Beckett Studies with new critical accents like archival scholarship, Indian philosophy, the philosophical discursification of the literary proper name, and with fresh critical approaches like reading Beckett as a symptom of the dispute between two different conceptions of philosophical language: the Continental and the Analytic.

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.

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.

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.

Beckett, Sartre and Camus: the Darkness and the Light

Southern Review VII(1), 1974

Beckett demands to be seriously treated as a philosophical writer and this fact is already generally recognized. There is no question of turning the writer into a philosopher pure and simple, of course, or into an imitator of the philosophers. Whatever Beckett shares with the philosophers, he has made it his own and he has made it art. With this proviso, however, the parallel is worth pursuing because it helps the critic to delineate more precisely the contours of Beckett's vision, that is, it helps us to see Beckett as he ls. So far critical discussion has tended to focus on the Cartesian and Occasionalist element in the novels and plays, but, as I have suggested in a previous article in this journal,I this kind of comparison has its weaknesses. Of necessity the relevance of seventeenth and eighteenth century systems to works of art produced in the twentieth is limited. Beckett's_ Occasionalism is not exactly that of Geulincx or Malebranche; nor i8 his insistence on the cogito exactly Cartesian, or his concern with the monad exactly Leibnizian. Beckett uses the philosophers as he uses Dante, without necessarily sharing their outlook. It is enough to point out that for Descartes, Geulincx, Malebranche and Leibniz a deity seemed a fundamental requirement of any philosophical system. Beckett borrows the structure but leaves out its soul, or rather replaces it with something of his own: the Unnamable. This does not mean that the validity of the comparison with the above thinkers is to be questioned, only that a comparison with modern philo- sophy may begin where the other leaves off. To some extent the usefulness of this procedure is assumed by most Beckett critics. But the appeal to Heidegger, Sartre or Camus is inevitably made in passing. We are told about the Void or the Absurd or Dread and always more or less in a context of vagueness and generality. As a result little of a con- crete sort is settled and Beckett takes on the anaemic appearance of a topical journalist, neither philosopher nor artist. But Beckett's work is far more than a statement of fashionable clich6s and consequently, in referring it to the existential tradition, it is vital that we should be con- cerned not with superficial similarities but with fundamentals, properly analysed and brought to light. For this reason some trouble has been taken in a previous article to isolate the core of Beckett's obsession and further trouble will be taken to do full justice to the philosophers also. The present article will deal with Samuel Beckett's writing in relation to Sartre and, more briefly, Camus.