Beckett, Sartre and Camus: the Darkness and the Light (original) (raw)

1974, Southern Review VII(1)

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.