Modernism/modernity: 'Beckett's Murphy, Gide's Les Caves du Vatican, and the "Modern" Novel' (original) (raw)
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The paper, presented at the NEMLA 2010 Seminar on the Letters of Samuel Beckett takes Beckett's comments on Murphy as a point of departure to read some fresh insights into the text. It seeks to explore the corpus in terms of certain conceptual frames, derived from the references to the novel in the letters, thereby evoking themes, issues and ideas, often considered exclusive to Beckett's later works. It thus intends to reassert the importance of Murphy in the canon and in the growth of Beckett's writing.
Some possible influences on Samuel Beckett as the author of Murphy
Edebiyat Fakultesi Dergisi, 1983
SamuelBeckett, an Aiıglo.Iriıılıman and a t\yentietb-century philosopbical poet, .. never concerıied withsoeial, political or~oUsproblems~t w.. always interested in thepc>8ition'ofman in the univ~ıııe,. the~880n of his e~stenee 'and the meaaing of life. in other words, his iateıest lay in the metapby..ı,/Spurred on by this mterest,. Beckettstudiedthein lectual baekground to the twentiethceııtury. He believ'ecithat Dante, Descart.esand 'Proust, more than anyo,M.elae, wereresponsible for the w,yof inking-ofwestem intellectuals, biıriselfincluded.. '
Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy can pose challenges for first-time readers. This short guide, developed in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Mannion, has been provided with the novel to students of my advanced Samuel Beckett seminar in recent years, and has shown some success in opening several of the book's key ideas, underlying structures, and more obscure references. It is being made available here for use by the academic community as a free teaching aid; please do just acknowledge us if you do use it, and let us know if you have found it useful.
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.
"Beckett Ongoing and the Novel," New Literary History, 51.1 (Winter 2020) 67-92.
New Literary History , 2020
This article reconsiders the ethico-political stakes of Samuel Beckett's literary and aesthetic practice of failure by elucidating the impulse of perseverance in the three novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) alongside other texts, as well as the wider implications of perseverance on the transnational dispersal of the modern novel and writing in general. While drawing on newly available archival sources--including letters, manuscripts, and translations--, it resituates Beckett's novelistic innovation of "going on" under the threat of the impossible within a strand of literature, visual art, and philosophy in postwar France, especially in connection to Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Georges Duthuit around the notion of inoperativity (désœuvrement). Blanchot sketches some of these resonances in The Book to Come, where he tracks how the literary experience of inoperativity culminating in the three novels exhibits the destitution of the subject, work, and language. To lay bare the sheer materiality and finitude of coexistence is to simultaneously refuse all forms of human power and domination. Perseverance, within this confluence, does not maintain fidelity to the event of being, as Alain Badiou argues by way of Spinoza's concept of conatus; instead, it opens onto the outside within and through the uneventfulness of everyday life. Ultimately, Beckett's experimentation with the genre of the novel, as part of a countercurrent of inoperative literature and art, on the one hand dismantles the possessive and acquisitive space of the subject as work, and on the other hand improvises entirely different ways of persevering at the interstices of writing, reading, living, and dying.
Seen and Unseen Narratives in Beckett's Cryptic Novel Murphy
Narrative, 2020
Abstract: Close observation of Murphy, commonly described as the most traditional of Beckett’s novels, reveals it to be a cryptic text, a member of the same category of literature as the later novel Watt, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” Minimally, this means that it poses problems designed to engage the reader in hermeneutic quest. For the Murphy reader, the object of quest is a covert narrative that exists within the overt story. My study aims to bring it to light. I begin by considering the last two chapters, which present a case of double closure: chapters 12 and 13 both convey the sense of finality associated with end-of-the-novel chapters. I initially correlate the twofold ending with the main issue dealt with at the overt level: the mind/body conflict that afflicts the eponymous hero. The correlation is reflected in the distribution of chapter content: chapter 12 deals with the death and destruction of Murphy’s body; 13 with the fate of his non-physical self. Tracing the complex narrative processes leading to and indeed necessitating the bifurcated ending, I conclude, however, that the non-physical self is not the mind but a barely mentioned third element: the soul. Accordingly, the semi-farcical overt story of a man headed toward physical annihilation also turns out to be the tale of a soul’s progress toward salvation. The redemptive ending is figured in the closing vision of a kite rising into the upper reaches of the sky and vanishing joyfully. Theoretical implications regarding closure and cryptic literature are discussed in my closing section.
Samuel Beckett's interest in St. Augustine is manifest throughout his oeuvre, both in terms of content and style, and can be traced from his very first works, such as Whoroscope, to his last plays and short stories. Although this interplay has been touched upon in the critical discourse on Beckett, a systematic analysis is still to be done. This paper represents a preliminary investigation into the Augustinian influence in the early Beckett, in particular Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy. By considering the presence of the Confessions in these two novels I intend to show how St. Augustine's work played a significant role in the development of the young author, offering him the occasion to overcome his theory of habit as outlined in his early essay, Proust. In this text, Beckett posits habit as merely “the generic name for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects”. Dream still endorses this perspective, but already suggests a different dialectic of memory, will, and habit. This shift, I argue, can be connected to Beckett’s reading of Augustine's meditations, in book VIII of the Confessions, on the cleavage between the spirit and the flesh. In Murphy, we see Beckett’s 'Augustinian dialectic' fully formed: habit is no longer a veil of Maya that hides the real essence of the individual, but the condition of possibility for the subject's flight from the “mercantile Gehenna” world towards the truth of the inner self.