“Samuel Beckett’s Debt to Aristotle: Cosmology, Syllogism, Space, Time.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 22 (2010): 183-195. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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, 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.
Samuel Beckett and the Early Middle Ages
Beckett’s investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett’s note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett’s absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett’s reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband’s History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett’s notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge’s Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett’s overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.
The Tulane Drama Review, 1967
NOTE 2022: The text is here taken from its book version in my To Brecht and Beyond (1984) slightly purged of some idiosyncrasies. A critic of modern dramaturgy with a bent for Brecht and Chekhov, for the Berliner Ensemble and Théâtre National Populaire, for Strehler and Planchon in the 1950s and 1960s, also for Karl Marx and Ernst Bloch-one, in other words, who enjoys the dramaturgy and theatre fully when their specific, exemplary sensual presentness participates in the great liberating effort of our century-has one outstanding difficulty to come to terms with, if he or she is to be sincere to his trade and even to her or his (ex hypothesi) encompassing horizons: Samuel Beckett. If the chief measure of a major dramatist is a happy union of relevance and consistency of dramaturgic vision, there is little doubt that in our cultural circle-middle and western Europe, based on the Mediterranean, with the massive wings of the Soviet Union and North America-the two major dramatists since the Second World War are Brecht and Beckett. Yet it is rare for a critic devoted to Beckett seriously and knowledgeably to face Brecht. I can think of only one such comprehensive effort, Martin Esslin's, and that one is, to my mind, finally unconvincing. Conversely, however, I can think of no critic of the Brechtian bent who has attempted a comprehensive study of Beckett. This chapter cannot, of course, pretend to such comprehensiveness, but it may suggest a need for it and lines of further exploration. In the process, I would claim for it at least one merit: that of shunning the prevailing tendency to accept or reject Beckett on purely ideological grounds, because of the closed existential horizons of his works. There are many instances of uncritical acceptance of Beckett's works. As for uncritical rejection, I will quote only one example from Werner Hecht, a theatre historian and theoretician from the Berliner Ensemble, in an article whose ironic title translates as 'Brecht "and" Beckett-An Absurd Comparison': 'Yet, for people who want to change the world to make it habitable, Beckett's theatre is uninteresting, lacking in matter and wit, simply: very old wine in not even quite new bottles.' 1 The best way to avoid aprioristic refusals, as well as fashionable adulations, seems to lie in trying, first, to consider Beckett's dramatic vision of world and man fully, in its internal consistency. From there, one should place it in its genetic and anthropological perspective in order, finally, to arrive at some conclusion about its external relevance.