Philosophy of Samuel Beckett

John Calder

Description

ncreasingly Samuel Beckett's writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century - succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance. John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see. Samuel Beckett's acute mind pulled apart with courage and much humour the basic assumptions and beliefs by which most people live. His satire can be biting and his wit devastating. He found no escape from human tragedy in the comforts we build to shield ourselves from reality - even in art, which for most intellectuals has replaced religion. However, he did develop a moral message - one which is in direct contradiction to the values of ambition, success, acquisition and security which is normally held up for admiration, and he looks at the greed, God-worship, and cruelty to others which we increasingly take for granted, in a way that is both unconventional and revolutionary.If this study shocks many readers it is because the honesty, the integrity and the depth of Beckett's thinking - expressed through his novels, plays and poetry, but also through his other writings and correspondence - is itself shocking, to conventional thinking. Yet what he has to say is also comforting. He offers a different ethic and prescription for living - a message based on stoic courage, compassion and an ability to understand and forgive.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• Western philosophy
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780714545547
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett
John Calder




calder publications an imprint of
alma books Ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.calderpublications.com
The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett first published in 2001 This edition first published by Calder Publications in 2017
Text © John Calder, 2001, 2017
isbn : 978-0-71454-283-6
John Calder asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Preoccupations and Sources
2 Philosophy as Fiction: Murph y and Watt
3 Man’s Inhumanity and the Search for Love
4 The Conquest of Time
5 The Failure of Art
6 Philosophy and Language
7 Looking at God
8 Prescriptions for Living: Beckett’s Ethics
Notes
Bibliography
C alder Publications


Acknowledgements
T his book can only be dedicated to its subject, whose personality has had a profound influence on my life, just as his writings have dominated my thinking about what life is or should be about. I am extremely grateful to Bill Swainson, a one-time colleague who not only improved the text when copy-editing it, but made valuable suggestions about certain conclusions which I had to rethink. He also insisted on my finding all the sources. A very few are missing because of the ten-year gap between writing the book and publishing it, but they are not of great importance.
Sheila O’Leary (now Dillon) carefully retyped the original manuscript and was helpful in many other ways and Laurie Chamberlain put it on disc for the printer. I am grateful to both of them, also to Elena Goodinson who started the latter job which Laurie finished.
There are so many publications about Samuel Beckett that I have limited the works by Samuel Beckett given in the first appendix to those I have used for this study, and only give a short list of further reading for the same reason.
Assuming that no one will want to read this book who does not have a knowledge and interest in the work of its subject, I have not given plots or description of events in Beckett’s writings except where necessary to clarify my points. The many references to the “trilogy” are of course to the three novels which have been published together at the author’s request, namely Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable .


1
Preoccupations and Sources
V oltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will in no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity. Beckett was the last of the great stoics.
Instead of covering ground already well-trodden, I want to concentrate in this short book on the attitudes, the thinking and the intellectual background of Samuel Beckett the philosopher, and where exegesis is necessary – there are many puzzles that have not been solved concerning the meaning of certain episodes and situations in the work – to concentrate on those parables and metaphors that dramatize Beckett’s philosophy seen as a whole.
It seems self-evident to me that Beckett is the most significant writer of the twentieth century: he represents the culmination of the achievements of his three most important predecessors, Proust, Kafka and Joyce. The key elements in their work, Proust’s demonstration of the elasticity of time, Kafka’s brooding sense of menace, prescient of the horrors to come in his own Germanic and Jewish world, and Joyce’s ability to blend myth with daily life through language – all find their synthesis in the literature of Beckett. The twentieth century has been rich in the arts, partly because its eventful history has given artists much material, either to use, illustrate and distort in their work, or from which to escape, as did the major figures of the ivory-tower Twenties like T.S. Eliot. Yet the three writers I have mentioned, with Beckett as their successor, intellectually dominate that period, standing head and shoulders above a horde of other literary figures most of whom are better known to the public and much more widely read. Proust, Kafka, Joyce and Beckett will, however, be the names that will loom largest when the twentieth century can be seen in perspective.
Beckett in particular has understood his own time as if he were already looking back on it at the time of writing. He has understood its social and military horrors, its criminal wastage of lives and of the planet’s resources, its refusal to look at the consequences of selfishness and short-term profit, and he has peered ahead, prophetically – and not very far ahead at that – to a world of want and deprivation, possibly even to the extinction of life on earth. He does not portray such an outcome as necessarily a tragedy, more as an escape from the misery of conscious existence and, in particular, an end to the cruelty of man. This is not expressed without some hesitation and misgivings, because life has so much to offer to some, in particular to those able to appreciate the glories of human achievement in the arts and the great architectural monuments left to us by different periods of civilization, as well as by the shorter-lived pleasures of the body. Ultimately, however, when weighed in the scales, all these things are very light compared to the great burden of human and animal misery. The enjoyment of power and wealth, available to very few, even the enjoyment of reasonable comfort in times of peace and civilized prosperity, does not come into consideration. These things are unstable, short-lived and belong to those who prefer to be blind to the real world. As with Schopenhauer, Beckett came to the conclusion that life is no blessing and it would be better never to have been born.
Great artistic ages have always been followed by an era of barbarism, during which the arts and the accompanying advances of knowledge are sometimes badly damaged, if not utterly destroyed, or else are absorbed into the new dominant culture that has overwhelmed them. A culture can be conquered by force and become a reluctant possession, as was the case of Greece overcome by Rome, or sometimes only kept alive by small communities of monks or men of culture, hidden away to be rediscovered in the future. Increasing speed of communication from the age of printing onward has made the complete destruction of culture and knowledge much more difficult: the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, right and left, have been able to eliminate some individuals and many works of art, but never the culture of which they were a part; knowledge has become too widespread to be lost. The world has shrunk, making most censorship impossible, but not the exercise of brutality and genocide, giving a more sinister meaning to ars longa , vita brevis .
Artists can see the horrors that are taking place in the world perfectly well and some of them are doing what little they can to create more awareness in society at large, but many more are giving way to apathy, treating art as an escape from reality, a comfortable, insulated world, metaphorically like the haven that Vladimir and Estragon hope Godot will offer them. That this latter world resembles in many ways an acceptable, non-violent death is not significant, and the relevance of such art produced to the real world can also be questioned. It is the norm of the Western world to live as if in a dream, through habit and a disciplined timetable, pushing what is unpleasant outside consciousness. Beckett could not accept membership of that world: he had a compulsion to create his own wounds and rub salt in them. Aesthetically, he needed to suffer pain to intensify his consciousness, and paradoxically there is the desire, expressed in much of his work, to reduce the thresholds of pain and feeling in order to suffer less. In Proust Beckett talks of “the wisdom of all sages from Brahma to Leopardi, the wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire” and quotes the latter:
In noi de cari inganni non che la speme, il desiderio è spento. *
Along with this “ablation” is the determination to resist the seductions of ambition and to become nothing, to desire nothing, expect nothing and be nothing, along the lines advocated by Arnold Geulincx in his Ethica . *
Geulincx played an important part in the development of the young Beckett, who found a kindred spirit in the writings of this Belgian follower of Descartes. There is, however, a significant difference in motivation, and by the time he discovered Geulincx, Beckett had lost the Christian faith of the philosophical espouser of poverty and humility. Geulincx was not a well-known name at Trinity and Beckett appears to have come across him more or less by accident in the university library, although he may