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Beckett’s enthusiasm for Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been examined throughout the history of Beckett studies. Cronin states that Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer constituted “perhaps . . . the most important literary discovery of his life,”10 while Knowlson claims that Schopenhauer was among those authors that Beckett had “so naturally absorbed and reworked . . . that, in some instances, when they [Schopenhauerian themes] creep unobtrusively into his work they are no longer easily detected” (JK, 653–4). Such remarks attest to the fact that the ultimate value of Schopenhauer’s thought to Beckett consisted of the means by which he could creatively manipulate Schopenhauerian discourse for distinctly aesthetic ends. In this sense, Schopenhauer’s concepts can be seen to figure in Beckett’s work not as discursive dogmas but as an intrinsic part of the ludic tendencies of his compositional strategies. In a letter to MacGreevy, written in August 1930, Beckett notes: “Schopenhauer says defunctus is a beautiful word—as long as one does not suicide. He might be right” (LI, 36). Beckett went on to inform MacGreevy of his intention to “try [Schopenhauer’s] ‘Aphorismes sur la Sagesse de la Vie’, that Proust admired so much” (LI, 43). In such cases Beckett provides clues which indicate the provenance of Schopenhauerian traces in his work, yet the variety of Schopenhauerian allusions in Beckett’s writings usually compel the reader to “guess where” a narrator potentially “stole” (DFW, 191–2) them from. In the present study the identification of thematic congruence is not assumed to constitute incontrovertible evidence of Beckett’s familiarity with specific textual sources of Schopenhauerian ideas. Critical works that are addressed to the avowed presence of Schopenhauerian traces in individual writings by Beckett will be examined in the following chapters. As a preliminary to such discussions, I will consider some of the more general developments in our understanding of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought with reference to a number of issues which have been raised by previous studies upon which my research builds and from which it deviates.

In order to concur with Harvey’s contention that, “Beckett evolves towards sparseness according to the Schopenhauer prescription,”11 we must assume that Schopenhauer argued that such compositional principles could be taught and that Beckett was willing to passively submit to such prescriptive dicta. For reasons that will become apparent in my first chapter such assumptions are overtly implausible. Schopenhauer observes that, “If the singer or virtuoso wishes to guide his recital by reflection, he remains lifeless. The same is true of the composer, the painter, and the poet. For art the concept always remains unproductive” (WWRI, 57). As we shall see, it was precisely owing to such convictions that Schopenhauer refused to provide aesthetic rules. Schopenhauer’s delineations between authentic and inauthentic art were formulated in accordance with strictly descriptive intentions. In stating that “Schopenhauer’s ideas would become in later years the philosophical foundation of Beckett’s thought,”12 Bair not only suggests that Beckett’s art became increasingly dependent upon Schopenhauer’s philosophy but that such reliance developed at a more advanced stage of Beckett’s authorial career than is now commonly accepted. In his discussion of Beckett’s Proust Pilling notes how Beckett “stole” his citation from Calderón by identifying its source in Schopenhauer’s thought.13 In the same year, Pilling, in his monograph entitled Samuel Beckett (1976), examined Beckett’s “very considerable” debt to Schopenhauer as he astutely observed how “much of the discussion in Proust is based on Schopenhauer’s very original aesthetics.”14 Rosen concurred with Pilling’s claims about the presiding role of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in Proust: “Beckett’s analysis depends not only on Schopenhauer’s main ideas, but also on the details of that philosopher’s thought, even on his literary allusions and examples.”15

Beckett’s use of Schopenhauerian notions in Proust and The Unnamable (1958) constitute the subjects of two essays, published in 1981 and 1988. In the first, entitled ‘Where There’s a Will There’s a Way Out: Beckett and Schopenhauer,’ O’Hara provides readers with an admirable précis of Schopenhauer’s thought. He then moves to a consideration of the applicability of Schopenhauerian principles to Beckett’s work, affording particular attention to The Unnamable. O’Hara also encourages us to be mindful of the stylistic impact that Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer seems to have produced upon the development of his critical consciousness: “Schopenhauer won him over, and there is an energy to the baroque and abrasive style of the Proust monograph quite different from the self-conscious intellectual mannerism of his earlier essay on Joyce.”16 As I propose to show in Chapter One, Beckett had already employed exegetical principles in ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’ (1929) which are consonant with Schopenhauer’s aesthetic views. Accordingly, it may have been the case that his independently formulated ideas were not merely corroborated but intensified by his study of Schopenhauer’s work prior to his writing of Proust. Unlike the speaker in ‘From an Abandoned Work’ (1956) who, despite being “A very fair scholar” had “no thought, but a great memory” (TNO, 59), Beckett impressed Rudmose-Brown by his “thoughtful appreciation of the texts that they were studying” (JK, 48) during Beckett’s undergraduate years at TCD. In a letter to Valery Larbaud, written on 18 January 1929, Rudmose-Brown emphasised Beckett’s independence of mind: “Un des mes élèves les plus intelligents, grand ennemi de l’impérialisme, du patriotisme, de toutes les Eglises.”17 While Schopenhauerian discourse demonstrably pervades Proust, O’Hara, in his essay entitled ‘Beckett’s Schopenhauerian Reading of Proust: The Will as Whirled in Re-Presentation,’ is overly eager to downplay Beckett’s personal contribution to his examination of Proust’s masterpiece: “The affinity between Beckett and Schopenhauer was a close one at this time; the philosopher’s assertions spoke for the still mute, or nearly mute artist.”18

Like many of his predecessors in the field of Beckett studies, Wood was content to focus upon the salient parallels between the excoriating evaluations of earthly existence to be found in Schopenhauer’s work and those offered by Beckett in Proust. He points to the enduring significance of Schopenhauer’s despairing vision of worldly affairs for Beckett’s compositional procedures: “Half-remembered snippets of these expressions of pessimism, all taken from Schopenhauer, reappear with some regularity in Beckett’s later drama and prose.”19 From the aforementioned examples it is clear that Beckett scholars were becoming increasingly attuned to the significance of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to Beckett, but in broader academic circles even major publications could omit Beckett from the company of those who had allegedly been impressed by Schopenhauer’s thought. In a seminal collection entitled Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (1996), Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s work is not discussed, while W. B. Yeats is included in the pantheon of major artists who were reputedly “influenced”20 by Schopenhauer’s thought, despite the fact that the biographical or intertextual evidence for Yeats’s interest in Schopenhauer’s writings remains scarce. Critics who have analysed the significance of Schopenhauer’s philosophy for our understanding of Beckett’s work have occasionally made the type of erroneous statement which merely serves to diminish our understanding of the range of Schopenhauerian echoes in Beckett’s oeuvre. Wood writes, “For Schopenhauer, the only way of escaping this futile force which controls our lives lies in the aesthetic experience,”21 while Wulf reiterates that view by stating that Schopenhauer considers “artistic contemplation” to be “the only means of overcoming the futility of our insatiable cravings.”22 According to Schopenhauer, “giving up and denying the will is the highest wisdom” (MRIII, 360). While aesthetic experience provides transitory respite from the ceaseless striving to which we are ordinarily subject, it is neither the sole nor the most effective means of doing so. It is “Through suffering [that] a man is chastened and sanctified, in other words is liberated from the will-to-live” (MRIII, 642). As we shall see, Beckett’s characters rarely achieve liberation from their woes through their experiences of artworks, but their personal tribulations occasionally inspire ephemeral cessations of their conative and epistemic cravings.

More recent studies have benefited from a use of Beckett’s letters and notebooks thereby enriching our awareness of the textual sources from which Beckett’s knowledge of Schopenhauer derived. However, key conceptual issues remain unaddressed, specifically the question of how Beckett, as a literary artist, could use Schopenhauer’s inherently systematic and discursive writings. Acheson evinced an awareness of the issue by asserting that, “Much as he admires Schopenhauer, Beckett does not, in his fiction and drama, seek to promote that philosopher’s theories.”23 However, that statement is difficult to reconcile with his later claim that, “it is clear that the philosophical ‘key’ to the Nouvelles is Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.”24 The following passage, transcribed from a conversation that Beckett held with d’Aubarède, serves to highlight Beckett’s own aversion to such reductive statements: “people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works. There’s no key or problem” (GF, 217). In 1959 Mintz claimed that, “Murphy is inexplicable except by reference to [Geulincx’s work],”25 while Bair averred that the philosophy of Geulincx constitutes “the key”26 to understanding Murphy. Knowlson and Pilling repudiate such views: “there is no key that will unlock every problem thrown up by his work, no formula that will elucidate every aspect of his oeuvre.”27 Similarly, Büttner is cautious about the hermeneutic value of bringing philosophical theories to bear upon the semantic enigmas that are continually posed by Beckett’s work: “no philosophy is able to ‘explain’ it.”28 While I will discuss a wide array of Schopenhauerian traces in Beckett’s art, at no point will any of Schopenhauer’s ideas be postulated as definitive solutions to the aesthetically-enriching interpretative puzzles which repeatedly arise in our engagement with Beckett’s work.

Given Schopenhauer’s own assertions pertaining to the ability of genuine art to resist exhaustive interpretations, a reading of Beckett’s work in conjunction with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics enables us to appreciate the numerous ambiguities that suffuse Beckett’s literary worlds. It also provides us with a means of recognising why no philosophical reading of Beckett can prove ultimately determinative in exegetical terms. Given Schopenhauer’s assertion that, “a concept can never be the source, and its communication can never be the aim, of a work of art” (WWRI, 240), an investigation of the parallels between Schopenhauer’s aesthetic views and Beckett’s critical reflections, such as that provided in Chapter One of the present study, can underscore the need for a re-evaluation of our notion of influence in relation to Beckett’s use of Schopenhauer’s ideas. When Büttner declares his intention to explore “the ways in which Schopenhauer’s thought made it possible for Beckett to create his literary work”29 it would be easy to assume that Beckett’s creative impulses originated in the abstract and systematic principles of that philosopher’s writings. Büttner proceeds to highlight some of the ways in which Beckett’s work “makes use of” Schopenhauer’s “recommendations [involving] the practice of compassion and resignation.”30 However, Schopenhauer is adamant that aesthetics and ethics are not to be understood as areas within which deontological prescriptions could be efficacious:

[J]ust as all the professors of aesthetics with their combined efforts are unable to impart to anyone the capacity to produce works of genius i.e., genuine works of art, so are all the professors of ethics and preachers of virtue just as little able to transform an ignoble character into one that is virtuous and noble. (WWRI, 527)

Having asserted that “Many of [Beckett’s] works call forth similar feelings of compassion or resignation in the audience,” Büttner subsequently claims that, “Resignation, for Schopenhauer, consisted in the denial of the will-to-live that it is the role of tragedy to evoke.”31 While Schopenhauer argued that tragedy could actuate aspirations towards such renunciation, he did not think that artworks ought to have the type of instrumental purpose that Büttner describes. In Chapter One we will recognise the fervency with which Schopenhauer consistently decries ideas regarding the role of artworks as didactic repositories of ethical ideals. In such cases, art becomes “a mere means and instrument” (PPII, 562). Büttner’s views regarding the potentially edifying effects of Beckett’s own works are plausible, yet when juxtaposed so closely with his contestable estimation of Schopenhauer’s reflections upon tragedy, they may serve to suggest that Beckett’s creative impulses were fundamentally inspired by moral principles. The idea that it is the “role of tragedy to evoke” thoughts of withdrawal in the readers, viewers or listeners of Beckett’s art would be difficult to reconcile with Schopenhauer’s view that, “to wish to communicate [concepts] through a work of art is a very useless indirect course; in fact, it belongs to that playing with the means of art without knowledge of the end which I have just censured. Therefore, a work of art, the conception of which has resulted from mere, distinct concepts, is always ungenuine” (WWRII, 409). The present study will identify numerous correspondences between Schopenhauer’s ethics and Beckett’s oeuvre but I am more interested in the purely aesthetic implications of such affinities than I am with the extent to which Beckett accepted Schopenhauer’s arguments regarding compassion as an indispensable foundation of morally significant behaviour.

In considering Beckett’s employment of Schopenhauerian themes, Weller goes beyond a mere identification of intertextual correlations and encourages us to recognise how the notions of ontological guilt which are the focus of those studies which deal with the Schopenhauerian aspects of Proust are radically reworked in Beckett’s later writings: “Schopenhauer’s sense of life as expiation for the sin of having been born gets twisted out of shape by the crooked logic of a number of Beckett’s post-war works.”32 This study will highlight numerous cases wherein Beckett adapts various elements of Schopenhauer’s thought in accordance with his early authorial aims. Schopenhauer’s unparalleled importance for artists of the first rank such as Turgenev, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Conrad, Proust, Hardy, Mann, Wagner, and Mahler ensures that he will continue to inspire much critical commentary, yet within Beckett studies extended treatments of Schopenhauer-Beckett issues are strikingly rare. To date, Pothast’s The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It (2008) provides the most comprehensive published account of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s work currently available in English. Like his predecessors, Pothast focusses on two of Schopenhauer’s works: The World as Will and Representation (1818) and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). Given his acknowledgement that Beckett “seems to have studied” works such as On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) “extensively indeed,”33 his neglect of Schopenhauer’s other writings, including On the Fourfold Root, is somewhat perplexing. Schopenhauer’s core conceptual claims are embedded in a strict referential totality, whereby his aesthetic reflections are unintelligible without a sense of their epistemological presuppositions. Guided by Schopenhauer’s “demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me” (WWRII, 461), I make extensive references to the entire body of English translations of his philosophical oeuvre. I also employ Schopenhauer’s posthumously published manuscripts in instances where a broader intratextual reading of Schopenhauer can illuminate concepts which seem to have been aesthetically valuable to Beckett. I deviate from Pothast’s view that Beckett “remained an author with a distinctly metaphysical tendency.”34 Quite apart from Beckett’s explicitly declared indifference to Schopenhauer’s value as a metaphysician, in Chapter One I examine how Beckett’s study of Proust is more in line with readings of Schopenhauer which regard the metaphysical connotations of his aesthetics to be dispensable in light of his own fervent views regarding the primacy of perceptual experience in creative practices. Pothast subsequently claims that, “important elements of the theoretical as well as aesthetic framework of Schopenhauer’s philosophy were left behind by Beckett very soon after having used them for his own purposes in Proust.”35 I aim to demonstrate that Beckett’s creative ventures which succeeded the composition of Proust contain numerous thematic and formal alignments with Schopenhauer’s thought.

My research also differs from that of Pothast in going beyond a mere focus on Proust and encompassing a wide array of Beckett’s critical reflections from a variety of periods in his life in order to demonstrate the extent of the consonance between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Beckett’s aesthetic views. My inclusion of cross-textual references to Beckett’s later prose and drama throughout this study will oppose Pothast’s assertion that “There is an obvious parallelism between Beckett and Nietzsche in that both set out with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art and left it behind later in their lives.”36 That statement is more verifiable in the case of Nietzsche, who, by working primarily through the medium of concepts, engaged in a more overt rebuttal of his erstwhile educator. Schopenhauer’s work was of abiding interest to Beckett. As Pilling and Knowlson have noted, it is far more plausible that Beckett had internalised Schopenhauer’s thought to such an extent that it informed his writing in a variety of subtle and nuanced ways throughout his authorial life. In a laudably comprehensive depiction of the problems facing discussions of the relationship between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Beckett’s art, Tonning observes that,

Schopenhauer’s utility for Beckett is such that, once noticed, it becomes hard to discuss almost any passage in Beckett, or any aspect of his thought, without referring to this influence. However, such a vague sense of ubiquity has created something of a quandary for Beckett scholarship. Generalized explication of Beckett texts in terms of Schopenhauer’s ideas can feel like a distinctly tired exercise: the ideas themselves grow overfamiliar, distinctions between individual Beckett texts begin to blur, and the entire oeuvre starts to resemble a ludicrously extended argument for a certain metaphysics. On the other hand, strictly limiting the discussion to documented allusions risks seriously under-estimating the full impact of the relationship under study, not least because allusions generally are much fewer and often hard to identify in Beckett’s post-war work. This is not to suggest that the alternative method of simply assuming that Beckett “must be” alluding to this or that Schopenhauer passage in a given instance is any improvement.37

My research differs from Tonning’s insofar as it eschews notions of Schopenhauer’s “influence” over Beckett. I am also averse to his suggestions regarding the difficulties of ridding ourselves of a sense of Schopenhauer’s omnipresence in Beckett’s oeuvre. Tonning is, however, justified in accentuating the issue of repetition. Proust has been repeatedly revisited by critics in their search for instances of the thematic congruence between Schopenhauer’s writings and those of Beckett. Tonning is also aware that the specifically literary value of Beckett’s work can be diminished when he is portrayed as an apologist for Schopenhauer’s metaphysical views. This study prioritises the purely aesthetic value of Schopenhauer’s work to Beckett by showing how Schopenhauer’s epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical reflections were exploited by Beckett for creatively enriching ends.

Tonning also remarks that, “While much excellent work has been done on Beckett’s reading of philosophy from about 1932 onward, it is arguable that Beckett’s fundamental philosophical (or anti-philosophical) position had already been formed through his first encounter with Schopenhauer.”38 Schopenhauer may have provided Beckett with a confirmation of ideas about life and art which he had previously intuited in an inchoate yet formative way. If we consider Beckett’s notes on authors such as à Kempis and Geulincx it is remarkable that many of the transcriptions contained therein are of a piece with Schopenhauer’s vituperation of worldly endeavours and his commendation of those who recognise the sheer futility of the incessant striving to which we seem ordinarily predisposed. At various points in this work I will note how Beckett’s prior reading of Schopenhauer would have acquainted him with themes which pervade the writings of figures such as à Kempis and Geulincx who espouse quietist views. As we shall see, the most revelatory aspect of such chronological precedence is that Beckett derived numerous insights from Schopenhauer regarding the means by which an author could employ the conceptual discourses of philosophy and theology in his texts without thereby imperilling their specifically artistic value.

Having read Tiedtke’s thesis on Proust, entitled Symbole und Bilder im Werke Marcel Prousts, Beckett was moved to condemn what he viewed as the “tedious academic distinctions” upon which it relied in its use of “[c]lassification, definitions + paradigms.” Beckett lamented that, in his reading of Tiedtke’s study, he did not receive even a “whiff of Proust as ARTIST.”39 Any interrogation of the intertextual concordance between the works of Schopenhauer and Beckett must provide an outline of the inherently systematic underpinnings of Schopenhauerian concepts. In this sense, provisions of “[c]lassification, definitions + paradigms” are indispensable if Schopenhauer’s arguments are to be properly contextualised. Proust is notorious for its omission of an adequate exposition of its Schopenhauerian foundations; Acheson justifiably avers that it is “obscured by the lack of an adequate background discussion of Schopenhauer.”40 However, Beckett may well have been confronted with an unavoidable problem that can be discerned in the aforementioned critical studies. In the essays which investigate Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought we invariably get little “whiff” of Beckett as artist owing to the unavoidable necessity for critics to cover the fundamental elements of Schopenhauer’s thought while facing relatively restricted word counts.