Читать книгу Against Reason - Anthony Barron - Страница 13

The history of Beckett criticism abounds with examples of reductionist readings. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1979) presents us with many instances wherein Beckett’s works are read as vehicles for philosophical investigations. French points to the apparently dogmatic tendencies of Beckett’s literary endeavours in stating that, by 1969, Beckett had “moved into an abstract world of unchallengeable assertion” (GF, 33). Beckett’s claim, reportedly uttered to Tandy, that he was “not unduly concerned with intelligibility” and that he hoped Not I (1973) “may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect” (GF, 36), accords with similar statements made by him throughout his artistic career. He was, nevertheless, consistently treated as an author who used his art as a declarative manifesto which served to propagate his worldview. Commentators who had previously offered favourable reviews of Beckett’s work were moved to denigrate his supposedly doctrinaire purposes. Tynan railed against what he considered to be Beckett’s desire to elevate subjective intimations of despair to the level of indubitable fact: “I suddenly realised that Beckett wanted his private fantasy to be accepted as objective truth” (GF, 166). Beckett has also been regarded as a writer who employs allegory as part of his didactic intentions. According to Fraser, Waiting for Godot (1954) is best understood as “a modern morality play, on permanent Christian themes” (GF, 100). My discussion of Beckett’s aesthetic views in Chapter One demonstrates how Beckett’s hostility towards allegorical practices is commensurate with key aspects of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. While I do not wish to suggest that Beckett subscribed to Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an authoritative system of normative principles from which he was loath to deviate, I aim to highlight those areas of Beckett’s art which align most suggestively with Schopenhauer’s views upon the creation and appreciation of art.

Some critics have taken Beckett to task for failing to exemplify the principles of despair that his work apparently espouses. In this sense, Beckett is assumed to have proselytising designs upon his readers. Toynbee argues that, “By continuing to live and, still more, by continuing to write, the author refutes his own message” (GF, 75). The fallacious notion that Beckett desired to supply his readers with a blueprint for living is based upon a failure to understand or accept his deeply Schopenhauerian attitudes regarding the relationship between philosophy and art. In an interview with d’Aubarède he categorically asserted that he “wouldn’t have had any reason to write [his] novels if [he] could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms” (GF, 217). Nevertheless, in spite of Beckett’s consistent disavowals of philosophical intentions, we can still come across statements which confidently assert that works such as Eleutheria (1995) are “true to [Beckett’s] philosophy.”49 Following his admirable exegesis of Schopenhauerian principles and their relevance to Beckett’s work, O’Hara confidently asserts that Murphy “has a thesis”50 and that the ideas in the novel “create an ambience” which “permits readers to experience the novel’s intellectual argument.”51 From a Schopenhauerian perspective, such statements pose serious questions regarding the status of Murphy as a work of art. O’Hara later sounds a note of censure in commenting upon Beckett’s earlier works where he contends, “aside from Murphy, Beckett’s presentations were essentially static. Each psychological problem was stated and examined; none was worked through.”52 One is here reminded of Beckett’s refusal to engage in an analysis of Hamm or Clov: “Hamm as stated and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could” (D, 109). Beckett’s refusal to create art in which his characters’ predicaments are “worked through” reveals his distinct antipathy towards such therapeutic finality.

As we shall see, Beckett’s insistence upon the purely descriptive function of art is one of the most salient aspects of his affinities with Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer formulates a strict distinction between philosophical and literary methodologies. As a conceptual discipline, philosophy is concerned with abstract problems which distance the theorist from the world, whereas the perceptual basis of art is founded upon its creator’s inherence in the world. According to Schopenhauer, “the concept . . . is eternally barren and unproductive in art” (WWRI, 235). It is from this Schopenhauerian perspective that we can point the limitations of Butler’s view that, “if Beckett laughs at and plays with the answers of traditional philosophy it can only be because he is concerned with the same questions. In spite of all his protestations to the contrary, Beckett is working the same ground as the philosophers.”53 While it is the case that Schopenhauer points to a certain overlap between the aspirations of artists and philosophers given that both art and philosophy “work at bottom towards the solution of the problems of existence” (WWRII, 406), Butler is quite adamant in referring to what he deems to be Beckett’s strictly philosophical intentions. He attempts to extract a conceptual solution from Murphy by reading it as indicative of Beckett’s desire to look “for a way out of dualism.”54 As recently as 2013 Butler’s claim was reiterated by Okamuro who pronounced that “Surmounting Cartesian dualism was Beckett’s lifelong desire.”55

Those who wish to locate a specifiable worldview in Beckett’s work are frequently repelled by what they discern therein. One of the most notable examples of this is O’Casey’s impassioned declaration that Beckett’s “philosophy isn’t my philosophy, for within him there is no hazard of hope, no desire for it; nothing in it but a lust for despair, and a crying of woe.”56 Kenner asserts that Waiting for Godot is barbed with designs upon our philosophical dispositions. He cites the opening words of Godot in support of his claim that the words “Nothing to be done” (CDW, 11) constitute the play’s “message” and are voiced early on “as though to get the didactic part out of the way.”57 Kenner’s view is representative of a significant trend within Beckett studies according to which the attribution of a philosophical motive to his work is a prelude to a reductionist reading. Calder attempted to distil a philosophical essence from Beckett’s oeuvre in The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (2001). This text, in its assertion that what we 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,”58 continues a critical tradition which was given rather extreme form by Esslin, who claimed that Beckett’s early poem, ‘The Vulture’ (1935), anticipates “the future argument of Beckett’s complete oeuvre.”59

In ascribing philosophical intentions to Beckett commentators have overlooked his overt alignment with Schopenhauer’s reflections upon the artist’s vocation. Schopenhauer’s confidence in the overall unity of his interrelated concepts prompted him to declare that his entire work articulates a “single thought” (WWRI, xii), yet he was also keen to point out that such coherence is the prerogative of the philosopher, not of the artist. The present work will show that to treat Beckett’s writings as if they are cumulatively related to some ultimate conclusion is to ignore the vast range of distinctly Schopenhauerian reflections within his own critical texts, interviews, and letters which consistently reveal his animus against such endeavours. My formal and thematic analysis of Beckett’s creative writings will underscore the means by which Beckett exalted semantic ambiguity in a way which can be mimetically related to his sense of the irreducible particularities of quotidian existence. As an author who had acquired direct insights into the distinctions between literature and philosophy, Murdoch’s dictum that, “the literary writer deliberately leaves a space for his reader to play in. The philosopher must not leave any space,”60 is invaluable for those who attempt to understand the delineations between systematic thought and literary art. Murdoch’s assertion echoes Schopenhauer’s view that, “We are entirely satisfied with the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept” (WWRII, 409). Beckett was clearly fascinated by the capacity of art to point beyond itself to realities which could not be explicitly stated. He refers to poetry’s capacity for producing an “extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said” (D, 94) and notes how painting can involve “un métier qui insinue plus qu’il n’affirme” (D, 130). Schopenhauer considers literature to be markedly adept at affording “profound glimpses” of those perplexing aspects of human character which are “beyond explanation” (EFR, 58). My research evaluates Beckett’s assertion that the key word in appreciating the abounding interpretative ambiguities of his plays is “perhaps” (GF, 220) in relation to such cardinal elements of Schopenhauer’s thought. Just as Gide had, according to Beckett, sought a “new narrative form, [which might be] analytical without being demonstrative, interrogative, not conclusive”61 Beckett creatively assimilated seminal ideas and conscripted them for aesthetic ends without submitting himself to the semantic constraints of strict philosophical methods. Those who have been closely involved with the staging of Beckett’s plays recognise the importance of avoiding the demands of spectators and actors for explanatory closure. As Pountney puts it, “it is important not to reduce Beckett’s work to a single interpretation, since its particular delight is its richness of possibility.”62

1911 witnessed the publication of a book entitled Thomas Hardy: An Illustration of the Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Its author, Helen Garwood, made a significant contribution to the emerging area of literary studies which sought to examine the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and a major novelist, but in its very title her text begs a question which should be uppermost in the mind of anyone who wishes to investigate the presence of Schopenhauerian concepts in the pages of a creative writer. In what sense could any literary text be an “illustration” of a philosophy without constituting a mere translation of abstract discourse into artistic terms? That problem attains particular urgency when we consider Schopenhauer’s damning indictments of art which is produced in accordance with conceptual thought. I propose to show how Beckett was demonstrably adept at relating the plight of his characters to culturally-hallowed ideas without rendering them artistically sterile or transforming them into the type of “clockwork cabbages” (PTD, 120) that inhabit Balzac’s literary worlds. Butler is all too willing to ignore Beckett’s aversion to Balzacian methods when he judges Beckett to be a dictatorial author who insistently coerces his characters into serving him as accomplices in a distinctively philosophical quest: “Beckett pushes and pushes his people into tighter and tighter corners in his search for a self that will be more than a self: clearly he does not just want to ‘find himself’ in the romantic cliché—he wants to find ‘the Self,’ that is, something that will render ‘the mess’ intelligible, something really quite like Being.”63 Such statements belie Beckett’s assertion that the “mess” must be observed, but it cannot be understood— “It is not a mess you can make sense of” (GF, 218–9). This book will evince how Beckett’s art derives much of its aesthetic value from its persistent exploitation of the aporias which beset the minds of his protagonists when they encounter the radically unintelligible nature of being.

It is incumbent upon any study of the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the writings of Beckett to examine the precise nature of Beckett’s understanding and use of Schopenhauerian thought. Thomas Mann’s own sense of indebtedness to Schopenhauer was immense, but not unduly deferential. He notes that, “artists often become ‘betrayers’ of a philosophy” and that they understand the subject in “their way, an emotional way.”64 Beckett was clearly adept at appropriating “grand, old, plastic words” (DFW, 191) for personal and artistic ends. He once admitted to the ways in which he had “twisted” elements of à Kempis’ thought “into a programme of self-sufficiency” (LI, 257), yet in his use of the writings of other thinkers and artists he was equally proficient in creatively adapting their works for his own authorial purposes. Bloom’s concept of “The clinamen or swerve” which amounts to “creative revisionism,”65 is helpful in suggesting how Beckett manipulated key ideas from Schopenhauer’s philosophy when composing of his critical and creative writings. Having observed that Beckett wrote Proust “presumably with no edition of Schopenhauer at hand to refer to,”66 Pilling subsequently claims that “it remains a moot point whether Beckett was simply working from a fallible memory, or whether his own developing creative vision—with words so very much a ‘shadow’ and a limitation—was beginning to generate its own refractory music.”67 In this sense, “affinities and resemblances” are occasionally less readily decipherable owing to the extent to which Schopenhauer’s thought was inflected in accordance with Beckett’s authorial strategies. Beckett commended Joyce for being a “superb manipulator of material” (GF, 148); as the following chapters endeavour to reveal, Beckett was himself remarkably adept at reworking aspects of Schopenhauer’s thought throughout his literary career.