Читать книгу Against Reason - Anthony Barron - Страница 6

This study examines the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms and themes of Beckett’s critical and creative writings. It aims to show that Beckett’s aesthetic preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauer’s seminal arguments regarding the arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human affairs. While Beckett’s critical writings are, in places, formidably opaque, this work explores the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with Schopenhauer’s arguments are revealed. Using Schopenhauer’s thought as my presiding interpretative framework, I propose to demonstrate that the widespread presence of philosophical and theological ideas in Beckett’s creative work signifies less about his personal convictions that it does about his authorial aims. In this sense, I highlight the ways in which discursive ideas were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for literary ends. A central contention of this study is that to judge the place of ideas within Beckett’s art we should ignore questions of their theoretical persuasiveness and consider their role as purely aesthetic devices, the value of which is revealed in terms of the existential impact they have upon his characters. In each of my chapters that deal with Beckett’s fiction I describe the artistically energising tensions that exist between the concepts that Beckett’s characters invoke in their attempts to comprehend the import of their experiences and their conative and affective tribulations which invariably prove resistant to such analysis. Accordingly, the means by which conceptual aporias engender semantic potentialities underpin my exploration of Beckett’s creative assimilation of rational discourse. While my focus is directed to Beckett’s early and middle fiction, which was composed at a time when the relationship between the chaos of quotidian ordeals and the value of rational thought became most acutely relevant for him, I provide numerous cross-references to his dramatic and poetical works in order to highlight the overall significance of these issues within his oeuvre.