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Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in 1906 of a middle-class Protestant family at Foxrock near Dublin. In 1927 he received his B.A. in Modern Literature from Dublin’s Trinity College. Not long after this he left Ireland to take a two-year position as lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Most of his subsequent life was to be spent in France. Immediately he entered into the life of the colony of literary and artistic expatriates from all over Europe who congregated in Paris at the time. One of the most prominent members of this group was Beckett’s fellow countryman, James Joyce, who was already famous for his Ulysses and whose Finnegans Wake was in progress. Beckett’s knowledge of French, later to become his main literary language, must have been impressive even at that time, because Joyce engaged him in 1930 as the principal translator for the French version of Anna Livia Plurabelle. This began a close association between Beckett and Joyce which lasted as long as Joyce lived.

It has been assumed by some that since Beckett spent a great deal of time with Joyce he must have held the formal position of secretary to him.¹ Actually, the relationship was more informal, part friendship and perhaps part hero worship. On a few occasions Beckett took down passages of Finnegans Wake as Joyce dictated, but this was out of friendship on Beckett’s part rather than because he was formally engaged for this sort of work. Richard Ellmann recounts an amusing anecdote told him by Beckett about one such session of dictation. During the dictation there was a knock on the door. Joyce said, ‘Come in.’ Beckett had not noticed the knock, so he put Joyce’s words down in the text. When Joyce found out later, he said, ‘Let it stand.’ Beckett told Ellmann he felt ‘fascinated and thwarted’ by this method of writing.²

Certainly Beckett’s relationship with Joyce was important to him, and perhaps to Joyce as well, although it is difficult to determine exactly what it meant to either. Peggy Guggenheim said she thought Joyce loved Beckett as a son.³ Perhaps, but according to Ellmann, Joyce also kept Beckett at a distance. As Ellmann described it, the friendship was as unique as were its two participants: both were taciturn, and their conversations were often made up largely of long silences directed toward each other.⁴

The influence of Joyce’s art on Beckett’s has been greatly overestimated by those critics who have described Beckett as an outdated imitation of Joyce.⁵ The two writers are really very different: Joyce constructed in his works a tightly organized universe in which each detail was suffused with symbolic import; Beckett’s novels are more loosely constructed, less systematic.

This is not to say, however, that Beckett did not owe much to Joyce. He did. In his essay on Joyce in Our Exagmination Beckett praised the manner in which Joyce had shown how to unite form and content: ‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.’⁶ Although Beckett’s method of uniting form and content in his own works was not to be the same as Joyce’s, he has also been concerned with trying to find forms that would adequately express his vision. As he told Tom F. Driver in an interview, ‘there will be new form, and . . . this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. . . . To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.’⁷ The important difference between Beckett and Joyce lies in this attempt to accommodate form to chaos. Although Joyce had lost his faith in his religious tradition, he constructed an aesthetic form in his novels and stories that attempted to reimpose the lost pattern of meaning on a universe that would have seemed meaningless to him without man’s ability to interpret it in human terms. Beckett would probably consider Joyce one of those who try to make it appear ‘that the chaos is really something else.’⁸

Beckett probably owes more to Joyce in the area of language. Joyce had used and made fashionable a colourful, colloquial language, rich in play on words. Beckett’s first collection of stories, More Pricks than Kicks, is virtually overburdened with linguistic brilliance. When Belacqua Shuah, the central character of all the stories, is doing something as simple as making himself a sandwich, for example, the narrator heaps his description with figurative language: ‘He clapped the toasted rounds together, he brought them smartly together like cymbals, they clave the one to the other on the viscid salve of Savora.’⁹ In many places the language is so florid that the meaning is difficult to follow. Beckett himself may have decided these verbal displays were excessive since he has never had the volume reprinted,¹⁰ which is unfortunate as it is actually an enjoyable and, for anyone concerned with Beckett’s development as a writer, a significant work.

Beckett’s next volume was the novel Murphy, which appeared in 1938. Here he still reminds one of Joyce, at least in language. In Watt, on the other hand, which was written during the German Occupation, from 1942 to 1944,¹¹ he began to search for a form and language uniquely his own with which to convey his vision of an empty universe in which man’s thoughts are at best irrevelant. As his own disillusionment with human systems of thought became more despairing, he saw language, the vehicle of thought, not as a game, as it had seemed in More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy, but as a burden. Belacqua Shuah had thumbed his nose at life by his mock-heroic description of his sandwich, but Watt has to grope laboriously for the words with which to express his vision of the unintelligible.

Much of the atmosphere of Watt seems to have come from Kafka.¹² Watt bears considerable resemblance to The Castle. In both books the protagonists desire to see a certain enigmatic figure. Knott’s house corresponds approximately to the Count’s castle, though Watt really does gain entry to the house, whereas K. never enters the castle. Both Knott and the Count suggest something more than man, God perhaps, and both change shapes, suggesting that they lack a definable nature. The significant difference between Watt and The Castle is that while both Knott and the Count seem to be deity figures, the Count represents God in the sense of an ultimate authority, and Knott represents the Absolute, that which understood would render all intelligible. Knott’s continual changing of shapes signifies that nothing is intelligible because there is a basic absurdity at the heart of the universe.

Beckett probably used Kafka again to a certain extent in the trilogy.¹³ Youdi’s organization with its agents and messengers is similar to the system of authority in the Count’s castle. Both Youdi and the Count are unapproachably remote and consequently seem godlike to Moran and K. The parallel, however, would seem to end here. The remainder of the trilogy, after Moran’s section, is hardly Kafkaesque. The style and the whole atmosphere are uniquely Beckett’s.

Perhaps a more important twentieth-century influence on the trilogy than Kafka can be seen in the thought of certain existentialist philosophers with whom Beckett was undoubtedly familiar by the time the trilogy was being written in the late 1940’s. The comfort Moran and Gaber take in the fact that, since they are members of a vast organization, their troubles are shared sounds like what Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit, would have called a flight to das Man. And in Moran’s statement, ‘I was a solid in the midst of other solids’ (Molloy, p. 147), Beckett is probably alluding to Sartre’s concept of the en soi. In Heidegger’s interpretation, the flight to das Man is an attempt to avoid recognizing one’s own individuality and freedom by giving up one’s personal identity to an impersonal group. Sartre described the same type of self-deception from another point of view: a person can never cease to possess individual freedom, but he tries to convince himself he is not free by deceiving himself into believing he has a fixed essence which limits his freedom, that he is a definite ‘thing,’ what Sartre calls an ‘en-soi.’ Although Beckett often parodies philosophical ideas in the tradition of ‘learned wit,’¹⁴ this seems to be a serious use of Sartre and Heidegger rather than a parody. Moran really was, at the time he is describing in this passage, a bourgeois who shared what Sartre believes to be a state of self-deception especially characteristic of the bourgeoisie. Beckett’s trilogy as a whole, however, cannot really be described as an existentialist work; the characters move from certain illusions to a kind of disillusionment, but this is not represented as progress toward an existentialist freedom. The disillusionment in this case is by its very nature incomplete, as we shall see, and its end is not freedom but despair.

Beckett probably also draws on the tradition of the underground man as exemplified in such works as Dostoievsky’s Notes from the Underground and Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman in the nineteenth century and Kafka’s The Burrow in the twentieth. Like the traditional underground man, the characters of Beckett’s trilogy feel isolated from society and suffer from divided states of mind, and they also seek by techniques of irony to draw the reader into identification with them.¹⁵

One of the most intriguing features of Beckett’s career as a writer has been his shift from the English language to French. The shift took place in the mid-1940’s after Beckett had already completed a number of important works in English, and libraries still seem to be having some difficulty deciding whether he should be filed under French literature or under English. It has often been suggested that Beckett’s reason for turning to French for a literary language after Watt may have been to free himself from the influence of Joyce’s English.¹⁶ This may be true. Beckett told one person that he changed to French ‘parce qu’en français c’est plus facile d’écrire sans style.’¹⁷ There may also have been other reasons for the shift to French.¹⁸ Since Beckett has never, except in fragmentary utterances, discussed his reasons for the change of language, all possible explanations must remain speculative. It may be that even he himself has no definite idea why he changed. To Israel Shenker, Beckett is reported to have said, ‘It was more exciting for me—writing in French.’¹⁹ Perhaps Beckett was motivated in part by the challenge to see what he could do with a language in which he had so steeped himself that it had practically become his own. Certainly his works in French show a skill that many native French writers could envy.

Skillful as he is with language, however, for Beckett language is less important than thought. Most of the changes that have taken place in Beckett’s language from the time of More Pricks than Kicks to that of How It Is have been for the sake of more adequately conforming his expression to his thought. It is ironic that a writer for whom thought is so important should have as his message the untrustworthiness of human intelligence or of any meaningful pattern the human mind might think it can discover in the universe. Beckett told Tom Driver, ‘I am not a philosopher.’²⁰ He probably meant that he held no allegiance to any system of thought, equally distrusting them all. But he is a thinker, and if a person whose entire body of work is a sort of prolegomenon to any future philosophy can be considered a philosopher, then Beckett is precisely that, at least in the sense that he is a man who has explored the limits of thought.

Although the development of Beckett’s philosophical and artistic vision has undoubtedly been influenced to greater or lesser extents by the various twentieth-century figures discussed in this chapter, the characteristic direction of his thought was already established before he ever came into contact with most of them. The next chapter will examine the early influence on him, during his academic years, of writers representing a large range of the thought of the past.