Abstract
Though Beckett is best known for Waiting for Godot (1952), he began his career as a writer not with a play but a critical essay.1 That essay, ‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ (1929), a defence ofJoyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, was the first of a number of occasional essays and reviews he was to write over the next quarter century.2 Beckett’s main ambition during this period was to establish himself as a novelist and poet, not as a literary theorist or journalist. He agreed to write the other essays and reviews either to publicise the work of friends or to supplement a meagre income; he did not set out to develop a literary aesthetic. Nevertheless, there emerges from these occasional pieces a consistent theory about the relationship between art and the limits of human knowledge, a theory he puts into practice both in his early fiction and drama.
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Notes
For a complete list of the plays of Samuel Beckett (1906–89) see Contemporary Dramatists, ed. D.L. Kirkpatrick (London: St James Press, 1988).
All quotations from ‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ are from Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983); page numbers will be given in the text.
Harold Hobson, ‘Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year’, International Theatre Annual, No. 1 (London: John Calder, 1956) p. 153. Earlier in the interview Beckett reveals that, although raised a Protestant, he lost his faith ‘after leaving Trinity [College]’.
It is well established that the title of More Pricks Than Kicks derives from Acts 9.5. I shall argue that the titles of Not I and That Time derive from the Bible and Wordsworth, respectively.
See Samuel Beckett, Cette fois (Paris: Minuit, 1978).
That Time, in Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1984) p. 228. All quotations from That Time, Not I and Ohio Impromptu are from this edition; page numbers will be given in the text.
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintem Abbey’, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800; rpt. London: Methuen, 1963) p. 116. All quotations from the poem are from this edition; line numbers will be given in the text.
S.E. Gontarski, ‘“Making Yourself All Up Again”: the Composition of Samuel Beckett’s That Time’, Modern Drama, 23 (June 1980) 114.
James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979) p. 210.
Quoted in Knowlson and Pilling, p. 206.
Galatians 2.20. See also 1 Corinthians 7.10 and 1 Corinthians 15.10.
Enoch Brater, ‘The “I” in Beckett’s Not I’, Twentieth Century Literature, 20 (1974) 189–200. See Bair, pp. 174–93 and passim for an account of Beckett’s interest in Jung.
C.G. Jung, ‘The Relations of the Ego and the Unconscious’, in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953) p. 171. Hereafter, page numbers of quotations from this work will be given in the text.
C.G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, trans. Stanley Dell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940) p. 20.
Brater, p. 196.
C.G. Jung, ‘Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower”’ (1929) in Alchemical Studies, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953) p. 52.
Acts 9.5.
See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911; rpt. London: Methuen, 1967) p. 227 and pp. 294–5.
‘Three Dialogues’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, p. 138.
For a discussion of the term ‘coenaesthesia’ (or ‘coenaesthesis’) see John Herbert Parsons, An Introduction to the Theory of Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927) pp. 10–11 and 31–41.
George W. Hartmann, Gestalt Psychology (NewYork: Ronald Press, 1935) pp. 23–4; Robert I. Watson, The Great Philosophers from Aristotle to Freud (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1968) p. 439.
See Solomon E. Asch, ‘Gestalt Theory’, in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David Sills (London: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1968) VI, 168.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1965) p. 16. All quotations are from this edition; hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
See Ross Chambers, ‘An Approach to Endgame’, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Endgame, ed. Bell Gale Chevigny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969) pp. 72–3.
David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) p. 154.
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968) pp. 64–5.
Colin Duckworth, Angels of Darkness: Dramatic Impact in Beckett and lonesco (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972) p. 89.
See G.C. Barnard, Samuel Beckett: a New Approach (London: Dent, 1970) pp.101–9.
Pierre Astier, ‘Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu: a View from the Isle of Swans’, Modern Drama, 25 (Sept. 1982) 337.
Astier, 338, comments, similarly, that the story’s character ‘remains a hopeless prisoner of his “old world” thoughts, unable ever to open his mind to a “new world” of ideas’.
S.E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett ’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1985) p. 178.
See Hartmann, p. 184.
See Richard EIlmann, James Joyce (London: Oxford U.P., 1966) pp. 661–2.
Bernard Beckerman makes this point in ‘Samuel Beckett and the Art of Listening’, in Beckett at 80/ Beckett in Context, p. 165. Similarly, in‘Beckett’s Auditors: Not I to Ohio Impromptu’,in Bec.kett at 80/Beckett in Context, p. 188, Katharine Worth argues that the two characters are different aspects of a single writer.
See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909) II, 392.
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Acheson, J. (1993). ‘The Absolute Absence of the Absolute’: the Theory and Practice of Samuel Beckett’s Drama. In: Acheson, J. (eds) British and Irish Drama since 1960. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22762-4_1
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