Abstract
This chapter details the Kantian philosophical tradition’s manifestations in Beckett’s essay Proust (1931) and his novel Murphy (1938), before considering their relationship to Beckett’s novel Watt (1945) and the essays written in the immediate post-war period, such as “Peintres de l’empêchement” (1948). Lawrence discusses the significance of visual perception in these texts, arguing that vision, for Beckett, operates against the representational demands of Enlightenment rationality. The chapter analyses this theme in connection to Arthur Schopenhauer’s conception of the “subject–object relation,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual consciousness and Georges Bataille’s concept of “unknowing.”
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Notes
- 1.
See the detailed “Biographical Timeline of Thomas MacGreevy,” in Susan Schreibman, ed., The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), xxi–xxiv; John Pilling and Andrew Nash, “The ‘Shatton and Windup’ affair,” in Publishing Samuel Beckett, ed. Mark Nixon (London: The British Library, 2011), 11–22.
- 2.
Rimbaud’s line is taken from his poem “Les Poètes de sept ans” (1871).
- 3.
See Tim Lawrence, “Representation, Relation and ‘Empêchement’: Aesthetic Affinities in Beckett’s Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” Journal of Beckett Studies 25, no. 2 (2016): 169–187.
- 4.
“La Peinture des van Velde” was published in Cahiers d’Art 20–21, edited by Christian Zervos, in October 1946; “Peintres de l’empêchement” was published in Derrière le miroir in May 1948, to accompany an exhibition of Geer and Bram’s paintings at The Galerie Maeght; “Three Dialogues” appeared in Transition Forty-Nine 5, published in December 1949.
- 5.
Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 122–123.
- 6.
The meaning of this term is unpacked in a footnote Beckett inserted into his translation of the third “dialogue” into French for a 1957 catalogue for an exhibition of Bram van Velde’s paintings in the Galerie Michael Warren, Paris. The footnote reads: “Occasion: l’ensemble d’antécédents dont le tableau se veut le conséquent.” [Occasion: the totality of antecedents from which the painting is supposed to arise.] Beckett, Trois Dialogues, trans. Beckett and Edith Fournier (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998), 25n5. I highlight as points of interest in this definition the fact that the painting is secondary to its “antécédents,” and that with the pronominal verb ‘se vouloir’ Beckett expresses scepticism towards the painting’s achievement even of this secondary status.
- 7.
Diane Lüscher-Morata, La Souffrance portée au langage dans la prose de Samuel Beckett (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 146.
- 8.
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 34.
- 9.
Ibid., 51–52.
- 10.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “figure, n.” def. 9a.
- 11.
Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 48–49.
- 12.
Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 22.
- 13.
Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology [1929], reissue of 1970 ed. (New York: Liveright, 1992), 202.
- 14.
C.J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 1998), 36; Laura Salisbury, “Psychology,” in Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett in Context, 312–323.
- 15.
Hugh Culik, “Raining & Midnight: The Limits of Representation,” Journal of Beckett Studies 17, nos. 1–2 (2008): 127.
- 16.
For empirical readings of Kant’s influence on Beckett, see P.J. Murphy, “Beckett and the Philosophers” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 229–237; and “Beckett’s Critique of Kant,” in “Beckett/Philosophy,” ed. Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani, special issue, Sofia Philosophical Review 5, no. 1 (2011): 193–209. Regarding the influence of Schopenhauer on Beckett’s work, the most comprehensive account is given in Ulrich Pothast, Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of it (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). The influence of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory on Beckett’s compositional practice is also discussed in Anthony McGrath, “An Agon with the Twilighters: Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of the Aesthetic,” Irish University Review 42, no. 1 (2012): 6–23; and Erik Tonning, “‘I am not reading philosophy’: Beckett and Schopenhauer,” in Feldman and Mamdani, “Beckett/Philosophy,” 19–44.
- 17.
Matthew Feldman, “‘But What Was this Pursuit of Meaning, in this Indifference to Meaning?’ Beckett, Husserl, Sartre and ‘Meaning Creation’,” in Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 14.
- 18.
Beckett translated “Peintres de l’empêchement,” into English as “The New Object,” for an exhibition of Bram’s paintings which took place at the Kootz Gallery, New York in March 1948. His translation is often liberal, so where a line or phrase is not translated, as here, I provide my own translation.
- 19.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1999), 178; A30 & passim.
- 20.
David Addyman and Matthew Feldman, “Samuel Beckett, Wilhelm Windelband, and the Interwar ‘Philosophy Notes’,” in “Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive,” ed. Peter Fifield and Bryan Radley, special issue, Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): 755–777; Matthew Feldman, “Samuel Beckett, Wilhelm Windelband and Nominalist Philosophy,” in Feldman and Mamdani, “Beckett/Philosophy,” 89–121; Feldman, Beckett’s Books: a cultural history of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (New York and London: Continuum, 2006), 48–52.
- 21.
Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, trans. James H. Tufts, 2nd ed., (New York and London: Macmillan, 1901), 546–547. Beckett’s notes transcribe most of §38, “Objects of Knowledge,” including this passage and those cited below, directly from Windelband’s study. These notes are collected in Beckett, “Philosophy Notes,” TCD MS 10967, fols. 223r-228v; see Feldman, Beckett’s Books, 48–52.
- 22.
Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 548.
- 23.
Ibid., 547.
- 24.
The comparison with Copernicus was first made by Kant himself, in the preface to the second (1787) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 110; B xvi.
- 25.
Shehira Doss-Davezac, “Schopenhauer according to the Symbolists: the philosophical roots of late nineteenth-century French aesthetic theory,” in Schopenhauer, philosophy and the arts, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 249–276.
- 26.
As Roth observes: “thinkers like the surrealists and Bataille […] had long thought about Hegel and Nietzsche together.” Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 191.
- 27.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. J.F. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:119; §24.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
A fact recognised by Kant, who also remarks in the Critique of Pure Reason that “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 246; B132.
- 30.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:119.
- 31.
Ibid., 1:418.
- 32.
Ibid., 1:3.
- 33.
Ibid., 1:196; §38.
- 34.
Ibid., 1:8; §3.
- 35.
David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 268–271.
- 36.
Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:379.
- 37.
See, for example, Yann Mével, L’Imaginaire mélancolique de Samuel Beckett, de Murphy à Comment c’est (New York: Rodopi, 2008), 208.
- 38.
Feldman, Beckett’s Books, 108.
- 39.
Schopenhauer’s doctrine of will-less contemplation is described as “absolute unreason of objectless will” in Beckett’s notes from Windelband (Feldman, Beckett’s Books, 49–50), while the doctrine of will-lessness forms the central tenet of Geulincx’s Occasionalism, from whose main works—the Ethics and Metaphysica Vera—Beckett also took extensive notes. Geulincx furnished Beckett with several images, including Murphy’s rocking-chair, and the axiom Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil veles, which works its way into Murphy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable. See David Tucker, Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing “a Literary Fantasia” (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 16–24, 37–39, 131–133.
- 40.
C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2006), 295.
- 41.
John Pilling, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook,” in Beckett the European, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005), 39–48.
- 42.
The contents of this lecture are discussed in Cohn, A Beckett Canon, 21–22; Beckett discusses the lecture in a letter to MacGreevy, dated 14 November 1930, LI, 54–56.
- 43.
Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 230–261; Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
- 44.
Referred to in scholarship on Beckett as Beckett’s German Diaries. At the time of writing, these diaries await publication, and Nixon’s study offers the most detailed account of their contents and context.
- 45.
Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 761n161.
- 46.
P.J. Murphy, “Beckett’s Critique of Kant,” 195.
- 47.
Pilling, “A Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: Beckett’s ‘Dissonance of Ends and Means’,” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Beckett (Oxford: Wylie-Blackwell, 2010), 70; Murphy, “Beckett’s Critique of Kant,” 194.
- 48.
Garin Dowd, “On Four Kantian Formulas that Might Summarise the Beckettian Poetic.” Journal of Beckett Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (2001): 53–68; “Beckett’s ‘Dislocutions’,” chapter six in Dowd, Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 225–262. I also share Dowd’s reservations about transposing scientific principles, such as Popper’s principle of falsifiability, to literary studies in general and to Beckett’s work in particular. As Dowd observes in his rejoinder to Feldman’s method of “excavatory reason,” given how Beckett’s writing resisted the cultures of rationalism to which Popper’s principle of falsifiability is inextricably linked, it is difficult to produce a reading in sympathy with Beckett’s texts solely spoken from the verificationist standpoint. See Dowd, “Prolegomena to a Critique of Excavatory Reason: Reply to Matthew Feldman,” in “Des éléments aux traces,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts, Danièle de Ruyter, Karine Germoni and Helen Penet-Astbury, special issue, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 20 (2010): 375–388.
- 49.
Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–141.
- 50.
Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 25, 41.
- 51.
Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 407.
- 52.
Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, “Commentary,” CP, 383. See also Nixon and Van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library, 139.
- 53.
Lawlor and Pilling, “Commentary,” CP, 383.
- 54.
Cassirer , Kant’s Life and Thought, 38–39.
- 55.
Earthquakes are evoked in the Critique of Judgement’s description of the “Dynamically Sublime” among other catastrophic events where “In the immeasurableness of nature and the inadequacy of our own faculty for adopting a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its realm, we found our own limitation.” Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91; §28.
- 56.
This distrust of Kantian rationality informs Beckett’s depiction of the object in his essays as fundamentally elusive to rational demands, and carries important political implications discerned by David Lloyd: “Kant’s critiques […] succeed in knitting together the distinct strands of the notion of representation, the political and aesthetic as well as the epistemological, and in tying what he poses as the fundamental forms of human faculties to the universal forms of human ‘common sense’. […] [T]he critique of the aesthetics of representation is at one and the same time the critique of the political sphere of public sense whose formal presupposition is the possibility of subjects meeting in and through their formal identity with one another. The thing as it is thought in convergent ways, though from very different perspectives, by both Beckett and Heidegger thus becomes the vehicle for a simultaneously aesthetic and political dismantling of a Western, liberal system of representation and of the understanding of the human and of the political community that it sustains. Here the recalcitrant ‘thing’ of the res-publica that defied the political formation of the nation emerges in the aesthetic domain as the thing that resists representation itself.” David Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 124.
- 57.
Beckett to MacGreevy , n.d. [August 1931], quoted in John Pilling, ed., Beckett’s Dream Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999), xiii.
- 58.
Beckett, quoted by Michael Haerdter, in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London and New York: John Calder, Riverrun Press, 1988), 230–231.
- 59.
Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 95.
- 60.
For Jean-Michel Rabaté, Beckett’s remarks to Haedter ally him with Sade and Adorno against Kantian ethics: “Beckett’s sadism inverts any transcendent law above humanity, which is the thesis of The Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Rabaté, “‘Think Pig! Beckett’s Animal Philosophies,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 117.
- 61.
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 89; §27.
- 62.
Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality, 22.
- 63.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:532.
- 64.
Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, ed. Arthur Hübscher, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 2:320.
- 65.
Sandra Shapshay, “Schopenhauer’s transformation of the Kantian Sublime,” The Kantian Review 17, no. 3 (2012): 502.
- 66.
See Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), especially chapter seven, “Knowing the Thing in Itself,” 188–207.
- 67.
On how Dada and Surrealism fostered a revision of Kantian aesthetics, see Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (MA and London: MIT Press, 1996).
- 68.
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 97; §29.
- 69.
See Derval Tubridy, “Beckett’s Spectral Silence: Breath and the Sublime,” Limit(e) Beckett 1 (2010): 102–122, http://www.limitebeckett.paris-sorbonne.fr/one/tubridy.pdf. Tubridy draws upon Lyotard’s essay “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” to argue for a “sublime of the absolute minimum” in Beckett’s famously brief and characterless play, Breath (1969). Also see Andrew Slade, “Samuel Beckett, The Sublime, The Worst,” chapter three in Lyotard, Beckett, Duras and the Postmodern Sublime (New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 53–75.
- 70.
Andrew Eastham, “Beckett’s Sublime Ironies,” in “All Sturm and No Drang: Beckett and Romanticism,” ed. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, special issue, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 17 (2007): 125.
- 71.
Ibid., 118.
- 72.
Lozier, De l’abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 198–260.
- 73.
According to Myskja, the focus on elusive objects in Beckett’s novel makes it an example of the ‘Mathematical Sublime,’ associated with what resists the interests of our senses, rather than the ‘Dynamically Sublime’ associated with feelings of terror before overwhelming forces. Bjorn K. Myskja, The Sublime in Kant and Beckett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 280.
- 74.
The series of sub-propositions for proposition 5.6 in the Tractatus , “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” develop the connection between representation and the subject through the theme of limitation, especially Wittgenstein’s assertion: “The subject does not belong to the world, but is rather a limit of the world” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.632). The Schopenhauerian origins behind this section in the Tractatus are analysed in detail by Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, 317–342.
- 75.
This perspective is most systematically foregrounded in “Imagination morte imaginez”/“Imagination Dead Imagine” (1965), which is discussed in Chap. 5.
- 76.
The circumstances behind Proust’s difficult publication are detailed in John Pilling and Andrew Nash, “The ‘Shatton and Windup’ affair,” in Nixon, Publishing Samuel Beckett, 11–22.
- 77.
A feature observed and criticised by James Acheson in the article discussed below, “Beckett, Proust, and Schopenhauer,” Contemporary Literature 19, no. 2 (1978): 165.
- 78.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:31.
- 79.
In a letter to MacGreevy of the same date, Beckett writes “I started writing this morning,” before lamenting “I can’t do the fucking thing. I don’t know whether to start at the end or the beginning.” In any case, he is tellingly keen to detail his further reading in Schopenhauer and argues the case for his influence on Proust’s aesthetic: “I am now going to try his [Schopenhauer’s] ‘Aphorismes sur la Sagesse de la Vie’, that Proust admired so much for its originality and guarantee of wide reading—transformed. His chapter in Will and Representation on music is amusing & applies to P., who certainly read it.” Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 25 August 1930, LI, 43.
- 80.
Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 118.
- 81.
John Fletcher, “Beckett et Proust,” Caliban 1 (1964): 98–99; Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, 407, 411, 423.
- 82.
James Acheson, “Beckett, Proust, and Schopenhauer,” Contemporary Literature 19, no. 2 (1978): 165–179.
- 83.
Ibid., 166.
- 84.
Detailed in Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity, 58–61.
- 85.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, bk. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), 1:183.
- 86.
Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann, bk. 1 of À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al., Collection Quarto (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 148.
- 87.
“Je regardais les trois arbres, je les voyais bien, mais mon esprit sentait qu’ils recouvraient quelque chose sur quoi il n’avait pas prise, comme sur ces objets placés trop loin dont nos doigts allongés au bout de notre bras tendu, effleurent seulement par instant l’enveloppe sans arriver à rien saisir.” Proust , À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleures, bk. 2 of À la recherche du temps perdu, 568; translated as: “I could see them plainly, but my mind felt that they were concealing something which it had not grasped, as when things are placed out of our reach, so that our fingers, stretched out at arm’s-length, can only touch for a moment their outer surface, and take hold of nothing.” Proust , Within a Budding Grove, bk. 2 of Remembrance of Things Past, 1:653.
- 88.
First mentioned, briefly, in parentheses, “(an objectification of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say)” (P, 515). A more developed assertion is made during the essay’s description of Proust’s anti-intellectualism: “We are reminded of Schopenhauer’s definition of the artistic procedure as ‘the contemplation of the world independently of the principle of reason’” (551). Finally, Schopenhauer’s theory of music is evoked: “The influence of Schopenhauer on [the musical] aspect of the Proustian demonstration is unquestionable” (553). A sustained discussion of the role played by Schopenhauer’s theory of music on Beckett’s aesthetic theory in Proust is found in Catherine Laws, “Beckett, Proust, and Music,” chapter one in Headaches among the Overtones: Beckett in Music/Music in Beckett (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), 27–62.
- 89.
Mark Nixon, Beckett’s German Diaries: 1936–1937, 56.
- 90.
According to John Wall, “For Beckett, the great virtue of the Proustian method is that it makes available to perception the Schopenhauerian Idea—that is, the proper object of art—perceivable only when the subject abandons itself to a state of will-less contemplation.” Wall, “A Study of the Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s Watt,” New Literary History 33 (2002): 535. The article goes on to argue that the Proustian model helps to shape the presentation of imagination in Watt, a reading which is relevant to my discussion of the novel later in this chapter.
- 91.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:257; §52.
- 92.
Pothast argues that Beckett imported an exclusively Schopenhauerian conception of the “subject-object relation,” which is understood by Beckett to be “the most general form of representation,” and “a necessary condition for there to be a subject on the one hand and an object on the other.” Pothast, The Metaphysical Vision, 23–24.
- 93.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:178; §34.
- 94.
Beckett’s debts to Bergson have been widely documented. See especially: S.E. Gontarski, Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze; Gontarski, “‘What it is to have been’: Bergson and Beckett on Movement, Multiplicity and Representation,” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 2 (2011): 65–75; Uhlmann, “Beckett’s aesthetic writings and ‘the image’,” chapter two in Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, 24–35. For a discussion of the influence of Bergson’s theories of time and memory on Beckett’s Proust, see S.E. Gontarski, ed., introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 4–8; and Paul Ardoin, “Perception Sickness: Bergsonian Sensitivity and Modernist Paralysis,” in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S.E. Gontarski and Laci Mattison (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 128–140.
- 95.
The word “empêchement” has no exact equivalent in English. However, given the importance of resistance as a principle in the essay, “resistance” is the primary sense given here. In this regard I follow C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, 430, and Emilie Morin Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 134. Contrast with Oppenheim and Cohn’s more literal rendering as “impediment,” in Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 80–81; Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 154–155.
- 96.
Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 77.
- 97.
Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, 58. My quotation from Hollingdale’s translation adapts the translation of vorstellbar and Vorstellung to ‘represented’ and ‘representation,’ against Hollingdale’s ‘conceived’ and ‘Idea.’ I do this in order to maintain consistency with Payne’s translation of Vorstellung by ‘representation’ rather than ‘idea’ in his World as Will and Representation.
- 98.
For Schopenhauer, the eye first brought the world into existence before a knowing subject, but the world as representation is still supported by the knowing subject, not the organ of sight: “the existence of this whole world remains forever dependent on that first eye that opened, [for] such an eye necessarily brings about knowledge, for which and in which the whole world is, and without which it is not even conceivable. The world is entirely representation, and as such requires the knowing subject as supporter of its existence.” Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:30; §7.
- 99.
McGrath, “An Agon with the Twilighters,” 9.
- 100.
The language of Beckett’s reflections on modern art is strikingly echoed in many of Adorno’s remarks, such as his elaboration of the concept of harmony, with its stress on the value of impedence and concealment: “According to their internal constitution, artworks are to dissolve everything that is heterogeneous to their form even though they are form only in relation to what they would like to make vanish. They impede what seeks to appear in them according to their own apriori. They must conceal it, a concealment that their idea of truth opposes until they reject harmony. […] Dissonance is the truth about harmony.” Adorno , Aesthetic Theory trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 144. Adorno also characterises Beckett’s plays in relation to the historical development of artworks, arguing that they “force the traditional categories of art” to undergo the “experience of the destruction of meaning.” Thus, Beckett’s plays “put meaning on trial; they unfold its history.” Adorno , Aesthetic Theory, 201.
To Adorno’s claims that dissonance guides the concept of harmony, compare Beckett’s description of the history of painting—echoing a line of argument in “Peintres de l’empêchement” (D, 135)—in “Three Dialogues ,” as the attempt to escape “the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to” by means of “more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee” (TD, 562–563). And to Adorno’s assertion that Beckett puts “meaning on trial” by thematising the destruction of meaning his plays themselves undergo, consider Beckett’s positioning of Bram van Velde as the “first” to take up the “sense of failure” which painting has hitherto repressed through the development of new technical means to provide deeper, more expansive modes of representation, choosing instead “to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation” (TD, 563), taking art’s unacknowledged limitations as subject-matter and principle of composition. On the politics of Adorno’s and Beckett’s shared interests in art as “the embodiment of a crisis of meaning” see Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 19–20.
- 101.
Merleau -Ponty most poetically expresses this sense of vision as a communion between body and world in his 1961 essay “Eye and Mind” (“LŒil et l’esprit”): “Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among other things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body. This way of turning things around, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision happens among, or is caught in, things—in that place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself by virtue of the sight of things; in that place where there persists, like the mother of water in crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception: and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 163.
- 102.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 232; §13, A107.
- 103.
Ibid., 233.
- 104.
Tropes constructed around the word “glimpse” in English, and the two verbs “apercevoir” and “entrevoir” are especially prominent in the vocabulary of Beckett’s late texts. The phrase “premier aperçu” also works its way unchanged from the French Le Dépeupleur (1970) into the English The Lost Ones (1972), while Beckett’s last work, the poem “Comment Dire”/“What is the Word” is constructed around the “need to glimpse.” A fuller discussion of these visual patternings in Beckett’s late writing is given in Chap. 5.
- 105.
Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body, 25.
- 106.
Taban, “Samuel Beckett: du discours descriptif, fictif et critique sur la peinture à la contiguïté du discursif et du pictural,” 230.
- 107.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 2003), 599–600.
- 108.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 50.
- 109.
Wall, “A Study of the Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s Watt,” 538; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 238, A118–119.
- 110.
Nixon and Van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library, 139.
- 111.
“My place is the fertile bathos of experience, and the word: transcendental […] does not signify something that surpasses all experience, but something that indeed precedes all experience (a priori), but that, all the same, is destined to nothing more than solely to make cognition from experience possible.” Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 125n.
- 112.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Beckett’s Three Critiques: Kant’s Bathos and the Irish Chandos,” in “Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive,” special issue, Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): 699–719. See also Frederik N. Smith, “Pope, Beckett, and the Aesthetics of Decay,” chapter seven in Samuel Beckett’s Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 132–155.
- 113.
P.J. Murphy, “Beckett and the philosophers,” 229–230.
- 114.
Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 5.
- 115.
Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 38.
- 116.
Responding to claims that the Critique lacked any “positive utility,” Kant’s preface to the second edition introduces a notoriously hazy distinction between thinking in general and cognition, by defining cognition as thought requiring proof. On the basis of this distinction, his preface argues that although “we can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself […] even if we cannot cognize these same objects as things in themselves, we must at least be able to think them as things in themselves.” Critique of Pure Reason, 115; B xxvi.
- 117.
There are many readings of Watt’s pot as an example of linguistic/perceptual slippage and nonrelation. Katherine White pertinently reads the scene as an example of how “‘unknowability’ procures mental derangement.” White, Beckett and Decay (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 93. By contrast, John Bolin reads the ungraspable aspect of Watt’s pot in relation to Surrealist and Sartrean object anxieties, ground which my next chapter discusses in further detail. See Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 102–104.
- 118.
Beckett, Fin de partie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957), 97–98.
- 119.
Beckett, Pas suivi de quatre esquisses (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1978), 16.
- 120.
Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body, 5.
- 121.
As Rockmore describes in detail, Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Kantian idealism and Gestalt psychology was a critical one of both appropriation and rejection. Tom Rockmore, “Kant, Merleau-Ponty’s Descriptive Phenomenology, and the Primacy of Perception,” chapter six in Kant and Phenomenology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 187–208.
- 122.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 271.
- 123.
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 270.
- 124.
Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 134.
- 125.
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 31; lecture delivered in 1935, essay published 1956. Lois Oppenheim also parallels Heidegger’s essay with Beckett’s descriptions of visual art. See Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 77–78.
- 126.
Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 40–71; chapters 2–3.
- 127.
Beckett, quoted in Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 156.
- 128.
Ibid.
- 129.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994), 473.
- 130.
Ibid., 474.
- 131.
Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 122.
- 132.
Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes, bk. 3 of À la recherche du temps perdu, 853–854; translated as The Guermantes Way, bk 3 of Remembrance of Things Past, 1:971–972.
- 133.
“The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph.” The Guermantes Way, 1:971; translation of: “Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand-mère, ce fut bien une photographie.” Le côté de Guermantes, 853.
- 134.
Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body, 115.
- 135.
Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 75.
- 136.
David Houston Jones, Samuel Beckett and Testimony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 76.
- 137.
Rabaté, “Bataille, Beckett, Blanchot: From the Impossible to the Unknowing,” 63.
- 138.
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 223.
- 139.
Ibid.
- 140.
Bataille, “Un-knowing, laughter and tears,” trans. Annette Michelson, in October 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing (Spring 1986): 90–91; translation of Bataille, “Non-savoir, rire et larmes,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 216.
- 141.
Weller pointedly explores the ethical implications to Beckett’s use of laughter alongside the experience of unknowing. See Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity, 125–131.
- 142.
Ibid., 92.
- 143.
See Claire Lozier, De l’abject et du sublime, 28–32.
- 144.
See Bataille’s entry, “Informe,” to the “Dictionnaire” in Documents 1 (1929): 382.
- 145.
Bataille, “Un chien andalou,” Documents 4 (1929): 216.
- 146.
Ramona Fotiade, “The slit eye, the scorpion and the sign of the cross: surrealist film theory and practice revisited,” Screen 39, no.2 (1998): 113–114.
- 147.
Bataille’s discussions of ‘unknowing’ are also importantly addressed in Blanchot’s review of L’Expérience intérieure, collected in Faux Pas, which Beckett read (Beckett to Duthuit, 3 January 1951, LII, 219). In Blanchot’s summary, “unknowing concerns the very fact of being, excludes it from what is intellectually possible and humanly tolerable; it introduces the one who experiences it to a situation past which no more existence is possible.” Blanchot , “Inner Experience,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 38. Blanchot’s summary is notable for emphasising unknowing as a limit experience, and attributing to it an ontological significance inaccessible to the intellect.
- 148.
Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 178.
- 149.
Rosalind Krauss, “Antivision,” October 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing (Spring 1986): 150–151.
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Lawrence, T. (2018). Representation and Resistance: Beckett as Reader and Critic. In: Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75399-7_2
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