‘Epidemics of Enough’: Beckettian Sufficiencies

Abstract

For a discussion of nihilism, Beckett’s work offers no shortage of entry points. In a philosophical key, one can evoke his two favourite tags: Democritus’ ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’, and the Belgian Arnold Geulincx’s ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ (‘There where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing’) both used in Murphy and the trilogy, and recommended by Beckett himself as the best starting places for a critic faced with the task of interpreting his work.¹ Recent biographies only confirm Beckett’s deep and ongoing exchanges with the continental philosophical tradition, and his interest in Schopenhauer has long been known.² Moreover, Beckett’s concern to place his work under a philosophical aegis stressing ‘nothing’ rhymes with his progressive technical elimination of so many of the traditional props of both prose and theatre, producing texts and dramatic works which if not ‘nothing’, certainly seem to be striving after less, as a title like ‘Lessness’ makes clear, along with the claim in the very late Wortstward Ho to be travelling ‘leastward’ (Beckett 1983, 33). However, the very care with which Beckett emphasises the remainder, or the ‘least’, should prevent us from seeing him as seeking some sort of literary presentation of an ideal nothing, of forging in words or on stage the ‘reality’ of this ‘nothing’ which Democritus’ sentence seems to promise. ‘Naught not best worse’ (ibid., 32) Worstward Ho acknowledges, ‘Least best worse.

‘Man has often had enough; there are actual epidemics of having had enough’.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (121)