Against Reason

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

In Loving Memory of Mum, Louie, and Nan

By nature man tries to explain to himself everything, attributes a meaning to everything.

(Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains)

Of infinitely more interest than how this came to be so was the manner in which it might be exploited.

(Samuel Beckett, Murphy)

Foreword

‘When I was ill I found the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer’, wrote a 31-year old Samuel Beckett, just off his sickbed: ‘I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered most to me’. (Beckett, Letters vol. I, 550). Commencing even before Beckett’s death in 1989, much has been written on his love affair with the melancholic nineteenth-century philosopher and quasi-quietist, ranging from temperament and aesthetics to eastern spirituality and literary utility (for an excellent overview, see Tonning 2015). It seems this relationship properly began in the summer of 1930 to the ridicule of Beckett’s interwar Parisian friends and continued right up to the final decade of his life. Beckett scholars can now assert this with greater empirical precision given the publication of four volumes of correspondence by Cambridge University Press, in addition to the traces left in Beckett’s ‘grey canon’ of archives, including the interwar commonplace book, the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ (Pilling), as well as his extensive summary of the history of western philosophy. In the latter ‘Philosophy Notes’, also composed in the 1930s, Beckett referred to Schopenhauer in familiar, even intimate, terms, describing ‘dear Arthur’ as a philosopher who held that ‘it must be a balls aching world’ (Feldman, 2006: 50).

This intertextual connection continued into the appendices of Watt, completed in 1945, and was rekindled in the final decade of his life in the so-called ‘Sottisier Notebook’. From the latter, Beckett recorded phrases from the second volume of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, seeming to reinforce a deep affinity with the philosopher’s oeuvre: ‘The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other’; and again, ‘Life penal colony’ (cited in Pothast, 15). Since Beckett’s German was fluent enough by the mid-1930s to purchase Schopenhauer’s six volume Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1923; see Nixon and van Hulle, 283)—which he kept in his library for the remainder of his life—these Anglophone translations are helpfully provided by the only other book-length study of Beckett’s relationship to Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It.

Reading Schopenhauer’s key texts against works from the 1931 essay “Proust” to the one-act play Endgame, Pothast’s labours have been of great service to Beckett studies and are a key point of departure for the present volume. Pothast shows, for instance, that Beckett’s eighth decade saw him returning to themes taken up much earlier, as in the Schopenhauer-suffused “Proust” essay, which concludes that there is an ‘“invisible reality” that damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum and reveals the meaning of the word: “defunctus”’. For Pothast, this is Beckett’s ‘metaphysical vision’—one ever impeded by the ‘veil of Maya’ (Nixon 2011, 170)—a phrase which clearly derives from Parerga and Paralipomena, volume II (300; cited in Pothast, 123). That Beckett transcribes this phrase in the ‘Sottisier Notebook’ fully a half-century after concluding with it in “Proust” is surely testament to this lifelong engagement with Schopenhauerian ideas: ‘Life is a pensum to be worked off; in this sense defunctus is a fine expression’ (cited in Pothast, 123).

And yet, for its genuine insights Pothast does not delve deeply into the majority of Schopenhauer’s works, focusing largely on the canonical World as Will and Representation that Beckett knew so well. It is here that Dr Anthony Barron’s study is of inestimable value. Bringing a philosopher’s eye to the whole of Schopenhauer’s philosophical output and a Beckett specialist’s nose for literary nuance, this interdisciplinary work is at once overdue and comprehensive. Rather than the ‘metaphysical’, Barron’s analysis is grounded in the philosophically material, aesthetic themes of which Beckett makes such creative use. Looking closely at Beckett’s works preceding his ‘frenzy of writing’ after 1945, Against Reason incisively focusses on the dilemmas of expression that so vexed these two writers.

Here, facile notions of philosophical influence are rejected in favour of shared preoccupations and artistic perspectives, whereby the Nobel Laureate’s ‘critical and creative practices cohere with Schopenhauer’s own meticulously developed views about the means by which art can engage with conceptual thought’ (3). These overlapping views extend to non-rationality; art as a ‘quieter’ of the will; issues of (pessimistic) temperament, as well as other ‘affinities’ (127) relating to human suffering and misery, individual perception, and, above all, the ‘shape of ideas’ so valorised by both writers. A strong and consistent case is made for Schopenhauer’s artistic importance to ‘Beckett [who], as a literary artist, could use Schopenhauer’s inherently systematic and discursive writings’ (8). Barron’s critical engagement with the extant literature on this subject is up-to-date, incisive and fair-minded. Yet at the same time, Against Reason palpably goes beyond these approaches in constructing a novel, deeply learned reading.

Accordingly, this is a serious and original contribution to Beckett studies, and to modernist uses of philosophy more broadly. Vitally, and unusually for a literary-critical monograph, Barron is well-versed in both Kant’s and post-Kantian philosophy, from which Schopenhauer’s philosophy explicitly departs, casting the knowable in terms of individual perception and Will. In turn, this makes for a rich, contextualised approach to Schopenhauer’s ideas and their decades-long development. Various thematic strands are insightfully analysed across this study, with a particularly able discussion of Schopenhauer’s hostility to traditional forms of reasoning, no less than his often-obscured sense of the inadequacies of language (301).

These are profound insights, particularly where Barron, following Pothast (248), demonstrates that this ‘alogical’ stance was not present in other candidates for the well-worn cliché of “Beckett’s favourite philosopher”. Barron accordingly makes a convincing case that Schopenhauer, from very early on, underwrote a great deal of Beckett’s unfurling resistance to reason as well as some of his artistic alternatives—whether against moralising, or on the overcoming of the will (as in Murphy’s celebrated chess game with Mr Endon). As this suggests, Barron’s is a monograph aptly focussing upon Beckett’s art and its intellectual development in light of, rather than as a proxy for, Schopenhauer’s thinking.

In terms of Beckett’s writing—rightly the focus throughout Against Reason—several aspects of this study provide ground-breaking findings. Amongst the most significant are chapters 2 and 3 here, covering Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett’s first extended works of fiction. While a scholarly consensus rightly holds that the 1931 “Proust” was refracted through Beckett’s contemporaneous reading of Schopenhauer, this is very rarely applied to other works from the early 1930s. Barron’s work in this respect is truly eye-opening: his approach to Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks makes a powerful case for the heavy, if characteristically obscured, presence of Schopenhauer. That Beckett’s views ‘cohere’ (85) with Schopenhauer’s approach to art and music is then carried forward into Murphy and Watt in the ensuing chapters (4 and 5), with the latter text—arguably Beckett’s pivotal novel, written during the bloody vicissitudes of the Second World War—further revealing substantial affinities with Schopenhauerian ideas: from aporias of rationalism suffusing the novel to the aforementioned quotation in the appendix to Watt: ‘zitto! zitto! dass nur das Publikum nichts merke! [silence! silence! so long as the public notices nothing!]'. As with that novel’s concluding passage, ‘no symbols where none intended’ indeed. (Watt, 217, 223). An extended conclusion then sets these findings against Beckett’s ‘mature’ prose, which is both compelling and throws the gauntlet for a new generation of Beckett researchers to take up.

Finally, both writers’ rejection of conceptual art, underpinning much of the discussion here, will doubtless find an interested readership in Beckett studies, and surely also beyond it. In reiterating that Beckett was an artist rather than a philosopher—and thus transformed ideas and experience into his revolutionary art—, Against Reason is a welcome, substantial addition to scholarship on Beckett’s relation to Schopenhauer. Put simply, this monograph may well represent the most detailed and critical pairing of ‘pseudocouples’ yet undertaken in Beckett studies. As the reader delves in, however, a Schopenhauerian injunction may well be of use in navigating the artistic-philosophical terrain mapped, albeit in different ways, by these poets of pessimism, who strongly felt, together, that ‘life is an expiation of the crime of having been born’ (Schopenhauer, ‘On the Suffering of the World’, 50). Perhaps surprisingly, this maxim is followed by an empathetic Schopenhauerian ‘lesson’ that Barron has taken to heart, as did Samuel Beckett before him:

… one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not “monsieur”, sir, but fellow suffer, “compagnon de misères”. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us need and which each of us therefore owes.

Matthew Feldman

July 2017

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel, The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: 1929-1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge:2009)

________, “Proust”, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (Calder, London: 1969)

________, Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (Faber and Faber, London: 2009)

Feldman, Matthew, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ (Continuum, London: 2008)

Nixon, Mark, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936-1937 (Bloomsbury, London: 2011)

Nixon, Mark, and Dirk van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2013)

Pilling, John, ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy’, in The Ideal Core of the Onion, eds. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading, Beckett International Foundation: 1992)

Pothast, Ulrich, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It (Peter Lang, New York: 2008)

Tonning, Erik, ‘“I am not reading philosophy”: Beckett and Schopenhauer’, reprinted in Beckett/Philosophy, eds. Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani (Ibidem, Stuttgart: 2015)

Schopenhauer, Arthur, ‘On the Suffering of the World’, in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, London: 1976)

________, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, volume II, ed. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1974)

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

My academic development has benefited in numerous ways from the conscientious encouragement and profoundly insightful guidance of Sam Slote, who, in his role as my Ph.D. supervisor, aided the completion of the dissertation upon which this book is based. While many will continue to benefit from Sam’s academic expertise, my own sense of gratitude to him will be recalled with profound esteem for his qualities as a scholar and as a man.

I also wish to acknowledge the benevolence of Mark Nixon who, in providing me with early access to his work on Beckett’s German Diaries, helped to shape some of my nascent ideas about my chosen theme. In promptly responding to various queries which arose during my studies, Mark showed a consistent willingness to assist my emerging thoughts.

My readings of Beckett’s unpublished writings at TCD were facilitated by the efforts of Jane Maxwell and Paula Norris; they were unstintingly helpful in enabling me to access such material. I hereby commend them for their efforts on my behalf.

The progression of this work from its origins as a Ph.D. dissertation to its current form was enhanced by the remarkable levels of kindness and encouragement shown to me by Professors Matthew Feldman and Christopher Morash. In their capacity as my Ph.D. examiners they offered advice which proved to be of inestimable value as I prepared this work for publication.

My work with The Waterford Philosophical Society has enhanced my awareness of the innumerable rewards to be enjoyed from sharing my passion for the arts and the history of ideas among devoted enthusiasts. I wish to thank those who, in actively participating in my classes in Waterford, helped me to attain deeper insights into the masterworks of Western culture.

On a more personal level, I am incomparably indebted to three people who enabled me to pursue my academic goals in an atmosphere of love and abiding loyalty. Having lost those individuals during my postgraduate studies I know that I have been left enduringly bereft, yet they reside within my thoughts as exemplars of all that I aspire to be. I dedicate this work to my mother, my uncle, and my grandmother, whose lives enriched my being, whose passing has proved utterly harrowing. Moments of desolation were, however, considerably eased by the company of Trixie, a sentient being whose cherished presence is dearly missed.

As this work neared publication I was blessed with domestic felicity. Joanna, you have taught me how the life of the mind is nourished by abounding love. Non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem (Saint Augustine).

Parts of Chapter One appeared in my essay entitled ‘An Agon with the Twilighters: Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of the Aesthetic’ in the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of the Irish University Review. I am thankful for the willingness of the editors of that journal, in particular Lucy Collins, to publish sections of my research.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Works Cited

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Works by Samuel Beckett

Works by Arthur Schopenhauer

Other Works

Library Archives

Notes on the Text

Introduction

Definitions + Paradigms

Concepts of Influence

Against Reductionism

Suffering and Solitude

The Hermeneutics of Pain

Outline

Chapter 1 The Aesthetics of Ambiguity

Vain Reasonings

The Irreducible Aesthetic

The Primacy of the Percept

The Palliation of Life

Archetypal Visions

Stating the Particular

Between Ennui and Desire

The Proustian Ideal

The Ablation of Desire

The Suffering of Being

The Impenetrable Without

The Ferocious Dilemma of Expression

Chapter 2 Torture by Thought and Trial by Living

Wide Reading—Transformed

Not Just Material

A Son of Adam

The Better Consciousness

The Burden of Existence

Sublime Illusions

Irreducibly Complex

The Sublime Character

Chapter 3 This Strange World

The Accursed Questions

Splendid Incoherence

Burning Illogicality

An Old and Dear Enigma

Defunctus

Stupefying Dilemmas

Chapter 4 Antinomies of Unmarried Love

The Brydell of Reason

The Imponderables of Personality

This Life Disease

Peace That is Higher Than All Reason

The Post-Golgothan Kitty

A Place of Unique Delights

Chapter 5 Lacerated With Curiosity

Words Fail Us

Nothing is Known

Supreme Suffering

A Hell of Unreason

Indeterminable Purport

Unintelligible Intricacies

The Vague Abyss

Conclusion Words Inane / Thought Inane

This Absurd Life

Inexplicable Forces

The Blessed Pus of Reason

Words and Music

Living and Bewildered

Great Confusion No Knowing

Reason-Ridden

All is Strange

Bibliography

Works by Samuel Beckett

Works About Samuel Beckett

Works by Arthur Schopenhauer

Works About Arthur Schopenhauer

General Works

Copyright

ibidem-Verlag

Abbreviations

Works by Samuel Beckett

(CDW) The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).

(CIWS) Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(CPS) The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, eds. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).

(CSP) Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995).

(D) Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984).

(DFW) Dream of Fair to Middling Women, eds. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London: Calder Publications, 1993).

(DN) Beckett’s Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999).

(EB) Echo’s Bones, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber and Faber, 2014).

(ECEF) The Expelled / The Calmative / The End & First Love, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(El) Eleutheria, tr. Barbara Wright (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

(HII) How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(LI) The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

(LII) The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dann Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

(M) Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(MC) Mercier and Camier, ed. Seán Kennedy (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(MD) Malone Dies, ed. Peter Boxall (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(Mo) Molloy, ed. Shane Weller (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(MP) More Pricks Than Kicks, ed. Cassandra Nelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(PTD) Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965).

(TNO) Texts for Nothing and Other Short Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(U) The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(W) Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

Works by Arthur Schopenhauer

(BM) On the Basis of Morality, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995).

(EFR) Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root, tr. F. C. White (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997).

(FR) On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Illinois: Open Court, 1974).

(FW) Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

(GB) Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987).

(MRI) Manuscript Remains, Volume I, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1988).

(MRII) Manuscript Remains, Volume II, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1988).

(MRIII) Manuscript Remains, Volume III, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1989).

(MRIV) Manuscript Remains, Volume IV, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1990).

(PPI) Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(PPII) Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).