Against Reason

(VC) On Vision and Colours, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York and Oxford: Berg Publications, 1994).

(WN) On the Will in Nature, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York and Oxford: Berg Publications, 1992).

(WWRI) The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969).

(WWRII) The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969).

Other Works

(CPR) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929).

(GF) Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979).

(Har) Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998).

(JK) James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).

Library Archives

(TCD) Trinity College Dublin Library, Department of Manuscripts.

Notes on the Text

Publication dates of Beckett’s texts are provided in accordance with the original appearance of works in the specific language from which they are cited.

Introduction

Just as supreme artworks perennially defy reductive exegesis, the innumerable predicaments of lived experience elude neat categorisations and facile solutions. Beckett’s creative and personal realisations of the impotence of rationality in artistic and existential affairs were, in part, derived from his awareness of the ludicrous pretensions of thinkers who were all too willing to exalt intellection as a faculty upon which we could rely in our theoretical and practical endeavours. Research by critics such as Doherty and Feldman has revealed the extent to which Beckett’s early knowledge of philosophers was reliant upon introductory works such as Mahaffy’s Descartes (1880) and Windelband’s A History of Philosophy (1893). However, the extensive range of intertextual traces of Schopenhauer’s work which are to be found in Beckett’s early writings suggest that his knowledge of Schopenhauer exceeded that which could have been obtained from secondary sources. Acheson claims that Beckett’s “interest in Schopenhauer may have been initially sparked by an editorial in transition [Eugène Jolas’ ‘Notes on Reality’] in praise of the German philosopher”1 which was published in November 1929. While much of Beckett’s initial acquaintance with philosophy was developed through the medium of secondary works, one of the earliest indications of his direct engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought is contained in a letter to MacGreevy from July 1930: “I am reading Schopenhauer” (LI, 32–3). This was, as Van Hulle and Nixon confirm, the point at which Beckett’s “appreciation [for Schopenhauer] started.”2 Elsewhere, Nixon and Van Hulle note that Beckett read a French translation of Schopenhauer by Auguste-Laurent Burdeau in the same year.3 Given Feldman’s view that Beckett’s composition of his ‘Philosophy Notes’ “most likely”4 did not commence until July 1932, it is remarkable that much of his early knowledge of Schopenhauer was derived from primary texts.

Beckett was unusually forthcoming in his professions of enthusiasm for Schopenhauer’s thought. Having stated that he was “not reading philosophy,” Beckett insisted that he did not care whether Schopenhauer “is right or wrong or a good or worthless metaphysician” (LI, 33). The stylistic beauty of Schopenhauer’s philosophy clearly impressed Beckett with its profusive literary qualities, such as its magisterial command of metaphorical depiction. Beckett was particularly fascinated by Schopenhauer’s apparent disregard for the rigid proprieties of logical inference: “it is a pleasure also to find a philosopher that can be read like a poet, with an entire indifference to the apriori forms of verification. Although it is a fact that judged by them his generalisation shows fewer cracks than most generalisations” (LI, 550). Beckett purchased a collected edition of Schopenhauer’s works during his travels in Germany in 1936; they were among the books that he “sent home”5 on November 4th. However, his extensive use of Schopenhauer’s thought in Proust (1931) demonstrates that his familiarity with the philosopher’s work was already well established prior to his study of those German editions. Pilling asserts that Beckett’s absorption of Schopenhauer’s writings was so profound that, “by the time of the Murphy [‘Whoroscope’] notebook [it had] become so much second nature to him as not to need recording, with chapter and verse attached to facilitate re-reading.”6

In his probing study of Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ Feldman describes how Beckett’s summaries of Windelband’s account of Schopenhauer’s thought “point toward both personal affinity and prior understanding.”7 He goes on to claim that, “with the exception of Schopenhauer, and to a much lesser extent Descartes, Beckett did not undertake any philosophical excursus prior to the composition of the ‘Philosophy Notes.’”8 Schopenhauer is scathing in his opposition to those who rely upon introductory texts and commentaries in their study of philosophy:

[O]nly in their own works and certainly not from second-hand accounts can we become really acquainted with philosophers . . . with those histories of philosophy the mind always receives only the movement that can be imparted to it by the stiff and wooden train of thought of a commonplace intellect. (PPI, 196)

Elsewhere, in a statement which typifies his aversion to how philosophy is ordinarily treated within academic contexts, he writes: “I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the idea of philosophy-professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder” (MRIV, 393). However, Windelband’s work served Beckett well insofar as it contains an accurate summation of some of the main tenets of Schopenhauer’s writings. Van Hulle and Nixon report that Beckett, in his German edition of Schopenhauer’s work, “marked Schopenhauer’s long praise of Kant and the plea to read his works directly rather than through the mediation of an introduction, for the ideas of such an extraordinary mind do not allow any form of filtering.”9 Given his lack of a formal education in philosophy, it is understandable that Beckett would have been drawn to works such as that by Windelband, but he may also have been struck by how Schopenhauer’s gifts as a prose stylist renders his philosophy eminently accessible. The presiding aim of this book is to show that an intertextual reading of the oeuvres of Schopenhauer and Beckett reveals a vast range of thematic correspondence but I will also highlight how Beckett’s critical and creative practices cohere with Schopenhauer’s own meticulously developed views about the means by which art can engage with conceptual thought.

Definitions + Paradigms

Beckett’s enthusiasm for Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been examined throughout the history of Beckett studies. Cronin states that Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer constituted “perhaps . . . the most important literary discovery of his life,”10 while Knowlson claims that Schopenhauer was among those authors that Beckett had “so naturally absorbed and reworked . . . that, in some instances, when they [Schopenhauerian themes] creep unobtrusively into his work they are no longer easily detected” (JK, 653–4). Such remarks attest to the fact that the ultimate value of Schopenhauer’s thought to Beckett consisted of the means by which he could creatively manipulate Schopenhauerian discourse for distinctly aesthetic ends. In this sense, Schopenhauer’s concepts can be seen to figure in Beckett’s work not as discursive dogmas but as an intrinsic part of the ludic tendencies of his compositional strategies. In a letter to MacGreevy, written in August 1930, Beckett notes: “Schopenhauer says defunctus is a beautiful word—as long as one does not suicide. He might be right” (LI, 36). Beckett went on to inform MacGreevy of his intention to “try [Schopenhauer’s] ‘Aphorismes sur la Sagesse de la Vie’, that Proust admired so much” (LI, 43). In such cases Beckett provides clues which indicate the provenance of Schopenhauerian traces in his work, yet the variety of Schopenhauerian allusions in Beckett’s writings usually compel the reader to “guess where” a narrator potentially “stole” (DFW, 191–2) them from. In the present study the identification of thematic congruence is not assumed to constitute incontrovertible evidence of Beckett’s familiarity with specific textual sources of Schopenhauerian ideas. Critical works that are addressed to the avowed presence of Schopenhauerian traces in individual writings by Beckett will be examined in the following chapters. As a preliminary to such discussions, I will consider some of the more general developments in our understanding of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought with reference to a number of issues which have been raised by previous studies upon which my research builds and from which it deviates.

In order to concur with Harvey’s contention that, “Beckett evolves towards sparseness according to the Schopenhauer prescription,”11 we must assume that Schopenhauer argued that such compositional principles could be taught and that Beckett was willing to passively submit to such prescriptive dicta. For reasons that will become apparent in my first chapter such assumptions are overtly implausible. Schopenhauer observes that, “If the singer or virtuoso wishes to guide his recital by reflection, he remains lifeless. The same is true of the composer, the painter, and the poet. For art the concept always remains unproductive” (WWRI, 57). As we shall see, it was precisely owing to such convictions that Schopenhauer refused to provide aesthetic rules. Schopenhauer’s delineations between authentic and inauthentic art were formulated in accordance with strictly descriptive intentions. In stating that “Schopenhauer’s ideas would become in later years the philosophical foundation of Beckett’s thought,”12 Bair not only suggests that Beckett’s art became increasingly dependent upon Schopenhauer’s philosophy but that such reliance developed at a more advanced stage of Beckett’s authorial career than is now commonly accepted. In his discussion of Beckett’s Proust Pilling notes how Beckett “stole” his citation from Calderón by identifying its source in Schopenhauer’s thought.13 In the same year, Pilling, in his monograph entitled Samuel Beckett (1976), examined Beckett’s “very considerable” debt to Schopenhauer as he astutely observed how “much of the discussion in Proust is based on Schopenhauer’s very original aesthetics.”14 Rosen concurred with Pilling’s claims about the presiding role of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in Proust: “Beckett’s analysis depends not only on Schopenhauer’s main ideas, but also on the details of that philosopher’s thought, even on his literary allusions and examples.”15

Beckett’s use of Schopenhauerian notions in Proust and The Unnamable (1958) constitute the subjects of two essays, published in 1981 and 1988. In the first, entitled ‘Where There’s a Will There’s a Way Out: Beckett and Schopenhauer,’ O’Hara provides readers with an admirable précis of Schopenhauer’s thought. He then moves to a consideration of the applicability of Schopenhauerian principles to Beckett’s work, affording particular attention to The Unnamable. O’Hara also encourages us to be mindful of the stylistic impact that Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer seems to have produced upon the development of his critical consciousness: “Schopenhauer won him over, and there is an energy to the baroque and abrasive style of the Proust monograph quite different from the self-conscious intellectual mannerism of his earlier essay on Joyce.”16 As I propose to show in Chapter One, Beckett had already employed exegetical principles in ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’ (1929) which are consonant with Schopenhauer’s aesthetic views. Accordingly, it may have been the case that his independently formulated ideas were not merely corroborated but intensified by his study of Schopenhauer’s work prior to his writing of Proust. Unlike the speaker in ‘From an Abandoned Work’ (1956) who, despite being “A very fair scholar” had “no thought, but a great memory” (TNO, 59), Beckett impressed Rudmose-Brown by his “thoughtful appreciation of the texts that they were studying” (JK, 48) during Beckett’s undergraduate years at TCD. In a letter to Valery Larbaud, written on 18 January 1929, Rudmose-Brown emphasised Beckett’s independence of mind: “Un des mes élèves les plus intelligents, grand ennemi de l’impérialisme, du patriotisme, de toutes les Eglises.”17 While Schopenhauerian discourse demonstrably pervades Proust, O’Hara, in his essay entitled ‘Beckett’s Schopenhauerian Reading of Proust: The Will as Whirled in Re-Presentation,’ is overly eager to downplay Beckett’s personal contribution to his examination of Proust’s masterpiece: “The affinity between Beckett and Schopenhauer was a close one at this time; the philosopher’s assertions spoke for the still mute, or nearly mute artist.”18

Like many of his predecessors in the field of Beckett studies, Wood was content to focus upon the salient parallels between the excoriating evaluations of earthly existence to be found in Schopenhauer’s work and those offered by Beckett in Proust. He points to the enduring significance of Schopenhauer’s despairing vision of worldly affairs for Beckett’s compositional procedures: “Half-remembered snippets of these expressions of pessimism, all taken from Schopenhauer, reappear with some regularity in Beckett’s later drama and prose.”19 From the aforementioned examples it is clear that Beckett scholars were becoming increasingly attuned to the significance of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to Beckett, but in broader academic circles even major publications could omit Beckett from the company of those who had allegedly been impressed by Schopenhauer’s thought. In a seminal collection entitled Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (1996), Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s work is not discussed, while W. B. Yeats is included in the pantheon of major artists who were reputedly “influenced”20 by Schopenhauer’s thought, despite the fact that the biographical or intertextual evidence for Yeats’s interest in Schopenhauer’s writings remains scarce. Critics who have analysed the significance of Schopenhauer’s philosophy for our understanding of Beckett’s work have occasionally made the type of erroneous statement which merely serves to diminish our understanding of the range of Schopenhauerian echoes in Beckett’s oeuvre. Wood writes, “For Schopenhauer, the only way of escaping this futile force which controls our lives lies in the aesthetic experience,”21 while Wulf reiterates that view by stating that Schopenhauer considers “artistic contemplation” to be “the only means of overcoming the futility of our insatiable cravings.”22 According to Schopenhauer, “giving up and denying the will is the highest wisdom” (MRIII, 360). While aesthetic experience provides transitory respite from the ceaseless striving to which we are ordinarily subject, it is neither the sole nor the most effective means of doing so. It is “Through suffering [that] a man is chastened and sanctified, in other words is liberated from the will-to-live” (MRIII, 642). As we shall see, Beckett’s characters rarely achieve liberation from their woes through their experiences of artworks, but their personal tribulations occasionally inspire ephemeral cessations of their conative and epistemic cravings.

More recent studies have benefited from a use of Beckett’s letters and notebooks thereby enriching our awareness of the textual sources from which Beckett’s knowledge of Schopenhauer derived. However, key conceptual issues remain unaddressed, specifically the question of how Beckett, as a literary artist, could use Schopenhauer’s inherently systematic and discursive writings. Acheson evinced an awareness of the issue by asserting that, “Much as he admires Schopenhauer, Beckett does not, in his fiction and drama, seek to promote that philosopher’s theories.”23 However, that statement is difficult to reconcile with his later claim that, “it is clear that the philosophical ‘key’ to the Nouvelles is Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.”24 The following passage, transcribed from a conversation that Beckett held with d’Aubarède, serves to highlight Beckett’s own aversion to such reductive statements: “people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works. There’s no key or problem” (GF, 217). In 1959 Mintz claimed that, “Murphy is inexplicable except by reference to [Geulincx’s work],”25 while Bair averred that the philosophy of Geulincx constitutes “the key”26 to understanding Murphy. Knowlson and Pilling repudiate such views: “there is no key that will unlock every problem thrown up by his work, no formula that will elucidate every aspect of his oeuvre.”27 Similarly, Büttner is cautious about the hermeneutic value of bringing philosophical theories to bear upon the semantic enigmas that are continually posed by Beckett’s work: “no philosophy is able to ‘explain’ it.”28 While I will discuss a wide array of Schopenhauerian traces in Beckett’s art, at no point will any of Schopenhauer’s ideas be postulated as definitive solutions to the aesthetically-enriching interpretative puzzles which repeatedly arise in our engagement with Beckett’s work.

Given Schopenhauer’s own assertions pertaining to the ability of genuine art to resist exhaustive interpretations, a reading of Beckett’s work in conjunction with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics enables us to appreciate the numerous ambiguities that suffuse Beckett’s literary worlds. It also provides us with a means of recognising why no philosophical reading of Beckett can prove ultimately determinative in exegetical terms. Given Schopenhauer’s assertion that, “a concept can never be the source, and its communication can never be the aim, of a work of art” (WWRI, 240), an investigation of the parallels between Schopenhauer’s aesthetic views and Beckett’s critical reflections, such as that provided in Chapter One of the present study, can underscore the need for a re-evaluation of our notion of influence in relation to Beckett’s use of Schopenhauer’s ideas. When Büttner declares his intention to explore “the ways in which Schopenhauer’s thought made it possible for Beckett to create his literary work”29 it would be easy to assume that Beckett’s creative impulses originated in the abstract and systematic principles of that philosopher’s writings. Büttner proceeds to highlight some of the ways in which Beckett’s work “makes use of” Schopenhauer’s “recommendations [involving] the practice of compassion and resignation.”30 However, Schopenhauer is adamant that aesthetics and ethics are not to be understood as areas within which deontological prescriptions could be efficacious:

[J]ust as all the professors of aesthetics with their combined efforts are unable to impart to anyone the capacity to produce works of genius i.e., genuine works of art, so are all the professors of ethics and preachers of virtue just as little able to transform an ignoble character into one that is virtuous and noble. (WWRI, 527)

Having asserted that “Many of [Beckett’s] works call forth similar feelings of compassion or resignation in the audience,” Büttner subsequently claims that, “Resignation, for Schopenhauer, consisted in the denial of the will-to-live that it is the role of tragedy to evoke.”31 While Schopenhauer argued that tragedy could actuate aspirations towards such renunciation, he did not think that artworks ought to have the type of instrumental purpose that Büttner describes. In Chapter One we will recognise the fervency with which Schopenhauer consistently decries ideas regarding the role of artworks as didactic repositories of ethical ideals. In such cases, art becomes “a mere means and instrument” (PPII, 562). Büttner’s views regarding the potentially edifying effects of Beckett’s own works are plausible, yet when juxtaposed so closely with his contestable estimation of Schopenhauer’s reflections upon tragedy, they may serve to suggest that Beckett’s creative impulses were fundamentally inspired by moral principles. The idea that it is the “role of tragedy to evoke” thoughts of withdrawal in the readers, viewers or listeners of Beckett’s art would be difficult to reconcile with Schopenhauer’s view that, “to wish to communicate [concepts] through a work of art is a very useless indirect course; in fact, it belongs to that playing with the means of art without knowledge of the end which I have just censured. Therefore, a work of art, the conception of which has resulted from mere, distinct concepts, is always ungenuine” (WWRII, 409). The present study will identify numerous correspondences between Schopenhauer’s ethics and Beckett’s oeuvre but I am more interested in the purely aesthetic implications of such affinities than I am with the extent to which Beckett accepted Schopenhauer’s arguments regarding compassion as an indispensable foundation of morally significant behaviour.

In considering Beckett’s employment of Schopenhauerian themes, Weller goes beyond a mere identification of intertextual correlations and encourages us to recognise how the notions of ontological guilt which are the focus of those studies which deal with the Schopenhauerian aspects of Proust are radically reworked in Beckett’s later writings: “Schopenhauer’s sense of life as expiation for the sin of having been born gets twisted out of shape by the crooked logic of a number of Beckett’s post-war works.”32 This study will highlight numerous cases wherein Beckett adapts various elements of Schopenhauer’s thought in accordance with his early authorial aims. Schopenhauer’s unparalleled importance for artists of the first rank such as Turgenev, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Conrad, Proust, Hardy, Mann, Wagner, and Mahler ensures that he will continue to inspire much critical commentary, yet within Beckett studies extended treatments of Schopenhauer-Beckett issues are strikingly rare. To date, Pothast’s The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It (2008) provides the most comprehensive published account of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s work currently available in English. Like his predecessors, Pothast focusses on two of Schopenhauer’s works: The World as Will and Representation (1818) and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). Given his acknowledgement that Beckett “seems to have studied” works such as On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) “extensively indeed,”33 his neglect of Schopenhauer’s other writings, including On the Fourfold Root, is somewhat perplexing. Schopenhauer’s core conceptual claims are embedded in a strict referential totality, whereby his aesthetic reflections are unintelligible without a sense of their epistemological presuppositions. Guided by Schopenhauer’s “demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me” (WWRII, 461), I make extensive references to the entire body of English translations of his philosophical oeuvre. I also employ Schopenhauer’s posthumously published manuscripts in instances where a broader intratextual reading of Schopenhauer can illuminate concepts which seem to have been aesthetically valuable to Beckett. I deviate from Pothast’s view that Beckett “remained an author with a distinctly metaphysical tendency.”34 Quite apart from Beckett’s explicitly declared indifference to Schopenhauer’s value as a metaphysician, in Chapter One I examine how Beckett’s study of Proust is more in line with readings of Schopenhauer which regard the metaphysical connotations of his aesthetics to be dispensable in light of his own fervent views regarding the primacy of perceptual experience in creative practices. Pothast subsequently claims that, “important elements of the theoretical as well as aesthetic framework of Schopenhauer’s philosophy were left behind by Beckett very soon after having used them for his own purposes in Proust.”35 I aim to demonstrate that Beckett’s creative ventures which succeeded the composition of Proust contain numerous thematic and formal alignments with Schopenhauer’s thought.