Against Reason

My research also differs from that of Pothast in going beyond a mere focus on Proust and encompassing a wide array of Beckett’s critical reflections from a variety of periods in his life in order to demonstrate the extent of the consonance between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Beckett’s aesthetic views. My inclusion of cross-textual references to Beckett’s later prose and drama throughout this study will oppose Pothast’s assertion that “There is an obvious parallelism between Beckett and Nietzsche in that both set out with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art and left it behind later in their lives.”36 That statement is more verifiable in the case of Nietzsche, who, by working primarily through the medium of concepts, engaged in a more overt rebuttal of his erstwhile educator. Schopenhauer’s work was of abiding interest to Beckett. As Pilling and Knowlson have noted, it is far more plausible that Beckett had internalised Schopenhauer’s thought to such an extent that it informed his writing in a variety of subtle and nuanced ways throughout his authorial life. In a laudably comprehensive depiction of the problems facing discussions of the relationship between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Beckett’s art, Tonning observes that,

Schopenhauer’s utility for Beckett is such that, once noticed, it becomes hard to discuss almost any passage in Beckett, or any aspect of his thought, without referring to this influence. However, such a vague sense of ubiquity has created something of a quandary for Beckett scholarship. Generalized explication of Beckett texts in terms of Schopenhauer’s ideas can feel like a distinctly tired exercise: the ideas themselves grow overfamiliar, distinctions between individual Beckett texts begin to blur, and the entire oeuvre starts to resemble a ludicrously extended argument for a certain metaphysics. On the other hand, strictly limiting the discussion to documented allusions risks seriously under-estimating the full impact of the relationship under study, not least because allusions generally are much fewer and often hard to identify in Beckett’s post-war work. This is not to suggest that the alternative method of simply assuming that Beckett “must be” alluding to this or that Schopenhauer passage in a given instance is any improvement.37

My research differs from Tonning’s insofar as it eschews notions of Schopenhauer’s “influence” over Beckett. I am also averse to his suggestions regarding the difficulties of ridding ourselves of a sense of Schopenhauer’s omnipresence in Beckett’s oeuvre. Tonning is, however, justified in accentuating the issue of repetition. Proust has been repeatedly revisited by critics in their search for instances of the thematic congruence between Schopenhauer’s writings and those of Beckett. Tonning is also aware that the specifically literary value of Beckett’s work can be diminished when he is portrayed as an apologist for Schopenhauer’s metaphysical views. This study prioritises the purely aesthetic value of Schopenhauer’s work to Beckett by showing how Schopenhauer’s epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical reflections were exploited by Beckett for creatively enriching ends.

Tonning also remarks that, “While much excellent work has been done on Beckett’s reading of philosophy from about 1932 onward, it is arguable that Beckett’s fundamental philosophical (or anti-philosophical) position had already been formed through his first encounter with Schopenhauer.”38 Schopenhauer may have provided Beckett with a confirmation of ideas about life and art which he had previously intuited in an inchoate yet formative way. If we consider Beckett’s notes on authors such as à Kempis and Geulincx it is remarkable that many of the transcriptions contained therein are of a piece with Schopenhauer’s vituperation of worldly endeavours and his commendation of those who recognise the sheer futility of the incessant striving to which we seem ordinarily predisposed. At various points in this work I will note how Beckett’s prior reading of Schopenhauer would have acquainted him with themes which pervade the writings of figures such as à Kempis and Geulincx who espouse quietist views. As we shall see, the most revelatory aspect of such chronological precedence is that Beckett derived numerous insights from Schopenhauer regarding the means by which an author could employ the conceptual discourses of philosophy and theology in his texts without thereby imperilling their specifically artistic value.

Having read Tiedtke’s thesis on Proust, entitled Symbole und Bilder im Werke Marcel Prousts, Beckett was moved to condemn what he viewed as the “tedious academic distinctions” upon which it relied in its use of “[c]lassification, definitions + paradigms.” Beckett lamented that, in his reading of Tiedtke’s study, he did not receive even a “whiff of Proust as ARTIST.”39 Any interrogation of the intertextual concordance between the works of Schopenhauer and Beckett must provide an outline of the inherently systematic underpinnings of Schopenhauerian concepts. In this sense, provisions of “[c]lassification, definitions + paradigms” are indispensable if Schopenhauer’s arguments are to be properly contextualised. Proust is notorious for its omission of an adequate exposition of its Schopenhauerian foundations; Acheson justifiably avers that it is “obscured by the lack of an adequate background discussion of Schopenhauer.”40 However, Beckett may well have been confronted with an unavoidable problem that can be discerned in the aforementioned critical studies. In the essays which investigate Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought we invariably get little “whiff” of Beckett as artist owing to the unavoidable necessity for critics to cover the fundamental elements of Schopenhauer’s thought while facing relatively restricted word counts.

Concepts of Influence

Tonning’s repeated use of the concept of influence in his exploration of Schopenhauerian notions in Beckett’s work echoes similar practices in the writings of many of those who have sought to probe the place of Schopenhauer’s ideas in Beckett’s oeuvre. By highlighting Beckett’s acute awareness of Schopenhauer’s opposition to art which is overtly guided by rational discourse, this study specifies the ways in which uncritical notions of influence can impede our understanding of Beckett’s commitment to the primacy of the aesthetic. Any consideration of the role of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the work of a creative artist should acknowledge Schopenhauer’s own explicit assertions regarding the inferiority of art which is subservient to conceptual thought. Kaufmann, in his study of Thomas Mann’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s work, notes that, while the reading of Schopenhauer was “the decisive intellectual experience of [Mann’s] youth,” such an encounter was “of a catalytic rather than generative nature; it brought him into his own.”41 In the majority of discussions of the role of Schopenhauer’s thought in Beckett’s work critics have not addressed the notion of influence upon which their research manifestly relies. Within Beckett studies, categorical assertions such as the following, made by Lees, are commonplace: “Beckett was deeply and permanently influenced by the writings of Schopenhauer.”42 Acheson claims that in Murphy “The influence of Leibniz, Geulincx and Schopenhauer is especially important.”43 Grouping Schopenhauer with such philosophers overlooks core issues in his aesthetics which radically problematize our basic assumptions about the concept of influence between the writings of philosophers and literary artists. Unlike Leibniz and Geulincx, Schopenhauer examines the distinctions between philosophy and literature in a way which can prove profoundly instructive in understanding how Beckett’s ideas and practices can be related to Schopenhauer’s thought. Even the more recent surveys of Schopenhauer’s importance to Beckett are illustrative of a tendency to proceed without a prior examination of the conceptual implications of the notion of influence. Büttner notes, “From the first studies on Beckett in the sixties until the present, Schopenhauer has been recognized as a major influence on [Beckett],”44 while Tonning is adamant that previous explorations of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought understate its significance: “there simply is no comparable influence on Beckett’s work, philosophical or otherwise.”45 Both writers appear to disregard the ways in which the application of the concept of influence to their subjects of study warrants prior analysis, especially in light of Schopenhauer’s highly refined sense of the relationship between philosophy and literature.

Pothast deviates from the aforementioned critics insofar as he would “very much hesitate to speak of an ‘influence’ of Schopenhauer on Beckett.” He goes on to claim that, “Concerning Beckett’s literature, the idea of influence seems to be altogether mistaken.”46 Pothast thereby echoes the views of Knowlson, who observes that, “With a creative mind like that of Beckett, influence is simply too straightforward and too deterministic a concept to be very helpful. Instead, recognition—of affinities and resemblances—is much more appropriate to the ambiguity, subtlety and suggestiveness of his artistic world.”47 Beckett may well have been sensitive to the problem of assigning the concept of influence to Proust’s engagement with Schopenhauer’s thought. In the words of O’Hara, “Curiously . . . Beckett never notes that influence, despite his own persistent application of Schopenhauer to the text.”48 As the present study attempts to show, Beckett was very much in agreement with Schopenhauer’s insistence upon the proper role of ideas in literary texts. In his consistent commendation of art which resists the logical proprieties of analytic thought in its inception and reception, his views are very much of a piece with those of Schopenhauer. This study will underscore various elements of Schopenhauer’s thought which render the concept of influence essentially contestable in relation to Beckett’s work, particularly in our attempts to comprehend the critical and creative significance of Schopenhauer’s philosophy to Beckett’s authorial procedures.

Against Reductionism

The history of Beckett criticism abounds with examples of reductionist readings. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1979) presents us with many instances wherein Beckett’s works are read as vehicles for philosophical investigations. French points to the apparently dogmatic tendencies of Beckett’s literary endeavours in stating that, by 1969, Beckett had “moved into an abstract world of unchallengeable assertion” (GF, 33). Beckett’s claim, reportedly uttered to Tandy, that he was “not unduly concerned with intelligibility” and that he hoped Not I (1973) “may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect” (GF, 36), accords with similar statements made by him throughout his artistic career. He was, nevertheless, consistently treated as an author who used his art as a declarative manifesto which served to propagate his worldview. Commentators who had previously offered favourable reviews of Beckett’s work were moved to denigrate his supposedly doctrinaire purposes. Tynan railed against what he considered to be Beckett’s desire to elevate subjective intimations of despair to the level of indubitable fact: “I suddenly realised that Beckett wanted his private fantasy to be accepted as objective truth” (GF, 166). Beckett has also been regarded as a writer who employs allegory as part of his didactic intentions. According to Fraser, Waiting for Godot (1954) is best understood as “a modern morality play, on permanent Christian themes” (GF, 100). My discussion of Beckett’s aesthetic views in Chapter One demonstrates how Beckett’s hostility towards allegorical practices is commensurate with key aspects of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. While I do not wish to suggest that Beckett subscribed to Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an authoritative system of normative principles from which he was loath to deviate, I aim to highlight those areas of Beckett’s art which align most suggestively with Schopenhauer’s views upon the creation and appreciation of art.

Some critics have taken Beckett to task for failing to exemplify the principles of despair that his work apparently espouses. In this sense, Beckett is assumed to have proselytising designs upon his readers. Toynbee argues that, “By continuing to live and, still more, by continuing to write, the author refutes his own message” (GF, 75). The fallacious notion that Beckett desired to supply his readers with a blueprint for living is based upon a failure to understand or accept his deeply Schopenhauerian attitudes regarding the relationship between philosophy and art. In an interview with d’Aubarède he categorically asserted that he “wouldn’t have had any reason to write [his] novels if [he] could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms” (GF, 217). Nevertheless, in spite of Beckett’s consistent disavowals of philosophical intentions, we can still come across statements which confidently assert that works such as Eleutheria (1995) are “true to [Beckett’s] philosophy.”49 Following his admirable exegesis of Schopenhauerian principles and their relevance to Beckett’s work, O’Hara confidently asserts that Murphy “has a thesis”50 and that the ideas in the novel “create an ambience” which “permits readers to experience the novel’s intellectual argument.”51 From a Schopenhauerian perspective, such statements pose serious questions regarding the status of Murphy as a work of art. O’Hara later sounds a note of censure in commenting upon Beckett’s earlier works where he contends, “aside from Murphy, Beckett’s presentations were essentially static. Each psychological problem was stated and examined; none was worked through.”52 One is here reminded of Beckett’s refusal to engage in an analysis of Hamm or Clov: “Hamm as stated and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could” (D, 109). Beckett’s refusal to create art in which his characters’ predicaments are “worked through” reveals his distinct antipathy towards such therapeutic finality.

As we shall see, Beckett’s insistence upon the purely descriptive function of art is one of the most salient aspects of his affinities with Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer formulates a strict distinction between philosophical and literary methodologies. As a conceptual discipline, philosophy is concerned with abstract problems which distance the theorist from the world, whereas the perceptual basis of art is founded upon its creator’s inherence in the world. According to Schopenhauer, “the concept . . . is eternally barren and unproductive in art” (WWRI, 235). It is from this Schopenhauerian perspective that we can point the limitations of Butler’s view that, “if Beckett laughs at and plays with the answers of traditional philosophy it can only be because he is concerned with the same questions. In spite of all his protestations to the contrary, Beckett is working the same ground as the philosophers.”53 While it is the case that Schopenhauer points to a certain overlap between the aspirations of artists and philosophers given that both art and philosophy “work at bottom towards the solution of the problems of existence” (WWRII, 406), Butler is quite adamant in referring to what he deems to be Beckett’s strictly philosophical intentions. He attempts to extract a conceptual solution from Murphy by reading it as indicative of Beckett’s desire to look “for a way out of dualism.”54 As recently as 2013 Butler’s claim was reiterated by Okamuro who pronounced that “Surmounting Cartesian dualism was Beckett’s lifelong desire.”55

Those who wish to locate a specifiable worldview in Beckett’s work are frequently repelled by what they discern therein. One of the most notable examples of this is O’Casey’s impassioned declaration that Beckett’s “philosophy isn’t my philosophy, for within him there is no hazard of hope, no desire for it; nothing in it but a lust for despair, and a crying of woe.”56 Kenner asserts that Waiting for Godot is barbed with designs upon our philosophical dispositions. He cites the opening words of Godot in support of his claim that the words “Nothing to be done” (CDW, 11) constitute the play’s “message” and are voiced early on “as though to get the didactic part out of the way.”57 Kenner’s view is representative of a significant trend within Beckett studies according to which the attribution of a philosophical motive to his work is a prelude to a reductionist reading. Calder attempted to distil a philosophical essence from Beckett’s oeuvre in The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (2001). This text, in its assertion that what we can expect to find in his work is “above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message,”58 continues a critical tradition which was given rather extreme form by Esslin, who claimed that Beckett’s early poem, ‘The Vulture’ (1935), anticipates “the future argument of Beckett’s complete oeuvre.”59

In ascribing philosophical intentions to Beckett commentators have overlooked his overt alignment with Schopenhauer’s reflections upon the artist’s vocation. Schopenhauer’s confidence in the overall unity of his interrelated concepts prompted him to declare that his entire work articulates a “single thought” (WWRI, xii), yet he was also keen to point out that such coherence is the prerogative of the philosopher, not of the artist. The present work will show that to treat Beckett’s writings as if they are cumulatively related to some ultimate conclusion is to ignore the vast range of distinctly Schopenhauerian reflections within his own critical texts, interviews, and letters which consistently reveal his animus against such endeavours. My formal and thematic analysis of Beckett’s creative writings will underscore the means by which Beckett exalted semantic ambiguity in a way which can be mimetically related to his sense of the irreducible particularities of quotidian existence. As an author who had acquired direct insights into the distinctions between literature and philosophy, Murdoch’s dictum that, “the literary writer deliberately leaves a space for his reader to play in. The philosopher must not leave any space,”60 is invaluable for those who attempt to understand the delineations between systematic thought and literary art. Murdoch’s assertion echoes Schopenhauer’s view that, “We are entirely satisfied with the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept” (WWRII, 409). Beckett was clearly fascinated by the capacity of art to point beyond itself to realities which could not be explicitly stated. He refers to poetry’s capacity for producing an “extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said” (D, 94) and notes how painting can involve “un métier qui insinue plus qu’il n’affirme” (D, 130). Schopenhauer considers literature to be markedly adept at affording “profound glimpses” of those perplexing aspects of human character which are “beyond explanation” (EFR, 58). My research evaluates Beckett’s assertion that the key word in appreciating the abounding interpretative ambiguities of his plays is “perhaps” (GF, 220) in relation to such cardinal elements of Schopenhauer’s thought. Just as Gide had, according to Beckett, sought a “new narrative form, [which might be] analytical without being demonstrative, interrogative, not conclusive”61 Beckett creatively assimilated seminal ideas and conscripted them for aesthetic ends without submitting himself to the semantic constraints of strict philosophical methods. Those who have been closely involved with the staging of Beckett’s plays recognise the importance of avoiding the demands of spectators and actors for explanatory closure. As Pountney puts it, “it is important not to reduce Beckett’s work to a single interpretation, since its particular delight is its richness of possibility.”62

1911 witnessed the publication of a book entitled Thomas Hardy: An Illustration of the Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Its author, Helen Garwood, made a significant contribution to the emerging area of literary studies which sought to examine the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and a major novelist, but in its very title her text begs a question which should be uppermost in the mind of anyone who wishes to investigate the presence of Schopenhauerian concepts in the pages of a creative writer. In what sense could any literary text be an “illustration” of a philosophy without constituting a mere translation of abstract discourse into artistic terms? That problem attains particular urgency when we consider Schopenhauer’s damning indictments of art which is produced in accordance with conceptual thought. I propose to show how Beckett was demonstrably adept at relating the plight of his characters to culturally-hallowed ideas without rendering them artistically sterile or transforming them into the type of “clockwork cabbages” (PTD, 120) that inhabit Balzac’s literary worlds. Butler is all too willing to ignore Beckett’s aversion to Balzacian methods when he judges Beckett to be a dictatorial author who insistently coerces his characters into serving him as accomplices in a distinctively philosophical quest: “Beckett pushes and pushes his people into tighter and tighter corners in his search for a self that will be more than a self: clearly he does not just want to ‘find himself’ in the romantic cliché—he wants to find ‘the Self,’ that is, something that will render ‘the mess’ intelligible, something really quite like Being.”63 Such statements belie Beckett’s assertion that the “mess” must be observed, but it cannot be understood— “It is not a mess you can make sense of” (GF, 218–9). This book will evince how Beckett’s art derives much of its aesthetic value from its persistent exploitation of the aporias which beset the minds of his protagonists when they encounter the radically unintelligible nature of being.

It is incumbent upon any study of the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the writings of Beckett to examine the precise nature of Beckett’s understanding and use of Schopenhauerian thought. Thomas Mann’s own sense of indebtedness to Schopenhauer was immense, but not unduly deferential. He notes that, “artists often become ‘betrayers’ of a philosophy” and that they understand the subject in “their way, an emotional way.”64 Beckett was clearly adept at appropriating “grand, old, plastic words” (DFW, 191) for personal and artistic ends. He once admitted to the ways in which he had “twisted” elements of à Kempis’ thought “into a programme of self-sufficiency” (LI, 257), yet in his use of the writings of other thinkers and artists he was equally proficient in creatively adapting their works for his own authorial purposes. Bloom’s concept of “The clinamen or swerve” which amounts to “creative revisionism,”65 is helpful in suggesting how Beckett manipulated key ideas from Schopenhauer’s philosophy when composing of his critical and creative writings. Having observed that Beckett wrote Proust “presumably with no edition of Schopenhauer at hand to refer to,”66 Pilling subsequently claims that “it remains a moot point whether Beckett was simply working from a fallible memory, or whether his own developing creative vision—with words so very much a ‘shadow’ and a limitation—was beginning to generate its own refractory music.”67 In this sense, “affinities and resemblances” are occasionally less readily decipherable owing to the extent to which Schopenhauer’s thought was inflected in accordance with Beckett’s authorial strategies. Beckett commended Joyce for being a “superb manipulator of material” (GF, 148); as the following chapters endeavour to reveal, Beckett was himself remarkably adept at reworking aspects of Schopenhauer’s thought throughout his literary career.

Suffering and Solitude