Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics

Tim Lawrence

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319753997
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

This book considers how Samuel Beckett's critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett's writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett's late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett's work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky's theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2018

Tim LawrenceSamuel Beckett's Critical Aestheticshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75399-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Tim Lawrence¹

(1)

University of York, York, UK

End Abstract

Beckett’s major novels and plays represent some of the most studied, discussed and performed works of the twentieth-century avant-garde. To state this fact scarcely requires great powers of observation, but despite the significant industry of scholarship Beckett’s writing has generated over the last half a century, his writing as a critic has received very little serious attention. This may have something to do with Beckett’s tendency to dismiss the value of his own insights as a reviewer of books, or a thinker on literature and visual art. Writing to his friend Georges Duthuit in 1949, Beckett observed of one of these essays, “Peintres de l’empêchement” (1948), that “the only thing […] worth keeping” from it was the “motif peinture empêchement” (“the painting/preventedness motif”), an aspect of the essay present only by chance, “a momentary oversight, no doubt” (Beckett to Duthuit , 26 May 1949, LII, 152, 155). In many respects, this is a characteristic move by Beckett, one of acknowledgement through dismissal, which he reliably employs when reflecting on his work or seeking to shape his relation to specific influences and traditions of thought. Beckett’s ambivalence towards the source essay in his comment to Duthuit brings out an important thematic trope intimately tied to what is resistant in modern painting, the quality of the work which resists its own appearance or interpretation. The fact that Beckett singles out his essay’s connection between painting and “empêchement” to be salvaged, and labels it a “motif,” suggests that this concept inaugurates a figure to which he consciously returns elsewhere.

Despite the lack of attention paid to motifs raised in Beckett’s critical writing, much attention has been paid to the ways in which tropes of perception, mind and body mark Beckett’s œuvre. Early approaches to philosophical influence in Beckett’s work were primarily attentive to the Beckettian tensions between mind and body, especially Maurice Blanchot’s essay on the voice, language and silence in L’Innommable (1953), and Hugh Kenner’s work on the Cartesian opposition between self and body in Beckett’s post-war novels.¹ By contrast, recent scholarship has paid closer attention to Beckett’s philosophical influences in relation to theories of perception and the status of the image; several studies have drawn upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual phenomenology,² while others have fruitfully conversed with Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the image, an avenue of scholarship fed by Deleuze’s own commentary on the issues regarding language and the image that Beckett’s television plays raise in relation to the rest of his œuvre.³

This study explores the situation of these philosophical and aesthetic discourses in the light of the dialogue—one both tense and fruitful—Beckett’s critical writing fostered with his prose and poetry. Beckett’s critical writing, consisting of book reviews, literary essays and reflections on modern art, represents the most overlooked and understudied part of Beckett’s canon. S.E. Gontarski usefully categorised Beckett’s ephemeral and marginalised texts as the “grey canon”—an umbrella-term encompassing his criticism, poetry, self-translations, letters, manuscripts, notes and incomplete texts.⁴ But an unintended consequence of such categorisations has been to separate off and further marginalise those texts as outside the canon proper. Essential points of contact and cross-pollination within Beckett’s œuvre are thus still persistently overlooked. The disturbing and fascinating tropes of visuality (often involving the negation of the visual as well as its affirmation) which characterise the Beckettian aesthetic do not come out of nothing; rather, these tropes draw from specific philosophical ideas about the nature and the limits of consciousness, perception and representation, which Beckett worked through in his critical writings. Beckett’s focus on the visual and the liminal provides the site where his fiction and critical essays most crucially meet. These limits are crucial to understanding the unwritten itches which underpin Beckett’s texts, from the canonical to the marginal, from the major novels such as L’Innommable—with its English counterpart , The Unnamable (1958)—to the broken, fragmentary landscapes of the late fiction.

Aesthetic concerns in Beckett’s fiction contain many important affinities with themes developed in his critical writing. The register deployed in Beckett’s late prose text Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) demonstrates these aesthetic lineages shared between the creative and critical:

Quick the eyes. The moment they open. Suddenly they are there. Nothing having stirred. One is enough. One staring eye. Gaping pupil thinly nimbed with washen blue. No trace of humour. None any more. Unseeing. As if dazed by what seen behind the lids. (IS, 463)

The sudden appearance and disappearance of the “staring eye” reappraises visual themes expressed in Beckett’s earlier critical essays, such as the neglected essay “La Peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon” (1945–46), which memorably emphasises that it is “impossible de vouloir autre l’inconnu, l’enfin vu” (D, 135) [impossible to want otherwise the unknown, the seen at last]. Anticipating the “dazed” eye in Ill Seen Ill Said, Beckett’s essay crucially presents artistic vision as a surprised sight—the “enfin vu”—offering a glimpse of the unknown.

The unknown is crucial to many of the ways in which Beckett’s writing figures the limit. The desire to speak the ends of language in The Unnamable, for example, uses ignorance to present states of absence, such as silence and invisibility, not as negative ideas, but parts of a positive aesthetic principle that guides and shapes the stories told by Beckett’s lone speaker. Ignorance is articulated through figures of the visual, such as when the Unnamable’s voice speaks of itself through the forceful figure of the unseeing but feeling eye: “I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly” (U, 298). The very dynamic of the sentence is built upon a carefully structured relationship between the subject, knowledge and perception. The structure of these terms even introduces a hierarchy, in which the slim remains of the knowable are grounded in perceptual experience. The eyes confirm their own existence through their capacity to cry, and the liquid sensation of tears reveals the eyes themselves as the organ that allows the narrator—who knows “nothing” of himself—to say “I”. This state of persistent perceptual impoverishment endures, and gradually reveals something inaccessible to clear-sighted reasoning: “What I see best I see ill” (U, 291). The model of ill-seeing and mis-saying proffering a paradoxically superlative vision (what the narrator may “see best”), then, is well-established in Beckett’s writings of the post-war period such as The Unnamable, and constitutes the set of aesthetic aspirations a late text such as Ill Seen Ill Said consciously calls upon.

From Murphy to Molloy, Watt to “What is the word,” Beckett’s novels, novellas, prose fragments and poetry rely upon tropes that connect visual perception to modes of consciousness resistant to intellectual revelation. Similar patterns are at work in Beckett’s critical essays on painting and literary history. For Beckett as an essayist, it is at least partly because the unknown is hidden and resists revelation that it offers a privileged state for addressing questions of artistic value. If, as Lois Oppenheim argues, the incoherent patterns that characterise the Beckettian visual work to resist the rationalisation of art and aesthetic experience,⁵ then Beckett’s statements on the aesthetic importance of the unknown must be considered by any study seeking to elucidate the framing of vision in Beckett’s writing. Perhaps the most striking of these statements is given in Beckett’s early essay Proust (1931), which opens by expressly declaring the unknown as the repository of value: “The unknown, choosing its weapons from a hoard of values, is also the unknowable” (P, 511). These terms serve to define the “unknown” as a hoard, a secret stash, both cache and caché, that makes up what Beckett’s essay calls “The Proustian Equation.” Yet these values are not simply unknown, they are “unknowable.” In one metonymic move, by making the description of a state of affairs (what is unknown) synonymous with its possibility (the unknown can only be unknown), Beckett’s essay also demarcates strict limits on what is knowable. By equating the unknown with the unknowable, and by making the aesthetic values to which Marcel Proust subscribes the sum of this equation, Beckett is implicitly suggesting that if the unknowable can be adapted towards literary ends, it will not be through a literature that seeks to make the values it contains knowable or comprehensible.

The attempt to articulate the aesthetic value of the unknowable and irrational is doggedly made and re-made throughout Beckett’s essays and reflections on art and literature. Within Beckett scholarship, it remains striking how little attention has been paid to the range of Beckett’s critical writing. This is particularly true of his two essays in French on the Dutch painters Geer and Bram van Velde, “La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon” (1945–46) and “Peintres de l’empêchement” (1948), which are usually overshadowed (particularly in anglophone scholarship) by “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” (1949). Yet these three essays are part of the same continuum: the final of Beckett’s “Three Dialogues ” draws upon the earlier essays in its presentation of Bram van Velde as the exemplary modern painter.

Despite these important continuities between Beckett’s essays, the only published monograph dedicated to either part of Beckett’s critical or poetic output remains Lawrence Harvey’s seminal study Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970). At the time of writing, Beckett’s critical writing, encompassing essays, reviews, art and literary criticism, constitutes the sole aspect of his work that still awaits a full scholarly reissue from any of Beckett’s international rights holders: Les Éditions de Minuit, Grove/Atlantic and Faber. Readers interested in Beckett’s art criticism and reviews must work from Ruby Cohn’s edited collection , Disjecta (1983). The title was suggested to Cohn by Beckett as an Ovidian echo of the phrase ‘disjecta membra,’ meaning ‘discarded remains,’ and over the decades many of the remnants collected in Disjecta (such as Beckett’s 1937 letter to Axel Kaun) have become the repository of of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Representation and Resistance: Beckett as Reader and Critic
• 3. Beckett’s Aesthetic of Vision: Figuration and Surrealist Influence
• 4. Transitions and Abstractions: Periodical Culture and Beckett’s Revisions of the Visual
• 5. “This Running Against the Walls of Our Cage”: Beckett at the Boundary
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter