Samuel Beckett. Eugene Webb

      Published by the University of Washington Press

      First paperback edition 2014

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      University of Washington Press

       www.washington.edu/uwpress

      ISBN 978-0-295-99434-5

      Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-103289

      The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞

       For my Mother and Father

      PREFACE

      Looked at collectively, the works of Samuel Beckett reveal a remarkable continuity of theme. Together, his various writings constitute a single, coherent presentation of a particular view of life. Beckett’s novels, especially, demand to be read as though each were a constituent part of a larger whole. Of course, Beckett did not sit down to write More Pricks than Kicks or Murphy with the idea that he was eventually going to follow these works with Watt, the trilogy, and How It Is, but as his career has proceeded he must have come to see an important thematic continuity running through all of these novels; and from Watt on he has deliberately connected each of them by means of frequent allusions from one to another.

      This explicit interrelatedness of Beckett’s novels does not make them easy to read. In fact, the author practically insists that if you wish to read one of his novels, you should read them all in order really to understand what he is trying to say. To some readers this demand might seem unreasonable, perhaps even pretentious. ‘A neo-classicism,’ John Updike called it, ‘in which one’s early works are taken as the classics.’¹ To a reader who has become interested enough in Beckett to read all, or at least several, of his novels, however, the continuities that connect them make them, though more demanding, more rewarding as well. Through a variety of narrators, characters, and stories, Beckett has been able to make in the total corpus of his novels a far more comprehensive portrait of man in his relationship to the universe than he could have in a single book. It is for the purpose of guiding the reader through the intricacies of Beckett’s novels to an understanding of their over-all vision that the present study has been written.

      Whereas several previous studies of Beckett have given a great deal of attention to his use of comic techniques, the present study concentrates on the development of his themes and his artistic presentation of them. I do hope, however, that a reader approaching Beckett for the first time will not be misled by my emphasis on Beckett’s thought into reading him as primarily a solemn and somber philosopher. Although Beckett presents an unusually bleak assessment of man and of the human condition, he is actually a tremendously funny writer, perhaps the greatest comedian of the grotesque that literature has ever seen. It is precisely this combination of seriousness and humor that make Beckett so fascinating and so important. There is a kind of sublimity in a writer’s being able to face with such honesty and courage a vision of life so pessimistic while at the same time retaining the inner freedom that enables him to laugh and to create.

      Since this study is intended as a guidebook which should lead the reader to a more careful examination of Beckett himself, I have provided all important quotations with page numbers. These follow the quotations in parentheses, or in the case of several quotations from a single page, they follow the first quotation. The English language texts referred to are, with two exceptions, the editions published in New York by Grove Press. In the case of the trilogy, which has been published in a single volume as well as in a series of three separate volumes, my references are to the three separate volumes. The exceptions referred to above are More Pricks than Kicks, which was published in London by Chatto and Windus in 1934 and which has not been reissued, and No’s Knife, a collection of Beckett’s short fiction published in London by Calder and Boyars. References to the French texts are to the editions published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Further details on the editions cited from will, of course, be provided in the footnotes to the main body of this study. Publication data on the British editions of Beckett’s works will be found in the Bibliography. Except for translations by Beckett and some others of his work, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

      I would like to express my appreciation to Professor William York Tindall of Columbia University for his careful reading of a part of this book and for his many helpful suggestions on it. I am also indebted to Professor Leon Roudiez of the same university for similar helpful criticism. I would also like to express my gratitude to my wife, Marilyn, for her help in the laborious task of proof reading this book. Final responsibility for any errors, either textual or interpretive, is, of course, my own.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Passages from the following works of Samuel Beckett are quoted by permission of The Grove Press, Inc.: Poems in English (copyright © 1961 by Samuel Beckett), Malone Dies (copyright © 1956 by Grove Press), The Unnamable (copyright © 1958 by Grove Press), How It Is (copyright © 1964 by Grove Press), Stories and Texts for nothing (copyright © 1967 by Samuel Beckett), Murphy, Proust, Watt, and Molloy (published by Grove Press). Beckett’s publishers in Great Britain, Calder and Boyars, Ltd., have also granted permission to quote from the above works as well as from No’s Knife (first published in Great Britain, 1967, by Calder and Boyars, Ltd.). Passages from More Pricks than Kicks (copyright © 1934 by Chatto and Windus) are quoted by permission of Chatto and Windus, Ltd. Passages in French from the following works of Samuel Beckett are quoted by permission of Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris: Molloy (copyright © 1951 by Les Éditions de Minuit), Malone meurt (copyright © 1951 by Les Éditions de Minuit), L’Innommable (copyright © 1953 by Les Éditions de Minuit), Nouvelle et Textes pour rien (copyright © 1958 by Les Éditions de Minuit), and Comment c’est (copyright © 1961 by Les Éditions de Minuit). Passages from the article ‘Moody Man of Letters’ by Israel Shenker (copyright © 1956 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission) are quoted by permission of The New York Times Company and of Mr Israel Shenker. Passages from Tom F. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’ (Columbia University Forum, Summer 1961), are quoted by permission of the author and his agents, James Brown Associates. The passage from John Updike, ‘How How It Is Was’ (New Yorker, December 19, 1964), is quoted by permission of The New Yorker.

      SAMUEL BECKETT: A STUDY OF HIS NOVELS

      CHAPTER I

       Introduction: Beckett and the Twentieth Century

      Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in 1906 of a middle-class Protestant family at Foxrock near Dublin. In 1927 he received his B.A. in Modern Literature from Dublin’s Trinity College. Not long after this he left Ireland to take a two-year position as lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Most of his subsequent life was to be spent in France. Immediately he entered into the life of the colony of literary and artistic expatriates from all over Europe who congregated in Paris at the time. One of the most prominent members of this group was Beckett’s fellow countryman, James Joyce, who was already famous for his Ulysses and whose Finnegans Wake was in progress. Beckett’s knowledge of French, later to become his main literary language, must have been impressive even at that time, because Joyce engaged him in 1930 as the principal translator for the French version