Samuel Beckett. Eugene Webb
to French ‘parce qu’en français c’est plus facile d’écrire sans style.’17 There may also have been other reasons for the shift to French.18 Since Beckett has never, except in fragmentary utterances, discussed his reasons for the change of language, all possible explanations must remain speculative. It may be that even he himself has no definite idea why he changed. To Israel Shenker, Beckett is reported to have said, ‘It was more exciting for me—writing in French.’19 Perhaps Beckett was motivated in part by the challenge to see what he could do with a language in which he had so steeped himself that it had practically become his own. Certainly his works in French show a skill that many native French writers could envy.
Skillful as he is with language, however, for Beckett language is less important than thought. Most of the changes that have taken place in Beckett’s language from the time of More Pricks than Kicks to that of How It Is have been for the sake of more adequately conforming his expression to his thought. It is ironic that a writer for whom thought is so important should have as his message the untrustworthiness of human intelligence or of any meaningful pattern the human mind might think it can discover in the universe. Beckett told Tom Driver, ‘I am not a philosopher.’20 He probably meant that he held no allegiance to any system of thought, equally distrusting them all. But he is a thinker, and if a person whose entire body of work is a sort of prolegomenon to any future philosophy can be considered a philosopher, then Beckett is precisely that, at least in the sense that he is a man who has explored the limits of thought.
Although the development of Beckett’s philosophical and artistic vision has undoubtedly been influenced to greater or lesser extents by the various twentieth-century figures discussed in this chapter, the characteristic direction of his thought was already established before he ever came into contact with most of them. The next chapter will examine the early influence on him, during his academic years, of writers representing a large range of the thought of the past.
CHAPTER II
Early Writings: The First Statements of Beckett’s Themes
One reason that Beckett’s works show such a remarkable continuity of theme is that his characteristic view of life seems to have been formed very early in his career. Even his earliest writings reveal preoccupations with the same problems that he examines in his later works. Beckett’s basic subject has been, from the very beginning, the difficulties of twentieth-century man in his efforts to understand his place in the universe. In his writings at least, Beckett shows little interest in the problems of society. Beckettian man’s concern is primarily metaphysical. He is disillusioned with the hopes previous generations have had for ameliorating their lives by making changes in the world around them, and he is also disillusioned with all of the religious systems or metaphysical theories that previous generations have used to enable themselves to feel more or less at home in the universe. Beckett’s career began with an examination of some of these previous systems and theories, and his writings as a whole can be read as, in part, an extended commentary on the inadequacies of these systems of thought.
Originally, Beckett intended to take up an academic career, and in fact he was well on his way to a distinguished position in the academic world when, in December, 1931, he quit his post as lecturer in French and assistant to the professor of Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in order to devote himself entirely to creative writing. His academic background provided him with a considerable knowledge of intellectual history. Three figures in particular who interested him keenly during that period have played important roles in his later thought: Dante, Descartes, and Proust.
Together, these three thinkers represent for Beckett the intellectual background of the modern world, three successive phases through which Western man has passed. Dante represents the old, orderly world view with which modern man has necessarily become disillusioned. In its time, the medieval world view presented in The Divine Comedy offered man the picture of a purposeful life in a coherent, intelligible universe. Dante, following his mentor Aquinas, believed in a universal order embracing both the natural and the supernatural. This order was believed to have been established by a reliable, basically predictable God: God could not will evil because this would be contrary to His nature. Man’s good was thought to correspond exactly with the good as understood and willed by God.
The good willed by Dante’s God applied to both the natural and the supernatural aspects of man’s life. God willed that men choose heaven, their supernatural good, but He was also concerned with the good in man’s temporal life. He willed that men establish in the temporal world a natural political order that would correspond to the supernatural order of paradise. This would consist, maintained Dante, of a single universal empire in harmony with, but independent of, a single universal church. Dante’s purpose in the Commedia was to interpret the divine plan both in its natural and in its supernatural aspects for his contemporaries. It was a plan which they could understand and which could and, for many, did give a sense of purpose to their lives; they could feel that in both their religious and their social lives they were serving the ultimate purposes of the universe.
Dante’s metaphysics, the Aristotelian metaphysics he derived from Aquinas, was what might be called ‘unitary’ (as compared with ‘dualistic’). The essential harmony between the natural and the supernatural applied within men as individuals, just as it did in society as a whole. A man’s body and soul formed a single unit, and their goals were in harmony. The moral order as appointed by God could be discerned by man’s reason and, with the help of grace, pursued by man’s will. The moral life was believed to lead to felicity in this world and beatitude in the next. The good of the whole man was the good of both body and soul. In fact, from this point of view, the body and the soul were seen as so closely united that the one could hardly have any real existence apart from the other. In Canto XXV of the Purgatorio, for example, the spirit of Statius explains to Dante that the souls of the dead, while waiting for the return of their original bodies at the final resurrection, form interim bodies for themselves, complete with all the organs of sense, by impressing themselves upon the air. In Dante’s world, the soul is at home in the body, and man is at home in the universe.
In Beckett’s world, the situation is quite the opposite. There is no God and no universal order. Beckettian man does not feel at home in the universe, nor can he feel that any worldly goal serves any ultimate purpose. Man can find no intelligible pattern in the universe or in his own life. If man is honest, as some of Beckett’s characters try to be, he must face this situation. But this is not a situation in which anyone, not even Beckett’s most lucid characters, such as Molloy or the Unnamable, can easily acquiesce. His less lucid characters—Murphy and Moran are examples—try by various kinds of self-deception to retain their belief in at least some of the elements of the older world view. To a large extent Beckett’s novels make up an extended commentary both on the untruth of Dante’s religious and metaphysical system and on the inability of twentieth-century man to completely free himself of a tendency to want to see in the universe some of the order that Dante’s beliefs seemed to give it.
More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy can both be read as, in part at least, commentaries on Dante’s Purgatorio. The main character of More Pricks than Kicks is Belaqua Shuah, named after one of the characters in Dante’s antepurgatory (Purgatorio, IV), the region in which the spiritually indolent, who delayed their repentance until the last possible moment, are required to spend a period of time equal to that which they wasted while on earth. Like his namesake in Dante, Beckett’s Belacqua is said to be ‘sinfully indolent,’ and his goal in life is to protect and maintain his state of indolence. Both Murphy and Belacqua would like to escape from the burdens of life and thought into a condition of total inaction, a condition resembling that of the spirits in Dante’s antepurgatory. Murphy even names one of the stages on the path to absolute freedom ‘the Belacqua bliss.’ Both men are deluded, however. From Beckett’s point of view, there can be no permanent escape from the conditions of this existence. In his later work this is shown clearly—in The Unnamable, for example. Because they still live with the illusion that life can have a goal, life for Murphy and Belacqua can appear to be purgatorial, that is, it can appear to be leading through a process of training or detachment to a kind of peace. Murphy