Samuel Beckett. Eugene Webb
sees the world and man not as dualistic but as fragmentary. The conflict within man is not nearly so simple as a mere conflict between body and soul; it is a general disunity involving a multiplicity of conflicting physical and psychological impulses. Just as the Descartes of Whoroscope had one foot in the modern world and one foot in the medieval, so Cartesianism, though it helped break down belief in the Thomistic system, is still a system itself, and in Beckett’s world reality is stubbornly resistant to all systems. The allusions to Dante and Descartes that run through Beckett’s novels show both the world out of which twentieth-century man has grown and the manner in which he continues to cling to the comfort of the old illusions.
Of the three thinkers—Dante, Descartes, and Proust—who interested Beckett in his academic days and who seem to have become symbols to him of the stages in the cultural history of modern man, the one whose thought is most congenial to Beckett’s own is the twentieth-century figure, Marcel Proust. Much of what Beckett has to say about Proust’s ideas in his book, Proust (1931),4 written as a scholarly monograph to further his intended academic career, may be interpreted as a description of what Beckett’s own ideas either were at the time or were to become.
Beckett opens his study by announcing that he will discuss the role in Proust’s thought of ‘that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation—Time.’ If Beckett had been speaking of what his own views were to become, he might have called time a monster of damnation and apparent salvation. Beckett’s pessimism has less room for hope than Proust’s. For Proust, as for Beckett, life in the temporal world, except when one’s awareness of it is deadened by habit—‘Habit is a great deadener,’ says Didi in Waiting for Godot—is largely painful. The reason time is a ‘monster of damnation’ is that it erodes the insulation that patterns of habit can temporarily establish. In so far as the direct perception of reality would be painful, habit shields one from pain. When reality is beautiful, on the other hand—and for Proust, unlike Beckett, it often is—habit prevents the possibility of the joy that would constitute salvation. A person’s self at any given moment is made up of the habits that govern him at that particular time. But no set of habits lasts forever, and no set of habits is adequate to shield one from reality in all circumstances. Therefore, life in time consists of what Beckett calls ‘the perpetual exfoliation of personality’ (Proust, p. 13): one set of habits must die in order that a new set may form to replace it. Beckett cites Marcel’s first nights in the Grand Hotel at Balbec as an example. One set of habits had adapted him to sleeping in his own bedroom at home, but that made it all the more difficult for him to adapt to his new surroundings: ‘Habit has not had time to silence the explosions of the clock, reduce the hostility of the violet curtains, remove the furniture and lower the inaccessible vault of this belvedere’ (pp. 12-13). During the transition from one set of habits to another, the insulation of the old set breaks down before the new set is able to form. The result is an excruciating exposure to raw reality. Life tends to alternate between the boredom of habit and the pain of immediacy.
Beckett explains these features of Proust’s thought very clearly, but for a reader more interested in Beckett himself than in what he has to say about Proust, his explanation only leads to further questions. It is true that, as Proust describes it, life, in the moments of direct perception of reality, tends much of the time to be painful, but why does Proust describe it in this way, and why does Beckett find Proust’s view of life so interesting? One reason Proust, and his narrator Marcel, found reality painful is that Proust himself suffered from an acute asthmatic condition. Most people would find the transition from one set of habits or adaptations to another somewhat, though not extremely, uncomfortable, but Proust’s reactions were more highly sensitive than those of most people. Another reason reality is presented in Proust’s work as so painful, is that it is so illogical and uncontrollable. Proust’s characters wish to understand reality and control it, but reality not only defeats them, it mocks them: the intelligent and refined Charles Swann, try as he might, cannot capture his Odette, when he is in love with her, but after he has lost all interest in her—‘une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre’5 (‘a woman I didn’t like, who was not my type’)—fate allows him to marry her.
Beckett may or may not share Proust’s highly sensitive reactions to experience. In Proust’s case there were physiological and psychological reasons for his extreme sensitivity. This would be a biographical question about Beckett, and the biographical material available on Beckett is not very extensive. The idea that reality is intractable and illogical, however, is one that Beckett would agree with wholeheartedly. This view of life has since become the basis of that currently so popular concept, the Absurd. It has a long history. Proust probably received it in part—especially the idea that life alternates between pain and boredom—from the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, who was very popular among Parisian intellectuals during Proust’s younger years. It is interesting to speculate that Proust may be a possible link between Beckett and the most pessimistic of all the nineteenth-century pessimists. Beckett’s later characters, with their inexplicable and inescapable need to keep on moving and thinking, look very much like pawns of Schopenhauer’s Will.
Probably another reason that Beckett found Proust’s thought so congenial is that Proust’s idea of the individual as a succession of selves in constant change provided a more complex and therefore more adequate picture of human psychology than could a simple dualism like that of Descartes. Proust, like Beckett, saw human reality as fragmentary. This interpretation of man has several corrollaries. For one thing, an individual made up of a series of sets of habits will very likely be the seat of multiple conflicts, between old and new habits, and between simultaneous conflicting habits. The works of both Proust and Beckett are filled with examples of such inner conflicts. Another corollary is that if an individual is a series of selves, he will never be able to know himself completely in any given moment of time; he would at best be able to know only the self of that particular moment, and even this would be difficult. This is one of the reasons Proust decided to write A la recherche du temps perdu, that by writing a fictional re-creation of his life as a whole he might be able to construct a total self, in a way, by making all of his fragmentary selves copresent in memory. Many of Beckett’s characters seem to be trying to do the same thing. Moran and Molloy, in Molloy, are both writing accounts of their experiences in what seem to be attempts to bring some sort of order into the chaos of their lives; the narrators of the other parts of the trilogy, Malone and the Unnamable, are also compulsive story-tellers, and the stories they tell are either the stories of their own lives or of those of characters who closely resemble them.
The idea that each individual is composed of a temporal series of distinct selves does not have to mean that the successive selves do not involve a certain continuity. In the thought of both Proust and Beckett the personalities that make up the successive stages of one’s life tend to be only all too similar. Since they are all subject to the human condition, they all share the same limitations and a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again. In the case of Beckett, this view of human nature led him to the development of one of his most important themes, that of cyclical time. The idea that time goes through repetitious patterns is implicit in Proust, but in Beckett it is quite elaborately developed. Watt, leaving Knott’s house, has learned that there is no certain knowledge of reality, but nothing can prevent his ‘for ever falling’ into the same ‘old error,’ the mistake of trying to understand the unintelligible. The Unnamable is the most lucid of Beckett’s characters, the most aware that all attempts to explain reality are futile, but his very lucidity only makes him the more frustrated at his inability to stop trying to devise explanations.
This repetitious or cyclical character of human behaviour helps to explain the great family resemblance among Beckett’s protagonists. In the novels especially, it almost seems that each protagonist is a sort of reincarnation of the ones who appeared in the preceding novels. The idea of reincarnation in the traditional sense of the word is never explicitly advocated, however. The various narrators can be interpreted either as quite separate and distinct or as a series of personalities within a single abiding person; from Beckett’s point of view it would make little difference which interpretation was chosen. Human beings are in states of constant inner flux, but the patterns of flux vary little from person to person. All the patterns are repetitions of the same human compulsions: the