Beckett/Philosophy ed. by Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani

“I am not a philosopher,” Samuel Beckett told an interviewer. What other modern writer has felt pressed to make such a disavowal? Not even T. S. Eliot, who had studied at Harvard to become one. The very depth of the literary imprint of Beckett’s engagement with philosophy, which this rewarding anthology confirms and clarifies, wrested the denial from him.

“Beckett seems the most philosophical of writers in both his ‘early’ and ‘mature’ (postwar) work,” Matthew Feldman says in the book’s introduction (3). No qualification is necessary. Beckett read Schopenhauer in German, Vico in Italian, Geulincx in Latin, and Bergson in French, mailed home from his German sojourn Kants Werke, compiled copious notes from such overviews as Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, wrote his longest poem about Descartes and his shortest story about an axiom of Heraclitus, examined Viennese Sprachskepsis for Joyce, was solicited by Sartre for contributions to Les Temps modernes, noted in his German travel diary his Leibnizian aim to bring “light in the monad,” urged in a letter the aesthetic value of nominalism, wrote a screenplay inspired by Berkeley, and in the opening of The Unnamable ironically echoed the Tractatus interdiction “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”:¹ “I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak.”² This anthology contains accounts of Beckett’s engagements with all but one of these philosophies.

Gertrude Stein recalls Picasso saying that Joyce and Braque were “les incomprehensibles que tout le monde peut comprendre.”³ Beckett is so clear we hardly understand him at all. Scholars have long been concerned to identify Beckett’s philosophical kinships and gauge affinities, while philosophers like Adorno, Cavell, Deleuze, and Badiou have engaged with his work as with that of an intellectual peer.

Some of these have succeeded only at the expense of obscuring the immediacy of the work. However, with the increased availability of archival documents, including the 266 folio pages (recto and verso) of the philosophy notebooks held at Trinity College Dublin, and the painstaking account in Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon’s Samuel Beckett’s Library of his shelves of philosophy, Beckett criticism has been greatly enhanced, and sometimes chastened, by genetic scholarship, as this anthology, like the November 2011 special issue of Modernism/Modernity, attests.

Beckett/Philosophy has almost the character of a Festschrift to its coeditor, for Feldman, author of the indispensable Beckett’s Books, has been a prominent exponent of genetic criticism and “Historicizing Modernism,” as the series he co-edits for Continuum is titled. He is cited and quoted throughout the anthology, to which he contributes three essays, including a painstaking anatomy of the stages of Beckett’s immersion in nominalism.

In an essay also derived from research into the philosophy notebooks, Peter Fifield ascribes Beckett’s preoccupation with “the justice of suffering and death” as much to study of “the oppositional metaphysics of early Greek philosophy” as to “Judeo-Christian and psychoanalytical rationales” (108). David Addyman casts convincing doubt on whether Beckett had read Bergson before writing the seemingly Bergsonian Proust, finding more credible sources in Protagoras and arguing that, after a brief period of absorption in the philosopher, Beckett deviated from Bergson by shifting emphasis from temporality to place.

The dilemma facing those contributing chapters here on the early Greeks, Geulincx, Leibniz, Kant, Berkeley, Johnson, Schopenhauer, and Mauthner is the extensive treatment these instigations have received, sometimes by these very scholars. Thus Erik Tonning cites his own publications thirteen times, making his essay seem more a synopsis of his scholarship than an addition to it. Having already given us exhaustive annotations to Murphy and Watt, Chris Ackerley can but brilliantly reaffirm the inability of their eponymous protagonists to sustain monadic self-sufficiency. Tucker’s essay has by now largely been incorporated into his Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx; he detects parallels between Beckett’s interest in Geulincx and in Kleist’s essay on marionette theatre, which Beckett read over thirty years after reading Geulincx.

More tendentious claims appear in the anthology, as when Emilie Morin contends that, for Beckett, Dr. Johnson was an “anti-canonical philosopher” who anticipates language skepticism, “Heideggerian ontology and Sartrean phenomenology” (258). Charlotta Einarrson’s phenomenological reading finds conceptual abstraction, ambiguity, and unreliability in Beckett’s pellucid “One Evening,” in which the only instability is the inherently provisional nature of narrative itself, about which the story is candid rather than ambivalent.

The archive cannot, of course, secure consensus. Not surprisingly, several contributors come away from it assured of the preeminence of their area of research. Feldman documents how, from Watt on, Beckett is a nominalist (in Beckett and Phenomenology, Feldman called Watt the beginning of Beckett’s “phenomenological turn”), and while P. J. Murphy calls Kant the “decisive vision-changing influence” on the writer (205), for Tonning Schopenhauer is Beckett’s “fundamental” thinker (64).

Each of these views is convincingly documented, and Beckett, as one who frequently drew upon his study of Gestalt theory, might see here not contradictions but illustrations of the psychology of “aspect change.” Perception may restlessly fluctuate where sense data and perceptual norms converge, as when the protagonist of Watt peers quizzically at the circular picture in Knott’s house. An archive is an optimal facility for such convergence rather than a refuge from it.

Whereas P. J. Murphy, steeped in Beckett’s readings in Kant, perceives in Arsene’s revelation of “life off the ladder” in Watt a Kantian riposte to Joyce’s epiphany, a scholar steeped in Beckett’s readings in the psychology of perception would readily perceive here one of the novel’s exemplary applications of change of aspect. Must the archive arbitrate on this matter? This would be at the expense of the instructive vagueness Watt conjures.

Cautioning against a dogmatic empirical methodology that cannot be value-free, Van Hulle, taking counsel from the object of his essay, concludes his excellent account of linguistic skepticism by urging scholars “to keep the methodological conversation open” (237). Yet one conversation regrettably never gets started, although Van Hulle acknowledges its pertinence. As Beckett’s Library confirms, that library contained numerous books by and concerning Wittgenstein, Mauthner’s most influential follower. Like most other studies devoted to Beckett’s philosophical interests, Beckett/Philosophy overlooks one of the very few modern philosophers in whom he is known to have taken an interest.

Also consistent with scholarly norm is inattention to matters of philosophical style. Although Katherine White contributes a fine essay titled “Beckett’s Form of Philosophy,” it is to suggest, like Badiou long since, that Beckett’s aesthetic of failure enacts a philosophy. What then of the actual forms philosophy takes? To give a form to the confusion was Beckett’s reiterated artistic credo, and he was hardly oblivious to its philosophical precedents. The Heraclitean fragment, Empedoclean verse, Socratic elenchus, Kantian disquisition, Berkeleyian colloquy (from whence derives the very title of his “Three Dialogues”), Johnsonian aphorism, Wittgensteinian discrete paragraph, and other philosophical forms may not detain the literary historian, but a cursory glance at his work demonstrates Beckett’s awareness of their possibilities. As Ackerley notes, it was not for his doctrines that Beckett read Leibniz. He declared in a 1933 letter, “Leibniz [is] a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures.”⁴ Even of his fervent study of Schopenhauer he could write in a 1930 letter, “I am not reading philosophy.”⁵

The literary archive can tell us what notes Beckett snatched as he read Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy, Geulincx’s Ethica, Mauthner’s Beiträge, and Wittgenstein’s Schriften, but it cannot of itself afford insight into how these acted upon his imagination and entered a repertoire of forms to be manipulated, burlesqued, adapted. Here scholars may have to show a bit of imagination themselves.

If Feldman is right, such intangibles must be placed under the discipline of Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, whereby the validity of a claim is measured against its availability to refutation. Since, in the absence of evidence of Beckett’s direct reading of Heidegger, a Heideggerian reading cannot in principle be refuted, it cannot really be meaningfully affirmed. By this standard, the value of Beckett’s Schopenhauerian Proust may be almost nugatory, since Proust read Schopenhauer much less avidly than did Beckett. Yet that monograph shows how he imagined the cooperation of philosophy and literature.

It is thus instructive that one of the book’s most valuable chapters, Mireille Bousquet’s essay on art and ethics, does not originate in archival research at all. Bousquet locates ethics not in propositions or exempla but in the character of Beckett’s engagement with his own medium, one grounded on the “impossibility of judgment”: “Beckett explicitly puts forward the process of artistic creation as the invention of value internal and peculiar to the work, forever to be discovered” (304). Ethics and aesthetics are indeed one in Beckett.

“Philosophy is tedious and obscure,” Beckett misquoted Dr. Faustus (“odious and obscure,” rather) in a notebook for inclusion in Murphy. Beckett/Philosophy suggests why this profoundly philosophical writer never used Marlowe’s slur.