Against Reason

‘When I was ill I found the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer’, wrote a 31-year old Samuel Beckett, just off his sickbed: ‘I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered most to me’. (Beckett, Letters vol. I, 550). Commencing even before Beckett’s death in 1989, much has been written on his love affair with the melancholic nineteenth-century philosopher and quasi-quietist, ranging from temperament and aesthetics to eastern spirituality and literary utility (for an excellent overview, see Tonning 2015). It seems this relationship properly began in the summer of 1930 to the ridicule of Beckett’s interwar Parisian friends and continued right up to the final decade of his life. Beckett scholars can now assert this with greater empirical precision given the publication of four volumes of correspondence by Cambridge University Press, in addition to the traces left in Beckett’s ‘grey canon’ of archives, including the interwar commonplace book, the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ (Pilling), as well as his extensive summary of the history of western philosophy. In the latter ‘Philosophy Notes’, also composed in the 1930s, Beckett referred to Schopenhauer in familiar, even intimate, terms, describing ‘dear Arthur’ as a philosopher who held that ‘it must be a balls aching world’ (Feldman, 2006: 50).

This intertextual connection continued into the appendices of Watt, completed in 1945, and was rekindled in the final decade of his life in the so-called ‘Sottisier Notebook’. From the latter, Beckett recorded phrases from the second volume of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, seeming to reinforce a deep affinity with the philosopher’s oeuvre: ‘The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other’; and again, ‘Life penal colony’ (cited in Pothast, 15). Since Beckett’s German was fluent enough by the mid-1930s to purchase Schopenhauer’s six volume Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1923; see Nixon and van Hulle, 283)—which he kept in his library for the remainder of his life—these Anglophone translations are helpfully provided by the only other book-length study of Beckett’s relationship to Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It.

Reading Schopenhauer’s key texts against works from the 1931 essay “Proust” to the one-act play Endgame, Pothast’s labours have been of great service to Beckett studies and are a key point of departure for the present volume. Pothast shows, for instance, that Beckett’s eighth decade saw him returning to themes taken up much earlier, as in the Schopenhauer-suffused “Proust” essay, which concludes that there is an ‘“invisible reality” that damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum and reveals the meaning of the word: “defunctus”’. For Pothast, this is Beckett’s ‘metaphysical vision’—one ever impeded by the ‘veil of Maya’ (Nixon 2011, 170)—a phrase which clearly derives from Parerga and Paralipomena, volume II (300; cited in Pothast, 123). That Beckett transcribes this phrase in the ‘Sottisier Notebook’ fully a half-century after concluding with it in “Proust” is surely testament to this lifelong engagement with Schopenhauerian ideas: ‘Life is a pensum to be worked off; in this sense defunctus is a fine expression’ (cited in Pothast, 123).

And yet, for its genuine insights Pothast does not delve deeply into the majority of Schopenhauer’s works, focusing largely on the canonical World as Will and Representation that Beckett knew so well. It is here that Dr Anthony Barron’s study is of inestimable value. Bringing a philosopher’s eye to the whole of Schopenhauer’s philosophical output and a Beckett specialist’s nose for literary nuance, this interdisciplinary work is at once overdue and comprehensive. Rather than the ‘metaphysical’, Barron’s analysis is grounded in the philosophically material, aesthetic themes of which Beckett makes such creative use. Looking closely at Beckett’s works preceding his ‘frenzy of writing’ after 1945, Against Reason incisively focusses on the dilemmas of expression that so vexed these two writers.

Here, facile notions of philosophical influence are rejected in favour of shared preoccupations and artistic perspectives, whereby the Nobel Laureate’s ‘critical and creative practices cohere with Schopenhauer’s own meticulously developed views about the means by which art can engage with conceptual thought’ (3). These overlapping views extend to non-rationality; art as a ‘quieter’ of the will; issues of (pessimistic) temperament, as well as other ‘affinities’ (127) relating to human suffering and misery, individual perception, and, above all, the ‘shape of ideas’ so valorised by both writers. A strong and consistent case is made for Schopenhauer’s artistic importance to ‘Beckett [who], as a literary artist, could use Schopenhauer’s inherently systematic and discursive writings’ (8). Barron’s critical engagement with the extant literature on this subject is up-to-date, incisive and fair-minded. Yet at the same time, Against Reason palpably goes beyond these approaches in constructing a novel, deeply learned reading.

Accordingly, this is a serious and original contribution to Beckett studies, and to modernist uses of philosophy more broadly. Vitally, and unusually for a literary-critical monograph, Barron is well-versed in both Kant’s and post-Kantian philosophy, from which Schopenhauer’s philosophy explicitly departs, casting the knowable in terms of individual perception and Will. In turn, this makes for a rich, contextualised approach to Schopenhauer’s ideas and their decades-long development. Various thematic strands are insightfully analysed across this study, with a particularly able discussion of Schopenhauer’s hostility to traditional forms of reasoning, no less than his often-obscured sense of the inadequacies of language (301).

These are profound insights, particularly where Barron, following Pothast (248), demonstrates that this ‘alogical’ stance was not present in other candidates for the well-worn cliché of “Beckett’s favourite philosopher”. Barron accordingly makes a convincing case that Schopenhauer, from very early on, underwrote a great deal of Beckett’s unfurling resistance to reason as well as some of his artistic alternatives—whether against moralising, or on the overcoming of the will (as in Murphy’s celebrated chess game with Mr Endon). As this suggests, Barron’s is a monograph aptly focussing upon Beckett’s art and its intellectual development in light of, rather than as a proxy for, Schopenhauer’s thinking.

In terms of Beckett’s writing—rightly the focus throughout Against Reason—several aspects of this study provide ground-breaking findings. Amongst the most significant are chapters 2 and 3 here, covering Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett’s first extended works of fiction. While a scholarly consensus rightly holds that the 1931 “Proust” was refracted through Beckett’s contemporaneous reading of Schopenhauer, this is very rarely applied to other works from the early 1930s. Barron’s work in this respect is truly eye-opening: his approach to Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks makes a powerful case for the heavy, if characteristically obscured, presence of Schopenhauer. That Beckett’s views ‘cohere’ (85) with Schopenhauer’s approach to art and music is then carried forward into Murphy and Watt in the ensuing chapters (4 and 5), with the latter text—arguably Beckett’s pivotal novel, written during the bloody vicissitudes of the Second World War—further revealing substantial affinities with Schopenhauerian ideas: from aporias of rationalism suffusing the novel to the aforementioned quotation in the appendix to Watt: ‘zitto! zitto! dass nur das Publikum nichts merke! [silence! silence! so long as the public notices nothing!]'. As with that novel’s concluding passage, ‘no symbols where none intended’ indeed. (Watt, 217, 223). An extended conclusion then sets these findings against Beckett’s ‘mature’ prose, which is both compelling and throws the gauntlet for a new generation of Beckett researchers to take up.

Finally, both writers’ rejection of conceptual art, underpinning much of the discussion here, will doubtless find an interested readership in Beckett studies, and surely also beyond it. In reiterating that Beckett was an artist rather than a philosopher—and thus transformed ideas and experience into his revolutionary art—, Against Reason is a welcome, substantial addition to scholarship on Beckett’s relation to Schopenhauer. Put simply, this monograph may well represent the most detailed and critical pairing of ‘pseudocouples’ yet undertaken in Beckett studies. As the reader delves in, however, a Schopenhauerian injunction may well be of use in navigating the artistic-philosophical terrain mapped, albeit in different ways, by these poets of pessimism, who strongly felt, together, that ‘life is an expiation of the crime of having been born’ (Schopenhauer, ‘On the Suffering of the World’, 50). Perhaps surprisingly, this maxim is followed by an empathetic Schopenhauerian ‘lesson’ that Barron has taken to heart, as did Samuel Beckett before him:

… one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not “monsieur”, sir, but fellow suffer, “compagnon de misères”. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us need and which each of us therefore owes.

Matthew Feldman

July 2017

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel, The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: 1929-1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck, with George Craig and Dan Gunn (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge:2009)

________, “Proust”, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (Calder, London: 1969)

________, Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (Faber and Faber, London: 2009)

Feldman, Matthew, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ (Continuum, London: 2008)

Nixon, Mark, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936-1937 (Bloomsbury, London: 2011)

Nixon, Mark, and Dirk van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2013)

Pilling, John, ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy’, in The Ideal Core of the Onion, eds. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading, Beckett International Foundation: 1992)

Pothast, Ulrich, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It (Peter Lang, New York: 2008)

Tonning, Erik, ‘“I am not reading philosophy”: Beckett and Schopenhauer’, reprinted in Beckett/Philosophy, eds. Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani (Ibidem, Stuttgart: 2015)

Schopenhauer, Arthur, ‘On the Suffering of the World’, in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, London: 1976)

________, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, volume II, ed. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1974)

Abbreviations

Works by Samuel Beckett

(CDW) The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).

(CIWS) Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(CPS) The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, eds. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).

(CSP) Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995).

(D) Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984).

(DFW) Dream of Fair to Middling Women, eds. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London: Calder Publications, 1993).

(DN) Beckett’s Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999).

(EB) Echo’s Bones, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber and Faber, 2014).

(ECEF) The Expelled / The Calmative / The End & First Love, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(El) Eleutheria, tr. Barbara Wright (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

(HII) How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(LI) The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

(LII) The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dann Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

(M) Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(MC) Mercier and Camier, ed. Seán Kennedy (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(MD) Malone Dies, ed. Peter Boxall (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(Mo) Molloy, ed. Shane Weller (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

(MP) More Pricks Than Kicks, ed. Cassandra Nelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(PTD) Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965).

(TNO) Texts for Nothing and Other Short Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(U) The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

(W) Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).

Works by Arthur Schopenhauer

(BM) On the Basis of Morality, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995).

(EFR) Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root, tr. F. C. White (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997).

(FR) On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Illinois: Open Court, 1974).

(FW) Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

(GB) Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987).

(MRI) Manuscript Remains, Volume I, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1988).

(MRII) Manuscript Remains, Volume II, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1988).

(MRIII) Manuscript Remains, Volume III, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1989).

(MRIV) Manuscript Remains, Volume IV, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1990).

(PPI) Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(PPII) Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, tr. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).