Beckett's Books (Continuum Literary Studies)

Beckett’s Books

CONTINUUM LITERARY STUDIES SERIES Also available in the series: Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Joyce and Company by David Pierce Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips Forthcoming titles: English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips

Beckett’s Books A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’

MATTHEW FELDMAN

Continuum The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

80 Maiden Lane Suite 704 New York NY 10038

© Matthew Feldman 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 0–8264–9059–X (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record, for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents Foreword by Shane Weller Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction

viii xii 1

1

Theorizing ‘Misology’: Approaching Beckettian Paradoxes Beckett’s ‘poss’ and the dog’s dinner Beckett’s ‘non-Euclidean logic’

6 8 13

2

Beckett’s ‘poss’: An Introduction to the ‘Interwar Notes’ A bad ‘university professor’ and an excessively ‘good poet’ ‘The end is in the beginning and yet we go on’

21 21 32

3

‘Fallor, Ergo Sum!’: The ‘Philosophy Notes’ René Descartes and Samuel Beckett Beckett and the Presocratics From a syzygy to Beckettian ‘ataraxy’

39 41 57 65

4

‘TEMPORARILY SANE’: The ‘Psychology Notes’ Wilfred Bion and Samuel Beckett Spanish dungeons and insightful apes Insufficient reason

78 84 95 108

5

‘Myself I Cannot Save’: Geulincx, Mauthner, Beckett Effing the ineffable Arnold Geulincx and Samuel Beckett Fritz Mauthner and Samuel Beckett

116 118 131 137

Conclusion Notes Bibliography

147 153 167

Index

175

For my father

Foreword One of the abiding concerns of Beckett Studies since the late 1950s, when his works began to attract sustained critical attention, has been the identification of the philosophical affiliations of this seemingly most philosophically inclined of literary figures, a writer whose works explore in an unremittingly interrogative spirit the nature of cognition, perception, consciousness, memory, temporality, being and non-being, and whose entire oeuvre might even be seen as an attempt to respond adequately to the three questions with which The Unnamable (1953) opens: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ From very early on, however, two general assumptions came to dominate analyses of the philosophical heritage in Samuel Beckett’s work. These assumptions were, first, that Beckett possessed an almost unparalleled first-hand knowledge of many of the major figures in Western philosophy, from the Presocratics to G. W. H. Hegel, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Martin Heidegger to the French existentialists; and, second, that, for all his familiarity with these various philosophical traditions, Beckett’s was essentially a Cartesian vision. Now, among the scholars who have sought to challenge or at the very least to nuance these and many other assumptions about Beckett, one of the greatest debts is undoubtedly owed to James Knowlson, whose 1996 biography has had a scarcely calculable impact on Beckett Studies, not least through his identification of many of the works on which Beckett took notes during the 1930s, arguably the most formative, if also the most difficult, period in Beckett’s life and one during which he was far from clear about the direction – if any – of his own work. Matthew Feldman is one of a new generation of Beckett scholars to have set themselves the task of pursuing those lines of enquiry indicated by Knowlson in particular. Making use of the existing Beckett archive and, above all, of important archival material that has only very recently been made available to scholars, Feldman proceeds to challenge with considerable force both of the above-mentioned assumptions regarding Beckett’s relation to philosophy. That Beckett’s substantial transcriptions from works of philosophy and psychology in the 1930s were not always those of an academic scholar, that he often relied upon synoptic texts, and only in very specific, and indeed crucial, instances – above all, with regard to the Belgian Occasionalist Arnold Geulincx and the Austrian language philosopher Fritz Mauthner – then proceeded to acquaint himself with the originals, are facts

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of considerable importance to our understanding of how Beckett worked in the early years, when not only inspiration but also the means of publication were far from assured. In addition to identifying many of the sources from which Beckett’s notes were taken, Feldman analyses the manner in which both the nature and the purpose of Beckett’s note-taking changed during the 1930s, and connects this with the development of his art during that decisive, if painful, decade, as he sought to take his distance from Joyce and endow his works with what, in a letter to his publisher Charles Prentice, he terms his own ‘odours’. The Beckett who emerges from Feldman’s analysis is a figure who bears very little resemblance to either Beckett the Cartesian or Beckett the philosopher manqué. Beyond challenging some of the assumptions that have shaped so many attempts to analyse the place of the philosophical heritage in Beckett’s oeuvre, Feldman also challenges many of the theoretical assumptions that have dominated Beckett Studies, not just in the early postwar years, when Beckett was forced into an uncomfortable alliance with French existentialism, but also in the wake of the poststructuralist revolution, when he quickly came to be seen as the great anticipator of deconstruction, a writer whose works enact the very procedures subsequently adumbrated in a more strictly philosophical form by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, among others. The poststructuralist approach to Beckett has undoubtedly produced some of the most innovative recent readings of his work, not least Deleuze’s remarkable late essay on Beckett’s television plays. And there is certainly much in Beckett that does anticipate deconstruction, above all his sense of the aporetic, which in his works comes to take the form of both the obligation and the impossibility of expression. And yet, as Feldman reminds us, the risks entailed by attempts to think of Beckett in relation to poststructuralism are considerable, for what tends to get lost, and even on occasion simply dismissed without the slightest reservation, is not only the precise, if complicated, historical sequence within which Beckett is situated, but above all, the empirical history of his own readings in philosophy, a history the uncovering and comprehension of which make considerable scholarly and interpretative demands. If Beckett’s is indeed an aporetic art, which is to say an art that constitutes at once the experience and the enactment of a series of aporias, then, Feldman argues, that art is to be understood first and foremost in relation to those texts with which Beckett himself was familiar and which found their often distorted way into his own works. If one wishes to contribute to the understanding of Beckett’s oeuvre, then it is not enough to detect more or less striking resemblances between his works and those of a range of philosophers, theologians and literary figures picked to suit a particular commentator’s intuitions or predilections. It is certainly not enough to point out resemblances between the rhetoric of Beckett’s texts and the rhetoric of Derrida and others, since this will tell us less than we might imagine about Beckett, if rather more about Derrida and those writing in Beckett’s wake. Only once

Foreword

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the empirical groundwork has been laid, only once one has identified Beckett’s own concrete sources and analysed the precise manner in which those sources are incorporated into his works, can the theoretical questions regarding Beckett’s relation to the postmodern begin to acquire any real force. First and foremost, it is to the labour of this empirical groundwork that Feldman commits himself in this book, as that which must precede and indeed make possible the theoretical moment. This is not to say, however, that Feldman is simply content to engage in source-hunting, or that he rejects out of hand any theoretically informed approach to the literary. Far from it. Unlike some of those commentators with whom he takes issue in this book, Feldman does not underestimate the problematical nature of influence, and, as he makes clear, his aim is not to supplant the Cartesian Beckett with a Democritean, Schopenhauerian or Mauthnerian Beckett, but rather to propose a new way of thinking of Beckett’s relation to the philosophical. By arguing for a much more general indebtedness to the philosophical heritage than has hitherto been envisaged or demonstrated, Feldman makes the intertextual relation in Beckett something other than either a tidy one-to-one relation between two texts or two writers, or a purely anonymous textuality of the kind proposed by Roland Barthes in his influential 1971 essay, ‘From Work to Text’. While acknowledging Beckett’s early claim that ‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications’, and committing himself to saving that ‘perhaps’ which, he argues, is negated by both the existentialist and the poststructuralist versions of Beckett, Feldman never takes this sense of the danger of identifications as a licence for an interpretative free-for-all, or as proof that any identification of Beckett’s sources is either pointless or impossible. Indeed, one of the convictions underlying Feldman’s work is that literary interpretation has a scholarly responsibility. If a specific claim about Beckett’s works, his sources, his affiliations and his place within the intertextual space simply cannot be subject to falsification, then, for Feldman, it is illegitimate. One might imagine that literary criticism pursued in accordance with such a principle of responsibility would be pedestrian at best, a matter of what Beckett, in his 1929 essay ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’, disparagingly terms ‘book-keeping’. Feldman’s work demonstrates that nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, some of the interpretative risks he takes in this book are considerable, and this in itself is proof that a commitment to the empirical and to responsible literary scholarship does not preclude an adventurousness that is itself perhaps the most effective provocation to other scholars to enter into the task of trying to ‘make sense’ of Beckett. For all its commitment to the empirical and the falsifiable, then, Feldman’s work does not pretend to have the last word on Beckett’s relation to philosophy, even though it exhibits a wealth of essential new material, an impressive grasp of the hermeneutic stakes, and a series of very persuasive readings.

x

Foreword

Rather than seeking to put an end to the debates surrounding Beckett’s literary, philosophical and psychological debts, Feldman’s work constitutes nothing less than a call to others in the ever-expanding field of Beckett Studies to take up the challenge of reading Beckett responsibly, which is to say with a sense of the difference between ungrounded speculation and wellevidenced argumentation, and, at the same time, with an acute sense of that problematization of the very act of reading which Beckett’s own works might be said not simply to thematize but to enact. Shane Weller Canterbury, September 2005

Preface and Acknowledgements The following volume contains much within it owed to many. In the first instance, Damned to Fame, Jim Knowlson’s 1996 biography of Samuel Beckett, not only portended a massive sea change in Beckett Studies generally, but made studies like this one possible in the first place. Knowlson deposited most of the archival sources surveyed here in the Beckett International Foundation archives, materials that will be central to the explorations that ensue. For all this I am deeply grateful to Knowlson; moreover, his unparalleled text contains such a treasure of information that Beckett’s Books essentially adds analytical breadth and depth to Beckett’s artistic evolution prior to 1945, one so aptly captured in Damned to Fame: The image of Beckett undergoing a conversion like St Paul on the road to Damascus can too easily distort our view of his development as a writer. As critics have shown, some of his late themes were already deeply embedded in his earlier work, particularly his interest in Democritus’ idea that ‘nothing is more real than nothing’ and the quietistic impulse within his work. But the notion of ‘THE Revelation’ also obscures several earlier and less sudden or dramatic revelations: the certainty that he had to dissociate himself at an early stage from Joyce’s influence; the reassessment necessitated by almost two years of psychotherapy; the effect on him of being stabbed and in danger of dying; the freedom to discover himself as a writer that living away from Ireland, freed from his mother’s sternly critical influence, offered him; the impact of the war years, when his friends where arrested and he was forced to escape and live in hiding; and the greater objectivity that working with others at St-Lô allowed him to assume with respect to his own inner self. The ground had been well prepared.1

Colleagues of Knowlson’s have also been as kind as he has with their time and insights: John Pilling, Julian Garforth, Verity Andrews and a number of others at the Reading University Library have my gracious appreciation. Especially worthy of note here is Mark Nixon, who has offered support, shared materials and has been a constant stimulus both as outstanding scholar and colleague. A number of others have also helped to shape this monograph, and their mere names do little justice to the amount of thanks due to each: Shane Weller, Dirk van Hulle, Steven Connor, Julie Campbell, Paul Jackson, Catherine Morley, Erik and Judith Tonning, Marius Turda,

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Robert Mallett, as well as the Oxford Brookes University and Bodleian Upper Reserve library staffs. Beckett’s Books emerged from my 2004 doctorate ‘Sourcing “Aporetics”: An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Development of Samuel Beckett’s writing’ – that mouthful would have been impossible without Brookes’ University Studentship Award, or without the support of the English and History Departments therein. More narrowly, a range of European sources used by Beckett and quoted in English here were forged by the professionalism and excellent translations of Detlef Mühlberger (German), Roger Griffin (German), Anna Castriota (Latin) and Steven Matthews (French). The latter, my supervisor throughout, has contributed far more than French to this text, and far more than mere supervision to the entire project: I am deeply thankful to my mentor and friend. The aforementioned doctorate itself contains five appendices with large portions of those ‘Interwar Notes’ cited throughout this volume: included are roughly 150 pages of Beckett’s notes on – in particular – philosophy and psychology, as well as original material translated into English. For considerations of brevity these appendices have been excluded here, and Anna Sandeman, Kate Reeves, Anya Wilson, Rebecca Simmonds, Joanna Taylor and the excellent team at Continuum Books are doubtless right to find that its unwieldy nature is better served in the dusty recesses of the Brookes and Reading libraries. By way of denoting Beckett’s materials termed here ‘Interwar Notes’, archive numbers are included in the main body of the text; all other references are found in short notes, each corresponding to full details given in the bibliography. Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 appeared in recent issues of The Journal of Beckett Studies (hereafter JOBS ) and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (SBT/A ), and I am grateful for their editorial counsel and willingness to publish my earlier work. The Christoffel Press kindly allowed me to quote passages from Martin Wilson’s translation of Arnold Geulincx’s Metaphysics, for which they have my thanks. Finally, this text would really have been impossible without assistance from Edward Beckett and the Beckett Estate: in the granting of permissions, answering of questions and acting as constant support to scholars enquiring into Samuel Beckett’s literature. That said, none of those acknowledged share in any mistakes or omissions arising from Beckett’s Books; these are solely my responsibility.

Introduction The time is not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, any more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon and stars of the mind, the whole mind.1 ‘Negation is no more possible than affirmation,’ Samuel Beckett (1906–89) once shrugged in conversation with Charles Juliet. ‘It is absurd to say that something is absurd. That is still a value judgement. It is impossible to protest, and equally impossible to assent. You have to work in an area where there are no possible pronouns, or solutions, or reactions, or standpoints . . . That’s what makes it so diabolically difficult.’2 Similar difficulties have long extended to criticism on Beckett. The conflicting demands of interpretative clarity and Beckett’s unique writing – much of it without traditional literary foundations like plot, character, setting and so on – have to a great extent inspired a library of scholarship crammed together under the heading ‘Beckett Studies’. By way of contribution, Beckett’s Books yokes important insights from these shelves to archival documents first composed by Beckett during the interwar period. My aim, in (hopefully) remaining faithful to Beckett, has been twofold: to emphatically affirm the importance of these extant materials in the evolution of Beckett’s artistic approach, and to quietly negate overarching readings of Beckett that attempt to say what he (or ‘it’) actually ‘means’. A working method also insistently affirmed throughout assumes the importance of biographical facts and empirical information gathered around Beckett’s artistic development during the 1930s. Academic training, extreme personal experiences (such as Beckett’s near-fatal stabbing in Paris in January 1938) and an increasingly radical view of art all anticipated – and to varying degrees clearly underwrote – Beckett’s mature writings and less frequent public discussions (as with Juliet above). As Beckett said of himself, ‘I became a writer, because all else failed’.3 Irrespective of the accuracy of this remark, much of what Beckett was attempting at this time of ‘failure’ was, in turn, garnered from voracious reading and exhaustive note-taking during the interwar years. A theoretical approach to these ‘Interwar Notes’ is advanced in Chapter 1. As will become clear, the broad term ‘Interwar Notes’ embraces

2

Beckett’s Books

everything from the hugely illuminating ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ to the seemingly prosaic ‘German Workbook’. Their shared features are underpinned biographically, empirically and artistically by an exploration of Beckett’s own working methods, shorthanded as ‘non-Euclidean logic’; that is, a particular approach to art (and indeed much else) championing an alternative logic and modus operandi to the more rational, ‘Euclidean’, approaches to Western conceptions of the world. The term ‘non-Euclidean logic’, it should be stressed, attempts to capture Beckett’s artistic approach and development during the interwar period through his contemporaneous notes. This approach to Beckett’s own methodology does not seek to summarily ‘explain’ the literature of this most opaque of modern authors; but instead, to enquire into some of the ways that art turned out as it did, and why. Chapter 2 offers an overview of some characteristics shared by the ‘Interwar Notes’, in addition to pointing up their relevance to Beckett’s life and work. In surveying the massive collection of archival material, new evidence on this decisive period for Beckett features prominently, as well as a substantial amount of historical contextualization of these sources as a whole. The following three chapters further expound upon these themes, and delineate those materials invariably consuming the greatest amount of Beckett’s time in the construction of his notes. First, the more than 500 typed and handwritten sheets comprising the ‘Philosophy Notes’ are evaluated in Chapter 3 against the backdrop of longstanding Cartesian readings in Beckett Studies. Here, the focus is firmly upon the importance of empirical scholarship in best addressing those philosophical influences understood to be decisive in Beckett’s early development. In short, René Descartes’ shadow has been cast across Beckett Studies far too emphatically and for far too long: a corrective is applied here through the location of more general, and more widespread, philosophical debts comprising Beckett’s early development. Chapter 4 makes much the same case through the ‘Psychology Notes’, a corpus of some 20,000 words of typewritten notes taken by Beckett from nine psychological texts. Like the new perspective offered on Beckett’s relationship with philosophy in Chapter 3, this chapter reconsiders Beckett’s larger relationship with psychology; in this case, through an extensive biographical discussion of Beckett’s two years of psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion (1897–1979). Chapter 5 further underpins Beckett’s literary explorations of ignorance and ineffability through, paradoxically, learned books. By locating major sources of inspiration in the transcriptions of Arnold Geulincx (1624–69) and Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923), this chapter locates the importance of these figures in Beckett’s artistic and intellectual development to a far greater degree than previously acknowledged. Altogether, these three chapters reveal a different side of Beckett than has been generally explored: studious and meticulous; self-directed and curious about various currents of thought; and, at the same time, willing and able to turn these intellectual systems upon themselves for artistic reasons.

Introduction

3

But first a caution: the very novelty of Beckett’s literature has simultaneously raised the problem of reading Beckett: how is it possible to make a sensible assertion about something attempting to be ‘inexpressive’? One cannot rightly say that ineffability expresses meaning, but neither can one say that it does not express some meaning. However radical Beckett’s project is, the very act of committing words to paper, of not leaving a blank page, is still a form of communication. When speaking of a new medium not submitting to the ‘ultimate penury’ of an art detached from its occasion, Beckett asserted revealingly to his friend, the art critic Georges Duthuit, in their 1949 ‘Three Dialogues’: I know that all that is required now, in order to bring even this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion, is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, new term of relation, and of the act which unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation.4

Acceptance of failure, submission to obligation, expressing the inexpressible; these are the working methods Samuel Beckett presents to his readers, not in the interests of offering a doctrine, or in order to make the inexplicable comprehensible, but precisely to use his art to show that consciousness can only take blurred snapshots of memory and experience. Faced with Beckett’s academic pedigree and revolutionary artistic ideas, scholars are thus on notice in attempting systematic readings of his literature; for the problems encountered offer fundamental challenges to sense-making, as announced in the pivotal novel Watt: ‘But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend? These are delicate questions.’5 In response, the perspective here is presented in the following terms: it is inherently preferable to theorize from a position of empirical accuracy. Theorizing is intrinsic to scholarship; theorizing without empirical substance is not. In seeking to best circumvent the latter, Beckett’s Books focuses on the circumstances impacting upon Beckett during the late 1920s and 1930s – in the widest sense – in the construction of his notes, correspondence and literature. Analysis of Beckett’s writings will therefore take the form of a wide-ranging scrutiny of the interwar period in light of three vital considerations: first, the period from Beckett’s 1920s essays through to his transcriptions of Mauthner a decade later (covering, especially, 1928–38) provides far and away the largest body of extant, unpublished and heretofore undervalued writings. If empirical accuracy obtains as a worthy aim, a veritable treasure trove of journals, notebooks, transcriptions and letters is now available in the various Beckett archives. A second approach here explores the relationship between these archival deposits and Beckett’s life and writings at this time. In doing so, the intimacy between Beckett’s public and private writings becomes immediately evident. Beckett’s literature, and to a lesser extent, journalism

4

Beckett’s Books

and correspondence, reflects the intense reading undertaken during this period: again and again, a process of filtering knowledge into writing is detectable; here obscurely, there overtly. And third, it is biographically apparent that this period immediately preceded, and in many ways prepared, Beckett’s breakthrough in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As such, evidence surveyed here will locate some notable changes in Beckett’s literature, while also factually underpinning existing scholarship that finds erudition to be a crucial – if characteristically obscured – force in his art, one acting as a catalyst for artistic change as well. As an exemplar of perspectives guiding the ensuing chapters, a brief look at Beckett’s 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape, is instructive. As with his oeuvre as a whole, interpretative residua – from memories refracted through Krapp’s old tape recordings to the inclusion of Beckett’s own past – are firmly located outside the confines of the text. However, with James Knowlson’s indispensable biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, and Beckett’s Theatrical Notebook for the play to hand, veiled allusions within Krapp’s Last Tape become visible. An investigation of Beckett’s notebook reveals that lighting is essential: the 1969 direction instructs that ‘Explicit integration light dark’ is intended to occur in over half the 27 items listed as contents in the authorized edition. Note that Krapp decrees physical (ethical) incompatibility of light (spiritual) and dark (sensual) only when he intuits possibility of their reconciliation intellectually as rational-irrational. He turns from fact of anti-mind alien to mind to thought of anti-mind constituent of mind. He is thus ethically correct (signaculum sinus) through intellectual transgression, the duty of reason being not to join but to separate (deliverance of imprisoned light). For this sin he is punished as shown by the aeons.6

In this handwritten page, Beckett frames this fusion in terms of the title ‘Mani’ (Manichaeus), initiator of a sect of heretical Christians who believed the malevolence of this world could be understood by personal authenticity, astride esoteric insight into the meta/physical battle of Good and Evil waged amongst deities. Undoubtedly, the oppositions between light–dark, mind– body, rational–irrational were clearly important both to the Manicheans and to Beckett. But the explicit integration of such opposites in Krapp is nowhere mentioned in the play itself. Unlike the unconcealed erudition in writings preceding the eponymous hero’s first appearance in the 1946 Eleutheria, a dozen years later Krapp’s Last Tape employs a hidden philosophical– theological framing device to structure most of the play. Krapp’s view of ‘everything on this old muckball’ is thus steeped in Gnosticism, notwithstanding the playwright’s meticulous construction of the play as selfcontained and non-referential, one decontextualized and virtually bereft of allusion outside the stage and props. In revealing the context and personal

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elements (such as Beckett’s visits to Kassel, Germany, and the more specific instances there reading Effie Briest)7 of this universalized play, scholarship demonstrably increases our understanding of Krapp’s Last Tape. And it certainly appears proximate to Beckett’s own, if only rarely explicated, views: ‘If life and death did not both present themselves to us, there would be no inscrutability. If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable.’8 This brings up the final consideration pursued by Beckett’s Books. The readings, transcriptions and, in an important sense, internalization of many of the literary and especially philosophical texts Beckett noted in the years prior to the Second World War may therefore be viewed as an intellectual axis around which he redefined his own aims and honed the artistic methodology employed in the postwar works to such acclaim. A guiding paradox in this book takes into account the garnering of knowledge, prior to its divestment in an ‘anti-encyclopedic’ process, culminating in fully 140 instances of ‘I don’t know’ in The Trilogy of postwar novels: in exploring impotence and ignorance, Beckett’s literature was underpinned by wide-ranging erudition.9 As usual, Beckett has phrased this assessment most effectively in exclaiming, ‘You’ve got to get back to ignorance’. Taking him seriously and literally, I follow Anne Atik’s judgement of Beckett’s views on knowledge: ‘He feared erudition swamping the authenticity of a work, and constantly warned against that danger for other artists, having had to escape from it himself.’10 Decades earlier, such non-Euclidean logic was perfectly expressed in terms of language and silence in a personal counterpart to the academic ‘Interwar Notes’, the ‘German Diaries’, which frequently anticipate themes in Beckett’s postwar texts: ‘Even to listen is an effort, and to speak ausgeschlossen [ruled out]. Anyway the chatter is a solid block, not a chink, interruption proof. Curse this everlasting limpness and melancholy. How absurd, the struggle to learn to be silent in another language!’11 In attempting a return to ignorance by virtue of divesting learnedness, Beckett betrays an awareness of the paradox at hand; indeed, he perhaps indicates a way out. For ignorance assumes ‘ignorance of something’; that is, some knowledge of the very thing having ‘unknown’ as a property. Both the word and idea ‘ignorance’ simply cannot be self-contained: how such ignorance? ignorance of what? Seeking knowledge implies ignorance, just as seeking ignorance implies knowledge. Exploration of the latter marks Beckett’s later art. But the former necessarily precedes it. And by speaking of ignorance as a quest rather than a state of being, Beckett offers a first hint of his method; ours will centre upon his accumulation of knowledge – oftentimes itself pointing toward ineffability (as both linguistic proposition and individual experience) – as indispensable in precipitating that famous artistic quest for ignorance.

1 Theorizing ‘Misology’: Approaching Beckettian Paradoxes . . . a sufficient quantity of food was prepared and cooked to carry Mr. Knott through the week . . . these things, and many others too numerous to mention, were well mixed together in the famous pot and boiled for four hours, until the consistence of a mess, or poss, was obtained, and all the good things to eat, and all the good things to drink, and all the good things to take for the good of the health were inextricably mingled and transformed into a single good thing that was neither food, nor drink, nor physic, but quite a new good thing . . .1 In a spirit similar to that leading Samuel Beckett to characterize his own work with an ever-indeterminate ‘perhaps’ and to suggest that the (inadvisable) study of his work should begin with an awareness of the cul-de-sac of reason, we will here endeavour to alter, amplify, apply and amalgamate the epigraph into what will hopefully be, critically, ‘quite a new good thing’. This ‘thing’ depends, in the first instance, upon continuing provisions for (and in) Beckett’s writing, including exhaustive materials on Democritus and Arnold Geulincx, the two philosophers explicitly cited as departures for studying his art.2 In fine, Beckett’s own ‘poss’ is a mix of substantial intellectual debts owed to particular books, figures and systems from within European culture. In turn, these assisted him in a mode of expression that is at once inspirational and futile, philosophical and artistic: systematic at times within certain limits; and then again, non-systematic in response to those limits. Surveying these archival deposits means sifting through a jumble of notebooks and typewritten sheets from artistic, literary, historical, psychological and (of greatest volume, and arguably greatest importance) philosophical readings. These will be used throughout as an empirical platform to underpin a number of theoretical considerations. For the ‘Interwar Notes’ brilliantly demonstrate attention to the narcotic of systematic thought – linear perception as regards phenomena, linear progression as regards literary and philosophical developments, and the consequent ramifications for truth and the utility of knowledge – revealing a ten-year immersion in just such modes of thinking that, for Beckett, both made clear the hallucinogenic nature of rationalism and set the preconditions for what Knowlson has called a ‘frenzy

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7

of writing’ after the Second World War. The primary interest here is with the former travails – especially during the 1930s – and their reflection in the ‘Interwar Notes’, argued throughout as essential props ‘setting the stage’ for the creative breakthroughs of the latter period. Such sentiments are in step with James Knowlson’s exhaustive biography on the subject: Beckett always saw himself as belonging to and drawing from a wide European literary tradition . . . Although he was to turn away from the quest for more knowledge to the exploration of impotence and ignorance after the war years, he remained one of the most erudite writers of the twentieth century, with a range of easy reference that extended widely over many literatures.3

In short, our analysis throughout finds that Beckett’s notes were immediately integral to the construction of his writings during the 1920s and 1930s; were reflective of his temperament and tribulations at that time; and remained highly significant thereafter (as direct references specifically, and inspirations generally) in the development of his art. That a period of germination occurred in the years before Beckett’s fame will be suggested in ensuing chapters, astride numerous examples of the transformative contribution made by Beckett’s notes to his literary output. One crucial reservoir encountered again and again is the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’: an incredible mosaic of notes toward Murphy (‘Murphy “I am not of the big world, I am of the little world: Ubi nihil valeo, ibi nihil velo” (I quote from memory) and inversely’); quotations; facts, figures and phrases – like that from our title, ‘misology = hatred of theories’; and Beckett’s occasional aphorisms, such as ‘unselfish because he had no self – he had no self to be selfish about’, or ‘A lifetime hard’ (Reading University Library, hereafter RUL, MS 3000, pp. 9, 72, 36, 35). Beckett’s ‘commonplace book’ was his companion for much of the 1930s, testifies to his erudite interests, and undoubtedly acted as sometime creative spark for his literature. Indeed, much of Beckett’s reading and some of his creative jottings in the 1930s are recorded in this notebook. For indicating many of Beckett’s interests at this time alone, the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ is priceless. Moreover, the way in which some of his personal readings and writings are transformed, recycled and sometimes concealed, is evident here as well.4 In characterizing this process, Porter Abbott’s understanding of ‘autographing’ – a decanting from Beckett’s experiences into his literature – is an indispensable aid in viewing Beckett’s incorporation of his ‘Interwar Notes’ in terms of the practice of ‘autography’.5 Although Abbott is largely concerned with details from Beckett’s life, examples of ‘self writing’ abound during the interwar years. A bare example must suffice for now: whereas the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ records in the mid-1930s ‘Leibniz to Locke “Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipsi intellectus” [There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses except the mind itself ]’ (RUL MS

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3000, p. 62); by Malone Dies in 1948, Jackson’s parrot can only utter ‘nihil in intellectu, etc’: ‘These first three words the bird managed well enough, but the celebrated restriction was too much for it’.6 BECKETT’S ‘POSS’ AND THE DOG’S DINNER Before moving on, let us more closely consider Beckett’s own evolving method at this time. An early example is furnished by the 1931 academic essay on Marcel Proust, which ‘accepts regretfully the sacred ruler and compass of literary geometry’ in seeking ‘the heart of the cauliflower or the ideal core of the onion [that] would represent a more appropriate tribute to the labours of poetical excavation than the crown of bay’.7 Importantly, the ensuing eight years forming the bulk of our forthcoming analysis witnessed an expansion of intellectual endeavours after Proust, alongside a growing dissatisfaction with the rational, optimistic, positivistic ethos Beckett perceived in academia. By seeking the ‘heart of the cauliflower’ in his own art, Beckett’s enormous corpus of ‘Interwar Notes’ simultaneously harnessed erudition and cultivated an increasingly divergent artistic view of that erudition. That this widening fissure was becoming increasingly apparent to Beckett is documented in his ‘German Diaries’ between September 1936 and April 1937, where ‘the position of the intellectual is for me of secondary interest . . . what I want to know about is the artist, who is never comfortable by definition’.8 Insofar as Murphy, completed months earlier (but not published until 1938), constituted an amalgam of different intellectual schools of thought, Beckett’s trip to Germany announced a break with the somewhat gaudy erudition of a previously aspiring academic and more or less concluded his note-taking projects.9 Changes thereafter detectable in Watt, written during the Second World War, surely owe something to the fact that Beckett was fleeing from Nazi agents, arriving in his hideaway at Roussillon with none of the books and notes used in the composition of Murphy.10 Still, the materials left behind in Paris, exemplified by Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’, continued to anchor his evolving artistic approach in the generation between Proust and the ‘Three Dialogues’. An analysis of the latter text will best initiate our investigation of the erudition Beckett was directing himself toward in the interwar period, one fundamentally marking his later art. Nowhere is the conflation of a previous tradition and development of new ideas more apparent than in Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ with Georges Duthuit, composed in the months following the mid-1949 completion of En Attendant Godot. Generated from discussions in Paris between the two, the text, written by the former and published by the latter in the December 1949 issue of transition, has frequently been viewed, in terms formulated by

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Anthony Cronin, as ‘the nearest Beckett ever came to writing a manifesto or a statement of what he felt to be his own position’; namely, the ‘categorical imperative to create when combined with the impossibility of creation’.11 In stark contrast, Eyal Amiran asserts that the ‘Three Dialogues’ ‘are so explicitly dramatized’ that Duthuit ‘was not well pleased with the role assigned to him’, ostensibly because of the ‘fictional footing’ given to ‘factual’ conversations about the painters Bram van Velde, André Masson and Pierre Tal Coat.12 At any rate, the boundaries between artistic statement and artistic creation are visibly blurred. Unusually for Beckett, the creative process was to some degree shared, and as Lois Oppenheim’s research finds, ‘references to the collaborative effort are too numerable to cite’.13 Duthuit’s sizeable contribution notwithstanding, Beckett certainly wrote the text independently as a kind of personal statement on art, somewhere between Amiran’s deliberate fictionalization and Cronin’s declarative manifesto. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the correspondence between the two friends cited by Oppenheim points to a less opaque and more discursive exchange regarding their respective differences on art: ‘I think I see what separates us, what we always end up stumbling against, after many useless locutions. It is the possible-impossible, richness-poverty, possessiondeprivations, etc. etc. opposition.’ ‘You oppose a quotidian, utilitarian time to a vital one of tripes, privileged effort, the true’, Beckett later wrote to Duthuit. ‘All this comes down to wanting to save a form of expression that is not viable.’14 Lasting until the mid-1950s, these written exchanges shed light on the setting of the ‘Three Dialogues’ in much the same way as a London A-Z and 1935 calendar shed light on the setting of Murphy. Oppenheim’s reading of this correspondence never strays far from Beckett’s own understanding of his art; indeed, the transition venture was in retrospect touted by Beckett as an exercise in artistic self-reflection: ‘So you can’t talk art with me; all I risk expressing when I speak about it are my own obsessions’.15 Yet Oppenheim and other scholars approaching the ‘Three dialogues’ leave three important questions unanswered: Why was it written in such a way? Why dialogues? And why three of them? In approaching such questions, it ought to be noted that all three critics above have touched on important factors of intent and background. Next to nothing, however, has to date been written on the intellectual influences behind the ‘Three Dialogues’. For Beckett’s readings in the preceding twenty years reveal a structural debt raising a larger point about the general backdrop provided by various systems of thought in Beckett’s texts. Indeed, the very allusiveness of the title makes this apparent. Dialogues, as a marriage of (literary) form and (philosophical) content, have been a frequent trope for opposing rival philosophical traditions. Earliest employed to expound Socrates’ famous methods of questioning, Plato’s Dialogues cover subjects as various as the immortality of the soul, intellectual

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love, the relation of virtue to knowledge (or otherwise) and the Socratic idea that ‘the study of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom’. Also fundamental is the method of composition: comedy, tragedy, irony, opposition; the marriage of reality and imagination; and for Scott Buchanan, ‘the theatrical machinery and instrument of deeper vision in which both literary and philosophical ideas will find a focus; while the characters in the dialogues are historic personages . . . the characters are stylised to the point of becoming the abstract types, or stock characters, of comedy’.16 In sum, one is as likely to find Plato’s dialogues in the Classics section of bookshops as in the Philosophy section. The Platonic dialogue form, then, initiates a tradition dramatizing philosophical disputes in order to best distinguish and express their contours. This is also true of Cicero, upon whose dialogues David Hume later ‘modelled’ his own Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Like Plato, Hume was certainly read by Beckett – July 1932 for the former, and by 1938 for the latter – and although it is not certain he was familiar with either philosopher’s dialogues as such, of greater importance to note presently is the marriage of literary form and philosophical content long represented in this tradition: The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, as an example of the philosophical dialogue, is beyond dispute the most brilliant in the English language, surpassing Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), the only serious contender. . . . The Dialogues is the final marriage of philosophy with art that had been Hume’s ambition throughout a long career as a man of letters.17

Also significantly, the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous takes as its theme George Berkeley’s theory of ‘immaterialism’, which sets the act of perception in opposition to the perceived: ‘Berkeley’s own philosophy is ideally suited to the dialogue form’, Jonathan Dancy affirms, ‘because he denies what we would have thought the most obvious thing in the world, that the physical world consists of real material things, existing out there in a way that has really nothing to do with us’.18 The distinction is even extended to Berkeley’s participants, Philonous (‘lover of mind’) and Hylas (‘materialist’). Given that Beckett had read Berkeley’s Dialogues (specifically referring to it in 1936) and owned this text at his death, it is surprising that Frederik Smith’s perceptive essay ‘Beckett and Berkeley: A Reconsideration’ makes only passing mention of this connection, despite arguing throughout that in Berkeley we have a philosopher who is a fine writer and whose arguments depend in large measure on the form of his works, whereas in Beckett we have a literary writer interested in dealing, through the manipulation of form, with many of Berkeley’s most pressing philosophical concerns.19

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Yet Smith observes that Beckett found both style and theme alluring in the Bishop’s treatises, and also notes references to Berkeley in Murphy, the 1965 Film and (more opaquely) elsewhere, contending that ‘while critics have pursued the influence of Berkeley’s ideas on Beckett, we have paid little or no attention to the profound influence of the structure and style of his texts’.20 Smith’s contribution is particularly valuable insofar as it alerts us to Beckett’s general interest in Berkeley’s idealist structure and style. And in the context of the ‘Three Dialogues’, we find the most explicit appropriation of Berkeley’s form by Beckett: the 1949 Dialogues are modelled upon the 1713 Dialogues. Consider an exchange between ‘B.’ and ‘D.’ from Beckett’s first dialogue, where it is made clear that merely replicating nature can no longer be the goal of the modern artist. The unfolding contention, as in Berkeley’s dialogues, is over who exhibits the greater scepticism: the one believing art can still capture modern experience with the tools used by representational painting throughout the ages, or the one believing the subject matter of the modern artist demands a new form of expression, a new understanding. The history of painting stands condemned as a history of mimesis – for ‘B.’, perpetually forced ‘to enlarge the statement of a compromise’ – and the point of opposition in the dialogues, crafted right from the start, centres upon whether an explicit turning away from this tradition is absurd (or simply impossible), or whether another artistic plane can be perceived and ought to be pursued. B.

D. B.

In any case a thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience, as revealed to the vigilant coenaesthesia. Whether achieved through submission or through mastery, the result is a gain in nature. But that which this painter discovers, orders, transmits, is not in nature . . . By nature I mean here, like the naivest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience.21

We are thus returned to whether recreating the natural, material (or matter à la Hylas), or whether accepting pure perception, the void (or the mind à la Philonous), is the most appropriate way to interpret modern experience. When framed in this way, it becomes clear that a great deal of Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ is directly suggestive of Berkeley’s Dialogues. Although the flavour of this affinity is best served by reading the Beckett and Berkeley texts in tandem, an excerpt from the latter’s own first dialogue is illustrative: HYLAS. PHILONOUS.

But what say you to pure intellect ? May not abstracted ideas be framed by that faculty? Since I cannot frame abstract ideas at all, it is plain, I cannot frame them by the help of pure intellect, whatsoever

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HYLAS. PHILONOUS. HYLAS. PHILONOUS.

HYLAS.

Beckett’s Books faculty you understand by those words. Besides, not to inquire into the nature of pure intellect and its spiritual objects, as virtue, reason, God, or the like; thus much seems manifest, that sensible things are only to be perceived by sense, or represented by the imagination. Figures therefore and extension being originally perceived by sense, do not belong to pure intellect. But for your further satisfaction, try if you can frame the idea of any figure, abstracted from all particularities of size, or even from other sensible qualities. Let me think a little – I do not find that I can. And can you think it possible, that should really exist in Nature, which implies a repugnancy in its conception? By no means. Since therefore it is impossible even for the mind to disunite the ideas of extension and motion from all other sensible qualities, doth it not follow, that where the one exist, there necessarily the other exist likewise? It should seem so.22

One final influence remains buried in Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’. The Enlightenment project, as represented by the very different Berkeley and Hume, prized rationality, while often focusing upon the existence (or otherwise) of God as the barometer of humanity’s place and purpose in the world. To somewhat unfairly lump Arthur Schopenhauer into this movement, his own handful of dialogues in Parerga and Paralipomena share a great deal with the above philosophical predecessors, and with Beckett – who owed an enormous intellectual debt to Schopenhauer from 1930 onward. Like Berkeley, who felt that philosophers paradoxically ‘have so far prevailed against the common sense and natural notions of mankind’, Schopenhauer is famous for his castigation of what might be called ‘establishment philosophy’: ‘The failure of philosophy . . . is explained by the fact that . . . our intellect is immanent, and thus our philosophy too should be immanent and not aspire to supramundane things, but restrict itself to a thorough understanding of the world as given, which supplies material enough’. And, like Beckett’s ‘B.’ and ‘D.’, two of Schopenhauer’s dialogues title the opponents ‘A’ and ‘B’, who together effectively come to reject the value of an ‘intellect that grasped the infinite, eternal, and absolute’, instead of the ‘fleeting forms’ comprising our ‘petty circumstances of our ephemeral existence, which are for us the only real ones and actually concern us’.23 Beckett’s very evolution as an artist – of which the ‘Three dialogues’ may be seen as the public dénouement – so richly mirrored in the ‘Interwar Notes’, explores much of this same incommensurability of intellect and perception. By way of support, the pivotal ‘German Diaries’ suggest just such a transformation, toward ‘an “open-mindedness” which is mindlessness,

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the sphincter of the mind limply for ever open, the mind past the power of closing itself to everything but its own content, or rather its own treatment of a content’.24 Interestingly, Schopenhauer likens this incommensurability to ‘a telescope in a theatre’, a motif dramatized by Clov throughout much of the 1957 Endgame. The dilemma of perception is paramount in Endgame as well, and its unsatisfactory exploration by traditional philosophy contributed to Schopenhauer’s, no less than Berkeley’s, choice of employing dialogues as a more literary, less cumbersome, style. This clearly attracted Beckett, as explained in a 1937 letter to his close friend, Thomas MacGreevy: When I was ill I found the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer. Everything else I tried only confirmed the feeling of sickness. . . . And it is a pleasure also to find a philosopher that can be read like a poet, with an entire indifference to the a priori form of verification. Although it is a fact that judged by them his generalisations show fewer cracks than most generalisations.25

We have already seen how Beckett framed his discussions with Duthuit philosophically, and the above reference to Schopenhauer reinforces the primacy of literary expression to Beckett. But with Beckett, the Enlightenment faith in logic is conspicuously missing, replaced by an artistic ‘fidelity to failure’. This is Beckett’s, no less than van Velde’s, article of faith. It is for this reason that Schopenhauer’s concluding ‘You are right, old chap!’ can only be inverted and made explicit; hence Beckett’s concluding ‘Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken’.26 Indeed, the entire point of Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ is that perception and modernity demand a new approach to art, rejecting what Beckett dubs a return to the ‘bosom of St. Luke’.27 This reference is vital, for it links the role of religion in the tradition of philosophical dialogues to what Beckett has called ‘Humanistic Quietism’. Entailed here, the idea that ‘all poetry . . . is prayer’ actually replaces traditional approaches to God, as exemplified by Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer and their varying adherence to empiricism.28 Time and again, the reverential character of art is evident in Beckett’s writings; but with the ‘Three Dialogues’ this is taken one step further. Art is no longer constructed to better evince faith.29 Art has taken over the role of faith itself. Beckett’s understanding here employs an intertextual insight into the ‘Three Dialogues’ that both reflects his working methods and unveils their groundbreaking, post-Enlightenment flavour: Art is substituted for God. BECKETT’S ‘NON-EUCLIDEAN LOGIC’ The survey of Beckett’s unpublished writings in later chapters – spanning from the late 1920s to 1938 – will be undertaken both thematically and chronologically. Such a perspective is instructive in looking at the changes

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wrought during this period: the most concentrated period of self-directed note-taking commenced with the meticulous ‘Philosophy Notes’ in mid1932, and ended around mid-1938 with jotted excerpts in the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ from the 1923 edition of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. In the first instance, the ‘Philosophy Notes’ show a movement away from Joycean methods – those of hoovering up references and seeking linguistic foibles characteristic of James Joyce, with whom Beckett became friendly in the late 1920s – toward a comprehensive garnering of knowledge on the history of philosophy. The manner of constructing these notes exemplified what Schopenhauer understood as ‘the principle of sufficient reason [which] is the rational method, and it alone is valid and useful in practical life and in science’.30 Here Beckett was looking at developments and structures of thought within the Western philosophical tradition, especially its origins in Ancient Greece. Due to personal circumstances, Beckett turned to science next. Perhaps as an expression of Beckett’s self-diagnosed ‘obsessional neurosis’ observed in Chapter 4, another note-taking foray was undertaken, this time into psychology; and overwhelmingly, psychoanalysis. Like Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’, much of this material was directed toward a systematic understanding of psychology and psychoanalysis, in addition to a focus on (mainly) psychosomatic symptoms that Beckett thought might be the cause of his physical maladies at this time. Nevertheless, the ‘Psychology Notes’ offer an initial turn away from ‘sufficient reason’ in trying to account for unconscious, repressed or otherwise unrecoverable mental images. Thereafter, Beckett’s entries on Arnold Geulincx and later Fritz Mauthner – neither of which are systematic in character, but are instead short, focused, verbatim transcriptions – point in the same direction; that is, away from the systematic harnessing of knowledge. With Geulincx and Mauthner, erudition is provided by them and noted by Beckett with the understanding that knowledge of existence is ultimately unachievable. In stark contrast to the faith in reason lauded by René Descartes – used by Beckett to structure his 1930 poem Whoroscope – Geulincx and Mauthner use knowledge to point to the limitations of understanding; first in terms of Geulincx’s ‘how’, and subsequently in terms of Mauthner’s ‘how to say’. The corpus of ‘Interwar Notes’ thus locates a changing attitude toward erudition: where the exposition of philosophical systems characterized earlier note-taking projects, later notes (for example, from Mauthner on the incommensurability of language with reality and the world) become erudite tools in dismantling the foundations of plot, setting and character in Beckett’s postwar literature. The buttress offered by the ‘Interwar Notes’ thus parallels, and in subtle ways advances, the developing shift in both Beckett’s construction and understanding of his art. One obvious change is Beckett’s move to writing in French, in order to achieve ‘a greater simplicity and objectivity’, explained as a method to ‘cut

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away the excess to strip away the color [sic]’ of language.31 Although not fully undertaken until after the completion of Watt in 1945, the shift to French had already been mooted years earlier in the ‘German Diaries’: ‘I boast the possibility of stylelessness in French, the pure communication.’32 Also notably different is the reduced role of allusion, and learnedness generally. This point is noted by J. D. O’Hara, who claims that ‘structures of thought will turn out to be largely unnoticed, almost completely implicit, and consistent with themselves through the years.’33 But just as the change to French was conditioned by a permanent move to France in 1937, Beckett’s experiences thereafter may have also conditioned his writing. For in escaping from the Gestapo, the sources so evident in Murphy were necessarily left behind. This enforced change naturally heralded a much greater literary autarky in Watt that bridges Beckett’s interwar and postwar approach to literature. Another, related, change concerns the relation of subject and object which perplexed Beckett during the 1930s; the search for what Franz Marc – much admired by Beckett – called ‘an inner artistic logic’ in preference to the systematic rationality bequeathed by the Enlightenment.34 This too was at the forefront of Beckett’s concerns in the ‘German Diaries’: ‘the fence between the big and little worlds is Zwei Herren dienen [serving two masters]. I talk bilge (Kimwasser? Schlagwasser?) [attempts at bilge water] about relation of subject and object.’35 Building upon the incommensurability of form and content already sketched out in the 1934 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ in terms of a ‘no man’s land’, Franz Marc further stimulated Beckett’s interest on this artistic ‘nomansland’ as a subject for art itself: Interesting notes in Marc re subject, predicate, object relations in painting. He says: paint the predicate of the living, Picasso does that by the inanimate. By that he appears to mean not the relation between subject and object, but the alienation (my nomansland).

Fascinatingly, the result of painting a predicate is an appreciation of a special place for art – often, for Marc’s circle of pioneering Expressionists, at the cusp of non-representational painting – and as Beckett noted from Marc’s Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen in late 1936: ‘Artistic creation will free itself from human purpose and human will. All things artistic are alogical. There are artistic forms which are abstract and cannot be proven by human knowledge.’36 Remaining with the ‘German Diaries’, Beckett is repeatedly clear on what he is looking for, as well as what he is seeking to avoid: ‘I am not interested in the “unification” of the historical chaos any more than I am in the “clarification” of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know.’37

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This nevertheless leaves a great deal to record and learn during this ‘disinterested’ period and, in Beckett’s next sustained piece of writing, Watt, this is exhaustively (in all manners of speaking!) demonstrated throughout. Commenting upon this novel, John J. Mood painstakingly charts such ‘necessities’ and the attendant ‘chaos’ in an influential essay on the inevitable failure of metaphysical and personal structures in Watt. This is accomplished by a complete review of the mathematical permutations in the novel which, for Mood, acts as the method marrying Beckett’s content (the impossibility of consistent systematic thought) with form (the literary formulation of this failure). Mood concludes that mistakes were certainly planned. If there had been one or two, we could write it off as someone’s error. Twenty-eight mistakes clearly indicate a deliberate strategy at work, particularly when linked to the many other mistakes pointed out by the text itself. If Beckett is truly working with the incompetence he said he was, if his people are truly falling to pieces, then it follows that a portrayal of a personal system, of a closed logical set or a series of such sets, must, if the form is to be one with the content, be faulty.38

Given the maddening mathematics undertaken in this essay (following Watt’s lead) in order to demonstrate Beckett’s understanding of the ‘dog’s dinner’ of existence, Mood’s conclusions are hard to dispute: ‘the most fundamental system of which [Watt] is a part, of which he is, is itself flawed and inexplicable. That system is the series of series which make up Knott’s establishment. . . . Watt has portrayed the equal failure of rationality to provide an internal system of any use.’39 It is here, in this methodological ‘nomansland’ between form and content, that Beckett’s philosophical readings inform his artistic imagination and increasingly produce an ‘art of failure’, or what J. E. Dearlove has called a ‘nonrelational narrative’. Accommodating the Chaos locates this turn toward nonrelational art between Murphy and the 1946 Mercier and Camier, with Watt acting as the fulcrum of the breakdown ‘between word and world’: ‘According to Beckett, the artist cannot assume his works exhibit any connection, much less a mimetic one, to an external system. . . . Nothing may be affirmed or denied absolutely: all possible permutations must remain available. Ambiguity and fluidity characterize nonrelational arts.’40 While supporting this analysis, and especially assertions regarding the turn toward art of a different calibre around the time of Watt, an important axiom must be added. In order to refute a given system (or systems generally), one must have knowledge of that particular system. Beckett’s familiarity with systematic thought – without, of course, the belief in the essential(ist) validity of any particular line of thinking so aptly summarized by the Beckettian ‘perhaps’ – is held here to be quite simply indispensable to the revolutionary changes engendered in his writing after

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Murphy and prior to The Trilogy, roughly between 1936 and 1946. To press this case, a mathematical detour is necessary, again invoking Watt’s labours in the preparation of his master’s perplexing sustenance (given in the epigraph above), as an extended analogy to consider Beckett’s own nourishment ‘that is neither food, nor drink, nor physic’: non-Euclidean logic. This logic, initially formulated in Murphy and reaching its systematic apex in Watt as a revolt against systematic thinking, is employed here as shorthand to analyse the method, rather than to explicate the meaning, of Beckett’s literary approach. Given his required studies of Euclidian geometry at Trinity College Dublin, it involves little interpretative stretching to suggest that Beckett’s earliest writings already contain movements in this direction, for example in his 1929 essay ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’: ‘There is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line.’41 Moreover, following Mood, the relationship of these ideas to mathematics is held here to be a central feature of Watt, and corresponds perfectly with David Bohm’s Quantum Theory: ‘Revolutionary changes in physics have always involved the perception of a new order and attention to the development of new ways of using language that are appropriate to the communication of such order’; or, as Beckett wrote in Murphy ‘her quantum of wantum cannot vary’.42 In light of Beckett’s own interest in numbers – particularly evident in Murphy’s preferred 1.83 cups of tea, Neary’s final conversion from Pythagoreanism, Watt’s exhaustive numerical exercises and Molloy’s sucking stones – a mathematical appropriation here is not heretical, but heuristically useful. Non-Euclidean geometry flew in the face of 2,000 years of mathematical thinking by questioning the very premises of the Euclidean argument, redefining terms such as ‘radius’, ‘straight line’ and ‘in the same direction’ to establish alternative geometric axioms accounting for the instabilities of perception. Such geometrical questions are at the heart of how we define the macrocosm itself, as a basic introduction to mathematics suggests: you may be tempted to point out that space as we know it does not have these [curved] peculiarities. Lines that begin in the same direction continue in the same direction, and the right angles of triangles and circumferences of circles are what they ought to be. In other words, it appears that, even though it is logically possible for space to be curved, as a matter of fact it is flat. However, it could be that space appears to be flat to us only because we inhabit such a small part of it, just as the earth’s surface appears to be flat, or rather flat with bumps of various sizes, to somebody who has not travelled far.43

In our context, the above quotation may well say more about Beckett than mathematics, and the words of a pioneer in non-Euclidean geometry might well come from Murphy’s mouth:

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The assumption that the angle sum [of a triangle] is less than 180° leads to a curious geometry, quite different from ours [Euclidean] but thoroughly consistent, which I have developed to my entire satisfaction. The theorems of this geometry appear to be paradoxical, and, to the uninitiated, absurd, but calm, steady reflection reveals that they contain nothing at all impossible.44

What is left, then, for untravellers like Didi and Gogo? If no certainties reside in the macrocosm of space, what then of the microcosm of individual consciousness? And if these are indeed the very basic, structural questions about truth and reality that Beckett artistically poses, surely a response lurks somewhere? It would appear neither mathematical theory nor Beckett are very hopeful in this regard: However, the most significant fact about non-Euclidean geometry is that it can be used to describe the properties of physical space as accurately as Euclidean geometry does. Euclidean geometry is not the necessary geometry of physical space; its physical truth cannot be guaranteed on any a priori grounds.45 If it is permitted in a similar way to speak of an effective principle, it is not, thanks be to God and Poincaré, that which governs the petitions to principle in science and the crossed logos of theology, which feed the storms of affirmative and negative farts that have produced and continue to produce those crappy a posterioris of Spirit and Matter which are the despair of savage peoples. These go forward with blasts of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ like a detonating shell, until truth blows up. Another. Irreversible. Dead and wounded bear witness to the fact. Put another way, the holy reasoning, this slippery and dangerous place. Nothing less resembles the creative process than these convulsions of enraged vermin, propelled in spasms of judgement towards a rotting election. For in the enthymemes of art it’s the conclusions which are lacking, not the premises. Pending new advice.46

Translated from Beckett’s 1938 essay ‘Les Deux Besoins’, the latter quotation clearly demonstrates his interest in asystematic mathematics (which, like the character Watt, nevertheless uses a systematic methodology in its approach) just before the commencement of Watt in 1940. The mention of Henri Poincaré is also noteworthy, for he too was interested in non-Euclidean mathematics: [Poincaré] was willing to grant that mathematics was a purely deductive science which merely deduced the implications of its axioms. Thus man, using plausible axioms, perhaps suggested by sensations, constructs Euclidean geometry or non-Euclidean geometry. The axioms and theorems of these geometries are neither empirical nor a priori truths. . . . We use the geometry that is most convenient . . . and modify the physical laws to make the mathematics fit.47

For Beckett, thanks in part to the work of these men, at least in systematic mathematics, ‘truth blows up’. The apprehension, appropriation and

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application of this idea to literature and language, moreover, usefully contextualizes Beckett’s artistic project. This project is both creative and philosophical, and additionally demands a working knowledge of truths and systems – irrespective of whether this leads to the place where they lack tenability. This reading, and the accompanying turn it suggests in Beckett’s thought and writing in the years around ‘Les Deux Besoins’ – especially the way in which systematic analyses of logic and numbers are utilized as a metaphor for the breakdown/s of knowledge (language, existence, truth and so on) – owes much to Richard N. Coe’s ‘Words and Numbers’ chapter in his Beckett: Watt is the first incarnation of what is to be one of the primary themes of Beckett’s later work: the failure of man, in his search for the significance either of himself or of the cosmos, to penetrate the barrier of language . . . For Murphy, part rationalist, part mystic, the experience, even of his shabby, do-it-yourself Nirvana was blissful beyond description. In Watt, however, the mystic element has vanished, or nearly so. The Void is no longer a positive achievement, the answer to desire; it is approached by reason and discovered in the failure of reason – it is defeat, the bitter and anguishing defeat of human thought. Henceforward, in Beckett’s work, the longing for the Absolute will never be free from terror. . . . For Beckett, the irreducible decimal (pi, or the 52.285714 . . . of Watt’s ‘mixed choir’) is one of the most obsessive symbols in his writing: it is the very image of the human dilemma. Beckett’s people themselves are incommensurables – both in the sense that they are social misfits, and also in the sense that they are the extant impossible.48

Little can be said to surpass Coe’s remarks. For Coe is right to point out that Beckett shares the same ‘human dilemma’ plaguing his characters: how to not fail in expressing something outside of conditioned perception, or through a consistent metaphysical system. But also, the ‘52.285714 . . .’ cited above refers to the weeks in a leap-year (366 days), preferred by Watt in his song to the second verse of ‘52.142857 . . .’ in a non-leap-year (365 days). Yet both are infinitely recurring numbers, and both are a perfect Beckettian example of this breakdown in systematic thought; for a year has exactly 52 weeks in it, does it (K)not(t)?49 Following Coe, Dearlove and others, we shall also read Beckett’s artistic metamorphosis as centring around Watt, particularly in light of Mood’s study of the ‘approximately thirty [pages which] are devoted to lists, logical combinations, and mathematical permutations’, containing ‘thirty-seven items, [of which] twelve have mistakes, not counting those where awareness is acknowledged. . . . All this hardly adds up to a very comforting “personal system”, whether taken individually or collectively.’50 Returning to the homage paid to Joyce in Beckett’s first essay in 1929, the latter’s comments seem to be just as autobiographical as they are biographical: ‘Here is direct expression – pages and pages of it. . . . Here form is content, content is form. . . . His

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writing is not about something; it is that something itself. ’51 Though the Beckettian project may diverge sharply from Joyce’s, as Beckett recognized, the convergence of form and content in the latter’s art appears as the result of the painfully relativistic understanding he progressively adopted and mercilessly projected onto his characters. Yet Beckett’s art is built not only upon erudition, but also upon the defacing of that erudition, acting as a stark reminder that we in the modern world do not understand nearly as much as we might like to think. Or as Beckett expressed this in an interview with Israel Shenker: ‘I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, a non-can-er [i.e. someone who cannot].’52 Insofar as Beckett saw his work as excremental (or purgatorial, or expelled), the methodological perspective offered by non-Euclidean logic will focus on that pre-existing ‘poss’ of nourishment compiled early in his artistic career, one so aptly summarized in the 1934 poem ‘Gnome’: ‘Spend the years of learning squandering / Courage for the years of wandering’.53 For the explorations of ignorance later pursued in texts like The Trilogy and Waiting for Godot were paradoxically founded upon years of self-education. Quite simply, Beckett’s meticulously cultivated protestations of ignorance were deeply learned. Interestingly, the erudition on offer from Beckett’s books overwhelmingly points toward just such paradoxes and limitations constraining human existence. By attempting to conceptualize Beckett’s ineffable understanding of art (and its consequent view of the ‘mess’ of existence), non-Euclidean logic will thus be understood as shorthand for the artistic outlook and approach principally developed during the interwar years. Yet even a non-Euclidean path toward that art of failure so celebrated in Beckett’s postwar works – even one ‘from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself ’ in the perfectly unclassifiable, representative, 1976 text ‘neither’ – cannot be undertaken without adequate provisions.54

2 Beckett’s ‘poss’: An Introduction to the ‘Interwar Notes’ By his [Proust’s] impressionism I mean his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect.1 Let us now explore the extent to which the ‘Interwar Notes’ demonstrate the dedication and utility – indeed logic – that show the documents held here to be of substantial relevance to Beckett’s literary evolution. Upon his death in 1989, the notes in question were split, with Beckett bequeathing roughly one half of his notebooks to his Alma Mater, Trinity College, Dublin, and the other half to the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. One need look no further than John Pilling’s meticulously crossreferenced Beckett’s Dream Notebook to appreciate their value.2 On account of a reciprocity agreement between the universities, only when archivists were able to complete cataloguing at both institutions, and microfilmed copies could be exchanged between them, were Beckett scholars permitted to consult these 1,000 or so pages. This was completed by the start of 2002, and the material now available gives considerable insight into the impetuses and inspirations behind Beckett’s early working methods. This chapter will introduce these notebooks as a whole – namely, the prosaically titled manuscripts: Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD) MSS 10962–10971 and Reading University Library (hereafter RUL) MSS 5000–5006 – by way of highlighting four salient reasons for the general importance of these sources; in the first case, through a glimpse at Beckett’s early notes on literature and art.

A BAD ‘UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR’ AND AN EXCESSIVELY ‘GOOD POET’ The interwar years comprise the only period in which Beckett composed lengthy reading notes as part of a regimen of self-directed study. Beckett kept and used these notes all his working life, and doubtless much time was

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invested in their creation. But even before this process had properly commenced in the years after finishing his degree at Trinity College, Dublin in 1926 (and before meeting James Joyce in Paris), his distinction between great art and great erudition was already immense and, quite possibly, unbridgeable. Nor was a life of criticism equal to a life of artistic creation for Beckett, even before he began to create artistically. Pointing in this direction is an excerpt from Beckett’s (most probably) student essay on Giosué Carducci, likely the earliest of the ‘Interwar Notes’: The French realised this, and the verses of Ronsard, Racine, Rimbaud [crossed out], and Baudelaire are the verses of men who knew what they wanted to say, what they could not help saying, and who said it with that direct and inevitable simplicity of language . . . Carducci produced poetry by sheer force of intellect. We look in vain for lines cast once and for ever into an immortal and unchangeable form. Carducci is an excellent university professor but an excessively bad poet. (TCD MS 10965/30–TCD MS 10965/32)

To be sure, Beckett was a voracious reader before and after the interwar period, but this decade of independent note-taking is the only extant – and quite possibly the only compiled – source Beckett systematically accumulated. As TCD MS 10962 demonstrates, his mandatory revision arising from his years at Trinity College, Dublin was summative, largely conventional and generally reflective of the wide-ranging reading Beckett encountered as a student: Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ is a typical piece of Renaissance art, combining realism with a kind of spiritual sensuality and seriousness. Shelley approximates nearly to it. Cletinio is yet another side, purely material, bestial, carnal. Then we have the learned side, Alberti, Valli, Pico della Mirandola (cf. Walter Pater’s ‘Renaissance’). In Ariosto form took precedent over matter: he was more of an artist and less of a man! (TCD MS 10962/41)

Thereafter, Beckett’s methods changed markedly upon moving into Joyce’s Parisian circle by virtue of his temporary lectureship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and an introduction by Tom MacGreevy, assuming the Master’s penchant for ‘verbal oddities’3 and cultivating an interest in books as diverse as Jules Renard’s Journal, St Augustine’s Confessions and W. R. Inge’s Christian Mysticism. Indeed, Joyce’s influence is unmistakeable in notebook entries for Dream of Fair to Middling Women, much of which was recycled for More Pricks Than Kicks. Yet the latter collection of interlocking stories, and the two years Beckett subsequently spent in London in the early 1930s, can reasonably be seen to constitute a decisive break with Joycean methods; and increasingly, Joycean approaches to literature. For at this point, Beckett’s notes change markedly in character, toward selective quotation and

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transcription, exemplified by the 175 or so handwritten pages on the history of English, German and French literatures (TCD MSS 10968–10971) from the early 1930s. In a sense, this is representative of a larger break with Joyce, in favour of the much-recognized movement toward impoverishment and minimalism made explicit in Beckett’s interview with Israel Shenker. Contrasting himself with Joyce, Beckett famously declared: The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. . . . My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable – as something by definition incompatible with art.4

But before such an artistic exploration could be mounted by Beckett, detailed maps by previous explorers were first necessary. Beckett’s attraction to European literature was particularly evident during the 1930s, especially following his gravitation away from Joyce by the middle of that decade.5 Although Frederik Smith overstates Beckett’s literary influences from eighteenth-century literature – with the notable exception of Samuel Johnson – he is certainly right to maintain ‘we need to be careful not to cut Beckett off from his literary heritage’: Beckett’s embracing of the writers of the eighteenth century enabled him to escape the burden of Joyce and served in a sense to legitimize his own writing by connecting him to a long literary tradition; having established this connection, however, he could throw it away, or at least feel no pressure to make his heritage explicit, thus allowing these writers unconsciously to infuse themselves into his work.6

The change in Beckett’s note-taking itself also facilitates a longer-term influence: sources become more fully documented, notes are increasingly typewritten and organized both in composition and content, and loosely typed sheets are hole-punched and differentiated by discipline (history of art, literature, philosophy, psychology and so on). Such a change is exemplified by the extensive notes on Johann Goethe’s Faust taken in 1936, covering nearly 100 handwritten pages over two notebooks of settings and dialogue Beckett thought worthy of recording – despite seemingly losing interest in finishing Act 4. This opens onto a second and more important point. During this transitional phase in Beckett’s life, many of his activities and interests – from art galleries and films to German linguistic exercises and notes on Irish history – are mirrored in his recorded subjects. By this avenue, Beckett’s corpus of notes proffers valuable perspectives on his life at this time. Undoubtedly, these years were a time of great uncertainty for Beckett, having given up an academic career at Trinity but as yet without literary success, and having

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to survive on an allowance from home. Unsure of his future throughout the 1930s, Beckett tried his hand at journalistic writing, having decided against lecturing – although as late as August 1937 he wrote to Thomas MacGreevy: I applied last week for the Lectureship in Italian at Cape Town. It would be an excuse for taking up the subject again and people say Cape Town has its advantages. I am really indifferent about where I go and what I do, since I don’t seem able or to want to write any more, or let us be modest and say for the moment.7

Similar to Beckett’s understanding of systematic thought in order to show its unsystematic aspects, such ‘indifference’ during this period ought not to be seen as apathy, but as a fundamental indecision about the future. No better example of this uncertainty can be given than the surprising letter to Sergei Eisenstein of 2 March 1936, requesting admission to study at the Moscow State School of Cinematography: I have no experience of studio work and it is naturally in the scenario and editing end of the subject that I am most interested. It is because I realise that the script is function of its means of realisation that I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of these, and beg you to consider me a serious cineaste worthy of admission to your school. I could stay a year at least. (RUL MS 5040)

As a whole, the ‘Interwar Notes’ reflect just such a garnering of knowledge in preparation for potential opportunities, vocations and inspirations. Here Beckett’s notes on painting are instructive. Most of these were taken around the time of Beckett’s application for an Assistantship in the London National Gallery in autumn 1933, which he described to MacGreevy: ‘In a moment of gush I applied for a job of assistant at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and got Charles Prentice and Jack Yeats to act as referees’.8 Given that Beckett fitted the parameters perfectly (‘Candidates must have attained the age of 20 and must not exceed the age of 35. . . . Candidates should be familiar with the history and practice of the Fine Arts, and it is desirable that they should have a knowledge of modern foreign languages’),9 it follows that Beckett’s notes from this period were not only due to his lifelong interest in painting, but were also taken with an eye to preparing for possible entrance exams at the National Gallery. Thus the first 51 pages of RUL MS 5001, taken from R. H. Wilenski’s 1929 An Introduction to Dutch Art and Beckett’s tour of paintings at Hampton Court Palace prior to June 1934, demonstrate both wider reading in the area and a developing aesthetic eye. Both the erudition and the appreciation – in this case of Rembrandt van Rijn, as well as a selection of Dutch and Flemish paintings hung in the National Gallery – are directly anticipatory of the exhaustive notes on painting Beckett took in the

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six volumes of ‘German Diaries’ composed during his travels in Germany over 1936–7: (1606: Leyden – 1669 Amsterdam) 650 pictures, 300 etchings, 2000 drawings; 70 pictures and 200 drawings missing (Hofstede de Groot). 1620 in Leyden University and pupil of Swanenburgh. Then in Amsterdam – pupil and assistant successively to Lastman and Pynas. From 1626–31 back in Leyden with Don collaborator and pupil. From 1631 to his death in Amsterdam. (RUL MS 5001, p. 11) Willem Cornelisz Duyster (1599–1635) Amsterdam Pupil of Pieter Codde 1. Dutch Interior, with men and women pretending to enjoy themselves. 2. Soldiers in a Barn 3. Portrait of a man and his wife (RUL MS 5001, p. 57)

Given the six-month German tour to a number of cities, it is unsurprising to add that a major interest in Beckett’s life in the years leading up to his trip was a connection to all things German, including his cousins the Sinclairs – especially Peggy, a.k.a. the Smeraldina in More Pricks Than Kicks – German culture and literature; the country which Beckett visited five times from winter 1928 to spring 1937; and of course, the German language itself. As regards the latter, RUL MS 5002 and especially RUL MS 5003, the latter dated on the cover ‘13/7/36’, show Beckett teaching himself German in a much more exhaustive and anticipatory way than during his earlier holiday travels to Kassel. To be sure, Beckett’s linguistic abilities had already allowed him to pick up some German, as made plain by earlier writings like Echo’s Bones, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and, in particular, an even earlier 1931 letter to MacGreevy: ‘I’m reading German and learning a little that way. When its coming up to Xmas I get the German fever’.10 In the following few years, the conflation of Beckett’s ‘German fever’ and general interest in literature resulted in 71 handwritten folios from John G. Robertson’s A History of German Literature from 1902, an additional 30 pages or so from Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and a further handful of German ‘scraps’ of variable interest.11 Not until 1936, in preparation for Beckett’s extended trip through Germany, does a sustained effort at learning German appear to be undertaken. It is during this period that Beckett read Faust in the original (using Robert Petsch’s 1925 edition), and started to make more specific notes on German phrases he anticipated using; in this case, using the seemingly prosaic German language workbooks. But such an adjective is misleading, not least because the words Beckett chose to translate are particularly illuminating of both his personality and his expected milieu. Thus while RUL MS 5002 is generally concerned with translating generic words and phrases such as ‘perceive’, ‘dead drunk’, ‘failure’, ‘vale of tears’, ‘God-forsaken

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hole’, the subsequent manuscript demonstrates much greater timeliness in the choice of words translated: ‘armament’, ‘disarmament’, ‘devaluation’ and so on. This particular ‘German Workbook’ offers a useful scale of Beckett’s knowledge of German in August 1936, still probably weighing less in sum than Fritz Mauthner’s extremely difficult Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache that Beckett first encountered in 1938. Yet even more importantly, RUL MS 5003 – referred to as the ‘Clare Street Notebook’ for the address given on the cover – contains a more concerted effort at translation than previously attempted by Beckett. Within these 30 or so written pages are selftranslations of Beckett’s ‘Cascando’ (written in English in 1936), Johnson’s 1755 celebrated rebuke to Phillip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, and a remarkable series of entries in German, one of which is translated into English here: If you find yourself when confronted by death different than you have been hitherto then you should feel ashamed of your inadequate self-awareness, your lack of the strength I demand of my servants. And if you should find yourself after your death the same as you were before, then do not be too surprised. It is perhaps a law that someone who achieves self-knowledge does not die, just as it is certain that he who does not know himself never lives. If life shuts this goddess out whose voice sounds so comforting to her servants, then it would have been better if hope had flown out of Pandora’s Box with the other plagues of mankind.12

The title of this August 1936 entry in Beckett’s ‘German Workbook’, Victoria Gruppe, refers to Beckett’s reading of Faust, Act 2 of which begins with a procession featuring a winged Victoria. Though few phrases in the ‘Interwar Notes’ are given the meticulous care exhibited in the above excerpt, one consistent benefit offered by the entire corpus of notes is the insight into Beckett’s developing artistic outlook, ably expressed by Molloy’s conviction that truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway.13

The mirroring of life and subject matter in the notes also lays bare the third residuum of insight into Beckett’s life: that of temperament. For the above 1936 entry is a window onto Beckett’s developing gravitation toward ‘plagues of mankind’ and ‘inadequate self-awareness’ fully realized in, and incorporated into, the postwar works. In a March 1936 letter – just as he is finishing with transcriptions from Geulincx’s Ethics – Beckett mentions to MacGreevy in passing that he is reading Goethe’s Torquato Tasso ‘again with boredom’.14 Beckett proceeded to finish the play, and came away with

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11 particularly insightful excerpts in German. These selections were doubtless of special interest or personal significance, as an English translation of the penultimate transcribed monologue illustrates: When I can neither write nor meditate, Life is no longer life for me. Try to Forbid the silkworm to continue spinning Though it is spinning on to its own death. It will evolve its precious weft from deep Within its inner self and will not cease

Till it has cased itself in its own coffin. O would that a good god would give us also The destiny of that same enviable worm, To spread our wings abroad with speed and joy In a new valley of the sun! (TCD MS 10971/1/73.1)

Another important contribution transcribed in German by Beckett is Goethe’s poem ‘Prometheus’, directed at the ‘wretched’ gods who have absconded in their role as patrons to the Titans. In much the same way, Beckett’s self-translation of Samuel Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield accuses the Earl of turning his back in Johnson’s hour of need: ‘I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.’15 Working on Johnson and Goethe simultaneously during mid-1936, such a palpable similarity must not have been lost on Beckett. And as regards Beckett’s transcription of ‘Prometheus’, the final stanza of the poem reproduced below is also of interest for the light it sheds on the creative act itself, so unyieldingly explored in Beckett’s postwar works: Who was my ally Against the Titans and their insolence? Who saved me from death, Saved me from slavery? Did you not accomplish all this yourself, Oh heart of sacred fire? . . . I should respect you? For what? Have you ever soothed The pain that burdened me? . . . Here I sit, making men In my own image, A race that shall be like me, A race that shall suffer and weep And know joy and delight too, And never you no more Than I do! (TCD MS 10971/1/72)

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The image of Prometheus, chained to a rock and tortured, is certainly an interesting one in terms of Beckett’s temperament at this time. But the language of the poem itself also evokes later Beckettian voices defiantly continuing to create, in this case, the Unnamable: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. . . . I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle.16

The last of the four salient aspects of the ‘Interwar Notes’ introduced here is also perhaps the most obvious: utility. These sources were used and re-used by Beckett in different contexts, for different purposes and, as we shall see, with varying degrees of earnestness. Yet even those sources no longer to hand at Beckett’s death were, at various points previously, prominent artistic tools. This is demonstrably true of the typed notes on psychology, which are linked to the ‘Three Dialogues’ with Georges Duthuit for the first time since Beckett himself did so in 1949. In the second dialogue, ‘D.’ suggests that Masson mixes the spirit and technique of the ‘classical’ painter with the modern problem of ‘transparency’ in attempting to ‘paint the void’. ‘What you say certainly throws light on the dramatic predicament of this artist’, grants ‘B.’: Allow me to note his concern with the amenities of ease and freedom. The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God. With such preoccupations it seems to me impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already. It is perhaps an impertinence to suggest that he wishes to . . . So forgive me if I relapse, as when we spoke of the so different Tal Coat, into my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.17

This excerpt is particularly instructive. Strikingly, the entire passage marshals the notebooks of Leonardo (most likely those from MacGreevy’s translation of Paul Valéry mentioned in ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’), Immanuel Kant’s cosmological proof of God and Sigmund Freud’s italicized response to that proof. Yet this is done in precisely the same way Georges Duthuit posits that André Masson undertakes a classical approach to a modern problem. Here Beckett demonstrates his own ‘classical’ knowledge, concluding that it also invariably fails to express that ‘dream’ of an inexpressive art. In ‘B’s’ final speaking part on artists ‘skewered on the ferocious dilemma of expression’ prior to the crescendo of Bram van Velde’s ‘art of a new order’, then, Beckett offers a traditional example – in this case proof of God through classical astronomy – to demonstrate the absurdity of canonical methods in creating

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‘inexpressive’ art. Yet these same traditional means (paintbrush and easel, pen and paper, or an understanding of a tradition in painting, writing, philosophy, etc.) are the necessary, if disagreeable, vehicles to convey a revolutionary position. Such techniques are not therefore valueless. Although clearly insufficient in creating inexpressive art themselves (because they are concerned with the ‘plane of the feasible’, as ‘B’ stresses), these means nevertheless provide valuable material and methods; signposts toward this unfurling horizon. An analogy to Beckett’s relationship with James Joyce is instructive here: like the importance placed upon learning and applying the Master’s writing techniques by the young Beckett – if only to realize that his project was diametrically opposed to Joyce’s – the later rejection of mastery and turn toward literary indigence was itself predicated on a period of understudy, germination, convention and expression. Clearly, Beckett realized this as early as the abortive Dream of Fair to Middling Women, expressing in a letter to Charles Prentice (the publisher of his monograph on Proust), ‘Of course it stinks of Joyce in spite of my most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours.’ Yet it was precisely these natural odours emanating from his later prose that allowed Beckett to move away from the Joycean project of accumulation and retransmission, and to find his own voice. This is reinforced by Beckett’s comments on Joyce to James Knowlson almost 60 years after his letter to Prentice: ‘When I first met Joyce I didn’t plan to become a writer . . . but I do remember speaking [in the classroom] about Joyce’s heroic achievement. I had great admiration for him. That’s what it was epic, heroic, what he achieved. But I realised I couldn’t go down that same road.’18 As with Joyce, Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ reveals the same necessity of understanding and drawing upon a heritage, although not working from within its strictures or following its teleology. In the case of Beckett’s critical summation of Tal Coat’s and Masson’s ‘straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise’ excerpted above, the explicit knowledge underpinning such an assessment is taken, in part, from typed ‘Psychology Notes’ made by Beckett just before the writing of Murphy from mid-1935 to mid-1936. Knowlson comments that these 20,000 words were ‘discovered in a trunk in the cellar after his death’, the dusty provenance of which belies the significance of these notes to Beckett.19 At what point these notes were placed into Beckett’s trunk remains unknown, but their date of composition can be fixed, with relative certainty, to between early 1934 and early 1935, thanks in part to a letter to MacGreevy in February 1935: ‘I have finished with Adler. Another one trackmind [sic]. Only the dogmatist seems able to put it across.’20 As Alfred Adler’s 1921 The Neurotic Constitution was followed by his 1932 The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology – the penultimate book noted, just before Otto Rank’s 1929 The Trauma of Birth – a reasonable estimate suggests that Beckett finished these notes before the start of Murphy

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in August 1935, perhaps using books borrowed from Camden Public Library, London, at that time specializing in psychological and philosophical texts. The order of the other sources, similarly typed with care and with an emphasis on the history of psychological schools and disorders – particularly neurosis – is as follows: Karin Stephen’s 1933 Psychoanalysis and Medicine, Robert S. Woodworth’s 1931 Contemporary Schools of Psychology, Sigmund Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Ernest Jones’ 1923 Papers on Psycho-analysis and 1920 Treatment of the Neuroses, and Wilhelm Stekel’s 1923 Psychoanalysis and Suggestion Therapy. As Chris Ackerley has shown, many of the psychological references incorporated into Murphy – to the Külpe School, ‘Kohler and the apes’, the ‘figure and ground’ of Gestalt psychology, even concepts such as the ‘id’ – are drawn from Beckett’s understanding of psychology. But what has not been previously identified is that Beckett’s knowledge of this area is taken directly from his extensively noted reading of the above books, contemporaneous with his psychotherapy sessions with Wilfred Bion in London. This reinforces a point made earlier. The ‘Interwar Notes’ as a whole are not only important because of their artistic utility, but in many ways they are also a mirror of Beckett’s development and concerns at this time. In this case, the personal significance is obvious, given that Beckett undertook two years of thrice-weekly psychotherapy sessions in London. As regards artistic utility, consider this selection of the notes, taken from Freud’s chapter ‘Anatomy of the Mental Personality’ in his New Introductory Lectures: Id, Ego & Superego. The philosopher Kant once declared that nothing proved to him the greatness of God more convincingly than the starry heavens and the moral conscience within us. The stars are unquestionably superb . . . Super-ego: heir to Oedipus complex. A special function within the ego representing demand for restriction & rejection. Acute case of over-severity of super-ego towards ego appears in the melancholic attack. Cp. delusions of observation of certain psychotics, whose observing function (super-ego) has become sharply separated from the ego & projected into external reality. The Ego, (including super-ego), not coextensive with the conscious (since patient is frequently unconscious of his resistances), just as the repressed is not coextensive with the unconscious. Id: Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge – that in our view is all that the id contains. The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by contact with the external world. It borrows its energy from the id. The means by which it has separated itself off from one part of the id were repressions & resistances. Repressed material merges into the id. The poor ego has to serve three harsh masters & do its best to reconcile claims of all three. The three tyrants are: The external world, the super-ego & the id. Goaded on by the id, hemmed in by the super-ego, rebuffed by reality, the ego struggles with its economic task of reducing forces & influences working in it & upon it to some kind of

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unity. When it fails it breaks out into anxiety. Reality anxiety in face of the outer world, moral anxiety in face of the super-ego, neurotic anxiety in the face of the id. The object of psychoanalysis is to strengthen the ego, make it more independent of the super-ego, widen its field of vision & so extend its organisation that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall ego be. It is reclamation work, like the draining of the Zuyder Zee. (TCD MS 10971/7/6)

Interestingly, these are the only notes Beckett took from Freud’s writings. Also, in keeping with Beckett’s later allusions, the reference is small and not for intended ‘solution’, though Kant’s sentiments on ‘greatness of God’ are clearly the source for the Freudian passage in the ‘Three Dialogues’. Another selection, this time taken from The Trauma of Birth, is highly suggestive of the conflation of Molloy’s mother and his town in the first few pages of The Trilogy: Dream of travelling; such details as missing the train, packing & not being ready, losing luggage, etc., so painfully realised in the dream, can be understood only when one interprets the departure as meaning separation from the mother, & the luggage as symbolising the womb, which as we know is replaced by all kinds of vehicles. Every forward movement in the dream is to be interpreted as regressive. Cp. disinclination of many persons to travel with their backs to the engine, & sortir les pieds en devant. Spermatozoa dream (Silberer), regression to spermarium. Town as mother symbol, 7 hills of Rome corresponding to teats of she wolf. (TCD 10971/8/35)

Even more specifically, both in Watt and Mercier and Camier, trains play a recurring role. And in both texts Watt and Mercier are explicitly noted as having their backs to the engine. Indeed the former is defined on the last page before the Addenda to Watt as ‘the long wet dream with the hat and bags’.21 Both explicitly and more opaquely, then, the ‘Interwar Notes’ provided numerous initiatives for Beckett’s writing. Nevertheless, what is clear from the above survey of literary, artistic and psychological sources is that, like his own production of literature (journalism, poems, plays, novels, etc.), it is extremely difficult to classify what Beckett noted, other than making the banal assertion that it was of some personal importance or interest. But more than merely erudite shavings from the transitional decade of the 1930s, these sources had a utility both at the time and afterward; that is to say, these readings were further incorporated into the methodological structure of Beckett’s dramatic, poetic, critical and fictional texts, as we shall see. But at this critical time in his development, the driving consideration for such lengthy note-taking appears to be that, unsure of his own future or occupation, Beckett was trying to find his reflection in other thinkers. This, in turn, facilitated his realization that conventional

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systems of thought – no matter how radical – were merely points along the same axis of expression. As a result, Beckett’s studies subsequently helped to produce the famously different view set out earlier in terms of an evolving non-Euclidean logic: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express’.22 Bearing in mind the four salient vistas opened by the ‘Interwar Notes’; namely, the time-consuming act of their composition, the insight into Beckett’s changing milieu and (arguably) changeless temperament, and their artistic incorporation, will all be applied to remaining philosophical notes previously unexplored by Beckett Studies. ‘THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING AND YET WE GO ON’ In keeping with our empirical keystone, the final, largest and probably most important portion of the ‘Interwar Notes’ is best initiated with the writer and his words; in this case, through correspondence with renowned theatre director Alan Schneider on the production of Endgame. On 21 November 1957, the latter wrote: ‘Have you remembered who “that old Greek” was?’ – a reference to a comment in one of Hamm’s final, impassioned monologues. In a lengthy letter, Beckett responds by stating: Old Greek: I can’t find my notes on the pre-Socratics. The arguments of the Heap and the Bald Head (which hair falling produces baldness) were used by all the Sophists and I think have been variously attributed to one or the other. They disprove the reality of mass in the same way and by means of the same fallacy as the arguments of the Arrow and Achilles and the Tortoise, invented a century earlier by Zeno the Eleatic, disprove the reality of movement. The leading Sophist, against whom Plato wrote his Dialogue, was Protagoras and he is probably the ‘old Greek’ whose name Hamm can’t remember. One purpose of the image throughout the play is to suggest the impossibility logically, i.e. eristically, of the ‘thing’ ever coming to an end. ‘The end is in the beginning and yet we go on.’ In other words the impossibility of catastrophe. Ended at its inception, and at every subsequent instant, it continues, ergo can never end. Don’t mention any of this to your actors!23

This fascinating letter encapsulates much about Beckett from last to first: his reticence to reveal artistic ‘meaning’ (to actors, interviewers and so on); his remarkable intellect and memory (in this case directed toward philosophical issues); and, most importantly for present purposes, his reliance on sources accumulated much earlier in his life. The notes referred to above form a large portion of the 267 folios of typed and handwritten notes on the history of Western philosophy, from its Ancient Greek inception to the end of the nineteenth century, contained in TCD MS 10967.24

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Here, what Beckett termed his ‘notes on the pre-Socratics’ are clearly of greatest influence and of far and away the greatest significance. Following the two books principally relied upon for the history of philosophy, Platonic epistemology and systematic thought are understood to displace Presocratic notions of ‘The World’ and ‘Knowledge and Conduct’ (John Burnet’s distinction in Greek Philosophy), or ‘Cosmological’ and ‘Anthropological’ periods (Wilhelm Windelband’s distinction in A History of Philosophy). This point is (literally) underlined by Beckett in his ‘Philosophy Notes’: This systematising of knowledge so that it should become an all-inclusive philosophical doctrine assumed with Aristotle the term of an organic articulation of science into the individual disciplines. With this A. [Aristotle] concluded the development of Greek philosophy and inaugurated the age of the special sciences. (TCD MS 10967/72)

In following this philosophical distinction, the Schneider letter refers to roughly 150 pages (recto and verso) on what Beckett titled ‘ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY’. Therefore, more than half the notes on the history of philosophy cover classical Greek philosophy to Aristotle; replete with dates, facts, anecdotes, philosophical quotations and a striking hand-drawn colour map of the eastern Mediterranean, detailing each Greek philosopher’s area of origin (for example, Pythagoras, Melissus and Epicurus are grouped together inside a rectangle connected by a line to the city of Samos). These Presocratic notes, like the corpus as a whole, were almost certainly compiled from three different sources, of which one, Archibald Alexander’s A Short History of Philosophy, was typed (probably in one of Beckett’s London residences), and two – Windelband and Burnet – were handwritten (with different pens, and probably in a London library). Of the three texts, Alexander’s is by far the least employed: only a quarter of the book was marshalled for Beckett’s notes, whereas Burnet and Windleband are consulted in their entirety.25 That these notes were used intermittently throughout Beckett’s artistic life is incontestable, even if their significance for Beckett was later chiefly for opaque allusion and nostalgic pastiche, as in the 1964 short story ‘All Strange Away’: ‘ancient Greek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period’.26 Unfortunately, a degree of speculation is necessary in approximating these vital composition dates, for the sources Beckett used frequently appear in his texts in various guises and for various ends. And Frederik Smith is right to assert that Beckett is an intertextual writer of impressive magnitude and erudition, despite the ‘paradoxical’ fact that the postwar writings generally betray reduced allusions, in keeping with the larger movement toward impoverishment: ‘the essayists, poets, and novelists whom he read during this period came increasingly to influence his work as he reduced his allusions

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to them.’27 Influence aside for the moment, this consideration only redoubles the importance of precisely dating Beckett’s notes for two reasons. First, as Smith argues, the things read during these years – and, of course, for present purposes, the things noted down in the interwar period – essentially became grist in the mill for Beckett’s later project of ‘failing better’, a project aided tremendously by his wide reading. Thus a seemingly inauspicious reference to Hamm’s ‘old Greek’ becomes an esoteric reference to an entire philosophical movement, built upon extreme scepticism and the primacy individual perception: Plato’s Eristics, Euthydemus and Dionysidorus, brothers, who practised with great success this art of logomachy or eristic. Euclid’s adherents Eubulides and Alexinus were famous for a series of such catches, among which the Heap (which kernel of grain by being added makes the heap?) and the Baldhead (which hair falling out makes the head bald?), were fundamental thought [sic] far back to Zeno, who used it to [argue – added above] that the composition of magnitudes out of small parts is impossible. Zeno’s arguments against motion amplified by the Megarian Diodorus Cronos. His famous argument against the concept of possibility: only the actual is possible; for a possible which does not become actual thereby evinces itself as impossible. (TCD MS 10967/42)

The Sophists’ emphasis on subjectivity and relative truth – especially with respect to Protagoras – will be further discussed presently, as such a perspective offers important insights into many of the philosophical themes located in criticism on Beckett. However, before this, a second and more specific point is necessary regarding impediments to dating the ‘Philosophy Notes’. Unlike other sources Beckett kept until his death, these contain no composition dates (like the wide-ranging ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ or the ‘Clare Street Notebook’), are not specifically referred to in extant correspondence at the time (as with the transcriptions from Goethe) and do not explicitly parallel facts known about Beckett’s life (as with his application to the London National Gallery). Yet the influence of Beckett’s wide reading seems to fit a general pattern of use in dating Beckett’s notes before the Second World War: the last thing he read was often the first thing incorporated into his work. This will become clear over the next three chapters: the use made of J. P. Mahaffy’s (1838–1919) Descartes for the poem Whoroscope; the psychoanalytic concepts pervading Murphy; and the influence of Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, decisively shaping Watt. Therefore, having no other leads on dating, the earliest explicit reference Beckett made to the ‘Interwar Notes’ is held here to be the best guide to the composition date of the material in question. With this perspective to hand, the ‘Philosophy Notes’ were most likely taken between July 1932 and – at the latest – the completion of Murphy four years later. Pertinently, Knowlson relates Beckett’s complaint to MacGreevy:

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‘I couldn’t stand the British Museum any more. Plato and Aristotle and the Gnostics finished me.’28 As heretofore unknown documents from the British Museum confirm,29 Beckett received his reader’s ticket on 28 July 1932, eight days before his profession of exhaustion to MacGreevy. Considering Beckett’s penchant for reading, these must have been long days of study indeed. These readings make their way into the poem ‘Serena I’, a completed version of which John Pilling’s essential Beckett Before Godot places at early October 1932.30 Here is the earliest of many direct borrowings taken from Beckett’s notes on the history of philosophy: without the grand old British Museum Thales and Aretino on the bosom of the Regent’s Park the phlox crackles under the thunder scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift all things full of gods31

This section of the first stanza perfectly corresponds to Beckett’s first three sentences on Thales in the ‘Philosophy Notes’: THALES (650) His primal substance water. Earth afloat (dead fish) on surface of primal substance. All things are full of gods (TCD MS 10967/5)

And as Chris Ackerley’s scholarship shows, Burnet’s Greek Philosophy – and by obvious extension the ‘Philosophy Notes’ as a whole – was incontestably used in the construction of Murphy. Indeed, the first edition of the annotated Murphy is all the more impressive as Ackerley did not have access to the ‘Interwar Notes’ in 1998, but makes 23 references to Burnet’s work nonetheless. Having consulted these in the revised and updated edition of Demented Particulars, the subsequent inclusion of Windelband’s A History of Philosophy in 2004 further highlights both Ackerley’s cutting-edge scholarship and the centrality of the ‘Philosophy Notes’ to the composition of Murphy. Above all, Ackerley shows that Murphy was the reservoir for Beckett’s vast erudition in a manner much less direct than the earlier fiction, revealing the extensive artistic use of Beckett’s learning: ‘Murphy is a culmination of one stage in Beckett’s career, but equally the beginning of another, the matrix in which many later works were formed: the first text he did not consistently reject, and to which he returned in his later writings.’32 Underscoring the time and effort Beckett expended on such an important developmental project, it is quite likely that Beckett’s notes on philosophy were jumbled together with the more famous ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ in his rucksack during frequent trips to libraries in Dublin and London.

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Furthermore, the way in which Beckett went about composing the ‘Philosophy Notes’ is interesting, if a bit neurotic. Given that Windelband and Burnet jump around a fair bit when discussing particular philosophers, a great deal of indexing was necessarily done by Beckett, who structured the notes either chronologically by philosopher or, occasionally, by movement (such as Atomic Theory). Although the typed portions from Alexander were almost certainly taken first – given that these provide the headings and structure for the notes (until finishing with second-century Christian Gnosticism) – it is the meticulousness of work done on the handwritten entries which is most striking. For example, Windelband’s first (and, for Beckett, most important) section on ‘Cosmology’, running to a total of 65 pages, is either closely summarized or transcribed verbatim over 68 handwritten folios in Beckett’s notes. And there are numerous occasions where Beckett returned to and reread certain pages a handful of times, on account of more than one thinker being described on the same page. Although Beckett transcribed all subsections in both texts (which for Burnet covers Greek philosophy to Aristotle, and for Windelband concludes with late nineteenth-century philosophy), only sections prior to Aristotle feature in all three sources. The final two millennia or so of philosophical history are thus heavily condensed from Windelband, often with only a key sentence or two in the body of the text for clarification. This points to an inescapable conclusion: Beckett spent the most time and energy on the beginnings of philosophy, consulting texts focusing on epistemology, the progression of Greek thought and, as will be shown, its heritage. As made plain by the letter to Schneider – and especially Beckett’s recollection of the material above – it is no stretch to assert Beckett knew these ‘notes on the pre–Socratics’ exceedingly well. A representative example is the four typed and handwritten pages on Beckett’s ‘Old Greek’, abridged below. PROTAGORAS OF ABDERA (480–410) [above this, emphasized with line down side, states: ‘Legend that he was originally a porter and attracted attention of Democritus by carrying faggots on his head, poised in correct equilibrium.’] Exiled. His On the Gods burnt in the market-place. It opens: ‘Of the Gods, I know not whether they are or are not [“or what they are like in figure” – added in left margin]. Many things, the obscurity of the subject & the brevity of life, prevent us from knowing.’ ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Philosophy is the art of being happy. Happiness & virtue identified. All opinions equally true. The first great individualist, relativist & agnostic. A product of the Atomistic School. Intellectual head of Sophists and the only one responsible for any conceptions philosophically fruitful and significant.

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His Grounds of Refutation probably his most important writing. Formulated the law of the contradictory opposite. His effort to explain the idea of the human mind psycho-genetically. . . . Perception rests in the last instance upon motion, and not only in the thing to be perceived, but also in percipient organ (Cf. Empedocles). If perception is the product of these two motions directed toward one another, it is obviously something else than the perceiving subject, but just as obviously something else than the object which calls forth the perception. Conditioned by both, it is different from both. This pregnant discovery he called the doctrine of the subjectivity of sense-perception. From this double motion 2-fold result: perception in the man, content of perception in the thing. Perception is completely adequate knowledge of what is perceived but no knowledge of the thing. This is the meaning of the Protagorean relativism, according to which things are for every individual as they appear to him; and this he expressed in the famous proposition, Man is the measure of all things. This is phenomenalism in so far as it teaches knowledge of the phenomenon limited to the individual and the moment: it is scepticism in so far as it rejects all knowledge that transcends that. . . . He is said to have met Zeno at Athens, when problem of continuity was discussed: Z [Zeno]: Tell me, P [Protagoras], does a single grain of millet, or ten thousandth part of one, make a noise in falling? P: No. Z: Does a bushel of millet make a noise in falling? P: Yes. Z: Et alors.. Is there not a ration of a bushel of millet to 1 grain and ten thousandth of 1 grain [? – sic] P: Yes. Z: Then will not the sounds leave the same ratio? As the sounding objects to one another, so the sounds. Thus if the bushel makes a noise, the grain and ten thousandth grain will make a noise. (TCD MS 10967/ 44–TCD MS 10967/45.1)

This single entry was used at least twice: in the composition of Endgame, noted above and, with respect to the dialogue between Zeno and Protagoras, in Mercier and Camier: ‘And in between all are heard, every millet grain that falls, you look behind and there you are, every day a little closer, all life a little closer’. As with Murphy, the intertextual method remains consistent, but a crucial difference is evident. Here allusion is employed to make a philosophical point, situated as it is between Mercier’s vision of a ‘wretched’ old man and memories of his childhood, not to mention the swinging of heavy chains ‘[o]nce in motion they swing on and on, steadily or with serpentine writhing . . . till it seemed they would never come to rest’ (itself recalling Murphy’s rocking chair).33 But whether or not the latter point on the interminability of motion in fact explicitly alludes to Murphy, the reference itself remains paradigmatic in Beckett’s later art: alone with one’s memories

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in a world of flux. In the same way that Mercier’s preference for having his back to the engine is a veiled allusion to a particular psychoanalytic neurosis, the falling millet grain evokes Zeno’s celebrated philosophical paradoxes. Richard Coe’s excellent ‘A Little Heap of Millet’ makes much the same point with reference to Beckett’s later drama: ‘One millionth part of a grain has been added to the heap, and the heap is still unfinished.’34 As usual, Coe’s explication sticks close to Beckett’s own understanding of his work: ‘However, I have to go on . . . I am up against a cliff wall yet I have to go forward. It’s impossible isn’t it? All the same, you can go forward. Advance a few more miserable millimetres.’35 In keeping with Frederik Smith’s view of the increasingly opaque allusions in the post-Watt writings, the references themselves cease to publicize the formative ‘years of learning’ lampooned in the 1934 poem ‘Gnome’ in favour of a more solipsistic, esoteric construction. Allusions become like revolving stones to be shifted and manipulated, all the while hidden in pockets of ageold trousers. Without the recipe, such a ‘poss’ of allusions looks (like) fluid; but with many of the ingredients to hand, it finally becomes possible to appreciate the mixing, boiling and, above all, the transformation into a ‘quite a new good thing’.

3 ‘Fallor, Ergo Sum!’: The ‘Philosophy Notes’ It may seem surprising to find weighty judgements in the writings of the poets rather than the philosophers. The reason is that the poets were driven to write by enthusiasm and the force of imagination. We have within us the sparks of knowledge, as in a flint: philosophers extract them through reason, but poets force them out through the sharp blows of the imagination, so that they shine more brightly.1 In returning to the roots of scholarship on Beckett’s philosophical heritage, René Descartes emerges as a recurrent, looming figure throughout the historiography of Beckett Studies. The ‘Philosophy Notes’ mandate a serious reappraisal of formulations on a ‘Cartesian Beckett’, and simultaneously point to a panorama of philosophical influences based not on a single system or ‘ism’, but on the system of Western philosophy itself. Following on from earlier contentions regarding the desirability of theorizing from falsifiable bases, Cartesian readings of Beckett will act as a foil for discussion of the ‘Philosophy Notes’, sources punctiliously recorded and frequently employed in Beckett’s writings. In doing so, these notes will be clearly shown to have both immediate utility (in Murphy and elsewhere) and longer-term influence upon Beckett’s texts. A provocative example from the much less allusive postwar fiction arises in 1981, with the ‘Slow systole diastole’ of Ill Seen Ill Said. Despite recording some 50 years before that the ‘First pluralist’ taught that ‘Living an expiation of the arrogant desire for individual existence’ (TCD MS 10967/28), Beckett’s allusion to Empedocles in Ill Seen Ill Said is indebted to his notes, while transforming and effacing such (and other) references: ‘Tightening and loosening their clasp. Rhythm of a labouring heart. Till when almost despaired of gently part. Suddenly gently.’2 Within the context of Empedoclean dichotomies on the nature of existence, Ill Seen Ill Said thus reveals a ‘poss’ of philosophical knowledge much deeper and more referential than is generally supposed: Strife enters, drives Love to centre, and separates elements (cf. concept of world breathing). Until reverse process begins (systole – diastole), Love expanding and

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Strife expelled. (E. was the first to formulate theory of flux and reflux of blood to and from heart). (TCD MS 10967/30.1)

In marshalling the ‘Philosophy Notes’ – particularly those most significant recordings on Presocratic philosophy surveyed in the previous chapter – as evidence of Beckett’s much more general appreciation and understanding of the fundamental system of Western philosophy than that heretofore suggested in Beckett Studies, the aim is not just to provide a textual checklist of philosophical references. Instead, the possibilities offered to scholarship by empirical investigations into the philosophical development of Beckett’s later professions of ‘ignorance’ and ‘impotence’, held here to be part of an evolving non-Euclidean logic, will be measured against the Cartesian hyperbole dominating the longstanding dilemmas of Beckett’s relationship to European philosophy. Yet a tendency of criticism in Beckett Studies is precisely the overestimation and overidentification of a given thinker, theory or influence upon the author. As we shall see, this problem creates the temptation to stress an influence in encompassing and overzealous terms. Because his situations and themes are so opaque, the propensity to see a reflection of countless historical figures and ideas in Beckett’s writing means that all too often the case of this or that particular stimulus is overstated. Beckett, too, keeps us on guard, in his way: It’s a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can’t bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. But I’ll fix their gibberish for them. . . . My inability to absorb, my genius for forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they have glutted me with.3

The Unnamable here expresses the Cartesian ‘glut’ facing Beckett studies in fine. By refracting Beckett’s wide reading through one source, while establishing a Cartesian discourse to be accepted or rejected (but certainly not ignored), the earliest Beckett critics are at least partially responsible for later comments like Roger Scruton’s claim that Beckett ‘had a lifelong obsession with Descartes’.4 Given that Beckett’s first published fiction (outside the confines of Trinity College, Dublin) was a long poem on René Descartes in 1930, it becomes easy to see how the first Anglophone critics have inductively read this early flirtation into all of Beckett’s subsequent works. In many ways, this does a disservice to Beckett the polymath, by collapsing his knowledge and readings into one overarching heritage. But for present purposes, it is useful to note how greatly this distorts the reception of Beckett’s own writings, by broad-brushing an early Cartesian curiosity into something more akin to addiction. Beckett’s contemporaneous injunction, taken from his essay ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’ of a year earlier, will serve as a useful

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maxim in offering a new reading of philosophical influences drawn from the much longer and general Western tradition: ‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications.’5 The first generation of literary criticism on Beckett’s philosophical inspirations is captured by two quotations from John Fletcher’s chapter, ‘Some Sources and Influences’, in his 1967 Samuel Beckett’s Art: ‘Although Beckett has at one time or another been attracted to the Presocratics, there is nothing to suggest that his interest has ever gone beyond the superficial or anecdotal’; while conversely, Descartes’ ‘life and thought have dominated Beckett’s work from the beginning’.6 It is much easier to understand the second of these two postulations, while emphatically rejecting both. Given the wealth of references to Presocratic thought in Beckett’s writing by this time, the first assertion is surprising not least because it is simply erroneous. A major factor in Fletcher’s, as well as Lawrence Harvey’s, efforts to link Beckett to Descartes arises from their (diametrically opposed) readings of Whoroscope. But as we shall see, extrapolating from Beckett’s poetic pastiche on the life (rather than thought!) of Descartes has served to extend and justify longstanding Cartesian readings of Beckett’s work. By 1970, Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic had already built upon a decade of criticism emphasizing that, essentially, Beckett was a modern writer in Cartesian clothes: at the very least, this was a writer likely to flick through a wardrobe of themes such as systematic logic, mind/body dualism, the cogito, even use of first-person narrative and so on, prior to trying on anything else to see if it would ‘fit’ his literary undertakings (and even then only as accessories). To be sure, none of the critics presently surveyed argue that Beckett was anything other than an artist tailoring philosophical ideas to his needs – even taken to an extreme by Hugh Kenner’s unsupportable claim that ‘Beckett would seem to be the first to have read the Discours de la Méthode as what it is, a work of fiction’.7 While forgiving Kenner’s own penchant for exaggerated in the ensuing pages, it is high time to denude the entire approach he helped construct. RENÉ DESCARTES AND SAMUEL BECKETT When seeking influences upon Beckett – philosophical or otherwise – Descartes is undoubtedly worthy of note. But two changes occurred by the 1970s that established Descartes as the paradigmatic Beckettian progenitor. Ruby Cohn is at the heart of both. First and foremost is her editorship of the groundbreaking ‘Samuel Beckett issue’ of Perspective in 1959. Cartesian readings were largely initiated and strongly pushed here, though Cohn was more circumspect than her contributors, positing that Beckett ‘is only incidentally concerned with the physical–mental cleavage’.8 Beckett’s critical introduction to an Anglophone audience nevertheless ushered in more than a decade of virtually unanimous readings of Beckett’s philosophical heritage.

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Cohn’s second contribution was to reprint Whoroscope in Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut three years later. While mentioning Cartesian themes and residua – from that famous definition of homo sapiens as ‘a thing that thinks’ to more contentious references to spectacles, wheelchairs and slaughterhouses – she in no way foregrounds Descartes as a major factor in Beckett’s writing.9 But after Kenner’s and Samuel I. Mintz’s contributions to Perspective, and the appearance of Whoroscope in Cohn’s 1962 Appendix, Descartes increasingly came to dominate the nascent subject of Beckett Studies. From this ensued a veritable consensus that Cartesian constructs – moribund and ironic though they may have been portrayed – were Beckett’s central artistic playthings. Particularly guilty of such refractions are Kenner’s overstatements: ‘fiats and revulsions [in The Unnamable] come closer to the Cartesian spirit than Descartes himself ’; itself the culmination ‘of a trilogy which carries the Cartesian process backwards, beginning with a bodily “je suis” and ending with a bare “cogito” ’.10 Although careful not to identify Beckett wholly and unproblematically with Descartes, Kenner’s reading nonetheless depicts a modern novelist acting as the pineal gland between seventeenth-century philosophy and his own artistic concerns. One need not be an archrationalist like Descartes to arrive at Kenner’s finish line, especially given the dearth of scholarship on Beckett at this time: ‘This is not to say, however, that the fundamental problems of a seventeenth-century philosopher, and notably the problems presented by bodies in motion, do not confront The Unnamable in their baldest form’.11 Two years later, Kenner’s more widely circulated Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study covered much the same terrain, and offered much the same climb as his previous text. Mintz’s ‘Beckett’s Murphy: a Cartesian Novel’, while far subtler (despite the title) – he wisely introduces his essay with Beckett’s first line from ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’ cited earlier, while also marshalling Beckett’s 1929 essay to promise to ‘try not to wring the neck of any system’ – certainly makes a few neat identifications as well: ‘For Descartes’ mind, read Murphy’s mind’.12 Mintz’s focus, however, is upon Occasionalist thought, which reacted to and extended Descartes’ philosophy, by positing a divine ‘occasion’ withheld from the god-forsaken Murphy. While emphasizing the irony employed in Murphy, and affirming ‘that Murphy is a novel and not a treatise’ in a way Kenner does not, Mintz’s conclusion is still in step with Kenner’s reading: ‘In Murphy we are treated to a rigorous and illuminating exploration of the Self, refracted through the medium of Cartesian ideas’.13 The effect of the Perspective issue regarding Cartesianism, and much of the earliest Anglophone criticism on Beckett generally, lies in these final five words. In the decade following, Murphy in particular was increasingly viewed as the ground where these Cartesian ideas were most expansively employed. ‘We are introduced to Beckett’s recurrent preoccupation – Descartes’, wrote Michael Robinson in 1969 of the infamous Chapter 6 on Murphy’s mind, ‘and in the discourse which follows, Murphy emerges as the first of what is to

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be a succession of long suffering Cartesians’. And The Long Sonata of the Dead repeats the by-now familiar litany: ‘Beckett’s characters are rationalists’; ‘the problem of Cartesian dualism . . . is a complication which both Murphy and Descartes find impossible to explain.’ And finally, ‘Beckett builds the structure of Murphy on the contrast between the Cartesian and Newtonian attitudes’.14 With Whoroscope in hand, alongside readings of Murphy championed by Mintz, Kenner, Robinson, Federman and others, it is only a small jump to John Fletcher’s unearthing of Cartesian traces everywhere, not only in Beckett’s fiction – ‘[Cartesian dualism], it is no exaggeration to say, underlies the whole of Beckett’s work’ – but also personally: ‘Whatever the reasons, Beckett not only admired this thinker’s life but read deeply in his philosophy, and traces of Descartes’ influence can be found, as critics have not been slow to notice, in nearly all his writings’.15 We shall return to the validity of this last claim later, but beforehand, a look at three dissenting views from the above is instructive. The first conflicting view is a more even-handed account from 1978 – at least on the question of the extent to which Beckett accepted Cartesian philosophy – Michael Mooney’s ‘Molloy, Part 1: Beckett’s Discourse on Method ’. Yet sensitive as it is to Beckettian scepticism, aesthetics and irony as literary tropes, Mooney still cannot refrain from repeating maxims by now expected: ‘Beckett reads Descartes’s metaphoric statements literally, creating an absurdity from a figure of speech . . . [and] is able to view the Discourse on Method as a fiction in which rhetoric creates reality.’ In his comments, Mooney adds Molloy to the Cartesian canon more forcefully than even Kenner attempted, while simultaneously removing some of the cautions invoked on ‘the neatness of identifications’ by Mintz and others. For example, ‘in the Beckett–Descartes relationship’ there is an ‘identical technical procedure’ and there are ‘closer fictional affinities’ than critics have previously noticed, extending to ‘the language of Cartesian philosophy to describe physical and mental progress’. Thus, by building upon an unchallenged thesis, itself extrapolated from Whoroscope and Murphy as early examples of a lifelong fixation with Descartes, ‘Discourse on Method itself provides a model for Molloy’.16 Harvey’s well-known introductory chapter to Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, entitled ‘Cartesian beginnings’, which also takes a minority view. Indeed, this title is slightly misleading, for Harvey consistently holds that ‘Beckett, faced with the world of Descartes, rejected it in favor of a reality his nature and experience told him was deeper, truer – at least for him’.17 Like the Mintz–Fletcher approach, Harvey affirms that Beckett was heavily indebted to Descartes, though the emphasis differs here. Harvey finds that Descartes was knowingly rejected by Beckett, and poetically lampooned in consequence. Of course, Harvey places a great deal of emphasis upon the theme of Time as a satirical device in Whoroscope – in keeping with the parameters set by Nancy Cunard and Richard Aldington for the poetry competition Beckett famously entered at 3 a.m. on 15 June 1930.18 In sum,

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an intricate reading of Whoroscope argues that ‘Beckett’s Descartes is more Beckett than Descartes’; that is, Beckett’s fictional protagonist is only nominally René Descartes, and even less a faithfully represented Cartesianism. For Harvey, Beckett’s picture of Descartes is anchored to ‘man’s utter inability to know’, and is thus an inversion of Cartesian philosophy on account of Beckett’s own rejection of the scientific, constructive and timeless character of Descartes’ life and writings: Beckett’s narrator differs profoundly from René Descartes, whose own being, we suspect, was never seriously questioned, whose religious faith was at most held in abeyance for a short period, and whose confidence in the existence of the natural world soon became unshakeable. Purpose, plan, and progression mark his thought. In Whoroscope, on the contrary, random recollections and an enigmatic future cast their shadow over the present.19

Keen to marginalize any affinity to a Cartesian view of God, humanity and the world, Harvey’s exegesis meticulously considers Beckett’s use of humour and denunciations of rationality, while also making use of more standard poetic entrenching tools like rhythm, onomatopoeia and symbolism. The effect of Harvey’s 63 pages on Whoroscope is to firmly relocate Beckett’s concerns in the twentieth, rather than the seventeenth, century. Also essential to note in surveying Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic is that Harvey’s manuscript is based on detailed conversations with the author in 1961 and 1962. Before publication a few years later, Harvey’s text was checked over by Beckett, meeting with his explicit approval. None of this would have happened had Beckett not taken a liking to the American academic; but also, one suspects, if Beckett were as unflinching a Cartesian as the earliest critics advance. Still, Harvey also presupposes Beckett’s great familiarity with Descartes’ philosophy, casting the figure, and perhaps author, of Whoroscope as a Cartesian disciple who ceases to believe. Thus, the net result of Harvey’s assessment was to indirectly reinforce dominant philosophical readings of Beckett, assuming an intricate knowledge of Cartesian strictures employed (even if satirically) throughout his oeuvre. The final dissenting view on Cartesianism is closest to the reading of Beckett offered here. Three years after Fletcher’s assertion that Descartes’ philosophy coloured nearly everything Beckett thought and wrote, Eugene Webb contends in his 1970 Samuel Beckett: A Study of his Novels: Beckett is not a Cartesian. His works are based on a belief in the fundamental disharmony between body and mind, but they also show the futility and naïveté of imagining the mental world to be any less intractable than the physical. Beckett 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

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impulses. . . . Cartesianism . . . is still a system itself, and in Beckett’s world reality is stubbornly resistant to all systems.20

Beyond an excellent analysis of Beckett’s asystematic art, Webb importantly finds Watt to represent a shift in the tone and approach in Beckett’s writing, toward the more Stoic and universal. And to be sure, Webb’s Samuel Beckett is diametrically opposed to the positivism of what we will understand as the ‘pro-Cartesian’ camp. On the surface, this is a far cry from the embracing of Cartesianism already noted. But through a final analogy, this time to Descartes’ own life, one can see how the three dissenting voices above – even Webb’s hostility to a Cartesian Beckett – reinforce still-prevailing undercurrents in Beckett Studies. Even in the religiously tolerant Holland, Descartes’ philosophy was radical enough during his lifetime to inspire the short-lived injunction by ‘the University of Leyden which forbade all mention of him, favourable or unfavourable’.21 By 1970, study of Beckett had become the opposite. It was virtually impossible to argue that Descartes’ influence upon Beckett was negligible or unimportant. To date, that extended revision awaits Beckett Studies. By way of sketching out alternative epistemological influences, we will now explore the particular type of ‘nonCartesianism’ implied by such an overhaul of Beckett’s relationship to Western philosophy. But first, in characterizing the historiographical summary above, we have seen that scrutiny of the ‘anti-Cartesian’ assessments reveals much the same underpinning as ‘pro-Cartesian’ readings. Both hold that Samuel Beckett struggled with Cartesianism; they merely differ as to his conclusions and ultimate acceptance of that philosophical system. While recognizing that these conclusions are separated by a vast interpretative gulf, the subtext is clear: ‘the medium of Cartesian ideas’ has been the point of departure for any serious study of philosophical influences on Beckett’s thought and writing. Such an over-emphasis has served to obscure other, more pivotal, impetuses. Nowhere has the argument for a short-lived or otherwise inconsequential relationship with Descartes been posited in Beckett Studies. Instead, the first generation of criticism effectively internalized two highly contentious assumptions, long overdue critical reassessment. An appeal to empirically based theorizing will be of help in addressing these assumptions. The first conjecture to review is extrapolation. Building upon Whoroscope, and seeing traces of the same ‘Signor du Perron’ in Murphy, the earliest scholars reasonably viewed Descartes as instrumental to the development of Beckett’s thought. We have also seen how this extended beyond the fiction of the 1930s, most notably to The Trilogy. Yet unlike the construction of Whoroscope, indisputably created with Cartesian sources to hand, postMurphy texts betray little intertextuality, particularly with regard to Descartes. Of the latter, one reason might be found in Beckett’s explanation to Deirdre Bair that his ‘thick notebook’ containing Cartesian material was lost sometime

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before or during the Second World War – ‘Beckett does not remember the circumstances’.22 This hardly sounds like an intimate connection. Nevertheless, ‘obsession’, ‘lifelong interest’, ‘deep knowledge’ and so on are the repeated characterizations of Beckett’s relationship to Descartes (indeed even ‘resistant’ and ‘differed profoundly’ has been mongered into indebtedness). And we have already seen how Descartes has been championed as a formative influence in Beckett’s development by an entire generation of scholars tracing his early inspirations. Yet four decades after the first Cartesian assumptions were advanced, this thesis remains the current and paradigmatic point of departure; for example, any basic Internet search of both surnames is likely to issue references to Descartes as ‘Beckett’s favourite philosopher’.23 By way of redressing this highly exaggerated relationship, let us advance an opposing hypothesis. This is not ‘Descartes is Beckett’s least favourite philosopher’, but instead, ‘Beckett’s knowledge of Cartesian philosophy was superficial and anecdotal’. Unfortunately, direct evidence bearing upon such opposing hypotheses is now lost, unavailable, or necessarily compiled decades ex post facto by recent scholarship.24 That said, the following survey represents the most complete account of Beckett’s Cartesianism to date. Francis Doherty’s important work bears first mention, for it was not until ‘Mahaffy’s Whoroscope ’ was published in 1992 that the principal text for Whoroscope was located. Prior to this, Adrien Baillet’s unwieldy two-volume biography of 1691, La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, was considered Beckett’s main source. Doherty is probably right in asserting that Mahaffy’s Fellowship to Trinity College Dublin had interested the young Beckett (or more specifically, Mahaffy’s tutoring of Oscar Wilde?), not to mention the appeal of a syncretic and ‘unpretentious’ text intended for ‘the common reader’. And given the textual minutiae undertaken to substantiate the Mahaffy– Whoroscope link, Doherty is certainly right in finding that ‘the amount of material which can unequivocally be said to be from Baillet is small, compared to that which can be shown to be taken from Mahaffy’.25 It is likely that the latter inspired Beckett’s use of the former, for Baillet is mentioned – generally unfavourably – throughout Mahaffy’s slim 1880 Descartes. Then again, the philosopher frequently also gets unsympathetic treatment. Yet throughout, Mahaffy is at pains to show the ambiguities of Descartes’ milieu, as well as the paradoxes comprising the man himself: Thus his life was spent in controversy which he disliked; in writing books which he long avoided; in sustaining orthodoxy which he did not believe; in reverse with his own dogmatism, the dogmatism he so censured in the Schools. And in all this inconsistency, no man was more thoroughly and honestly consistent.26 To be sure, Mahaffy’s biography is a far less starstruck affair than that of

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Baillet. Yet both (particularly surprisingly in the case of Mahaffy’s English introduction to a French thinker) are held in the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Thus, in filling his ‘thick notebook’ on Descartes while a visiting English lecturer in Paris, Beckett need not have left college. Thanks to Mahaffy, Beckett succeeded in finding Descartes a useful protagonist for his early poem. Yet how Beckett first became interested in Descartes, or why he selected these books from amongst thousands on the library shelves, remains largely unexplored. Instrumental here must have been Thomas MacGreevy’s roommate at the Ecole, Jean Beaufret. Knowlson reports that ‘Beckett sought Beaufret’s help in catching up on his reading of some of the major classical and more modern European philosophers’.27 Beaufret was then a philosophical student at the Ecole, who befriended Beckett in the second year of his temporary lectureship; however, their relationship seems not to have lasted beyond the mid-1930s. Though it is impossible to establish whether he first interested Beckett in Descartes – at least, there is no evidence of any prior connection between Beckett and philosophy – the influence of Beaufret is immense. For Beaufret’s vital copy of L. Debricon’s undated (1892?) Descartes: Choix de Textes constitutes the only volume on Descartes in Beckett’s library at his death.28 While the date Beckett obtained this French account of Descartes’ life and writings must remain conjectural, given Beckett’s interest in the subject and his brief association with Beaufret, it is highly likely this is the book from which Beckett obtained his primary Cartesian knowledge in late 1920s Paris. Working on this assumption provides some interesting insights: along with Debricon’s short biography and bibliography are excerpts of numerous writings by Descartes, including a selection of philosophical extracts under the headings ‘Extraits complémentaires de la méthode’, ‘Métaphysique’, ‘La Science’, ‘La Morale’. In turn, each of these chapters is comprised of sections and further subsections. For example, Descartes’ purview of the body as ‘nothing but a statue or machine made of earth’ is originally found in paragraphs two and three of his little-known Treatise on Man, contained in the chapter ‘La Science’, in the section ‘La physiologie’, under the subsection ‘Le corps humain, machine parfaite’.29 Noteworthy too are Debricon’s large excerpts from a small selection of letters by Descartes – including probably his most famous, on intellectual love to Queen Christina of Sweden on 1 February 1647. This letter can justifiably bear claim to being the other half of Beckett’s equation in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ‘Beatrice lurked in every brothel’, explored during his Paris years.30 This theme surfaces later in the oft-cited epigraph to Chapter 6 of Murphy; which, as we shall see, is culled from yet another surprising source. Returning to Choix de Textes, excepting Descartes’ major works (The Discourse on Method and The Principles of Philosophy, Book I ) Debricon’s ‘choices’ are not reprinted in full. And the mélange of biography, letters and especially philosophical selections – such as excerpts from the famous Meditations on

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First Philosophy and Objections and Replies, as well as the odd page from the more obscure Optics and Passions of the Soul – are both subjectively chosen and selectively presented. Also notable are 16 illustrations, of a curiosity to equal the unusual standards for Debricon’s inclusion of extracts. The effect of the volume is one of great breadth superficially condensed, rather like a sporting highlights programme. In sum, if a single book could make cursory philosophical knowledge appear much greater than it really was, this is it. Again, there is no reason to think Beckett’s understanding of philosophy between 1929 and 1930 was any more than this: cursory. There is no evidence of philosophical studies before Beaufret and the Ecole, and no explicit mention of Descartes in Beckett’s prose later than Murphy’s unspectacular ‘dream of Descartes linoleum’.31 Of course, it is possible that Beckett independently, secretly, read widely in philosophy before leaving Ireland; possible that he bought an ‘antediluvian version’ of Descartes’ complete works after 1928 in the same way he did of Immanuel Kant’s a decade later.32 But neither of these explanations is convincing, or in character. Particularly with philosophical books, Beckett eschewed lengthy compilations or difficult works of criticism; instead, he generally sought out synoptic secondary sources just like Choix de Textes. Indeed, the more synoptic the better: hence Mahaffy, not Baillet. Similarly, the ‘synoptical and critical method’ is the essence of Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, described in the Author’s Prefaces as a ‘serious text-book, which is intended to portray in comprehensive and compressed exposition the evolution of the ideas of European philosophy’.33 If our dating of the commencement of the ‘Philosophy Notes’ is accurately placed at around mid-1932 – evidence marshalled in Chapter 2 strongly supports this view – this was less than a year after Beckett’s last recorded meeting with Beaufret. It is quite possible he suggested Windelband’s text to Beckett, especially given the way ‘Lucien’, Beckett’s artistic rendering of Beaufret, is treated as a sort of philosophical guru in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. At any rate, Beckett’s work on his ‘Philosophy Notes’ – within which extracts from Windelband comprise an overwhelming majority – was certainly undertaken after his reading of both Descartes and Arthur Schopenhauer. Yet unlike the silence on Descartes, Beckett was already commenting on Schopenhauer to MacGreevy in mid-1930, and states in a July letter: I am reading Schopenhauer. Everyone laughs at that. Beaufret and Alfy etc. But I am not reading philosophy, nor caring whether he is right or wrong or a good or worthless metaphysician. An intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted – is worth the examination of one who is interested in Leopardi and Proust rather than in Carducci and Barrès.34

This is obvious proof of an interest in Schopenhauer at this time, one strikingly in contrast with the contemporaneous dearth of such comments,

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either positive or negative, regarding Descartes. Crucially, when Beckett later covered these two philosophers in his notes from Windleband’s A History of Philosophy, Descartes is transcribed in the same neutral form as the overwhelming majority of entries; that is, echoing each of Windelband’s sentiments: Descartes propounds as principle of his synthesis: Everything must be true which is as clear and distinct as self-consciousness, i.e. which presents itself to the mind as surely and undeniably as mind’s own existence. Ideas clear and distinct in this sense he calls innate ideas, and of immediate rational evidence. (TCD MS 10967)

Moreover, the above is a useful example of how Beckett compresses Windelband’s own compressing of philosophy in the ‘Philosophy Notes’: Descartes propounded as his principle for the synthetic method the maxim, Everything must be true which is as clear and distinct as self-consciousness, i.e. which presents itself before the mind’s vision as surely and underivably as the mind’s own existence. ‘Clear’ is defined by Descartes as that which is intuitively present and manifest to the mind, ‘distinct’ as that which is entirely clear in itself and precisely determined. And those mental presentations – or ideas, as he calls them after the manner of later Scholasticism – which are in this sense clear and distinct, whose evidence is not to be deduced from any other, but grounded solely in themselves, he calls innate ideas. With this expression he indeed incidentally connects also the psycho-genetic thought that these ideas are imprinted upon the human soul by God, but for the most part he desires to give only the epistemological significance of immediate, rational evidence.35

But more insightfully, the four total pages on Descartes even include a list of primary texts, as well as a restatement of many themes prominent in both Mahaffy and Debricon. As a whole, these entries fail to cast the impression of Cartesian knowledge nearly as encyclopaedic as much Beckett scholarship would have us believe. Diametrically opposed are Beckett’s entries on Schopenhauer from A History of Philosophy, which demonstrate knowledge of his primary texts – exemplified by Beckett’s marginalia on Schopenhauer, clearly recalled from his earlier readings in mid-1930 – as well as rare creative departures from Windelband. Compare the tame entry on Descartes with this fascinating excerpt on Schopenhauer: Irrationalism comes to full development in Schopenhauer by removal of religious element. With him the Urgrund and Urzufall became the will-to- live and T I I [Thing-In-Itself]. Whereas this activity directed solely towards itself is with Fichte the autonomy of ethical self-determination and with Schlegel (pfui!), the ironical

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play of fancy, with dear Arthur it is the absolute unreason of objectless will. Creating itself alone and perpetually it is the never satisfied, the unhappy will; and since world is nothing but self-revelation (objectivation) of the will, it must be a balls aching world. (TCD MS 10967/252.1, my italics)

Note the contraction and variation when compared with Windelband’s paragraph: Irrationalism came to its full development in Schopenhauer by the removal of the religious element. The dark urgency or instinct directed only toward itself appears with him under the name the will to live, as the essence of all things, as the thing-in-itself (cf. § 41,9). In its conception, this will, directed only towards itself, has a formal resemblance to Fichte’s ‘infinite doing’, just as was the case with Schlegel’s irony (cf. § 42,5): but in both cases the real difference is all the greater. The activity directed solely toward itself is with Fichte the autonomy of ethical self-determination, with Schlegel the arbitrary play of fancy, with Schopenhauer the absolute unreason of an objectiveless will. Since this will only creates itself perpetually, it is the never satisfied, the unhappy will: and since the world is nothing but self-knowledge (self-revelation – objectification) of this will, it must be a world of misery and suffering.36

To be sure, neither transcription strays too far from Windelband, for noting every section and a varying degree of its contents is one of Beckett’s selfassigned tasks. But whereas comments on Schopenhauer point toward both personal affinity and prior understanding of his philosophy, Beckett’s entries upon Descartes are bereft of any suggestion that he differed markedly, for Beckett, from Dante’s Belacqua: merely an interesting character, one useful for literary pastiche. Beyond Descartes’ pilloried character in Whoroscope, corroboration that Beckett was thinking seriously about Cartesianism is effectively nonexistent. Even the Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophical ideas (as opposed to subject, personality or writing style) so rarely considered by Beckett are greatly indebted to Windelband. A fascinating example is evident regarding Chapter 6 of Murphy. Where the ‘justification of the expression “Murphy’s mind” ’ is typically seen as the essence of Cartesian dualism (as by Robinson above), and by implication drawn from primary philosophical sources – particularly the eclectic Cartesianism of Baruch Spinoza’s posthumously published Ethics – this too is refracted through Windelband.37 As three of Beckett’s letters from the summer of 1936 reveal, Spinoza had not been properly read by Beckett until after the completion of Murphy, at which point Brian Coffey ‘lent me Brunschvig’s Spinoza et ses Contemporains, the Ethica in the Classiques Garnier with Latin en regard’.38 All Spinozan (and post-Cartesian generally) references in Murphy, therefore, are derived from A History of Philosophy, for example:

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Spinoza develops this line of thought to its farthest consequences. He adheres to qualitative and moral dualism of spatiality and consciousness. The endless series of bodies, modes of extension, and endless series of minds, modes of consciousness, are absolutely heterogeneous and independent. From the things came no title to be called ‘substance’ which belongs only to that whose attributes are extension and consciousness themselves i.e. The infinite being a deity; which cannot be exhausted by 2 attributes accessible to human experience. Ens realissimum contains actuality of infinite number of accessible attributes. Spinoza’s def. [definition] of deity as essence which involves its own existence, is only condensation of ontological proof; substance is that quod in se est et per se concipitur. Spinoza is careful to refuse to deity any of the modifications of consciousness or of extension. God neither mind nor body, only is. (Negative Theology). Ens generalissimum, above the last two substantial determinations, spatiality and consciousness, is devoid of content. Only empty Form of substance is left. God All – and Nothing – (TCD MS 10967/187.1–TCD MS 10967/188)

We have already seen how vital Beckett’s readings and jottings are to his writings – clearly extending to his correspondence – and how often these are incorporated in one form or another, even to the point of helping date archival material. So how vital was Windelband to Chapter 6 of Murphy? Incredibly, the famous epigraph on Murphy’s intellectual love for himself (‘Amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat ’) is in fact slightly amended from a footnote in A History of Philosophy. Confirming Beckett’s notable interest in Occasionalist ideas of ‘miraculous’ mind/body interaction – artistically rendered insofar as ‘Murphy was content to accept this partial congruence of the world of his mind with the world of his body as due to some such process of supernatural determination’ – consider Beckett’s corresponding entry from Windelband in the ‘Philosophy Notes’:39 God is Nature: as the universal world essence, natura naturans; as sum total of individual modes of this essence, natura naturata. This is Spinoza’s unreserved pantheism. He distinguishes finite and infinite modes, affirming three of latter. To the finite modes of individual things corresponds as infinite mode the universe; and those of particular space-forms, the infinite mode of space, and matter; to those and ideation of will, the intellectus infinitus (amor intellectualis quo deus se ipsum amat = raison universelle of Malebranche). (TCD MS 10967/188)

In all the archival material surveyed here, right down to infrequent Greek words in the ‘Philosophy Notes’, Beckett never translated from one language to another while note-taking (unless as part of his self-education in German): he merely took them down in the language in which he found them. By the completion of Murphy, the only language in which Beckett had tried

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Spinoza, English, is too ponderous to translate, too uncharacteristic of Beckett’s artistic method and too coincidentally perfect a rendering to have been the source for the epigraph to Chapter 6. Like Mahaffy’s Descartes from Whoroscope – earlier described by Harvey as ‘more Beckett than Descartes’ – the Spinoza of Murphy seems to be as much Windelband’s construction as Beckett’s. And although it is unlikely that Beckett was greatly exercised by Descartes and the post-Cartesians at this point, let alone at any point thereafter, it is likely that Beckett’s understanding of this area came overwhelmingly from secondary sources. With respect to Descartes, none of this sounds like a treasured connection. One final proof must suffice, although it addresses perhaps the most often cited instance of Murphy’s Cartesianism. In the opening pages of Murphy, Neary defends himself against Murphy’s jibes thus: ‘I should say your conarium has shrunk to almost nothing.’40 Again the word is Windelband’s, not Descartes’: ‘Animals are mere bodies, but in humans the form of spiritus animales in pineal gland (conarium) disturbs the mental substance and gives rise to unclear and indistinct idea (emotion, passion, perturbatio animi)’ (TCD 10967/189). In Beckett Studies, the assumption has always been that Descartes created or initiated (rather than revisited or refashioned) ideas most typically associated with him. Yet it is clear that many of Descartes’ own predecessors and contemporaries were deeply engaged in advancing scepticism, reason, mathematics, the ‘proof’ of God’s existence and, especially, the rejection of medieval scholasticism. As the intent here is not to engage in philosophical disputes, but instead to offer a new perspective on Beckett’s relationship to Western thinking generally, Beckett’s Presocratic notes surveyed later must suffice in showing just how many Cartesian themes are in fact perennial philosophical aporias. But one philosophical point merits recognition, so much so it deserves restating: Descartes did not ‘invent’ philosophical approaches to consciousness, scepticism, systematic rationalism and so on; instead he contributed and responded to – and many times undervalued – a Western tradition over two millennia old. It may well be that Descartes was a forerunner of the Enlightenment and the grandfather of modern philosophy, but not with respect to virtually all the themes ascribed to him, at least, those ascribed to him by Beckett Studies. To avoid uncertainty in these matters, Descartes’ most succinct overview of his ideas is reproduced below from The Principles of Philosophy, Book I, which will be regarded here as representative of the general parameters of his thought: In order to philosophise seriously and search out the truth about all the things that are capable of being known, we must first of all lay aside all our preconceived opinions, or at least we must take the greatest care not to put our trust in any of the opinions accepted by us in the past until we have first scrutinized them afresh and confirmed their truth. Next, we must give our attention in

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an orderly way to the notions that we have within us, and we must judge to be true all and only those whose truth we clearly and distinctly recognize when we attend to them in this way. When we do this we shall realize, first of all, that we exist in so far as our nature consists in thinking; and we shall simultaneously realize both that there is a God, and that we depend on him, and also that a consideration of his attributes enables us to investigate the truth of other things, since he is their cause. Finally, we will see that besides the notions of God and of our mind, we have within us knowledge of many propositions which are eternally true, such as ‘Nothing comes from nothing’. We shall also find that we have knowledge both of a corporeal or extended nature which is divisible, moveable and so on, and also of certain sensations which affect us, such as the sensations of pain, colours, tastes and so on (though we do not yet know the cause of our being affected in this way). When we contrast all this knowledge with the confused thoughts we had before, we will acquire the habit of forming clear and distinct concepts of all the things that can be known. These few instructions seem to me to contain the most important principles of human knowledge.41

By far the most informative application of the above framework to Beckett’s art is contained in Eduard Morot-Sir’s 1976 ‘Samuel Beckett and Cartesian emblems’. For his extensive survey of Cartesian criticism on Beckett, and for his knowledge of modern philosophy, Morot-Sir is invaluable. Like Richard Coe and David Hesla – neither of whom dwells upon Descartes at any length – Morot-Sir is especially adept at philosophical explorations of Beckett’s writings. Many other important scholarly contributions to the Beckett– Descartes debate, both proponents of ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-Cartesian’ readings, seem all too frequently distorted by a limited knowledge of Descartes: there is little to suggest that most have read much further than The Discourse on Method. Morot-Sir’s extensive understanding of Cartesian philosophy is refreshing, but unlike other critics, he does not take a stand on whether Descartes is treated positively or otherwise by Beckett (he understands this as ‘an artificial concern’). Instead, he focuses upon ‘emblems’ found to be recurrent in Beckett’s fiction, especially as his employment of this term is ‘synonymous with image’ and ‘refers to Descartes, Cartesians, or Cartesianism’.42 With this broad remit in hand, Morot-Sir locates seven thematic emblems, which shall be presently adapted for our view of Cartesian philosophy vis-à-vis Beckett. Unsurprisingly, the first of these is ‘The cogito’, ‘Beckett’s most important borrowing from Descartes’, yet one, for Morot-Sir, devoid of the ‘optimistic impulse for the conquest of truth’ in Beckett’s fiction, as well as any attendant ‘philosophical bearing’.43 The following two emblems rather confusingly fall under the headings ‘The duality of mind and body’ and ‘The union of mind and body’. As to the former, its location is grounded in the experiential act of perception: ‘duality of mind and body is for Beckett an immediate “given” of one’s consciousness’; that is, the fictional construction of ‘an internal

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duality’. Contradictory though it is, the latter is not the inverse of the former, nor does such a ‘union’ refer to Descartes’ notorious pineal gland. Instead, this union, ‘perhaps, for Beckett, the most significant part of Descartes’ philosophy’, is rather vaguely unified by Morot-Sir under perception via the cogito. Given that this pairing is summarized as a sort of odd couple – ‘Beckett . . . holds that one feels both duality and union, that it is largely a matter of degree’ – these two emblems will be here joined under one basic formula: the interactions of body and mind. The last major theme, indeed an example of Beckett’s ‘hyper-Cartesianism’ is ‘Methodological doubt’: a more radical form than Descartes’ vehicle for attaining the ‘first truth’, but less aporetic than the ‘Sceptics’ confession of intellectual impotence’. Morot-Sir sees this doubt as largely grounded in terms of linguistic formulations that, for Beckett, are inescapable, and thus act as a writing methodology because ‘statements in the form of a truth-proposition [i.e. true or false, affirmative or negative] are impossible’. Finally, the last three, more minor, emblems are held by Morot-Sir as circumstantial to Beckett’s fiction, rather than as an intrinsic part of its formation. These are, first, ‘Mechanism and relative movement’, or the ‘concept of movement and its meaning for human life’ through the body, which is ‘a combination of mechanical devices’ (and Morot-Sir adds that, for Beckett, ‘they are in poor working condition’). Another emblem is the ‘Duality of intelligence and will ’, again related to the cogito through the freedom of mind and employment of the will as ‘the source of action and of breaking out of the little world and into the big one’. Lastly and most importantly is the ‘The rule of enumeration ’, exemplified by Watt’s inventories or Molloy’s sucking stones. Unlike the previous two, which will be treated here as permutations of duality and the cogito respectively, the idea of enumeration is a separate, guiding principle employed by Descartes in order to ‘be certain of having omitted nothing’.44 ‘Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems’ justly reaffirms that ‘Beckett’s Cartesian kit’ is not philosophical and empirical, but linguistic and artistic: Morot-Sir understands the cogito for Beckett as a ‘hive of words’ to be formulated (that is, explored, dramatized, transformed, satirized, but not accepted or rejected) in fictional discourses. Despite locating seven interrelated Cartesian emblems, contra Morot-Sir’s italicized themes in the preceding paragraph, we have boiled these down to a distinct three – methodological doubt, the cogito, and the permutations of dualism – to which ‘rationalism’ and its ramifications, strangely omitted in his catalogue, should be added. Along with these four is the vital Cartesian method of ‘enumeration’, heretofore only observed by Morot-Sir and Michael Mooney. It is this final rule, characterized as ‘enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out’ in Part 2 of the Discourse, which links Morot-Sir to Mahaffy, Debricon and, quite probably, Beckett.45 For the principle of enumeration – that bastion of mathematical

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certainty for Descartes containing ‘the main secret of my method; and there is no more useful Rule in this whole Treatise . . . required for the completion of our knowledge’ – is cited by both Mahaffy and Morot-Sir, and is reprinted twice in Debricon’s Choix de Textes.46 To be sure, the bare description in Part 2 of the Discourse does no justice to the method of enumeration, but Descartes’ work a decade later goes much further; namely, in the pivotal Rules for the Direction of the Mind, quoted above: This one Rule [of ordering and arranging objects] covers the most essential points in the whole of human endeavour (Rule V) . . . that all things can be arranged serially in various groups (Rule VI) . . . it is only with the aid of enumeration that we are able to make a true and certain judgement about whatever we apply our minds to (Rule VII) . . . which is so careful and accurate that we may conclude with manifest certainty that we have not inadvertently overlooked anything. So even though the object of our inquiry eludes us, provided we have made an enumeration we shall be wiser at least to the extent that we shall perceive with certainty that it could not possibly be discovered by any method known to us (Rule VIII).

Vitally, the above three Rules contained in Choix de Textes are excerpted there together, as here, obeying Descartes’ own injunction in Rule VII: ‘Now these last three Rules should not be separated. We should generally think of them together, since they all contribute equally to the perfection of the method.’47 Unlike the other four emblems in Beckett’s ‘Cartesian kit’, enumeration has no parallel in the Presocratic notes surveyed presently. It is here Descartes is at his most insistent and arrogant regarding his greatness, in stark contrast to Geulincx’s ‘Humility’, which Chapter 5 will show so markedly impressed Beckett. But this is, arguably, Descartes’ most original contribution to philosophical rigour, and the one most suitable for literary pastiche along the lines traced out by Harvey. To his great credit, it was Morot-Sir who located the intrinsically Cartesian method of enumeration, and saw in it what is held here to be Beckett’s only notable borrowing from Descartes: ‘Save for a few indirect allusions, Beckett’s critics have failed to discuss the problem of Cartesian methodology and the possible impact of the “four rules” as exposed in the second part of the Discourse or as developed in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii – especially the . . . fourth rule, called “the rule of enumeration” ’.48 Despite his groundbreaking work, Morot-Sir still repeats and codifies a much more persistent dilemma in Beckett Studies than the mere weighing of ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-Cartesian’ artistic sympathies which he avoids; namely, the underlying premise that Descartes was Beckett’s own ‘first cause’ long after Whoroscope. We have seen little beyond the assertions of scholars to substantiate such a thesis – indeed, Beckett’s silence in letters and notes speaks volumes regarding his (dis)interest in Descartes. Thus, if it is true

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that ‘ “Whoroscope” is Descartes put to the test for his possible literary adaptability’, perhaps only the conception of mathematical enumeration passed Beckett’s Cartesian examination: the one theme directly, explicitly attributable to Descartes as a philosophical innovation (and in turn appropriated by Beckett as an artistic trope). Despite his provocative scholarship on emblems like enumeration, Morot-Sir nevertheless cannot refrain from some of the familiar Mintz–Fletcher characterizations: ‘All Beckettian characters or impersonations come from Descartes. They have Descartes’ personality.’ This transgresses the very limits set at the start of ‘Samuel Beckett and Cartesian emblems’: that of systematically tracing Cartesian themes, rather than advancing ‘irritating’ conflations.49 Ironically, Descartes’ final Rule on method, reprinted in Debricon and therefore almost certainly read by Beckett at least once, warns against the danger of unsystematic overreach: Nor is it an immeasurable task to seek to encompass in thought everything in the universe, with a view to learning in what way particular things may be susceptible of investigation by the human mind. For nothing can be so manysided or diffuse that it cannot be encompassed within definite limits or arranged under a few headings by means of the method of enumeration we have been discussing.50

Interestingly, Beckett drifted away from the study of Descartes around the same time as he was coming from under the shadow of Joyce’s influence. Quite probably, Beckett found neither figure commensurate with his own voice and interests. Nor is Beckett attempting to encompass ‘everything in the universe’ in his fiction after Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in the way he attributes to the Master: ‘the difference is that Joyce is a superb manipulator of material – perhaps the greatest’, recalled Beckett to Israel Shenker in 1956, ‘He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous.’51 During its period of maturation, Beckett Studies consistently argued that Beckett’s primary philosophical influence – if not interest and intellectual proximity – was Descartes and his descendants (as one of which he was sometimes regarded). Although Cartesianism has monopolized philosophical discussions of Beckett’s fictional development, we have seen that attributing a well-stocked ‘Cartesian kit’ to Beckett is unsupported by empirical evidence, at least, beyond that of enumeration. Given Beckett’s interests during the Paris years and immediately thereafter, it is likely that Mahaffy, Baillet and Choix de Textes were effectively used for ‘phrase-hunting’ in much the same way, and at around the same time, as Augustine’s Confessions.52 Regardless, Descartes’ championed clarity is far removed from Beckett’s self-characterization to Shenker. The former believed all knowable knowledge could be methodically obtained through reason; yet inversely in

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1937, Beckett confessed to his ‘German Diaries’ that his mind was a ‘blank, a dim chaos, 90% of my waking hours, the other ten a tiny part is sharply lit with nutritional, sexual and generally [eudaemonical] positions.’53 Far from encompassing ‘in thought everything in the universe’, Beckett was coming to realize even when writing Dream of Fair to Middling Women that too much erudition was a bane: ‘I have enough butin verbal [verbal booty] to strangle anything I’m likely to want to say’.54 BECKETT AND THE PRESOCRATICS Evidence reviewed so far does not support the mountain of Cartesian criticism looming over Beckett’s relationship with Western philosophy, one which has obscured other lines of enquiry. Despite contributing to such a ‘preempting of other avenues of inquiry’ in ‘Molloy Part 1: Beckett’s Discourse on Method ’, Michael Mooney’s subsequent work appreciates this dilemma: ‘ “Cartesian” analyses so dominate critical responses to Samuel Beckett that we overlook the importance of presocratic and sceptical thought in his work’.55 Focusing almost wholly upon Murphy, Mooney’s ‘Presocratic Scepticism: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy Reconsidered’ makes an important contribution to Beckett Studies by pointing up the way in which many philosophical debates – he emphasizes microcosm versus macrocosm, pluralism versus monism and reality versus perception – are in fact derived from Presocratic attempts to understand matter and existence. And by turning to Anaxagoras’ epistemology, especially a fragment on ‘the weakness of the sense perceptions, [so] we cannot judge truth’, Mooney goes beyond the work of others who have focused solely on Democritus and Atomic Theory. Regarding Democritus, the most prominent article is Sylvie Debevec Henning’s ‘The Guffaw of the Abderite’. Henning also frames Murphy in terms of a ‘philosophical satire’, taking up many of the oppositional elements noted by Mooney. She also adds those of motion and rest, in terms of Atomic Theory: ‘The atom then, “is” not, it is constantly becoming. It never was nor ever will be at rest; it exists as eternally in motion’ – or, in the more famous Democritean phrase in Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’, ‘Naught is more real than nothing’ (TCD MS 10967/75).56 Surprisingly, neither critical text notes Democritus’ ideas about delusions of the senses caused by these shifting atoms. Without the fire-atoms comprising perception there would be only the void, and ‘we could see an ant crawling on the sky’. This phrase, found in both the ‘Philosophy Notes’ and the climactic pages of Chapter 11 in Murphy, figures in Murphy’s demise to a far greater degree than Henning’s view of his ‘inadvertent’ suicide.57 The importance of the perceivable ant for reassessing philosophy in Murphy is such that we shall further pursue it in the following pages.

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The last and most insightful study on Presocratic thought surveyed here is, curiously, also titled ‘The Guffaw of the Abderite’. Here too, Democritus embodies everything that Descartes is not. Against Cartesian systematic thought, ‘Beckett evidently wants us to understand that chaos has the last word with man in the sensory world’: He brings in philosophers and their ideas simply when they happen to provide grist for his literary mill. And he appears to regard philosophers in two ways. . . . Either they are genuine guides, directing us how to deal with the mess we cannot get rid of; or else, through their contradictory recipes for making sense of the mess, they reveal all the more patently the kind of mess we are stuck in and stuck with. False guides, too, have their uses.58

Alongside Henning and Mooney, the Hamiltons’ strongest proof lies with the climax of Murphy: ‘Endo in Greek is within. Democritus said that all true knowledge comes from within. The harmony of the good life, moreover, he termed “symmetry.” Thus Murphy learns from within that symmetry is the name of the game.’59 It is also worth pointing out here that this symmetry is consummated after the famous chess match, through the ‘butterfly kiss’, with Murphy’s ‘fingers, his lips, nose and forehead almost touching Mr. Endon’s, seeing himself stigmatised in those eyes that did not see him’. Given the explicit reference to the Abderite, and his ‘Naught is more real’ maxim alongside the allusion to the ‘famous ant’ – all within two pages60 – the emphasis on sensory perception through the five senses is explicitly Democritean: ‘ “There are two forms of knowledge, the trueborn and the bastard. To the bastard belong all these: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The trueborn is quite apart from these” (Fr. 11)’ (TCD MS 10967/79). Even more importantly, Murphy’s ‘trueborn’ moment of realization, his first understanding of a solipsism much more genuine than merely binding himself to a rocking-chair, does not come from his perception of Endon – for Democritus taught that the senses are unreliable – but from within himself: Murphy heard words demanding so strongly to be spoken that he spoke them, right into Mr. Endon’s face, Murphy who did not speak at all in the ordinary way unless spoken to, and not always even then. the last at last seen of him himself unseen by him and of himself 61

Again, this understanding is drawn directly from the ‘Philosophy Notes’: The atoms outside us can affect our soul atoms directly without intervention of special senses. Soul atoms permeate the body and could come into immediate

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contact with external atoms, and so know them as they really are. Thus D.[Democritus] refused, like Socrates, to separate sense and thought. ‘Poor mind’ he makes the senses say (Fr. 125) ‘it is from us thou hast got the proofs to throw us with. Thy throw is a fall.’ Trueborn knowledge not thought, but a kind of inner sense, with objects like the ‘common sensibles’ of Aristotle. (TCD MS 10967/79)

Murphy’s inner revelation, arising from his (unreliable) perceptions of Endon’s eyes, animates Democritus’ perhaps most famous extant fragment: ‘truth is in the depths’ (TCD MS 10967/78.1). With this inner sense ‘incandescent’ within him, Murphy has no further need for the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat, his clothes, even the mental images his ‘poor mind’ failed to conjure. Climatically, Murphy returns to his rocking chair, but with a twist: unlike in Chapter 1 of the novel, there are now unseen atoms of ‘excellent gas, superfine chaos’ around him.62 How else could Murphy die than through ‘misadventure’ caused by fire? Doctrine of Perception: We perceive through our high class fire-atoms. The emanations from things set in motion the fire-atoms of the soul of man. These emanations are the images (infinitely small copies) of the things whence they proceed and their effect on fire-atoms constitutes perception. (TCD MS 10967/75)

These interventions with the ‘Philosophy Notes’ show that Mooney, Henning and the Hamiltons are more right than they know: Murphy is much less a Cartesian novel than a Presocratic one. Even more precisely, if one overriding perspective is needed to ‘define’ this novel of ideas, it is a Democritean one shaped by Beckett’s notes. Whereas Mooney and Henning attempt to offer a Democritean reading of Murphy, the Hamiltons helpfully trace a general trend in Beckett’s use of Democritus. For example, as a prototype of later Beckettian ‘people’: ‘commonly old, suffering from some major physical disability, and homeless wanderers. They are comic only in the sense they refuse to view either themselves or their world under the aspect of tragedy, so that they may be termed “tragic-comic” ’. Their analysis holds that Democritus’ ideas on continuing consciousness after bodily death applies to the 1946 The Calmative; a life originated in slime (or mud) provides the setting for How It Is in 1960; and more generally in Beckett’s oeuvre, that a Democritean conviction regarding the unreliability of the senses means ‘Beckett’s people are continually perplexed about where they are, how they came to be where they are, what they are seeing, and what they may or may not have seen a moment earlier.’63 Unfortunately, the ‘Philosophy Notes’ on Democritus do not explicitly highlight human origins through slime, nor post-mortem consciousness.

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Neither is there any physical description of Democritus: the ‘little wearyish old man’ of ‘Euneg I’, as John Pilling has shown, is in fact taken from Robert Burton’s ‘Democritus to the Reader’ in his Anatomy of Melancholy.64 Parenthetically, this reinforces the idea that Beckett read summarily, and is a strong signal to keep wary: in Dream of Fair to Middling Women alone, references to Socrates, Plato, Gottfried Leibniz and Henri Bergson suggest deep philosophical reading; however, as Beckett’s Dream Notebook shows, like the Burton entries on Democritus, these come from varied sources and are not evidence of any sustained study of philosophy before 1932.65 Still, writing against dominant Cartesian readings in Beckett Studies, the Hamiltons are to be commended for suggesting that Beckett’s knowledge of Presocratic thought was evident in both his interwar and postwar texts. It must be emphasized again that, with the exception of Schopenhauer, and to a much lesser extent Descartes, Beckett did not undertake any philosophical excursus prior to the composition of the ‘Philosophy Notes’. Like the Descartes of Whoroscope, the use of philosophical thought in Beckett’s writing prior to Murphy was popularized rather than personalized, as it was later to become. During these early interwar years, Beckett used the contrasting figures of Democritus and Heraclitus, if only anecdotally and without reference to their philosophical ideas: their contrast of laughter and weeping is first employed in More Pricks Than Kicks.66 The idea is further transformed in Beckett’s postwar fiction, in one instance, as part of Malone’s surroundings, comprising ‘the peaceful sounds of men at large, getting up, lying down, preparing food, coming and going, weeping and laughing, or nothing at all, no sound at all’.67 Malone Dies also explicitly invokes Democritus, whose famous maxim becomes ‘one of those phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.’ The magnitude of the thought remains, but it becomes subsumed into Malone’s tale, a part of the darkness ‘that accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything’.68 In contrast to the superficial marshalling of Democritean laughter in More Pricks Than Kicks, Malone is well aware of Democritus’ philosophical thought, needing to ‘guard’ against such dangerous ideas in his struggle against silence. With finality, the Unnamable offers even less referential traction regarding Democritus in his culminating battle against silence, intrusive voices, synthetic stories and the tears of Heraclitus – despite (purposely?) confusing the former with the latter: I’ll laugh, that’s how it will end, in a chuckle, chuck chuck, ow, ha, pa, I’ll practise, nyum, hoo, plop, psss, nothing but emotion, bing bang, that’s blows, ugh, pooh, what else, oooh, aaah, that’s love, enough, it’s tiring, hee hee, that’s the Abderite, no, the other, in the end, it’s the end, the ending end . . . open on the void, open on

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the nothing, I’ve no objection, those are words, open on the silence, looking out on the silence . . .69

A later example of the Democritean ‘guffaw’ occurs in 1951, in the penultimate ‘Text for Nothing’: ‘here the laugh, the long silent guffaw of the knowing non-exister, at hearing ascribed to him such pregnant words, confess you’re not the man you were, you’ll end up riding a bicycle’.70 By 1961, that ‘Cartesian centaur’ famously championed by Kenner is denied to Winnie in Happy Days, buried up to her waist; in Act 2 she is even less mobile, into it up to her neck. Yet even in such an untenable position, here too the Abderite’s cackle at existence is made explicit. Responding to Alan Schneider’s question when in rehearsals, ‘We all assume “old joke” is Winnie herself . . .?’, Beckett wrote: ‘ “Old joke” not Winnie, rather the joke of being that is said to have caused Democritus to die of laughter. To be related also if you like to Nell’s “nothing is funnier than unhappiness etc.” Same idea in Watt (the 3 smiles).’71 Consistent with the postwar ‘shedding’ process, Democritean traces, such as his doctrine of fire explored above, are merely ashes within the play itself – suggested by Winnie’s parasol spontaneously bursting into flames. We are thus returned to Beckett’s consideration that ‘form is content, content is form’ in his first published essay, on Joyce: ‘How can we qualify this general esthetic vigilance without which we cannot hope to snare the sense which is for ever rising to the surface of the form and becoming the form itself ?’72 Thirty years later the question is answered – or more accurately, qualified – in a return to Democritean ideas on perception and humour at the absurdity of existence, both so initially unconcealed in Murphy: Or a brief . . . gale of laughter, should I happen to see the old joke again. [Pause. Smile appears, broadens and seems about to culminate in laugh when suddenly replaced by expression of anxiety] . . . Looks like life of some kind! [Looks for spectacles, puts them on, bends closer. Pause.] An emmet! [Recoils. Shrill.] Willie, an emmet, a live emmet! [Seizes magnifying-glass, bends to ground again, inspects through glass.] Where’s it gone? [Inspects.] Ah! [Follows its progress through grass.] Has like a little white ball in its arms. [Follows progress. Hand still. Pause.] It’s gone in.73

Far from being able to ‘see an ant crawling on the sky’, Winnie needs spectacles and a magnifying glass to see an ‘emmet’ crawling across her immediate path. So much for clarity or pure perception, then, in Beckett’s veiled employment of Democritus in Happy Days. Finally, in keeping with this turn toward the postwar inextricability of subject and object indicated by Happy Days, the strange setting from the 1970 prose text ‘The Lost Ones’ is also strongly evocative of the Democritean universe found in the following entry from the ‘Philosophy Notes’:

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Inside a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony. The light. Its dimness. Its yellowness.74 ‘If a cone is cut by a plane parallel to its base, what are we to think of the surfaces of the two sections? Are they equal or unequal? If they are equal, then the sections will be equal, and the cone will have the properties of a cylinder, which is composed of equal, not unequal, circles. Which is most absurd.’ Also the first to give volume of cone. (TCD MS 10967/79)

But again this would be ‘the neatness of identifications’ writ large: by refracting Beckett’s interests and artistic approach through one system at the expense of all the others, other avenues are obscured. While a Democritean laugh, indeed echoes through ‘The Lost Ones’, arguing that Beckett is ‘obsessed by Democritus’ is precisely what our discussion of the ‘Philosophy Notes’ deliberately seeks to avoid. For Beckett’s own jokes simply do not have only one author. The ‘danger’ of such ‘identifications’, for example in Murphy, is already manifest in the critical collapsing of fundamentally oppositional elements into Cartesian dualism (imperfectly represented by the three zones of Murphy’s mind on the one hand, and ‘it was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind’ on the other). For the issues Beckett is addressing in Murphy – including ‘psychiatric-psychotic’, ‘I am not of the big world, I am of the little world’, and fate (as represented by Suk’s horoscope against Murphy’s mental freedom in his rocking chair) – simply cannot be consistently read through Cartesianism.75 Here rests the basic distinction between Descartes and the Presocratics. Whereas the former offers a clear rational philosophical system, the latter initiated philosophical systems as such. Whereas Descartes’ first principles were inextricable from the Judeo–Christian conception of God, the Presocratics sought suppositionless ideas both with and without deism, physically (as with the shape of the earth) and metaphysically (indeed, Beckett recorded that Anaximander first ‘transferred the Weltstoff [worldstuff] beyond experience’) (TCD MS 10967/7). And whereas Descartes expresses opposition through the interplay of mind and body, oppositional structures are methodologically inherent in the philosophies of Heraclitus, Eleaticism and others – let alone their opposition to the respective ideas of Democritus and Pythagoreanism. Also pertinently, debates over the basis of reality and nothingness; sensualism and logic; motion and rest; truth and deception; being (Logos) and becoming (experience); the unity or diversity of existence; and many others, all feature prominently in Presocratic thinking. That Beckett was particularly drawn to Ancient Greek ideas is independently confirmed by the vitally important ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, which ‘assumes exceptional importance from a developmental point of view’ in John Pilling’s research: ‘one comes closer than one would ever have believed possible to a mind in the process of defining itself, and to creative impulses

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later subjected to more severe self-denying ordinances and restraints’. Classifying it as an ‘enchiridion’ – the Greek term for ‘handbook’ contained in that handbook – Pilling views this pivotal manuscript as proof ‘that Beckett, having abandoned an academic career, had by no means abandoned the academic habits of mind inculcated by it’.76 While Pilling justly reviews these habits categorically, we shall instead focus upon the rich material concerning Ancient Greece, which covers various subjects: Greek mythology and lexicography; historical figures and events; and a wealth of references like ‘Euripides studied eloquence under Prodicus, ethics under Socrates, philosophy under Anaxagoras’ (RUL MS 3000, p. 75). As might be expected, Presocratic philosophy also plays a notable role. Strangely enough, the story of Hippasos and Pythagoras in Beckett’s ‘Les Deux Besoins’ are taken from neither Burnet nor Windelband, which offer different renderings and are taken much earlier than 1938, but from the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’. Over a period of perhaps six years there are far too many entries on Ancient Greece to recount here, and anecdotal evidence must suffice: ‘Epicurean taunted a Stoic with numerous conversions from Stoicism to Epicureanism, whereas hardly ever inversely, Stoic: “A man may become a eunuch, but a enuch [sic] can never become a man” ’ (RUL MS 3000, p. 60). It is not surprising that Beckett’s preference for the latter philosophical outlook is codified in the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, for almost all of Beckett’s interests in the second half of the 1930s are. Ranging over most erudite subjects – from science and languages to religion and noteworthy quotations, though by no means limited to things Greek – this repository acted as Beckett’s intellectual piggy bank during the interwar years, and periodically thereafter. One final withdrawal from this ‘enchiridion’ is appropriate to our discussion of the Presocratics. As the initial pages of the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ set out, the specific importance of Presocratic thinking to the structure of Murphy is enormous, if simultaneously concealed. Given that Beckett wrote ‘Whoroscope’ on the cover of RUL MS 3000; given his interest in aspects of early Greece at this time, and interest in words generally; and given that both texts were started roughly simultaneously, it is not surprising that Beckett looked to etymology early in writing Murphy: ‘Greeks trace horoscope from position of stars and planets at hour of birth (or of conception)’ (RUL MS 3000, p. 5). Along with character and setting, the second sentence raises the issue of the hero’s (losing) struggle with fate and freedom as integral to the novel’s plot: ‘Murphy sat out of it [the sun], as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.’ In both the opening pages of the novel – Celia’s obtaining the horoscope for Murphy elicits the first, fitting, exchange (‘ “God blast you”, he said. “He is doing so,” she replied. Celia.’) – and in the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, then, the fatalistic nature of the horoscope is intended to act as a trigger.77 Vitally, this trigger is methodologically tied to Ancient Greek ideas on the very first page of the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, setting out at this initial period

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of writing how Beckett intended these diffuse strands to eventually structure Murphy. Written even before the eponymous character is named, the first 11 of 34 numbered sections (comprising the first 16 pages of the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’) make clear the debt to Democritean fire, and to Anaximander’s proto-quietism (RUL MS 3000, pp. 1–2). They are also an incredible glimpse of Beckett’s creative process: 1 Impetus given by H.[Horosocope] throughout. To X [Murphy] who has no motive, inside or out, available. 2 Dynamist ethic of X. Keep moving the only virtue

vicious = [cindled] etc.

3 H. any old oracle to begin with. If corpus of motives after stichomancy had given quietism oder was [i.e. ‘or what’]. But gradually ratified by its own refutation. Till it acquires authority of fatality. No longer a guide to be consulted but a force to be obeyed. Dutiful death of both! 4 X. and H. clarified side by side. Monads in arcanum of circumstance, each apperceiving in the other till no more of the petites perceptions, that are life. So that H., more and more organic, is realised in X. as he [via] it, and they must perish together (fire oder was). 5 Racinian lighting, darkness devoured. 6 Journey through the ‘layers’ like D.[Dante] and V.[Virgil] along the Purgatorial cornices, except that V. goes back, H. goes out. Purgatorial atmosphere sustained throughout, by stress on Anaximander’s individual existence as atonement. 7 H. mentor and squire, principle of knowledge and suggests its life of its own by inexplicable dis- and re-appearances, changing, [bent] etc. 8 Choose ‘layers’ carefully on some such principle as that of V.’s, distribution of sins and punishments. But keep whole Dantesque analogy out of sight. 9 Each undertaking, in accordance with a clause of H., breaks down in accordance with clause of H. (This is the sense of H. being ratified by its own [controversion].) Thus H., and thereby X. decrease in scope and transform their potential into actual. Entelechies.

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10 Each ‘cornice’ occupied by the physical failure which is the metaphysical achievement, in so far as it narrows the physical field (petites perceptions) and constitutes an increase in the apperceived. Vocation the essence of purgatory, defunction its negation. 11 Important to vary technique in demonstrating the successive defunctions. Thus an elegiac tune for a quasi-vocation where attunement hardly perceptible, debasing X in the virtual and threatening to incarcerate him. [RUL MS 3000, pp. 1–2]78

Without doubt, reference to both ‘attunement’ and Anaximander come from that portion of the ‘Philosophy Notes’ on the Presocratics, and we have also seen the importance of fire and motion, indeed ‘H.’ itself, in Ancient Greek thinking. In drawing upon other influences, Dante provides the purgatorial setting, Quietism the mood and Jean Racine the lights. Descartes is nowhere to be found. The closest trace is, unexpectedly, Leibniz, who Beckett described as ‘a great cod’ after finishing his Monadology in early December 1933.79 A response like this, however, is strange considering that monads, entelechies and apperception are so prominent above. Why? Doubtless not on account of Leibniz’s philosophical model, understood as the apogee of rationality, nor, surely, his conclusion that we live in the most ideal of all possible worlds. If the argument throughout this text is worth anything, the answer is certainly not Beckett’s adherence to those doctrines. Rather, the most likely answer is again Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, which affords Leibniz a central place in the philosophical canon, finding that ‘in Leibniz all threads of the old and the new metaphysics run together’. A reasonable supposition is that Beckett takes this understanding one step further than Windelband, using Leibniz as a methodological fulcrum for the ‘Interwar Notes’ occupying Beckett’s attention in the years before the start of Murphy. While this will be considered in greater depth in Chapter 4, it is worth noting that the only philosophical phrase used twice in Beckett’s outline above is ‘petites perceptions’. This phrase is not to be found in standard translations of Leibniz’s Monadalogy, but is given this unusual definition by Windelband, who relates these perceptions to ‘the representative side of the monads’: ‘In the language of to-day the petites perceptions would be unconscious mental states.’80 FROM A SYZYGY TO BECKETTIAN ‘ATARAXY’ After showing how Cartesian readings of Beckett are an effective house of cards that collapses under the fresh air of empirical scrutiny, rebuilding

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with care is all the more essential. For in proposing not a ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-’ but a ‘non-Cartesianism’, the facile mistake would be to simply substitute Democritus for Descartes, or Presocratic for Cartesian philosophy. Instead, the perspective advanced thus far has stressed Beckett’s general indebtedness to philosophical themes and debates, as opposed to defining his artistic servitude by virtue of one philosopher or movement. To be sure, even philosophers in Ancient Greece betray great dependence on their predecessors in developing their ideas. One example is that Democritus’ more comprehensive conception of life as cylindrical is itself noted by Beckett to have initiated with Anaxagoras: ‘His earth in shape intermediate between disc of Thales and Sphere of Pythagoreans – a short cylinder “like the drum of a pillar” on the upper surface of which we live, with the other antipodal to us’ (TCD MS 10967/7.1). The continuing conversation between Presocratic philosophers on the basic composition of reality – like that over the shape of the earth – cannot have been lost on Beckett. Other examples of the shape of the earth transcribed by Beckett include Thales’ planet ‘as an island surrounded by river Okeanos’ (TCD MS 10967/5.1), Anaximander’s ‘disc and the heavens surround it “like a hat” ’ (TCD MS 10967/6) and the Atomists’ view that ‘the sun and moon were at one time worlds by themselves, which subsequently fell into the greater vortex of which our earth is the centre’ (TCD MS 10967/ 33). We may today scoff that ‘Ionia [was] never able to accept scientific views of the earth, and even Democritus continued to believe it was flat’ (TCD MS 10967/6), but for one interested in ‘the shape of ideas’ this is fertile ground, pointed up by the overwhelming proportion of the ‘Philosophy Notes’ rooted in the different systems of Presocratic understanding of systemic thought itself.81 It remains to show how this effort was directed toward much larger and longer philosophical themes; that Beckett is indeed a ‘non-Cartesian’. Evidence surveyed in Chapter 2 noted Beckett’s continued interest in motion and rest in Mercier and Camier, exemplified also by Murphy’s rocking chair. Paradoxes of motion and rest are first attributed to Zeno of Elea: Zeno’s demonstrations directed against the assumption of motion as selfintelligibly made by Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Atomists. . . . These arguments an illustration of the antithesis between thinking and perceiving. (TCD MS 10967/14) That is all he undertook to prove. His work was argumentum ad homines and as such perfectly successful. (TCD MS 10967/15.1)

Nearly 50 years later, the tension between motion and rest is powerfully restated in Beckett’s 1980 Rockaby:

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time she stopped going to and from all eyes all sides high and low for another another like herself 82

Chapter 2 also traced the ‘old Greek’ Hamm (and later Beckett, unable to find his ‘notes on the Presocratics’) alluded to in Endgame. As previously seen, these in turn correspond to Beckett’s entries on Protagoras: Thinking and perceiving had been set over against each other from point of view of their relative worth; this determining element disappeared for Protagoras, and so there remained for him only the view of the psychological identity of thinking and perceiving. He declared that the entire psychical life consists only in perceptions. Sensualism. (TCD MS 10967/44)

In Rockaby, views of this ‘first individualist’ were given a sombre gloss by ‘V’, viewing individualism in terms of a lonely search for ‘another like herself ’. In keeping with the less explicitly associative postwar writing, the ideas become indistinguishable from presentation, connecting with Beckett’s ‘new relation’ of form and content given such pride of place in his ‘Three Dialogues’ with Georges Duthuit. A number of critics have noticed the importance of Murphy as the progenitor of this artistic transformation. Ackerley’s essential dissection of that novel has shown that in addition to ‘phrase bombs’, Murphy ‘was the matrix in which many later works were formed . . . many of the later concerns (word, theme and detail) are implicit in Murphy’.83 A central reason for such continued emphasis on Murphy is the increasing scholarly consensus on the insights offered by Beckett’s first novel as a kind of laboratory of ideas. For Murphy offers the first application of virtually all of Beckett’s self-directed philosophical and psychological knowledge (with the notable exception of Fritz Mauthner). Since it was composed just as Beckett’s own laborious notetaking from scholarly sources was coming to an end and the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ was becoming the main receptacle for Beckett’s reading – indeed, with the latter quite possibly supplanting the more focused reading of the previous four years – Murphy is a vital text on the basis of this congruence alone. Yet the main impetus for its centrality in recent scholarship is the way in which Beckett transforms erudite ‘notesnatching’ into structural artistic devices in Murphy.84 Whereas philosophy is used for essentially decorative purposes in More Pricks Than Kicks (although Belacqua’s decision to ‘arm his mind with laughter’ rather than the tears of Heraclitus does kill him in the end of ‘Yellow’ – albeit in the form of a gaseous anaesthetic),85 we saw that

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the outline commencing the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ initially structures what becomes Murphy around Leibnizian monads and Anaximander’s concept of atonement. As to the latter, Beckett correspondingly registered in his notes on the Presocratics that Anaximander’s ‘doctrine that things must perish as an expiation for injustice presents the first dim attempt to conceive the cosmic process as ethical necessity and the shadows of transitoriness’ (TCD MS 10967/7.1). By way of showing the truly ancient heritage of a ‘Cartesian’ trope, not to mention the true source for the rationalistic ‘emblem’ held to exist in Beckett’s writing, the most demonstrably important system invoked in Murphy is that of Pythagoras, not Descartes. As Beckett transcribed from his ‘Philosophy Notes’, not only is rationalism systematized by Pythagoras, so too is his entire conception of existence: Virtue: realisation of harmony through exercise of asceticism, music, gymnastics, geometry. The Deity: The One (First Unity) devoid of oppositions. (TCD MS 10967/16)

Without doubt, Pythagoreanism is visible throughout Murphy. Virtually every utterance of Neary, perhaps Pythagoras’ most fervent disciple, is traceable to Beckett’s 13 pages of notes on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. And Beckett certainly is not trying to hide this influence in the barroom exchange between Neary and Wylie: ‘But betray me,’ said Neary, ‘and you go the way of Hippasos.’ ‘The Akousmatic, I presume,’ said Wylie. ‘His retribution slips my mind.’ ‘Drowned in a puddle,’ said Neary, ‘for having divulged the incommensurability of side and diagonal.’ ‘So perish all babblers,’ said Wylie. ‘And the construction of the regular dodeca – hic – dodecahedron.’86

Unlike the later use of Hippasos’ story in ‘Les Deux Besoins’, drawn from the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, almost the entire conversation between Neary and Wylie is lifted from two extended Pythagorean excerpts: Tradition represents Hippasos as divulger of Pythagorean secret, and he is said to have been drowned at sea for revealing incommensurability of side and diagonal, or for publishing construction of regular dodecahedron. (TCD MS 10967/22.1) Chief characteristic of later Pythagoreans is the relinquishing of religious element and effort to clear Pythagoras of charge of mysticism. Thus Hippasos of Metapontion was guilty of publishing a mystic discourse ‘with the view of misrepresenting Pythagoras’. Tradition that there had always been 2 grades in the

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order, Mathematicians (Pythagoreans) and Akousmatics (Pythagorists), and that Hippasos led the latter. (TCD MS 10967/23)

And Neary’s stoppable heart, which he called alternately ‘Apmonia’, ‘Isonomy’ and ‘Attunement’ – starkly contrasting with Murphy’s own palpitations – is a sign of his health and virtue in Pythagorean cosmology: health was ‘isonomy’ of opposites in the body, disease undue predominance of one or other. Health was ‘attunement’ (Apmonia) and blend (temperament). (TCD MS 10967/21)

Nevertheless, Neary’s heart does flutter for Miss Counihan (‘My tetrakyt!’), for him truly a ‘perfect 10’: Early Pythagoreans represented numbers and explained their properties by means of ‘figures’ (as on dice). Most celebrated of these was the tetrakyts by which they used to swear, which showed at a glance what they regarded as most important property of number 10, namely that it is the sum of first four natural integers (1+2+3+4 = 10):

Consequently, Neary gives her the rather dubious gift of his autographed ‘tractate, The Doctrine of the Limit’ which is in fact scored in Beckett’s margins, next to the following: P.[Pythagoras]’s great contribution to philosophy. He supplemented Milesian conception of matter with correlative conception of Form. This doctrine he illustrates from music and medicine. [margin: Music] It is certain that P. discovered numerical ratios which determine concordant intervals of the scale. Harmony (Apmonia) in classical Greek music refers not to chords but to melodic progressions, and means, first ‘tuning’ and then ‘scale’. (TCD MS 10967/26)

So too with Neary’s knowledge ‘of his great master’s figure of the three lives’ (TCD MS 10967/19.1), use of the phrase ‘Ipse dixit’ (TCD MS 10967/20)

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and so on. The utility of the Pythagorean philosophical system, however, is given the lie in Murphy with Neary’s final realization that his perfect system is unsuitable to lived experience: ‘Life is all rather irregular’.87 Yet long before Neary’s admission of defeat, Murphy had come to the conclusion that his experience as ‘a physical and rational being’ was essentially incurable, as he was forced into choosing ‘between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world’.88 Such problems face a host of Beckett’s creations in one way or another, like Hamm’s armchair-bound soliloquy on the ‘old Greek’ which demands: ‘use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ Again, comparison is not made here in order to argue for an ‘anti-Pythagorean’ unity underwriting Beckett’s literature, but to point out how often ideas encountered – by Beckett and by his people – are often ‘nothing less fundamental’ than the earliest philosophical doctrines in Europe. For just as neither Hamm nor Murphy ought to be defined by the constraints of Cartesian dualism, neither does that famed guide of rationality offer much direction. Already in Murphy, the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ offered by the progenitor of modern philosophy and (alongside Bacon) science is castigated along with his Newtonian kin: The nature of outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and children of science would seem to have as many ways of kneeling to their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer reality, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the definer.

Instead of Enlightenment rationality, Presocratic thought offers a more appropriate context for the paradoxical opening lines of Endgame: ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.’89 Two further points bear mentioning here, best effected through recalling the earlier Heraclitean opposition to Democritean laughter, first advanced by Beckett in ‘Yellow’. Akin to the preceding discussion of Democritus, Heraclitus is also the subject of lengthy transcription in the ‘Philosophy Notes’, as ‘the dark, the obscure, the weeping philosopher’. But in addition to such ‘phrase-bombs’ regarding this ‘first relativist’, Heraclitus also opposes Pythagorean rationality, while being particularly noted for advancing dialectal thought structures in Ancient Greece. Heraclitus is therefore afforded a prominent place in Murphy the character, as well as the novel. As a paragon of rationality, Neary is bound to be scorned by Murphy, just as Heraclitus scorned Pythagoras: Had not a good word for any of his predecessors – Homer, Hesiod, Xenophanes, Hekataios, Pythagoras: ‘Much learning does not teach men to think.’ Wisdom

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is not a knowledge of many things, but the clear knowledge of one thing only. And this he describes as his Logos ‘true evermore’. (TCD MS 10967/26)

In keeping with the fundamentally dialectical thinking of the Presocratics, in general, Murphy is cast in a role opposing Neary in everything from Miss Counihan’s affections – for it is not ‘intellectual love’ that Neary is after – to choosing 1.83 cups of coffee, and even his own mind. Contra Neary, Murphy’s love is not Miss Counihan, and preferably not even his ‘deplorable susceptibility to Celia, biscuits, and so on’. Indeed, so long as his body could be appeased, the ‘one thing only’ Murphy desires is to come alive in his mind, especially the third zone, ‘the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms’.90 This ‘Matrix of surds’ offers the best ‘kick’ given to Pythagoreanism, and simultaneously evokes the Heraclitean flux: The ‘flux of things’ is a ceaseless strife of opposites and this strife the father of all things . . . Becoming is unity of opposites. (TCD MS 10967/25) In this ceaseless transformation of all things nothing individual persists, but only the order, in which the exchange between the contrary movements is effected – the law of change, which constitutes the meaning and worth of the whole . . . The Becoming of Heraclitus produces no Being, as the Being of Parmenides no Becoming. (TCD MS 10967/26) His thought dominated by opposition of sleeping and waking, life and death. Life, sleep and death correspond to Fire, Water, Earth, and latter are to be understood from former. Sleep and death are due to increase of moisture. ‘It is death to souls to become water’. Waking and life are due to increase of warmth and fire: ‘The dry soul is the wisest and the best.’ As sleep alternates with waking and life with death, so fire is fed by exhalations of water and these are in turn produced by warmth of fire. Similarly for macrocosm, night and day, summer and winter. Sun is pure fire, the wisdom that ‘steers’ the world. (TCD MS 10967/26.1)

For the Presocratics, truly starting from the most basic ignorance of the shape and primal substance of the world, opposition was a veritable methodology. Nor was Beckett removed from the interplay of such oppositional structures, for these ideas vastly swell his transcriptions. The first of two appropriate examples, taken from Beckett’s notes on the Presocratics, is the listing of Pythagorean oppositional structures: Essential opposition is between the one and the many; One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Many Limited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Non-Limited

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Even Female Darkness Cold Wet Bad In Motion Crooked, oblong (TCD MS 10967/17)

Their Weltanschauung becomes thus dualistic: over against the limited, odd, perfect and good stand the limitless, even, imperfect, and bad. As, however, both principles are united in the number one, which has the value of an even as well as an odd number, so in the world as a whole these antitheses are adjusted to form a harmony. The world is harmony of numbers. (TCD MS 10967/17.1)

A second instance is offered by Empedocles – listed by Beckett as ‘To Pythagoras as Aristotle to Plato’ – whose Love and Strife also bear upon Chapter 6 of Murphy. Endlessly repeated archetypical world cycle under this double aegis. From unity of love (non-world) through appearance of world in its opposition to hate, to disintegration of world of hate and reintegration into worldless unity of love. Love – Strife – Hate – for ever and ever. Living an expiation of the arrogant desire for individual existence. From plant through animal to man, who is finally worthy to return to primal unity. Propagation is an evil, because it retards reorganisation of primitive unity. Precursor of Darwin and Schopenhauer. Four radical principles in man: Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His solid parts Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His liquid parts Air . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His breath. Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His spirit (mind). (TCD MS 10967/28)

Although there are countless instances throughout Beckett’s pages – particularly in Beckett’s late work – The Trilogy is the first to employ such a dialectic structurally. This is perfectly expressed by Moran’s transformation from bourgeois father into (a likeness of ) Molloy, his own disintegration and rising uncertainties brilliantly exposed by Molloy ’s final lines, inverting the opening of the second section: ‘I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.’91 In short, the oppositional structures at play in Molloy and elsewhere are ill-suited to Cartesian mind–body interactions. Instead, those of Cartesian dualism pervading criticism on Beckett ought to be

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subsumed into that larger dialectical thinking first advanced by the Presocratics. Useful in highlighting these dialectics in Beckett’s writing is David Hesla’s telescopic history-of-ideas approach, his reading of Beckett’s exploration as ‘finally ontological: it asks the question: What is the being of that unity we call man?’ Hesla is the first to fully appreciate how Beckett places Western thinking itself, at its most basic and formative, under scrutiny. This has a twofold, liberating effect. Tracing the development of this question beyond any single philosophical tradition, toward the tradition of Western philosophy itself, allows for a wide opening of still mainly unexplored vistas in Beckett Studies. Hesla’s The Shape of Chaos – effectively following Murphy in his pursuit of ‘syzygy’ and the Greek etymology of ‘chaos’ as gas – explored Beckett’s methodology to ‘include the formlessness of chaos within the structure of art’: [Beckett’s] world is a syzygy, and for every laugh there is a tear, for every position an opposition, for every thesis an antithesis, for every affirmation a negation. His art is a Democritean art, energized precisely by the dialectical interplay of opposites – body and mind, the self and the other, speech and silence, life and death, hope and despair, being and non-being, yes and no.92

Helsa’s invocation of Democritus and later discussion of Parmenides, his phrasing and focus; all maintain a close proximity to Beckett’s conclusions to Tom Driver: ‘How could the mess be admitted, because it appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be?’ But we can now keep it out no longer, because we have come to a time when ‘it invades our experience at every moment. It is there and must be allowed in’. . . . What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be a new form, and that this form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.93

The artistic approach to this ‘mess’ has been here characterized as an evolving non-Euclidean logic. Moreover, despite his protestations, Beckett’s self-taught understanding of Being is philosophical. This does not mean, however, as emphasized elsewhere in the same discussion with Tom Driver, that Beckett is himself a philosopher. For the merging of the artistic and the philosophical within this non-Euclidean logic, one finding an alternative to rationality, places Beckett close to the spirit of Parmenides, Empedocles, Xenophanes and more minor Presocratics – who, it should be remembered, were artists writing poetry, not philosophers writing treatises.

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For example, Parmenides’ view of Being, ‘paradoxical in the extreme’, was also the first to employ metrical language: his location of Being hinged upon forming the question both aesthetically (‘The Way of Truth’) and cosmologically (‘The Way of Opinion’).94 Beckett, too, recorded this in his ‘Philosophy Notes’: Although to the 1st part of his didactic poem, which presents the doctrine of Being, he added a 2nd part which treats of physical problems, he does so with the protest in advance that he is here presenting not truth, but the ‘opinions of mortals’, based on the false presupposition that in addition to Being there is still another Non-Being. (TCD MS 10967/11.1) The great question is it, or is it not? = can it be thought or not? What then are consequences of saying that a thing is? In first place it cannot have come into being. If it had, it must have arisen from nothing and no[t] something. But there is no nothing, and not something other than what is. Nor can anything beside it come into being, for there is no empty space in which it could do so. Is it or is it not? If it is, then it is now, all at once. Ex nihilo nihil fit. (TCD MS 10967/12) [The real] must be explained if there is to be escape from conclusions of Parmenides. (TCD MS 10967/12.1)

From this perspective, words are but a part of Being, and therefore cannot properly explicate it. Non-Being simply cannot be conceived. To be sure, literature, no less than philosophy, is able to contribute to Parmenides’ question. And Beckett’s own contribution is clear enough: if there is no conception of non-Being, and characterizations of ‘What Is’ must themselves fail when attempting to encompass everything, all that is left is to ‘fail better’ when starting from ‘false presuppositions’ on existence, to seek out the shape of ideas for their own sake, to explore the contours of ignorance. These postwar visions are closely linked to Beckett’s vision ‘in his mother’s room’, dramatized in Krapp’s Last Tape as ‘the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most –’.95 But again, that very embrace of extreme scepticism was paradoxically founded on Beckett’s intellectual materials, as with the very doctrines of Scepticism: Happiness the highest good zwar [sic], but happiness presupposes a knowledge of the nature of things which cannot be acquired. Hence happiness is not possible or only possible in a non-committal condition of suspense, suspension of judgement, reserve of opinion. Only possible happiness ataraxy. Our faculties cannot furnish us with information concerning the essence of phenomena and our relations to them, but only concerning the relations of phenomena to one another. Sujet deteint sur l’objet. Doctrine which leads to absolute inaction.

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Here, Descartes’ cogito and methodological doubt are already submerged into ‘withdrawal of wise man into himself ’. Moreover, Scepticism moves beyond circular Cartesian propositions, by consistently holding ‘All objective knowledge and absolute truth denied’ (TCD MS 10967/122). Should such Presocratic notions offer insight into Beckett’s understanding of art that ‘does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear’ in his 1938 review of Denis Devlin, then Cartesian ‘clear and distinct’ consciousness and methodological doubt are both misplaced.96 Following ontological questions back to their Greek initiation thus leaves the door open to Presocratic-based readings precisely because they set out, as it were, Western philosophical chess pieces on the board of existence, initiating and delimiting the very debates to which Descartes and others later contributed. And so it is the rocking chair and the mismatched shoes rather than the bicycle that offer a discernible picture of Beckett’s philosophical influences, one far more ‘non-Euclidean’ than ‘rational’. Cartesianism is to the history of philosophy what dualism is to philosophical oppositions: one expression of a much larger dialogue that Beckett’s erudite notes show to be finally irresolvable or, in the Unnamable’s words, by ‘aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking.’97 In accepting that Beckett felt no adherence to any given system, but instead employed systematic thought artistically in creating his own ‘alogical’ outlook, then surely the very initiation of Western thinking becomes a more promising field of exploration than the strictures of Cartesian dogma. It should be remembered that in his life and work, Beckett was far more interested in the shape of ideas than their power of conversion: ‘I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in St. Augustine: “Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.” That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.’98 Even Beckett’s disingenuous comments about his knowledge of philosophy in general (‘Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?’/ ‘I never read philosophers.’/ ‘Why not?’/ ‘I never understand anything they write.’99), and existentialists in particular (‘When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply a mess.’100), tend to reinforce the pervasive sense that he also knew more about philosophy than he admitted. Since Beckett quite appropriately maintained he was an artist rather than a philosopher, these basic questions on ‘the Weltstoff ’ were accordingly attuned to the basics of literature: plot, character and setting. But whatever the questions, it is worth bearing in mind Rubin Rabinovitz’s fitting injunction: ‘Samuel Beckett says in interviews that he knows little

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about philosophy; but his little could easily be another man’s abundance’.101 There is certainly an ‘abundance’ of notes on Presocratic philosophy; that is, materials meticulously composed, consulted and incorporated by Beckett in the construction of his literature. None of this can be said of Beckett’s relationship to Descartes after Whoroscope, nor to Cartesian interpretations of Beckett, which themselves fit more snugly within Presocratic conceptions of existence. For if we cannot subsume Cartesian dualism into a much wider – and much longer – philosophical tradition that Beckett sought to understand through the ‘Philosophy Notes’, it does his labours a disservice, and obscures the very basic philosophical questions being asked of existence and our selves by his literature. Finally, this non-Euclidean project needed a period of intellectual gestation – and the effects of wartime experiences – for Beckett to explicate his quest in terms of finding a form for insolubility, rather than attempting conclusions. Lacking conclusion surely characterizes the Unnamable’s ‘final’, paradoxical phrase – ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ – better than Kenner’s understanding of this text as ‘closer to the Cartesian spirit than Descartes himself ’.102 Were a moment of weakness to prompt a hyperbolic assertion here, the Unnamable is closer to the nihilist strand of the Presocratic spirit than Gorgias himself: GORGIAS OF LEONTINI in Sicily (483–375) Three celebrated propositions– 1. Nothing exists. 2. If it did, it could not be known. 3. If it could be known, it could not be communicated. (In his On Nature, or, The Non-Existent) All opinions equally false. (TCD MS 10967/48)

Indeed, empirical corroboration in a 21 April 1958 letter to his friend, A. J. ‘Con’ Leventhal suggests that, 25 years after initial composition, Gorgias’ ‘celebrated propositions’ had lost little relevance to Beckett: As thus solicited it can link up with the 3rd proposition (coup de grâce) of Gorgias in his Nonent: 1. Nothing is. 2. If anything is, it cannot be known. 3. If anything is, and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech.103

Descartes tried to clear away paradoxes through the rational enterprise, but in his literature – and partially aided by the ‘Philosophy Notes’ – Beckett showed this enterprise to be bereft of palliation; the Unnamable is itself a paradox: it is and is not a name. Indeed, Beckett may be the

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first to ask those fundamental questions of literature that, in their varying ways, the Presocratics had previously asked in their initiation of systematic thought in European philosophy: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’104

4 ‘TEMPORARILY SANE’: The ‘Psychology Notes’ I am utterly alone (no group even of my own kind) and without purpose alone and pathologically indolent and limp and opinionless and consternated. The little trouble I give myself, this absurd diary with its lists of pictures, serves no purpose, is only the act of an obsessional neurotic Counting pennies would do just as well.1 Prior to a consideration of Wilfred Bion and Samuel Beckett, and then a systematic view of Beckett’s attempts to better understand his psychosomatic difficulties of this period through the ‘Psychology Notes’, a contextualization of the latter is in order. For only when situated within a larger investigation of the ‘Interwar Notes’ is Beckett’s intellectual association with psychology properly comprehensible. To be sure, personal echoes of those maladies bringing Beckett to Bion’s couch in London are but one of a number of aspects distinguishing these notes from the earlier ‘Philosophy Notes’ as well as from later transcriptions of Arnold Geulincx and Fritz Mauthner considered in Chapter 5. Nevertheless, Beckett’s notes on psychology must be viewed in terms of a larger self-education process during the interwar years, one that was especially intense between 1932 and 1938. It is worth recalling that right at the start of Beckett’s post-collegiate studies – and thus undertaken by choice – synoptic overviews are afforded privileged status. During the Cartesian flirtation producing Whoroscope, L. Debricon and J. P. Mahaffy, rather than René Descartes’ Oeuvres Completes or Adrien Baillet’s massive biography, are the principal texts consulted. So too with Wilhelm Windelband’s summary of Western philosophy considered in the previous chapter – Beckett’s debt to A History of Philosophy is overwhelming – and, as we shall presently see, R. S. Woodworth’s 1931 Contemporary Schools of Psychology, Beckett’s source for the bulk of his general introduction to psychology. In keeping with previous attention to empirically linking the ‘Interwar Notes’ to later artistic use, Beckett’s various texts in the 1930s similarly help affix the construction of his ‘Psychology Notes’. By calling Thomas MacGreevy ‘an existentialist in verse’ in his 1934 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Beckett’s following comparison, ‘the Titchener of the modern lyric’,2 is taken

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from notes on Woodworth’s second chapter, ‘Introspective and Existential Psychology’: Existentialism: Their distinction between physics & psychology: physical experience refers to object, psychological experience to the subject or to the process of experiencing. Aliter sic: physics relates facts to one another, psychology relates them to the subject. The essence of psychology is the description of the individual experience. Experience equals existence. Individual is an experiencer, not a performer. The chief exponent of Existentialism is Titchener (1867–1927), scholar of Wundt (1832–1920), worked in Cornell Laboratory, Ithaca, N.Y. (TCD MS 10971/7/7–TCD MS 10971/7/8)

In another unusual compliment, Beckett’s 1934 ‘Humanistic Quietism’ argues that MacGreevy’s poetry contains a ‘nucleus of endopsychic clarity, uttering itself in the prayer that is a spasm of awareness’,3 which is also traceable to Beckett’s notes on psychology, this time from Ernest Jones’ third chapter of Papers in Psycho-Analysis, entitled ‘Freud’s Psychology’: ‘Sole function of dreams is to protect sleep by stilling turmoil of unconscious processes that otherwise would disturb it. When activity of endopsychic censor, diminished during sleep, is inadequate to exclude latent processes from consciousness, or to render them innocuous through distortion, then nightmare, terror and awakening’ (TCD MS 10971/8/3). Vitally, John Pilling’s labours, discussed in Beckett Before Godot and elsewhere, date the writing of Beckett’s two texts to around May 1934, with both appearing in the summer of that year.4 By marshalling all available material, from Beckett’s public texts to private correspondence, Beckett’s 54 pages on psychology thus probably took around ten months in construction, as evidenced by comments to MacGreevy of 8 February 1935 on Alfred Adler, the penultimate psychological author transcribed, noted in Chapter 2 as ‘another one trackmind’ (sic). All this provides an excellent context: having probably completed his extensive ‘Philosophy Notes’ and recently commenced his therapy with Bion, by spring 1934 Beckett began another intensive reading and note-taking project, this time from psychological – and particularly psychoanalytical – books. With this basis of time, length and duration in hand, Beckett’s nearly year-long labours in psychological self-education become visible as part of a larger accruing of systemic knowledge; one simultaneously deeply personal as well. That these notes are valuable as part of Beckett’s encounter with erudition, and as a personal attempt to diagnose his psychological maladies during this time, is a matter that shall occupy this chapter. But first, another theme guiding earlier discussion has been our exploration of how Beckett’s harnessing of erudition during the 1930s – and the pivotal changes wrought during that decade – contributed to subsequent changes in

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his artistic vision. In this vein, an excellent template from the ‘Psychology Notes’ shows how Beckett’s harnessing of knowledge is intimately linked to his writing and experiences at this time. Although used satirically in this case, three weeks after the start of Murphy, Beckett’s letter to MacGreevy of 8 August 1935 ties Jones’ reading of ‘Gerontophilia: special fondness for old people’ (TCD MS 10971/8/24) to both personal experience and artistic utility: I begin to think I have gerontophilia on top of the rest. The little shabby respectable old men you see on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, pottering about doing odd jobs in the garden, or flying kites immense distances at the Round Pond, Kensington. . . . My next old man, or old young man, not of the big world but of the little world, must be a kite-flyer. So absolutely disinterested, like a poem, or useful in the depths where demand and supply coincide, and the prayer is the god. Yes, prayer rather than poem, in order to be quite clear, because poems are prayers, of Dives and Lazarus one flesh.5

In keeping with this quotation, the following analysis of psychology will be both biographical as regards Beckett and utilitarian as regards his writing. The above letter is a perfect example of both: ‘gerontophilia’ is derived from Beckett’s readings in psychology, and is explicitly linked to his interest in watching the elderly pottering about at weekends in London. The latter obviously had an important impact, for kite-flying at the Round Pond features heavily in Murphy, which Beckett started writing 12 days later. Murphy’s last chapter takes place at the Round Pond, juxtaposing Celia’s return to prostitution after Murphy’s death and her wheelchair-bound grandfather’s ‘ecstasy’ in his disinterest: ‘the kite had disappeared from view. Mr Kelly was enraptured. Now he could measure the distance from the unseen to the seen, now he was in a position to determine the point at which seen and unseen met. . . . He fixed with his eagle eyes a point in the empty sky where he fancied the kite to swim into view, and wound carefully in.’6 Beckett’s readings and notes from this period comprise, in short, one large experiential ‘poss’. From this standpoint, the archival transcriptions as a whole are merely part of a larger reservoir. No inflexible barrier should be erected to separate the ‘Philosophy-’ from ‘Psychology Notes’; nor can these be properly contextualized without a proper understanding of the intimately associated and vital period in which they were transcribed. To be sure, looking at the influence of and treatment by psychoanalysis must not be confused with a psychoanalytic reading of Beckett. Restating the defining premises of this study thereby assures that we avoid conflating radically different approaches. While the one closely scrutinizes the extant in Beckett’s life and work in order to locate an underlying methodology, the other takes a fixed methodology to the underlying – even unconscious or repressed – aspects of

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Beckett’s life and work in order to recover hitherto unknown phenomena. Contra psychoanalytic literary, the only hitherto unknown phenomena examined here have manuscript numbers. Psychoanalytic literary criticism, like the movement itself, is naturally disparate and, thus, just as impossible to casually define as any other critical genre. However, in relation to Beckett’s texts, two poles are evident. The first is exemplified by Phil Baker’s scholarship, finding in Beckett’s texts evidence of mourning and melancholia, internalised parent figures and gendered identification with them, displacement, anality, the womb, deathly repetition, and idealised regression. The overall approach [here] is intertextual, considering psychoanalysis as a historically specific family of recognisable discourses which can be seen refracted through Beckett’s writing. It is less a psychoanalytic ‘reading’ of Beckett’s work than an attempt to read the psychoanalytic and quasi-psychoanalytic material which is already present in certain texts.7

Like Baker’s Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, J. D. O’Hara’s Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives also emphasizes the influence of psychology on Beckett, albeit foregrounding Freud much more firmly: ‘Beckett’s use of Freud required him to perceive or conceive many such odd details, and also to understand the general structures of neuroses, repressions, and symptoms within which such details have a place.’ While the centrality of Freudian ideas providing the ‘scaffolding or structures of thought’ of Beckett’s texts seems rather overstated (for Beckett’s transcriptions display much more interest in psychoanalysis as such than solely Freudian conceptions), the quality of O’Hara’s writing is indisputable.8 But more importantly, O’Hara nails his colours to the same mast as Baker: the onus throughout is on the textual demonstration of a theoretical approach. Knowlson confirms what a number of critics have been slowly demonstrating: like Joyce, the early Beckett relied more heavily on sources and systems of thought than critics had heretofore suspected, and the identification and close study of this source material can reveal much not only about Beckett’s creative methods but about the completed works themselves.9

Both published in 1997, Baker’s and O’Hara’s texts make excellent use of Damned to Fame, the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, and other newly available sources, a boon unavailable to earlier applications of psychoanalytic theory to Beckett’s texts.10 Yet in the broad discourse of psychoanalytic criticism, opposing the above textual approaches is scholarship effectively unconcerned with the textual object, broadbrushing the entirety of an artistic corpus with unconscious colours. Maud Ellmann has warned of such ‘howlers’: ‘In

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literary studies, for example, psychoanalytic criticism often disregards the textuality of texts, their verbal surface, in favour of the Freudian motifs supposedly encrypted in their depths. Typically the work of art is treated as a window to the artist’s sex-tormented soul.’11 The psychologist-as-séanceleader of long departed meanings is placed in capslock by Didier Anzieu’s writings on Beckett. Even allowing for the dearth of primary sources on Beckett before the publication of Damned to Fame, those facts within Anzieu’s ambit are travestied, assumptions are frequently groundless and textual interpretations strain credulity to the breaking point. Consider Anzieu’s reading of Beckett’s How It Is : Beckett recapitulated three phases in his hero’s life and his crawling in the mud: before Pim, with Pim and after Pim, which I decipher as: before Bion, with Bion and after Bion. . . . In How It Is the two protagonists Pim and Bom are the two faces of the same person. Now if the two syllables are put together, there is no doubt about the outcome: Pim = Bom = (P)Biom, i.e. Bion (pronounced ‘Bionne’ in English). Let us add that in English Bom sounds like a thud and indeed Bom makes contact with Pim by striking his buttocks with a tin-opener (allusion to the boil on Beckett’s anus and to strong sadistic and homosexual impulses).

From such a reading, Beckett’s response to Anzieu’s ‘interpretations’ of his work – ‘a psychoanalyst’s phantasms’ – would simply be yet another act of transference.12 Regrettably, more of the same is on offer in Anzieu’s subsequent Beckett et la Psychoanalyse : ‘Beckett left Bion and made vehement accusations against him; on the level of fantasy, Beckett imagines that he was misjudged and expelled by Bion’, a ‘fact’ evidently dramatized in the two ensuing novels from the 1940s, Watt and Mercier and Camier.13 At its most one-sided, psychoanalytic reductionism is merely Cartesian circular logic without an attendant method. Everything is merely a proof or an attempted obfuscation (perhaps subconsciously so) of that proof. This caution should not be read as hostility to psychoanalytic criticism tout court; it is only hostility toward unfounded and slanderous readings. Reinforcing this view, it seems clear that this reading tells us more about Anzieu than about Beckett. As psychoanalytic readings are yet another critical perspective from which to characterize Beckett, it is in keeping with arguments propounded here that these often fail to move beyond readings akin to a Rorschach test. Using psychoanalytic language, Vivian Mercier’s Beckett/Beckett furnishes an excellent summary of the prismatic reception of Beckett’s texts, where, despite a panel of ‘experts’ on Waiting for Godot, the most effective contribution was made by a member of the audience who asked the panel the rhetorical question, ‘Isn’t Waiting for Godot a sort of

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living Rorschach [inkblot] test?’ He was clapped and cheered by most of those present, who clearly felt as I still do that most interpretations of that play – indeed of Samuel Beckett’s work as a whole – reveal more about the psyches of the people who offer them than about the work itself or the psyche of its author.14

Scraping the surface of psychological, and especially psychoanalytical, readings of Beckett, it should be perfectly evident that enough has been written from this angle in Beckett Studies to rival philosophical and Cartesian readings of Beckett, respectively. To be sure, criticism surveyed in previous chapters indicates that there is rarely scholarly fire without Beckettian smoke (and ‘a great mirror’). As regards psychology, Phil Baker placed readers on guard for psychoanalytic language and ideas at the outset of his important text. Twenty years earlier, Pilling’s revolutionary study Samuel Beckett first found ‘the anagrammatic playfulness in Molloy (Freud’s libido becomes the “character” Obidil)’ and, almost as an afterthought, noted Freud’s dictum in the ‘Three dialogues’ ‘when seeking a stick with which to beat Kant’. Unsurprisingly, Pilling already anticipated some of the arguments in this chapter in his 1976 study: ‘no Freudian, or Jungian key, will unlock Molloy ’.15 By way of extending this insight, it will be suggested here that there is no single key capable of unlocking Molloy, or any other of Beckett’s texts, using psychological (or any other) approaches. Like the procedure here in methodologically approaching Beckett’s encounter with psychoanalysis, Rubin Rabinovitz’s ‘Beckett and psychology’ offered a timely return from psychological readings of Beckett, to their function in terms of artistic utility: ‘Psychological ideas are dealt with artistically rather than intellectually’ by Beckett; for example, Watt’s ‘Davus complex’ is better understood as Beckettian shorthand for ‘a deep-rooted reluctance to confront difficult questions’ rather than a specific reference to Oedipal theories.16 In fine, the mythology and science invoked by Beckett is of less moment than their methodological transformation, an underlying contention upon which our discussion rests. Even more broadly than O’Hara, Rabinovitz sees the entirety of psychology as a convenient structure with which to approach subjective experience best attained, at least for Beckett, through introspection rather than science. Instead of reading psychological maladies into the man or the writings – which Rabinovitz firmly asserts only belies the importance of fundamental human questions raised by both – this most seminal text on a massive subject maintains that ‘psychological concepts are useful, in the final analysis, for raising the questions about the nature of mental reality’.17 The last two words perfectly invoke the concept of non-Euclidean logic yoking together intellectual experience and artistic imagination in Beckett’s textual construction. As such, ‘mental reality’ will be used to guide this chapter in

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elucidating Beckett’s relationship with psychoanalysis and his ‘Psychology Notes’. But first, a related point regarding self-analysis needs to be made concerning its proximity to the ‘autographing’ of Beckett’s texts raised by Porter Abbott. Especially during this most formative of periods for Beckett, it is important to note that his ‘Calmative’ was found through art and, to a lesser extent, erudition. To be sure, more erudition is on offer in the ‘Psychology Notes’, as well as Beckett’s attention to the import of subjective perception in shaping reality. These clearly remained a lifelong feature of Beckett’s art, evidenced by the memory of ‘Darly’s’ death more than 40 years on, in the 1988 Stirrings Still 1; Connolly’s store in Company ; the Aberdeen named Zulu in Molloy – Damned to Fame lists a dozen such instances in the first chapter alone.18 Still, the mimetic preponderance of Beckett’s experiences is most clearly marked during the early 1930s; reading Damned to Fame alongside his texts effectively mandates agreement with Knowlson’s judgement: ‘as so often with Beckett’s early work, fiction followed fact very closely’. One thinks of ‘Smeraldina’s Billet Deux’ here – and the events and characters in Dream of Fair to Middling Women generally – which Beckett later admitted was a ‘mixture of fact and fiction’.19 It will become clear that, as with Watt, writing was often Beckett’s chief form of therapy (Beckett later told James Knowlson that Watt was partially written in wartime refuge ‘to keep himself sane’).20 This may go far in explaining why non-Euclidean permutations so litter the pages of the novel: with so much time on his hands, in Roussillon, it is unsurprising to find that Beckett took up linguistic and mathematical games. And similar to Beckett’s very real fears before his hospitalization, recounted in the More Pricks Than Kicks text ‘Yellow’, the ensuing story, ‘Draff ’, was written as a veritable catharsis for his father’s death and burial. Finally, descriptions of Murphy’s fluttering heart read very much like Beckett’s own contemporaneous letters. Hence, just when his psychological troubles were at their most severe, his writing was at its most personal. But it is not so much that psychological troubles lead him to write in the first place. Instead, as we shall see, just as the heart’s ‘jigs’ reached their apogee in the early 1930s, Beckett’s self-writing appears in large part an attempt, via psychology, to make his ‘mental reality’ bearable again. WILFRED BION AND SAMUEL BECKETT By synthesizing available sources – most never previously consulted in Beckett Studies – a comprehensive and empirical scrutiny of Beckett’s gravitation toward psychoanalysis is now possible. Commencing with Beckett’s own problems in the 1920s and 1930s, a closer look at the psychological aspects of these will facilitate our subsequent view of the

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‘Psychology Notes’ as the culmination of his personal concerns during this period. Most importantly here, a biographical accounting of some salient features comprising Samuel Beckett’s encounter with Wilfred Ruprecht Bion shall shed some light on their association. For writers on both ‘subjects’, this period is understood as pivotal to their development and later fame. Given the many unanswered questions surrounding the effects of this brief relationship on the subsequent decades of writing by each, the handful of texts on Beckett and Bion’s relationship are necessarily speculative, ranging from Steven Connor’s cautious formulations to Anzieu’s wild postulations.21 In one of these texts, Lois Oppenheim rightly points out that their association was technically psychotherapy, not psychoanalysis, given that Bion had neither trained for, nor personally undertaken, psychoanalysis when he first met Beckett. A number of similar misconceptions will be further encountered here. Also, Oppenheim’s bridling against heavily metaphoric and faux empirical studies like Anzieu’s (which she regards as ‘foolhardy’) contains an important proviso worth heeding: ‘The claims of far-reaching and profound correspondences between the two men, however, remain highly conjectural and need to be recognized as such.’22 Indeed, recognizing the current dearth of evidence must be the starting point for any survey of the Beckett–Bion relationship: no contemporaneous account of their sessions exists; no explicit mention of the other was made following Beckett’s therapy, between Christmas 1933 and Christmas 1935, in the public writings of either analyst or analysand. Even the official records of the Institute of Medical Psychology – wrongly called the Tavistock Clinic in later references to Beckett’s thrice-weekly sessions there – burned alongside much of London during the Second World War.23 It remains highly problematic that we know so little about what transpired: naturally, Bion never revealed his professional notes on Beckett, and Oppenheim received a letter from his widow, Francesca Bion, suggesting that, in hindsight, her husband maintained he did little to shape Beckett’s vision: ‘I don’t think I did him much good, but I probably didn’t do him much harm either’.24 Similarly, only Knowlson has recorded Beckett’s retrospective view of that encounter more than a half-century later. In interviews with James Knowlson Beckett also downplayed Bion’s importance, at least in terms of the former’s artistic views: I used to lie down on the couch and try to go back in my past. I think it probably did help. I think it helped me perhaps to control the panic. I certainly came up with some extraordinary memories of being in the womb. Intrauterine memories. . . . I think it all helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing and what I was feeling.25

As with our epigraph, in one of the few references to psychology in the ‘German Diaries’, these years of intimacy with psychoanalysis also

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appear important for the methods of inspection offered, rather than the realization of any deep-seated psychological transformation: ‘Learnt something of interest but can’t remember what. Prenatal function of Blinddarm [appendix], that nervous appendix might be taken as yet another uterine reminiscence.’26 Yet in the years leading to his German trip over 1936–7, a number of events in Beckett’s life contributed to making ‘mental reality’ highly distressing, resulting in two years of psychotherapy in London; and perhaps, the onset of ‘intrauterine memories’ as an analysand. Professionally, the disenchantment with academic life, and particularly lecturing, caused difficulties with his family as well as academic supporters at Trinity College, Dublin. Nor was artistic success forthcoming, with Dream of Fair to Middling Women universally turned down. An estrangement from James Joyce in May 1930 was certainly also troubling for Beckett, not to mention the increasingly evident illness of that affair’s other protagonist, Lucia Joyce, later diagnosed with schizophrenia. (The drama of this situation, and Lucia’s subsequent institutionalization, could not have failed to impact Beckett at this critical period.) Problems with other women also played a part, such as Beckett’s unrequited feelings for Ethna McCarthy and the problematic relationship with his cousin in Kassel, Peggy Sinclair; her death from tuberculosis in May 1933 devastated him. Yet the most vexed female interactions were the notoriously complex emotions felt for his mother: after yet another fearsome row (this time over drinking), Beckett planned to leave Ireland in June 1933. But whatever fertile psychoanalytic soil this relationship has provided for scholars, it was the death of his father on 26 June 1933 that ultimately changed Beckett’s travel plans and sapped his psychological reserves. A veritable scholarly consensus holds that much of what Beckett was doing and feeling stemmed from psychosomatic concerns, resulting in a number of physical symptoms. Biographies by Bair, Cronin and Knowlson spare no details on the variety and consequent discomfort these episodes caused Beckett: boils on the groin and an anal abscess, constipation and diarrhoea, eczema around his face, anaemically thinned blood, severe colds and two bouts of pleurisy. ‘At this time of sorrow and stress’, writes Cronin, ‘ailments, or fancied ailments, continued to afflict him’.27 But as regards health, it was only the lancing of Beckett’s ‘fleam in the neck’ and the simultaneous removal of a corn on his toe in December 1932 which were directly transposed into literature; in this case, in ‘Yellow’. During the event itself, both Beckett and Belacqua’s pain ‘top and bottom’ required an injection in the buttocks before the operations. Yet this was not all bad: ‘My sufferings under the anaesthetic, he reflected, will be exquisite, but I shall not remember them’. Even before the anaesthetic, Belacqua’s ‘tortures of the damned’ were cast in Dantesque terms, alongside references to Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Robinson Crusoe and the paradoxes of John Donne.28 For Belacqua, the last is

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‘crucial’ due to ‘the extremes of wisdom that it rendered’: Democritean laughter or Heraclitean tears.29 For Beckett, and for critics as well, crucial may well be the right word. For the effect of the paradox is to calm Belacqua’s mind – that ‘last ditch when all was said and done’ – strongly suggested throughout ‘Yellow’ as the real cause of agony: ‘His mind might cave in for all he cared, he was tired of the old bastardo’. And again, ‘What were the eyes anyway? The posterns of the mind. They were safer closed.’30 That Belacqua is made ‘to lie on his back in the dark’ (later recast in the opening of the 1979 Company), with his mind racing, suggests that the ultimate cause of physical maladies is his ‘brute’ of a ‘psyche’ in ‘Yellow’.31 In consequence, the paradoxical way to deal with Being – to see existence as a joke or a tragedy – is attempted through the use of the mind to assuage the unceasing pricks of consciousness or, in Beckett’s words, ‘Belaqua ransacked his mind for a suitable engine of destruction’. This arrives in the form of Heraclitus and Democritus, although for one of Belacqua’s temperament, ‘There were limits, he felt, to Democritus’.32 These limits, pertaining to the Presocratics generally, were earlier delimited and traced in Beckett’s writings in Chapter 3. But the ‘autograph’ from ‘Yellow’ also suggests that Beckett was starting to conceive of a psychological ‘last ditch’ as the nexus of his – and by extension, Belacqua’s – ailments. At this early stage of his oeuvre, Beckett’s art is already indebted to the interface between his erudition and experience. To be sure, echoes are evident across Beckett’s work; for example, in the 1981 Ohio Impromptu: In this extremity his old terror of night laid hold on him again. After so long a lapse that as if never been [Pause. Looks closer.] Yes, after so long a lapse that as if never been. Now with redoubled force the fearful symptoms described at length page forty paragraph four [Starts to turn back the pages. Checked by L’s left hand. Resumes relinquished page.] White nights now again his portion. As when his heart was young. No sleep no braving sleep till – [Turns page.] – dawn of day.33

At the very least, however, we are a far cry from Cartesian dualism, or any miraculous ‘occasion’ for interaction between the mind and the body, which a number of critics have suggested that Beckett endorsed. Each of the nine texts used by Beckett in constructing the ‘Psychology Notes’ took what may be regarded as a ‘common-sense’ approach to mind–body interactions: the mind can cause painful physical ailments and vice versa. Thanks to the MacGreevy correspondence, it is possible to mark the onset of what are now generally understood as ‘panic attacks’ to the stressful preparation for final exams at Trinity College Dublin in April 1926: ‘I have had the old internal combustion heart and head a couple of nights, in the bed where I had it the first time almost exactly 11 years ago, but as little anxiety as

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then’.34 Yet if a racing heart gave Beckett only mild concern while studying for exams at Trinity in 1926 (and after his therapy with Bion), these soon developed with greater incidence and severity into ‘dreadful night sweats and feelings of panic that eventually became so serious that Beckett felt he was being paralysed by them and was forced to seek medical help’.35 One of these instances is recorded in another letter to MacGreevy nearly five years later, in 1931: ‘I went to a doctor because my bitch of a heart was keeping me awake.’36 As Beckett himself recalled in an interview with Knowlson, this severe discomfort anticipated his psychological nadir in the following years: After my father’s death I had trouble psychologically. The bad years were between when I had to crawl home in 1932 and after my father’s death in 1933. I’ll tell you how it was. I was walking down Dawson Street. And I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. I found I couldn’t go on moving. . . . And I felt I needed help. So I went to Geoffrey Thompson’s surgery. . . . He gave me a look over and found nothing wrong. Then he recommended psychoanalysis for me.37

To Beckett’s knowledge, psychoanalysis was illegal in Ireland at the time, and he consequently convinced his mother to subsidize his therapy and send him to England. The choice of London was obviously conditioned by availability, though sparse evidence suggests that Geoffrey Thompson may have recommended Bion specifically, as the two trained together at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in the 1930s.38 Whatever the case, Beckett took Thomspon’s advice and addressed his health problems psychologically. In consequence, ‘Beckett presented himself to Bion with severe anxiety symptoms, which he described in his opening session: a bursting, apparently arhythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and, at its most severe, total paralysis’.39 The man to whom Beckett presented himself in late 1933, in the words of Wilfred Bion’s admiring biographer, ‘ranks with Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein in the psychoanalytic tradition’.40 Surprisingly, Bion probably knew little more about psychoanalysis at this point than Beckett did. For Bion had only joined the Institute of Medical Psychology in 1932, having previously served with distinction as a tank commander in the First World War; subsequently studying Modern History at Oxford, and then teaching French at Bishop’s Stortford School (his Alma Mater); finally settling upon medicine in 1930 with medical and surgical qualifications. Yet even these bare facts of Bion’s early life are disputed, not helped by his own ‘autobiographical’ dialogues in A Key to a Memoir of the Future – perhaps even less personal than Beckett’s own writings – nor the more straightforward autobiographies incomplete at his death and only incompletely published thereafter. All these writings, as well as secondary sources, are virtually silent

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on the vital 1919–33 period, and are anyway nearly inextricable from the figure Bion had become at the end of his life: post-Freudian, post-Kleinian and in many respects post-psychoanalytical: ‘Bion is committed to the view that there is an absolute truth which can never be known directly. . . . This ultimate reality is the psychoanalytic object par excellence of which others are only derivatives. This lies at the heart of Bion’s thinking.’ The Symingtons’ recent explication of Bion’s psychotherapy, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, repeatedly stresses shared characteristics with art and mysticism in his later thought, as well as his communing with ‘primitive’ thought and the limitations inherent in the human mind. ‘Bion encouraged us to leave go of psychological comfort’, they conclude, ‘and venture forth into the unknown and risk the terror’.41 Patient and therapist moving into the unknown together is a far cry from the prevailing psychoanalytic theories which attempted to bring a patient’s unconscious to consciousness through the expertise of the analyst. Interestingly, in the last years of his life Bion focused upon ‘ignorance and the exercise of curiosity’, ‘repetition compulsion [. . . as] a spark of human curiosity which has hitherto failed to be extinguished by any authoritative statements from whatever source’, and the importance of ‘cultivated’ artists communing with ‘primitive artistic ideas’; in fine, ‘articulate people who listened to the inarticulate’. In the 1970s, more reference is made to art than science, and Freud’s quotation used to open Bion’s text ‘Emotional turbulence’ – ‘There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and the earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe’ – is artistically analysed in a number of additional texts between 1976 and Bion’s death three years later.42 An example from the late ‘Four Papers’ concerns the notebooks of Leonardo, a rather surprising source also referred to in Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’.43 By his death, Bion had jettisoned virtually every major psychoanalytic tenet in constructing what the Symingtons understand as ‘a new metapsychology’: ‘We cannot emphasize enough that Bion’s starting points are the phenomena encountered in the analytic session. . . . Any use of theory is always a provisional means of representing a stage in the development or degeneration of truth.’44 From the above, comparisons between Bion and Beckett appear inevitable, not least because it was left to those explicating their ideas to speak words like ‘truth’ that these men were so consistently unwilling to do. Attempting to explicate the unsayable may be a fair summary of scholars tying the ideas of Beckett to Bion, as though suggesting that if Beckett staked out the boundaries of art, Bion did the same for psychoanalysis. But we must observe two important facts that ought to be construed as ‘attacks on linking’. First, the intermediate part of Bion’s work is much less radical, essentially Kleinian, and much more scientific than the ‘metapsychology’ of his later years. Bion’s writings from the 1950s and 1960s are primarily concerned with group analysis, pioneered during his service in the Second World War. Also

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undertaken during the early 1950s is his development of ‘The Grid’, the container–contained relationship, as well as his groundbreaking papers, ‘Attacks on Linking’ and ‘The Imaginary Twin’. While much commends the view that these later papers reveal prismatic Beckettian traces (whether ‘real’ or ‘imagined’) in much the same way that psychoanalytic scholarship on Beckett does generally, the direct relevance of Beckett upon Bion’s intermediate period is entirely speculative. Yet here is precisely where critics investigating Beckett–Bion links have focused, rather than on Bion’s later concerns – notable both for exploring his own past and for his harsh critiques of narrow psychoanalytic thinking. Oppenheim reports that Bion’s widow held the same position: one ‘cannot see any direct connection between the patients, and the problems in those papers, and Beckett.’ Though ‘any past experience that one has in life, especially in analytic work, is sure to contribute to subsequent work,’ Francesca Bion claims, ‘The Imaginary Twin’ is an essay she suspects to have been motivated by her husband’s analytic experience following the war and ‘Attacks on Linking’ refers to ‘patients in analysis during the nineteen fifties and was based on theories [her husband] had developed as a result of that work.’45

It is worth adding here that Bion’s publications between 1940 and his membership paper (‘The Imaginary Twin’) for the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1950 are exclusively centred upon group analysis and wartime psychiatry – neither of which relates to Beckett in the mid-1930s. In short, Beckett’s contribution to Bion’s later concerns (especially the post-Nobel Laureate texts Bion could not fail to be aware of ) appears fairly limited and certainly circumstantial; there is little, if any, relationship between Beckett and Bion’s most famous work prior to the latter’s semi-retirement in 1968. Just as problematically, Bion’s earliest years are also difficult to trace. Beckett may well have been Bion’s first patient. He may well also have been his fifth, or tenth: facts of this period are much harder to come by for Bion than for Beckett. Superficially, they shared many characteristics: expatriates in London (Bion was born in India to British parents in 1897); athletes; intellectuals; and also, what Bennet Simon labels a ‘considerable temperamental similarity’.46 Beyond this, however, the best evidence available on Bion in the mid-1930s comes via Beckett’s letter to MacGreevy, regarding Carl Jung’s Tavistock Lecture that patient and therapist attended together in 1935: [Bion] let fall some remarkable things nevertheless. He protests so vehemently that he is not a mystic that he must be one of the very most nebulous kind. Certainly he cannot keep the terminology out of his speech, but I suppose that is a difficulty for everyone. [Jung’s] lecture the night I went consisted mainly in the so called synthetic (versus Freudian analytic) interpretations of the dreams of a

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patient who finally went to the dogs because he insisted on taking a certain element in the dreams as the Oedipal position when Jung told him it was nothing of the kind! However he lost his neurosis [among] the dogs – again according to Jung. The mind is I suppose the best Swiss, Labata and Rousseau, mixture of enthusiasm and Euclid, a methodical rhapsode. Jolas’s pigeon all right, but I should think in the end less than the dirt under Freud’s nails: I can’t imagine his caring a fig [for] neurosis, and yet he is said to have actually cured cases of schizophrenia. If this is true he is the first to do it. He insists on patients having their horoscopes cast!47

Beyond a number of fascinating details on Jung’s lecture and Bion’s mysticism, Beckett too gives only an obscure picture of Bion at this time. Nothing more explicit arises in available correspondence, biographies or written texts published by Beckett or Bion. Any approach to their interactions is thus best served by exploring their mutual development, and we can go no further than Steven Connor’s apt delimitation: ‘rather than looking for the influence of Bion or the experience of psychoanalysis more generally on the work of Beckett, I have suggested that Beckett’s and Bion’s careers interpret each other in significant ways’.48 Bion’s encounter with Beckett took place early in his career, before he had any documented psychoanalytic experience. Incredibly, Bion only became a trained analyst in 1937 after meeting – and becoming a patient of – John Rickman (himself analysed by Melanie Klein from 1934); Bion qualified as an analyst a decade later. What comprised Bion’s relationship to psychoanalysis beforehand, either in influence or in title, is largely a mystery. How he came to supervise Beckett’s therapy with no psychological credentials is even more mysterious. It seems Bion was recruited by James Hadfield, who had won something of a power struggle with the less doctrinaire Hugh Crichton-Miller. Originally a neurologist, Crichton-Miller first established the ‘Tavistock Clinic’ (as it was then known) in 1920 as the first out-patient treatment centre for psychoneurosis in Britain. Anxiety disorders – ranging from shellshock to what Crichton-Miller understood as ‘minor mental disorders’ – were the Tavistock’s bread and butter.49 From the start, CrichtonMiller viewed anxiety and obsessional states as essentially products of modern life, in a manner rather similar to Beckett’s stoic views on existence: ‘If then we contemplate this vast array of those [“of outstanding force of character and some of unusual intelligence”] who are inefficient from mental causes it behoves us to ask ourselves how far so great an evil is unavoidable and how far we are called to endure it’.50 For these and other reasons, the Tavistock Clinic was ‘a highly idiosyncratic institution’ from the start, eschewing white coats and couches in favour of Crichton-Miller’s radical ideas: Our avowed aim is to investigate, and if possible to remedy, disabilities of the personality as a whole . . . the healer’s function should be interpreted in the broadest way and the consideration be given not only to the body but to the mind,

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not only to the patient, but if necessary to his environment . . . many a neurosis is a potential psychosis, just as many a cold is potential tuberculosis. Such hard-andfast differentiations between sane and insane do not belong to life nor yet to science.51

Yet idiosyncrasy was almost certainly not a trait Bion commenced with upon joining the renamed ‘Institute of Medical Psychology’. At that point, Hadfield was ascendant in the recruiting and training of new staff, and H. V. Dicks correspondingly reports that ‘Bion started as a Hadfieldian’.52 By his own account, Hadfield felt that psychoneurosis is ‘due to defects of character’, thereby informing his own view of psychology as a kind of moral science.53 Two essential further points arise concerning Hadfield. Both of these relate fundamentally to Bion’s early years as a psychotherapist; and therefore, indirectly (and perhaps pivotally) to Beckett’s analysis. First, Bion rejects reliance on ‘repression’ as a catch-all explanation for neurosis very early in his career, and castigates a ‘Mr. Fip’ for just such a reliance. Mr. Fip, short for ‘Mr. Feel-it-in-the-Past’, was a therapist well known to Bion, one who believed that ‘unpleasantness experienced in the present was linked to past traumas, not to the present being lived’.54 If not Mr. Fip himself, Hadfield unmistakeably employed such criteria in his approach. By all accounts, Hadfield was more academic than clinical, and emphasized past repression over lived experience. Everywhere his writings unswervingly stress that the ‘best means of understanding a character is to go back to its sources in childhood’. Dicks, Hadfield’s colleague at the time, views this outlook as ‘reductive’, characterizing Hadfieldian analysis ‘too tidy and intellectually remote’ for a sensitive exchange with patients. ‘He was always working on “an incident” ’causing ‘a certain unreality and artificiality to the procedure best described by the notion of “forced fantasy” ’. This determinism eventually led to a ‘rebellion’ against Hadfield by Bion, Geoffrey Thompson and others during the 1930s.55 And second, instead of Freudian ‘dream analysis’, Hadfield’s preferred method of treatment was Jungian ‘free association’ involving hypnosis, automatic writing or unconscious drawing.56 Crucially, in January 1935, roughly halfway through his therapy, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy, ‘Bion is now a dream habitué’.57 The ‘now’ is highly suggestive of a change in technique, and possibly outlook. The limited evidence available points to a turn toward Freudian ideas and practices, and away from those of Hadfield’s more Jungian collective reservoir that occurred between Bion’s commencement at the Institute and the outbreak of war in September 1939. Yet if Beckett was subject to the changing methodology of an amateur therapist, and if Bion’s treatment was indeed helpful, Beckett’s comment to J. D. O’Hara becomes both more personal and more comprehensible: ‘ “In the quarrel between Freud and Jung,” he said, “I sided with Freud” ’.58 At the risk of reading too much into the six words written to MacGreevy on this

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subject, Beckett’s ‘dream habitué’ comment points toward a shift in Bion’s concerns during his treatment of Beckett; but, as outlined above, one that was just as plausibly effected through Bion’s changing circumstances as through the influence of Samuel Beckett as an analysand. This certainly would be in keeping with Bion’s move toward Freudian – and later Kleinian – psychoanalysis in the years leading up to the war. Most promisingly, it would offer an alternative and altogether less haphazard explanation for Bion’s development than assertions by Anzieu to the effect that Bion’s professional concerns were essentially the product of the longest incidence of transference on record. Still, the above remains partly conjectural: for patient and analyst all that can be confidently advanced is that the mid–1930s was a period of enormous transformation – vocationally, intellectually and emotionally. Even the circumstantial evidence advanced by Anzieu and Simon, ‘that in analysis both Beckett and Bion profoundly influenced each other’, is simply wanting.59 Neither does such a view do either Bion or Beckett much justice considering the originality and self-evidently changed approach in both of their postwar work. Theorizing two seemingly convergent perspectives – through different modes of writing – of one psychoanalytic encounter, ostensibly returned to again and again by the respective participants, serves only to diminish the substantial achievements of both. And to refract the postwar writing of their personal experiences – for example, Krapp’s reminiscence of reading Effie Briest in a boat, or Bion’s wartime case histories60 – through a psychotherapeutic encounter leaving no explicit residua behind only confuses ‘profound influence’ with the necessary tools of artist and therapist. In short, that Bion and Beckett used their vocational tools to highly influential effect after the Second World War should not be narrowly conflated with their encounter between late 1933 and late 1935. Furthermore, Bion’s work is simply too positivistic and too linked to his wartime research to show any great harmony with Beckett’s concerns in the 1930s. As sketched out earlier, if we are to speculate on Beckett’s role in Bion’s thinking, it would seem the later the better. Toward the end of his life, Bion was much less scientific, much more phenomenological and spiritual in his approach, while Beckett had of course achieved worldwide fame; and of greatest importance, Bion had retired from practice and started writing his memoirs and quasi-autobiographies by the 1970s. By spending his days going back into his own past, as it were, rather than in daily encounters with patients, Bion’s time with Beckett would surely have again become a subject of thought. Finally, there is obviously more experimental writing – for A Key to a Memoir of the Future is nothing if not highly experimental – and an increased attention to what might be understood as ‘mature’ Beckettian poetics (ignorance, repetition, language and so on) marking Bion’s twilight years than at any point previously. In short, Bion was a late convert to Beckett’s vision – ‘the familiar one of grandeur and desolation’ – if at all.61

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Also raised in considerations of influence is a strong suspicion that the therapy with Bion had only an ancillary effect upon Beckett’s mature vision. Rejecting significant long-term effects of his analysis is in keeping with arguments here and in other chapters. For the overall argument pursued holds that the 1930s planted the seeds of Beckett’s artistic vision, later to blossom in the postwar ‘frenzy of writing’ and thereafter. The experiential composition of this vision, this ‘mental reality’, is much larger than merely psychoanalysis or even psychology. While indisputably showing traces of psychoanalytic theory and practice in his ‘Psychology Notes’, these understandings of psychology are no more a fixture of Beckett’s writing than linguistics or art or philosophy. Correspondingly, the import of those two years of analysis was, in Bion’s favoured phrase, the (Kantian) ‘thing-in-itself ’, and limited to the mid 1930s: in short, there is little long-term effect. Only limited and circumstantial indications suggest another conclusion. Instead, there is some evidence that at the termination of these sessions, Beckett was in a position to see his own psychological improvement. Consider four quotations from correspondence over the duration of Beckett’s therapy. Written to Morris Sinclair on 27 January 1934, the first is a clear reflection on the early days in therapy, and its initial importance as a consequence of the maladies detailed above. The second, written from Ireland to MacGreevy on 8 August 1934, illustrates both Beckett’s recognition of the psychological bases of his problems and the usefulness of his treatment. Also from the Beckett–MacGreevy archives, the third, on 20 August 1935, points to both some progress and the sense that Beckett is part of the way through a continuing process. And to the same correspondent on 16 January 1936, the final excerpt suggests that Beckett had at least addressed, if not entirely resolved, the core of his anxieties: It is the only thing that interests me at the moment . . . and that’s as it should be because these kind of things require you to dedicate yourself to them to the virtual exclusion of everything else. I am obliged to accept the whole panic as psychoneurotic – which leaves me in a hurry to get back and get on. I go on with Bion . . . histoire d’elan acquis. I see no reason why it should ever come to an end. The old heart pounces now and then, as though to console me for the intolerable symptoms of an improvement. Perhaps the flight will be sooner than I expect, but no more Bion. As I write, think, move, speak, praise and blame, I see myself living up to the specimen that these 2 years have taught me I am. The word is not out before I am blushing for my automatism.62

Placed together, the effect of these letters is one of an analytic trajectory already appreciated by Beckett in early 1936. Along with these letters and his two years with Bion, the ‘Psychology Notes’ offer important insight into

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Beckett’s attempts at self-analysis and more comprehensive understanding of the ‘specimen’ that he perceived himself to be. From 1935 to 1937, the writing of Murphy, the exhaustive ‘German Diaries’ and the general remission of the panic attacks and psychosomatic symptoms of the previous decade all together suggest a more stable acceptance of Beckett’s self, his nature and his artistic outlook by the late 1930s. A final, remarkable letter to MacGreevy roughly halfway through his psychotherapy suggests that Bion’s chief assistance had already been rendered. On 10 March 1935 Beckett appears in a position to frankly enumerate his problems; consequently, psychotherapy will here be viewed in terms of a larger ‘turn’ in Beckett’s thinking rather than a vital, specific encounter dramatically altering Beckett’s person and art. It was with a specific fear and a specific complaint that I went to Geoffrey and then to Bion to learn that the ‘specific fear and complaint’ was the least important symptom of a diseased condition that began in a time which I could not remember . . . the fatuous torments which I had treasured as denoting the superior man were all part of the same pathology.63

Finding more immediate effects in psychoanalysis need not diminish the importance of analysis upon Beckett, but instead situates it within a larger introspection in the 1930s. Ironically, this might be abridged by Hadfield’s maxim, quite possibly communicated to Beckett via Bion: ‘KNOW THYSELF: ACCEPT THYSELF: BE THYSELF’.64 In this context, Beckett’s notes on psychology are another non-Euclidean piece in a larger definitional process underway long before Waiting for Godot. For the artistic vision (if not execution), its philosophical and psychological underpinnings, and the personal Weltanschauung – all are traceable to this period. SPANISH DUNGEONS AND INSIGHTFUL APES Even a cursory glance at Beckett’s written materials and experiences during the 1930s betrays certain neuroses (a manifestation of which may easily be said to be the very notes so neurotically compiled to elucidate those very complexes) perceived by him to be the root of his anxiety and physical maladies. Yet in contrast to the dating hypotheses on the history of philosophy transcriptions advanced in Chapter 3, superficially at least, Beckett’s note-taking on psychoanalysis presents much less uncertainty and far fewer difficulties. Whereas the absence of all dating to locate the construction of the ‘Philosophy Notes’ mandated conjectures based upon the appearance of material in Beckett’s texts directly attributable to that corpus, we have seen that the ‘Psychology Notes’ are unmistakably traceable to the period of his therapy with Wilfred Bion. Consequently, the reason for typing these

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20,000 or so words is far more personally germane than the longer, earlier philosophical material. Also, unlike the ‘Philosophy Notes’, these are typed throughout, with a glossary and five divided sections, with all but the last numbered by Beckett (discounting the single, unnumbered page on Freud reproduced in Chapter 2). The meticulous listing of all sources is different from the rest of the ‘Interwar Notes’, and the use of a noisy typewriter generally reinforces the sense that Beckett compiled these notes from his home in Gertrude Street. Indeed, at Gertrude Street is probably even more accurate concerning the construction of TCD MS 10971/7 and 10971/8: while handwritten entries are naturally possible virtually anywhere, such is certainly not the case with a bulky typewriter like Beckett’s. That his British Library card entitled him to take out books from Public Libraries in London (most likely the Camden Library, which at the time specialized in philosophy and psychology), thus allows for a safer supposition on precisely where the ‘Psychology Notes’ were composed. Finally and most importantly, a major difference of critical value here is that, unlike Beckett’s chronological and thematic transcriptions of philosophy, nine psychological texts are sequentially noted. Yet as a corpus, Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’ point away from dispassionate erudition and ‘verbal booty’, marking a trend toward utility and personal application within the ‘Interwar Notes’ as a whole. For the impetus is different: a strong sense is conveyed that Beckett was attempting to better understand his perceived condition in these books. Where the role of overviews on philosophical history seemed to confirm his sceptical feelings about the world at large and the impossibility of gleaning consistent, underlying truths about it, the patchwork of selected psychoanalytical theories appears simultaneously more private and more clinical, far more concerned with the nuts and bolts of neuroses, repression and consequent psychological manifestations. Almost never, curiously, do case studies frequently employed in the psychoanalytical texts rouse Beckett to notation. He is far more interested in the general tenets of psychoanalysis than the specific clinical instances of their practice. Nevertheless, within the broad church of psychology, psychoanalysis (and even more specifically, acute anxiety states and accompanying symptoms) comprises the overwhelming majority of material transcribed. Yet lest too deep a fissure between the ‘Philosophy Notes’ of 1932–4 and the ‘Psychology Notes’ of 1934–5 obscure a fundamental connection with the larger ‘notesnatching’ projects of the 1930s, a central idea to bear in mind is the underlying unity in Beckett’s meticulous attempts to better understand ‘mental reality’ evidenced by his notes. Straddling these two sets of notes, a connecting axis may well have been Beckett’s reading of the Monadology in December 1933, advancing Gottfried Leibniz’s much wider understanding of perception as a human totality, which ‘should be carefully distinguished from Apperception or Consciousness, as will appear in what

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follows. In this matter the Cartesians have fallen into a serious error, in that they treat as non-existent those perceptions of which we are not conscious’.65 Moreover, in demonstrating that consciousness may not be the totality of ‘mental reality’, Leibniz (who in Jung’s words first ‘postulated unconscious psychic activity’66), may well be the link between Beckett’s philosophical and psychological readings. Chapter 3 argued that Windelband’s – and by extension, Beckett’s – take on Leibnizian ideas (‘entelechies’, ‘monads’ and, especially, ‘petites perceptions’) are traceable in the initial structure of Murphy, set out in the opening pages of the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’. Windelband is unmistakable on the indebtedness of later thinkers to Leibniz: The soul (as every monad) always has ideas or representations, but not always conscious, not always clear and distinct ideas; its life consists in the development of the unconscious to conscious, of the obscure and confused to clear and distinct ideas or representations. In this aspect Leibniz now introduced a significant conception into psychology and epistemology. He distinguished between the states in which the soul merely has ideas, and those in which it is conscious of them.67

Windelband earlier points out that monads ‘have no windows’ and this ‘ “windowlessness” is to a certain extent the expression of their “metaphysical impenetrability” ’ – surely the backdrop to the descriptions of Murphy’s ‘pads’ at the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat: ‘No system of ventilation appeared to dispel the illusions of respirable vacuum. The compartment was windowless, like a monad . . . [Murphy] had never been able to imagine a more creditable representation of what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little world.’68 A fitting supposition is that Beckett goes one step further than Windelband’s reading of Leibniz, employing the latter as a sort of methodological fulcrum connecting up the ‘Interwar Notes’ so occupying Beckett in the three and a half years preceding Murphy. Supporting Windelband and Jung’s views on Leibniz’s discovery of ‘unconscious mental states’, consider Beckett’s transcription of Ernest (‘Erogenous’) Jones’ Papers on Psycho-Analysis – comprising wholly one-third of Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’ – in light of the concepts advanced by (especially Windelband’s) Leibniz: The Unconscious: Absurdity of equating unconscious with non-mental. Consciousness merely one component of mentality. The ‘Limbo’ conception of the unconscious (Hartmann, Myer & Jung), as an obscure dumping-ground of the mind for the processes devoid of inherent initiative or any primary dynamic faculty, processes utterly inert & passive, as well as for another group of nascent processes for which the conscious personality is not yet ripe. Freud’s conception of the unconscious is inductive & scientific as opposed to the a priori philosophic view of the Limboists. The unconscious is essentially a function of repressing

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& consisting of mental material incompatible with the conscious personality. This is its 1st characteristic, 2nd being the independent & typically conative nature of its processes. The 3rd its close relation to crude & primitive instincts. The 4th its infantile nature & origin. The splitting up of mentality takes place in 1st year of life, as a result of the conflict between congenital amoral & primordial endowments on the one hand & on the other the inhibiting social forces (some inborn but mostly acquired). The primordial impulses are repressed & their energy diverted to social aims, but they continue to exist underground & to manifest themselves circuitously & symbolically. The 5th its indifference to moral & logical considerations, though it has an emotional logic of its own. The 6th its predominantly sexual character, the sexual impulse being subjected to greater intensity of repression than any of the other primary instincts. This last attribute in no way incompatible with the 4th, given the intensity of pregenital sexuality, which is distinguished from the adult form in its being more diffuse, tentative & preliminary, closely associated with excretory functions & highly coloured by child’s relations with the parents (incest complex). Jung distorts these incest fantasies into symbols for ethical ideas & denies them any inherent dynamic initiative. The unconscious, therefore, according to psychoanalysis, may be summed up as a region of the mind the content of which is characterised by being (1) Repressed (2) Conative (3) Instinctive (4) Infantile (5) Unreasoning (6) Predominantly sexual. A typical instance of an unconscious process, illustrating all 6 characteristics, would be, a little girl wishing that her mother might die so that she could marry her father. (TCD MS 10971/8/9)

Whether or not Leibniz can be legitimately recognized as the nexus between philosophy and psychology, the latter considering the underside of ‘mental reality’ – the unconscious, repression, physical symptoms produced by mental neuroses and so on – both projects must be understood in terms of an intellectual self-education, necessarily anticipating the later divestment of knowledge in order to, in Beckett’s words, ‘eliminate all the poisons and find the right language’ in the postwar writing.69 The readings, transcriptions and, in an important sense, internalization of many of the psychological and especially philosophical texts comprised prior to the outbreak of the Second World War ought, thus, to be viewed as a fulcrum around which Beckett conceived his own aims and developed the non-Euclidean logic later artistically employed with such precision in the postwar works. Similar to that of the ‘Philosophy Notes’, discussion of the ‘Psychology Notes’ also points toward the utility of this material in Beckett’s life and writing. Although the care and exertion inherent in both projects suggest rather obsessional behaviour during the 1930s, the corpus of material was certainly much more valuable to Beckett’s development than the neatly stacked pennies this chapter’s derisive epigraph suggests. By way of demonstration, let us briefly turn to a few contemporaneous textual examples.

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To start with, to demystify some of Beckett’s undoubted erudition, most references in his writings at this time come via secondary sources and overviews. Baker’s very first page in Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis lists 15 terms used in Beckett’s writings during the 1930s. Of these, wholly two-thirds are taken directly from the ‘Psychology Notes’, and most not included are not sufficiently technical to be transcribed.70 Further, it is apparent that even when Beckett does not explicitly incorporate phrases or terms into his prose, they are often drawn upon nonetheless. For example, ‘the body, mind and soul of Murphy’ attain their final resting place amongst ‘the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit’ after his cremated remains are angrily thrown by Cooper at another man during a pub argument. Cooper might be forgiven: ‘for the first time in more than twenty years’ he has been able to sit at a bar, thanks to Murphy’s death. The preceding page informs us, ‘Cooper did not know what had happened to set him free of those feelings that for so many years had forbidden him to take a seat or uncover his head, nor did he pause to inquire.’71 Had Cooper paused to inquire, as Beckett did, into the initial pages of Wilhelm Stekel’s Psychoanalysis and Suggestion Therapy, this neurotic malady would become clear: ‘Acathisia i.e., inability to sit down’ (TCD MS 10971/8/24).72 This is yet another in a long line of psychosomatic symptoms recorded by Beckett, often for their outlandish names – both in German and in English – and for their potential insight into Beckett’s own life. Bearing this in mind, a closer look at those texts contributing to Beckett’s understanding of psychological mechanisms is in order. The first text, Karin Stephen’s Psychoanalysis and Medicine: A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill, seems to be used more or less as an introduction, which is unusual considering that Stephen’s first page declares that her reprinted series of eight Cambridge lectures is chiefly medical and clinical and thus not an ideal initiation. In this and the subsequent eight texts, Beckett shows no clinical interest whatsoever; that is, in case histories illustrating various psychoanalytic disorders. He also seems to have had little use for the medical aspects of psychoanalysis, although in Stephen and elsewhere some interest is taken in patient–therapist interaction, as in her final line, copied word for word from The Wish to Fall Ill : ‘If he is dominated by unconscious starvation so that he needs in all relationships to get as much as possible, he will try & get the utmost out of his hour, irritably demanding explanations’ (TCD MS 10971/7/5). Conversely, Beckett took particular interest in a ten-page section in chapter 5 of Stephen’s work, indicated by a line drawn down the side of his notes. Beckett’s summarized excerpt highlights the poles of bodily control – from soiling oneself to constipation – through ‘excessive parental control’, serving to ‘turn the aggression in upon the subject & produce melancholia’.

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Overwhelming quality of infantile excretory processes, so that they are both dreaded & desired by the subject. They constitute a diffuse form of orgasm, taking control of the organism & carrying themselves through to a crisis independently of volition. This typical of sensation of excretion before sphincter control has been established. The child punished for lack of control may grow up dreading loss of control on various planes, excretory, genital, etc., resulting in constipation, frigidity, etc. The sheer terror of being run away with by a bodily function. (TCD MS 10971/7/2)

Beckett’s interest in this chapter might link to his prior interest in scatology (recorded in Beckett’s Dream Notebook), or instead to personal travails from the 1930s (like a few references to having a weak bladder in the ‘German Diaries’). And if Beckett’s margin jottings indicate subsequent artistic employment – as one suspects it does – the real interest in the above excerpt may have been to characterize the narrator of, and advance narration in, the 1946 ‘First Love’. Here constipation is introduced as a symptom of neurotic anxiety: ‘One day, on my return from stool, I found my room locked and my belongings in a heap before the door. This will give you some idea of how constipated I was, at this juncture. It was, I am now convinced, anxiety constipation. But was I genuinely constipated? Somehow I think not.’73 But whatever the particular interest in the above excerpt, two more general reasons for Stephen’s use can be observed: the basic contours of a strict Freudian reading of the unconscious, and classifications of guilt and anxiety states within the neurotic processes. In terms of Beckett’s interest in psychoanalysis, most influential is Freud’s chief disciple, Ernest Jones, called ‘Freudchen’ (little Freud) in the ‘Psychology Notes’. Chapters from his two books, Treatment of the Neuroses and Papers on Psycho-analysis (the latter employed to describe the unconscious above), establish Jones as Beckett’s main expositor of psychoanalytic theory, comprising nearly half the entire corpus of psychological notes. With ‘Erogenous Jones’, the onus is overwhelmingly upon the outlines of Freudian psychoanalysis: each of the eight chapters of the first section on ‘General Papers’ is noted from Papers on Psycho-analysis. Conversely, Beckett’s notes only cover the first chapter of the subsequent section ‘Papers on dreams’, no reading is traceable to the following ‘Papers on Treatment’ section, and only two chapters are noted from each of Jones’ final two sections, ‘Clinical Papers’, and ‘Papers on Child-Study and Education’.74 The glossary at the end of this text was also employed, if only for the shape of words such as ‘Ophresiophilia’, ‘Cunnilingus’ and ‘Mixoscopia’ rather than their sterile definitions (TCD MS 10971/8/19; TCD MS 10971/8/20). That said, the overriding impulsion is one of attempted self-diagnosis. Beckett then read (with increasing distaste) a second, much shorter, text by Ernest Jones, Treatment of the Neuroses. Again, the focus is upon the tenets of psychoanalysis, in this case, Jones’ specialisms, hysteria and anxiety:

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the bulk of these four pages is upon the fourth chapter, ‘Psychoanalysis’, to which Beckett devotes an entire page. Both the perceived maladies and emergent manifestations resulting from psychological neuroses recur again and again. Hysteria, or, malingering. Common neurotic manifestations: oedemas, neuralgias, pseudoangina & other cardiac syndromes, bronchial asthma, enuresis, pavor nocturnus, gastric & intestinal disturbance, pollakiuria, spermatorrhoea, dysuria. Central symptom of neurosis is interference with social capability. One of the functions & meanings of a neurosis is the provocation of distress in the subject’s entourage (hence resentment & scepticism of ‘normal’ people). Neuroses represent a conflict between the individual & society, other diseases a conflict between man & nature. Hysteria almost as incurable as cancer. Three simple or ‘actual’ neuroses: neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis & hypocondria [sic]; & four psychoneuroses: conversion-hysteria, anxiety-hysteria, fixation-hysteria & the obsessional neurosis. (TCD MS 10971/8/21)

Although we have seen that both Beckett and Bion likely settled into a more phenomenological routine much preferred by the latter to the determinism of Freud and his disciples, their ideas were nevertheless preferred by the former to those of Jung and, to a lesser extent, Adler’s ‘one trackmind’ (sic). Quite possibly, the psychoneurosis in the above excerpt is in closest proximity to Beckett’s own self-conception, conveyed in portions of his ‘German Diaries’ and selected correspondence. Yet Beckett reacts to Jones’ determinism when the latter encroaches upon the sphere of art. ‘An important characteristic of hysterical disorder, noted Beckett, ‘is the excessive development of fantasy at the expense of adjustment to reality’. Here Jones writes of fantasy, that life-blood of the creative artist, as a probable sign of hysteria ‘like a well-known hero of the juvenile drama, he has “never grown up” ’ or ‘dreaming of “Castles in Spain” ’.75 Introjection: ‘there but for the grace of God . .’ [sic] Sensitiveness of neurotics devant les souffrances d’autrui. The ‘tramatophilic disposition’. An important characteristic of hysterical disorder is the excessive development of fantasy at the expense of adjustment to reality. Thus it becomes practically irrelevant whether a given traumatic memory recovered from the unconscious corresponds with a fact or not, the effect on the patient is the same. Dungeons in Spain. (Mine own.) By ‘over-determination’ is meant the disproportion between a single hysterical symptom & the elaborate plexus of repressions that motivate it. To check the analysis before the fundamental aberration is elucidated is like presuming to cure a riddling abscess by tapping superficial pockets of pus instead

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of thoroughly laying open & draining entire system of connected cavities (free discharge from necrotic areas). Peter Panitis (mine own). (TCD MS 10971/8/21)

Aside from the term ‘introjection’ recycled to describe ‘Papini’s Dante’ – ‘he introjected certain forms of suffering like a neurotic’76 – notable here is an acceptance of suffering (in a castle dungeon in Spain, perhaps) underlying the more sarcastic self-diagnosis, and indeed the diagnosis of Ernest Jones. Over and above Beckett’s employment of the above passage in his journalism, the same sense cast here links the above selection to Murphy. Believing that at last he had found his own ‘pleasant’ mercy-seat, both Murphy’s success with the patients and his (illusory) identification of this newfound ‘brotherhood’ in the MMM leads him to conclude that he has found his refuge: ‘With these and even less weighty constructions he saved his facts against the pressure of those current in the Mercyseat. Stimulated by all those lives immured in mind, as he insisted on supposing, he laboured more diligently than ever before at his own little dungeon in Spain.’77 Insofar as the ‘Psychology Notes’ were fodder for the writing process, nothing beats R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology, comprising a quarter of Beckett’s total psychological notes. In contextualizing modern psychology, Woodworth is wholly unlike all eight psychoanalytic texts, and is responsible for our understanding of this corpus of material as the ‘Psychology Notes’ rather than the ‘Psychoanalysis Notes’. As a survey of research on unconscious, repressed or otherwise unrecovered events, Beckett’s close reading of this book and notes from every chapter evoke the Leibnizian inception of psychology as an outgrowth of earlier consciousness philosophy. Right from the opening outline, the contemporary psychological schools seek to ‘humanise’ approaches to the mind by extending their remit to account for personal experience: R. S. Woodworth: Contemporary Schools of Psychology. 20th century: 3 schools in reaction against ‘consciousness’ psychology of 19th century– (1) Psychoanalysis (apotheosis of unconscious) (2) Behaviourism (rejection of consciousness altogether) (3) Purposivism (reducing the function of consciousness) All three seek to humanise psychology. (TCD MS 10971/7/7)

Murphy’s second page sets out Woodworth’s obvious importance in the construction of Neary’s character, also viewed earlier in Beckett’s terms of indebtedness to Presocratic thought. Immediately following his introduction as Pythagorean, tutor and heart-stopper, Neary’s first words in Murphy concern love, which later comes to structure the action of the Irish ‘puppets’ (Counihan, Wylie, Neary and Cooper) in pursuit of Murphy:

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‘Murphy, all life is figure and ground.’ ‘But a wandering to find home,’ said Murphy. ‘The face,’ said Neary, ‘or system of faces, against the big blooming buzzing confusion. I think of Miss Dwyer.’78

As Ackerley points out, while the ‘big blooming buzzing confusion’ is derived from William James, Woodworth quotes it in a brief discussion of James’ ideas in a chapter on Gestalt Psychology.79 Again, in keeping with Beckett’s focused reading of summative books (like Mahaffy) and summative sections within books (such as Windelband’s first chapter on ‘Cosmology’), from Woodworth’s 15 pages on ‘Associations’ and ‘Figure and ground in Gestalt psychology’, Beckett constructed a Gestaltist basis for Neary’s otherwise Pythagorean character, one that also provided a fair amount of dialogue in Murphy. Moreover, what the ‘Psychology Notes’ prove is that the two distinct traditions are explicitly conflated by Neary’s response to Murphy’s sarcasm – ‘ “And then?” said Murphy. “Back to Teneriffe [sic] and the apes?” ’ – in defining his love for Miss Dwyer (and later Miss Counihan) as both a ‘closed figure’ and a ‘tetrakt’.80 The latter is Pythagoras’ most perfect of figures reproduced earlier in Chapter 3, and the former is the Gestaltists’ defined ‘figures’ against a backdrop of competing images. ‘You may sneer,’ said Neary, ‘and you may scoff, but the fact remains that all is dross for the moment at any rate, that is not Miss Dwyer. The one closed figure in the waste without form, and void! My tratrakyt! . . . Or to put it another way,’ said Neary; ‘the single, brilliant organized, compact blotch in the tumult of heterogeneous stimulation.’81

To an even greater extent than Ackerley has suggested, the entire opening exchange in Murphy is an artistic rendering of Beckett’s page on Gestalt psychology: Associationists rejected innate ideas & all native knowledge of objects. Only by experience can we interpret raw material of sense data (e.g. elicit an organised scene from a manifold of coloured spots). Gestaltists admit that we know the properties of objects by experience, but deny that we ever had to learn their shapes. Their contention is that we do not have to learn to see a compact blotch as a unit, because the primary brain response to area of homogenous stimulation is a dynamic system & not an aggregation of separately active points. Figure & Ground in Gestalt Psychology. The figure stands out naturally from the ground in virtue of the fundamental distinction between them. A baby does not open its eyes on James’s ‘big blooming buzzing confusion’, but singles out a face or other compact visual unit. Cp. noise figure against noise background, movement on skin against general mass of cutaneous sensation. This distinction is of the first importance for Gestaltists & a fundamental principle of their conception of experience & behaviour.

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The closed figure has an advantage over all others competing for separation from the ground. A natural tendency of brain dynamics is to close up gaps. Brain processes tend towards equilibrium & minimal tension & this is achieved by removing unbalanced tensions of gaps. The seeing of figures is inherent in perceptive activity. In the same way symmetry is perceived more readily than asymmetry. The organic unity of optical sensorium & motorium. Sense perception & motor response imbedded in the total activity of the organism. Gestalt view of Behaviour: Gestaltists object to view of behaviour as made up of stimulus–response units & to all other and forms of psychological atomism, to concept of instinct as a chain of reflexes & learned behaviour as a chain of conditioned reflexes. (TCD MS 10971/7/12)

Elsewhere, Kurt Koffka’s Gestaltism, which ‘insisted that insight & not trial & error was at the root of all learning, i.e. he stressed perceptual factor as against blind motor behaviour’ (TCD MS 10971/7/13), provokes an angry (and unreplied) letter to ‘Herr Kurt Koffka’ by Neary, demanding an ‘explanation’ for his solitude even though Miss Dwyer had ‘became one with the ground against which she had figured so prettily’.82 In Murphy, then, neither love nor human experience is depicted as particularly suited to a Gestalt analysis. More favourably received, and generally indicative of both Woodworth’s shorter (Murphy) and longer (Watt) utility, are the ideas on ‘reactive experiences’ by the Külpe School, holding that ‘Introspection is subjective observation’ (TCD MS 10971/7/7). Commencing from self-inspection (related to Geulincx’s ethical system discussed in the ensuing chapter) was certainly closer to Beckett’s heart than the Behaviourism comprising Woodworth’s subsequent chapter. Again Beckett uses an excerpt on a school of thought to comical effect, in this case for wheedling 1.83 cups of coffee from a most reactive waitress named Vera, after Murphy ‘applied the stimulus proper. “A cup of tea and a packet of assorted biscuits.” . . . Murphy had some faith in the Külpe school. Marbe and Bühler might be deceived, even Watt was only human, but how could Ach be wrong?’83 The Külpe (1862–1915) School: Marbe, Buhler, Ach, Watt – concerned not with the nature of the reaction but with the actual reactive experience, & concluding in the inportance [sic] of the preparation for reaction – preparation, adjustment, set, Einstellung. P (preparatory signal) / Fore-Period /

S (stimulus) R (reaction) Main-Period /

Most of the effort, active experience & real work takes place in the fore-period. This school agrees with Binet in asserting imageless thought. Imageless Thought Controversy: the parting of the ways in modern psychological theory. Existentialism arose out of reaction against it, Behaviousism [sic] reacted by rejecting introspection altogether, Gestalt Psychology by objecting to

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introspection as an instrument of analysis & by proposing to abandon mental chemistry altogether, sensory elements & thought elements alike. (TCD MS 10971/7/7)

In addition to the possible eponymy, the novel Watt also owes something to the ‘Imageless Thought Controversy’ insofar as the climactic, indeterminate figure causing such great consternation – impatience is mentioned three times – never allows Watt to form a meaningful appearance to describe his reactive experience. For if the figure drew merely near, and very near indeed, how should he know, if it was a man, that it was not a woman, or a priest, or a nun, dressed up as a man? . . . Watt was puzzling over this, when the figure, without any interruptions of its motions, grew fainter and fainter, and finally disappeared.84

But the experience of imageless thought (inducing a will-less calm) notwithstanding, Watt’s (lack of ) experience with the indeterminate figure (and to a lesser extent with the Galls), certainly echoes Murphy’s much more explicit employment of a disconcerting ‘imageless thought’ induced by Endon before that eponymous character’s death. When he was naked he lay down in a tuft of soaking tuffets and tried to get a picture of Celia. In vain. Of his mother. In vain. Of his father (for he was not illegitimate). In vain. . . . In vain in all cases. He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat. It was his experience that this should be stopped, whenever possible, before the deeper coils were reached.85

Moving forward rather than back along Beckett’s oeuvre, one need look no further than the opening sentences in some of the later fiction, first to appreciate the casting of interminable pictures after mental images cease, and then to recognize the inherent value of the ‘Psychology Notes’ to both Beckett’s art and Beckett Studies alike: ‘No trace of life anywhere, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yes, dead, good imagination dead imagine. Islands, water, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda.’86 A final example from Woodworth further points up both the immediate and longer-term influence of the ‘Psychology Notes’: beyond merely being the source for Murphy’s jibe at Neary above, the excerpt on Wolfgang Köhler’s study of apes at Tenerife underwrites the contention here that Beckett’s reading was both narrower and more meticulous than is usually supposed. Despite two notes to himself to actually read Mentality of the Apes,

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clearly indicating an interest, Beckett’s only entry on Köhler’s work is the following excerpt. Köhler’s studies on apes at German arthropoid [sic] station of Teneriffe [sic] during the war. Did the apes possess insight? Was their learning more than a mere matter of trial & terror [sic], as concluded by Thorndike? Köhler was able to show that the apes did possess insight, provided they were allowed to see all the elements in the situation (its pattern), instead of being placed in such a blind situation as a box, maze, etc., & that they could close gaps. Thus a chimpanzee could join two sticks together to get at food beyond the reach of either, or similarly pile up boxes. Insight essential in learning: this view opposed to that of associationism, with its conception of learning as made up of linkages, native & acquired, between stimuli & responses. The brain works in large patterns, closing gaps. (TCD MS 10971/7/12–TCD MS 10971/7/13)

Twenty years later, Köhler’s study acts as the setting and events in Act Without Words I, ‘A mime for one player’: ‘He takes up small cube, puts it on big one, tests their stability, gets up on them and is about to reach carafe [marked “WATER”] when it is pulled up a little way and comes to rest beyond his reach’.87 Revealing the intertextual reference affords a lovely contrast between Köhler’s apes as ‘can-ers’ in terms of conceptual learning, and Beckett’s mime as a ‘non-can-er’, with relief ever beyond reach. Beckett’s source for Act Without Words I is thus not Köhler in any direct sense, but Köhler via Woodworth. Those texts comprising the remainder of the ‘Psychology Notes’ are, on the whole, far less important in terms of psychological and particularly psychoanalytic transcriptions. Chapter 2 reproduced the entirety of Beckett’s notes from Sigmund Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; from this text, Lecture XXXI is noted while seemingly more interesting chapters for Beckett are passed over (for example, ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’). Much the same can be said of Wilhelm Stekel’s Psychoanalysis and Suggestion Therapy; in this case, Beckett read the whole book, favouring particularly noteworthy passages, like the second entry ascribed to Freud, ‘We can only convert hysterical unhappiness into real unhappiness’ (TCD 10971/8/24). It appears that, after the exposition of psychology by Woodworth, and psychoanalysis by Stephen and Jones, Beckett was chiefly recording notable phrases, symptoms of neurosis and the role of the subconscious in experience. The final dozen pages in the ‘Psychology Notes’ on Adler, Stekel and Rank – unlike the laborious descriptions of the first threequarters of Beckett’s notes – merely give quotable phrases and the occasional interpolation. Nice examples of the former include Adler’s ‘The neurotic, nailed to the cross of his fiction’ (TCD 10971/8/25) and his ‘We continually act as if we possessed knowledge of the future, although we realise we

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can know nothing’ (TCD MS 10971/8/33). But as regards interpolation, Beckett’s response is consistently unfavourable: Inestimable advantage of man over woman, consisting in his being able partially to back into the mother by means of the penis which stands – ha! ha! – for the child. Coitus, with its momentary loss of consciousness, a slight hysterical attack. (TCD MS 10971/8/35)

One gets the impression that, as the fifth academic psychoanalyst encountered, Adler was not the only ‘dogmatist’ who insistently ‘put it across’ to Beckett. Although the last excerpt belongs to Rank, and the above comments on the emaciated transcription of Beckett’s final four texts certainly include him, The Trauma of Birth is nevertheless somewhat different. Beckett’s notes on Rank are both more complete than on Adler and Stekel, and are more immediately associated with a longstanding interest in the caul. Of course, such uterine tropes abound across Beckett’s texts, from Belacqua’s pleasantly purgatorial ‘wombtomb’ in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Jung’s ‘never properly been born’ in the Appendix to Watt, to Mrs. Rooney’s ‘The trouble with her was she had never really been born!’ in All That Fall.88 Beckett’s first entry from Rank also has fascinating resonances with the desire for company and the darkened, embryonic condition of the narrator in Company, ‘from the occasional relief it was supineness becomes habitual and finally the rule. You now on your back in the dark shall not rise again to clasp your legs in your arms and bow your head till it can bow down no further. But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable.’89 Anxiety of child left alone in dark room due to his unconscious being reminded (er-innert) of intrauterine situation, terminated by frightening severance from mother . . . Analysis the belated accomplishment of incomplete mastery of birth trauma. Analytic situation identified with intrauterine one, patient back in position of unborn. Just as all anxiety goes back to anxiety at birth (dyspnoea), so every pleasure has as its final aim the reestablishment of the primal intrauterine pleasure. (TCD MS 10971/8/34)

That Beckett was particularly drawn to subconscious states, like ‘intrauterine pleasure’ especially, is a matter we shall encounter in an assessment of the salient features connecting some of his experiences to the ‘Psychology Notes’.

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Considering the entirety of the ‘Psychology Notes’, within the context of larger note-taking and writing enterprises predating Murphy, a striking change signalled in Beckett’s reading and interests becomes evident. Whereas Beckett’s Dream Notebook is heavily Joycean in method, textual pillaging and artistic transformation – Dream of Fair to Middling Women itself is ostentatiously erudite – Beckett may well first register a turn away from Joyce’s ‘heroic’ approach to literature in the ‘Psychology Notes’. Even the earlier ‘Philosophy Notes’ adhere to Schopenhauer’s ‘principle of sufficient reason’, stressing facts, basic outlines of a given system of thought and the conviction that these ideas are comprehensible and communicable. With the ‘Psychology Notes’ one first glimpses the intellectual – as opposed to artistic – enshrinement of a major theme in Beckett’s later writing: knowing is not enough. For Beckett’s readings in psychology all presuppose ‘Leibnizian’ non-conscious mental activity as a significant feature of individual life and experience. Insofar as the ‘Interwar Notes’ are taken for their own sake – that is, in terms of what was offered in the particular texts Beckett chose to record – by so highlighting the unconscious, repressed or otherwise veiled, the ‘Psychology Notes’ anticipate Geulincx and Mauthner in the development of Beckett’s non-Euclidean logic: knowledge toward, and deference to, ineffability. A number of other transcribed passages point to Beckett’s interest in those psychologically imperceptible parts of ‘mental reality’: repressed memories, dreams, psychoanalytic symbols, preconscious thoughts and so on. Even where discussion of these features is peripheral, non-conscious experience in the ‘Psychology Notes’ is present from the first page of Beckett’s notes to the last entry: Normal life a matter of more or less efficient repression. Thesis: Psychogenic symptoms are defences designed to prevent anxiety from developing when repression threatens to give way. (TCD MS 10971/7/1) The depths of the unconscious can no more be changed than any other organ necessary to life. The only result we can attain in Psychoanalysis is a changed attitude of the Ego to the Unconscious. (TCD MS 10971/8/36)

Of greatest importance in terms of the unconscious is clearly Ernest Jones (whose discussion of psychoanalysis as ‘concerned less with the mechanisms and material of remembering than with those of forgetting’ is especially evident), containing the sections ‘Forgetting material not in itself unpleasant’ and ‘All forgetting due to repression’ underlined in Beckett’s hand (TCD MS 10971/8/8). The ‘General Papers’ section in Papers on Psycho-analysis forms wholly one-third of the entire corpus of ‘Psychology Notes’; of these eight chapters, Beckett was notably drawn toward the final three papers, ‘The

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repression Theory in its Relation to Memory’, ‘The unconscious and its Significance for Psychopathology’ and ‘The Theory of Symbolism’. The first contains the underlined headings above, which immediately precedes the second, namely, Jones’ long excerpt on the unconscious cited earlier. And, as befitting an artist, Beckett’s third and most important borrowing from Papers on Psycho-analysis specifically emphasizes ‘indirect figurative representation, such as metaphorical use of words’ – that is, the symbolism of ‘dreams, myths, etc.’ – in over 2,000 words covering yet another aspect of the subconscious (TCD MS 10971/8/11). Given Beckett’s recurring attention to unconscious drives, memories and symbolism throughout his recorded psychoanalytic readings, this significant feature of the ‘Psychology Notes’ supports the psychological symbolism often found by scholars, for instance, what Molloy terms the ‘well-known mechanism of association’: ‘And I even crawled on my back, plunging my crutches blindly behind me into the thickets, and with the black boughs for sky to my closing eyes. I was on my way to mother.’90 There are the 3 groups of psychic material: (1) Unconscious complexes (2) Inhibiting influences (3) Sublimated tendencies. Symbols are the product of an intrapsychic conflict between (1) & (2), their material derived from (3), & (2) to some extent represented in their formation. The force that creates them, their meaning & raison d’être, all derived from (1). (TCD MS 10971/8/15)

Reference to Molloy in connection with psychoanalytic symbolism is thus not arbitrary. Barbara Shapiro’s two-part ‘Toward a Psychoanalytic Reading of Beckett’s Molloy’ reads the eponymous hero’s journey in Molloy, Part one, as a symbolic ‘mother-quest’, which both structures and ‘announces the mother’s centrality to her son’s narration’.91 Similarly, Raymond Riva’s ‘Beckett and Freud’ sees Molloy’s crutches as one amongst many phallic symbols in The Trilogy: ‘These are perhaps too obviously phallic (symbols) to be taken seriously, but the idea is intriguing. And Beckett’s universe of atrophied arms and legs also includes, wishfully, the sexual parts . . . these seem echoes of unconscious oedipal feelings which have been sublimated’.92 Just as Shapiro reads psychoanalytic theory into Molloy, Riva contends ‘we must accept that Freud and Beckett are travelling parallel roads’ because the latter uses ‘essentially symbolic language . . . of our repressed and sublimated selves’.93 This too corresponds with Beckett’s five pages on symbolism: Most primary type of symbol is that in which one part of the body is equated with, then replaced by, another – the upper part of the body tending to be emphasised to exclusion of lower (Freud’s ‘displacement from below upwards’). Only that which is repressed is symbolised, because only it need be. (TCD MS 10971/8/13– TCD MS 10971/8/14)

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A paradoxical observation is useful here: instead of reading Beckett’s life and art through his primary materials (as advocated in the first two chapters), with the ‘Psychology Notes’ one is able to read secondary criticism (like that by Shapiro and Riva) for associations with Beckett’s own demonstrable knowledge of this discipline. In short, we can use these notes as a sort of checklist against which psychological, and especially psychoanalytic, themes have been incorporated into Beckett’s texts, as well as the extent to which Beckett Studies is justified in highlighting particular themes deliberately embedded in those texts. And in supporting both close readings of Beckett’s art and psychoanalytical paradigms in scholarship, the ‘Psychology Notes’ return us to our advocacy for theorizing from a position of empirical soundness. The intention throughout has not been to refute conjectural readings as such – exemplified by the different studies on the subconscious by Shapiro and Riva, which are emphatically affirmed by the ‘Psychology Notes’ – but instead to methodologically buttress these with archival material demonstrably shaping Beckett’s art. Another central aspect of the ‘Psychology Notes’, one much more immediate in utility than the role of the subconscious, is an unquestionably personal bias. Of far and away the greatest importance here is psychoanalytical discussion of anxiety neurosis and its accompanying symptoms. As outlined above, psychosomatic ‘panic attacks’ plaguing Beckett caused his move from Dublin to London. That Beckett’s ‘specific fear and complaint’ regarding his heart palpitations and general anxiety had deeper psychological roots is a hallmark of psychoanalytic theory: Three classes of anxiety: Primary, resulting directly from a state of tension; Secondary, lest such a state should recur; Tertiary, ‘mutilation’ anxiety, lest the barriers should cave in & the repressed fantasies of sexualised cruelty be carried out in fact. Vicious cycle of psychogenic illness: disappointment of desire, aggression, fear of results, object of desire turned into something terrifying, repudiation, disappointment, etc. Anxiety & guilt arise from omnipotent fantasies threatening to erupt. Both psychogenic symptoms & sublimations express indirectly the pleasure instinct, which has become repressed because of its entanglement with destructive impulses. But whereas in symptoms the destructive impulses appear in the form of self-inflicted pain, in defensive sublimation they are turned to advantage, in that the activities whereby they are symbolically achieved (cutting, soiling, etc.) are used to make symbolic restitution (creation). Thus a sublimated activity is acceptable as no symptom could ever be, for here the destructive component is utilised & does not remain merely painful & mischievous as in the symptom. (TCD MS 10971/7/4)

Yet again, the bulk of Beckett’s knowledge on anxiety neurosis is derived from Stephen, as above, and more exhaustively from Ernest Jones:

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Anxiety neurosis: paroxysmal & inter-paroxysmal. Air-hunger, larval attacks, palpitation, vertigo, sudden hunger, sweating, imperative desire to micturate & defaecate, feelings of suffocation. Hyperaesthesia for auditory sensations, various paraesthesias. Freud’s postulate: Under certain circumstances sexual excitations arise that cannot follow their natural course of leading to either physical gratification or even conscious desire for such; being deflected from their aim they manifest themselves mentally as morbid anxiety, physically as the bodily accompaniments of this. Anxiety hysteria: May lead to psychic impotence & sexual anaesthesia. Distinction between physical symptoms of anxiety-hysteria, which are merely physiological accompaniments of a given emotion, & those of conversionhysteria, which are the direct consequence & symbol of the morbid mental processes. The ideational content of phobia does not coincide with, but symbolises, that of underlying wish. The function of a phobia is to guarantee the subject against an anxiety attack. The inhibiting phobias surround him like a chain of fortresses, & thereby he is protected from anxiety but also excluded from action. Lassitude & depression following masturbation are due to the moral scruples that have to be overcome & to the excessive expenditure of psychic energy, in the sense that the subject has to provide from within excitations that normally come from without & thus bears the whole expense of that energy that is normally shared between two partners. (TCD MS 10971/8/22–TCD MS 10971/ 8/23)

Running in tandem to his thrice-weekly sessions with Bion, Beckett’s attempts at self-diagnosis pervade the ‘Psychology Notes’. Although heavily slanted toward anxious states, other states are also given psychoanalytic consideration, such as melancholia (described by Jones), Adler’s neurotic insomnia, and, as we shall see momentarily, Rank’s birth trauma. Given that the latter was explicitly tied to psychotherapy in Beckett’s discussion with Knowlson, it is unsurprising that Rank’s birth trauma also figures prominently in Beckett’s efforts to understand his own ‘neurotic disturbances’: Primal anxiety-effect at birth, which remains operative through life, right up to the final separation from the outer world (gradually become a second mother) at death, is from the very beginning not merely an expression of the new-born child’s physiological injuries (dyspnoea – constriction – anxiety), but in consequence of the change from a highly pleasurable situation to an extremely painful one, acquires a psychical quality of feeling. (TCD MS 10971/8/36)

Right the way through Beckett’s texts, the trope of birth as origin of trauma (dovetailing, as we shall see in Chapter 5, with philosophical encounters on the idea of birth itself as a curse) strongly echoes Rank’s

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conception of the ‘physical reproduction of the birth trauma’ (TCD MS 10971/8/35). Lest we forget, Beckett’s appropriated hero in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks is, in Dante’s original introduction, first glimpsed in a fittingly embryonic position and purgatorial stasis: And one of them, who seemed to me weary, Was sitting, with his hands clasped round his knees, And his head bowed down and touching them.94

And in later works such as the 1972 Not I and the 1979 A Piece of Monologue, the birth trauma and the pain entailed therein are conflated on stage with ‘the final separation from the outer world’ (TCD MS 10971/8/35); and so, ‘Birth was the death of him’.95 Similarly in the late prose, the 1973 ‘Fizzle 4’ concedes, ‘I gave up before birth, it is not possible otherwise, but birth there had to be, it was he, I was inside, that’s how I see it, it was he who wailed, he who saw the light’.96 Texts like ‘All Strange Away’ and ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ also deliberately evoke a foetal position, in many ways dramatizing Rank’s own understanding of existence as being ‘expelled’ from the womb: ‘Finally the great hysterical attack shows a complete defence mechanism in the well known arc de cercle position, diametrically opposed to doubled-up embryonal position’ (TCD MS 10971/8/35). A reinforcement of the personal and artistic fusion found in Beckett’s writing around the construction of the ‘Psychology Notes’ perfectly illustrates the manner in which his own experiences are transformed via Abbot’s understanding of textual ‘autography’. Drawing upon both the subconscious and the anxiety states gleaned from his notes, Beckett’s German entry in the ‘Clare Street Notebook’, headed ‘den 11 Aug’ (11 August 1936), provides an early instance of self-analysis as artistic subject: This is how angst starts growing and to be transformed into the old familiar physical pain. How translucent this mechanism now seems to me: at its core lies the principle that it is better to be afraid of something than of nothing. In the first case only a part of you is threatened in the second case the whole of you, not to mention the monstrous quality that is an intrinsic and inseparable part of the incomprehensible, one might even say boundless. And that fear is truly completely incomprehensible, for its causes lie in the depths of the past, and not just in the past of the individual (in this case the task would perhaps not be insoluble and life would not necessarily be tragic), but of the family, the race, the nation, human beings, and of nature itself. When such a fear begins to grow a reason must be found for it as soon as possible, since it is not within the power of anyone to be able to live with it in all its utter unfathomableness. Thus the neurotic, i.e. Everyman, may declare in all seriousness that there is only a marginal difference between God in heaven and a pain in the stomach. Since both emanate from one source and serve one purpose: to transform angst into fear.97

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That everyone is essentially neurotic was likely a lesson Beckett learned in therapy at the same time as its formulation in terms of Rank’s birth trauma. Yet more importantly, this particularly insightful passage also demarcates a preference for a conscious fear of something prompting anxiety, rather than a subconscious angst when faced with the unknown, the void. Here selfeducation through his notes gives way to an attempted self-diagnosis through artistic creation; that process acted as Beckett’s ‘Calmative’, as in his 1946 short story of that name: ‘I’m no longer with these assassins, in this bed of terror, but in my distant refuge, my hands twined together, my head bowed, weak, breathless, calm, free, and older than I’ll have ever been, if my calculations are correct.’98 Artistic creation is the final – and for Beckett, likely most therapeutic – feature to be encountered in the ‘Psychology Notes’. Just as Beckett’s transcription of subconscious states clearly contributed to his writing in the longer term, and his exploration of psychosomatic anxiety states more immediately corresponded to his own anxious experiences, so too the artistic utility of his notes reveals both prompt application and longer-term residua. From this perspective, the ‘Psychology Notes’ are absolutely in keeping with the rest of the ‘Interwar Notes’: from heavy and referential use in the 1930s to an increasingly faint, even esoteric, employment in the postwar works. We have already seen that the first three-quarters of the ‘Psychology Notes’ are engaged with a systematic exposition of psychological schools by Woodworth, and psychoanalytic theory largely by Jones and Stephen. While continuing to evince an interest in the psychology of anxiety, the subconscious and intrauterine memories, remaining transcriptions (of Stekel, Adler and Rank) are nevertheless more explicitly directed toward notable passages and terms. In short, as Beckett comes to the end of his psychological enterprise, he becomes less and less interested in psychoanalytic theory, and increasingly in favour of potential artistic fodder. Thus Adler’s ‘neurosis of the spasmophilic child’ (TCD MS 10971/8/25) becomes Neary’s jealous insult: ‘that schizoidal spasmophile, occupying the breast of angel Counihan’.99 In terms of artistic employment, then, a final glance at these three authors shall reinforce earlier suggestions that Beckett’s allusions become increasingly opaque and embedded in his later writing, acting as ideas rather than erudite references. We have already witnessed instances in the overt use of the ‘Psychology Notes’ around the time of composition. Indeed, employment in Beckett’s journalism has helped us to date their commencement. And in Murphy, Cooper is a psychoanalytic basket case: perpetually standing, he suffers from Stekel’s ‘acathisia’; an inability to remove his hat signifies a corresponding inability to master the birth trauma, for as Rank informs us, the ‘crown, the noblest of all head coverings, goes back to embryonal caul, as also our modern hat, the loss of which in a dream signifies separation from part of one’s Ego. “I’m back in the caul when I don my hat!” ’ (TCD MS 10971/8/35).

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The inversely afflicted Miss Dew, whose Duck’s disease makes her appear perpetually seated – and whose Dachshund is too close to the ground to tell the difference – is twined with Cooper. Like Cooper’s enthralment to Neary, Miss Dew is in the service of Lord Gall of Wormwood and, like Cooper, suffers from a ‘distressing pathological condition’, declared by the ‘psychopathological wholehogs’ as ‘simply another embodiment of the neurotic Non me rebus sed mihi res [I adapt life to myself, not myself to life]’.100 The ‘wholehog’ in this case is Alfred Adler: In toto, we get the picture of a man who does not want to play the game, a dog in the manger. Non me rebus, sed mihi res (Horace to Maecenas), expressing itself as an acathisia. (TCD MS 10971/8/30)

Yet whereas characters like Neary, and to a lesser extent Cooper and Dew, are partly modelled on the ‘Psychology Notes’, and whole excerpts often find their way into Murphy, use of the three authors in question becomes much sparer in both utility and allusion in the postwar texts. This is in keeping with Beckett’s later, more structural, use of the ‘Psychology Notes’ as a whole, as with Köhler’s influence on Act Without Words I. This point is amplified by Ernest Jones’ contribution to Arsene’s ‘short statement’ in Watt, replete with Germanic ‘Ifors’ and ‘Ihaf ’ to emphasize accent:101 A man, habitually reticent in speech, cherished the ambition, largely carried out, of being able so to construct his clauses, on a very German model, as to expel all he might have to say in one massive but superbly finished sentence that could be flung out & the whole matter done with. (TCD MS 10971/8/19)

However, the exemplar of this transformation from interwar artistic reference to increasingly esoteric allusion – indeed, one approaching a personal joke – is found again at the end of Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’, this time from Beckett’s entries from The Trauma of Birth. Chapter 2 connected the first instance of Rank’s ‘disinclination of many persons to travel with their backs to the engine’ to Watt’s preference ‘to have his back to his destination’, which is restated with greater subtlety in Mercier and Camier: ‘Mercier, whose back was to the engine, saw him [Mr. Madden] as he stood there, dead to the passengers hastening towards the exit’.102 Yet by the writing of The Unnamable, the entire meaning is subsumed into a story, within a story, within a story . . . the other comes back, from the wars, he didn’t die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back into the house, he’s dead, the other is dead, the mother in law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought

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of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there’s a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that’s called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that’s emotion, that’s love, and trains, the nature of trains, and the meaning of your back to the engine, and guards, stations, platforms, wars, love, heart-rending cries . . .103

Despite never agreeing with Adler that ‘Psychotherapy is an artistic profession’ (TCD MS 10971/8/33), Beckett’s knowledge of the psychological profession through the ‘Psychology Notes’ nevertheless certainly helped teach temperamental, intellectual and even linguistic lessons in the development of his own ‘artistic profession’. That these notes assisted by way of source material has been amply attested above, although the understandings derived may well have only crystallized in the years following Beckett’s termination of psychotherapy in late 1935. While finding in these notes further expression of Beckett’s developing non-Euclidean logic, it bears reasserting that these ‘Psychology Notes’ constitute a significant outlay of effort in their own right, while also providing traceable material used in Beckett’s later literary career. If only as a resonance of life nearly half a century earlier ‘steeping in Freud and his followers’, this final, tantalizing phrase in Beckett’s workbook for Company serves as a metonymy for both the longevity of influence derived from his interwar psychological encounters, and the employment of increasingly opaque allusions – often derived from this same interwar period – discernable at composition, yet all-but-erased for reception.104 Although this artistic methodology may have only been used to dodge the shadows of a ‘psychoanalyst’s phantasms’ discussed above, this chapter has suggested that, perhaps surprisingly, Beckett’s not doing so might have been giving away too much insight into his formative influences.

5 ‘Myself I Cannot Save’: Geulincx, Mauthner, Beckett There is an old story that King Midas had hunted for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, for a long time in the woods without catching him. But when he finally fell into his hands, the King asked: ‘What is the very best and the most preferable thing for Man?’ The demon remained silent, stubborn, and motionless; until he was finally compelled by the King, and then broke out into shrill laughter, uttering these words: ‘Miserable, ephemeral species, children of chance and hardship, why do you compel me to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear? The very best is quite unattainable for you: it is, not to be born, not to exist, to be Nothing. But the next best for you is – to die soon.’ 1 Arnold Geulincx and Fritz Mauthner remain secondary figures in the Western philosophical canon. And were it not for Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gottfried Leibniz – the latter already encountered under different auspices – the philosophies of Mauthner and Geulincx, respectively, may well have sunk without trace. Their philosophy has long been marginal for anglophone readers, on account of virtually nothing being available in English translation by either, and an especially limited secondary literature. We shall encounter these secondary texts sporadically throughout, but in a manner far removed from earlier chapters. Whereas the archival material previously highlighted has mandated a reappraisal of the massive historiography on a Cartesian Beckett and, to a lesser extent, a psychoanalytical Beckett, the evidence here points in a different direction. For the very different ideas of Mauthner and Geulincx have together provoked far too little exploration within Beckett Studies (and indeed elsewhere). Scholarship on Beckett’s relationship with and indebtedness to Geulincx and Mauthner is surprisingly scant, despite the fact that both are in the rather select canon of named philosophers in Beckett’s oeuvre: Mauthner is the last reference Beckett makes to any philosopher in his 1976 Rough for Radio II, and Geulincx is the only figure explicitly mentioned in Beckett’s art over more than a decade, from Murphy to Molloy. Again, a simple refraction of Beckett’s texts through philosophical ideas propounded by either is unhelpful and prismatic; nevertheless, we shall see that Geulincx and Mauthner, by emphasizing uncertainty and the

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consequent failure of human endeavours – in the sphere of ethics by the former, and through language by the latter – contributed vital ideas to Beckett’s view of humanity so aptly expressed by Malone: Come on, we’ll soon be dead, let’s make the most of it. But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.2

Separated as they are by two and a half centuries in time, and two and a half years in Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’, Mauthner and Geulincx certainly make unlikely bedfellows. Beyond their shared philosophical – yet differently approached – fidelity to failure, it is not my intention to make the rationalist and Christian devout Geulincx lie down with the Austrian apostate and post-Kantian sceptic Mauthner, and neither is the pursuit of their more idiosyncratic concerns particularly illuminating to our discussion. But considering that these verbatim transcriptions are the last taken for a general rather than specific purpose (as is the case with material on Samuel Johnson, accumulated from 1937 to 1940 with an eye to writing the quasi-biographical play Human Wishes), and thus closest to the postwar flurry of texts, the relevance of Geulincx and Mauthner to Beckett is, prima facie, indisputable. And notwithstanding their immense differences, Geulincx’s strange mixture of mysticism and Cartesianism in the mid-seventeenth century and Mauthner’s pioneering philosophy of language in the early twentieth century together bequeathed to Beckett a decisive intellectual perspective on impotence and ignorance. In first Geulincx and later Mauthner, then, Beckett’s ‘years of learning’ during the 1930s culminate with philosophically complex recriminations against the utility of knowledge. In short, we will see that Beckett’s own position comes to rest somewhere between Geulincx’s spiritual tabula rasa already cited in discussion of Murphy – exemplified by his ethical maxims, ‘It is a requirement of Humility to comprise its own despicable negation’ (TCD MS 10971/6/13.1) – and Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism, which paradoxically points toward ineffability over three immense volumes of erudition finally signalling that the ‘critique of language alone can unlock these gates [of truth] and show with friendly resignation that they lead from the world and thought into the void’ (TCD 10971/5/4). Both phrases were quoted by Beckett, and survived his 83 years as part of the ‘Interwar Notes’. As we have held throughout, the period preceding 1945 witnessed Beckett’s artistic evolution toward a position that is not a position, an aporia rejecting resolution; toward the construction of ‘unnameable’ protagonists and ‘Texts for Nothing’. And it is this non-Euclidean logic that finds its greatest development in Beckett’s encounter with Mauthner and Geulincx.

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EFFING THE INEFFABLE For Geulincx, even a marginal role in the philosophical canon as a contemporary of Descartes was doubtful until the late nineteenth century. At this time, a heated debate erupted over Leibniz’s seeming plagiarism of the Occasionalist clock theory. The analogy of coordinated clocks was used by Geulincx to illustrate the synchronization of the mind’s willing and body’s doing – an ‘occasional cause’, in short – in understanding God as a kind of vigilant timekeeper, constantly performing miracles that facilitated the apparent causality between mind and body. Nonetheless, Geulincx was construed as a mere philosophical cousin of Nicolas Malebranche – who rates a mention in How It Is and Beckett’s 1956 ‘The Image’ – and a strange, and rather estranged, descendent of René Descartes. Given the awkward position of Cartesianism in the religious debates that rent Holland (and Europe generally) at this time, Geulincx appears to have been hounded out of his post at the University of Leyden for teaching these new ideas and advocating ‘philosophical reform’ of the dominant Scholastic views. Before he could re-establish himself on the back of his just-published Ethics, he and, it seems, his entire household, were killed by an outbreak of plague in 1669. These details come from the only biographical work in English by J. P. N. Land who, in 1893, had completed publication of Geulincx’s complete works.3 The reason for Land’s efforts was twofold. First, on account of the systematic defamation and misinterpretation of Descartes’ supporters by reactionaries (in Geulincx’s case, it should be noted, hindered also by a narrow philosophical conflation with Baruch Spinoza, and by Pierre Bayle’s extensive yet misleading characterizations of Occasionalism in his Dictionnaire), the subsequent two centuries of writing on the Dutch philosopher are ‘largely a history of errors and misunderstandings’.4 Yet such a one-sided and tarnished legacy would have likely been Geulincx’s fate if not for allegations of unscholarly use of the infamous clock analogy in Leibniz’s construction of his ‘pre-established harmony’. Though a number of philosophical heavyweights defended Leibniz, the culmination of this fascinating genealogical debate about who said what first, in the end, sparked a revival of Geulincx’s ideas. This was consummated by Land’s 14-year endeavour in the construction of Geulincx’s complete works, appearing in a three-volume edition published between 1891 and 1893, entitled Arnoldi Geulincx Antverpiensis Opera Philosophica.5 From these volumes, Beckett took a handful of Quaestiones Quodlibeticae [Questions concerning Disputations] from the first volume, a handful of pages of transcriptions from Metaphysica Vera [True Metaphysics] in the second volume and a further 10,000 or so words from the Ethica [Ethics] in the final volume. The importance of the Opera, and especially Geulincx’s Ethics, is

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such that Beckett copied the material by hand in the Trinity College, Dublin library in early 1936, subsequently recopied his transcription and finally typed it up. This probably explains the non-sequential state of the archival reproductions, as well as the occurrence of both handwritten and typed material in the original Trinity College, Dublin manuscripts. The amount of work done by Beckett also doubtless explains the continued reference to Geulincx in correspondence over the initial months of 1936: I have been reading Geulincx in TCD without knowing exactly why. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is rationalisation and my instinct is right and the work worth doing, because of its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remaining alive.6

The use of ‘rationalisation’ and the idea of an eternal watchfulness over humanity merits highlighting here – even if Beckett accepted neither – for both are in keeping with revisionist scholarship on Geulincx’s unique contribution to philosophy, which stressed ‘the paradoxical unity of the rationalistic intrepidity and the religious mind’: The realisation of human impotence and of the impenetrable nature of God in his essence and work does not evoke from him the rebellious cries of rationalistic scepticism, but rather a believing sursender [sic] and a trusting and yielding optimism that is peculiar to a religious soul prepared for such feelings. Such an adaptation of rationalistic philosophy to the religious movements of the time distinguished Geulincx from Descartes as well as from Spinoza.7

Similar to Beckett’s indifference as to ‘whether he [Schopenhauer] is right or wrong or a good or worthless metaphysician’ in favour of the latter’s ‘intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted’,8 surely Geulincx’s self-chosen philosophical maxim – Serio et candide [serious and candid] – was no less important than Geulincx’s own intellectual justification of unhappiness: ‘I cannot have wings that would sustain my flight so rapidly and violently from the tedium of life or the disasters of humanity’ (10971/6/25). Or to return to Malone’s bedridden formulations: ‘And I thought I had it all thought out. If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window. But perhaps it is the knowledge of my impotence that emboldens me to that thought.’9 Moreover, the ethical consequences of Geulincx’s eclectic mix of Cartesian rationalism and Christian mysticism were also earlier employed in the structure of Murphy, as Beckett recognized in a letter of 16 January 1936 to Tom MacGreevy: I shall have to go into TCD after Geulincx, as he does not exist in National Library. I suddenly see that Murphy is break down between his ubi nihil vales ibi

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nihi velis and Malraux’s Il est difficile a celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens [It is hard for someone who lives outside society not to seek out his own].10

Like the ‘beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi ihil velis ’ in Murphy, Geulincx’s Ethics also appears in ‘The End’ as a gift from a tutor named Ward, prior to making its most famous, transformed, appearance in Molloy: I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck.11

This invocation is taken directly from Beckett’s notes on Geulincx and, like the notorious ‘where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing,’12 also has its source in the Ethics: Just as on the ship speedily carrying a passenger toward the West, nothing stops him walking on the very same ship towards the East; in the same way the willingness of God carries everything, everything bearing the fatal impetus, nothing obstructs any one of us . . . we struggle against his willingness by our own full decision. (TCD MS 10971/6/9.1)

One final point with respect to Geulincx is important to note at the outset. Similar to the dangers of collapsing Beckett’s own philosophical interests into Cartesianism observed in Chapter 3, ‘Occasionalism’ itself should not be viewed solely in terms of Descartes’ rather nebulous mind–body problem. As a recent philosophical study observes, ‘the foundation of occasionalism lies more generally in a large-scale explanation of causal relations in created nature’; meaning that Occasionalism is itself a particular approach to the perennial philosophical problem of causality, or ‘how a finite substance can act on another finite substance, whether they be of the same or different nature’.13 To this, Geulincx’s own philosophical contribution is less concerned with the physical (how material substances interact) than the metaphysical (regarding mind–body interaction via divine ‘continuous creation’). Both are derived from his views on the impotence of the self as ‘the fundamental axiom of his occasionalism: one does not do that which one knows not how to do’. This consideration is not limited to the motion of bodies (for example, the movement of arms, legs, books or bicycles – anything outside the mind), but extends to logic, understood by Geulincx as the ‘science of consequence’.14

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Despite his faith in reason, the first Western scratchings of the mind as a disunity may well have been offered to modern philosophy by Geulincx, whose doctrine ‘begins not with considerations about the heterogeneity of substances, but rather uniquely on the discovery of the impotence of the “I” to produce or even simply account for the infinite multiplicity of thoughts’.15 The consequence of not knowing how substances work actually moors Geulincx’s scepticism to reason – that sole facility remaining in human, rather than divine, jurisdiction under Occasionalism. This is exemplified by the final two paragraphs of the Metaphysica Vera, transcribed virtually in their entirety by Beckett: And even though our mind is not completely irrational in some respects, such as in the reception of ideas, and in the union with the body, and its release from that union, in general it behaves in a quite irrational manner, as those things do not depend on its knowledge or will: for it too is a created thing. It is clear from the foregoing that the ex nihilo principle has no place in the concept of Creation: it is not the case that nothing came first, and then something, but on the contrary the nature of Creation consists in the prior nature of God, all other things being dependent on Him. Hence, they do not arise and come ex nihilo rather than from God, as there was nothing prior to God. (TCD MS 10971/6/6–TCD MS 10971/6/6.1)

The sentiments above appear throughout Watt, perhaps Beckett’s most concentrated look at the breakdown of rationality through its own faulty mechanisms. That Watt was undertaken four years after Murphy – itself nearly complete by the time Beckett encountered Geulincx’s Metaphysics and Ethics in 1936 – and was the first following the termination of sustained note-taking, bears remembering. So too is the reality of Beckett’s situation at that time: Watt was mostly written while Beckett was in hiding from the Nazis in Roussillon, from a Europe tearing itself to pieces in even worse fashion than the trauma initiated a quarter of a century earlier – a situation not conducive to the embrace of reason. The haste of Beckett’s enforced departure in summer 1942 after the penetration of his resistance cell, Gloria, also doubtless meant that most of his life – including artistic aids like the ‘Interwar Notes’ – was left behind in his Paris flat.16 Watt is thus itself a product of upheaval and instability, as the socio-political and ethical systems operant in Europe before the Second World War were fundamentally tested in that conflict. And Watt is nothing if not an attack on systematic thinking. A good example encountered earlier is the division of the year into weeks, which on account of a leap year having 366 days, contains two different solutions (52.2857143 and 52.1428571), heard as a ‘mixed choir’ by Watt.17 Against the backdrop of these non-Euclidean permutations, Watt inscrutably enters into Mr. Knott’s service, where even basic propositions (such as weeks in a

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year) and fundamental causes (like the manner of Watt’s entrance into Knott’s house) contain ‘great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport’. The narrator, Sam, underscores how vital this is to Watt’s experience in Knott’s house: ‘Some idea will perhaps be obtained of the difficulties experienced in formulating, not only such matters as those here in question, but the entire body of Watt’s experience, from the moment of his entering Mr. Knott’s establishment to the moment of his leaving it’. Sam’s comments on ‘perhaps the principal incident of Watt’s early days in Mr. Knott’s house’ are themselves tied to Watt’s encounter with the piano tuners, the Galls father and son, confronting Watt for the first time in his life with the realization that a ‘nothing had happened, with all the clarity and solidity of something’.18 Metaphysica Vera reminds us that this ‘is a valid philosophical principle, that whatever is precluded by anything at all is nothing; for our assurance that what we consider is not nothing but something is in proportion to how much we can understand of it’.19 But this kind of philosophical system, epitomized by Geulincx’s attempts to establish logical foundations for thinking, is merely a plague to Watt, whose very understanding of existence is placed in abeyance in Knott’s house. The onus of forging meaning is again placed upon Watt when he moves to the first floor, further illustrating the dilemma encountered by both Geulincx and Beckett: is nothing in fact something? The question vexes Watt extensively, until he moves upstairs with the appearance of Arthur, whose arrival is similarly inscrutable. Watt was now tired of the ground-floor, the ground-floor had tired Watt out. What had he learnt? Nothing. But was not that something? He saw himself then, so little, so poor. And now, littler, poorer. Was that not something? So sick, so alone. And now. Sicker, aloner. Was not that something? As the comparative is something. Whether more than its positive or less. Whether less than its superlative or more.20

But it is not only Watt’s movements between floors that proves resistant to his attempts at comprehension: his entrance and exit, the amount of time spent there and, most importantly, knowledge of his Master, Knott, remains wholly elusive. In keeping with some studies finding Knott to be a kind of God-figure in Watt, Geulincx again supplies the ammunition: ‘[God] is ineffable, so that it is not given to Man to fathom His works. . . . Even though our human condition is rightly called ineffable, it is God

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(who brings that condition about) who has the better right to be called ineffable.’21 Before leaving Geulincx, it should be noted that Proposition 3 of his Metaphysics, cited above and partially transcribed by Beckett, paradoxically deigns to define God as ineffable (a term noted 18 times in Beckett’s notes on Geulincx): 3. He is an ineffable Father. For His Fatherhood of us, which consists in His bringing us into the human condition, is altogether ineffable. He maintains us in this condition by His ineffable work of arousing thoughts in our mind through the inadequate and irrational instruments (quite unworthy in themselves) of Body and Motion; and by His no less stupendous work of moving parts of our body at the behest of our will, of which we ourselves are incapable . . . Wherefore, He is a Father; and the manner in which He is the Father of us all is stupendous and ineffable. (TCD MS 10971/6/5)

At the conclusion of Arsene’s ‘short statement’ punctuating Watt’s own ineffable arrival at Knott’s house, understanding the inscrutability of cause – for example, whether Mr. Knott draws the two distinct types of servants to him, or whether they are instead drawn to Knott – and the knowledge of the difficulty of establishing meaning, both add up, for Arsene, to ‘quite useless wisdom so dearly won’. For him, the paradoxical comprehending of his own lack of comprehension is far from ‘stupendous’ or, like for Geulincx, worthy of piety. ‘I blush to say even blasphemous words and expressions’, remarks Arsene, ‘and perhaps also because what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail’.22 Similarly to Geulincx’s posthumous recognition, Mauthner’s notoriety would have remained parenthetical if not for a more fashionable philosopher’s similarity dressed up as difference: ‘all philosophy is a “critique of language” (though not in Mauthner’s sense)’.23 Proposition 4.0031, cited here, is taken from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a much more scientific quest for an incorruptible and unchanging metalanguage than ever undertaken by Mauthner. Wittgenstein’s later notion of linguistic meaning as closely related to use, developed particularly in his Philosophical Investigations, shares much more affinity with Mauthner’s idea that language is equivalent to the vicissitudes of speech. In the first, still unsurpassable, anglophone text on Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [Contributions to a Critique of Language; hereafter Kritik], Gershon Weiler locates the fundamental difference between these two Austrian language philosophers: ‘This conception of language, which stresses the fluidity of all linguistic expressions, should be contrasted with the conception of an ideal language’ – the latter a reference to Wittgenstein’s attempts in his Tractatus. Where the

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latter holds that ‘the proposition is a picture of reality’, Mauthner’s understanding of the metaphorical nature of language sees the relationship inversely: reality is but an abstract image sketched out by language.24 Also like Wittgenstein, Mauthner was born in the nineteenth century to assimilated Jewish parents living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised in Prague, later settling in Wilhelmine Germany for the remainder of his life, the effect of a polyglot upbringing upon Mauthner is noted in his autobiography: ‘I cannot understand how a Jew born in a Slavonic land of the Austrian Empire could not be drawn to the study of language. In those days . . . he learned to understand three languages at once [. . . and this] was bound to draw a child’s attention to certain linguistic laws.’25 Despite a respectable career as a drama critic and journalist, an apparently dilettante literary artist, and a more successful writer of satire, Fritz Mauthner’s reputation is today nevertheless chiefly based upon his radical works on language philosophy: the 1910 Wörterbuch der Philosophie [Philosophical Dictionary] and his 2,200-page opus, the Kritik. The latter was undoubtedly the product of a lifetime of work: following an inspiration that Gershon Weiler reads as akin to the ‘the conception of lyric poetry’ (whereby Mauthner ‘conceived the idea of a totally new and revolutionary departure in epistemology’ and hurriedly wrote a philosophical manuscript on language), Mauthner burned his first manuscript on language philosophy ‘in despair of his own ignorance’, and devoted the subsequent two decades to rigorous self-education in preparation for what became the Kritik.26 Paradoxically, even when his enormous, erudite project was published between 1901 and 1903 (although Beckett read the 1923 edition), failure remained a guiding theme. To this end, Weiler’s study of Mauthner finds him to be ‘primarily a sceptic who then supports his position by evidence of a linguistic nature’. That sceptical position understands language as a ‘useless tool for knowledge’: ‘Truth is in language only’; hence Mauthner regards the assumption of a ‘real truth’ as a nonsensical expression of man’s innate desire for certainty: ‘Real truth is a metaphysical concept; men have reached the concept of truth, like the concept of God, without (relying on) any experience whatever’. And as the author of a four-volume history of atheism, Mauthner’s 1923 Lutheran burial in a Meersburg church is surely more surprising than the subsequent town protests engendered by the religious service for a professed atheist. But as we will see, as a proponent of ‘godless mysticism’, perhaps this controversial end best punctuates Mauthner’s eclectic thinking.27 In stark contrast to Geulincx, Mauthner’s philosophical interests were advanced by a secular mysticism rather than a rationalized piety: ‘God’ is but the greatest ‘word superstition’ offered by the metaphorical nature of language, tasked with expressing individual perceptions of the world: sense information must be organized before it actually becomes knowledge. The filtering, organizing activity results in a gap between mind and world; our pictures

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or representations of reality are always only partial ones. These representations are considered ‘metaphorical’ because in Mauthner’s view the transformation of sense data into concepts takes place in language.28

Language, as it were, acts as a bad translation between subject and object, which for Mauthner is best attempted via philosophy; Beckett, of course, understood such imperfect translation in artistic terms, as he noted in the ‘German Diaries’ of 1936–37: ‘Launched into mixed dissertation, twine subject-object round stem of art as prayer. New figure occurs as I speak. The art (picture), that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer.’29 To be sure, Beckett’s French, Italian, Latin and German fluency (not to mention a variable amount of Gaelic, Spanish, Latin and Greek) by the time of reading the Kritik already suggests certain affinities regarding Mauthner’s ‘linguistic laws’. Anne Atik’s insightful memoir How It Was further substantiates such a Beckett–Mauthner link in asserting that, even after the 1950s, ‘Beckett talked about Fritz Mauthner, whose work on linguistics he was interested in’; and thereafter, ‘whenever Mauthner’s name came up, Sam would ask casually, but with evident curiosity, how Weiler was’, as the latter had introduced Anne Atik to Beckett’s friend Avigdor Arikha.30 Finally, considering Mauthner’s religious views, his philosophical indebtedness to the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer and George Berkeley and especially his conviction that a ‘philosopher’s task is to . . . free us from the spell of language’, despite the inevitable failure of the task; when considered together, the temptation to categorize Beckett as a Mauthnerian is virtually irresistible.31 Yet a final – and perhaps the most important – methodological detour concerning Mauthner, and the historiographically vital nature of dating generally, will show that irresistibility often acts as a double-edged sword. Following interviews with Beckett over 1953 and 1954 toward his classic 1959 biography James Joyce, Richard Ellmann first placed Beckett’s reading of the Kritik for Joyce in 1932. Seemingly on this basis, subsequent mention of Mauthner crops up in early Beckett criticism, like Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd, John Fletcher’s Samuel Beckett’s Art, Michael Robinson’s The Long Sonata of the Dead and David Hesla’s The Shape of Chaos; although the first concentrated study, Jennie Skerl’s still-unrivalled ‘Fritz Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” in Samuel Beckett’s Watt’, only appeared in 1974. Quite possibly, this early academic snooping prompted Beckett’s (ironic) mention of Mauthner in the 1976 Rough For Radio II: ‘The least word let fall in solitude and thereby in danger, as Mauthner has shown, of being no longer needed, may be it – three words underlined.’ This reference may well say more about Beckett’s reaction to criticism than ‘the report on yesterday’s results’ between the play’s controlling Animator and subservient Stenographer.32 Indeed, the entire emphasis on effective verbal and written communication in Beckett’s short play can be profitably construed as Mauthnerian joke.

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In the years following Skerl’s article, the work of Linda Ben-Zvi had a critical, twofold effect in trying to pin down when, and to what extent, Beckett encountered Mauthner. In two influential articles of 1980 and 1984, she found traces of Mauthner in Beckett’s work up to the late text Company: ‘For over fifty years – from the composition of Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932 to the 1979 completion of Company – two Mauthner themes appear and reappear in Beckett’s works: the impossibility of verification and the impossibility of proving this impossibility.’33 Ben-Zvi’s own possibilities were aided by an unusually frank letter from Beckett, quoted in both of her articles: ‘In an answer to a query of mine in the summer of 1978, Beckett said that he still owns the three volumes of the Critique . . . [and] admitted recently that he still finds Mauthner of importance.’34 In the same letter, cited this time in Ben-Zvi’s 1984 ‘Fritz Mauthner for Company’, Beckett continued: ‘Recently I came across an ancient commonplace book in which I had copied verbatim from the last section of the work [Wissen und Worte] beginning “Der zeine [sic] und konsequente Nominalismus” ’ – the first of 11 quotations by Mauthner in Beckett’s ‘Whoroscope Notebook’.35 Beckett also added, in that particularly illuminating letter to Ben-Zvi, a reason why he was so drawn to the Kritik: ‘For me it came down to: Thought words/ Words inane/Thought inane/Such was my levity’.36 Regrettably, a second consequence more than mitigates these advances in scholarship and has significantly muddied critical understanding; namely, the effects of Ben-Zvi’s research into ‘when’ Beckett encountered Mauthner. Her 1984 article understandably takes Ellmann’s dating at face value while simultaneously castigating his scholarship as ‘offered without supporting citations’.37 Castigation notwithstanding, Ben-Zvi’s 1980 and 1984 articles nonetheless accept Ellmann’s date as a starting point. But similarly, also ‘without supporting citations’, in her 1986 Samuel Beckett, Ben-Zvi simply moved back Beckett’s reading of ‘Fritz Mauthner, Austrian philosopher of language, whose Critique of Language (Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache) Beckett read in 1929 at the suggestion of Joyce, [which] described the impossibility of individuals coalescing parts of the ego’. By placing Beckett’s encounter with Mauthner three years earlier than Ellmann, Ben-Zvi thus maintained that these ideas helped to shape Beckett’s Proust (and by implication, of course, all his texts thereafter).38 Justifications for locating Mauthner at the very outset of Beckett’s writing career – despite contrary views considered shortly – remain as shaky as Ben-Zvi’s appreciation of (by now) well-documented alternatives. Despite mounting evidence countering her dating of Beckett’s vital encounter with Mauthner, a recent chapter in Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies maintains the same interpretative position, despite notable advances in Beckett Studies since Ben-Zvi’s first article on the subject more than a generation before: ‘The notion of using words to indict words was an idea Beckett came across in 1929 when, at Joyce’s behest, he read the Beiträge’.39

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Ben-Zvi’s arguments influenced a whole generation of scholars to view Beckett’s earliest writing projects (Proust, Murphy et al.) in terms of Mauthner’s philosophy of language. For example, in 2001 Richard Begam, in attempting to advance ‘Beckett seriously as a philosophical writer’ through a consideration of the latter’s stance on the underpinnings (or otherwise) of twentiethcentury thought, draws ‘especially [on] Linda Ben-Zvi’s illuminating work on Mauthner: Certainly Mauthner’s nominalism represented one of the earliest and most influential forms of postfoundationalism Beckett encountered’.40 Illuminating or otherwise, we shall see that the facts on offer directly refute Ben-Zvi’s speculations, demonstrating here that ‘Mauthner’s nominalism’ acted as the last form of ‘postfoundationalism’ – indeed, depending on how narrowly the term is defined, the only form – Beckett encountered during his interwar note-taking enterprise. As discussed over previous chapters, offering an empirical underpinning to Beckett’s engagement with particular sources and influences is demonstrably useful in and of itself. Such a perspective offers a basis for theorization grounded in evidence. By rooting influence historically, at the very least, criticism starting from this basis is never wholly imperilled by documentary falsification. Before offering a negative proof of the importance of precise dating, consider this quotation from Mauthner’s Kritik in the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’: It is true that the animal stands, in its orientation, under the force of necessity. The chain can be longer or shorter, depending on how far the senses carry; but necessity is dragged behind on a chain by the amoeba in the same way as by a clever dog. And the chain of a human being endowed with a rich array of senses is so long that he considers himself to be free. (RUL MS 3000 p. 52)

Were one to accede to imprecise and unverifiable dating, shades of Mauthner’s phrase may be said to abound in Beckett’s early work; for example, in Proust: ‘The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. . . . Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit.’41 The image is the same, as is the sentiment; according to Ben-Zvi, Beckett had already read Mauthner by the 1930 writing of Proust. Similarly, the first two lines of Murphy set out that ‘the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free’.42 This point bears reiteration: even Beckett’s early texts are wide-ranging and nuanced, and incorrect dating can all too easily become self-fulfilling prophecy. Without an empirical anchor to substantiate such an important association, interpretations can simply tend to float away. Considering Beckett’s development between Proust and Murphy – both held to be Mauthnerian by Ben-Zvi, and subsequently, other scholars basing their work upon hers – the sheer amount of sources consulted and rapid artistic changes experienced by Beckett at this time mandates that, even with archival sources to hand,

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precision and scholarly care cannot be more important in affixing dates to Beckett’s transcriptions. It is worth adding here that Beckett’s knowledge of German was probably not good enough to read Mauthner for himself, let alone for Joyce, either in 1929 or in 1932, as shown by efforts in the ‘German Workbook’ of 1936. A second piece of circumstantial evidence concerns the ‘literature of the unword’ favoured over the ‘senseless’ comparisons of ‘Nominalism (in the sense of the Scholastics) with Realism’ in Beckett’s much-quoted letter to Axel Kaun.43 Without doubt the ‘German letter of 1937’ shares (and in the reading offered here, anticipates) ideas contained in the Kritik, which suggests on the surface that Beckett read Mauthner prior to the July composition date of that letter. But crucially, the nominalism glossed there was much more probably derived from Beckett’s transcription from the two-volume Elementa Philosophiae – a page remarkably close to the subject matter of the Kaun letter and, as such, probably close in time to the composition of that letter as well. Joseph Gredt’s text on Catholic philosophy, quite possibly recommended by Brian Coffey in 1936, deals with precisely the same relationship between Nominalism and Realism via the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, Anicius Boethius, St Anselm and William of Champeaux (TCD MS 10971/6/37). It is likely that Beckett had this text in mind for the ‘German letter of 1937’; especially considering his propensity to use material most recently noted in his writing. In this single typewritten page, Beckett notes that ‘Nominalists . . . give to “universality” only a mere denominational meaning. In fact, they deny concepts and preach that the term “universal” does not correspond in one’s mind to a universal concept’, which is set in opposition to ‘Realists’ who ‘believe that universals have a correspondence with . . . external reality’ (TCD MS 10971/6/37). Parallels with the relevant portion of Beckett’s letter to Kaun, in reference to ‘the logographs of Gertrude Stein’, reveal an artistic appropriation of this page: To bring this method into relation with that of Joyce, as is the fashion, strikes me as senseless as the attempt, of which I know nothing as yet, to compare Nominalism (in the sense of the Scholastics) with Realism. On the way to this literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me, some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage.44

For present purposes, all of these considerations boil down to the fact that Beckett by no means necessarily encountered Mauthner’s nominalism before 1938. Due in large part to recent scholarship in Joyce Studies, such impressionistic and circumstantial evidence is no longer pivotal in affixing Beckett’s own encounter with Mauthner’s radical language scepticism. More grounded proof, in the form of Joyce’s own Mauthner transcriptions in two of his Work

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in Progress notebooks toward Finnegans Wake, has been recently provided by the paradigm-shifting research of Dirk van Hulle. In the first of three recent articles, van Hulle’s ‘Beckett – Mauthner – Zimmer – Joyce’ provides a transcription of the 66 entries on Mauthner in one of Joyce’s late Work in Progress notebooks, entitled VI.B.46 (all words or phrases unsequentially based on the third volume of the Kritik). Also provided here are 22 entries in another Wake notebook, entitled VI.B.41, taken from Heinrich Zimmer’s 1938 Maya: der indische Mythos. Pivotally, Danis Rose has dated the composition of these two notebooks to between December 1937 and October 1938; that is, at the final stages of Finnegans Wake, when Joyce was again recruiting assistance from all possible quarters.45 The Zimmer entries from VI.B.41 correspond to three handwritten pages remaining inside Joyce’s copy of Maya, which bears a dedication from Zimmer’s son of 8 October 1938.46 Furthermore, these Zimmer notes are demonstrably in Beckett’s hand, and van Hulle finds these ‘are the only material proof of Beckett’s contribution to the writing process of Finnegans Wake’. Alongside marginalia in the inscribed copy of Maya, Beckett’s notes for Joyce are transcribed in The Personal Library of James Joyce, which reveals some overlapping material, ‘such as the first Zimmer note in B.41 (“fishnoo”) and Beckett’s note “Manu, first man. Vishnu as fish” ’.47 All this is of particular importance to precisely placing Beckett’s reading of Mauthner. We have seen that in winter 1937–8 – right around the time of Beckett’s nearly fatal stabbing in Paris – Joyce had collected 66 references from Mauthner’s Kritik. Later in 1938, Joyce again returned to the Kritik, this time to Volume II [Concerning Linguistics] rather than the final volume used months earlier. Here, van Hulle’s ‘ “Out of metaphor”: Mauthner, Richards and the development of Wakese’ provides another transcription of 49 entries from VI.B.41 (14 pages before Joyce’s notes on Zimmer). Van Hulle has also shown that these citations range between page 455 and page 687 in the Kritik, concluding that ‘Joyce was mainly interested in two chapters: one on metaphors . . . and one on linguistics and ethnology’, although not necessarily because of any theoretical agreement with Mauthner: ‘If Joyce believed that language influences thought, the important difference with Mauthner is that Joyce did not regard this as a restriction.’48 Turning to Beckett, what have not yet been recorded are his own transcriptions of Mauthner found in the handwritten ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ and in a heretofore unknown transcription, TCD MS 10971/5/1–4. Comparing both to van Hulle’s research on VI.B.41 is revelatory. Ten of the 11 quotations from Beckett’s 1930s ‘commonplace book’ are also taken from Volume II of the Kritik, and fully half of these fall between Joyce’s range of 233 noted pages. Further, Beckett’s typewritten notes are a verbatim reproduction of pages 473–9 in Volume II of the Kritik, concerning Mauthner’s gloss on Giambattista Vico – a subject of longstanding interest to Joyce and, consequently, a subject in Beckett’s essay on Joyce nearly a decade earlier. And

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just as Joyce’s first entries in VI.B.41 centre upon Vico’s views on language, Beckett’s final sentence in TCD MS 10971/5 – also from the exact same page – is on Vico: ‘The last word of thought can only be the negative act, the selfdissolution of anthropomorphism, the insight into the profound wisdom of Vico: not everything is intelligible to men’ (TCD MS 10971/5/4). Similarly, Joyce’s final entry in VI.B.41, ‘rot. gelb. blau [red. yellow. blue]’ (traced by van Hulle to pages 686–7 in Volume II of the Kritik), is echoed by Beckett’s passage from the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ on the ‘Origins and History of Reason’: When we thus through one of the simplest sensations, namely perception of the colour blue, realised that human reason could come to take note of this perception by chance, when we feel with terrible resignation, that reason is therefore not a superhuman gift bestowed on humanity, that it is not an unchanging and eternal deity, that reason evolved in humanity and evolved into what it is, but that it also, however, could have evolved differently; when we recognise with a twitch as that of a wriggling worm that we are, not only in every step in our miserable existence, but also in what we hold to be the eternal and unalterably fixed fundamental laws of our intellectual being, merely a game played by the coincidence that is the world; when we recognise that our reason (which, after all, is language) can only be a coincidental reason, because it rests on coincidental senses, then we will only smile when we consider the argumentative passion with which anthropologists have laboured over questions of custom, belief and other collective psychological ‘facts’. (RUL MS 3000, pp. 55–6)

Comparing Beckett’s and Joyce’s notes thus sheds significant light upon previously unclear issues in Beckett Studies. First, similar to some of the Zimmer entries in VI.B.41 – which in turn correspond to Beckett’s handwritten notes found in Joyce’s copy of Maya – Mauthner’s Kritik was undoubtedly shared between Beckett and Joyce. With the latter’s eyesight making his own reading of the Kritik virtually impossible, the former assisted in taking notes in the final stage of Joyce’s Work in Progress. Quite simply, too many overlapping textual entries cannot be coincidental. But Beckett’s own – almost certainly initial – encounter with Fritz Mauthner’s ideas was surely more than just as a favour to Joyce. Although Zimmer’s Maya may well also have connected with some of Beckett’s own interests, The Personal Library of James Joyce demonstrates that this work was for Joyce: only distinctively Joycean terms are recorded in those three vital pages. But with Mauthner, Beckett copied whole passages – commensurate with his own changing note-taking methods since the earlier Joycean entries in Beckett’s Dream Notebook – while Joyce consistently sought only what van Hulle calls ‘verbal oddities’ in completing Finnegans Wake. This opens a double-glazed window onto growing differences between the two. On one side is an author completing his masterpiece and remaining true to his methods to the last; and on the

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other, an author codifying his own artistic values and approach, increasingly in opposition to Joyce’s ‘heroism’. Van Hulle further buttresses this reading by arguing that Mauthner essentially threw into relief the literary chasm separating these Irish pioneers: ‘Joyce was looking for words, Beckett tried to find the “unword”. . . . For Joyce, Mauthner was an interesting collection of linguistic examples, ready to be plundered in order to enrich his own, almost finished work. Beckett was still establishing his poetics.’49 And the above number-crunching serves three final, critical points for Beckett Studies. First, the cross-checking of material, the collection and subsequent employment of all available evidence and indeed the conscious reference to methodological considerations in the interest of minimizing guesswork; all these allow for theorizing with empirical accuracy. Second, this archival review allows for a confident postulation: Beckett first read Mauthner in 1938. To be more precise, Beckett’s first reading of the Kritik occurred in the months after his stabbing and hospitalization in early–mid 1938, perhaps around late May, as suggested by John Pilling.50 The ramifications are clear enough: all of Beckett’s published interwar journalism and essays on aesthetics, let alone the first decade or so of creativity, were all accomplished without recourse to Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism. For the uninitiated the equation may be made even simpler: Beckett read Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache between Murphy and Watt; after the ‘German letter of 1937’ but before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Yet even this important source only served to reinforce an already developing view (for the ‘word’s inadequacy’ is already a subject for thought and debate in the ‘German Diaries’),51 instead of radically altering Beckett’s artistic ethos. Here quotation by another Joyce expert, Geert Lernout, is fitting, not least because of his – and those of Joyce Studies as a whole – labours and conclusions on the Beckett–Joyce relationship: ‘If the dating proposed here is correct, the reading of Mauthner’s Kritik at the most confirmed an attitude to language and literature in Beckett that was already firmly entrenched: there does not seem to be a fundamental break in Beckett’s poetics in 1938’.52 We shall now see that such an aesthetic view not only encompassed Beckett’s approach to language and literature but also extended beyond this, by coming to embrace both an ethics and a Weltanschauung largely developed over the previous decade. Turning to a consideration of Beckett’s encounter with Geulincx during the completion of Murphy in 1936 will now allow for an exploration of one particularly notable source contributing to the attitude referred to by Lernout. ARNOLD GEULINCX AND SAMUEL BECKETT In an insightful letter to his friend Arland Ussher from early 1936, Beckett is himself absolutely clear as to Arnold Geulincx’s merit:

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I am obliged to read in Trinity College Library, as Arnoldus Geulincx is not available elsewhere. I recommend him to you most heartily, especially his Ethica, and above all the second section of the second chapter of the first tractate, where he disquires on his fourth cardinal virtue, Humility, contempus negativus sui ipsius [to comprise its own contemptible negation].53

Beyond the fact that the final four words are actually Geulincx’s, the importance of Humility as the indispensable Cardinal Virtue is absolutely consistent with Beckett’s notes from the Ethics: ‘The root of Ethics is Humility, self-neglect, disregard for oneself, contemplation of childhood; the true scope and results of Ethics are the Law and the obligation that we shall consider, has been written by Reason and by God himself ’ (TCD MS 10971/6/8). To be sure, Beckett’s use of Geulincx above is demonstrably based on his transcriptions from the Opera Philosophica. The source may well again be indebted to Beckett’s friend Brain Coffey. Supervised by reputed French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain from the early 1930s, Coffey’s own Catholic pedigree in Moral Philosophy was surely reflected in his reading. His doctoral work on Thomism likely put him in contact with Joseph Gredt – seen earlier in Beckett’s catalogue of ‘nominalist’ philosophers – referred to in a number of Maritain’s texts; but especially, the post-Cartesianism that Maritain also wrote on which Coffey understood well. Beckett’s letters at this time make it clear that, when in Dublin together, Coffey was a philosophical advisor in much the same way as Jean Beaufret earlier had been in Paris. Coffey certainly recommended Spinoza’s Ethics to Beckett, eight months after Beckett wrote to MacGreevy in January 1936 complaining that he had not heard ‘from Coffey, who promised me Geulincx and Eluard informations’.54 In his article ‘Memory’s Murphy’s maker’, Coffey independently confirms that Beckett sought out information on Geulincx: ‘post-Cartesian thinking reached a curious position of involvement with theology. One such thinker was Guelincx [sic], concerning whom I once had a p.c. from Beckett asking questions.’55 Notwithstanding the misspelling, Coffey’s knowledge in this area probably secured Beckett’s interest and consequent transcription of Gredt’s Elementa Philosophiae as well as Geulincx’s Opera Philosophica during his ten months in Dublin prior to leaving for Germany in autumn 1936. The archival material on Geulincx indicates that a substantial expenditure of Beckett’s time was directed toward Land’s compilation. A few further Geulincx references in letters to MacGreevy confirm that Beckett went through ‘the abhorred gates’ of Trinity College Dublin ‘in search of Geulincx’ in the first week or so of January, finally admitting he ‘could not quite finish the Ethics of Geulincx, . . . not even in Lent’ in mid-April.56 As far as his meticulous transcriptions are concerned, Beckett was never close to finishing: in the end, he only made notes from half of the Ethics (pp. 28–60,

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and annotations on pp. 163–254). Overwhelmingly, passages are taken from the ‘Inspection of Oneself ’ and ‘Contempt of Oneself ’, comprising Geulincx’s section on Humility, from his second chapter on the Cardinal Virtues. Clearly, Beckett was drawn to those elements in Geulincx emphasizing worldly torment, stoicism and disability. In Beckett’s Ethica transcriptions, for example, ‘Nothing is veiled like Reason, there is no other veil over Reason other than our own prejudices and greediness’ (TCD MS 10971/6/11); in addition to the following passage, directly evocative of Otto Rank’s frontispiece in the Trauma of Birth, read a year earlier by Beckett (and appearing in the epigraph to this chapter): I do not want to condemn the body that generated me, which is less than nothing (and that I cannot think of without horror) and that made my body the way it is and with it made me in such a miserably copulative way in order to create my existence. The best status of all is not to be born. The most similar status to this is to reach death as soon as possible. (TCD MS 10971/6/30)

Also transcribed is Geulincx’s attention to the impotence of the body and ‘ineffability’ of doing and knowing: ‘this is very clear and nothing can be more clear that this: I must admit that I do not know how I do what I do (We do not say what you do not know, whatever it is, does not exist, but what you do not know, whatever it is, cannot be done.)’ (TCD MS 10971/6/14.1). In the few pages Beckett recorded from the Metaphysics, Geulincx is absolutely clear in using human impotence as the link between his Cartesian methodology and his distinctive ethics. Whereas his first Proposition gives the familiar ‘cogito ergo sum’, by Proposition 11, Geulincx concludes that the mind is dependent upon God for the coordinating of human will and the movement of otherwise inert bodies: Nothing ever happens to me, properly speaking, because I will it, but rather because the true Mover wills what I will . . . And here we reach the estuary of the moral river, where the coastline broadens out into Ethics: for it follows from what I have said, that when it is not our human destiny to have power to do anything, neither should we will anything. And because it involves the whole of morality, this principle is the first, the best, and the broadest foundation of Ethics, and the one most easily known to us by the light of nature: Wherein you have no power, therein you should not will. (TCD MS 10971/6/3)

Two points arise here: first, common sense, holding that mind interacts with matter in a readily comprehensible way, is actually rather devious and overblown in Occasionalist doctrine; and second, God is really at the centre of our every move, and thus is perpetually underappreciated. As such, Occasionalism is rightly understood as an overtly Christian philosophy that

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downplays the importance of the acting subject in favour of perpetual miracles performed by God via the coordination of human minds and bodies in the world. This doctrine constitutes the answer given by the main protagonists of Occasionalism, Geulincx and Malebranche, to the rather unclear mind–body relationship ungratefully received by Descartes’ growing cadre of disciples from the mid-seventeenth century. For Geulincx, the impossibility of understanding motion and causality leads to their radical separation from the mind – and therefore belongs to God, who coordinates it with the will ‘Like two clocks set according to the course of the sun and when they strike the hour we all know what the precise time is’ (TCD MS 10971/6/15.1). With an ineffable God acting as the final arbiter of all actions, the individual is in essence powerless, ‘a mere spectator of this machine, whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust; wherein I neither devise nor destroy anything: the whole thing is someone else’s affair’ (TCD MS 10971/6/15.1). Reflecting upon what one does not know how to do forces a recognition that the will cannot act alone. In Geulincx’s philosophy, this leads to unambiguously ethical responses. Here is where Geulincx is most emphatic and Beckett’s notes are most complete: ‘Humility originates from virtue, but it is not to be able to do something; so neglecting oneself is thus to be neglected and deserted by virtue’ (TCD MS 10971/6/13.1). Impotence thus induces humility. Even in Beckett’s last text – the 1988 trilogy of short prose entitled ‘Stirrings Still’ – echoes of Geulincx abound: ‘Unknowing and what is more no wish to know nor indeed any wish of any kind nor therefore any sorrow’, save a wish for the sound of clock-strokes: It was therefore in the guise of a more or less reasonable being that he emerged at last he knew not how into the outer world and had not been there for more than six or seven hours by the clock when he could not but begin to wonder if he was in his right mind. By the same clock whose strokes were those heard times without number in his confinement as it struck the hours and half hours and so in a sense at first a source of reassurance till finally one of alarm as being no clearer now than when in principle muffled by his four walls. Then he sought help . . .57

As we have seen, humility is precisely the virtue recommended ‘most heartily’ to Arland Ussher during Beckett’s immersion in Geulincx. And the resulting transcriptions from early 1936 are employed to great effect in Murphy. Turning to that ‘second section of the first tractate’ in Beckett’s letter to Ussher, we find that ‘The divisions of Humility are twofold: Inspection of Oneself, and Contempt for Oneself’ (TCD MS 10971/6/13.1). These sections may well structure chapter 9 of Murphy, which offers the greatest insight into Murphy’s character and desire, engendered by his moving to the ‘sanctuary’ of the asylum. First we find ‘ “I am not of the big world, I am of the little world” was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two

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convictions, the negative first’, certainly in keeping with Geulincx’s preference for writing in negatives: ‘Humility is carelessness for oneself; not in a positive (as here the words might sound) but in a negative way. Therefore, it should be better not to say Humility is carelessness or negligence of oneself, but rather, as contempt for oneself’ (TCD MS 10971/6/13.1). We are confirmed that Beckett understood this to be Geulincx’s perspective by virtue of an earlier reference in the ‘Philosophy Notes’: Geulincx reduces self-activity to immanent mental activity of man. The ‘autology’ or inspectio sui is not only epistemological starting point, it is also ethical conclusion of his system. Man has nothing to do in outer world. Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis. Highest virtue humility – despectio sui. (TCD MS 10967/189.1)

Murphy’s pattern of submission, even unto death, was certainly viewed in such terms in Beckett’s later ‘German Diaries’: ‘That is also in the figure of Murphy in the chair, surrender to the thongs of self, a simple materialisation of self-bondage, acceptance of which is the fundamental unheroic. In the end it is better to perish than be freed.’58 In a world without God’s mercy, Murphy’s humble detachment was attempted via thongs and chair; our first glimpse of the eponymous ‘unhero’ is interrupted by a cuckoo-clock chiming in simultaneity with the ‘Quid Pro Quo!’ ‘echo of a street cry’.59 Over the course of the novel, this unfortunate situation is given up in favour of the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat, with the ‘garret, the fug, fatigue, night, the hours of vicarious autology, these had made it possible for him to do without the chair.’60 As is clear from the description of Murphy’s new home throughout chapter 9, the central benefit of Murphy’s ‘garret’ is that it allows for self-reflection. Murphy’s autology is again based on Geulincx’s own understanding of self-reflection: Inspection of Oneself consists in a careful enquiry into the nature, condition, and origin of the self. In this investigation, which must act as the first one, we detach ourselves from everything . . . so that we do not see anything else in ourselves other than knowing and wanting. (TCD MS 10971/6/14)

Yet inspection of oneself is merely a substitute for Murphy’s chair. In contrast, despising oneself ‘is the virtue that is indisputably fundamental in building humility’ (TCD MS 10971/6/25). Once in his room, unable to explain the virtue of humility to Ticklepenny (who compares him to a catatonic), Murphy proceeds to have a splendid night, the reason being not so much that he had his chair again as that the self whom he loved had the aspect, even to Ticklepenny’s inexpert eye, of a real alienation. Or to put it perhaps more nicely: conferred that aspect on the self whom he hated.61

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As with Murphy’s autological encounters with chairs and catatonia, Beckett’s notes on Geulincx also provide the template for self-contempt: Where I am worth nothing, the complete axiom of both the parts of humility: even saying I am worthless denotes an arrogance about myself, but I do not want anything denotes contempt for oneself. For nothing is more valuable than death, the exit from this world; I cannot delay . . . and neither do I want to. (TCD MS 10971/6/25)

Geulincx’s passage on will-lessness above also sheds light upon Murphy’s demise, that ‘classical case of misadventure’.62 By realizing that he holds no power over the ‘superfine chaos’ of life and death, one is led to believe that it mattered little to Murphy whether the ‘excellent gas’ had been turned on or not. At any rate, as Geulincx reminds us, ‘it is impossible for us to prolong life and delay death; equally, it is impossible for us to interrupt life and anticipate death’ (TCD MS 10971/6/26). Seen just in terms of the impact upon Murphy, this excursus into Beckett’s notes on Geulincx is revealing. At least, we know Beckett was on the level in advising Sighle Kennedy on the importance of ‘ “Ubi nihil vales . . .” both already in Murphy’. Influential also, no doubt, was the ‘beautiful Belgo-Latin’ comprising Geulincx’s esoteric and elliptical style.63 Similar paradoxes are also prominent in Beckett’s writing, as with the injunction ‘Grace to breathe that void. Know Happiness’ concluding Ill Seen Ill Said two centuries later:64 Happiness is just a shadow: you look for it and it runs away from you. It follows you and you run away from it. But Happiness carries you, it does not follow you and you must be cautious; in fact, if the mind could know Happiness, it would run away from it. Therefore, you will pursue, not be pursued. In fact, to run away from Happiness is not actually to keep away from it but indeed to pursue it. No one is pursued by Happiness and those who pursue it are looking for something else. (TCD MS 10971/6/32.1)

Also in terms of linguistic similarity, compare these two passages, the first from Beckett’s 1961 Words and Music, the second from Geulincx’s Ethics. WORDS: [Orotund.] Love is of all the passions the most powerful passion and indeed no passion is more powerful than the passion of love. [Clears throat.] This is the mode in which the mind is most strongly affected and indeed in no mode is the mind more strongly affected than in this. [Pause.]65 1. Love A. This passion we call Love is the only sweetness of the human mind, since it is human and connected to the body. In fact, even if the human mind, because of its nature, is capable of any kind of high pleasure (which consists of a mere approval of its actions), this is so because of the Supreme Rule and in the same

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fashion, since it is connected to the body and therefore acts accordingly. Love expresses itself through the body, although the passion of love seems born to make us suffer, for no other kind of sweetness renews itself like this passion. (TCD MS 10971/6/7.1)

As quite possibly the most explicit source on ‘man as a “non-knower” and as a “non-can-er” [i.e. someone who cannot]’ – in Knowlson’s characterization of Beckett’s development – the self-contempt underpinning this view can be seen to become a major point of reference in the postwar literature.66 In terms of Beckett’s evolving non-Euclidean logic, this is another – highly influential – contribution to Beckett’s attempt at the ‘syntax of weakness’ discussed with Lawrence Harvey.67 And in the same way that Geulincx’s impotence may be seen to become something of a personal credo and an artistic trope for Beckett, the methods of contemplation advocated by the Ethics serve as the realization that there is ‘nothing doable to be done’, as well as the derivative consequences, for example in The Unnamable: Better, ascribe to me a body. Better still, arrogate to me a mind. Speak to me of a world of my own, sometimes referred to as the inner, without choking. Doubt no more. Seek no more. Take advantage of the brand-new soul and substantiality to abandon, with the only possible abandon, deep down within. And finally, these and other decisions having been taken, carry on cheerfully as before. Something has changed nevertheless.68

As we have seen, especially in Chapter 3, Beckett is much less likely thinking of Descartes than Geulincx here. And the failure of bodies needs little introduction in Beckett’s literary gallery of moribunds. Building upon Geulincx’s intellectual donations to Beckett via J. P. N. Land, we shall now see how easily the impotence espoused in the Ethics bleeds into Mauthner’s linguistic ignorance in the postwar texts; as instanced in ‘Texts for Nothing’, written shortly after The Unnamable, to choose one succinct example from amongst countless in Beckett’s later work: ‘Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun’.69 FRITZ MAUTHNER AND SAMUEL BECKETT With Fritz Mauthner the development of Beckett’s non-Euclidean logic reaches its interwar apogee, taking a decisively linguistic turn that also forms the chronological conclusion of the ‘Interwar Notes’. Beckett transcribed the main thrust of Mauthner’s Kritik himself, in those typed notes from 1938 which may well have been taken with Joyce in mind: ‘it is beyond our intellect to speak or think about reason or language’ (TCD MS 10971/6/ 7.1). Nine of the remaining ten handwritten entries in the ‘Whoroscope

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Notebook’ – overwhelmingly taken from Mauthner’s chapters ‘The Metaphor’ and ‘Origins and History of Reason’ – are similarly from Volume II of the Kritik. Nothing is recorded from Volume I and only one entry, from the chapter on ‘Epistemological Nominalism’, comes from the last volume; thus, the final 400 pages of the second volume seem to have provided Beckett’s education in Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism. At only about 5,000 words of transcription from (intensely difficult) German, these relatively sparse notes on Mauthner nevertheless represent a radical intellectual debt, in a sense ‘completing’ Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. Alongside Watt – the novel first incorporating ideas derived from the Kritik – Beckett’s transcriptions from Mauthner effectively facilitated a number of changes anticipating Beckett’s postwar writing ‘turn’. Bearing these contentions in mind, we have already witnessed a tendency to incorporate material just read (and especially, noted) into the earliest subsequent writing. Similarly, Watt unmistakeably betrays Beckett’s reading of the Kritik. Here, Skerl’s suggestion 30 years ago remains apt: ‘The philosophical background of Watt must be reevaluated, placing Mauthner in the position of a dominant and informing influence whose “critique of language” provides the meaning of Watt’s quest, struggle and failure.’70 Moreover, Skerl’s neglected reading bears reaffirming: Watt is a wholly Mauthnerian exercise, one largely recasting Beckett’s earlier scepticism and angst into linguistic terms; indeed, ‘Watt could be seen as an illustration of the inability of language to describe or explain reality and the inevitable failure of one who attempts to know truth through language.’71 Given the tautological nature of language for Mauthner, even a critique of language – the culminating act of philosophy, psychology and theology – can only ever be ‘learned ignorance’, or as Beckett transcribed: What people say can never contribute to knowledge of the world. Whoever speaks is only learning his perceptions by heart; whoever hears can never experience more than what he knows, than what is already contained in his vocabulary. It certainly cannot be spoken. And whatever we still, and until the grave, take for knowledge, stored up in our language, is the expectation, is the trust in an order in nature. Expectation and trust are the content of astronomical feats of the spirit as much as the content of the railway timetable. Deeply rooted in all of us is the belief in regularity. Naturally, for without a certain degree of repetition our perceptions could not transform themselves into representations, we could not think. Our faith exaggerates the regularities almost mythologically, simply in order to enable us to think. In the case of big, regular trains we trust the timetable of the previous year, just as we hope that tomorrow morning the sun will rise again. Presumably, nothing will have changed! (RUL MS 3000, pp. 50–2)

In this way, failure is introduced into the very fabric of the Kritik: in dealing with the linguistically inexpressible and misunderstood, Mauthner’s philosophy must still use words to point toward their insufficiency in describing

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human perception. Mauthner accordingly describes his paradoxical task ‘to show the various meanings and imperfections of words, when we have nothing else but words to do it by’; and again, ‘as the difficult and usually impossible task of proving to the owner of fine phrases that he possesses nothing’.72 Put simply, language is intrinsically metaphorical, and in consequence cannot describe experiences or states of affairs with accuracy; that is, language is capable of saying nothing about lived experience, but only about itself. Mauthner’s failure of language and the myth of regularity quoted above are both pastiched in the conclusion to Watt: When Watt saw a face on the other side of the window, he said: Give me a ticket, if you please. . . . One and three, said Mr. Nolan. Watt counted out, in the fluted trough, one shilling, two sixpences, three threepences, and four pennies. What’s all this? said Mr. Nolan. Three and one, said Watt. One and three, roared Mr. Nolan. Watt put the difference in his pocket. The train! exclaimed Lady McCann. Quick, said Mr. Cox, two there and back. It was Mr. Cox’s and Mr. Waller’s practice, though they travelled daily, on this line, to and from the city, to buy their tickets every morning anew.73

But before further assessing Watt for Mauthnerian influences, the correspondence above relates to earlier discussions of non-Euclidean logic: while Beckett’s notes from the Kritik undoubtedly built upon much of the earlier ‘Interwar Notes’, Mauthner was surely transcribed with an eye to developing ‘learned ignorance’ into a workable approach to literature. First of all, Mauthner is very clear on his philosophical forbears, most of whom are explicitly cited in Beckett’s transcriptions: Vico, Kant, Aristotle, Schopenhauer and the Ancient Greeks. Notwithstanding the importance of ideas bequeathed by Mauthner’s selected predecessors, the systematic character of their thinking results, for him, in a ‘beautiful error (Der schöne Irrtum) in believing that a desire for complete knowledge was in itself an increase in knowledge’.74 Language is thought, and both are intrinsically tautological. Philosophy can only aspire to pointing out the inadequacy of human thinking, and the metaphorical character of our perceptions, thoughts and communications (the last at a double-remove from individually perceived reality) can only ever hope to be as translucent a window between subject and object as possible. This too is registered in Beckett’s transcriptions from the Kritik: Schopenhauer became – leaving the weaknesses of his system aside – one of the greatest philosophical writers because – in contrast to Hegel – he put the world

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back in its rightful place, because he attempted to think perspicuously. One reads him therefore with the admiration with which one once read Plato. Whoever demands from philosophy no more than the highest conceivable perspicuity, the liveliest metaphorical representation of abstract concepts, must call him a tremendous thinker-poet. (TCD MS 10971/5/4)

This championed transparency marking Schopenhauer as a ‘thinkerpoet’ returns philosophy to the study of words, and moves Mauthner to view ‘linguistics as a chapter of psychology’ or, in his own words: ‘meaning is never detachable from the word and it cannot be separated from it in the real psychology of thinking. Meaning is a purely psychological concept’.75 Philosophy as language-critique, then, becomes intrinsically linked to psychology. Earlier remarks on Beckett’s attempted conflation in the ‘Philosophy-’ and ‘Psychology Notes’ via Leibniz are applicable here. That tens of thousands of words on each discipline were taken over roughly four years already suggests a connection between Beckett’s philosophical and psychological notes. And like Leibniz’s posited interest in ‘unconscious mental states’, Wilhelm Windelband’s vital A History of Philosophy uses much the same language regarding Wilhelm Wundt – who ‘has gone on in the development of his thought from a “Physiological Psychology” to a “System of Philosophy” ’ – and Eduard von Hartmann, described as the author of ‘a witty synthesis between Leibniz and Schopenhauer on the basis of his metaphysics, which regarded the world-ground as a complex resultant of the irrational will and of the “logical element” ’.76 The Kritik understands Wundt similarly, invoking his approach as the inverse of Mauthner’s own ‘critique of language’, an epistemological philosophy pointing toward a psychologism. Indeed, both Wundt and von Hartmann crop up repeatedly in Beckett’s notes.77 And Beckett may well have been drawn toward precisely this unification of philosophy and psychology – one explored in terms of Rabinovitz’s ‘mental reality’ earlier in Chapter 4 – in transcriptions of Mauthner’s Kritik: Schopenhauer, his fierce and powerful opponent, rediscovered Kant’s way and shakes often and strongly at the gates of the critique of language. But his system also ultimately culminates in word superstition, in a mythological person, in the will, which was afterwards to be given the self-betraying name of ‘the unconscious’ by Eduard von Hartmann. (TCD MS 10971/5/3)

As with borrowings from Schopenhauer, Kant and a handful of other philosophical forbears, Mauthner’s debts to contemporary psychological pioneers like Wundt and von Hartmann are both explicit and offered with reservation. For psychology itself is only another path to that fence between reality and perception, which ultimately bars the path of even a language critique. Weiler is adamant on this point: ‘It is important to remember here that Mauthner accepted the main tenets of associationist psychology and

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gave this associationism a linguistic emphasis. For him the source of our associations is language’.78 Following Weiler’s comments, Elizabeth Bredeck aptly remarks, Mauthner’s posited transformation from epistemology to psychology is pliable enough to allow for a rapprochement between philosophy and poetry as well. In other words, his understanding of philosophy as psychology represents something other than one of two mutually exclusive options. Like the distinction between metaphor and concept, the border between poetic and philosophical discourse is shifting rather than remaining static.79

The border between poetry and philosophy noted by Bredeck as a Mauthnerian idea was unsurprisingly noted by Beckett, keenly interested in ‘poets of thought’ like Schopenhauer, Geulincx and the Presocratics. In Beckett’s notes from the Kritik, for example, Goethe is singled out for praise on account of his prose style, which ‘really appears to rise above all the possible boundaries of language . . . because he uses words in an ironic sense’ (RUL MS 3000, p. 52). Mauthner’s emphatic statements on this matter derive from his view that the metaphorical nature of language means it is an ‘unfit tool for knowledge’.80 That said, language is not wholly without merit. First, the impressionistic character of thinking and speaking means that language ‘is most powerful as a tool of poetry’: ‘This evocative capacity of words makes language an excellent tool of artistic expression. . . . Words fulfil their true role when they are used to suggest a mood indirectly and not when being employed to make literally true statements.’81 Although Beckett famously found the act of writing literature difficult, some of Mauthner’s conclusions on the flexibility of language certainly echo across Beckett’s works after 1938. Another of Mauthner’s conclusions is that language is simply linguistic usage, a process (like the building of a city or an ongoing conversation, to use Mauthner’s own metaphors) and a game not so different from Molloy’s sucking stones. Or as Beckett noted from the Kritik : I would like to hold on to the basic idea of this book. It raises the question whether a language is more or less suited to allow its speaker to recognise the world. On this point, of course all the results of comparative linguistics sink to the level of a game children play with coloured pebbles. (RUL MS 3000, p. 50)

For Mauthner, language games themselves are, of course, bereft of fixed rules. By extension, for example, contradiction is impossible: ‘Mauthner’s thesis, which he repeats many times, is that contradiction is itself a linguistic notion. . . . In other words contradictions exist only in language or in our words. People and not things contradict each other.’82 This point, too, is recorded by Beckett:

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This insight into the nature of experience and thinking, which at this level no longer present themselves as opposites, but as two ways in which memory views things, we owe to a continuation of Kant’s critique, and we would owe it to Kant himself, if Kant had undertaken, instead of his critique of pure reason, a critique of reason in general, if he, the most astute and hopefully last of all the ‘word realists’, had not taken abstractions for reality, words for definable judgements, worthless currency as real money. (RUL MS 3000, p. 56)

Again, the above view is surely closer to the voice in the final of Beckett’s ‘Texts for Nothing’ than Cartesian dualism: ‘It’s not true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything.’83 Once formulated in Mauthnerian rather than Cartesian terms, serving Beckett’s own work as a ‘thinker-poet’, the ideas taken from the Kritik are significant enough to rival even Schopenhauer’s writings on the failure of philosophy: I cannot resist the temptation to indicate, with a few words at least, how the history of philosophy (in so far as it is not the product of individual minds and therefore a chance event like all history) can be interpreted as a slow selfdissolution of the metaphorical. It is true that we must here consider only those philosophies which historically are successively based one upon another, and must ignore the traffic of thought of the Indians, who already in ancient times viewed the ‘image of reality’ as a deception of the Maya, as an innate illusion, called forth by false analogies, that is, supposedly, by metaphor. The coherent history of so-called philosophy only starts, however, with the earlier Greeks, who with enormously bold, false analogies made either some invented, unthinkable concept, like xxxx, or one of the four elements, into a world-forming principle, the only thing that Is. This had therefore to be, in its own origin a senseless concept, even if it has held sway for a full two-thousand years. (TCD MS 10971/5/1)

For Mauthner, ‘so-called philosophy’ is nothing other than an epistemological window-cleansing, culminating in a critique (one more akin to playing a game than solving a riddle) of language as the supreme gesture of an enquiring consciousness. Mauthner’s consistent point was that all philosophy can aspire to is language criticism. In this way, philosophy, psychology and especially art are all – when at their best, no less – merely attempts at a ‘SelfDestruction of the Metaphorical’ (TCD MS 10971/5/1). While this acts as a pillar for Mauthner’s view on the representational nature of sense perceptions and mental formulations; vitally, this may well have also contributed to Beckett’s own struggle with the chasm between subject and object. For in the chapter entitled ‘The Metaphor’ (by far the chapter most noted by Beckett), Mauthner’s appeal to the inherently representational nature of language (and therefore thought, with which it is synonymous), in Weiler’s words, ‘rejects the distinction between subjective and objective as terms referring to the inner and the outer respectively’.84

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By now it should be clear that the Kritik finds all linguistic propositions suspicious. For Mauthner, they are certainly unable to adequately characterize reality. Failure is inevitable; all one can ‘hope’ to attain is ‘learned ignorance’. For an artist such as Beckett, struggling with many of the problems of expression raised in the Kritik, this may have been the paradoxical tonic necessary to initiate the ‘turn’ detectable in his postwar art – perhaps in this way, Mauthner ‘may be it ’ after all. Let us conclude, then, with a sideways glance at Watt, the receptacle for a number of Mauthner’s ideas and the pivotal novel in Beckett’s oeuvre, one separating Beckett’s developing non-Euclidean logic from its seamless incorporation in The Trilogy and beyond. In short, Watt can be usefully read as the culminating process of Beckett’s ethical and aesthetic development during the interwar period, especially the 1930s. Skerl contends that, for Watt, ‘the reality problem is a language problem’, especially highlighting Watt’s difficulties with naming: ‘Similarly, he finds he can no longer call himself a man. Whereas with the Galls, Watt found he could not put an experience into words, with the pot and himself, he found that accepted words (names) no longer referred to concrete reality.’85 With Skerl’s comments in mind, let us take a brief look at Watt. Certainly the language games highlighted above as Mauthnerian themes are prominent in Watt. The game itself is given away by the punning title and the opening pages, where Hunchy Hackett calls after Mrs. Nixon (called ‘Tetty’ by her husband, ‘Goff’): ‘Pleased to have met you, Mrs Nisbet. Mrs. Nixon tightening her hold on Mr. Nixon’s arm, cried back, The pleasure is mine, Mr. Hackett.’ From the start of Watt, then, naming is not easy going. And Skerl is right: this is particularly evident in Watt’s need of ‘semantic succor’ when faced with the altered environment of Mr. Knott’s house not to mention his own greatly distressing inability to name things: ‘Watt was greatly troubled by this tiny little thing, more troubled perhaps than he had ever been by anything . . . by this imperceptible, no, hardly imperceptible, since he perceived it, by this indefinable thing that prevented him from saying, with conviction, and to his relief, of the object that was so like a pot, that it was a pot.’86 In Mauthnerian terms, Watt’s realization that his perceptions could not be adequately formulated in language explains why Watt is set in an asylum in the first place: common sense may judge the person insane who does not allow himself to be deceived by the senses, who claims the subjectivity of all these sensations, and who perhaps even dares to say that in the final analysis, this deceptive activity of the senses has developed historically and does not belong to the essence of knowledge – that it could have been otherwise.87

Moreover, Watt’s vital interactions at the asylum fence with Sam, Watt’s scribe and the novel’s narrator, also illustrate another idea quite likely derived from the Kritik. Mauthner emphasizes that language is defined by its

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employment in speaking and thinking, and therefore in Weiler’s words, ‘there cannot be any such thing as a mistaken use of language. . . . For Mauthner there cannot be language-speech faults at all. If communication is successful then there is no sense in talking about faults of any kind.’88 Language is thus rooted in fitful understanding, as exemplified by Watt’s inverted, reversed and backwards declarations to Sam: ‘But soon I grew used to these sounds, and then I understood as well as before, that is to say a great part of what I heard’. Similarly, after the description of Watt’s ‘eighth or final stage’ Sam concludes, ‘But soon I grew used to these sounds, and then I understood as well as ever, that is to say fully one half of what won its way past my tympan’. To be sure, this correlates to Mauthner’s repeated affirmation that ‘communication is always a doubtful enterprise’.89 In light of the only one to communicate – rather than illustrate – these sentiments, Arsene’s ‘short statement’ is a monologue of Mauthnerian sentiments writ large. Most notably it evokes the final sentence of the Kritik, ‘Pure critique is but an articulated laughter’, reformulated by Arsene: Haw! My laugh, Mr. Watt. Christian name, forgotten. Yes. Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless. They correspond to the successive, how shall I say successive . . . suc . . . successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form.90

Particularly in respect of Geulincx’s sentiments on humility and resignation transcribed two years earlier, Fritz Mauthner reformulates a major contribution to our understanding of Beckett’s non-Euclidean logic in terms of linguistic ineffability. Here, Geulincxian impotence and Mauthnerian ignorance both reinforce a burgeoning conclusion earlier offered to Beckett by Schopenhauer: ‘Resignation as [Mauthner] presents it stems from the belief in forces that the senses do not register, and that consequently will never be part of our knowledge of the world’.91 Moreover, we have seen the transformation from a ‘knower’ to a ‘non-knower’ reflected in Beckett’s notes over the 1930s, a transformation from aspiring academic to ‘non can-er’ by the writing of The Trilogy. But irrespective of whether he can be heuristically tied to Beckett’s evolving non-Euclidean logic, Mauthner’s hand in Beckett’s literary development is unequivocal. Given Mauthner’s stridency, this is actually rather unsurprising: ‘And because thinking is language, this new philosophy is, out of the death-wish of thought, a suicide of language . . . Critique of language must teach liberation from language as the highest aim of self-liberation’.92 Nearly four decades after first encountering Fritz Mauthner, Beckett repeated a central conclusion from the Kritik to Charles Juliet, ‘Writing has

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led me to silence’.93 Yet even earlier, this idea had been codified: compare Beckett’s only entry in Volume III (‘On Grammar and Logic’) of the Kritik with his comments to Gabriel D’Aubarede in 1961: this epistemological nominalism is not a provable world-view. It would not be nominalism if it pretended to be more than a feeling, than a disposition of the human individual facing the world . . . time and again the brooder seeks, like a lyricist, to capture the mood through an inadequate word and must grasp at thin air, when he no longer believes in the word. (RUL MS 3000, p. 48) I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling. ‘Molloy’ and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.94

Despite the remarkable correspondences between the two, it would be hasty to conclude that a decisive ‘turn’ in Beckett’s approach to literature simply occurred upon reading Fritz Mauthner in 1938. Instead, such an evolving shift in focus had been cultivated through Beckett’s reading and notes for more than a decade. Yet with Mauthner, many of the same themes recurring throughout our construction of non-Euclidean logic – ineffability, impossibility, resignation, even stoicism and compassion; all systems which later structured Beckett’s art – are powerfully restated in terms of linguistic primacy in the Kritik: ‘if an intelligent reader has to affirm, when all is said and done, that skepical [sic] resignation, insight into the incomprehensibility of reality, is not merely another negation among others. It is our best knowledge.’95 In turn, like the humble submission of Geulincx, this was not just another erudite source for Beckett but was, in many respects, also an essential ingredient in the transformation of later writing, as in The Unnamable: I can only speak of me, no, I can’t speak of anything, and yet I speak, perhaps it’s of him, I’ll never know, how could I know, who could know, who knowing could tell me, I don’t know who it’s all about, that’s all I know, no, I must know something else, they must have taught me something, it’s about him who knows nothing, wants nothing, can do nothing, if it’s possible you can do nothing when you want nothing, who cannot hear, cannot speak, who is I, who cannot be I, of whom I can’t speak, of whom I must speak, that’s all hypotheses . . .96

In writing of Mauthner, Bredeck has observed that the ‘very types of questions he considers necessitate a style of thinking and writing that, while hostile to systematic philosophy, is still informed by a particular rigor [sic] or logic’. Bredeck holds that this understanding is responsible for the metaphorical, circular and often ironic style used in the Kritik, upon which Beckett doubtless picked up.97 We shall now conclude with some brief

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observations on precisely how appropriate Bredeck’s comments also are with respect to Beckett’s own ‘particular rigour or logic’. Before returning to the place of non-Euclidean logic in Beckett’s interwar development, a final quotation is apposite. Using the very 1938 stabbing incident that immediately preceded his first contact with Fritz Mauthner, Beckett later described his art thus: ‘I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silence, I could hear his screams continually. That’s the only kind of form my work has.’98

Conclusion This book has been about how the interwar Beckett became the Nobel Laureate Beckett. The main focus throughout has been on the circumstances and writing conditioning the former, but while a turn is visible after Watt in the ‘frenzy of writing’ that acted as a literary breakout, the concerns of the earlier Beckett doubtless remained much the same as those of the later Beckett. What changed, as any reader of both Beckett’s earlier and later texts appreciates, were the literary and methodological tools used to construct those works of art. In turn, the reasons and inspirations underpinning that change have remained highly contentious in Beckett Studies. This has helped give rise to a deluge of scholarship in the area, much of it in fundamental disagreement about the very nature of Beckett’s art (positive or negative?, existential or linguistic?). Elsewhere, I have understood these basic interpretative incompatibilities as a ‘prism of interpretation’ largely facilitated by the opaque writing in Beckett’s, especially later, literature.1 And the rapid growth of the discipline Beckett Studies shows no signs of abating, as the events surrounding the 2006 centenary of Beckett’s birth amply demonstrate. To be sure, that ‘birth was the death of him’, for Beckett, no less than his characters, can be traced across Beckett’s earliest writings from the 1920s and 1930s, up to and beyond A Piece of Monologue in 1979.2 Like the rude caesura of birth, many of the artistic and intellectual concerns registered in the early fiction recur across Beckett’s oeuvre. But at the same time, a number of intellectual donations are registered in his ‘Interwar Notes’ that spawned new interests, and opened new artistic vistas to more effectively weave longstanding interests into a radical artistic project. The progressive embrace of what Franz Marc called ‘an inner artistic logic’, recorded in Beckett’s insightful ‘German Diaries’, is itself derived from intensive selfdirected study in the years around the writing of Murphy. This contributed heavily to the change in tone and style first advanced there, but which became only fully evident in The Trilogy. For Beckett, the explorations of ignorance and impotence later pursued in texts like Endgame and ‘Texts for Nothing’ were paradoxically founded upon years of self-education in this earlier period. Such a realization owes much to the revolution in empirical scholarship following the 1996 publication of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame. The sheer amount of biographical and documentary information on Beckett now

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available is in and of itself revelatory. But particularly in regard to Beckett’s formative artistic development, the archival material only starting to be mined by Beckett scholars can substantially assist in narrowing the prismatic exegesis characterizing Beckett Studies. In short, we can start from those sources we know Beckett consulted in the construction of his art – a necessary enterprise still far from complete. By this means, previously unseen material has buttressed – and in many cases supplanted – older readings of Beckett’s literary evolution. As emphasized throughout, theorizing from a position of empirical accuracy is inherently preferable to either disregarding facts or inventing one’s own. Especially with respect to affixing the dating of Beckett’s encounter with his intellectual sources and artistic forbears, a reliance on evidence that can be falsified is imperative in demonstrably enhancing scholarly knowledge, which can then be built upon more constructively in the advancing heuristic interpretations of Beckett’s art. While this will be unlikely to substantially impact the more impressionistic, or ‘alchemic’, readings of Beckett’s literature, a positive consequence inherent in the recent release of a veritable treasure trove of letters, textual drafts and workbooks as well as notes of various kinds means that scholars can look at those sources demonstrably impacting Beckett in both meticulous compilation and artistic inspiration.3 By way of contribution, this study has looked to the principal intellectual sources comprising the ‘Interwar Notes’ in offering a number of new perspectives on Beckett and his art. As a whole, this substantial corpus demonstrates studies and knowledge of European culture wholly incompatible with a view of Beckett as somehow either rejecting these traditions or never bothering to learn about them in the first place. As a whole, this lengthy period of note-taking, especially intensive between 1932 and 1938, reveals Beckett progressively pulling up the ladder of knowledge in order to destroy erudition from above, from the vantage point exemplified by Fritz Mauthner’s term ‘learned ignorance’. Here too, new perspectives offered by the ‘Interwar Notes’ have challenged several critical approaches long dominant in Beckett Studies. A brief recounting of these is in order. Beckett remarked on his artistic approach to Israel Shenker in 1956, ‘I see no trace of a system anywhere’, and it is important to recognize that this statement, and many others similar to it, imply knowledge of intellectual systems in the first place.4 To see no traces of a system, one must know what to look for. Yet if such systematic thinking was explored in terms of Beckett’s knowledge or understanding of philosophy, the critical point of departure has invariably proceeded from Cartesianism. But we have seen that Beckett’s flirtation with Descartes was a short one, effectively only resulting in poetic pastiche in the 1930 Whoroscope. The interest clearly waned quickly thereafter. Yet the earliest scholarship in Beckett Studies found this to be a dominant influence, positing virtually unanimously that Descartes underwrote Beckett’s

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philosophical interest in, rejection of or artistic debt to Cartesianism. The effects of this reading continue to bedevil Beckett Studies. But thanks to the newly available ‘Philosophy Notes’, this refracted influence can be fundamentally challenged. More than 500 sheets on the history of Western philosophy, from the Presocratics to the late nineteenth century, reveal Beckett to have a much more general interest in philosophy than merely the Cartesian tropes of dualism and rationalism; even consciousness and methodological doubt. All of these themes are noted by Beckett in his ‘Philosophy Notes’, not with respect to Descartes, but in terms of the basic structures and development of European philosophy itself. Beckett’s understanding of philosophy was therefore more substantial than he publicly maintained. So too was his debt to philosophy. For indirect employment, direct quotation and frequent allusion to this corpus of philosophical notes ripple across Beckett’s writings, from heavy use around the time of his first encounter with them in 1932, to the more effaced allusions traceable to his final works of literature in the 1980s. This mandates two important reappraisals. First, Cartesian themes must be re-evaluated against the much larger backdrop of the system of European philosophy in Beckett’s art, especially with respect to the Presocratics, who may be said to have initiated philosophy in the West – a point certainly not lost in the extensive treatment of Presocratic thought in the ‘Philosophy Notes’. Beckett’s interest in philosophy was thus much more general than has previously been appreciated, and much more directed toward the development and strictures of Western philosophy as a whole. What also becomes clear is that Beckett’s greatest philosophical debt may not be to Descartes or even the Presocratics, but to secondary philosophical expositions – most notably Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy – revealing a consistent gravitation toward sources summarizing various currents of intellectual thought, ranging from literature and art to philosophy and psychology. Indeed, Beckett read relatively few philosophers in the Western canon in the original; instead, he sought to understand the tradition of philosophy qua systematic thought, as well as how it attempted to understand and explain human existence. The relevance of synoptic texts to Beckett’s art clearly and significantly points away from an immersion in particular ideas, thinkers or modes of thought, to more general interests in the development of various European intellectual trends. The burgeoning realization that knowledge, even of the history of philosophy, was not sufficient to make sense of the world is amply expressed in Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’. Undoubtedly, this portion of the ‘Interwar Notes’ also connects Beckett’s note-taking enterprises to his larger experiences in the mid-1930s: a time of indecision, artistic failure and psychological distress. For these typewritten notes, taken from a general introduction to psychology and eight more specific psychoanalytic texts, are concurrent with Beckett’s psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion in London. While much has been

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written on this relationship, and on Beckett and especially on psychoanalysis little has previously been said about Wilfred Bion’s own background and influences at the time. These too had their bearing on Beckett, and in helping to frame the relationship of analyst and analysand, the ‘Psychology Notes’ have revealed an interest in the unconscious, birth trauma and the psychological nature of various neuroses and anxiety states. Beckett’s notes on psychology, moreover, were certainly composed with his own therapy with Bion in mind. But in charting the landscape of what Rubin Rabinovitz has called ‘mental reality’, Beckett’s psychological readings both fostered an interest in Windelband’s ‘non-conscious mental states’ (ascribed to Leibniz), and bequeathed further literary tools clearly employed in Beckett’s texts during the interwar period and beyond. By the writing of Murphy between mid-1935 and mid-1936, the nature of Beckett’s intensive note-taking had itself substantially altered, from neologisms and ‘verbal oddities’ betraying a close adherence to Joycean literary methods first encountered in late-1920s Paris, to lengthy expositions of art, philosophy and psychology. With Beckett’s selective readings of J. P. N. Land’s complete works of Arnold Geulincx in early 1936 – an immersion coming to impact Murphy far more centrally than heretofore appreciated – some 15,000 words of typed and handwritten transcriptions heralded another change in Beckett’s compilation of the ‘Interwar Notes’. Notable words and phrases, so evident in John Pilling’s Beckett’s Dream Notebook, let alone summarized excerpts and occasional interpolations from synoptic texts like Windelband, Burnet or Alexander, are all replaced by verbatim quotation in the case of Geulincx’s Opera Philosophica. As a source Beckett frequently employed in his art – in addition to later recommending him as a departure in the critical examination of that art – Geulincx remains a major figure in Beckett’s intellectual heritage. By surveying Geulincx’s ideas relating to human impotence, we have seen that Beckett’s interest extended not only to the famous maxim ‘where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing’, but also to the humility and indeed virtuous self-contempt underwriting this approach to ethics. An even more explicit engagement with the inscrutability of reason that conditions human affairs – in this case through Beckett’s reading of Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache – was also comprised of direct quotation. Beckett’s transcriptions of Fritz Mauthner were handwritten in the case of the revealing ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, and typewritten in the case of a previously unseen typescript covering six pages on the metaphorical nature of language. These pages were the last, and perhaps most decisive, philosophical–psychological donations Beckett garnered from his ‘Interwar Notes’. Interestingly, discussion of Mauthner’s language critique has shown that he found little difference between the two disciplines, as Beckett recognized: at their best, both philosophy and psychology merely attempt to explain the identification of language and thought, and try to express the ways in which verbal com-

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munication is unsuitable for conveying knowledge about the world outside of individual consciousness. By finding ignorance through erudition, the impossibility of knowledge via rigorous philosophy and the tautological nature of language (which can only speak about itself ), Mauthner’s view of ‘poets of thought’ able to evoke the chasm between subject and object – like the Presocratics, Schopenhauer and Goethe – reinforced a developing conviction in Beckett’s approach to art, and marked a decisive change toward language and ineffability in the subsequent writing of Watt. Given the body of primary sources now available and briefly sketched above, Beckett’s transcriptions from Mauthner’s Kritik are a microcosm of the larger corpus of ‘Interwar Notes’, both buttressing an evolving approach to literature in the interwar period and pointing the way toward a decisive shift in the writing of that literature following the Second World War. These notes do not, and cannot, hold the answer to Beckett’s unique contribution to Western literature, for monocausal explanations are surely the antithesis to his ‘fidelity to failure’. But in the end, these notes provide us with an overwhelming flotsam of influence vital to Beckett’s artistic progression and developmental labours, while also demonstrably impacting upon his later thought and writing. Consequently, this corpus of ‘Interwar Notes’ is of inestimable value to scholars for years to come, and this study represents but a scratching of the surface for scholarship on this subject. Finally, while Beckett’s Books offers a detailed overview of this archival material, it also places Beckett’s notes into the context of an evolving artistic methodology fully explicated in the 1949 ‘Three Dialogues’: artistic creation supplants God’s creation as the only thing worthy of reverence, becoming the only way to endure the torture of existence for the Unnamable’s interminably creating voice: ‘Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity’.5 Through mathematical permutations, ‘alogical’ explorations of consciousness and existence, the understanding of systematic thought only to turn it against itself as well as the dialectical structures and syntax all employed in Beckett’s literature, ‘non-Euclidean logic’ has been advanced here as a way of characterizing those literary journeys toward indigence and impossibility so structurally and syntactically woven into the later drama and prose. In attempting to capture Beckett’s evolving literary methods through explorations of an alternative logic akin to non-Euclidean mathematics, we have seen only the outline of how such an approach was made manifest in the postwar works. Throughout, the principal focus here has been on the empirical documentation and coverage of a previously overlooked cultural history of those sources Beckett encountered during the interwar years, and to some degree internalized thereafter. Much more research is needed on the way this material helped to effect a larger transformation in Beckett’s artistic imagination. It is particularly hoped that the contribution to understanding Beckett’s literary development in terms of non-Euclidean logic will be of

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subsequent assistance in approaching the paradoxical nature of his ‘mature’ artistic explorations of the ineffable. As with Beckett’s comments to Avigdor Arikha on accepting a portrait of the Queen Mother because the commission was ‘in the grand tradition’, Beckett’s – and indeed Arikha’s – untraditional art does not reject artistic tradition tout court any more than Beckett rejected literary criticism tout court.6 Instead, neither art nor the criticism of art are shown by Beckett to no longer have the answers – the assured essences, the power of representation – that are hallmarks of both. In short, the guiding assumptions upon which both rest, in their divergent ways, are radically called into question. This may be observed in terms of sensitivity to unsystematic human experience, which Beckett comes to feel is simply incommensurate with positivist or mimetic traditions in both scholarship and art. Again, this realization is derived of knowledge rather than ignorance, even if the latter comes to overshadow the former in Beckett’s late art. And more than just in the sphere of art, this stoic approach becomes an ethics as well. To conclude with the author’s own words, in consoling his friend Alan Schneider on the death of his father, Beckett’s stark picture of existence twines the two together in that trope of ‘on-ness’ which has inspired such a public following in his work, one that shows no signs of abating in the early twenty-first century. I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.7

Notes PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1

Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 353.

INTRODUCTION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

Taken from ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 94. Beckett in Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, p. 165. Beckett in Gussow, Conversations with (and about) Beckett, p. 35. ‘Three Dialogues’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 145, my italics. Beckett, Watt, p. 72. Beckett, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume III: Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 141. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, pp. 442–5; Krapp’s Last Tape in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 222. Beckett to Tom Driver (in an interview of summer 1961), reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 220. Rabinovitz’s important Innovation in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction scrupulously explores the attempts to ‘know’ in Watt and especially The Trilogy : ‘Any sense of establishing facts or of mastering language must be countered by the invocation of a formulaic “I don’t know.” And alas, this bumbling equivocation is the closest we can come to framing significant statements’, p. 33. Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett, pp. 121, 52, my italics. ‘German Diary’ entry of 18 October 1936, in Beckett, Samuel Beckett Alles Kommt Auf So Viel An, p. 18.

CHAPTER 1 1 2

3 4

Beckett, Watt, p. 84, my italics. The celebrated sentiment – ‘if I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the “Naught is more real . . .” and the “Ubi nihil vales . . .” both already in Murphy and neither very rational’ – can be found in a 1967 letter to Sighle Kennedy, reprinted in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 113. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 55. Beckett described the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ as a ‘commonplace book’ in a letter to Linda Ben-Zvi, partially reprinted in Ben-Zvi, ‘Fritz Mauthner for Company’, p. 66; discussion of this notebook is found in Pilling, ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy’ and Smith, ‘Dating the “Whoroscope Notebook” ’.

154 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

Notes See Abbott’s Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph for an outline of Beckett’s process of ‘signing’ his texts, especially chapter 1. Beckett, Malone Dies in The Beckett Trilogy, p. 200. Beckett, Proust in Proust and Three Dialogues, pp. 12, 29. ‘German Diary’ entry of 4 February 1937. I am grateful to Mark Nixon for alerting me to this reference. This does not include entries recorded in Beckett’s ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, which extends beyond the outbreak of war in September 1939. For details of Beckett’s resistance to Nazism and consequent flight to Vichy, France, see Damned to Fame, chapters 12 and 13, especially the discussion of the harrowing escape allowing Beckett and Suzanne to pack only a ‘suitcase and a couple of bags’, p. 315. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 398. Amiran, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative, p. 6. Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art, p. 82. Ibid., pp. 82–91. Ibid. Buchanan, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ and ‘A Note on the Theatrical Machinery of the Dialogues’ in Plato, The Portable Plato, pp. 20, 34. Some of the intellectual influences in Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ are sketched out in Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, p. 577. E. C. Mossner, quoted in Martin Bell’s ‘Introduction’ in Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 2. Dancy, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, p. 6. Berkeley’s ‘immaterialize or bust’ also appears in Beckett, Murphy, p. 36. Smith, ‘Beckett and Berkeley: A Reconsideration’, p. 331. Ibid. Smith’s Beckett’s Eighteenth Century also lists Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge; and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous as books Beckett still owned at the time of his death, p. 165. ‘Three Dialogues’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 138. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, p. 80. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralimpomena, Vol. II, pp. 56, 88. Damned to Fame, p. 252. Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 21 September 1937, TCD MS 10904. Parerga and Paralimpomena, Vol. II, p. 360; ‘Three dialogues’, p. 145. Ibid., p. 143. ‘Humanistic Quietism’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 68. ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 33. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, Sect. 36, p. 185. Damned to Fame, pp. 356–7. I am grateful to Mark Nixon for alerting me to Beckett’s ‘German Diary’ entry of 11 March 1937. O’Hara, Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, p. 1. Marc, Letters from the War, p. 45. ‘German Diary’ entry of 31 October 1936, in Samuel Beckett Alles Kommt Auf So Viel An, pp. 28–9. I am indebted to Mark Nixon for both the quotation, originally transcribed in the ‘German Diaries’ (19 November 1936), and the reference in Marc’s Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen. For Beckett’s discussion of an artistic ‘no man’s land’, see ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 74. Damned to Fame, p. 244. Mood, ‘ “The Personal System”: Samuel Beckett’s Watt’, p. 263.

Notes 39 40 41

155

Ibid., p. 264. Dearlove, Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art, p. 3. ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’, p. 21. Regarding the Euclidean requirement for Beckett’s degree in Modern Languages at Trinity College, Dublin: The Course in Geometry (a) is that covered by Euclid, Books i., ii., iii., and Book iv., Props. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, with some additional Elementary Practical Constructions, and also some Elementary loci. Geometrical Methods other than those followed by Euclid will be accepted, such as regarding tangents as limiting positions of chords, &c. (The Trinity College Dublin Calendar for the Year 1923–4 )

42 43 44

Bohm, Quantum Theory, p. 111; Murphy, p. 36. Gowers, Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction, p. 106. An 1824 letter from Karl Gauss, cited in Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 82. An earlier letter from 1811 is equally illuminating: One should never forget that the functions [of a complex variable], like all mathematical constructions, are only our own creations, and that when the definition with which one begins ceases to make sense, one should not ask, What is, but what is it convenient to assume in order that it remain significant. (ibid., p. 87)

45 46 47

Ibid., p. 84. ‘Les Deux Besoins [The Two Needs]’ in Beckett, Disjecta, pp. 56–7, private translation. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, pp. 342–3, which also asserts: The mere fact that there can be alternative geometries was in itself a shock. But the greater shock was that one could no longer be sure which geometry was true or whether any one of them was true. It became clear that mathematicians had adopted axioms for geometry that seemed correct on the basis of limited experience and had been deluded into thinking that these were self-evident truths. (p. 88)

48 Coe, Beckett, pp. 44, 48. 49 Watt, pp. 32–4. 50 ‘ “The Personal System”: Samuel Beckett’s Watt’, pp. 257, 262. 51 ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’, pp. 26, 27. 52 Letter from Beckett to Shenker in interview of 5 May 1956, reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 148. 53 ‘Gnome’ in Beckett, Collected Poems, p. 7. 54 ‘neither’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose 1929–1986, p. 258.

CHAPTER 2 1 2 3 4

Proust in Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, p. 87. See Pilling’s Beckett’s Dream Notebook, which corresponds to RUL MS 5000. I am grateful to Dirk van Hulle for discussions on Beckett’s relationship with James Joyce; for use of his phrase ‘verbal oddities’ to characterize Joyce’s note-taking methods, see ‘Samuel Beckett’s Faust Notes’, forthcoming in SBT/A 16. Beckett’s ‘art of failure’ is perhaps most cogently stressed by Copeland’s Art and the Artist in the Works of Samuel Beckett, p. 3; Beckett’s statement to Israel Shenker (on 5 May 1956) is reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 148.

156 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Notes Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 105. Smith, Beckett’s Eighteenth Century, pp. 3, 8. Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 4 August 1937, TCD MS 10904. Undated letter [October 1933?] from Beckett to MacGreevy, TCD MS 10904. I am grateful to the National Gallery, London for providing me with these details, now lodged in the University of Reading Archives. Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 21 November 1931, TCD MS 10904; for discussion of Beckett’s holidays to Kassel, see Damned to Fame, p. 109. See Mark Nixon’s ‘Scraps of German: Samuel Beckett Reading German Literature’ in SBT/A 16, forthcoming; I am grateful for a copy of this text. Findest du dich vor deinem Tode anders als schon bisher, so schäme dich deiner verfallenen Selbstkenntnis, deines Mangels an der Kraft, die ich von meinen Dienern verlange. Und findest du dich nach deinem Tode gerade so wie schon bisher, staune doch nich [sic] übermässig darüber. Es ist vielleicht ein Gesetz, dass der, der sich einmal kennt, nie stirbt, wie es ohne Zweifel eins ist, dass der, der sich nie kennt, nie lebt. Schliesst das Leben diese Göttin aus, deren Stimme seinen Dienern so ruhig tönt, so wär es besser gewesen, wenn die Hoffnung mit der Menschheit andern Plagen aus der Büchse der Pandora rausgeflogen wäre. (RUL MS 5003, p. 37). I am grateful to Mark Nixon for assistance with Beckett’s ‘Clare Street Notebook’. Molloy in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 31. Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 25 March 1936, TCD MS 10904. Johnson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson Vol. I: 1731–1772, p. 97. The Unnamable in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 278. ‘Three dialogues’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 141. Pilling, Beckett Before Godot, p. 56; for Beckett’s quotation on Joyce’s ‘achievement’, see Damned to Fame, p. 105. Ibid., pp. 176–8. Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 8 February 1935, TCD MS 10904. Beckett, Watt, pp. 25, 246; Beckett, Mercier and Camier, p. 40. ‘Three dialogues’, p. 139. Letter from Beckett to Schneider in Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Alan Schneider and Samuel Beckett, p. 23, my italics. For a bare overview, see Everett Frost’s findings, ‘Beckett’s Notebooks at Trinity College Dublin’, pp. 12–13. I am grateful to Chris Ackerley for a copy of his forthcoming Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt, which discusses Alexander’s A Short History of Philosophy. ‘All Strange Away’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 175. Beckett’s Eighteenth Century, p. 11, my italics. Damned to Fame, p. 734 (n. 85). Included in this clutch of material is Beckett’s reader’s ticket receipt, a letter of reference by Chatto & Windus and Beckett’s original letter of application, which cites his ‘need of original texts in French and Italian in greater detail than is available in other collections’ he has consulted, which he lists as ‘the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the National Library, Dublin, the Library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, Ste-Geneviève, and the Bibliothèque Nationale’. Importantly, also included in the card register are the three times Beckett renewed his six-month ticket as well as his corresponding address at the time: February 1934 at Paulton’s Square, September 1934 at Gertrude Street, and October 1937 at Harrington Road. My thanks to the British Museum, and particularly its Assistant Archivist, Gary Thorn, for providing me with this material, now lodged in the University of Reading Archives.

Notes 30 31 32 33 34 35

157

Beckett Before Godot, pp. 86–7. ‘Serena I’ in Beckett, Collected Poems, p. 21. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, p. ix. Mercier and Camier, pp. 77–8. Coe, Beckett, p. 96. Beckett, in Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, p. 141.

CHAPTER 3 1 The title is taken from line 73 of Whoroscope in Beckett, Complete Poems, pp. 1–6, a pastiche combining Augustine’s ‘Si, fallor enim’ and René Descartes’ ‘Cogito ergo sum’, translated as ‘For if I am deceived, I am’. The epigraph, as well as subsequent material on Descartes, is found in Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes; here from ‘Early Writings’, Vol. I, p. 4. 2 Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, pp. 31–2. 3 The Unnamable in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 298. 4 ‘Beckett and the Cartesian Soul’ in Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture, p. 230. 5 The first line from ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 19. 6 Fletcher, Samuel Beckett’s Art, pp. 122, 126. 7 One suspects Descartes would roll in his grave to find critics asserting his Discourse was intended as fiction; quoted in Kenner, ‘The Rational Domain’, p. 81. 8 Cohn, ‘Preliminary Observations on Samuel Beckett’, pp. 119–20. 9 Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, pp. 12–13. 10 Kenner, ‘The Cartesian centaur’, pp. 134, 139. 11 Ibid., p. 139. 12 Mintz, ‘Beckett’s Murphy: a Cartesian Novel’, pp. 156, 161. 13 Ibid., p. 165. 14 Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead, pp. 86–90. 15 Samuel Beckett’s Art, p. 129. 16 Mooney, ‘Molloy, Part 1: Beckett’s Discourse on Method ’, pp. 54, 43–4. 17 Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, p. 47. 18 For a useful discussion of the circumstances surrounding the writing of Whoroscope and its subsequent publication by the Hours Press, see Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, pp. 93–9. 19 Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, pp. 53–4. 20 Webb, Samuel Beckett: A Study of His Novels, pp. 27–8. 21 Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 544. 22 Letter from Beckett to Bair in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, pp. 94, 553 n. 35. This ‘thick’ notebook was certainly lost by the time of the Harvey interviews in 1961 and 1962, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, p. 34. Clearly, this notebook did not have the longevity of the other ‘Interwar Notes’ and, most likely, did not have the importance either. 23 This quotation can be found on the ‘Nobel prize-winners timeline’, under ‘Samuel Barclay Beckett’ at: www.nobel-winners.com/Literature/samuel_barclay_beckett.html 24 The unavailable material from this period is the holy grail of Beckett Studies: ‘six holograph manuscript notebooks, consisting of 800 pages in all, in a bank vault in London’; as reported in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 743 n. 32. 25 Doherty, ‘Mahaffy’s Whoroscope ’, p. 28. Where he is incorrect however, is in dating J. P. Mahaffy’s Descartes at 1901, which is a verbatim reprint of the original 1880 text. 26 Mahaffy, Descartes, pp. 69, 143.

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Notes

27 Damned to Fame, p. 96. 28 I am grateful to Edward Beckett for conveying this information in a letter of 9 October 2003. This text is listed in Damned to Fame as ‘Jean Beaufret’s copy in SB’s library’, p. 841. I take this to mean Jean Beaufret’s name and/or marginalia is written inside Choix de Textes and was consequently in Beckett’s possession. 29 Debricon, René Descartes: Choix de Textes, p. 194, English versions taken from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, p. 99. 30 Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 40. 31 Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, p. 129. 32 Coffey, ‘Memory’s Murphy’s Maker: some notes on Samuel Beckett’, which continues, ‘When the volumes arrived, Beckett spent much time with them’, p. 7. 33 Windelband, A History of Philosophy, pp. xi, ix. 34 Damned to Fame, p. 118. 35 A History of Philosophy, p. 392. Furthermore, Beckett almost invariably underlined Windelband’s italicized portions in the ‘Philosophy Notes’. 36 A History of Philosophy, p. 620. 37 Beckett, Murphy, p. 63. 38 Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 19 September 1936, TCD MS 10904. The other two undated letters to MacGreevy referring to Spinoza are dated in Damned to Fame as 26 July 1936 and 19 August 1936 respectively, p. 746 n. 127. 39 Murphy, pp. 63–4; corresponding to A History of Philosophy, p. 410. 40 Murphy, p. 8. 41 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, p. 221. 42 Morot-Sir, ‘Samuel Beckett and Cartesian emblems’, pp. 60–1. 43 Ibid., pp. 64, 67, 69. The following quotations and references are taken from ibid, pp. 64–77. 44 Ibid., p. 75. Morot-Sir’s final quotation is taken from Descartes (The Discourse on Method, Part 2), found in ibid., p. 44. 45 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, p. 120. 46 Descartes only mentions enumeration in Discourse on Method once, see ibid., p. 120. 47 The above quotations are taken from ibid., pp. 20, 21, 25–6, 27. The subsections from the vital ‘La Méthode’ chapter in Choix de Textes are as follows: unité de la science, la verité mathematique est le type de la veriée scientifique, l’énumération, le deux modes de la déduction, l’analyse remonte jusqu’aux éléments simples ou absolus, l’énumération, exemple de l’usage des principales règles, pp. 106–13. 48 ‘Samuel Beckett and Cartesian emblems’, pp. 43–4. 49 Ibid., pp. 58, 98; Morot-Sir’s explanation of what he finds ‘irritating’ in the Cartesian literature is found on p. 26. 50 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, p. 31. 51 Letter from Beckett to Israel Shenker in interview of 5 May 1956, reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 148. 52 Beckett to MacGreevy of 25 January 1931, cited in Pilling, Beckett’s Dream Notebook, p. 11. 53 ‘German Diary’ entry of 2 February 1937. Others have rendered this word as ‘endomonical’ and ‘endaemonical’ in Beckett’s difficult handwriting, though I suspect Beckett was trying to express, in terms of the ‘Philosophy Notes’: ‘Eudaemonistic “Happiness dwelleth not in herds nor in gold; the soul is the dwelling-place of the daimon.” (Daimon = guardian spirit = fortune; hence Eudaimonia = happiness)’, TCD MS 10967/79.1. See also the later reference to the ‘eudemonistic slop’ in Molloy in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 52. 54 Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 8 November 1931, cited in Beckett’s Dream Notebook, p. xiv. 55 Mooney, ‘Presocratic scepticism: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy reconsidered’, p. 14.

Notes

159

56 Henning, ‘The Guffaw of the Abderite: Murphy and the Democritean universe’, pp. 6, 11. 57 Ibid., p. 14. 58 Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, ‘The Guffaw of the Abderite: Samuel Beckett’s Use of Democritus’, pp. 12, 2. 59 Ibid., p. 12. For a further discussion of symmetry in Murphy, see Taylor and Loughrey, ‘Murphy’s Surrender to Symmetry’. 60 Murphy, pp. 138–9. 61 Ibid., p. 140. 62 Ibid., p. 142. 63 ‘Alice and Kenneth Hamilton, ‘The Guffaw of the Abderite’, p. 9. 64 Beckett’s Dream Notebook, entry 720, p. 104. Pilling notes that this is the ‘first of almost 300 entries from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, making it easily the most important of all Beckett’s sources for Dream’, ibid., p. 104. 65 The references in Dream to these philosophers are found on pp. 61, 179, 212, 234. 66 ‘Yellow’ in Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, p. 175. 67 Malone Dies in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 168. 68 Ibid., pp. 175, 177. 69 The Unnamable, pp. 376, 378, my italics. 70 ‘Texts for Nothing 12’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 150. 71 Letter from Beckett to Schneider in Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Alan Schneider and Samuel Beckett, p. 103. 72 ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’, p. 27. 73 Happy Days in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 145, 149. 74 ‘The lost ones’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 202. 75 Murphy, pp. 100–1. 76 Pilling, ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy’, pp. 1, 19. 77 Murphy, p. 5; Pilling, Beckett Before Godot, p. 141. 78 Demented Particulars has ‘arcanum’, p. xxiii; ‘From a (W)horoscope to Murphy’ has ‘stichomany’, p. 20; the other uncertain words from this extremely difficult passage are in brackets. I am grateful to Mark Nixon for his assistance with this transcription. 79 Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 6 December 1933 in Demented Particulars, p. 103. 80 A History of Philosophy, p. 424. 81 Beckett’s comment to Harold Hobson on ‘the shape of ideas’ is quoted in Alan Schneider’s ‘Working with Beckett’ (of autumn 1958), reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 173. 82 Rockaby in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 435. 83 Demented Particulars, p. ix. 84 See Beckett’s comment to MacGreevy of August 1931 on being ‘soiled . . . with the old demon of notesnatching’, cited in Beckett’s Dream Notebook, p. xiii. 85 ‘Yellow’, p. 177. 86 Murphy, p. 31. 87 Ibid., p. 152. 88 Ibid., pp. 152, 101. 89 Endgame in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 125; Murphy, p. 101; Endgame, p. 93. 90 Murphy, pp. 102, 65–6. 91 Molloy, p. 162. 92 Hesla, The Shape of Chaos, pp. 10–11. 93 Beckett to Driver in interview of summer 1961, reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 219. 94 Barnes, ed, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 130. 95 Krapp’s Last Tape in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 220. Beckett was adamant to Knowlson on this point of discrepancy: ‘Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dún

160

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Notes Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make that clear once and for all’, Damned to Fame, p. 352. ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 94. The Unnamable, p. 267. See Alan Schneider’s ‘Working with Beckett’ in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 173. Beckett to Gabriel D’Aubarede in interview of 16 February 1961, reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 217. Beckett to Tom Driver in interview of summer 1961, reprinted in ibid., p. 219. Rabinovitz, ‘Watt from Descartes to Schopenhauer’, p. 261. The Unnamable, p. 382. I am grateful to Mark Nixon for information on Beckett’s letter to Con Leventhal of 21 April 1958. The Unnamable, p. 267.

CHAPTER 4 1 The title comes from Belacqua’s gesture to Ruby Tough in ‘Love and Lethe’ characterizing their intended ‘l’Amour et la Mort – caesura – n’est qu’une mesme chose’ in Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks, pp. 102, 105. The epigraph is an excerpt from the ‘German Diaries’ of 2 February 1937, in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 252, my italics. 2 ‘Recent Irish poetry’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 74. 3 ‘Humanistic Quietism’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 69. 4 Pilling, Beckett Before Godot, pp. 118–23; see also Disjecta, p. 174. I am also grateful for John Pilling’s additional insights on this material. 5 For quotation of Beckett’s letter to MacGreevy of 8 August 1935, I am indebted to Mark Nixon. 6 Beckett, Murphy, p. 157. 7 Baker, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, xii, my italics. 8 O’Hara, Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, pp. 10, xi. 9 Ibid., vii. 10 Notable here are Bernard, ‘The Hysterico-Obsessional Structure of “From an abandoned Work” ’; Riva, ‘Beckett and Freud’; Brink, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and the Schizoid ego’ and Shapiro’s two-part ‘Toward a Psychoanalytic Reading of Beckett’s Molloy ’. 11 Ellmann, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, p. 2. 12 Anzieu, ‘Beckett and Bion’, quoted pp. 165, 167. 13 Anzieu, ‘Beckett and the psychoanalyst’, p. 27. 14 Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, p. vii. 15 Pilling, Samuel Beckett, p. 130. 16 Rabinovitz, ‘Beckett and psychology’, pp. 68, 67. The ‘Davus complex’ and its accompanying ‘morbid fear of sphinges [sphinxes]’ is found in the Appendix of Beckett, Watt, p. 252. 17 ‘Beckett and Psychology’, p. 72. 18 Damned to Fame, pp. 1–29. 19 Ibid., pp. 80, 148. 20 Ibid., p. 357. 21 In addition to Anzieu’s writings, see Connor, ‘Beckett and Bion’; Oppenheim, ‘ObjectRepresentation: the Beckett–Bion Case Revisited’; Simon, ‘The Imaginary Twins: the Case of Beckett and Bion’. 22 ‘Object-Representation’, pp. 768–9, quoted p. 769.

Notes

161

23 This was a consequence of the Institute’s move to Malet Street from Tavistock Square in 1930: the ‘Tavistock Clinic’ subtitle was placed in brackets until taken up again in 1936, Dicks, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, p. 88. For information on the effects of the London Blitz on the clinic, see ibid., p. 14. 24 Oppenheim, ‘Object-Representation’, p. 769. 25 Damned to Fame, p. 177. 26 ‘German Diary’ entry of 3 November 1936 in Alles Kommt Auf So Viel An, p. 30. 27 Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 195. 28 ‘Yellow’ in Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks, p. 172. 29 Ibid., p. 175. 30 Ibid. pp. 174, 172, 173. 31 Ibid., pp. 183, 174. 32 Ibid., pp. 175, 182. 33 Ohio Impromptu in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 446. 34 Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 26 April 1937, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 717 n. 86. 35 Ibid., p. 63. 36 Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 24 February 1931, TCD MS 10904. 37 Damned to Fame, pp. 172–3. 38 Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, p. 68. 39 Damned to Fame, p. 176. 40 Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897–1979, p. 1. 41 Joan and Neville Symington, The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, pp. 177, 184. 42 ‘Emotional turbulence’, in Bion, Clinical Seminars and Other Works, pp. 302–4. 43 ‘Three Dialogues’, p. 141. 44 The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion, pp. 11, 2–3. 45 ‘Object-Representation’, p. 768. 46 Simon, ‘The imaginary twins’, p. 339. 47 Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 10 August 1935; TCD MS 10904. I am grateful to John Pilling and Lois Overbeck for assistance with this transcription. 48 ‘Beckett and Bion’, p. 13. 49 Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, p. 20; the rate of improvement for the 44 per cent of patients with anxiety states was correspondingly high, at 80 per cent upon discharge and 64 per cent three years later, pp. 69–70. 50 Ibid., p. 20. 51 Ibid., p. 32. Crichton-Miller’s first report to the Council of Administration on the functioning of the Tavistock Clinic, from which the lengthy quotation is excerpted, is found in ibid., pp. 18–21. 52 Ibid., p. 136. 53 Hadfield, Psychology and Morals: An Analysis of Character, p. 2. 54 Bléandon, Wilfred Bion, p. 41. 55 Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, p. 68. 56 Hadfield, Psychology and Morals, pp. 121–5. 57 Damned to Fame, p. 177. 58 O’Hara, Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives, p. 292. 59 ‘The imaginary twins’, p. 339. 60 Krapp’s reminiscence of reading ‘Effie again, a page a day, with tears’ is found in Krapp’s Last Tape in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 222; corresponding to Beckett’s summer of 1929 with Peggy Sinclair, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 105. For his part, Bion’s Experiences in Groups and Other Papers offers a good example of the clinical use of case histories, see Bion, ‘Experiences in groups’, pp. 41–58. 61 ‘The End’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 90.

162

Notes

62 Damned to Fame, pp. 177, 186, 224, except for the third quotation, taken from TCD MS 10904. 63 Damned to Fame, pp. 179–81. 64 Psychology and Morals, p. 181. 65 Monadology in Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, Monadology, p. 253. 66 Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 1. 67 Windelband, A History of Philosophy, pp. 462–3. 68 Murphy, p. 103, my italics. In his discussion of Leibnizian monads, Windelband footnotes his view that Leibniz is here served a very good turn by the ambiguity in the word ‘représentation’ . . . in accordance with which the words means, on the one hand, to supply the place of or serve as a symbol of, and on the other hand, the function of consciousness. . . . The deeper sense and justification of this ambiguity lies in the fact that we cannot form any clear and distinct idea whatever of the unifying of a manifold, except after the pattern of that kind of connection which we experience within ourselves in the function of consciousness’. (A History of Philosophy, pp. 422–3) 69 Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, p. 140. 70 Those terms not included in Baker’s book – ‘alienation’, ‘narcissism’, ‘manic’, ‘fetish’, ‘schizoid’ – are more common, and consequently less notable, than the others found in the ‘Psychology Notes’, such as: ‘cathexes’, ‘endopyschic’, ‘syntonic’ and ‘introjected’; Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, p. xi. 71 Murphy, pp. 153–4. 72 Ackerley makes this point, and a number of others germane to Beckett and psychology in Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy; here on ‘acathisia’, p. 121. 73 First Love in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 28. 74 These are ‘The Pathology of Morbid Anxiety’ and ‘Psychosexual Impotence and Anaesthesia’ from ‘Clinical Papers’, and ‘The Significance of Sublimating Processes for Education and Re-education’ and ‘Anal Erotic Character Traits’ in ‘Papers on Child Study and Education’, Jones, Papers on Psycho-analysis. 75 Jones, Treatment of the Neuroses, p. 116. 76 ‘Papini’s Dante’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 81. 77 Murphy, pp. 100–2, my italics. 78 Ibid., p. 6. 79 Demented Particulars, p. 10, which gives the corresponding paragraph in Woodworth, Contemporary Schools of Psychology, p. 107. 80 Murphy, p. 7. 81 Ibid., pp. 7–8, my italics. 82 Ibid., p. 31. 83 Ibid., p. 49. 84 Watt, pp. 226–7. 85 Ibid., p. 141. 86 ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 182. 87 Act Without Words I in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 201, 204. 88 Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, pp. 132, 141; Watt, p. 248; All that Fall in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 196. 89 Beckett, Company, p. 88. 90 Molloy in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, pp. 45, 83. 91 ‘Toward a Psychoanalytic Reading of Beckett’s Molloy’, pp. 78, 72. 92 ‘Beckett and Freud’, pp. 166–7.

Notes 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104

163

Ibid., pp. 160, 165. Purgatory, Canto IV in Dante, The Divine Comedy, p. 581. A Piece of Monologue in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 425. ‘Fizzle 4’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 234. So fängt die Angst wieder zu steigen an, und in den alten wohlbekannten körperlichen Schmerz überzugehen. Wie durchsichtig klar kommt mir dieser Mechanismus heute vor, dessen Prinzip heisst: Lieber um Etwas Angst haben, als um Nichts. Im ersten Fall wird nur ein Teil, im zweiten das Ganze bedroht wird [sic]. Von dem Ungeheuren, welches zum Wesen des Unbegreiflichen, fast dürfte man des Unbegrenzten sagen, unzertrennlich gehört, nicht zu reden. . . . Wenn eine solche Angst zu steigen anfängt, muss ein Grund schleunigst dafür erfunden werden. Da es keinem gegönnt wird, mit ihr in ihrer absoluten Grundlosigkeit leben zu können. So mag der Neurotische, d.h. Jedermann, mit dem grössten Ernst u. mit aller Ehrfurcht behaupten, dass zwischen Gott im Himmel u. Schmerz im Bauch der Unterschied bloss minimal ist. Da beide von einer Quelle herrühren u. zum einen Zweck dienen: Angst in Furcht zu verwandeln. (RUL MS 5003, pp. 5, 7.) I am grateful to Mark Nixon for alerting me to this German passage. ‘The Calmative’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 62. Murphy, p. 32. Ibid., pp., 58, 61. Watt, pp. 37, 42. Watt, p. 25; Beckett, Mercier and Camier, p. 40. The Unnamable in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 374, my italics. Beckett, Company: Solo, A Bilingual Variorum Edition, p. 82. I am grateful to Erik Tonning for kindly alerting me to this reference.

CHAPTER 5 1 The title of this chapter is taken from ‘A Case in a Thousand’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 18, itself based on the Bible’s Matthew 27.41–2. The epigraph is from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, used as the frontispiece in Rank, The Trauma of Birth, read by Beckett in early 1935. 2 Malone Dies in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 207. 3 Land, ‘Arnold Geulincx and his Works’, p. 226. Land’s insightful biography also suggests that an excuse for Geulincx’s dismissal was found in his inability to prove his legitimacy and his unsanctioned marriage to a cousin, both seized on by adversaries. 4 de Vleeschauwer, Three Centuries of Geulincx Research: A Biographical Survey, p. 13. 5 Ibid., pp. 45–56. 6 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 219. 7 Three Centuries of Geulincx Research, pp. 41, 59. 8 Damned to Fame, p. 118. 9 Nuchelmans, Geulincx’ Containment Theory of Logic, p. 13; Malone Dies, p. 201. 10 Damned to Fame, p. 219. 11 ‘The end’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 91; and Molloy in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 48. 12 This is the usual rendering of Geulincx’s maxim; although Wood’s translation reads: ‘you should want nothing where you have no power’, ‘Murphy, Beckett; Geulincx, God’, p. 37. However, the translation here offers a less personalized rendering from Beckett’s transcriptions than those cited above: ‘where nothing has value, everything is worthless . . . the Supreme Principle of Ethics, where all and singular obligations come from, which constitutes both the contents of Ethics’ (TCD MS 10971/6/9). The first published

164

Notes translation of Geulincx into English by Martin Wilson offers yet another reading of this opaque phrase: And because it involves the whole of morality, this principle is the first, the best, and the broadest foundation of Ethics, and the one most easily known to us by the light of nature: ‘Where you have no power, therein you should not will ’. (Geulincx, Metaphysics, p. 44)

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

These and other selections of Beckett’s transcriptions from the Metaphysica Vera are reproduced with the kind permission of the Christoffel Press; here TCD MS 10971/6/3. Bardout, ‘Occasionalism: La Forge, Cordemoy, Geulincx’, pp. 141, 140. Nadler, ‘Knowledge, volitional agency and causation in Malebranche and Geulincx’, quoted pp. 264, 266, 269, 270. ‘Occasionalism: La Forge, Cordemoy, Geulincx’, pp. 149–50. For details of Beckett’s resistance operations and his flight to southern France in 1942, see Damned to Fame, pp. 307–21. Beckett, Watt, pp. 32–4. Ibid, pp. 71, 72, 69, 73. Geulincx, Metaphysics, p. 97. Watt, p. 147. Nuchelmans offers a helpful insight into Geulincx’s position here: the words ‘something’ and ‘thing’ have to be taken here in the very broad sense of anything that can be consistently thought of or talked about, irrespective of whether it really exists in the outside world or not. Everything that can be put before the mind has at least the kind of being that consists in being intelligible or thinkable (cogitabile) and is therefore not nothing. (Geulincx’ Containment Theory of Logic, p. 277)

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

One instance on ‘Knott’s resonances of a deity figure’ is found in Cohn, Back to Beckett, p. 53; Metaphysics, pp. 97–8. Watt, pp. 59–61. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 23. Weiler, ‘On Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Language’, pp. 82, 83. Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge: Language and Thought in Mauthner’s Critique, pp. 21, 17. Weiler, Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 336. Ibid., pp. 329–30, 220, 294. Metaphors of Knowledge, pp. 20, 23. ‘German Diary’ entry of 15 November 1936 in Samuel Beckett Alles Kommt Auf So Viel An: Das Hamburg Kapitel aus den ‘German Diaries’, p. 40. Atik, How It Was, p. 19. ‘On Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Language’, p. 84. Rough for Radio II in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 276. Ben-Zvi, ‘Fritz Mauthner for Company’, p. 70. Ben-Zvi, ‘Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the limits of language’, p. 185. ‘Fritz Mauthner for Company’, p. 66. The full quotation is found in the Kritik Vol. III, p. 615; corresponding to RUL MS 3000, p. 46. Ben-Zvi’s implication is that Company was written or inspired by the location of ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ and Beckett’s re-familiarization with Mauthner. ‘Fritz Mauthner for Company’, p. 66. Ibid., p. 65. Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett, p. 152. Ben-Zvi, ‘Biographical, Textual and Historical Origins’, p. 137.

Notes 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

165

Begam, ‘Beckett and Postfoundationalism: Or How Fundamental are those Sounds?’, pp. 13, 17. Proust in Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, pp. 18–19. Beckett, Murphy, p. 5. ‘German Letter of 1937’ in Beckett, Disjecta, p. 173. Ibid., pp. 172–3. Rose, The Textual Diaries of James Joyce, pp. 34–5. ‘ “Nichtsnichtsundnichts”: Beckett and Joyce’s transtextual undoings’. Van Hulle, ‘Beckett – Mauthner – Zimmer – Joyce’, p. 149. Van Hulle, ‘ “Out of metaphor”: Mauthner, Richards and the development of Wakese’, pp. 103, 107. ‘Nichtsnichtsundnichts’. I am most grateful to John Pilling for repeated discussions at the University of Reading on this matter; I am also indebted to him for an unpublished copy of a forthcoming text on the subject, sent via a personal communication. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 258. Lernout, ‘James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner and Samuel Beckett’, p. 22. Letter from Beckett to Arland Ussher of 25 March 1936. I am grateful to Mark Nixon for this reference. Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy of 29 January 1936, TCD MS 10904. Coffey, ‘Memory’s Murphy’s maker: some notes on Samuel Beckett’, p. 3. Letters from Beckett to MacGreevy of 9 January 1936 and 15 April 1936, TCD MS 10904. See also Beckett’s letter of 25 March 1936, TCD MS 10904; and Damned to Fame, p. 219. ‘Stirrings still 2’ in Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, p. 262; my italics. Damned to Fame, p. 247. Murphy, p. 5. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 147. For Beckett’s letter to Sighle Kennedy, see Beckett, Disjecta, p. 118; the ‘beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ is in Murphy, p. 101. Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 59. Words and Music in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 288. Damned to Fame, p. 353. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, pp. 248–9. The Unnamable in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, pp. 354, 359. ‘Texts for nothing 11’ in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 144. Skerl, ‘Fritz Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” in Samuel Beckett’s Watt’, p. 486; Watt, pp. 247, 254. ‘Fritz Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” in Samuel Beckett’s Watt’, p. 478. Bredect, Metaphors of Knowledge, pp. 30, 100. Watt, pp. 244–5. Weiler, Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 270. Metaphors of Knowledge, p. 84; Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 77. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, pp. 646, 673. See also reference to Eduard von Hartmann and Wilhelm Wundt in the ‘Psychology Notes’, TCD MS 10971/8/9 and TCD MS 10971/7/10–TCD MS 10971/7/11, respectively. Wundt is also found in Beckett’s transcription of Joseph Gredt’s Elementa Philosophiae aristotelico thomisticae (TCD 10971/6/37). Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 67. Metaphors of Knowledge, p. 123. Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, pp. 175.

166 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Notes Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 248. ‘Texts for Nothing 13’ in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 154. Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 170. ‘Fritz Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” in Samuel Beckett’s Watt’, p. 479. Watt, pp. 22, 79. Metaphors of Knowledge, p. 44. Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, pp. 99, 104. Watt, pp. 163, 167; Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 179. Ibid., p. 296; Watt, p. 46. Metaphors of Knowledge, p. 47. Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’, p. 296. Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, p. 141. Beckett to Gabriel D’Aubarede in interview of 16 February 1961, reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 217. Mauthner in Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, p. 131. The Unnamable, p. 372. Metaphors of Knowledge, pp. 14–15. Beckett cited in Coots, Samuel Beckett: A Beginner’s Guide, p. 9.

CONCLUSION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Feldman, ‘I Inquired into Myself: Beckett, Interpretation. Phenomenology?’. A Piece of Monologue in Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 423. For further discussion on the principle of falsification in Beckett’s texts, see Feldman, ‘Beckett and Popper, Or “What Stink of Artifice”: Some Notes on Methodology, Falsifiability and Criticism in Beckett Studies’. Beckett to Shenker in interview of 5 May 1956, reprinted in Graver and Federman, eds, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 149. The Unnamable in Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 311. Atik, How It Was, p. 117. Letter from Beckett to Schneider of 19 November 1963, in Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Alan Schneider and Samuel Beckett, p. 142.

Bibliography PRIMARY SOURCES Trinity College, Dublin Archives TCD MS 10904 [Thomas MacGreevy–Samuel Beckett correspondence] —— 10962 [Notes on Machiavelli and Ariosto] —— 10965 [Notes and essays on Carducci] —— 10967 [‘Philosophy Notes’] —— 10971/1 [Notes on German literature] —— 10971/5 [Notes on Mauthner] —— 10971/6 [Notes on Geulincx] —— 10971/7 [‘Psychology Notes’] —— 10971/9 [‘A Se Stesso’]

Beckett International Foundation, Reading University Library RUL MS (unnumbered) ‘German Diaries’ [Six volumes, late September 1936 to early April 1937] —— 3000 [‘Whoroscope Notebook’] —— 5000 [Beckett’s Dream Notebook] —— 5001 [Notes on painting] —— 5002 [‘German Workbook’] —— 5003 [‘Clare Street Notebook’] —— 5004, 5005 [Notes on Faust] —— 5006 [German phrasebook] —— 5037 [Günther Albrecht–Samuel Beckett correspondence] —— 5040 [Letter by Samuel Beckett to Sergei Eisenstein of 2 March 1936] Beckett, Samuel, The Beckett Trilogy [Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable] (Picador, London: 1979) —— Collected Poems (Calder, London: 1999) —— Company (Calder, London: 1996) —— Company: Solo, A Bilingual Variorum Edition, ed. Charles Krance (Garland, London: 1993) —— The Complete Dramatic Works (Faber and Faber, London: 1990) —— The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989 (Grove Press, New York: 1995) —— Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (Grove Press, New York: 1984) —— Dream of Fair to Middling Women (The Black Cat Press, Dublin: 1992) —— Eleutheria, trans. Michael Brodsky (Foxrock, New York: 1995) —— Ill Seen Ill Said (Calder, London: 1982) —— Mercier and Camier (Calder, London: 1999)

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Index Abbott, Porter 7, 84 autograph/autographing 7, 69, 84, 87, 113 Adler, Alfred 29, 79, 101, 106, 111, 113–15 Alexander, Archibald 33, 36, 150 Anzieu, Didier 82, 85, 93 Aquinas, Thomas 128 Arikha, Avigdor 125, 152 Aristotle 33, 35–6, 59, 72, 139 Atik, Anne 5, 125 Baillet, Adrian 46–8, 56, 78 Baker, Phil 81, 83, 99 Beaufret, Jean 47, 48, 132 Beckett Studies 1–2, 32, 39–40, 42, 45, 52, 55–7, 60, 73, 83, 106, 110, 115, 126, 130–1, 147–8 Beckett Trilogy, The/ The Trilogy 5, 17, 20, 31, 45, 72, 109, 143, 144, 147 See also: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable Being 5, 23, 44, 47, 51, 62, 70–1, 73–5, 87, 106–7, 130 non-Being 73–4 Ben-Zvi, Linda 126–7 Berkeley, George 10–13, 125 biography/ biographical 1–2, 4, 7, 46–8, 80, 85, 117–18, 125, 147 Bion, Wilfred 2, 30, 78–9, 82, 84–5, 88–95, 101, 111, 149–50 Burnet, John 33–6, 63, 150 ‘can-er’ 106 See also: ‘non-can-er’ Cartesian 2, 39–47, 49–62, 65, 68, 70, 73, 75–6, 78, 82–3, 87, 97, 115, 119, 132–3, 142, 149 cartesianism 42, 44–6, 50, 52–4, 62, 66, 75, 117–18, 120, 132, 149 Carducci, Giose 22, 48 ‘Clare Street Notebook’ 26, 34, 112 Coe, Richard 19, 38, 53

Cohn, Ruby 41–2 Collected Poems Whoroscope 14, 34, 35, 41–6, 50, 52, 56, 60, 63, 76, 78, 148 ‘Gnome’ 20, 38 ‘Cascando’ 26 ‘Echo’s Bones’ 25 ‘Serena I’ 35 Company 84, 87, 107, 115, 126 Complete Dramatic Works, The A Piece of Monologue 112, 147 Act Without Words I 106, 114 All that Fall 107 Cascando 26 Embers 90 Endgame 13, 32, 37, 67, 70, 147 Film 11 Krapp’s Last Tape 4–5, 74 Not I 112 Ohio Impromptu 87 Rockaby 66–7 Rough for Radio II 116, 125 Waiting for Godot 20, 82–3, 95 Words and Music 136 Complete Short Prose, The All Strange Away 33, 112 Calmative, The 59 End, The 120 First Love 100 Fizzle 4, 104 Image, The 118 Imagination Dead Imagine 106, 112 Lost Ones, The 62 neither 20 Stirrings Still 84, 134 Texts for Nothing 117, 137, 142, 147 Connor, Steven 85, 91 conscious/consciousness 3, 18, 31, 49, 51–2, 54, 59–60, 75, 79, 87, 89, 96–8, 102, 107, 111, 113, 131, 143, 149, 150–1 See also: unconscious

176 Crichton-Miller, Hugh 91 Cronin, Anthony 9, 86 D’Aubarede, Gabriel 145 Dearlove, Judith 16, 19 Debricon, L. 47, 49, 54–6, 78 Descartes, René 2, 14, 35, 39–50, 52–8, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 75–8, 118–20, 134, 137, 148–9 Dicks, H. V. 92 Disjecta Dante . . . Bruno.Vico . . . Joyce 17, 40, 42 Denis Devlin 75 German Letter of 1937 128, 131 Jack B. Yeats 24 Les Deux Besoins 18–19, 63, 68 MacGreevy on Yeats 29 On Murphy to Sighle Kennedy 136 Papini on Dante 102 Recent Irish Poetry 15, 78 Thomas MacGreevy 13, 24, 47, 78 Donne, John 86 doubt 54, 65, 75, 137 Dream of Fair to Middling Women 22, 25, 29, 47–8, 56–7, 60, 84, 86, 107–8, 112, 126 ‘Draff’ 84 Driver, Tom 73 Dublin 17, 21, 22, 35, 40, 46, 86–7, 110, 118, 119, 132 Duthuit, Georges 3, 8, 28, 67 Eleutheria 4 Ellmann, Richard 125–6 empirical 1–3, 6, 19, 32, 40, 45, 54, 56, 66, 76, 78, 84–5, 110, 127, 131, 147–8, 151 Enlightenment 12–13, 15, 52, 70 Eisenstein, Sergei 24 Epicurus 33 Epistemology 33, 36, 57, 97, 124, 141 erudition 4–5, 8, 14, 20, 22, 24, 34, 36, 57, 79, 84, 96, 99, 117, 148, 150 existential 79, 147 existentialism 79, 105 existentialist 75, 78 Federman, Raymond 43 ‘fidelity to failure’ 3, 13, 117, 151 Fletcher, John 41, 43–4, 56, 125

Index Freud, Sigmund 28–31, 79, 81, 83, 88–9, 91–2, 96–7, 100–1, 106–7, 109–11, 115 Freudian 31, 81–3, 88, 90, 92–3, 100 ‘German Diaries’ 5, 8, 12, 15, 25, 57, 85, 95, 100–1, 125, 131, 135, 147 ‘German Workbook’ 2, 26, 128 Geulincx, Arnold 2, 6, 14, 26, 55, 78, 104, 108, 116–24, 131–7, 141, 145–6, 150 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 23, 25, 26, 34, 141, 151 Faust 23, 25–6 Gredt, Joseph 128, 132 Greece 14, 63, 66, 70 Habit/habitual 53, 63, 107, 114, 127 Hadfield, James 91–2, 95 Hartmann, Eduard von 97, 140–1 Harvey, Lawrence 41, 43–4, 52, 55, 137 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 140 Henning, Sylvie Debvec 57–9 Hesla, David 53, 73, 125 Hume, David 10, 12–13 Humility 55, 117, 132–6, 145, 150 ignorance 2, 5, 7, 10, 20, 23, 40, 71, 74, 89, 93, 117, 124, 137–9, 143, 145, 147–8, 150, 152 Ill Seen Ill Said 39, 136 impotence 5, 7, 23, 40, 54, 111, 117, 119–21, 133–4, 137, 145, 147, 150 inexpressible/inexpressive 3, 29, 139 ‘insufficient reason’ 108–16 See also: ‘sufficient reason’ intellectual 2, 4–6, 8–9, 12, 37, 47–8, 51, 54, 56, 63, 71, 74, 76, 78, 83, 90, 92–3, 98, 108, 115, 117, 119, 130, 137–8, 145, 147–50 intertextual 13, 34, 38, 45, 81, 106 interwar 1–3, 7–8, 14, 15, 20–2, 34, 60, 63, 78, 115–16, 127, 131, 138, 143, 146–7, 150–1 ‘Interwar Notes’ 1–2, 5–8, 12–15, 21–2, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 34, 65, 78, 96–7, 108, 113, 117, 121, 138–9, 147–51 Johnson, Samuel 23, 26, 27, 117 Jones, Ernest 30, 79–80, 97, 100–2, 107, 108, 110–11, 113 journalism 4, 32, 102, 114, 131

Index Joyce, James 14, 17, 19, 22–3, 29, 40, 42, 56, 61, 81, 86, 108, 125–6, 128–31, 138, 150 Joyce, Lucia 86 Juliet, Charles 1, 144 Jung, Carl 90–2, 97–8, 101, 107 Jungian 83, 92 Kenner, Hugh 41–3, 61, 76 Kant, Immanuel 28–31, 48, 83, 94, 117, 139–42 Kenner, Hugh 41–3, 61, 76 Knowlson, James 4, 6–7, 29, 34, 47, 81, 84–6, 88, 112, 137, 147 Köhler, Wolfgang 30, 105–6, 114 Land, J. P. N. 118, 132, 137, 150 ‘learned ignorance’ 138, 139, 143, 148 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 7, 60, 65, 68, 96–8, 102, 108, 116, 118, 140, 150 logic 2, 5, 13–15, 17, 19–21, 32, 40–1, 62, 74, 82–3, 98, 108, 115, 117, 120, 137–40, 143, 145–6, 148, 151 logical 16–17, 20, 33, 122 alogical 15, 75, 151 London 9, 22, 24, 30, 33, 34–5, 78, 80, 85–6, 88, 90, 96, 110, 149 MacGreevy, Thomas 13, 22, 24–5, 26–30, 34, 47–8, 78–80, 87–8, 90, 92, 94–5, 119, 132 Mahaffy, John Pentland 34, 46–9, 52, 54–6, 78, 103 Malebranche, Nicolas 51, 118, 134 Malone Dies 8, 60 Marc, Franz 15, 147 Mauthner, Fritz 2–3, 14, 26, 34, 67, 78, 108, 116–17, 123–31, 137–46, 148, 150–1 Mercier and Camier 16, 31, 37, 66, 82, 115 metaphor 19, 43, 85, 109, 124–5, 129, 138–43, 146, 150 Mintz, Samuel I. 42–3, 56 Molloy 17, 26, 28, 31, 43, 54, 57, 72, 81, 83–4, 109–10, 116, 120, 141, 145 monads 64–5, 68, 96–7 Mood, John 16–17, 19, 65, 141, 145 Mooney, Michael 43, 54, 57–9 More Pricks Than Kicks 22, 25, 60, 67, 84, 112 See also: ‘Draff’, ‘Yellow’ Morot-Sir, Eduard 53–6

177

Murphy 7–9, 11, 15–19, 29, 34–5, 37–8, 39, 42–3, 45, 47–8, 50–2, 57–65, 67–8, 70–2, 80, 84, 95, 97, 102–5, 108, 113, 116–17, 119–21, 127, 131, 134–6, 147, 150 Nazi 8, 121 nominalism 126–8, 132, 138, 145 Nominalist 128, 132 ‘non-can-er’ 20, 106, 137, 145 See also: ‘can-er’ non-Euclidean logic 2, 5, 13, 17, 20, 32, 40, 74, 83, 98, 108, 115, 117, 137–9, 143, 145–6, 151 Occasionalism 42, 51, 118, 120–1, 133–4 O’Hara, J. D. 15, 81–3, 92 Paris 8, 22, 47, 56, 70, 78, 89, 121, 128–9, 132, 150 perception/perceive 6, 10–12, 13, 17, 19, 21, 26, 34, 37, 54–5, 57–9, 61, 64–5, 67, 81, 84, 95–7, 101, 104, 130, 139–40, 141, 144 ‘Philosophy Notes’ 2, 14, 32–6, 39–40, 48–9, 51, 57, 58–60, 61–2, 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 76–9, 95–6, 98, 108, 135, 129 Pilling, John 21, 35, 60, 62–3, 79, 83, 131, 150 Plato 9–10, 32–5, 60, 72, 140 Presocratics 36, 41, 57, 62–3, 65, 67–8, 71–4, 77, 87, 141, 149, 151 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae 57, 63, 66 Anaximander of Miletus 62, 64–5, 66, 68 Atomic Theory 36, 57 atomism 104 Atomists 66 Democritus of Abdera 6, 37, 57–62, 66, 70, 83, 87 eleaticism 62 Empedocles of Argenta 37, 39, 66, 72, 74 Gorgias of Leontini 76 Heraclitus of Epheseus 60, 62, 68, 70–1, 87 Hippasos of Metapontum 63, 68–9 Parmenides of Elea 71, 73–4 Protagoras of Abdera 32, 34, 37–8, 67 Pythagoras of Samos 33, 63, 68–9, 71–2, 103 Thales of Miletus 35, 66 Xenophanes of Colophon 71, 74 Zeno of Elea 32, 34, 37–8, 66

178

Index

Proust 8, 21, 126–7 psychology 2, 14, 23, 28, 30, 78–81, 83–5, 88–9, 92, 94–8, 102–3, 105, 107–8, 114, 138, 140–1, 143, 149–50 anxiety 31, 61, 87–8, 91, 95–6, 100–1, 106–8, 110–14, 150 Associationism 106, 141 Behaviourism 102, 104 ‘Gestalt Psychology’ 30, 103–5 panic 85, 87–8, 94–5, 110 psychosomatic 14, 78, 86, 95, 99, 110, 113 ‘Psychology Notes’ 2, 14, 29, 78, 80, 84–5, 87, 94–100, 102–3, 105–110, 111–15, 140, 149–50 psychoanalysis 14, 30–1, 79–81, 83–5, 88–9, 91, 93–102, 106–7, 109, 149 psychotherapy 2, 30, 85–6, 89, 95, 112, 115, 129

Shenker, Israel 20, 23, 56, 148 Skerl, Jennie 125–6, 138, 143–4 Smith, Frederick 10–11, 23, 33, 38 Socrates 9, 59–60, 63 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict) 50–2, 118–19, 134 Stekel, Wilhelm 30, 99, 106, 107, 113 Stephen, Karin 30, 99, 100, 107, 111, 113 ‘sufficient reason’ 14, 108 See also: ‘insufficient reason’ Symingtons 89 system 2, 6, 9, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 32, 39–40, 42, 45, 62, 66, 68, 70, 75, 81, 97, 102–4, 108, 121, 135, 140–1, 146, 148–9 systematic 3, 6, 14–20, 24, 33, 41, 52, 56, 58, 68, 75, 77–9, 113, 118, 121, 140, 146, 148–52

Rabinovitz, Rubin 75–6, 83, 140, 150 ‘mental reality’ 83–4, 86, 94, 96–8, 108, 141, 150 Rank, Otto 29, 88, 95, 107, 112–15, 126, 133 rational 2, 4, 8, 14, 49, 62, 70, 75. 77. 124 rationalism 6, 52, 54, 68, 119, 149 rationalist 19, 42–3, 68, 117 realism 22, 128 realist 11, 128, 142 reason 4, 6, 12, 14, 19, 50, 52, 57, 108, 121, 130, 132–3, 138, 142, 150, 152 Rembrandt, van Rijn 24 Riva, Raymond 109–10 Robertson, John G. 25 Robinson, Michael 42–3, 50, 125

tautological 138, 140, 150 Tavistock Clinic (Institute for Medical Psychology) 85, 88, 90–2 theology 18, 51, 132, 138 theorizing 3, 6, 39, 45, 93, 110, 131, 148 Thompson, Geoffrey 88, 92 Three Dialogues 3, 8–13, 28–9, 67, 83, 89, 151 transition 8–9, 31 Trinity College, Dublin 17, 21–2, 40, 46, 86–8, 119, 132

scepticism 11, 34, 37, 43, 52, 57, 74–5, 101, 117, 119, 121, 128, 131, 138 Schneider, Alan 32–3, 36, 61, 152 Scholasticism 49, 52, 128 Schopenhauer, Arthur 12–14, 48–50, 60, 72, 108, 119, 125, 139–42 Second World War 5, 7–8, 34, 46, 85, 89, 98, 121, 131, 151 See also: World War Two Shapiro, Barbara 109–10

Unnamable, The 28, 40, 42, 60, 75–7, 114–15, 137, 145, 151 unconscious 14, 23, 31, 65, 79–81, 89, 92, 97–102, 107–10, 140–1, 150 See also: conscious University of Reading 7, 21 Ussher, Arland 131, 134 van Hulle, Dirk 129–31 ‘verbal oddities’ 22, 130, 150 van Velde, Bram 9, 13, 28 Watt 3, 8, 15–19, 31, 35, 38, 45, 54, 61, 82, 84, 104–5, 107, 114, 121–3, 125, 131, 138–9, 143, 144, 147, 151

Index Weiler, Gershon 123–5, 141, 143–4 Wilenski, R. H. 24 Windleband, Wilhelm 33, 35, 49 window 26, 73, 82, 97, 119, 130, 139–40, 143 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 116, 123–4 ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ 2, 7, 14, 34, 35, 62–4, 67–8, 81, 97, 126–7, 129–30, 137–8, 150

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Woodworth, Robert S. 30, 78–9, 102–4, 106–7, 113 World War One 88 World War Two 5, 7–8, 35, 46, 85, 89, 98, 121, 131, 151 See also: Second World War Yeats, Jack 24, 29 ‘Yellow’ 68, 70, 84, 86–7