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Insight into Beckett’s God-haunted works
This translation of a literary criticism of Samuel Beckett’s work sheds valuable light on the writer’s early life, writes John Calder
Samuel Beckett. Anatomy of a Literary Revolution by Pascale Casanova, Verso, £12.99. order this book
When it comes to literary criticism, as against other non-fiction categories, such as books on history, politics or an art form, national differences quickly become apparent.
Among the flood of books on Samuel Beckett that have appeared in connection with his centenary in 2006, there is now this translation from the French, enlightening in its investigations into writers and philosophers who contributed to Beckett’s intellectual progress through the bog of Irish nationalism, prudery and dogma that tarred and feathered him for years, and infuriating in its ignorance of the English Language world with its wealth of published detail about Beckett’s life and work, and of much common knowledge about everyday life in Britain and America.
The early influence of the Belgian theologian Geulincx on Beckett is well known, always urging humility in life because the remoteness of God suggests that he does not even know we exist, and Pascale Casanova has much to say of interest about Geulincx not easily found elsewhere.
But then we discover that she has never heard that the first line of Waiting For Godot is a Geulincx quotation, which every study of Beckett in English has to mention.
Quoting a Beckett doggerel with the line ‘Oh Double Day Doran’, she comments that Beckett had dedicated it to a publisher called Doran without realising that Doubleday Doran was the best-known publishing name in New York of its time, which not surprisingly had refused an early work sent to them.
There are other evidences of the author’s ignorance of the Anglo world in this book, and there are far too many references to French intellectual contemporaries of Beckett where there was no contact, either of awareness or influence, such as Blanchot and Deleuze, important figures in their own right, but in a very different world of ideas than Beckett’s.
Although the author rightfully comments on the narrow parochialism, and the class and religious conflicts which sometimes divided, sometimes united, Yeats, Synge and others who stayed in Ireland and looked to the soil and the Irish past for their literary material, and points out that Joyce and Beckett in particular had to flee from all that, Casanova seems unaware that Beckett never was involved in the political scene ideologically.
He simply felt much more at home in the free European atmosphere of bohemian Paris, even as an unknown and so far unsuccessful writer, where everyone mixed on equal terms without prejudice against difference or failure.
Where Casanova does add something significant to the enormous existing canon of Beckett information is her insightful picture of the young Beckett in his impotent but growing realisation during the years before the last war that he had something to say about the human condition that was original and true but totally unacceptable to the mentality of his time and therefore unpublishable.
Her description of one of the century’s greatest geniuses at his lowest ebb, coping with deep depression and psychosomatic illnesses is a very moving one. Perhaps that is why the best things in Casanova’s book is her exploration of Beckett’s nihilism, the search for hell in a sense, except that that hell is void and eternity, not fire and suffering.
She is also very good at exploring the concept of purgatory, not just as taken by Joyce and Beckett from Dante as a metaphor for human life on earth, but going back to the 12th century when an Irish monk located it on Station Island on Lough Derg, still visited by pilgrims to this day.
Casanova’s research into the arcane, although often not very relevant to Beckett’s work is always interesting. Unfortunately, she does often miss the obvious, not because it can easily be found elsewhere, but because she has either not thought about or realised it, or thinks it irrelevant.
Beckett was brought up by his family to be a God-fearing member of the Dublin protestant ascendancy, the ruling class of Ireland.
Instead he lost his faith, became a total drop-out, happiest with artists in Paris, an unsuccessful writer who nevertheless continued writing, until at the age of 47, with the totally unexpected success of a play in a small Paris theatre, itself about to go bankrupt, he brought something revolutionary and new into modern literature.
He was always God-haunted and used his loss of faith to create a new, invented mock-theology that was just right for an increasingly agnostic generation.
Beckett’s later texts, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho in particular, are God-speak, based on Genesis.
They are wickedly subversive to conventional organised religion. Beckett was certainly a well-informed and deep-thinking intellectual, but what he has to say, and the humour and brilliancy with which he says it, can appeal to a much wider public than Casanova imagines.
Far too often, in exploring the depth of his thinking, she overlooks the obvious message that the average intelligent reader can apply to himself. The notes are copious, but sometimes wrong, and the book sadly lacks an index.
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